chief use of the nutriment in the seed is to favor the growth of the seedlings, while struggling with other plants growing vigorously all around. or animal is placed in a new country among new competitors, the conditions of its life will generally be changed in an essential manner, although the climate may be exactly the same as in its former home. If its average numbers are to increase in its new home, we should have to modify it in a different way to what we should have had to do in its native country; for we should have to give it some advantages over a different set of competitors or enemies. Look at a plant in the midst of its range, why does it not double or quadruple its numbers? We know that it can perfectly well withstand a little more heat or cold, dampness or dryness, for elsewhere it ranges into slightly hotter or colder, damper or drier, districts. In In this case we can clearly see that if we wish in imagination to give the plant the power of increasing in number, we should have to give it some advantage over its competitors, or over the animals which prey on it. On the confines of its geographical range, a change of constitution with respect to climate would clearly be an advantage to our plant; but we have reason to believe that only a few plants or animals range so far that they are destroyed exclusively by the rigor of the climate. Not until we reach the extreme confines of life, in the Arctic regions or on the borders of an utter desert, will competition cease. The land may be extremely cold or dry, yet there will be competition between some few species, or between the individuals of the same species, for the warmest or dampest spots. Hence we can see that when a plant | vive and multiply. It is good thus to try in imagination to give to any one species an advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do. This ought to convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction as necessary as it is difficult to acquire. All that we can do is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy sur CELTIC ELEMENTS IN ENGLISH POETRY1 The philosophical pessimism consequent upon the dissemination of the Darwinian theory found its sincerest expression in the poetry of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). While Arnold's poetry is tinged with the sadness of resignation and religious doubt, his prose is militant against the rising commercialism of his age. As a critic he stresses the influence of literature on the life of the reader, for he held that "the end and aim of all literature is a criticism of life." Significant phrases that he added to the language of literary criticism are Culture and Anarchy, Sweetness and Light, Dissidence of Dissent, Hebraism and Hellenism. The essay on Celtic Literature (1867) unites simplicity of a classic style with genuine enthusiasm. THE Celt's quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his poetry style; his indomitable personality gave 'From On the Study of Celtic Literature and on Translating Homer by Matthew Arnold Published by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission. it pride and passion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysteri ous life and grace there; they are Nature's own children, and utter her secret in a way which make them something quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so preeminent a mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it-the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature -that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism-that the Germans had; but the intimate life of Nature, her weird power and her fairy charm. As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them-Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford-are to the Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon-so is the homely realism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature. Gwydion' wants a wife for his pupil: "Well," says Math, "we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect." Celtic romance is full of exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy of the Celt's feeling in these matters, and how deeply Nature lets him come into her secrets. The quick dropping of blood is called "faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest." And thus is Olwen described: "More yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood The following Celtic passages are quoted from Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion (1838), a collection of eleven Welsh prose tales. anemony amidst the spray of the meadow fountains." For loveliness it would be hard to beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the following: "And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the valley he came to a hermit's cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly, and there he spent the night. And in the morning he arose and when he went forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night before, and a hawk had killed a wild-fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the bird. And Peredur stood and compared the blackness of the raven, and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady whom best he loved, which was blacker than the raven, and to her skin, which was whiter than the snow, and to her two cheeks, which were redder than the blood upon the snow appeared to be." And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful: "And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the meadows. And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck; and he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher." And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear beauty, is suddenly magicalized by the romance touch:-- "And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one-half of which was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf." Magic is the word to insist upon-a magically vivid and near interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the special charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar aptitude. But the matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy to make mistakes here in our criticism. In the first place, Europe tends constantly to become more and more one community, and we tend to become Europeans instead of merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians; so whatever aptitude or felicity one people imparts into spiritual work, gets imitated by the others, and thus tends to become the common property of all. Therefore anything so beautiful and attractive as the natural magic I am speaking of, is sure, nowadays, if it appears in the productions of the Celts, or of the English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will be a stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the literatures where it is native, which it will not have in the literatures where it is not native. Novalis or Rückert, for instance, have their eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling for natural magic; a rough-and-ready critic easily credits them and the Germans with the Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic nearness to Nature and her secret; but the question is whether the strokes in the German's picture of nature have ever the indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakespeare's touch in his daffodil, Wordsworth's in his cuckoo, Keats's in his Autumn,3 Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree or his Easterdaisy among the Swiss farms. To decide where the gift for natural magic originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must decide this question. In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we are here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready critic imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is han 1Winter's Tale IV., 4. 