TWO MINISTERS, A BARD, A SCHOOLMASTER, AN INNKEEPER, AND OTHERS
MR. JONES, THE MINISTER
Jones is a little, thin, long-skulled, black-haired, pale Congregational
minister, with a stammer and a squint. He has a book-shelf containing
nothing but sermons and theology, which he has read, and the novels of
Sir Walter Scott, which he hopes to read. I suppose he believes in
metempsychosis. He is accustomed to say that everything is
theology—which is fine; and that theology is everything—which is hard.
He tries to love man as well as God, and succeeds in convincing every
one of his honesty, generosity, and industry. In the care of souls he
fears no disease or squalor or shape of death. But there is a
condescension about his ways with men. He calls them the worldliest of
God's creatures. But with the Divine he is happy and at ease, and in his
pulpit seems to sit on the right hand. Then his Biblical criticism is
absent as if it had never been, and he sees the holy things at once as
clearly as Quarles and as mystically as Herbert or Crashaw. He speaks of
them with the enthusiasm of a collector or of a man of science dealing
with a bone or a gas. Like them, he sees nothing but the subjects of the
moment. He loves them as passionately and yet with a sense of
possession. He gives to them the adoration which he seems wilfully to
have withheld from women, pageantry, gardens, palaces—which his speech
would have adorned. He lavishes upon them his whole ingenious heart, so
that, to those used to the false rhetoric and dull compliment of
ordinary worshippers, there is in his sermons something fantastical,
far-fetched, or smelling of the lamp. If he has to describe something
naked or severe, he must needs give them a kind of voluptuousness by
painting the things which they lack, and the lack of which makes them
what they are. With Herbert, he might repeat:
[Illustration: CARNARVON, FROM ANGLESEY]
My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee,
Wherewith whole shoals of Martyrs once did burn,
Besides their other flames? doth Poetry
Wear Venus' livery? only serve her turn?
Why are not Sonnets made of thee? and lays
Upon thine altar burnt? Cannot thy love
Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise
As well as she? Cannot thy Dove
Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight?
Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same,
Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name?
Why doth the fire which by thy power and might
Each breast does feel, no braver fuel choose
Than that, which one day worms may chance refuse?
Sure, Lord, there is enough in thee to dry
Oceans of ink; for as the Deluge did
Cover the Earth, so does thy Majesty;
Each cloud distils thy praise, and doth forbid
Poets to turn it to another use.
Roses and lilies speak thee: and to make
A pair of cheeks of them, is thy abuse.
Why should I women's eyes for crystal take?
Such poor invention burns in their low mind
Whose fire is wild, and does not upward go
To praise, and on thee, Lord, some note bestow.
Open the bones, and you shall nothing find
In the best face but filth; when, Lord, in thee
Thy beauty lies in the discovery.
It is no matter to him that to the uninspired audience his holy persons
appear only exquisite marionettes. His sermons are all of his love for
them. Could one leave out the names of prophet and evangelist, they
might seem to be addressed to earthly beauties. No eyebrow ever awakened
more glowing praise. He takes religion, as he does his severe morality,
like a sensuous delight. One might think from his epithets that he was
an æsthete, except that he is so abandoned.
When he ventures to speak of men, their very virtues and vices are all
handled in such a way that they seem to be his own imaginations. Thus,
his drunkard is as unreal and as terrible as a chimera. The words are
those of a man who has conceived a drunkard in his own brain, and then,
seeing the real thing, has preferred his own conception, and shunned the
poor human imitation. Still, he speaks of religious things, of incidents
in the life of David or Christ or the Maries, as if he had seen, for
example, the Holy Family in some misty barn among his own hills. I have
even heard him introduce a farmer whittling a flail of hazel sticks and
binding it with willow thongs, in a picture of that scene. This
quaintness and clearness are perhaps the result of his not quite healthy
asceticism. But even by the farmhouse fire he makes use of them, and
will speak of the red or brown hair of scriptural characters, and even
of the grey hair and shining eyes of Charity. In hunger or weariness or
pain, common people sometimes see things thus: he never sees them
otherwise. In the chapel they delight the older labourers, and yet fail
because they vanish in the cold night air and "leave not a rack behind."
Some hearers, on the other hand, sicken at them, when the blood is noisy
in the breast and the brain is warm, as they sicken at drugs.
It is not, therefore, surprising that at one time he had gorgeous
earthly dreams. But with an oddity of which nothing will cure him, he is
much troubled by this pomp which he desires not to see save in celestial
things. And now he allows sleep nightly but a brief victory over him.
THE LANDLORD OF THE "CROSS INN"
A very pretty companion for Jones was Owen, the innkeeper, a robust man
of words, who called himself the preacher's best customer, because he
needed so much of his charity.
He was a perfect Celt, according to the English superstition. For never
was there such a failure who was also such a swaggerer as he. He had
fair hair, blue eyes, and a small, elegant beard, which
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild.
He was bullied by a contemptuous wife; he was ridiculed by all his
regular customers, rallied by the rest. But the beard was always neat
and fair, a symbol of his unconquerable mind. No matter how he was
trodden down, he smelt sweet. He had humour, for he could laugh at
himself, though he lacked the common gift of being able to laugh at
others, and had no repartee. The more lusty the Saturday night thrusts
at him, the more vivid was his reply, and it was commonly a piece of
egoism and self-exposure, which, if not so long and so wonderfully
draped, would have called for a repetition of the very blow he was
parrying. Once when he had been sold up and had little more than a wife
and a walking-stick in the world, and his position attracted some
trifling compliments and condolences from his old harriers, he stood up,
and, wielding his stick and motioning to his wife to be silent, gave an
inventory of the things he had lost with such decoration as would have
abashed an auctioneer. There is a Welsh proverb, "A Welshman keeps
nothing until he has lost it"; and the now invisible and inaccessible
furniture called up such a tumult of admiration that he cared not that
it was no longer his. How rich he looked! As the words flowed on and it
was time for his hearers to be going, it was clear that if he had
forgotten anything, he had invented more; but though he ended in no
better company than that of his wife, who picked something from his coat
and held it between the tips of two fingers for his humiliation, he but
wiped his forehead and cursed because he had forgotten the ancient
horse-trappings of brass that used to hang over the mantelpiece at the
—— Arms.
