As one reads Mr. Nash’s explanation and translation after Edward
Davies’s, one feels that a flood of the broad daylight of common-sense
has been suddenly shed over the _Panegyric on Lludd the Great_, and one
is very grateful to Mr. Nash.
Or, again, when another Celt-lover, Mr. Herbert, has bewildered us with
his fancies, as uncritical as Edward Davies’s; with his neo-Druidism, his
Mithriac heresy, his Crist-celi, or man-god of the mysteries; and above
all, his ape of the sanctuary, ‘signifying the mercurial principle, that
strange and unexplained disgrace of paganism,’ Mr. Nash comes to our
assistance, and is most refreshingly rational. To confine ourselves to
the ape of the sanctuary only. Mr. Herbert constructs his monster,—to
whom, he says, ‘great sanctity, together with foul crime, deception, and
treachery,’ is ascribed,—out of four lines of old Welsh poetry, of which
he adopts the following translation:—
‘Without the ape, without the stall of the cow, without the mundane
rampart, the world will become desolate, not requiring the cuckoos to
convene the appointed dance over the green.’
One is not very clear what all this means, but it has, at any rate, a
solemn air about it, which prepares one for the development of its
first-named personage, the ape, into the mystical ape of the sanctuary.
The cow, too,—says another famous Celt-lover, Dr. Owen, the learned
author of the Welsh Dictionary,—the cow (_henfon_) is the cow of
transmigration; and this also sounds natural enough. But Mr. Nash, who
has a keen eye for the piecing which frequently happens in these old
fragments, has observed that just here, where the ape of the sanctuary
and the cow of transmigration make their appearance, there seems to come
a cluster of adages, popular sayings; and he at once remembers an adage
preserved with the word _henfon_ in it, where, as he justly says, ‘the
cow of transmigration cannot very well have place.’ This adage, rendered
literally in English, is: ‘Whoso owns the old cow, let him go at her
tail;’ and the meaning of it, as a popular saying, is clear and simple
enough. With this clue, Mr. Nash examines the whole passage, suggests
that _heb eppa_, ‘without the ape,’ with which Mr. Herbert begins, in
truth belongs to something going before and is to be translated somewhat
differently; and, in short, that what we really have here is simply these
three adages one after another: ‘The first share is the full one.
Politeness is natural, says the ape. Without the cow-stall there would
be no dung-heap.’ And one can hardly doubt that Mr. Nash is quite right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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