This something is STYLE, and the Celts certainly have it in a
wonderful measure. Style is the most striking quality of their
poetry. Celtic poetry seems to make up to itself for being unable to
master the world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by
throwing all its force into style, by bending language at any rate to
its will, and expressing the ideas it has with unsurpassable
intensity, elevation, and effect. It has all through it a sort of
intoxication of style,--a Pindarism, to use a word formed from the
name of the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the power of style
seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating effect; and not
in its great poets only, in Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian,
does the Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but in all its
productions:-
The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr;
Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd;
But unknown is the grave of Arthur.
That comes from the Welsh Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors,
and if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an
English churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that
our productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as
well as of its opposite):-
Afflictions sore long time I bore,
Physicians were in vain,
Till God did please Death should me seize
And ease me of my pain -
if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English,
which in their Gemeinheit of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a
clear sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking
of is.
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