Lord Rhys in the south made little of English kings, a farmer's widow
lived with one son at Blaensawdde, near the lake. She sent her cattle on
to the Black Mountain under the care of her son. And the cattle liked
Llyn-y-Fan because the great stones on its shore gave them shade, and
because the golden stony shallows were safe and sweet, and no water was
finer than that in the little quiet wells of the Sawdde brook.
Watching his cattle there one day, the youth saw a lovely girl, with
long, yellow hair and pale, melancholy face, seated on the surface of
the lake and looking down into the mirror of the water, for she was
combing her hair. Some say that she was rowing with golden sculls up and
down the lake in a golden boat, so ample was her hair. The young man was
moved by her loveliness to hold out to her his own barley-bread and
cheese, which was all that he had with him. And she came near, but she
would not accept the food; when he tried to touch her, she slid away,
saying—
"O thou of the crimped bread,
'Tis not easy to catch me";
and so disappeared, as a lily when the waves are rising.
The youth told his adventure to his mother, who advised him to take
unbaked dough for the girl, instead of his crisp barley bread.
[Illustration: MIST ON CADER IDRIS]
The next morning he was at the lake before dawn, and saw cold ripples on
the water and a cloud on the highest of the hills. But as the light
overcame the cloud and began to warm the ripples, he saw some of his
cattle in danger on the steep side of the lake, where the rains run
almost perpendicularly down to the margin and cut weals of naked red
earth in the mountain-side. And as he was running round to the cattle,
he saw the girl upon the water, and again held out his hand to offer his
unbaked dough. Again she refused, and said:
"O thou of the moist bread,
I will not have thee."
Then, with smiles, she disappeared.
The youth told his second adventure to his mother, and she advised him
to take slightly baked bread. The Welsh have a proverb: "Better is
cookery than kingship"; and she being skilled with the oven, baked him
the bread.
The next morning he was again at the lake. The cold ripples turned to
gold and then to silver, and the cloud left the mountain; and he saw the
wind making grey O's and V's on the water, until it was almost evening,
and behind him the oak trees in the Sawdde valley gleamed where his
homeward way would be, when he saw several cows walking on the water,
and then the girl moving towards him. He ran forward into the water; he
held out the bread, and she took it, and promised to marry him on the
condition that he should not give her three causeless blows; if he did,
she would disappear. Suddenly she left him, and he would have cast
himself in with despair, if she had not returned with another as
beautiful and in the same way, together with a majestic, tall, and hoary
man, who promised to bestow the girl upon him if he could distinguish
her.
So the two girls stood before him; and the youth, casting down his eyes
in thought and perplexity, saw one thrust her little foot forward, and
he noticed how her sandals were tied, because he had before studied the
beauty of her ankles and feet; and he chose rightly. The old man
promised that they should have as many cattle, horses, sheep, and goats
as she could count of each without drawing breath. The girl counted
quickly, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on, and all the beasts
came up from the lake; and the young man went with the girl and married
her, and lived at Esgair Llaethdy beyond Blaensawdde, and there she bore
him three sons.
[Illustration: IN THE WOODS, BERWYN]
But one day, when they were to go together to a christening, she was
reluctant, saying that it was too far to walk; and he bade her take a
horse. She asked for her gloves, and when he returned with them, he
found her still delaying, and flicked her shoulder with one and said
pettingly, "Go, go." And she reminded him that he had given her a
causeless blow.
On another day, at a wedding, she gave way to tears, and he tapped her
shoulder to admonish her. And she reminded him that he had given her two
causeless blows.
Many years later, at a funeral, she laughed, and again he tapped her
shoulder. And she turned, and called her cattle and horses and sheep and
goats by name—the brindled cow, the white speckled, the mottled, the
white-faced cows;
"And the grey Geingen
With the white bull
From the court of the king;
And the little black calf
Though suspended on the hook,
Come thou also quite well home";
and the four grey oxen ploughing in the fields. They followed her to the
lake, and behind them grew the furrow made by the plough which the four
oxen still drew, and they all entered the lake.
Her sons desired to see her, and she appeared again to her son
Rhiwallon, and told him that he was to be a healer of men, and gave him
prescriptions, and promised that if he needed her, she would come again.
So she often met them near the lake, and once walked with them towards
Myddfai, as far as Pant-y-Meddygon, where she showed them herbs and
their virtues. And they became famous, and good physicians. They were
physicians to Rhys Gryg of South Wales; and the last of their
descendants who practised at Myddfai was buried in 1739 at Myddfai
church.
_August_
I
On a fine, very hot day I had to wait three hours for a train, and
should have left the bald junction for that time, if I had not seen
there a poet of my acquaintance, contentedly reading Spenser on the
central platform. I sat down with him, but he preferred reading to
talking, and I looked over his shoulder to read:
Begin then, O my dearest sacred Dame!
