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The Crest Wave of Evolution by Kenneth Morris

K >> Kenneth Morris >> The Crest Wave of Evolution




But the empire of the Celtic Kings was already far fallen, before
it was confined to Gaul, Britain, and perhaps Ireland. When
first we see this people they were winning a name for fickleness
of purpose: making conquests and throwing them away; which
things are the marks of a race declining from a high eminence it
had won of old through hard work and sound policy. We shall come
to see that personal or outward characteristics can never be
posited as inherent in any race. Such things belong to ages and
stages in the race's growth. Whatever you can say of Englishmen,
Frenchmen, Germans, now, has been totally untrue of them at some
other period. We think of the Italians as passionate, subtle of
intellect, above all things artistic and beauty-loving. Now
look at them as they were three centuries B.C.: plodding, self-
contained and self-mastered, square-dealing and unsubtle, above
all things contemning beauty, wholly inartistic. But a race may
retain the same traits for a very long time, if it remains in a
back-water, and is unaffected by the currents of evolution.

So we may safely say of the Celts that the fickleness for which
they were famed in Roman times was not a racial, but a temporal
or epochal defect. They were not fickle when they held out (in
Wales) for eight centuries against the barbarian onslaughts which
brought the rest of the Roman empire down in two or three; or
when they resisted for two hundred years those Normans who had
conquered the Anglo-Saxons in a decade. This very quality, in
old Welsh literature, is more than once given as a characteristic
of extreme age; "I am old, bent double; I am fickly rash." says
Llywarch Hen. I think that gives the clew to the whole position.
The race was at the end of its manvantaric period; the Race Soul
had lost control of the forces that bound its organism together;
centrifugalism had taken the place of the centripetal impulse
that marks the cycles of youth and growth. It had eaten into
individual character; whence the tendency to fly off at
tangents. We see the same thing in any decadent people; by
which I mean, any people at the end of one of its manvantaras,
and on the verge of a pralaya. And remember that a pralaya, like
a night's rest or the Devachanic sleep between two lives, is
simply a means for restoring strength and youth.

How great the Celtic nations had been in their day, and what
settled and civilized centuries lay behind them, one may gather
from two not much noticed facts. First: Caesar, conqueror of the
Roman world and of Pompey, the greatest Roman general of the day,
landed twice in Britain, and spent a few weeks there without
accomplishing anything in particular. But it was the central
seat and last stronghold of the Celts; and his greatest triumph
was accorded him for this feat; and he was prouder of it than
anything else he ever did. He set it above his victories over
Pompey. Second: the Gauls, in the first century B.C., were able
to put in the field against him three million men: not so far
short of the number France has been able to put in the field
in the recent war. Napoleon could hardly, I suppose, have
raised such an army--in France. Caesar is said to have killed
some five million Gauls before he conquered them. By ordinary
computations, that would argue a population of some thirty
millions in the Gaulish half of the kingdom of Diviciacos a
century after the latter's death; and even if that computation
is too high, it leaves the fact irrefutable that there was a very
large population; and a large population means always a long and
settled civilization.

Diviciacos ruled only Gaul and Britain; possible Ireland as
well; he may have been a Gaul, a Briton, or an Irishman; very
likely there was not much difference in those days. It will be
said I am leaving out of account much that recent scholarship has
divulged; I certainly am leaving out of account a great many of
the theories of recent scholarship, which for the most part make
confusion worse confounded. But we know that the lands held by
the Celts--let us boldly say, with many of the most learned, the
Celtic empire--was vastly larger in its prime than the British
Isles and France. Its eastern outpost was Galatia in Asia Minor.
You may have read in _The Outlook_ some months ago an article by
a learned Serbian, in which he claims that the Jugo-Slavs of the
Balkans, his countrymen, are about half Celtic; the product of
the fusion of Slavic in-comers, perhaps conquerors, with an
original Celtic population. Bohemia was once the land of the
Celtic Boii; and we may take it as an axiom, that no conquest,
no racial incursion, ever succeeds in wiping out the conquered
people; unless there is such wide disparity, racial and
cultural, as existed, for example, between the white settlers in
America and the Indians. There are forces in human nature itself
which make this absolute. The conquerors may quite silence the
conquered; may treat them with infinite cruelty; may blot out
all their records and destroy the memory of their race; but the
blood of the conquered will go on flowing through all the
generation of the children of the conquerors, and even, it seems
probable, tend ever more and more to be the prevalent element.

