A CELTIC CRITIC ON THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND.* GENERATION after generation,

Englishmen find an undying interest in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Dart hur. The learning and enterprise of Dr. Sommer and Mr. Nutt have given us a splendid reprint of our old prose epic, of which we hope to say more hereafter. The concluding volume of Dr. Sommer's prolegomena gives us the firbt complete account of Malory's French and English sources: and these Studies in the Arthurian Legend, by the learned Professor of Celtic in the University of Oxford, offer us a like account of the Celtic forms of the Legends. On opening the volume, we were somewhat appalled by the signs of a critical apparatus of Celtic learning far beyond our power of investigation. We thought of the great Arabic dictionary entitled Ramis (The Ocean), and though we remembered that the Prophet Mahommed had said, "He need not fear the waves who has Noah for a pilot," we have thought the counsels of Lucretius and Sir Isaac Newton still better, and shall, like the latter, content ourselves with picking up a few of the pebbles which the ocean is rolling in upon us, and not attempt to explore the ocean itself. And the book the rather offers itself to such desultory examination, since it purports to be only a series of "studies," and these as a kind of appendix to the learned Professor's Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Heathendom. Yet in the present day it is required that every subject of scientific inquiry shall be considered not only in itself, but in its relations with all other subjects. If the niece of King Gorbeduc were now living, she would not be content with the dogma of the Hermit of Prague—" that which is, is "—but would demand to know the relations as well as the essence of "that which is." Be it theology, history, geology, astronomy, or any other science, it is expected to show its relation to its sister. sciences, and to admit of itself that "what no one with us shares • Studies in the Arthurian Legend. By John Bhp, M.A., Fellow of Jeans College, Professor of Celtic in the University of Oxford. Oxford : The Clarendon Press. 1891. seems scarce our own." So we have looked out for some links or clues for connecting these Studies of the Arthurian Legend, and have found that our author has, consciously or uncon- sciously, supplied us with two such clues. These are the science of the Solar Myth, and the historical method which

that distinguished philologist, Captain Fluellen, adopted so effectively in his parallel of Alexander of Macedon and Henry of Monmouth, and which for shortness—though not for- getting the rivers or the salmon—we may call the method of the two "Ms." The present writer looks back more

than fifty years since he first became acquainted with the Solar Myth in a little French brochure, in which it was clearly shown that the so-called Napoleon was II) other than the Sun-God himself. He was rtl 'Manor, truly Apollo, and his mother was Asri,/, or Letitia. He

rose, as the dwellers in Provence were wont to see him rise, from the sea behind the mountains of Corsica, to reign over the sunny land of France ; with the seasons and the months, his four brothers and his twelve Generals, as his ministers, he fought long with the Northern powers of storm and winter, till he was vanquished by the greatest of them in the snows of Russia. Then he rose again from the Eastern sea, to be again overcome by the army of the land of fogs, and then to set in the western waves of the Atlantic.

And for the present generation, Mr. Andrew Lang has pro- vided a still more complete example of the science of Heliology

—or shall we say creed of Heliosophy P—in the "Great Glad- stone Myth," which shows how he whom we now call the

Member for Midlothian, will be known to the post-historic New Zealander. While the learned Professor, with the modesty which characterises this volume throughout, deprecates the notion that he would intrude this Solar Myth on any unwilling readers, we find it reappearing again and again as the explana- tion of legends in which none but the most practised eye could have discovered it : for "virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it." The method of the two 'Ma" is so simple, that we need not say more of it till we come to an instance of its application.

The first chapter of the book treats with much learning, as well as with many conjectures which the author himself seems only to half-believe, of "Arthur, Historical and Mythical," and we are finally left to choose for ourselves whether Arthur is a "Culture Hero "—whatever that may be—or a Celtic Zeus.