Daughter of Phœbus and of Memorye....
[Illustration: ABERDOVEY]
And I could not sufficiently admire his fortitude, until, on the arrival
of a train, he left the book on the seat, and walked down alongside the
train. It stopped ten minutes, and he talked with persons in three
different carriages before it left. He came back unperturbed, and told
me briefly that —— from Patagonia was in the train, with —— the bard
from North Wales, and a friend from London. Seeing me surprised, he
explained that every Saturday in the summer he spent entirely on the
platform, waiting for surprises of this kind. Four trains stopped there
before I left, and each seemed to be laden with friends and
acquaintances,—some who lived in distant parts and even overseas, and
some whom he had not seen for years. And some of the persons whom he
greeted he had never seen before, which was a good reason for greeting
them; he had perhaps heard of them, or they of him; and so they talked.
The liking of Welshmen for Welshmen is very strong, and that not only
when they meet on foreign soil, as in London, but in their own land.
They do not, I suppose, love their neighbours more than other men do,
but when they meet a fellow-countryman for the first time they seem to
have a kind of surprise and joy, in spite of the commonness of such
meetings. They do not acquiesce in the fact that the man they shake
hands with is of their race, as English people do. They converse readily
in trains: they are all of one family, and indeed if you are Welsh, not
only can you not avoid meeting relatives, but you do not wish to. Small
news about the coming and going of people travels among them rapidly,
and I have never got out of a train in Wales without feeling that I
shall meet some one whom I should like to meet, on the platform or in
the first street. They like their own land in the same way. I do not
easily believe in patriotism, in times of peace or war, except as a
party cry, or the result of intoxication or an article in a newspaper,
unless I am in Wales.
I did not know before that any save sellers of newspapers were happy in
railway stations, and as my train went out, I passed the poet at his
Spenser again and recalled the poem called "Howell's Delight," which was
written by a young, unfortunate prince of North Wales in the twelfth
century:—
A white foam-crowned wave flows o'er the grave
Of Rhuvawn Bevyr, chief of Rulers.
I this day hate England, a flat and inactive land,
With a people involved in every wile;
I love the land where I had the much-desired gift of mead,
Where the shores extend in tedious conflict;
I love the society and the numerous inhabitants
Therein, who, obedient to their Lord,
Direct their views of peace;
I love its sea-coast and its mountains,
Its cities bordering on its forests, its fair landscapes,
Its dales, its waters, and its vales,
Its white seamews, and its beauteous women;
I love its warriors, and its well-trained steeds,
Its woods, its strongholds, and its social domicile;
I love its fields clothed with tender trefoil,
Where I had the glory of a lasting triumph;
I love its cultivated regions, the prerogative of heroism,
Its far extended wilds, and its sports of the chase,
Which, Son of God! are great and wonderful.
How sleek the majestic deer, and in what plenty found;
I achieved with a push of a spear the task of honour
Between the Chief of Powys and fair Gwynedd;
And if I am pale in the rush of conflict,
'Tis that I know I shall be compelled to leave my country,
For it is certain that I cannot hold out till my party comes,
A dream has revealed it, and God says 'tis true.
A white foam-crowned wave flows o'er the grave,
A white bright-foaming wave boldly raves against the towns,
Tinted the time it swells like glittering hoar.
I love the marches of Marioneth,
Where my head was pillowed on a snow-white arm;
I love the nightingale on the privet wood
In the famous vale of Cymmer Deuddwfr,
Lord of heaven and earth, the glory of Gwyneddians.
Though it is so far from Keri to Caerliwelydd,
I mounted the yellow steed, and from Maelienydd
Reached the land of Reged between night and day.
Before I am in the grave, may I enjoy a new blessing
From the land of Tegyngyl of fairest aspect!
II
The flowers by the road, wood-betony, sage, mallow, ragwort ... were
dry; the larches, that were fitted to the hillside like scales or breast
feathers, were dry; but a mountain stream, which many stones tore to
ribbons, was with me for miles, and to the left and to the right many
paths over the hills ran with alluring courses for half a mile, like
happy thoughts or lively fancies, and ended suddenly. The mountains
increased in height as the sun sank, and their sides began to give a
home to enormous, still shadows and to rich, inaccessible groves among
the clefts. And in the end of the afternoon I came to a village I knew,
which grew round an irregular lawn.
From the inn, I could see the whole village.
The limes before me were full of light; the green grass beyond was
tending to be grey. There were not far fewer people than usual in the
neighbourhood, yet the calm was great. It seemed to have something to
announce and to call solemnly for silence; the voice of a child crying,
a man with shining cuffs, was an extraordinary impertinence.