The Celts, then, at one time or another, have held the following
lands: Britain and Ireland, of course; Gaul and Spain;
Switzerland and Italy north of the Po; Germany, except perhaps
some parts of Prussia; Denmark probably, which as you know was
called the Cimbric Chersonese; the Austrian empire, with the
Balkan Peninsula north of Macedonia, Epirus and Thrace, and much
of southern Russia and the lands bordering the Black Sea.
Further back, it seems probable that they and the Italic people
were one race; whose name survives in that of the province of
Liguria, and in the Welsh name for England, which is Lloegr. So
that in the reign of Diviciacos their empire had already shrunk
to the meerest fragment of its former self. It had broken and
shrunk before we get the first historical glimpses of them;
before they sacked Delphi in 279 B.C.: before their ambassadors
made a treaty with Alexander; and replied to his question as to
what they feared: "Nothing except that the skies should fall."
Before they sacked Rome in 390. All these historic eruptions
were the mere sporadic outburst of a race long past its prime and
querulous with old age, I think Two thousand years of severe
pralaya, almost complete extinction, utter insignificance and
terrible karma awaited them; and we only see them, pardon the
expression, kicking up their heels in a final plunge as a
preparation for that long silence.

Some time back I discussed these historical questions, particularly
the correspondence between Celtic and Chinese dates, with
Dr. Siren and Professor Fernholm; and they pointed out to
me a similar correspondence between the dates of Scandinavian
and West Asian history. I can remember but one example now:
Gustavus Vasa, father of modern Sweden, founder of the present
monarchy, came to the throne in 1523 and died in 1560. The last
great epoch of the West Asian Cycle coincides, in the west, and
reign of Suleyman the Magnificent in Turkey, from 1520 to 1566.
At its eastern extremity, Babar founded the Mogul Empire in India
in 1526; he reigned until 1556. On the death of Aurangzeb in
1707, the Moguls ceased to be a great power; the Battle of
Pultowa, in 1709, put an end to Sweden's military greatness.

It is interesting to compare the earliest Celtic literature we
have, with the earliest literature of the race which was to be
the main instrument of Celtic bad karma in historical times--the
Teutons. Here, as usual, common impressions are false. It is
the latter, the Teutonic, that is in the minor key, and full
of wistful sadness. There is an earnestness about it: a
recognition of, and rather mournful acquiescence in, the
mightiness of Fate, which is imagined almost always adverse. I
quote these lines from William Morris, who, a Celt himself by
mere blood and race, lived in and interpreted the old Teutonic
spirit as no other English writer has attempted to do, mush less
succeeded in doing: he is the one Teuton of English literature.
He speaks of the "haunting melancholy" of the northern races--the
"Thought of the Otherwhere" that

"Waileth weirdly along through all music and song
From a Teuton's voice or string: ..."

Withal it was a brave melancholy that possessed them; they were
equal to great deeds, and not easily to be discouraged; they
could make merry, too; but in the midst of their merriment, they
could not forget grim and hostile Fate:--

"There dwelt men merry-hearted and in hope exceeding great,
Met the good days and the evil as they went the ways of fate."

It is literature that reveals the heart of a people who had
suffered long, and learnt from their suffering the lessons of
patience, humility, continuity of effort: those qualities which
enable them, in their coming manvantaric period, to dominate
large portions of the world.

But when we turn to the Celtic remains, the picture we find is
altogether different. Their literature tells of a people, in the
Biblical phrase, "with a proud look and a high stomach." It is
full of flashing colors, gaiety, titanic pride. There was no
grayness, no mournful twilight hue on the horizon of their mind;
their 'Other-World' was only more dawn-lit, more noon-illumined,
than this one; Ireland of the living was sun-bright and
sparkling and glorious; but the 'Great Plain' of the dead was
far more sun-bright and sparkling than Ireland. It is the
literature of a people accustomed to victory and predominance.
When they began to meet defeat they by no means acquiesced in
it. They regarded adverse fate, not with reverence, but with
contempt. They saw in sorrow no friend and instructress of the
human soul; were at pains to learn no lesson from her; instead,
they pitted what was their pride, but what they would have called
the glory of their own souls, against her; they made no terms,
asked no truce; but went on believing the human--or perhaps I
should say the Celtic--soul more glorious than fate, stronger to
endure and defy than she to humiliate and torment. In many sense
it was a fatal attitude, and they reaped the misery of it; but
they gained some wealth for the human spirit from it too. The
aged Oisin has returned from Fairyland to find the old glorious
order in Ireland fallen and passed during the three centuries of
his absence. High Paganism has gone, and a religion meek,
inglorious, and Unceltic has taken its mission thereto: tells
him the gods are conquered and dead, and that the omnipotent God
of the Christians reigns alone now.--"I would thy God were set on
yonder hill to fight with my son Oscar!" replies Oisin. Patrick
paints for him the hell to which he is destined unless he accepts
Christianity; and Oisin answers:

