of its melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all
that from a Celtic source is got nearly all its natural magic.'

I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere
chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless
meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs
of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions and
beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Sclavonic, the Finnish, the
Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries
close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again
brought 'the vivifying spirit' 'of excess' into the arts of Europe. Ernest
Renan has told how the visions of purgatory seen by pilgrims to Lough
Derg--once visions of the pagan under-world, as the boat made out of a
hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the holy island were alone enough to
prove--gave European thought new symbols of a more abundant penitence; and
had so great an influence that he has written, 'It cannot be doubted for a
moment that to the number of poetical themes Europe owes to the genius of
the Celt is to be added the framework of the divine comedy.'

A little later the legends of Arthur and his table, and of the Holy Grail,
once it seems the cauldron of an Irish God, changed the literature of
Europe, and it may be changed, as it were, the very roots of man's
emotions by their influence on the spirit of chivalry and on the spirit of
romance; and later still Shakespeare found his Mab, and probably his Puck,
and one knows not how much else of his faery kingdom, in Celtic legend;
while at the beginning of our own day Sir Walter Scott gave Highland
legends and Highland excitability so great a mastery over all romance
that they seem romance herself.

In our own time Scandinavian tradition, because of the imagination of
Richard Wagner and of William Morris and of the earlier and, as I think,
greater Heinrich Ibsen, has created a new romance, and through the
imagination of Richard Wagner, become all but the most passionate element
in the arts of the modern world. There is indeed but one other element as
passionate, the still unfaded legends of Arthur and of the Holy Grail; and
now a new fountain of legends, and, as I think, a more abundant fountain
than any in Europe, is being opened, the great fountain of Gaelic legends;
the tale of Deirdre, who alone among the women who have set men mad was at
once