Well, then, here was a contact which one might
expect would leave its traces; if the Saxons got the upper hand, as
we all know they did, and made our country be England and us be
English, there must yet, one would think, be some trace of the Saxon
having met the Briton; there must be some Celtic vein or other
running through us. Many people say there is nothing at all of the
kind, absolutely nothing; the Saturday Review treats these matters of
ethnology with great power and learning, and the Saturday Review says
we are 'a nation into which a Norman element, like a much smaller
Celtic element, was so completely absorbed that it is vain to seek
after Norman or Celtic elements in any modern Englishman.' And the
other day at Zurich I read a long essay on English literature by one
of the professors there, in which the writer observed, as a
remarkable thing, that while other countries conquered by the
Germans,--France, for instance, and Italy,--had ousted all German
influence from their genius and literature, there were two countries,
not originally Germanic, but conquered by the Germans, England and
German Switzerland, of which the genius and the literature were
purely and unmixedly German; and this he laid down as a position
which nobody would dream of challenging.
I say it is strange that this should be so, and we in particular have
reason for inquiring whether it really is so; because though, as I
have said, even as a matter of science the Celt has a claim to be
known, and we have an interest in knowing him, yet this interest is
wonderfully enhanced if we find him to have actually a part in us.
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