NED OF GLAMORGAN
Long after his celebrated introduction to Abercorran House, and soon
after Philip and I had been asking old Jack again about the blackthorn
stick, Mr Stodham was reminded of the story of the Welshman on London
Bridge who was carrying a hazel stick cut on Craig-y-Dinas. “Do you
remember it?” asked Mr Morgan.
“Certainly I do,” replied Mr Stodham, “and some day the stick you gave
me from that same Craig-y-Dinas shall carry me thither.”
“I hope it will. It is a fine country for a man to walk in with a light
heart, or, the next best thing, with a heavy heart. They will treat you
well, because they will take you for a red-haired Welshman and you like
pastry. But what I wanted to say was that the man who first told that
story of Craig-y-Dinas was one of the prime walkers of the world. Look
at this portrait of him....”
Here Mr Morgan opened a small book of our grandfather’s time which had
for a frontispiece a full-length portrait of a short, old, spectacled
man in knee breeches and buckled shoes, grasping a book in one hand, a
very long staff in the other.
“Look at him. He was worthy to be immortalised in stained glass. He
walked into London from Oxford one day and mentioned the fact to some
acquaintances in a bookshop. They were rather hard of believing, but
up spoke a stranger who had been observing the pedestrian, his way of
walking, the shape of his legs, and the relative position of his knees
and ankles whilst standing erect. This man declared that the Welshman
could certainly have done the walk without fatigue; and he ought to
have known, for he was the philosopher, Walking Stewart.
“It was as natural for this man in the picture to walk as for the
sun to shine. You would like to know England, Mr Stodham, as he knew
Wales, especially Glamorgan. Rightly was he entitled ‘Iolo Morganwg,’
or Edward of Glamorgan, or, rather, Ned of Glamorgan. The name will
outlive most stained glass, for one of the finest collections of
Welsh history, genealogies, fables, tales, poetry, etc., all in old
manuscripts, was made by him, and was named after him in its published
form--‘Iolo Manuscripts.’ He was born in Glamorgan, namely at Penon, in
1746, and when he was eighty he died at Flimstone in the same county.
“As you may suppose, he was not a rich man, and nobody would trouble to
call him a gentleman. But he was an Ancient Briton, and not the last
one: he said once that he always possessed the freedom of his thoughts
and the independence of his mind ‘with an Ancient Briton’s warm pride.’
“His father was a stonemason, working here, there, and everywhere, in
England and Wales, in town and country. When the boy first learnt his
alphabet, it was from the letters cut by his father on tombstones.
His mother--the daughter of a gentleman--undoubtedly a gentleman, for
he had ‘wasted a pretty fortune’--taught him to read from the songs
in a ‘Vocal Miscellany.’ She read Milton, Pope, ‘The Spectator,’ ‘The
Whole Duty of Man,’ and ‘Religio Medici,’ and sang as well. But the boy
had to begin working for his father at the age of nine. Having such
a mother, he did not mix with other children, but returned nightly
to read or talk with her, or, if he did not, he walked by himself in
solitary places. Later on, he would always read by himself in the
dinner-hour instead of going with his fellow-workmen to the inn. Once
he was left, during the dinner-hour, in charge of a parsonage that was
being repaired, and, having his own affairs to mind, he let all the
fowls and pigs in. His father scolded him, and he went off, as the
old man supposed, to pout for a week or two with his mother’s people
at Aberpergwm, near Pont Neath Vaughan. It was, however, some months
before he reappeared--from London, not Aberpergwm. Thus, in his own
opinion, he became ‘very pensive, very melancholy, and very stupid,’
but had fits of ‘wild extravagance.’ And thus, at the time of his
mother’s death, though he was twenty-three, he was ‘as ignorant of the
world as a new-born child.’ Without his mother he could not stay in the
house, so he set off on a long wandering. He went hither and thither
over a large part of England and Wales, ‘studying chiefly architecture
and other sciences that his trade required.’”
“There was a mason,” said Mr Stodham, “such as Ruskin wanted to set
carving evangelists and kings.”
