Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/65

 Rh judgment, is even more dependent than conscious, individual, deliberately artistic literature upon the strong organisation of its professors.

In applying these general considerations to the traditional literature of the three historically known communities represented in our population, Celtic, as the oldest, claims the first place. Two sections can be clearly distinguished: Goidelic, now represented, linguistically at all events, by Ireland, Northern Scotland, and Man, and Brythonic, represented by Wales and the extreme south-west of England; of these Goidelic or Gaelic is the older in these islands.

The conditions under which Gaelic traditional literature has come into being are precisely those I have previously indicated. The professional literary class was strong, and very well organised; it elaborated and handed down extremely rigid literary conventions; it effected a compromise with the representatives of Christian classic culture which enabled the preservation in large measure of the traditional romantic material, and it remained for some fifteen hundred years, at least, in close touch with every section of the community whose emotions and imaginings it faithfully interpreted. The resultant literature, if meagre and lacking in variety when compared with the great literatures of modern Europe, is extraordinarily homogeneous, and is represented by a still living folklore which has preserved its conventions, alike of conception and expression, with amazing tenacity.

If there be such a thing as a distinctive racial representation of life through the medium of words, we may seek it with confidence in the recorded twelve centuries of Gaelic literature, marked, as is no literature known to me, by unity of subject-matter and treatment.

We cannot speak as clearly with regard to Wales. Here, too, the literary class was strong, highly organised, thoroughly representative of the community; here, too, it elaborated rigid literary conventions. But it seems to have