2"Solitary Reaper." 3"To Autumn.” Obermann is a highly romantic story by Etienne Pivert de Senancour. dled at all, and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of handling her. But these modes are many; I will mention four of them now: there is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the Greek, the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added; in the magical, the eye is on the object, but charms and magic are added. In the conventional way of handling nature, the eye is not on the object; what that means we all know, we have only to think of our eighteenthcentury poetry: "As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night"5 to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry supplies plenty of instances, too; if we put this from Propertius' Hylas: is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added. German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of handling nature; an excellent example is to be found in the stanzas called Zueignung, prefixed to Goethe's poems; the morning walk, the mist, the dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be, they are given with the eye on the object, but there the merit of the work, as a handling of nature, stops; neither Greek radiance nor Celtic magic is added; the power of these is not what gives the poem in question its merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of moral and spiritual emotion. But the power of Greek radiance Goethe could give to his handling of nature, and nobly, too, as any one who will read his Wanderer-the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a peasant woman and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a temple near Cuma-may see. Only the power of natural magic Goethe does not, I think, give; whereas Keats passes at will from the Greek power to that power which is, as I say, Celtic; from his: What little town, by river or seashoreto his : White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine, Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leavesor his : then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in Shakespeare's: I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantineit is mainly a Greek note which is struck. Then, again in his : look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold! we are at the very point of transition from the Greek note to the Celtic; there is the Greek clearness and brightness, with the Celtic aërialness and magic coming in. Then we have the sheer, inimitable Celtic note in passages like this: Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the in such a night Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand, To come again to Carthage. And those last lines of all are so drenched and intoxicated with the fairydew of that natural magic which is our theme, that I cannot do better than end with them. THE NATURE OF GREEK MYTHS1 JOHN RUSKIN The florid style of John Ruskin (1819-1900) offers a striking contrast to the lucid, yet musical prose of Matthew Arnold. While Ruskin's earlier writings concern art, architecture, and the beauties of nature, his later writings turn toward economic problems. In Modern Painters he deals largely with art; in Seven Lamps of Architecture he aims to create intelligent appreciation for the cathedral-building of the Middle Ages; and in Stones of Venice he points out the merits of early Italian painting. Throughout these volumes, however, he is never interested merely in art for art's sake, but in the life and the ideals of the artists and the temper of peoples during periods of high artistic enthusiasm; so that his later writings, aiming to ameliorate the living conditions of English workmen, are the logical development of this chief interest. The Queen of the Air (1869), of which the opening sections are given here, is an excursus into the field of Greek mythology. in "There is no God," the folly is prouder, deeper, and less pardonable, in saying, "There is no God but for me.' 1. I WILL not ask your pardon | folly may justly attach to the sayingfor endeavoring to interest you the subject of Greek Mythology; but I must ask your permission to approach it in a temper differing from that in which it is frequently treated. We cannot justly interpret the religion of any people, unless we are prepared to admit that we ourselves, as well as they, are liable to error in matters of faith; and that the conviction of others, however singular, may in some points have been well founded, while our own, however reasonable, may in some particulars be mistaken. You must forgive me, therefore, for not always distinctively calling the creeds of the past "superstition," and the creeds of the present day "religion"; as well as for assuming that a faith now confessed may sometimes be superficial, and that a faith long forgotten may once have been sincere. It is the task of the Divine to condemn the errors of antiquity, and of the Philologist to account for them: I will only pray you to read, with patience, and human sympathy, the the thoughts of men who lived without blame in a darkness they could not dispel; and to remember that, whatever charge of 1From The Queen of the Air by John Ruskin. Published by Longmans, Green and Co. Reprinted by permission, 2. A Myth, in its simplest definition, is a story with a meaning attached to it, other than it seems to have at first; and the fact that it has such a meaning is generally marked by some of its circumstances being extraordinary, or, in the common use of the word, unnatural. Thus, if I tell you that Hercules killed a water-serpent in the lake of Lerna, and if I mean, and you understand, nothing more than that fact, the story, whether true or false, is not a myth. But if by telling you this, I mean that Hercules purified the stagnation of many streams from deadly miasmata, my story, however simple, is a true myth; only, as, if I left it in that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing beyond, it will be wise in me to surprise your attention by adding some singular circumstances; for instance, that the water-snake had several heads, which revived as fast as they were killed, and which poisoned even the foot that trod upon them as they slept. And in proportion to the fullness of intended meaning I shall probably multiply and refine upon these improbabilities; as, suppose, if, instead of desiring only to tell |