Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/397

 Celtic Myth and Saga. 389

reached no definitely settled results. His work is essentially- pioneer work, and it would be unfortunate if the rather large class of persons whose interest in Celtic matters is not controlled by critical instinct were to regard the num- berless brilliant hypotheses scattered throughout these lectures as other than tentative. The principle, however, which underlies most of Prof. Rhys's theories deserves to be brought into prominence — it is that the Celtic-speak- ing tribes were numerically insignificant compared with the populations they subdued, and that their own speech, institutions, and beliefs were profoundly modified by those of these peoples.

This principle, of which Prof Rhys has given examples in these pages (cf ante, iii, 260), is accepted by other scholars. A striking instance is furnished by M. S. Reinach's note on Druidism {Revue Celt., 1892, April). He claims that it represents the pre-Celtic (probably pre-Aryan) worship of the race which erected the megalithic monuments, that its spirit was in striking contrast, not to say marked hostility, to the anthropomorphic conception of religion found among the Aryan tribes of Greece, Italy, and Asia, and that it shared this particularity with the Pythagorean doctrine. Indeed, whilst M. Reinach very properly lays no stress upon the theory of certain ancients that Pythagoras was a pupil of the Druids, he evidently considers that it has a legitimate justification in the affinity of the two systems of belief

It is not easy to exaggerate the importance of this expression of opinion from a scholar fully equipped with all the appliances of modern research and animated by the strictest critical method. M. Reinach deliberately countenances a traditional theory, discarded for a while as unscientific, whilst at the same time he indicates how that theory must be modified to make it accord with existing knowledge. I shall have frequent occasion in the follow- ing pages to instance other cases in which the traditional view has been vindicated or rehabilitated in its essence, if not in all its details.