'
And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful:-
'And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came
to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the
meadows. And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down
and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a steep
bank, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his
neck; and he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the
mouth of the pitcher.'
And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear
beauty, is suddenly magicalised by the romance touch:-
'And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one-half of which
was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green
and in full leaf.'
Magic is the word to insist upon,--a magically vivid and near
interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the
special charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and
it is for this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar
aptitude. But the matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy
to make mistakes here in our criticism. In the first place, Europe
tends constantly to become more and more one community, and we tend
to become Europeans instead of merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans,
Italians; so whatever aptitude or felicity one people imparts into
spiritual work, gets imitated by the others, and thus tends to become
the common property of all.
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