[Illustration: BODDNANT HALL, CONWAY VALLEY]
His voice, whether he sang or spoke, was of wide range and exquisite
adjustment, and he spoke with care and gusto, as if he loved his native
tongue. Under its influence, he respected nobody of any importance.
Thus, he was once pretty justly thrashed; when, having tired his
chastiser by his patience, he remarked at great length that he supposed
the other did not know who he was, and the splendour of his manner
overcame his heated companion. No sooner had he got home than he gave a
rapturous description of how one had given another a thrashing down the
road. He did it so well that he was asked whether he was the beater.
"No," said he bravely, "it happened that I was beat."
Had he lost by a bargain, had he taken a bad coin unawares, had he been
worsted in argument, he could so rant that he moved every one, and
himself obviously first of all, and made the worse appear the better. He
kept a genealogical tree in constant use by pruning and watering, and
though there was not only a prince but a poet in it, I think he gloried
less in the old splendour of his family than in the length of its fall,
as who should say he had once been so high that he was "from morn to
dewy eve" in falling.
When first I saw him, he had just come into the "Cross Inn." It was
mid-day; the weather was cold and wet; and since he never liked to see a
man drinking by himself, and the shepherds coming down from the
mountains to market had called pretty often, he was not sober. He told
me that his was a fine house—the finest in the village, and therefore in
the county; and that it had not paid the former tenant well, who had, in
fact, sold but eighteen gallons of beer in a month. He was going to do
better than that, he said; to make a beginning, he was going to drink
that quantity himself. I asked for brandy. He had not a drop, and
explained that he had a weakness for it himself—took a drop very often;
and that therefore, to get out of temptation, he had finished his stock
on the night before. "But," said he, "I have upstairs such a bed as
you—pardon me—never slept in yet."
"I have no doubt," said I, and sat down.
[Illustration: CARNARVON CASTLE]
But when he heard that I was walking across Wales, and had therefore
tried many beds, he insisted that I should see the thing. It was the
finest in the village—in the county—in Wales—"I don't see why I should
not say in the whole world." Truly it was a noble bed, in a great,
empty, raftered, uncarpeted room; the wood all darkened oak, with a
dusky gleam; the hangings ample and of a rich crimson stuff; the purity
of the linen splendid. If a royal person or a poet had not slept in it,
"that was their misfortune." He stood by, awed and reverent, beholding
the bed. I was not his equal in eloquence, and he echoed my praise with
an elaborate "of course": and for the sake of hearing some of the words
he loved, he finally invited me to spend a night in the bed, "as his
guest," so he magnificently said.
All his family were of the same temper. His father and mother had gone
to London years ago, and, at seventy years of age, to the infirmary of a
workhouse....
The aged paupers sat in a long, grey, motionless, and silent row—like a
sculptured frieze, or like persons expecting to be photographed—under
the wall of a church. Before them was a strip of grass, one emerald half
of which shone so that it seemed of an element like flame; for it was
pure, insubstantial colour; and into this, as the paupers saw, the tide
of the shadow of the church gradually ate. Beyond the grass was the
infirmary, and alongside it a yellow road, and on that a hearse.
Watching this and the paupers, a crowd of persons, with uninterested,
inquisitive eyes and bowler hats, stuck their noses through the railings
which ran between the busy street and the infirmary. Motor cars brayed,
hooves clattered.
Presently three men carried out a coffin, containing the remains of Mrs.
Owen, and shoved it into the hearse. "God love me, what a coffin!" said
one of the crowd. But the frieze of paupers were silent and motionless
in the long grey row—all but the husband of the corpse. He, like the
others, seemed to stare at the hearse with fixed gaze, and in a loud
voice he remembered what a bonny woman the corpse had been, and in
particular how, while a travelling musician played in the village
street, when she was past fifty years of age, she had locked herself
into the kitchen and danced, having spread a mat to deaden the clicking
of her merry clogs; and he had watched her, unobserved. The story and
his uncontrolled, bleating voice raised a laugh under the bowler hats;
and the old men lifted their heads and straightened themselves and
laughed; and most loudly and grimly of all laughed Owen, while he
remembered the cottage in sight of the beacons of Breconshire; and the
hearse rolled out and the crowd removed.
MR. ROWLANDS, THE MINISTER
Rowlands, another minister, is six feet and two inches in height,
seventeen stone in weight, and has a voice which is in proportion. When
he stands up, one supposes that he can never sit down; when he sits
down, one supposes that he can never stand up. Every one of his
attitudes seems to be final. Only when he is moving is his ponderosity a
little less than divine; for he moves with an odd briskness, so that,
from behind, he is like a large schoolboy on some urgent business. His
mind is subject to similar changes of aspect. In domestic life no one is
less awful than he; and were he not good-tempered, cheerful, frolicsome,
and humorous as well, he would be one of the most mirth-provoking of
mankind. On children he leaves no impression but that of weight, and in
spite of his black clothes, he once reminded a child (with a shrill
voice) of Atlas upholding the world.
