Germans of a hundred years ago
listened to Italians singing Metastasio's verses. But soon the songs and
tales were translated; and French poets imitated in their language,
northern and southern, the graceful metres of the Keltic lays, and
altered and arranged their subjects. So that, in a very short time,
France, and through it Germany, was inundated with Keltic stories. This
triumph of the vanquished race was not without reason. The Kelts, early
civilized by Rome and Christianity, had a set of stories and a set of
heroes extremely in accordance with mediaeval ideas, and requiring but
very little alteration. The considerable age of their civilization had
long obliterated all traces of pagan and tribal feeling in their tales.
Their heroes, originally, like those of all other people, divinities
intimately connected with natural phenomena, had long lost all cosmic
characteristics, long ceased to be gods, and, manipulated by the fancy
of a race whose greatness was quite a thing of the past, had become a
sort of golden age ideals--the men of a distant period of glory, which
was adorned with every kind of perfection, till it became as unreal as
fairyland. Fairyland, in good sooth, was this country of the Keltic
tales; and there is a sort of symbolical significance in the fact of its
lawgiver Merlin, and its emperor Arthur, being both of them not dead,
like Sigurd, like Dietrich, like Charlemagne and Roland, but lying in
enchanted sleep. Long inaction and the day-dreaming of idleness had
refined and idealized the heroes of this Keltic race--a race of
brilliant fancy and almost southern mobility, and softened for a long
time by contact with Roman colonists and Christian priests. They were
not the brutal combatants of an active fighting age, like the heroes of
the Edda and of the Carolingian cycles; nor had they any particular
military work to do, belonging as they did to a people huddled away into
inactivity. Their sole occupation was to extend abroad that ideal
happiness which reigned in the ideal court of Arthur; to go forth on the
loose and see what ill-conditioned folk there might yet be who required
being subdued or taught manners in the happy kingdom, which the poor
insignificant Kelts connected with some princelet of theirs who
centuries before may have momentarily repelled the pagan Saxons. Hence
in the Keltic stories, such as they exist in the versions previous to
the conquest by the Norman kings, and previous also to a