Already before the Anglo-Saxon invasion there were doubtless floating among the British Celts legends of mystery and marvel congenial to the racial taste. After the conflicts with the Saxons a great chieftain, Arthur, grew into prominence, and around him were destined to gather both these older legends, and also new stories of adventures with human foes, with dragons, or with mysterious powers and spells. Christianity, working upon the natural temperament of the Celt, encouraged that idealizing self-dedication to the cause of love or piety, which belongs to knights with a mission to “right the wrong.” It is this spirit which is the most important Celtic contribution to the literature of the middle ages.
In the sixth century Gildas, called by Gibbon the “British Jeremiah,” who had at least been educated in Wales, writes in Latin his Destruction and Conquest of Britain, a dirge in the true tone of Celtic remonstrance against the hardship of ruthless circumstance. In the ninth century Nennius composes a summary of Welsh traditions, in which we meet with the story of Brutus as the legendary colonizer of primitive Britain. In 1132 appeared the Latin History of the Britons by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who pretends to base his interesting but unhistoric compilation upon materials gathered in Brittany by Walter of Oxford, but who probably collected at least as many from the neighbouring Celts of Wales. In this work are to be found not only the legendary Brutus, but also the stories of Gorboduc and Lear, afterwards to figure in Elizabethan drama. The cycle of Arthur is as yet incomplete; the Holy Grail is not mentioned nor the Round Table.
In 1155 the Jersey Norman, Robert Wace, converts and amplifies Geoffrey’s work into the French romance Brut d’Engleterre or Geste des Bretons, introducing for the first time the Table Round. This again is developed in English verse by Layamon in his Brut of 1205. From various sources, and by various hands, the Arthurian legends are increased, first in the romances in verse, next in the romances in prose. Though the infusion of Celtic chivalrous sentiment appears in all, there are naturally various degrees in the mysticism and asceticism which they display. The vogue of these romances was not confined to France and England. As with other portions of the epic verse of France, it passed into Italy, and inspired both the predecessors of Ariosto and also that great poet himself. Thence, as well as from the sources nearer home, it awoke the interest of Spenser. To the same subjects Milton also was for awhile strongly attracted. In his Epitaphium Damonis he shows the hold which the Arthurian legends had taken upon him, and he explicitly proposes to make Arthur and the British knights the subject of an epic. In the Sabrina of the Comus, and in various references, the same poet reveals how well read he was in the matter of Geoffrey.
In Spain “matter of Britain” took a new lease of life. In that country was produced the series of chivalric romances in prose, which began soon after the year 1300 with the Amadis of Gaul (i.e., Wales), and continued for nearly three centuries, until, from their increasing extravagance, they fell into disrepute, and were finally slain by the satire of Cervantes. How these operated together with pastoral, to produce the sentimental longueurs of La Calprenède and Scudéry in France of the seventeenth century, and thence affected the novel and drama of post-Restoration England, is told in the sketch of the literature of Spain. The affiliation to Celtic origins is in this case clear enough, but with the circuitous route there goes a gradual defection in that real Celtic spirit which was possessed by the original Amadis.
When we are asked at what date English literature is most distinctly affected by the creations of Celtic countries, we may reply that it is chiefly before the age of Chaucer, when the romantic legends of Arthur and his Table came through two channels; on the one hand through Breton sources, on the other through Wales. This is, in point of subject matter, the largest Celtic contribution on which we can lay our hand. To it we owe not only the Arthurian cycle of romances as we find them in Geoffrey, the trouvères, Layamon, and later in the compilation of Sir Thomas Malory (called Morte D’Arthur), which was one of the earliest books that Caxton chose to print; but also much reference in Spenser and Milton, as well as the whole substance of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. To a once independent group of legends, afterwards brought into relation with the Arthurian, we owe the exquisite Tristram and Iseult of Matthew Arnold.
It was in “matter of Britain” that appeared the special vein of tender chivalry which passed into the romances, first of France, then of Italy and Spain. Not in Germany, not in Italy, not in Provence, not in Spain, did these stories of knightly loyalty and uttermost honour and devotion take their rise. It was in Northern France, where Franks and Normans were in contact with the large Celtic remnants of the Bretons. In all these legends there speaks the Celtic voice, rememberable and distinguishable everywhere by its prevailing melancholy, its devotion to a cause, be that cause right or wrong, be it strong or weak.
For the rest, we are in no position to fix the first invention of the Quest of the Holy Grail, or any other legend of the cycle, upon any definite author. What we allow to Tennyson in his liberties with the details of the stories and the form they take, we must perforce allow to the many who had told and retold the same stories scores of times since the Celt of Britain first passed them on to Brittany.
A very dubious, if not wholly mythical, figure in Celtic literature, is the once hugely admired Ossian. Macpherson, a contemporary of Dr. Johnson, came into prominence at the time when the eighteenth century was growing weary of the “classicism” of the school of Pope, and was ready to be interested in the simple, frank, romantic world. Macpherson was a Scotsman, who pretended to have collected from manuscripts, and from the memory of Highlanders, sundry poems of a certain Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third century. These he translated into pompous declamatory prose, attempting something like the style and imagery of the Hebraic scriptures, but overstraining both. They were received with immense enthusiasm in England, France, and Germany, and were Napoleon’s favourite odes. Unhappily the alleged originals will, for the most part, not bear the light of criticism. Johnson did not scruple to call Macpherson an impostor. That there was an Ossian is probable, but the few poems which can with tolerable safety be assigned to him belong to a much later date than Macpherson claimed. Nevertheless, though Macpherson’s Ossian may be as great an imposture as Chatterton’s Rowley Poems, he, no doubt, did gather from the Celtic fragments and the Celtic folklore a mass of imagery and fire of words, which came in most fitting time to lend some help in ridding the weary world of the stereotyped coldnesses of the followers of Pope.