In his everyday life he is a learned, happy child. His curiosity is
matched by his credulity. He is the victim not only of tradesmen,
but of beggars. He cannot keep his coat clean, and that he sews on
his own buttons is apparent from the fact that he seldom has more
than one or two of those decorations. He knows every one in his
neighbourhood—miners, farmers, parsons, and the resident
Englishmen—and knows and loves them so well that he never condemned
any one except for cruelty. For he seems to have started life with
such a strong belief in the sinfulness of men, that he has ever
since been pleased and surprised by this one's goodness and the
amiability of that one's badness. He might, in truth, have spoken of
himself in something like the words of that fine, possibly Welsh
poet of the seventeenth century, Thomas Traherne:
A learned and a happy ignorance
Divided me
From all the vanity,
From all the sloth, care, pain, and sorrow that advance
The madness and the misery
Of men. No error, no distraction I
Saw soil the earth or overcloud the sky.
I knew not that there was a serpent's sting
Whose poison shed,
On men, did overspread
The world; nor did I dream of such a thing
As sin, in which mankind lay dead.
They were all brisk and living wights to me,
Yea, pure and full of immortality.
Joy, pleasure, beauty, kindness, glory, love,
Sleep, day, life, light,
Peace, melody, my sight,
My ears and heart did fill and freely move.
All that I saw did me delight.
The universe was then a world of treasure,
To me an universal world of pleasure....
[Illustration: DISTANT VIEW OF CARNARVON BAY]
His own verses, by the way, are not so good, for, like all Welsh
ministers, he writes a hundred lines of verse every day, perhaps to
avoid being thought singular.
He makes a fine figure of Charity in his old age, with his preoccupied
blue eyes under a brow that is marked only by three lines like three
beams thrown upward by a sun. He has a large, joyous, curving mouth,
side-whiskers, careless beard, large feet.
He has but one touch of sentiment. Nearly half a century ago he fell in
love with a pretty woman, and unsuccessfully; yet, though she is known
to be married and still alive, he has come to have for her memory a
grandfatherly tenderness, regarding her as a white and careless girl, in
spite of time. For the rest, so warm and radiant is he, that I remember
the peculiarity of Kai. "When it rained hardest, whatever he carried
remained dry for a handbreadth above and a handbreadth below his hand,
and when his companions were coldest, it was to them as fuel with which
to light their fire."
But in the pulpit—whether it is a whim or an atonement or merely a
recollection of his years at a theological college—he always makes an
attempt to dust the wrinkles of his waistcoat. In every other way he
makes his week-day self incredible to a stranger. He justifies and makes
use of his size more than any man I ever saw. Seeing him in the pulpit,
it seems fitting that he should live there day and night, so necessary a
pillar is he to the dull, small chapel, though, when holding out his
arms, as often he does, he threatens to demolish the little arches and
poor windows and to create something more splendid in their place. Going
there once in his absence, a visitor remarked to a deacon that they had
made some changes in the building; and asking what had gone from there,
he was told, "Oh, only Mr. Rowlands."
Standing there, he undertakes to speak on behalf of the Deity, whose
ways he explains, and by a magnificent self-conceit supposes that his
own stature and voice are fitting symbols to mortals incapable of
apprehending things more august. For a time, indeed, during the singing
of the hymns, there is a geniality as of lightning about his face. He
smiles; he tosses his head with the joy of the song, and may even be
supposed to feel, not without sympathy, that the mighty music says
things which were not dreamed of by prophets or apostles.
[Illustration:
ON THE RIVER SEIONT, CARNARVONSHIRE—EVENING GLOW
]
When he reads a lesson, it is plain to see that above all other Gods he
loves "the Lord that smiteth." He opens his mouth and rejoices in the
rich and massy Welsh. He makes no attempt at mere clear reading, which
would be of no use to an imaginative audience, that is familiar with the
Bible; but, raising and lowering his voice, now hurrying as if to a
precipice where all will be overthrown, now creeping as if he feared
what is to come, he makes the chapter anew, creating it as if he were
sculptor or musician. I suppose he uses nearly as many musical notes as
if he sang; but the result differs from singing, as prose from poetry;
and so noble is the prose that it suggests only one possible answer to
the question which, like a school-man, he once asked, Whether the music
of the spheres be verse or prose? Yet, if the note of the lesson is
melancholy, full of the dreariness of moving over the void and creating,
the note of the sermon is triumphant, or if not triumphant it is
minatory, or if not minatory it is scornful, and at times a listener
expects to see him wrapped in a cloud and carried away from an
undeserving and purblind race.
The medium of what English people would call his rhetoric is the "hwyl,"
an exuberant, impassioned, musical modulation of the voice, and, to
compare great things with small, comparable to the very finest intoning
to which has been added (if we can suppose it) a lyrical, egotistical
indulgence in all moods of pity, scorn, tenderness, anger, sorrow, joy,
anxiety and hope. It can be familiar or lofty. It is as powerful as harp
and song together; and the force of it often arises from the fact that
what is heard is rather the musical accompaniment of the man's thought
than the thought itself. Hence its terrible and lovely purposes, and the
many sentiments with which it is shot, and the dubiousness of the
loftier passages, as in the verses which the bards recited before Arthur
and only one man understood them, except that they were in Arthur's
praise.
