Style is the most striking quality of their poetry.
Celtic poetry seems to make up to itself for being unable to master the
world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by throwing all its
force into style, by bending language at any rate to its will, and
expressing the ideas it has with unsurpassable intensity, elevation, and
effect. It has all through it a sort of intoxication of style--a
_Pindarism_, to use a word formed from the name of the poet, on whom,
above all other poets, the power of style seems to have exercised an
inspiring and intoxicating effect; and not in its great poets only, in
Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian,[260] does the Celtic genius show
this Pindarism, but in all its productions:--
"The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr;
Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd;
But unknown is the grave of Arthur."[261]
That comes from the _Welsh Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors_, and
if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an English
churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that our
productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as well as
of its opposite):--
"Afflictions sore long time I bore,
Physicians were in vain,
Till God did please Death should me seize
And ease me of my pain--"
if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English, which
in their _Gemeinheit_ of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a clear
sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking of is.
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