ENTERING WALES
The best way into Wales is the way you choose, provided that you care.
Some may like the sudden modern way of going to sleep at London in a
train and remaining asleep on a mountain-side, which has the advantage
of being the most expensive and the least surprising way. Some may like
to go softly into the land along the Severn, on foot, and going through
sheath after sheath of the country, to reach at last the heart of it at
peaty Tregaron, or the soul of it on Plynlimmon itself. Or you may go by
train at night; and at dawn, on foot, follow a little stream at its own
pace and live its fortnight's life from mountain to sea.
[Illustration: BREEZY MORNING, LLANDUDNO BAY]
Or you may cross the Severn and then the lower Wye, and taking Tredegar
and Caerleon alternately, or Rhigws and Landore, or Cardiff and Lantwit,
or the Rhondda Valley and the Vale of Neath, and thus sharpening the
spirit, as an epicure may sharpen his palate, by opposites, find true
Wales everywhere, whether the rivers be ochre and purple with
corruption, or still as silver as the fountain dew on the mountain's
beard; whether the complexions of the people be pure as those of the
young cockle-women of Penclawdd, or as heavily superscribed as those of
tin-platers preparing to wash. Or you may get no harm by treading in the
footsteps of that warm-blooded antiquarian, Pennant, who wrote at the
beginning of his tours in Wales: "With obdurate valour we sustained our
independency ... against the power of a kingdom more than twelve times
larger than Wales: and at length had the glory of falling, when a
divided country, beneath the arms of the most wise and most warlike of
the English monarchs." That "we" may have saved the soul even of an
antiquarian.
But the entry I best remember and most love was made by a child whom I
used to know better than I have known anyone else. He disappeared, after
a slow process of evanishment, several years ago: and I will use what I
know as if it were my own, since the first person singular will help me
to write as if I should never be subjected to the dignity of print,—as
if I were addressing, not the general reader, but some one who cared.
At a very early age, I (that is to say, he, _bien entendu_) often sat in
a room in outer London, where I now see that it was probably good to be.
It was always October there, and the yellow poplar leaves were always
falling. And so also there was always a fire—a casket in which emeralds
and sapphires contended with darker spirits continually. Where are the
poplars now? Where the leaves which loved the frost that spoiled them at
last? Where the emeralds and sapphires—and the child? There were late
October twilights that seemed so mighty in their gentleness and so
terrible in their silence that they alarmed the child with fear of
desolation, until the spell was suspended by lighted lamps and drawn
curtains and fearless voices of elder persons, though one could draw the
curtains and see the thing still, and oneself, and the very fire,
outside in its embrace. And still
The jealous ear of night eave-dropped our talk.
[Illustration: COUNTRY LANE]
I think those twilights have overwhelmed all at last, and they have
their way with child and trees and fire. But they have spared one thing,
which even in those days was more puissant than the fire, though they
have left their marks upon it, and now it seems a less mighty thing if
one goes to it soberly too critically, or even too cheerfully. For a
picture hung in the room, and the last October sunlight used to fall
upon it when the silence set in. The picture meant Wales.
In the foreground, a stream shone with ripples in the midst, and glowed
with foam among the roots of alders at the edge. Branches with white
berries overhung the stream; and there were hornbeams and writhen oaks;
and beyond them, a sky with a shaggy and ancient storm in it, and
wrestling with that, and rising into it, the ruins of an Early English
chancel. The strength and anger and tenderness and majesty of it were
one great thought. I still think that could deeds spring panoplied from
thoughts, and could great thoughts of themselves do anything but flush
the cheek, such a simply curving landscape as this would be at the
bidding of one of those great thoughts that empty all the brain....
Under one of the columns by the chancel, the artist meant to have drawn
vaguely a pile of masonry and a muscular ivy stem. And that was the
point of the picture, because it seemed to be a kneeling knight, with
one forearm on an oval shield and the other buried in his beard, and his
head bent. I suppose that the thought that it was a knight, and that the
knight was Launcelot, first came as I looked at the picture once,
straight from a book where I had been reading:
"Then Sir Launcelot departed, and when he came to the Chapel Perilous,
he alighted, and tied his horse to a little gate. And as soon as he was
within the churchyard he saw on the front of the Chapel many fair, rich
shields turned upside down; and many of the shields Sir Launcelot had
seen knights have before; with that he saw standing by him thirty great
knights, more by a yard than any man that he had ever seen, and all
these grinned and gnashed at Sir Launcelot; and when he saw their
countenances he dreaded them sore, and so put his shield afore him, and
took his sword in his hand ready to do battle; and they were all armed
in black harness, ready with their shields and swords drawn. And when
Sir Launcelot would have gone through them they scattered on every side
of him, and gave him the way to pass; and therewith he waxed all bold,
and entered into the Chapel, and there he saw no light but a dim lamp
burning, and then he was aware of a corse covered with a cloth of silk.
