Читать книгу Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry онлайн

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But this great exception apart, the difference alluded to is extraordinary. Wales is so animated by national enthusiasms, pride, and incalculable hereditary uplift, that her silence—in English, that is—can hardly be accounted for away from the supposition that, in closing her ears against English, she has also set her lips against utterance in that tongue.

The Scoto-Celtic writers of to-day, both in prose and poetry, have produced more Anglo-Celtic literature than Wales has done since the beginning of the century, and with a range, a vitality, a beauty, far beyond anything that has come forth from modern Cymru; and Ireland, again, in poetry at any rate, has given us even more than Scotland.

The Celtic Renascence, of which so much has been written of late—that is, the re-birth of the Celtic genius in the brain of Anglo-Celtic poets and the brotherhood of dreamers—is, fundamentally, the outcome of “Ossian,” and, immediately, of the rising of the sap in the Irish nation.

Of the immense and never yet approximately defined Irish-Celtic influence in literature a fine and true word has been said by one of the ablest of the Irish fellowship; and I would strongly urge every reader to obtain Mr Stopford Brooke’s admirable and stimulating little essay “On the Need and Use of getting Irish Literature into the English Tongue.”[3] With its conclusion, every lover of English poetry and romance will agree.