Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/110

 84 people play no mean part in the drama. The results were not, it is true, immediately apparent. The Viking ideal, as embodied at least in his literature, exercised no influence upon the general trend of European culture. It was otherwise with the next great movement in which Britain also plays a capital part. In the twelfth century, thanks, and thanks alone, to the political and social movements of which Britain was the centre, Celtic fancy, Celtic romance, penetrated to every district of Western Christendom and victoriously influenced the social and moral ideals of the time. It was true they had to wear a foreign dress, to accept a large admixture of Christian and classic elements, but nevertheless, alike by the actual subject-matter which it presents and by its animating spirit, the Arthurian romance belongs to those older worlds of belief and fancy which it is our task to investigate.

This older world, as I contended two years ago, came again to the front when, at the breaking up of mediæval civilisation, the order under which we are still living may be said to have begun. I need not urge afresh the claim I made on behalf of England, that here alone the thoughts and fancies of that older world were given a worthy form, and were enabled to become an imperishable portion of mankind's inheritance of beauty and wisdom. Nor need I emphasise the part played alike by the Teutonic and the Celtic elements of our race in the great romantic revival, which, starting a century and a half ago, was to result in the momentous changes, literary, intellectual, social, and political, which have profoundly affected the century drawing to a close, and the force of which is not yet spent. Viewing that revival in its widest and most general aspect, it must be regarded as a return to earlier sources of inspiration whether for the artist or the thinker, as the sympathetic reconstruction and vindication of much that humanity