“Foemen feet to dust have trod The blue-robed messengers of God,”
was Llywarch Hên’s allusion to the slaughter of bards, evincing his belief in their sacred character. Song was to the Cymry at once education, a vent for national feeling, and a memorial of great events. The bard ranked beside the artisan as one of the pillars of social life. He had only one theme, his country’s hope, misfortune, and destiny; and, as M. Thierry has aptly said, the nation, poetical in its turn, extended the bounds of fiction by ascribing fantastic meaning to the words. “The wishes of the bards were received as promises, their expectations as prophecies; even their silence was made expressive. If they sang not of Arthur’s death, it was a proof that Arthur yet lived; if the harper undesignedly sounded some melancholy air, the minds of his hearers spontaneously linked with the vague melody the name of a spot, rendered mournfully famous by the loss of a battle with the foreign conqueror. This life of hopes and recollections gave charms, in the eyes of the latter Cambrians, to their country of rocks and morasses.” How much we really owe, then, to historic fact and how much to bardic song the accounting of Camelot and Avalon, Tintagel and Almesbury, as the famous and redoubtable spots of Arthurian accomplishments and occupation, would be difficult to decide. Literary genius from the first centres in the minstrel, who is both composer and singer, who stimulates to action and records events, who is himself “doer” and “seer.”
But for this rich and sustained Celtic influence our literature would be poor indeed, would be less romantic, less poetic, and lacking in the vitality of human passions, human hopes and aspirations, human suffering and despair. For the dominant note in Celtic literature--and this particularly applies to the Arthurian legend which, despite its boasts, is a story of failure--is an indefinable melancholy, an exquisite regret; the poetry may be, as Matthew Arnold said, drenched in the dew of natural magic, and the romances may be threaded with radiant lights, but there always remains the underlying sombreness of texture or the overhanging cloud-darkening of the scene. Joyous music concludes in a minor key or is broken by a sudden note of pathos. The Celtic bards sang of war, but though the heroes always went forth bravely to battle it has been recorded that they “always fell.” Victories are less frequently celebrated than defeats are mourned. The glory of the Celt was vast and transcendent, but from minstrel-times it was a fading glory. Work as the history-weavers might with the golden shuttles of romance their tears mingled with the gleaming strands, and the tissue as it left the loom was a medley of broken lights and shadows. Nevertheless, the pictures they have left us of chivalrous times remain unsurpassed for the grandeur of their conception: they remain the model and despair of all ages.