I have seen him so thunder that I thought of the Llewelyns and Glyndwr,
and forgot that the castles fester no longer with Englishmen, and
aerea ramis
dependet galea et prato gravia arma quiescunt,
and for the moment, thought he was a man. No actor ever stormed and
swelled so, because no actor yet played the part which he played. It was
a chant; yet it was too uncontrollable for a chant. If you call it
declamation, you must admit that to declaim a man shall first go to
Medea, that she
Having drawn that weakness from his limbs
Which torpid now and chilly there abode,
Through every vacant artery may force
The green and joyous sap of thriving plants,—
Juice of crushed stalks mixed with their ropy gums,
And purpled bright with strength from berry and grape,
Full of a stinging, swift, and masterful
Vivacity.
For the blood of a declaimer of seventy does not travel so by ordinary
ways. Nor can a declaimer, as he does, build up for the imagination an
earth, with sky and mountains, within a little chapel, for the sake of
showing how the lightning vaults and impales the unjust man. At other
times his words rise up and circle and make fantastic architecture, as
real as dreams, for the terror of the soul that for the time is forced
to dwell therein. And though the substance of his sermon is but
anecdote, biblical reference, exhortation, warning, picturesque logic
built upon some simple religious theme, men and women weep under this
divine bullying. A man, listening outside the chapel, put his hand to
his head to make sure that his hat was on, so stiffly his hair stood up.
"Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills
moved and were shaken, because he was wroth....
"He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his
feet.
"And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings
of the wind.
"He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were
dark waters and thick clouds of the skies...."
Once he paused long, towards the end of a sermon, while the thunder
withdrew with a terrible solemnity which he envied; and he did not
hesitate to follow the thunder with the words, "It has been said," and
so to end.
THE POACHER
One who used to come in late, years ago, was Gwilym Pritchard, the
poacher.
[Illustration: BRIDGE, CWM-Y-GLO—EVENING]
I wish to make a nice distinction between poachers and poachers. The man
who is nothing but a poacher I regard as one only in the strict literal
sense. Such a man is rare to-day. Formerly he went to the woods as
another man went to the Bar. He lived like a gentleman upon other men's
venison, and was beneath the pleasure of salt-pork broth. He would
swagger about the hamlet with a deer on his back. The deer was but a
carcass at sixpence the pound to him. He has lately stooped to dictate
his autobiography, which may be bought over the counter. A less
majestical note was never sounded. He turned gamekeeper, and no doubt
touched his cap for half-a-sovereign, and stared at his palm for a
crown. He is, in short, "one of God's creatures." But the nobler one I
have in mind seemed to bear high office in the scheme of the natural
world. A mighty man, capable of killing anything and of sparing anything
too, he was a true scholar in his kind. The pedants who peep and
botanise and cry "allium" or "cnicus" to one another in the awful woods,
and the sublime enthusiasts who cannot see the earth for the flowers,
were equally beneath him. He would give twelve hours a day at least to
the open air, as a scholar to his books. Thus he had acquired a large
erudition which would probably have exhausted a whole field of inquiry
if written down. It is fortunate that faultless observers like this hand
down nothing to posterity, since it leaves us in these latter days free
to feel ourselves discoverers when we come upon what hundreds have known
during the last thousand years. In the case of this man, the knowledge
came out not so much in speech—of which he was economical—as in infinite
tact,
Wearing all that weight
Of learning lightly like a flower.
It was shown in the way he stepped in the woods, in the way he laid his
ear to the bare ground (not the grass) to ascertain a distant noise of
footsteps. I have seen him lose a wood-pigeon by an interrupted aim,
and, standing without sound or motion, shoot the bird, that returned to
its branch, enchanted by the absence of hostile sounds; for his very
clothes were more the work of nature than the tailor, and matched the
trees like a hawk or a November moth. His belief in the earth as a
living thing was almost a superstition. I shall not forget how he took
me to a hilltop one autumn day, when the quiet gave birth to sound after
sound as we listened and let our silence grow. By a process of
elimination he set aside the wind, the birds, the falling leaves, the
water, and tried to capture for my sake the low hum which was the earth
making music to itself. And what I heard I can no more describe than the
magic of an excellent voice when once it is silent. "Depend upon it,
that means something," he said. "And now——" there was a sharp report and
a hare that I had not noticed bounded as if it had fallen from a great
height, and lay dead.
[Illustration: FIELD PATH, NEAR LLANRUG]
Having been caught once, I remarked that his captor must have been a
clever man. "A fool," he replied—"a fool. He'd been after me a hundred
times, and I had fooled him all but once." It was at one time his
practice to deliver a tithe of his poached game at the cottages of the
sick, infirm, or poor, _as a present from the Squire_, a notoriously
ungenerous man. His occupation had made him indifferent to the future or
the past. None ever chattered less about past happiness and future pain.
He seemed to owe a duty to the present moment of which he partook as if
he were eating ripe fruit. Even a piece of drudgery or a keen sorrow
never drove his intelligence backward or forward; pain he took as some
take medicine, on trust. Thus he was a small, though not a poor, talker.
Venturing once to greet him pleasantly with the long beginning of a
story, when I found him seated without any visible occupation, and
noticing his irritation, I said that I had supposed he was not doing
anything; to which he answered "Yes, nothing!" and continued. At one
time of his life he heard that a considerable sum of money had been left
to him. A year later, the foundering of a ship left his fortunes
unchanged; and on the afternoon of the news, he shot every pigeon at
which he raised his gun. Birds of prey he would never shoot, even to
show his skill. Jackdaws were always spared; he used to say that there
was "a bit of God" in that bird. It was noticeable, too, that here and
there he spared game birds, though he despised the race. I have seen him
raise his gun and drop it again, not without a sigh as the bird flew
off, observing that there was "something in the bird" which stayed his
hand. In men, as in birds and beasts, he was anxious to see
individuality, and loved the creature that possessed and used it. The
only time I ever saw him use contempt was towards a beggar who had
soiled his calling by theft. A good beggar, a good thief, anything
beyond which "the force of nature could no further go," he reverenced.