“No. He knew too much, or half-knew too much. Besides, he hated
kings.... Those travels confirmed him in the habit of walking. He was
too busy and enthusiastic ever to have become an eater, and he found
that walking saved him still more from eating. He could start early in
the morning and walk the forty-three miles into Bristol without any
food on the way; and then, after walking about the town on business,
and breaking his fast with bread and butter and tea, and sleeping in a
friend’s chair, could walk back again with no more food; and, moreover,
did so of choice, not from any beastly principle or necessity. He
travelled thus with ‘more alacrity and comfort,’ than at other times
when he had taken food more frequently. He always was indifferent to
animal food and wine. Tea was his vice, tempered by sugar and plenty of
milk and cream. Three or four distinct brews of an evening suited him.
Once a lady assured him that she was handing him his sixteenth cup. He
was not a teetotaller, though his verses for a society of journeymen
masons ‘that met weekly to spend a cheerful hour at the moderate and
restricted expense of fourpence,’ are no better than if he had been a
teetotaller from his cradle:
“‘Whilst Mirth and good ale our warm spirits recruit,
We’ll drunk’ness avoid, that delight of a brute:
Of matters of State we’ll have nothing to say,
Wise Reason shall rule and keep Discord away.
Whilst tuning our voices Jocundity sings,
Good fellows we toast, and know nothing of kings:
But to those who have brightened the gloom of our lives,
Give the song and full bumper--our sweethearts and wives.’
At one time he made a fixed resolve not to _sit_ in the public room of
an ale-house, because he feared the conviviality to which his talent
for song-writing conduced. But it is a fact that a man who lives out of
doors can eat and drink anything, everything, or almost nothing, and
thrive beyond the understanding of quacks.
“Iolo walked night and day, and would see a timid gentleman home at any
hour if only he could have a chair by his fireside to sleep. He got to
prefer sleeping in a chair partly because his asthma forbade him to lie
down, partly because it was so convenient to be able to read and write
up to the last moment and during any wakeful hours. With a table, and
pen, ink, paper, and books beside him, he read, wrote, and slept, at
intervals, and at dawn usually let himself out of the house for a walk.
During a visit to the Bishop of St David’s at Abergwili he was to be
seen in the small hours pacing the hall of the episcopal palace, in
his nightcap, a book in one hand, a candle in the other. Probably he
read enormously, but too much alone, and with too little intercourse
with other readers. Besides his native Welsh he taught himself English,
French, Latin and Greek. His memory was wonderful, but he had no power
of arrangement; when he came to write he could not find his papers
without formidable searches, and when found could not put them in an
available form. I imagine he did not treat what he read, like most of
us, as if it were removed several degrees from what we choose to call
reality. Everything that interested him at all he accepted eagerly
unless it was one of the few things he was able to condemn outright as
a lie. I suppose it was the example of Nebuchadnezzar that made him try
one day ‘in a thinly populated part of North Wales’ eating nothing but
grass, until the very end, when he gave way to bread and cheese.
“He had a passion for antiquities.”
“What an extraordinary thing,” ejaculated Mr Stodham.
“Not very,” said Mr Morgan. “He was acquisitive and had little
curiosity. He was a collector of every sort and quality of old
manuscript. Being an imperfectly self-educated man he probably got an
innocent conceit from his learned occupation....”
“But how could he be an old curiosity man, and such an out-door man as
well?”
“His asthma and pulmonary trouble, whatever it was, probably drove him
out of doors. Borrow, who was a similar man of a different class, was
driven out in the same way as a lad. Iolo’s passion for poetry was not
destroyed, but heightened, by his travels. God knows what poetry meant
to him. But when he was in London, thinking of Wales and the white cots
of Glamorgan, he wrote several stanzas of English verse. Sometimes he
wrote about nymphs and swains, called Celia, Damon, Colin, and the
like. He wrote a poem to Laudanum:
“‘O still exert thy soothing power,
Till Fate leads on the welcom’d hour,
To bear me hence away;
To where pursues no ruthless foe,
No feeling keen awakens woe,
No faithless friends betray.’”
“I could do no worse than that,” murmured Mr Stodham confidently.
“He wrote a sonnet to a haycock, and another to Hope on an intention of
emigrating to America:
“‘Th’ American wilds, where Simplicity’s reign
Will cherish the Muse and her pupil defend ...
I’ll dwell with Content in the desert alone.’
