20 Hartley Burr Alexander 



Where else could have been attained the tender warmth of this 

 allegory save in a mood passionately en rapport with Nature and 

 graced with a child's implicit faith in Nature's never-failing 

 responsiveness to the heart's need? 



But Nature is not always kind. She may prove most fickle of 

 mistresses, utterly cruel to those who love her. Against this incon- 

 stancy, when caress gives place to stormy lashing, the Celtic soul 

 rises in mad revulsion. The trust has been perfect; the hurt is 

 sore ; the heart cries out. Read in The Black Book of Caer- 

 martJieu the curse upon Seithenhin whose vice brought the de- 

 stroying sea upon the plain of Gwydnen; or in The Red Book of 

 Hergest the rebellious imprecation of the old bard against the 

 crutch-token of his vanished youth and beauty ; or again, that wail 

 over the woes of war — desolations inviting race suicide, — 



It is not well that a son should be born : 

 His youthful destiny 

 Will perforce be unbelief 

 And sore privation. . . . 



Yet if the Celt was extravagant in sorrow, so was he exultant 

 in stress of battle. He gloried in the red spectacle of war- 

 wrought slaughter : 



Mild beams belong not to the storm; 



The soul of Gaul is in the roar of battle ! 



cries one of Ossian's heroes, voicing the spirit of an ever- 

 contending though ever-vanquished race, a race too hot-headed 

 to abstain from quarrel, too valorous to be cautious in the fight. 



It is not difficult to draw antitheses between the two folk-souls, 

 the Saxon and the Celtic. The essential difference cannot appear 

 more clearly than in the contrast of the passing of Scyld and the 

 passing of Arthur. There is a striking outward similarity, but 

 the tempers of the two episodes are all at odds. On the one 

 hand we have a bare outline of the event; there is a dumb tug- 

 ging, a straining hush, with only the over-impending sense of 

 doom to exalt the bald reality. On the other, there is all the 

 atmosphere of magic illusion : the uncanny waste, the wailing 

 mere, the mysterious funeral barque thronged with shadowy 



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