And he was a good poacher, glorying in the name. He died polishing the
white steel on his gun.
LLEWELLYN, THE BARD
Of Llewelyn, the bard, I cannot decide whether he most loves man or men.
He is for ever building castles in the air and filling them with
splendid creatures, whom he calls men. Then he laments that he cannot
find any like them on hill or in valley: when, straightway, he will meet
some human being, old friend or passing stranger, on the road or in a
shop, and away go the phantoms of his castles, and he is wild in
adoration of the new thing he has found. His grandmother, by the way,
was called a fairy's child, though the truth seems to have been that her
mother was a gipsy girl. Perhaps that is why he has no creed but many
creeds, and was looked upon with great favour by the Calvinists until
they found that he liked the Church as well. Yet I think that he likes
men truly because they remind him of something he has read or dreamed,
or because they make him dream; herein somewhat resembling the fellow
who paid much court to another because he reminded him of the late Duke
of ——, and he was a lover of dukes. Or he is like some that have seen
processions of phantoms and say that sometimes the phantoms are simply
fairies speaking an unknown tongue, but that sometimes several have the
faces and voices of some among the dead whom they used to know. Why he
is so glad to be among us at the farmhouse I have not discovered, but I
suppose we remind him of Hebrew prophets or Greekish kings, for of our
established merits he takes no thought.
I think he wastes so much pity for Annie of Lochroyan that other maids
find him passionless, and he grows tender over Burd Ellen and Cynisca as
their lovers never did. Arthur and Gwalchmai and Gwenhwyvar, the most
unreal and unliving of all the persons of literature, please him most.
In a world where all things are passing, he loves best those things
which, having past and having left a ghost of fame behind, can live for
ever in minds like his. In London he saw but a place where marsh and
river and woods had been and might be again; or where
Sometimes a lily petal floated down
From dear, remote pools to the dreary town;
where the gulls flew over in the mournful January light; where a few
friends had fires and lamps and books—their light faintly flickering in
tremendous gloom and making one faint reality in the place; where wind
and rain sometimes brought the past again; for the very touch of rain
and wind beckoned to him, as it is fabled that the foam driven from
waters that cover old towns will draw the unwary whom it touches into
the deeps.
[Illustration: WINDY DAY, NEAR LLANRUG]
He himself professes to care only for his own childhood and youth; only
he is aware, as not every one is, that the childhood began in Eden, and
is ages old, so that, after all, the few years that make middle age do
not count for much. His life and his way of looking at it remind me of a
story of a young Eastern prince. Every day, from his early childhood, a
story-teller had told him a tale. But, soon after he was sixteen, the
story-teller came to him, and, falling on his knees, told him that he
had no more stories to tell. The young prince fell into a rage and swore
that he would kill the man if, in a week, he had no new story ready. And
the story-teller, who was very old and unwilling to die, went into the
desert and neither ate nor drank, and made a plan by which to save his
life. So he returned to the young prince, who asked if he had a new
story, and he said that he had. And the prince bade him tell the story;
and he began to speak, and told the prince the story which he had told
him first, when he was a small child; and the prince was pleased. And
until the old man died, he never told a story which he had not told
before; and the prince was always pleased.
His poetry, if it could be understood, might be counted great, and
perhaps it is so in a world where trees and animals are reverenced in a
way which is hardly dawning here. He is a kind of mad Blake. He sees the
world from among the stars, and those who see it from an elevation of
five or six feet, and think that they see it as it really is, are not
satisfied. He would make human the stars and seasons; he would make
starry the flowers and the grass. He would have it that the world is but
a shadow of Blake's "Real and Eternal world": that we who are shadows
cling to the superstition that we are not, and have but prejudiced and
fearful ears for his prophecies. He sees the world as a commonwealth of
angels and men and beasts and herbs; and in it, horrible discords that
we others scarcely hear seem to him to strike the stars.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain doth tear;
A skylark wounded on the wing
Doth make a cherub cease to sing.
After all, in matters of the spirit, men are all engaged in colloquies
with themselves. Some of them are overheard, and they are the poets. It
is his fortune that he is not overheard, at least by men.
[Illustration: MORNING MISTS, NEAR TREFRIW]
Yet how much would he sacrifice could he but write a few verses in the
old Welsh manner,—but a few verses like those he repeats as lovingly as
others would their own. First, there is the elegy on Gwenhwyvar by
Griffith ap Meredith ap Davydd:
The wearer of white and green, of red and blue,
Is now in the painful fold of death.
The Church conceals her—she whom velvet so adorned.
Wearer of velvet,
We mourn with tears now that the flush of her beauty has faded,
Now that the wearer of velvet and red is no more.
That he praises for its clear-eyed simplicity, its mournfulness direct
as the cry of a child, as the bravery of this is as direct as the
laughter of a child (it is by a poet who was also a prince):
I love the time of summer, when the charger
Of the exulting chief prances in the presence of a gallant lord,
When the nimbly moving wave is covered with foam,
When the apple tree is in flower,
And the white shield is borne on my shoulder to battle.
This, also, for its simple pride:
The men who went to Cattraeth were men of name:
Wine and mead out of gold was their drink:
Three men, and threescore, and three hundred, with golden torques.
How often will he repeat "with golden torques"!