They were blessed days when Content still walked the earth with a
capital C, and probably a female form in light classic drapery. There
was Felicity also. Iolo wrote ‘Felicity, a pastoral.’ He composed a
poem to the cuckoo, and translated the famous Latin couplet which says
that two pilgrimages to St David’s are equivalent to one to Rome itself:
“‘Would haughty Popes your senses bubble,
And once to Rome your steps entice;
’Tis quite as well, and saves some trouble,
Go visit old Saint Taffy twice.’
He wrote quantities of hymns. Once, to get some girls out of a
scrape--one having played ‘The Voice of Her I Love’ on the organ after
service--he wrote a hymn to the tune, ‘The Voice of the Beloved,’ and
fathered it on an imaginary collection of Moravian hymns. One other
virtue he had, as a bard: he never repeated his own verses. God rest
his soul. He was a walker, not a writer. The best of him--in fact, the
real man altogether--refused to go into verse at all.
“Yet he had peculiarities which might have adorned a poet. Once, when
he was on a job in a churchyard at Dartford, his master told him to go
next morning to take certain measurements. He went, and, having taken
the measurements, _woke_. It was pitch dark, but soon afterwards a
clock struck two. In spite of the darkness he had not only done what he
had to do, but he said that on his way to the churchyard every object
appeared to him as clear as by day. The measurements were correct.
“One night, asleep in his chair, three women appeared to him, one
with a mantle over her head. There was a sound like a gun, and one of
the others fell, covered in blood. Next day, chance took him--was it
chance?--into a farm near Cowbridge where he was welcomed by three
women, one hooded in a shawl. Presently a young man entered with a
gun, and laid it on the table, pointing at one of the women. At Iolo’s
warning it was discovered that the gun was primed and at full cock.
“Another time, between Cowbridge and Flimstone, he hesitated thrice at
a stile, and then, going over, was just not too late to save a drunken
man from a farmer galloping down the path.
“In spite of his love of Light and Liberty, he was not above turning
necromancer with wand and magic circle to convert a sceptic inn-keeper.
He undertook to call up the man’s grandfather, and after some
gesticulations and muttering unknown words, he whispered, ‘I feel the
approaching spirit. Shall it appear?’ The man whom he was intending
to benefit became alarmed, and begged to be allowed to hear the ghost
speak, first of all. In a moment a deep, sepulchral voice pronounced
the name of the grandfather. The man had had enough. He bolted from the
place, leaving Iolo and his confederates triumphant.
“Iolo should have been content to leave it unproved that he was no
poet. But he had not an easy life, and I suppose he had to have frills
of some sort.
“Well, he walked home to Glamorgan. There he took a Glamorgan wife,
Margaret Roberts of Marychurch, and he had to read less and work more
to provide for a family. By the nature of his handiwork he was able to
make more out of his verses than he would have done by printing better
poetry. The vile doggerel which he inscribed on tombstones gained him a
living and a sort of an immortality. He was one of the masons employed
on the monument to the Man of Ross.
“Though a bad poet he was a Welsh bard. It was not the first or the
last occasion on which the two parts were combined. Bard, for him,
was a noble name. He was a ‘Christian Briton and Bard’--a ‘Bard
according to the rights and institutes of the Bards of the Island of
Britain’--and he never forgot the bardic triad, ‘Man, Liberty, and
Light.’ Once, at the prison levee of a dissenting minister, he signed
himself, ‘Bard of Liberty.’ To Southey, whom he helped with much
out-of-the-way bardic mythology for his ‘Madoc,’ he was ‘Bard Williams.’
“Bardism brought him into strange company, which I dare say he did
not think strange, and certainly not absurd. Anna Seward, who mistook
herself for a poet, and was one of the worst poets ever denominated
‘Swan,’ was kind to him in London. He in return initiated her into
the bardic order at a meeting of ‘Ancient British Bards resident in
London,’ which was convened on Primrose Hill at the Autumnal equinox,
1793. At an earlier meeting, also on Primrose Hill, he had recited an
‘Ode on the Mythology of the British Bards in the manner of Taliesin,’
and, since this poem was subsequently approved at the equinoctial, and
ratified at the solstitial, convention, it was, according to ancient
usage, fit for publication. It was not a reason. Nevertheless, a bard
is a bard, whatever else he may or may not be.
“Iolo was proud to declare that the old Welsh bards had kept up a
perpetual war with the church of Rome, and had suffered persecution.
