Welsh Journals

that is Breton and Welsh, as the mother of all world languages. In 1804, the Academie celtique was founded, to become, in 1814, the Societe royale des Antiquaires de France. The adherents to Celto- mania had, in the course of over a hundred years of much injudicious enthusiasm for their cause, become respectable if not respected. But they had at least one thing to their credit: they had succeeded in diverting to Celtic history and literature, archaeology and mythology, the attention of scholars hitherto exclusively con- cerned with the civilisations of the Jews, the Greeks and the Romans.25 And they had done this in spite of the scorn poured upon the Celts by Voltaire in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). The Celts, said Voltaire, are a race of savages, whose name alone is known to us and whom people have tried in vain to make illustrious by means of fables A relic of their ancient patois is still preserved among a few bumpkins in Lower Brittany and elsewhere. Poor Celts, allow me to tell you that people who have never had the least smattering of the useful and agreeable arts do not deserve our researches any more than the pigs or asses that have inhabited their country.26 It is reasonable to suppose that Voltaire's essentially classical mind had been shocked, and his professional jealousy aroused, by the spate of bards and druids, Celts and Gauls that had invaded the novel, the theatre, and light literature in general during the sixties and seventies of the eighteenth century in France.27 One should not, however, leave the eighteenth century without noting that other dictionaries of the period gave a less biassed and more informative account of the Celts. La Martiniere's Grand Dictionnaire, for instance, has this to say about Wales: The air there is healthy and clear; the cattle small; but food is cheap and good que les Etymologies du corps de l'ouvrage et les Tables'. On p. 382, there is a long and impassioned plea for Breton and Welsh: 'c'est par eux enfin qu'il faut retrouver l'ancienne langue celtique tout entiere, et suppleer au defaut des monumens ecrits, dont le principe du druidisme, de tout confier a la memoire, nous a prives'. 23 S. Reinach, op. cit., p. 112. 26 Quoted by Louise L £ ger, La Celtomanie et les etudes celtiques Revue des Cours litteraires de la France et de I'Etranger (7e annee, 1870), p. 618. Voltaire also makes fun of Celtic pretensions in Zadig (1748), chap. xii, Le Souper, and in his Discourse aux Welches (1764). 27 Cf. Paul Van Tieghem, Ossian en France (Paris, 1917, 2 vols.), Vol. 1. pp. 192-201.