But (and here some will reconsider their opinion that he is a fool, or
one "not wise" as the pleasant Welsh phrase goes) there is no one that
can laugh more loudly than he; or sing a song more happily; or join more
lustily than he in hunting on foot, over the craggy hills, some fox
which the farmer can never shoot when he comes for the turkeys in
November; and in the heat of the run he will curse the hounds for
gaining on the fox, and the fox for running no faster, saying that the
worst of fox-hunting is that it is so one-sided, since the fox is not
allowed to rejoice at the end with hounds and men.
And here is one of his imitative songs, reduced to its lowest terms by a
translator:
She is dead, Eluned,
Whom the young men and the old men
And the old women and even the young women
Came to the gates in the village
To see, because she walked as beautifully as a heifer.
She is dead, Eluned,
Who sang the new songs
And the old; and made the new
Seem old, and the old
As if they were just born and she had christened them.
She is dead, Eluned,
Whom I admired and loved,
When she was gathering red apples,
When she was making bread and cakes,
When she was smiling to herself alone and not thinking of me.
She is dead, Eluned,
Who was part of Spring,
And of blue Summer and red Autumn,
And made the Winter beloved;
She is dead, and these things come not again.
[Illustration: DISTANT VIEW OF BETTWS-Y-COED]
AZARIAH JOHN PUGH
One of the most inspiriting of our fire-siders at the farmhouse is a
young schoolmaster named Azariah John Pugh, and called, in the Welsh
fashion, almost invariably, Azariah John.
He is mainly English and partly Spanish; he was born in England, but
having a Welsh name, he boasts much of his country, as he has elected to
call Wales. But in truth he belongs to no time or place. He cares
nothing for the house he lives in, for the village, or for any place he
ever saw. Yet are we never tired of hearing his rich sentiments about
them all. If only he be far away from it, there is no place known to him
which he will not magnify with words which others do not easily use even
for their true loves. Probably he would like to like them; but that very
liking seems to be due to his feverish wide reading in books that are
full of sentiments he admires and would borrow, if he could. Thus, of
old cities, rivers flowing past famous places, mountains of beauty or
story, the white cliffs of the south, the whin-red moorland of Wales,
old gardens, solemn woods, all solitudes, fading races, sunsets, fallen
greatness in men and things, old books, old beer, poverty, childhood ...
of all these he will talk as if he had discovered them to the world,
though it may be doubted whether he knows them at all. Yet is he a
magnificent echo of the genuine lovers of these things, and he is so
sorrowfully anxious to be believed that to some of us he has seemed to
be the true heir, though defrauded of his inheritance, of all beauty and
all antiquity. He is for ever speaking of "remembering afresh and with
pleasure ancient matters," though he knows that even he cannot remember
them with pleasure, and that no experienced man ever does so. He is so
young that he has nothing to forget. But in his own esteem he is old
now, and shakes his head over the light-heartedness of old men, saying,
"If they were as old as I am——"
He speaks so suavely that the plain man wonders that he has never felt
as deeply himself. Before his patriotism, the patriot is abashed. The
lover of the quiet life, in his presence, is persuaded that himself can
hardly be said to love it. No lover repeats more fondly—
[Illustration: THE OLD BRIDGE, BETTWS-Y-COED]
And I would send tales of forgotten love
Late into the lone night, and sing wild songs
Of maids deserted in the olden time.
He thus deceives every one but himself, and that one exception is the
real cause of his unhappiness. He cannot avoid his affectations. He only
finds them out when they are full-grown and most noisily and hungrily
abroad in every man's ears, and then he has to maintain them, wearily
but with an apparent gaiety. Pity even will not hurt him. It is his
genial air: he rejoices in it as a pigeon, leaning and raising her wing
to expose her tender side, rejoices in summer rain, and as languidly;
and then again he is furious at it, and cultivates brutality, drinks
much beer, and uses many oaths, of which he wearies and comes again to
the old tap.
The ghosts of the subtle emotions which we say make up modernity have
come into his brain, and they are so many that he has become, if not a
theatre, at least a mortuary, of modernity. But the nervous strain of
any real passion in his neighbourhood obliges him to be rude or to run
away. Real passion was always scandalously ill done: he would have no
lover die less romantically than Romeo.
And as his thoughts, so are his acts, except that they are few. He has
been to Rome, the Bay of Spezzia, Windermere; he has walked along the
Pilgrim's Road to Canterbury. He has learned to work badly in metal and
wood. He has had whims and drugs enough to win an appreciation from Mr.
Arthur Symons. He has written poems under the influence of something in
his stomach; but either he cannot read them, or they are not fit to be
read. He wrote one, I remember, about a girl who worked a story in
tapestry while her lover played on a harp the melody which told the same
story. He wrote a sermon on the death of John Jones because a hundred
persons of that name die every day, and he wished to praise the average
man, out of a whimsical distaste for his late less fantastic likings. He
has had friends and has been left by them; or, as he says, after the
Welsh poet,
The brave, the magnanimous, the amiable, the generous, and the energetic
Are as stepping-stones to the bard.
He has made love, and he has been scorned; the sad tunes of
Old unhappy far off-things
And battles long ago
[Illustration: SWALLOW FALLS, BETTWS-Y-COED]
are accordingly most dear to him, and in his gayest moments he will
murmur some sad melody like "The Marsh of Rhuddlan" or "My Johnny was a
shoemaker." I have heard him repeat this strange poem of Taliesin's as
if he were a reincarnation of the bard:
Primary chief bard am I to Elphin,
And my original country is the region of the summer stars;
Idno and Heinin called me Merddin,
At length every King will call me Taliesin.
I was with my Lord in the highest sphere,
On the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell;
I have borne a banner before Alexander;
I know the names of the stars from north to south....
