What possibilities of affinity and
influence are here hinted at; what lines of inquiry, worth exploring,
at any rate, suggest themselves to one's mind. By the forms of its
language a nation expresses its very self. Our language is the
loosest, the most analytic, of all European languages. And we, then,
what are we? what is England? I will not answer, A vast obscure
Cymric basis with a vast visible Teutonic superstructure; but I will
say that that answer sometimes suggests itself, at any rate,--
sometimes knocks at our mind's door for admission; and we begin to
cast about and see whether it is to be let in.
But the forms of its language are not our only key to a people; what
it says in its language, its literature, is the great key, and we
must get back to literature. The literature of the Celtic peoples
has not yet had its Zeuss, and greatly it wants him. We need a Zeuss
to apply to Celtic literature, to all its vexed questions of dates,
authenticity, and significance, the criticism, the sane method, the
disinterested endeavour to get at the real facts, which Zeuss has
shown in dealing with Celtic language. Science is good in itself,
and therefore Celtic literature,--the Celt-haters having failed to
prove it a bubble,--Celtic literature is interesting, merely as an
object of knowledge.
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