The next chapter is headed "Arthur and Airem," and it tells at length the Irish legend of the latter hero. The story has not much interest, except that we learn from it that the Irish 'believed that the King of the Fairies had taught their ancestors to train their oxen to draw with the yoke instead of pushing with their foreheads, as they still do in the South of France. This legend is connected with that of Arthur by what we have called the method of the two "Ms." The " Ar " in Arthur manifestly corresponds with the " Air " in Airem ; and by a combination and development of letters and grammatical forms with which we will not trouble our readers,

the full name of Arthur comes to light as a Welsh name. A further use of the two " Ms " connects Arthur with Roman history in Britain, and with the Greek mythology. For "Welsh literature never calls Arthur a gwledig, or prince,

but emperor." And Malory tells a story of the relations of Arthur with Morgan le Fay which has its parallel in those of the Greek Zeus with Here, his sister and his wife. And then the result of these two chapters is thus summed up :—

"To sum up these remarks, it may be granted that there was a historical Arthur, who may have held the office, which under the Roman administration was known as that of the Comes Britannic; that he may, like Aurelius Ambrosius, have been partly of Roman descent ; that Maelywn was his nephew, whom Gildas accuses of slaying his uncle ; that his name Arthur was either the Latin ArtOrius, or else a Celtic name, belonging in the first instance to a god Arthur ; for the Latin ArtOrius and the god's name, which we have treated as early Brythonic Artor, genitive Art6ros, would equally yield in Welsh the familiar form Arthur. In either case, the name would have to be regarded as an important factor in the identification or confusion of the man with the divinity. The latter, called Arthur hy the Brythons, was called Airem by the Goidels, and he was probably the Artiean Mercury of the Allobroges of ancient Gaul. His role was that of Culture Hero, and his name allows one to suppose that he was once associated, in some special manner, with agriculture over the entire Celtic world of antiquity. On the one hand we have the man Arthur, whose position we have tried to define, and on the other a greater Arthur, a more colossal figure, which we have, so to speak, but a torso rescued from the wreck of the Celtic pantheon."

A series of Celtic legends follow, some of which are pretty enough to make us fancy that Malory would have put them into his epic, if he had known them. And to these follows an elaborate parallel of the labours of the Greek Hemkles with those of Ofichulainn and Peredur. In these the exploit of Hemkles in killing the Nemtean lion and making an invul- nerable coat of his skin, finds its counterpart in that of the Celtic hero killing a knight and putting on his armour; while to make the correspondence of the two "Me" more re- markable, we notice that the slain knight was of a wicked nature, and that his armour was got off with so much difficulty that it almost seemed to be his skin. The story of Herakles stealing the three apples of the Hesperides has its counterpart in an adventure of Ctichulainu, who brings away a cauldron.

We opened this book with expectation, we close it with disappointment, notwithstanding its undoubted learning.

We had hoped for a scientifically arranged collection of the fossil remains of the so-called "Arthurian Legend;" we have. found the fossils indeed, but the dry bones are strung together by the wires of modern conjecture, and made to dance fan- tastically to tunes they never heard in their lifetime. We not only respect but enjoy the labours of Dryasdust when he

makes fight against the inexorable• laws of Waste and of Death as the conditions of life and abundance, and we are thankful to him for every grain of mummy-wheat saved from the wrecks and revolutions of time. But when these relics of the past are offered to us enveloped in clouds of conjecture,. supposition, and mere fancy, we turn from them with an incredulus odi. Of the worthlessness of these projections

of the critic's imagination, taken for facts, we have an instance in Professor Rhys's last chapter, in which he gives us a detailed account of the fabric of "higher criticism" which the learned M. Gaston Paris has raised on the history of the Arthurian Legend ; then the contradiction of M. Paris's whole argument by the no less learned Germans, Professor Foerster and Professor Zimmer; and lastly, his own cautious inclination of the balance to the aide of the two latter.

"And art thou nothing P Such thou art as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ring haze, Sees all before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head. The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues !"

There is a way in which those dry bones can live again ; but it is the way of Malory, Spenser, and Lord Tennyson.