I have been with my Lord in the manger of the ass;
I strengthened Moses through the water of Jordan;
I have been in the firmament with Mary Magdalene;
I have obtained the muse from the cauldron of Ceridwen;
I have been bard of the harp to Lleon of Lochlin;
I have been on the White Hill, in the court of Cynvelyn;
For a day and a year in stocks and fetters,
I have suffered hunger for the Son of the Virgin.
I have been fostered in the land of the Deity,
I have been teacher to all intelligences,
I am able to instruct the whole universe,
I shall be until the day of doom on the face of the earth:
And it is not known whether my body is flesh or fish....
And it falls strangely from this wandering voice that calls itself a
man. It is comic and it is terrible. He alone seems to feel the true
sadness of them: flatterers and low comic persons tell him that he is
but a vessel come into the world to be filled with all the sorrows that
have been. Truly, all that has passed, is.
Nevertheless, we love him for his gross natural self, for so we think
his only convincing affectation, the only one which he displays with
some consistency by the fireside; and we know, as the world does not
know, how costly and passionate affectations are.
MORGAN RHYS AND OTHERS
I should like to win some charity for Morgan Rhys, the descendant of a
prince, a bard and a tin-plater. Charity it must be; for, in truth, he
is something of a Celt in the bad, fashionable sense of that strange
word, and is somewhat ridiculous beside the landlord of the "Cross Inn."
An orphan, he lived as the only child in the large house of a distant
relative, reading everything, playing half-heartedly at games, yet now
and then entering into them with such enthusiasm that he did what he
liked and won a singular reputation. He went seldom to a chapel, and
when he went, did something more than escape boredom, by the marvellous
gift of inattention which enabled him to continue his own chain of
thought or fancy from beginning to end of the service. He was quite
unhindered by hymn, prayer, or sermon, and accepted what he heard, as
elderly persons accept fairies, without even curiosity. The death of
others made him helpless for a time, but he did not reason about the
fact: his own death he at all times contemplated without fear; what he
feared, if anything, was the fear of death.
These things would not be remarkable, if he had not been at the same
time an impressionable, submissive child, incapable of listening to
argument, indeed, but of an unsatisfied sentimentality that might have
been made much use of by a priest. His abstraction from things to which
he was indifferent was wonderful. He was delighted and fascinated by
abstraction itself, and finding a thing uninteresting, he could at once
withdraw into a sweet, vaporous, empty cave. Thus, he was praised at
school for his calmness during punishment, which, he says, on many
occasions he never felt at all.
When a child of five he had been left alone for half a day in a remote
chamber of a great house, and at nightfall was found sitting at a window
that commanded an orchard and a lawn, and when he did not rise to greet
his friends, and was questioned, merely said "Look!" Nobody could see
anything, or rather, they saw everything as usual: nor could he explain.
He always remembered the incident, and could not explain it. There was
no fairy, no peculiar light or gloom. Yet he admitted that he was
intoxicated by the mere trees and the green lawn. In the same way he was
often found listening to silence. He did not pretend to hear strange
music. It was the voluptuousness of sheer silence. At home, in the
fields, at school, he would cry: "There!" So far as any one could see,
there was nothing. To shut his eyes was not to see amply and clearly,
but to see infinite purple darkness, which he vastly loved. He would ask
friends whether they remembered this place or that on a certain day, and
if they did, could never have them share his pleasure at the
recollection; and for this whim he was scolded and ridiculed.
[Illustration: FAIRY GLEN, BETTWS-Y-COED]
But at the age of sixteen or seventeen, poetry gave him a second world
in which he thenceforward moved with a rapture which I do not often
observe in the religious, while in religious matters he remains so pure
a sceptic that he has never yet learned that there is anything about
which to be sceptical. This so-called matter-of-factness in combination
with a rich imaginativeness is perhaps a Welsh characteristic. I
remember a farmer in Cardiganshire, with the blood of a lamb on his
wrist, singing a fine hymn very nobly; and though I cannot like such a
mystic, I admire him. In the same way will Rhys turn from ribaldry to a
poem by Mr. Yeats. But he valued poetry not so much because it was full
of music for ear and spirit, though that he loved; not so much because
it was the first discoverer of Nature and Man, though that he well knew,
as because it revealed to him the possibility of a state of mind and
spirit in which alone all things could be fully known at their highest
power, and that state was his most cherished aim, and poetry helped him
to achieve it. Along with love of poetry went a curious study of
appearances and illusions. He was never tired of considering them; of
trying to elucidate the impressionism of the eyes and the other senses;
of trying to know what there was in tree or face or flower which many
measurements, scientific descriptions, photographs, and even pictures
did not exhaust. So many trees he saw were scarcely more than nothing,
though close by and in clear air: what were they, he asked. He had never
any answer. "If only we could think like that!" he said once, pointing
to a fair, straight hawthorn that stood, with few branches and without
leaves, on the mountain side. And he came to hope for a state in which
he and the trees and the great estuary near his house, the flowers, the
distant white cottages, should become all happily arranged in as perfect
a pattern as that made with iron dust by a magnet—all filling their
places, all integral parts of a whole, and important because they were.
