when

"All day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the wintry sea,
Till all King Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their lord
King Arthur."

Now the reign of Arthur may be supposed to represent the culmination of a national revival among the British Celts; and, —this is the detail I was pleased to come upon,—according to Geoffrey, Camlan was fought in 542;—a matter of thirteen decades (and two years) after the expulsion of the Romans. So that, I say, it looks as if there were some cyclic reality behind it. Geoffrey of Monmouth did not know that such periods of national revival do last as a general rule for thirteen decades. He had some other guide to help him to that 542 for Camlan.

History knows practically nothing about fifth-century Britain. It has been looking at it, since scientific methods came in, through Teutonic (including Anglo-Saxon) or Latin eyes; and seen very little indeed but confusion. Britain like the rest of the western empire, suffered the incursions of northern barbarism; but unlike most of the rest, it fought, and not as a piece of Rome, but as Celtic Britain;—fought, and would not compromise nor understand that it was defeated. It took eight centuries of war, and the loss of all England, and the loss of all Wales, to teach, it that lesson; and even then it was by no means sure. In the twelve-eighties, when last Llewelyn went to war, he was still hoping, not to save Wales from the English, but to re-establish the Celtic Kingdom of Britain, Arthur's Empire, and to wear the high crown of London. The men that marched to Bosworth Field under Harri Tudor, two centuries later, went with the same curious hope and assurance. It was a racial mold of mind, and one of extraordinary strength and persistence,—and one totally unjustified by facts in what were then the present and future. But I do not believe such molds can ever be fudged up out of nothing: ex nihilo nihil is as true here as elsewhere. So we must look for the cause and formation of this mold in the past. Something, I think, within that first cycle of Welsh history must have impressed it on the Welsh mind: some national flowering; some great figure, one would say.—Arthur? He is like Vikramaditya of Ujjain; no one know whether he existed at all. There is no historic evidence; but rather the reverse. But then there are all those mountains and things named after him, "from the top of Pengwaed in Cornwall to the bottom of Dinsol in the North"; and, there is the Arthurian Legend, with such great vitality that it drove out the national Saxon legends from England, and quenched the Charlemagne legend in France, and made itself master of the mind of western Europe in the Middle Ages;— I imagine there would have been an Arthur. Some chieftain who won battles; held up the Saxon advance for a long time, probably; and reminded his people of some ancient hero, or perhaps of a God Artaios, thought to be reincarnate in him.

Not that I believe that the mold of mind of which we have been speaking could have been created in the fifth and sixth centuries. Whoever Arthur was—the Arthur of that time,—however great and successful, he could but have reigned over some part of Britain, precariously resisting and checking the barbarians; but tradition tells of a very Chakravartin, swaying the western world. No; that mold certainly was a relic of the lost Celtic empire. It had grown dim during the Roman domination; but it had survived, and the coming in of the Crest-Wave had put new life into it. Nothing could have put new life into it, it seems to me, but such a coming in of the Crest-Wave,—to make it endure and inspire men as it did. I think it is certain the Crest-Wave, —a backwash of it, a little portion of it, but enough to make life hum and the age important,—was among the Welsh between 410 and 542. The wave was receding towards the Western Laya-Center; and gathered force as it rolled from Ausonius' Gaul to Taliesin's Wales, and from Tallesin's Wales to Ireland.

Let us look at the probabilities in Britain in 410, seeing what we can. Three hundred years of Roman rule had left that province, I cannot doubt, rich and populous, with agriculture in a better condition than it has been since:—remember the corn Julian brought thence to feed Gaul. We must think of a large population, Roman and Romanized, mixed of every race in the Roman world, in the cities; and of another population, still Celtic, in the mountains of northern England, in the western Scottish Lowlands, and especially in Wales. It was the former element, the cities, that appealed to Aetius for help against the Picts and Scots; the latter, dwelling in less accessible places, fought as soon as they felt the invaders' pressure. Wales itself had never been all held by the Romans. The legions had covered the south from Caerleon in Monmouthshire to Saint Davids in Penfro, a region held by Silures and Gaelic Celts. They had marched along the northern coast to the island of Mona, establishing, just as Edward the Conqueror did in his day, strongholds from which to dominate the dangerous mountains: these regions also were held by Gaels. But just south of those mountains, in what are now the counties of Meirionydd and Montgomery, there was a great piece of Wales which they seem never to have penetrated; and it was held by the Cymric Ordovices, Welsh, not Irish, by language.