‘Man, Liberty, and Light.’ You and I, Mr Stodham, perhaps don’t know
what he meant. But if Iolo did not know, he was too happy to allow the
fact to emerge and trouble him.
“Of course, he connected the bards with Druidism, which he said they
had kept alive. A good many sectarians would have said that he himself
was as much a Druid as a Christian. He accepted the resurrection of
the dead. He did not reject the Druid belief in transmigration of
souls. He identified Druidism with the patriarchal religion of the Old
Testament, but saw in it also a pacific and virtually Christian spirit.
He affirmed that Ancient British Christianity was strongly tinctured by
Druidism, and it was his opinion that the ‘Dark Ages’ were only dark
through our lack of light. He hated the stories of Cæsar and others
about human sacrifices, and would say to opponents, ‘You are talking
of what you don’t understand--of what none but a Welshman and a British
bard _can possibly_ understand.’ He compared the British mythology
favourably with the ‘barbarous’ Scandinavian mythology of Thor and
Odin. He studied whatever he could come at concerning Druidism,
with the ‘peculiar bias and firm persuasion’ that ‘more wisdom and
beneficence than is popularly attributed to them’ would be revealed.
“In the French Revolution he recognised the spirit of ‘Man, Liberty,
and Light.’ His friends deserted him. He in turn was willing to
leave them for America, ‘to fly from the numerous injuries he had
received from the laws of this land.’ He had, furthermore, the hope of
discovering the colony settled in America, as some believed, by the
mediæval Welsh prince Madoc.”
“That was like Borrow, too,” suggested Mr Stodham.
“It was, and the likeness is even closer; for, like Borrow, Iolo did
not go to America. Nevertheless, to prepare himself for the adventure,
he lived out of doors for a time, sleeping in trees and on the ground,
and incurring rheumatism.
“But though he did not go to America for love of Liberty, he had
his papers seized, and is said to have been summoned by Pitt for
disaffection to the State. Nothing worse was proved against him than
the authorship of several songs in favour of Liberty, ‘perhaps,’
said his biographer, ‘a little more extravagant than was quite
commendable at that inflammatory period.’ They expected him to remove
his papers himself, but he refused, and had them formally restored
by an official. When he was fifty he gave up his trade because the
dust of the stone was injuring his lungs. He now earned a living by
means of a shop at Cowbridge where books, stationery, and grocery were
sold. His speciality was ‘East India Sweets uncontaminated by human
gore.’ Brothers of his who had made money in Jamaica offered to allow
him £50 a year, but in vain. ‘It was a land of slaves,’ he said. He
would not even administer their property when it was left to him,
though a small part was rescued later on by friends, for his son and
daughter. The sound of the bells at Bristol celebrating the rejection
of Wilberforce’s Anti-Slavery Bill drove him straight out of the city.
Believing that he was spied upon at Cowbridge he offered a book for
sale in his window, labelled ‘The Rights of Man.’ He was successful.
The spies descended on him, seized the book, and discovered that it was
the Bible, not the work of Paine.
“He was personally acquainted with Paine and with a number of other
celebrities, such as Benjamin Franklin, Bishop Percy, Horne Tooke, and
Mrs Barbauld. Once in a bookshop he asked Dr Johnson to choose for
him among three English grammars. Johnson was turning over the leaves
of a book, ‘rapidly and as the bard thought petulantly’: ‘Either of
them will do for you, young man,’ said he. ‘Then, sir,’ said Iolo,
thinking Johnson was insulting his poverty, ‘to make sure of having
the best I will buy all’; and he used always to refer to them as ‘Dr
Johnson’s Grammars.’ It was once arranged that he should meet Cowper,
but the poet sat, through the evening, silent, unable to encounter the
introduction.
“The excesses of the Revolution, it is said, drove Iolo to abandon
the idea of a Republic, except as a ‘theoretic model for a free
government.’ He even composed an ode to the Cowbridge Volunteers. Above
all, he wrote an epithalamium on the marriage of George the Fourth,
which he himself presented, dressed in a new apron of white leather
and carrying a bright trowel. His ‘English Poems’ were dedicated to the
Prince of Wales.”
“What a fearful fall,” exclaimed Mr Stodham, who may himself have been
a Bard of Liberty.