"Put the staff in my hands! for I go to the Fenians, thou
cleric, to chant
The warsongs that roused them of old; they will rise,
making clouds with their breath.
Innumerable, singing, exultant; and hell underneath them
shall pant,
And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them
in death."

"No," says Patrick; "none war on the masters of hell, who could
break up the world in their rage"; and bids him weep and kneel in
prayer for his lost soul. But that will not do for the old
Celtic warrior bard; no tame heaven for him. He will go to
hell; he will not surrender the pride and glory of his soul to
the mere meanness of fate. He will

"Go to Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or
at feast."

So with Llywarch Hen, Prince of Cumberland, in his old age and
desolation. His kingdom has been conquered; he is in exile in
Wales; his four and twenty sons, "wearers of golden torques,
proud rulers of princes," have been slain; he is considerably
over a hundred years old, and homeless, and sick; but no whit of
his pride is gone. He has learnt no lesson from life excepts
this One: that fate and Karma and sorrow are not so proud, not
so skillful to persecute, as the human soul is capable of bitter
resentful endurance. He is titanically angry with destiny; but
never meek or acquiescent.

Then if you look at their laws of war, you come to know very well
how this people came to be almost blotted out. If they had a true
spiritual purpose, instead of mere personal pride, I should say
the world would be Celtic-speaking and Celtic-governed now. Yet
still their reliance was all on what we must call spiritual
qualities. The first notice we get in classical literature of
Celts and Teutons--I think from Strabo--is this: "The Celts
fight for glory, the Teutons for plunder." Instead of plunder,
let us say material advantage; they knew why they were fighting,
and went to get it. But the Celtic military laws--Don Quixote in
a fit of extravagance framed them! There must be no defensive
armor; the warrior must go bare-breasted into battle. There are a
thousand things he must fear more than defeat or death--all that
would make the glory of his soul seem less to him. He must make
fighting his business, because in his folly it seemed to him that
in it he could best nourish that glory; not for what material
ends he could gain. Pitted against a people--with a definite
policy, he was bound to lose in the long run. But still he
endowed the human spirit with a certain wealth; still his folly
had been a true spiritual wisdom at one time. The French at
Fontenoy, who cried to their English enemies, when both were
about to open fire: _"Apres vous, messieurs! "_ were simply
practicing the principles of their Gaulish forefathers; the
thrill of honor, of _'Pundonor'_ as the Spaniard says, was much
more in their eyes than the chance of victory.

Now, in what condition does a race gain such qualities? Not in
sorrow; not in defeat, political dependence or humiliation. The
virtues which these teach are of an opposite kind; they are what
we may call the plebeian virtues which lead to success. But the
others, the old Celtic qualities, are essentially patrician. You
find them in the Turks; accustomed to sway subject races, and
utterly ruthless in their dealings with them; but famed as clean
and chivalrous fighters in a war with foreign peoples. See
how the Samurai, the patricians of never yet defeated Japan,
developed them. They are the qualities the Law teaches us through
centuries of domination and aristocratic life. They are developed
in a race accustomed to rule other races; a race that does
not engage in commerce; in an aristocratic race, or in an
aristocratic caste within a race. Here is the point: the Law
designs periods of ascendency for each people in its turn, that
it may acquire these qualities; and it appoints for each people
in its turn Periods of subordination, poverty and sorrow, that it
may develop the opposite qualities of patience, humility, and
orderly effort.

