im. New races understand instinctively, because the
future cries in their ears, that the old revelations are insufficient, and
that all life is revelation beginning in miracle and enthusiasm, and dying
out as it unfolds itself in what we have mistaken for progress. It is one
of our illusions, as I think, that education, the softening of manners,
the perfecting of law--countless images of a fading light--can create
nobleness and beauty, and that life moves slowly and evenly towards some
perfection. Progress is miracle, and it is sudden, because miracles are
the work of an all-powerful energy, and nature in herself has no power
except to die and to forget. If one studies one's own mind, one comes to
think with Blake, that 'every time less than a pulsation of the artery is
equal to six thousand years, for in this period the poet's work is done;
and all the great events of time start forth and are conceived in such a
period, within a pulsation of the artery.'

February 1900.

THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE

I

Ernest Renan described what he held to be Celtic characteristics in _The
Poetry of the Celtic Races_. I must repeat the well-known sentences: 'No
race communed so intimately as the Celtic race with the lower creation, or
believed it to have so big a share of moral life.' The Celtic race had 'a
realistic naturalism,' 'a love of nature for herself, a vivid feeling for
her magic, commingled with the melancholy a man knows when he is face to
face with her, and thinks he hears her communing with him about his origin
and his destiny.' 'It has worn itself out in mistaking dreams for
realities,' and 'compared with the classical imagination the Celtic
imagination is indeed the infinite contrasted with the finite.' 'Its
history is one long lament, it still recalls its exiles, its flights
across the seas.' 'If at times it seems to be cheerful, its tear is not
slow to glisten behind the smile. Its songs of joy end as elegies; there
is nothing to equal the delightful sadness of its national melodies.'
Matthew Arnold, in _The Study of Celtic Literature_, has accepted this
passion for nature, this imaginativeness, this melancholy, as Celtic
characteristics, but has described them more elaborately. The Celtic
passion for nature comes almost more from a sense of her 'mystery' than of
her 'beauty,' and it adds 'charm and magic' to nature, and the Celtic
imaginativeness and melancholy are alike 'a passionate, turbulent,
in