[Illustration: CHURCH POOL, BETTWS-Y-COED]
One evening he came into the farmhouse in deep excitement because (as he
said) he had been part of the music of the spheres. He had walked
through village after village, over the mountains and along the rivers,
under great motionless white clouds. The air had been so clear that
every straw of the thatch gleamed separately. He had passed through the
lonely places with a sense of passing through a crowd because the rich
spring air had been so much a presence. The men labouring or idling in
the fields had seemed to be seraphic and majestic beings; the women
smiling or talking by the gates were solemn and splendid. When at last
he descended into this valley, he saw the wood smoke rising gently and
blue from all the houses, as if they had been a peaceful company smoking
pipes together. He had looked at the sky, the flushed mountain sheep,
the little stony lanes that led steeply up to farmyard and farm, the
jackdaw making suitable music high up in the cold bright air, the
buzzard swirling amidst the young bracken, and he had approved, and had
been approved, in ecstasy. And on that day the mazes of human activity
had been woven into a rich pattern with the clouds and the hills and the
waters for the pleasure of the gods, and were certainly for once fitted
to the beauty and harmony of the universe. Thus he spoke in
ejaculations, to our great joy, though not without giving us a fear that
he would spoil it by something inapposite. But merely remarking that he
had seen the parson feeding his boar and that the harmony between them
also was complete, he became silent, and for a time the whole world
shimmered and darkened as if it had been some tapestry which Rhys had
made. The most pious member of the party, a Christian if ever there was
one, remarked that he "wished he had felt like that sometimes." To which
Rhys replied that he could not possibly wish that, as he would then be
damned like himself: and the other agreed.
On days like this, he stepped over the edge of the world and saw the
gods leaning from the stars among the clouds, and perhaps the loneliness
that followed appalled him. For these days flew fast. And so he tried to
fortify himself by mingling warmly with the life of every day in the
village, where his reputation was for generosity, hard drinking, and
perfect latitude of speech. He stimulated the trade-unionist, the
parson, the minister, the bard. But he could not live both lives. The
worldly one was the more difficult and he gave it up, and only made
spasmodic and gross attempts to return to it. He began to shrink not
only from all men but from all outward experience, and to live, as only
too easily he could, upon his own fantasy. He was "surprised" when he
saw men in the street. A million people, all different and their
differences so much the more difficult because they were not
acknowledged, frightened him. So his advocacy of certain humane measures
and his support of some enthusiasms sounded as if they came from an
angel, a fiend, or a corpse. As will happen with men who love life too
passionately, he was often in love with death. He found enjoyment in
silence, in darkness, in refraining from deeds, and he longed even to
embrace the absolute blank or death, if only he could be just conscious
of it; and he envied the solitary tree on a bare plain high up among the
hills, under a night sky in winter where the only touch of life and
pleasure was the rain. And now, with his fantastic belief that the
corpse is life's handiwork and its utmost end, he is humanised only by a
dread of the blank to which he is going:
When we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December, how,
In that our pinching cave, shall we discourse
The freezing hours away?
He has made a heaven and he fears it.
Once there came to him and to the farmhouse a ghost from the north. He
was a tall, black-haired, white-faced man, with high curved brow,
straight fleshy nose, perfect firm lips, and bony chin. Was he soldier
or scholar or priest? asked one and another. His face was vigilant, of
childlike freedom of expression, and yet of boundless mystery in repose.
When he spoke, he had fire, dignity, rapidity, ease, fertility of ideas,
and everything of the orator except that his speech was simple. He could
move a Welsh multitude with politics as a wind moves the corn, yet he
did so but once, because "it was a blackguard game." Distinguished from
the rest only by his white tie, in the pulpit he looked a Loyola and was
a Chrysostom; yet he stood there but once or twice, to bury a noble man.
He was master of an English style that was like Newman's in simplicity,
music, and weight, yet published but one pamphlet that was wrung from
him by a needy cause in a week, and never did anything to disabuse a
public that praised him for it. His handwriting, in any haste, was that
of a leisured and proud monk. His deep voice had a kind of flame-like
hum of passion in it; he always used it in the service of the beautiful
and the true. I heard him laugh only once, and then the depth which he
discovered for a moment disturbed me so that I distrusted all laughter
afterwards: it was like a nymph emerging from a deep cave. In scorn, in
ignorance, in mere contentedness, he never uttered a word. He is content
to be the light and the rest of a few scholars and a hundred miners, and
to be the faithful, unhonoured Levite of the mighty dead, of whom not
one, or prince or bard, had a virtue which he has not, except it were a
strong right arm and the will to make a war in which to use it for the
service of the liberty and integrity of Wales, for these alone of mortal
things he passionately loves.
[Illustration: MINER'S BRIDGE ON RIVER LLUGWY]
Lastly, there is at the farmhouse still a memory of that poet, great
discoverer of manuscripts and splendid human being—Iolo Morganwg—also
herbalist, lover of liberty and of the Revolution in France, a mighty
walker, who would ride in no man's coach, and having been given a horse,
drove it before him for a long way, and complained that a horse was
wearisome. He learned his alphabet from the tombstones which his father
made. In his youth, in the middle of the eighteenth century, he thought
of going to America to search for the Welsh colony left five hundred
years before by Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd, whom Southey strove to sing. He
was stone-mason, bookseller, land-surveyor and (in slave-owning days)
seller of sugar "uncontaminated by human gore." Eighty years ago he was
to be seen "on the highways and byways of Glamorgan—an elderly
pedestrian of rather low stature, 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 angular, the lines deep, and the grey eye
benevolent but highly excitable. He was clad in rustic garb: the coat
blue, with goodly brass buttons, and the nether integument 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" (the study and collection of old Welsh manuscriptions for the
illustration of Welsh history). "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. A tall staff, which he grasped at about
the level of his ear, completed his travelling equipment." And in this
chair, they say, he spent a night, sleeping and reading alternately.
Outside, by the window, is the village idiot, with a smile like the
sound of bells ascending from a city buried in the sea.