Would it not appear then, that in those first centuries B. C.
when Celts and Teutons were emerging into historical notice, the
Teutons were coming out of a long period of subordination, in
which they had learnt strength--the Celts out of a long period of
ascendency, in which they had learnt other things? The Teuton,
fresh from his pralayic sleep, was unconquerable by Rome.
The Celt, old, and intoxicated with the triumphs of a long
manvantara, could not repel Roman persistence and order. Rome.
too, was rising, or in her prime; had patience, and followed her
material plans every inch of the way to success. Where she
conquered, she imposed her rule. But whatever material plan were
set before the Celt, some spiritual red-herring, some notion in
his mind, was sure to sidetrack him before he had come half way
to its accomplishment. He had enough of empire-building; and
thirsted only after dreams. Brennus turned from a burnt Rome, his
pride satisfied. Vercingetorix, decked in all his gold, rode
seven times--was it seven times?--round the camp of Caesar:
defeat had come to him; death was coming; but he would bathe his
soul in a little pomp and glory first. Whether you threw your
sword in the scales, or surrendered to infamous Caesar, the main
thing was that you should kindle the pride in your eye, and puff
up the highness of your stomach. . . . So the practical Roman
despised him, and presently conquered him.

Here is another curious fact: the greater number, if not all, of
the words in the Teutonic languages denoting social order and the
machinery of government, are of Celtic derivation. Words such as
_Reich_ and _Amt,_ to give two examples I happen to remember out
of a list quoted by Mr. T. W. Rollestone in one of his books.

And now I think we have material before us wherewith to reconstruct
a sketch or plan of ancient European history. Let me remind you
again that our object is simply the discovery of Laws. That, in
the eyes of the Law, there are no most favored nations. That
there are no such things as permanent racial characteristics;
but that each race adopts the characteristics appropriate to
its stage of growth.

It is a case of the pendulum swing, of ebb and flow. For two
thousand years the Teutons have been pressing on and, dominating
the Celts. They started at the beginning of that time with the
plebeian qualities--and have evolved, generally speaking, a large
measure of the patrician qualities. The Celts, meanwhile, have
been pushed to the extremities of the world; their history has
been a long record of disasters. But in the preceding period the
case was just the reverse. Then the Celts held the empire. They
ruled over large Teutonic populations. Holding all the machinery
of government in their hands, they imposed on the languages of
their Teuton subjects the words concerned with that machinery;
just as in Welsh now our words of that kind are mostly straight
from the English. It does not follow that there was any sudden
rising of Teutons against dominant Celts; more probably the
former grew gradually stronger as the latter grew gradually
weaker, until the forces were equalized. We find the Cimbri and
Teutones allied on equal terms against Rome. According to an old
Welsh history, the _Brut Tyssilio,_ there were Anglo-Saxons in
Britain before Caesar's invasion; invited there by the Celts, and
living in peace under the Celtic kings. To quote the _Brut
Tyssilio_ a short time ago would have been to ensure being
scoffed at on all sides; but recently professor Flinders Petrie
has vindicated it as against both the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and
Caesar himself. English Teutonic was first spoken in Britain
probably, some two or three centuries B.C.; and it survived
there, probably, in remote places, through the whole of the Roman
occupation; then, under the influence of the rising star of the
Teutons, and reinforced by new incursions from the Continent,
finally extinguished the Latin of the roman province, and drove
Celtic into the west.

But go back from those first centuries B.C. and you come at last
to a time when the Celtic star was right at the zenith, the
Teutonic very low. Free Teutons you should hardly have found
except in Scandinavia; probably only in southern Sweden: for
further north, and in most of Norway, you soon came to ice and
the Lapps and _terra incognita._ And even Sweden may have been
under Celtic influence--for the Celtic words survive there
--but hardly so as to affect racial individuality; just as
Wales and Ireland are under English rule now, yet retain their
Celtic individuality.

And then go back a few more thousand years again, and you would
probably find the case again reversed; and Teutons lording it
over Celts, and our present conditions restored. It is by
suffering these poles of experience, now pride and domination,
now humiliation and adversity, that the races of mankind learn.
Europe is not a new sort of continent. Man, says one of the
Teachers, has been much what he is any time these million years.
History has been much what it is now, ebbing and flowing.
Knowledge, geographical and other, has receded, and again
expanded. Europe has been the seat of empires and civilizations,
all Europe, probably, for not so far short of a million years;
there has been plenty of time for it to multiply terrible karma--
which takes the occasion to expend itself sometimes--as now. I
mistrust the theory of recent Aryan in-pourings from Asia. The
Huns came in when the Chinese drove them; and the Turks and
Mongols have come in since; but there is nothing to show that
the Slavs, for example, when they first appear in history, had
come in from beyond the Urals and the Caspian. Slavs and Greco-
Latins, Teutons and Celts, I think they were probably in Europe
any time these many hundreds of thousands of years.