And as Sir Launcelot stooped down and cut a piece of the cloth away, the
earth quaked, and he was afraid...."
[Illustration: A NOCTURNE, LLANDUDNO BAY]
And the picture was a picture of the Chapel Perilous; and thus out of a
poor story-book and a dear picture and the dim poplars in the dim
street, I made a Launcelot who was not merely an incredible mediæval
knight of flesh and armour, but a strange immortal figure that lived and
was desirable and friendly in the grey rain of a suburb in the
nineteenth century.
* * * * *
This was the beginning of the creation of Wales. Or shall I say that it
was the beginning of the discovery? Let the reader decide, with the help
of the explanation, that I use the words as I should use them of a play
of Shakespeare's, or a picture of Titian's, or any other living thing
which grows and changes and is born again, in age after age, as
certainly and as elusively as the substance of a waterfall is changed;
even in one moment these things are never the same to any two observers,
backward or advanced, egotistical or servile, blind or keen....
Looking back, the artistry of time makes it appear that soon after I had
become certain that the painter had somehow caught Launcelot kneeling at
the foot of the column, I reached Wales.
There I saw one of the Round Tables of Arthur, but also a porpoise hunt
in the river close by; and the porpoise threshed the water so that the
shining spray now hides the Round Table from my view. And I heard the
national anthem of Wales: and at first I cowered beneath the resolved
and terrible despair of it, forgetting that—
In every dirge there sleeps a battle-march;
so that I seemed to look out from the folds of a fantastic purple
curtain of heavily embroidered fabric upon a fair landscape and an awful
sky; and I know not whether the landscape or the sky was the more
fascinating in its mournfulness.
And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong,
And trumpets blown for wars,—
and it was of Arthur's last battle that I dreamed. But the sky cleared,
and I seemed to let go of the folds of the curtain and to see a red
dragon triumphing and the shielded Sir Launcelot again; and next, it was
only a tournament that I saw, and there were careless ladies on high
among the golden dust. And, at last, I could once more think happily of
the little white house where I lived, and the largest and reddest apples
in all the world that grew upon the wizened orchard, and the smoked
salmon and the hams that perfumed the long kitchen, and all the shining
candlesticks, and the wavy, crisp, thin leaves of oaten bread that were
eaten there with buttermilk: and the great fire shook his rustling sheaf
of flames and laughed at the wind and rain that stung the window-panes;
and sometimes a sense of triumph arose from the glory of the fire and
the vanity of the wind, and sometimes a sense of fear lest the fire
should be conspiring with the storm. That also was Wales—a meandering
village street, the house with the orchard, and a white river in sight
of it, and the great music of the national anthem hovering over it and
giving the whole a strange solemnity.
Just beyond the village, but not under the same solemn sky, I see an
island of apple trees in spring, which in fact belongs to a somewhat
later year. It was reached by a mile of winding lane that passed the
slender outmost branches of the village, and lastly, a shining cottage,
with streaked and mossy thatch, and two little six-paned windows,
half-filled with many-coloured sweets, and boasting one pane of
bottle-glass. Outside sat an old woman; her moist, grey, hempen curls
framing a cruel face which had been made by three or four swift strokes
of a hatchet; her magnificent brown eyes seeming to ponder heavenly
things and really looking for half-pence. A picture would have made
her—wringing her hands slowly as if she were perpetually washing, or
sitting bolt upright and pleased with her white apron—a type of resigned
and reverend and beautiful old age. On the opposite side of the road was
a white and thatched piggery, half the size of the house; and alongside
of it, a neat, moulded pile of coal-dust, clay, and lime, mixed, for her
ever-burning fire. The pigs grunted; the old woman, who would herself
watch the slaughtering, sat and was pleased, and said, "Good morning,"
and "Good afternoon," and "Good evening" as the day went by, except when
the children were due to pass to and from school, with half-pence to
spend.
