To an inquirer such as myself, incompetent to criticise Welsh literature, yet hesitating to accept the once current theories of fabrication, forgery, and deception, it is peculiarly gratifying to find so distinguished a scholar as Sir John Morris-Jones vindicating at any rate some portion of the suspect literature. In his study Taliesin, Sir John grinds detractors past and present into as fine and small a powder as that to which Spedding imperturbably reduced the flashy superficialities of Macaulay,[1030] and I confess it has caused me most agreeable emotions to find Sir John alluding to a certain truculent D.Litt. as “that naïve type of mind which naturally assumes that what it does not understand is mere silliness”:[1031] it is even more stimulating to witness the iconoclastic and dogmatic Nash rolled in the dust for his “unparalleled impudence” in laying down the law of antiquity in language.
Among the fragments of Welsh poetry occurs the claim “Bardism or Druidism originated in Britain—pure Bardism was never well understood in other countries—of whatever country they might be, they are entitled Bards according to the rights and institutes of the Bards of the Island of Britain.”[1032] Before superciliously dismissing the high claims of British Bardism it would be well to consider not only the recent findings of Prof. Sir John Morris-Jones, but to bear steadily in mind the following points: (1) The cultured shape of the extraordinarily ancient British skull: (2) Avebury, the strangest megalithic monument in the world: (3) Stonehenge, a unique and most developed form of stone circle: (4) that England was the principal home of stone circles: (5) that England not only possessed the greatest earth-pyramid in the world, but that Britain was peculiarly the home of the barrow, and that there is no word barrow in either Greek or Latin, thus seeming to have been essentially British: (6) that in Cæsar’s time the youth of the Continent were sent to Britain to study the Druidic philosophy which was believed to have originated there: (7) the remarkable character of the English coinage which dates back admittedly to 200 B.C., and for aught one knows much earlier: (8) that the art of enamelling on bronze probably originated in Britain, and the craft of spear-making evolved there.
In Earthwork of England Mr. Allcroft observes: “Of all the many thousands of earth-works of various kinds to be found in England, those about which anything is known are very few, those of which there remains nothing more to be known scarcely exist. Each individual example is in itself a new problem in history, chronology, ethnology, and anthropology; within every one lie the hidden possibilities of a revolution in knowledge. We are proud of a history of nearly twenty centuries: we have the materials for a history which goes back beyond that time to centuries as yet undated. The testimony of records carries the tale back to a certain point: beyond that point is only the testimony of archæology, and of all the manifold branches of archæology none is so practicable, so promising, yet so little explored, as that which is concerned with earthworks. Within them lie hidden all the secrets of time before history begins, and by their means only can that history be put into writing: they are the back numbers of the island’s story, as yet unread, much less indexed.”
The prehistoric building here illustrated might be any age: it is standing to-day in a remote corner of Britain, and, so far as I am able to trace, has been hitherto uncharted and unrecognised. Whether it were a temple or the compound of a chieftain, the authorities to whom it has been referred are unable to say: my brother, to whom its discovery was due, is of the opinion that it was a temple, and on a subsequent occasion we hope—after digging—to publish a more detailed account of it, merely now noting it as an example of the innumerable objects of interest which exist in this country at present unrecognised, unconsidered, and unvalued.
Fig. 507.—Ground plan of a hitherto Uncharted English Edifice.