“But his business, apart from his trade, was antiquities, and
especially the quest of them up and down Wales.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Mr Stodham, “if the old man hoped
for some grand result from meddling with those mysterious old books
and papers--perhaps nothing definite, health, wealth, wisdom, beauty,
everlasting life, or the philosopher’s stone,--but some old secret of
Bardism or Druidism, which would glorify Wales, or Cowbridge, or Old
Iolo himself.”
“Very likely. He was to a scientific antiquary what a witch is to an
alchemist, and many a witch got a reputation with less to her credit
than he had.
“As a boy he remembered hearing an old shoemaker of Llanmaes (near
Lantwit) speak of the shaft of an ancient cross, in Lantwit churchyard,
falling into a grave that had been dug too near it for Will the Giant
of Lantwit. As a middle-aged man he dug up the stone. It was less
love of antiquity than of mystery, buried treasure, and the like.
He was unweariable in his search for the remains of Ancient British
literature. At the age of seventy, when the Bishop of St David’s
had mislaid some of his manuscripts and they had thus been sold,
Iolo walked over Caermarthenshire, Pembrokeshire, and Cardiganshire,
and recovered the greater part. He took a pony with him as far as
Caermarthen, but would not allow it to carry his wallets until at last
it was arranged that his son should walk on one side and himself on the
other, which made him remark that ‘nothing was more fatiguing than a
horse.’ The horse appears in a triad of his own composition:
“There are three things I do not want. A Horse, for I have a good pair
of legs: a Cellar, for I drink no beer: a Purse, for I have no money.
“He would not ride in Lord Dunraven’s carriage, but preferred to walk.
That he did not dislike the animal personally is pretty clear. For at
one time he kept a horse which followed him, of its own free will, upon
his walks.
“Iolo was a sight worth seeing on the highways and byways of
Glamorgan, and once had the honour of being taken for a conjuror.
His biographer--a man named Elijah Waring, who was proud to have
once carried his wallets--describes him ‘wearing his long grey hair
flowing over his high coat collar, which, by constant antagonism, had
pushed up his hat-brim into a quaint angle of elevation behind. His
countenance was marked by a combination of quiet intelligence and quick
sensitiveness; the features regular, the lines deep, and the grey eye
benevolent but highly excitable. He was clad, when he went to see a
bishop, in a new coat fit for an admiral, with gilt buttons and buff
waistcoat, but, as a rule, in rustic garb: the coat blue, with goodly
brass buttons, and the nether integuments, good homely corduroy. He
wore buckles in his shoes, and a pair of remarkably stout well-set
legs were vouchers for the great peripatetic powers he was well known
to possess. A pair of canvas wallets were slung over his shoulders,
one depending in front, the other behind. These contained a change
of linen, and a few books and papers connected with his favourite
pursuits. He generally read as he walked....’”
“Tut, tut,” remarked Mr Stodham, “that spoils all.”
“He generally read as he walked, ‘with spectacles on nose,’ and a
pencil in his hand, serving him to make notes as they suggested
themselves. Yet he found time also, Mr Stodham, to sow the tea-plant
on the hills of Glamorgan. ‘A tall staff which he grasped at about the
level of his ear completed his equipment; and he was accustomed to
assign as a reason for this mode of using it, that it tended to expand
the pectoral muscles, and thus, in some degree, relieve a pulmonary
malady inherent in his constitution.’
“He did not become a rich man. Late one evening he entered a
Cardiganshire public-house and found the landlord refusing to let a
pedlar pay for his lodging in kind, though he was penniless. Iolo
paid the necessary shilling for a bed and rated the landlord, but
had to walk on to a distant friend because it was his last shilling.
Yet he wrote for the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ and corresponded with
the _Monthly_ and others, so that towards the end he was entitled to
advances from the Literary Fund. An annual subscription was also raised
for him in Neath and the neighbourhood. His last three years he spent
at Flimstone, where he is buried. He was a cripple and confined to the
house, until one day he rested his head on the side of his easy chair
and told his daughter that he was free from pain and could sleep, and
so he died.”
“I will certainly go to Craig-y-Dinas,” said Mr Stodham solemnly, “and
to Penon, and to Cowbridge, and to Flimstone.”
“You will do well,” said Mr Morgan, shutting up Elijah Waring’s little
book and getting out the map of Glamorgan.