Or rather, I think there were Europeans--Indo-Europeans, Aryans,
call them what you will--where they are now at any time during
such a period. Because race is a thing that will not bear
close investigation. It is a phase; an illusion; a temporary
appearance taken on by sections of humanity. There is nothing in
it to fight about or get the least hot over. It is a camouflage;
there you have the very word for it. What we call Celts
and Teutons are simply portions of the one race, humanity,
camouflaged up upon their different patterns. So far as flood
and ultimate physical heredity are concerned, I doubt there is
sixpenny-worth of difference between any two of the lot. "Oi
mesilf," said Mr. Dooley, speaking as a good American citizen,
"am the thruest and purest Anglo-Saxon that iver came out of
Anglo-Saxony." We call ourselves Anglo-Saxons because we speak
English (a language more than half Latin); when in reality we
are probably Jews, Turks, infidels or heretics, if all were
known. What is a Spaniard? A Latin, you answer pat. Yes; he
speaks a Latin-derived language; and has certain qualities of
temperament which seem to mark him as more akin to the French and
Italians, than to those whom we, just as wisely, dub 'Teutonic'
or 'Slavic.' But in fact he may have in his veins not a drop of
blood that is not Celtic, or not a drop that is not Teutonic, or
Moorish, or Roman, or Phoenician, or Iberian, or God knows what.

Suppose you have four laya centers in Europe: four Foci through
which psychic impulses from the Oversoul pour through into this
world. A Mediterranean point, perhaps in Italy; a Teutonic
point in Sweden; a Celtic point in Wales-Ireland (formerly a
single island, before England rose out of the sea); and a Slavic
point, probably in Russia. The moment comes for such and
such a 'race' to expand; the Mediterranean, for example. The
Italian laya center, Rome, quickens into life. Rome conquers
Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the East; becomes _Caput Mundi._
Countries that shortly before were Celtic in blood, become,
through no material change in that blood, Latin; by language,
and, as we say, by race. The moment comes for a Teutonic
expansion. The laya center in Sweden quickens; there is a
Swedish or Gothic invasion of Celtic lands south of the Baltic;
the continental Teutons presently are freed. It is the expansion
of a spirit, of a psychic something. People that were before
Celts (just as Mr. Dooley is an Anglo-Saxon) become somehow
Teutons. The language expands, and carries a tradition with it.
Head measurements show that neither Southern Germany nor England
differs very much towards Teutonicism from the Mediterranean
type; yet the one is thoroughly Teutonic, the other Anglo-Saxon.
Sometimes the blood may be changed materially; often, I suppose,
it is changed to some extent; but the main change takes place in
the language and tradition; sometimes in tradition alone. There
was a minor Celtic quickening in the twelfth century A. D.;
then Wales was in a fervor of national life. She had not the
resources, or perhaps the will, for outside conquest. But her
Authurian legend went forth, and drove Beowulf and Child Horn out
of the memory of the English, Charlemagne out of the memory of
the French; invaded Germany, Italy, even Spain: absolutely
installed Welsh King Arthur as the national hero of the people
his people were fighting; and infused chivalry with a certain
uplift and mysticism through-out western Europe. Or again, in
the Cinquecento and earlier, the Italian center quickened; and
learning and culture flowed up from Italy through France and
England; and these countries, with Spain, become the leaders in
power and civilization.

England since that Teutonic expansion which made her English was
spent, has grown less and less Teutonic, more and more Latin;
the Italian impulse of the Renaissance drove her far along that
path. In the middle of the eleventh century, her language was
purely Teutonic; you could count on the fingers of your hand the
words derived from Latin or Celtic. And now? Sixty percent of
all English words are Latin. At the beginning of the fifth
century, after nearly three hundred years of Roman occupation,
one can hardly doubt that Latin was the language of what is now
England. Celtic, even then I imagine, was mainly to be heard
among the mountains. See how that situation is slowly coming
back. And the tendency is all in the same direction. You have
taken, indeed, a good few words from Dutch; and some two dozen
from German, in all these centuries; but a Latin word has
only to knock, to be admitted and made welcome. Teachers of
composition must sweat blood and tears for it, alas, to get their
pupils to write English and shun Latin. In a thousand years'
time, will English be as much a Latin language as French is?
Quite likely. The Saxon words grow obsolete; French ones come
pouring in. And Americans are even more prone to Latinisms than
Englishmen are: they 'locate' at such and such a place, where an
English man would just go and live there.

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