Evidence has been forthcoming that a cave in Oban was occupied by human beings, at an epoch when the sea was 30 feet higher than its present level, and it is now generally admitted that humanity existed in these islands prior to the Glacial Period. Archæology of the future will provide strong wine of astonishment to her followers: she will prove beyond question that mythology is not merely fossil philosophy, but is likewise to a large extent fossil history, and that the records may be pieced together from the traditionary blissful Tertiary Period to that time and onwards when a perilous torrent-fire struck the earth, resulting in sequent horrors, and the slow replenishment of the world.[1033] She will prove, I think, further that the land now called England possesses a documentary record, and an intellectual ancestry which is practically beyond computation, and if History shies at her findings she will instance Brandon as a typical example of continuous occupation and unbroken sequence from the Stone Age to to-day. Further, she will in all probability prove that in either Crete or England the main doctrines of Christianity were practically indigenous. The version of Christianity which returned to us about 1500 years ago is now generally attributed to the mystic Therapeuts of Egypt: from the time it was officially adopted by the temporal powers the materialising process seems almost steadily to have progressed, notwithstanding the allegorising teaching of the Troubadours and kindred Gnostics who claimed really to know.[1034] Happily petrifaction is a preservative, and it may be doubted whether when Comparative Archæology has finished her researches any of the prehistoric Christianity preached by the Celtic Christies will prove actually lost, and whether the supposedly impassable gulf of ages which separates the earliest literature from the testimony of the Stones may not practically be bridged. That our popular customs were the detrita of dramatised mythology, and that many of these customs evidence an astonishing beauty of imagination and depth of thought, will not be questioned except by those unfamiliar with English folklore. In many cases the quaint customs which still linger in the countryside, and the cults which underlie them are, as Dr. Rendel Harris has recently observed, those of misunderstood rituals and lost divinities, and thus embalmed like flies in the amber of unchanging habit turn out to be the very earliest beliefs and the most primitive religious acts of the human race: “Every surviving fragment of such a ritual is as valuable to us as a page of an early Gospel which time has blurred or whose first hand has been overwritten”.[1035]
Few nowadays have any sympathy with the theories which a generation ago autocratically ascribed Myth to a Disease of Language; still less is it possible to accept the more modern supposition that Mythology is merely the gross growth of disgusting savagery! There is more truth in Bacon’s dictum that in the first ages when such inventions and conclusions of the human reason as are now trite and common were new, and little known, all things abounded with fables, parables, similes, comparisons, and illusions which were not intended to conceal, but to inform and teach. Research tends more and more to justify Bacon in his penetrating judgment: “And this principally raises my esteem of these fables, which I receive not as the product of the age or invention of the poets, but as sacred relics, gentle whispers, and the breath of better times, that from the traditions of more ancient nations came at length into the flutes and trumpets of the Greeks”. Whence these sacred relics came, whether from Atlantis, Crete, or Britain,[1036] we are not yet in a position to assert, but eventually the Comparative Method will decide this point. Dr. Rendel Harris who has, to quote his own words, “audaciously affirmed that Apollo was only our apple in disguise,”[1037] further concludes: “It is tolerably certain that Apollo in the Greek religion is a migration from the more northerly regions and his mythical home is somewhere at the back of the north wind”.[1038] While I am in sympathy with many of Dr. Harris’ findings, it is, however, difficult to accept his conclusions that the Olympian divinities were merely “personifications of, or projections from the vegetable word”: the greater probability seems to me that the Apple was named after Apollo rather than Apollo from the Apple: similarly the mandrake was in greater likelihood an emblem of Venus rather than Aphrodite a projection from the Mandrake. The Venus of the Gael was Bride or Brigit, “The Presiding Care,” who was represented with a brat in her arms: there is an old Spanish proverb to the effect that “An ounce of Mother is worth a ton of Priest”; nowhere was Woman more devoutly idealised than among the Celts, and it is more probable that the conception of an immaculate Great Mother originated somewhere in Europe rather than in the sensuous and woman-degrading East. Of the legends of Ireland Mr. Westropp has recently observed: “When we have removed the strata of euhemerist fiction and rubbish from the ruin, the foundations and beautiful fragments of the once noble fane of Irish mythology will stand clear to the sun”:[1039] “Whether,” said Squire, “the great edifice of Celtic mythology will ever be wholly restored one can at present only speculate. Its colossal fragments are perhaps too deeply buried and too widely scattered. But even as it stands ruined it is a mighty quarry from which poets yet unborn will hew spiritual marble for houses not made with hands.”
Finis