Just beyond this dragon and its house, an important road crossed the
lane, which then narrowed and allowed the hedgerow hazels to arch over
it and let in only the wannest light to the steep, stony hedge-bank of
whin and grass and fern and violets. Little streams ran this way and
that, under and over and alongside the lane, and at length a larger one
was honoured by a bridge, the parapet covered with flat, dense, even
turf. The bridge made way for a wide view, and to invite the eye a
magpie flew away from the grassy parapet with wavy flight to a mountain
side.
[Illustration: CONWAY FROM BENARTH—EARLY MORNING]
Between the bridge and the mountain, and in fact surrounded by streams
which were heard although unseen, was an island of apple trees.
There were murmurs of bees. There was a gush and fall and gurgle of
streams, which could be traced by their bowing irises. There was a
poignant glow and fragrance of flowers in an air so moist and cold and
still that at dawn the earliest bee left a thin line of scent upon it.
Beyond, the mountain, grim, without trees, lofty and dark, was clearly
upholding the low blue sky full of slow clouds of the colour of the
mountain lambs or of melting snow. This mountain and this sky, for that
first hour, shut out, and not only shut out but destroyed, and not only
destroyed but made as if it had never been, the world of the old woman,
the coal-pits, the schools, and the grown-up persons. And the magic of
Wales, or of Spring, or of childhood made the island of apple trees more
than an orchard in flower. For as some women seem at first to be but
rich eyes in a mist of complexion and sweet voice, so the orchard was
but an invisible soul playing with scent and colour as symbols. Nor did
this wonder vanish when I walked among the trees and looked up at the
blossoms in the sky. For in that island of apple trees there was not one
tree but was curved and jagged and twisted and splintered by great age,
by the west wind, or by the weight of fruit in many autumns. In colour
they were stony. They were scarred with knots like mouths. Some of their
branches were bent sharply like lightning flashes. Some rose up like
bony, sunburnt, imprecating arms of furious prophets. One stiff, gaunt
bole that was half hid in flower might have been Ares' sword in the
hands of the Cupids. Others were like ribs of submerged ships, or the
horns of an ox emerging from a skeleton deep in the sand of a lonely
coast. And the blossom of them all was the same, so that they seemed to
be Winter with the frail Spring in his arms. Nor was I surprised when
the first cuckoo sang therein, since the blossom made it for its need.
And when a curlew called from the mountain hopelessly, I laughed at it.
[Illustration: NEAR COLWYN BAY]
When I came again and saw the apple trees in flower, the island was very
far away, and the unseen cuckoo sang behind a veil and not so suitably
as the curlew. There was something of the dawn in the light over it,
though it was mid-day; and I could hardly understand, and was inclined
to melancholy, until chance brought into my head the poem of the old
princely warrior poet Llywarch Hên, and out of his melancholy and mine
was born a mild and lasting joy. He sang:
Sitting high upon a hill, to battle is inclined
My mind, but it does not impel me onward.
Short is my journey, my tenement is laid waste.
Sharp is the gale, it is bare punishment to live.
When the trees array themselves in gay colours
Of Summer, extremely ill am I this day.
I am no hunter, I keep no animal of the chase,
I cannot move about:
As long as it pleases the cuckoo, let her sing.
The loud-voiced cuckoo sings with the dawn,
Her melodious notes in the dales of Cuawg:
Better than the miser is the lavish man.
At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing,
On the blossom-covered branches;
Woe to the sick that hears their contented notes.
At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing.
The recollection is in my mind,
There are that hear them that will not hear them again.
Have I not listened to the cuckoo on the ivied tree?
Did not my shield hang down?
What I loved is but vexation; what I loved is no more.
And I thought that perhaps it is even true, as Taliesin sang, that "A
man is wont to be oldest when born, and younger all the time," and that
the apple flowers did but remind me of old capacities laid waste.
* * * * *
These little things are the opening cadences of a great music which I
have heard, and which is Wales. But I have forgotten the whole, and have
echoes of it only, when I hear an old Welsh song, when I am trying to
catch a trout, or am eating bread and butter and white cheese, and
drinking pale tea, in a mountain farm.... One echo of it I had strangely
in Oxford, when, entertaining an old wise gipsy, and asking him of his
travels, and whether he had been in Wales, he meditated for a long time,
and then sang in an emotionless and moving tone the "Hen wlad fy
nhadau," up there among the books, the towers, and the stars. I have had
a vision of a rose. But my memory possesses only the doubtful and
withered dustiness of a petal or two.