About this time there was a great upheaval of the Irish; who conquered western Scotland, and established there sooner or later the Scottish kingdom of history. They also invaded Wales and England, and sent their fleets far and wide: they were the 'Picts and Scots' of the history-books. There seems also to have been an invasion and conquest of Wales, from the north, by the Welsh; who, joining forces with the Welsh Ordovices whom they found already in the unconquered un-Roman part, established in the course of time the kingdom and House of Cunedda, which reigned till the Edwardian Conquest. It is pretty safe to say that the Romanized cities and the Romanized population generally offered no great resistance to the Saxons; mixed with them fairly readily, and went to form perhaps the basis of the English race; that they lost their language and culture is due to the fact that they were cut off from the sources of these on the continent, and, being of an effete civilization, were far less in vigor than the Saxon incomers. And as we saw in the first of these lectures, there was probably a large Teutonic or Saxon element in Britain since before the days of Julius Caesar.

But there seems to have been a time during those thirteen decades that followed the eviction of the Romans, when the Celtic element, wakened to life and receiving an impulse from the Crest-Wave, caught up the sovereignty that the Romans had dropped, remembered its Ancient greatness, and nourished vigorous hopes. To the Welsh mind, the age has appeared one of old unhappy far-off things,—unhappy, because of their tragic ending at Camlan;— but grandiose. Titanic vague figures loom up: Arthur, the type of all hero-kings; Taliesin, type of all prophet-bards; Merlin, type of magicians. Tennyson caught the spirit of it in the grand moments of the Morte D'Arthur; and missed it by a thousand miles elsewhere in the Idylls. The spirit, the atmosphere, is that of a glory receding into the unknown and the West of Wonder; into Lyonnesse, into Avallon, into the Sunset Isles. There is a sense of being on the brink of the world; with the 'arm clothed in white samite' reaching in from a world beyond,—that Otherworld to which the wounded Arthur, barge-borne over the nightly waters by the Queens of Faerie, went to heal him of his wounds, and to await the cyclic hour for his retum. He is the symbol of—what shall we say?—civilization, culture, or the spiritual sources of these, the light that alone can keep them sweet and wholesome; that light has died from the broken Roman world, and passes now west-ward through the Gates of the Sunset: through Wales, through Ireland, the Laya-Center; into the Hidden, the Place of the Spirit; into Avallon, which is Ynys Afallen, the 'Isle of Apple-trees';—whence to return in its time:—Rex quondam, rexque futurus.

There is a poem by Myrddin Gwyllt, traditionally of the sixth century, about that Garth of Apple-trees; which he will have a secret place in the Woods of Celyddon, the Occult Land, and not an island in the sea at all; and in this poem it has always seemed to me that one gets a clue to the real and interesting things of history. He claims in it to be the last of the white-robed Guardians of the Sacred Tree, the fruit of which none of the black-robed,—no 'son of a monk,'—shall ever enjoy. There has been a battle, in which the true order of the world has gone down; but there Myrddin stays to guard the 'Tree' against the 'Woodmen,'—whom also he seems to identify with the 'black-robed' and the priests Myrddin Gwyllt, by the by, is one of the two figures in Welsh tradition who have combined to become the Merlin of European tradition; the other was Myrddin Emrys the magician. I take great risks, gentlemen but wish to give you a taste, as I think the sound of some lines from the original may, and doubt any translation can, of the old and haughty sense of mystery and grandeur embodied in the poem; because it is this feeling, perhaps the last echo of the Western Mysteries, that is so characteristic of the literature that claims to come down to us from this age:

Afallen beren, bren ailwyddfa,
Cwn coed cylch ei gwraidd dywasgodfa;
A mi ddysgoganaf dyddiau etwa
Medrawd ac Arthus modur tyrfa;
Camlan darwerthin difiau yna;
Namyn saith ni ddyraith o'r cymanfa.