[Illustration: SUNNY AFTERNOON, CARDIGAN BAY]
But two reclining cows were calm enough, and in the middle distance an
oak was stately enough. A tramp, his wife, and five children spoke with
quiet, husky voices that were sad enough. A passage from _Hyperion_
which I recalled was noble enough. Six bells that rang three miles off
and some white downs of cloud on the horizon were in harmony. It was a
time when the whole universe strove to speak a universal speech, the
speech of the stars in their courses, of the flower that is beautiful,
of the soul that aspires, of the mind that thinks. But, as it seemed,
owing to my fault, the effort was unsuccessful, and I rose hurriedly and
left the village behind.
III
And while the hedgerows on one side of the road were in places rich with
the heavy, horizontal sunshine that came through gateways on the other
side, I saw the star-like shining of the windows of an old house on a
hill. A difficult winding lane led up to it, and so long was the lane
that between the road and the house a badger and a raven had their
homes. When I came near the house one pallid angle of it glowed, and
only where it glowed was it visible.
The house was perhaps two hundred years old—stately, grey as the old
blackthorns in the hedge, and it was, perhaps because I knew of the
fading race that had lived within it, the oldest thing among those old
hills. It was more unchangeable than the most grim crag on the hills
which had its milkwhite harebell on that day. It was a survival from
winter, from hundreds of winters, and therefore, though young in years,
it spoke a language which time, knowing that the unchangeable is dead,
had forgotten:
A spirit calling in an old old tongue
Forgotten in lost graves in lonesome places;
A spirit huddled in an old old heart
Like a blind crone crouched o'er a long-dead fire....
Nothing ever happened among the Powells at ——. The lawn was mowed; the
fern from the hill was carted down; the little red apples ripened; the
Powell hair turned from gold to grey. A stranger, indeed, heard much of
them, but when he asked where they lived, he was told that there were
thirty of them in the church and one at —— on the hill. Five generations
of them had lived there, since the only conspicuous one of the family
had died in the first war with Napoleon. Of those five, the last could
only say that theirs had been the most desperate of quests, for they
knew not what they sought. They had lived in dignity and simplicity,
neither sporting nor cultured, yet loving foxhounds and books.
Generation after generation of the children had learned "L'Allegro" and
"Il Penseroso" from their fathers, and with all their happiness in that
dim house, they learned to love "Il Penseroso" best....
[Illustration: A SUDDEN SQUALL, CARDIGAN BAY]
_September_
In the afternoon I climbed out of a valley, descended again, and came on
to a road that rolled over many little hills into many little valleys,
and at the top of each hill grew the vision of a purple land ahead. But,
for some miles, the valleys were solitary. There were brooks in them
with cold, fresh voices, and copses of oak, and sometimes the smoke or
the white wall of a house. There sang the latest of the willow-wrens,
and among the blackthorns a bullfinch, with delicate voices. The air was
warm and motionless; the light on oak and grass was steady and rich; the
sky was low and leaning gently to the earth, and its large white clouds
moved not, though they changed their shapes. But these things belonged
to the brooks, the copses, the willow-wrens; or so it seemed, since that
warm day, which elsewhere might have seemed so kind with an ancient
kindness as if to one returning home after long exile, was not kind, but
was indifferent and made an intruder of me. And I should have passed the
stony hedges and the little brooks over the road and the desolate mine,
in the indifferent little worlds of the valleys, one by one, as if they
had been in a museum, or as if I had been taken there to admire them,
had it not been that on the crests of the road between valley and
valley, I saw the purple beckoning hills far away, and that, at length,
towards the last act of the dim, rich, long-drawn out and windless
sunset, the road took me into a small valley that was different. Just
within reach of the sunset light, on one side of the valley lay a farm,
with ricks, outhouses, and two cottages, all thatched. In the corner of
the field nearest to the house, the long-horned craggy cattle were
beginning to lie down. Those cattle, always vast and fierce, seemed to
have sprung from the earth—into which the lines of their recumbent
bodies flowed—out of which their horns rose coldly and angrily. The
buildings also had sprung from the earth, and only prejudice taught me
that they were homes of men. They enmeshed the shadows and lights of
sunset in their thatch, and were as some enormous lichen-covered things,
half crag, half animal, which the cattle watched, together with five
oaks.
There was not a sound, until a child ran to a pump, and sang a verse of
some grave hymn lightheartedly, and filled a shining can with dark
water, and disappeared.
[Illustration: ST. DAVID'S—BISHOP'S PALACE]
Then I raised my eyes, so that they crept swiftly, though not without
feeling the weariness of the distance, over hill after hill to the one
upon which the last, mild, enormous, purple dragon of the sunset was
pasturing; yet I saw nothing in earth or sky which did not belong to
those things, half crag, half animal, in the small valley, in happiness
and peace that consented to the voice of the child.
Then I passed the farm and saw a crimson fire casting innumerable arms
about a room; I heard the rattle and click of the pump; and I knew that
it was cold, that I had far to go, and that the desolation beyond the
farm was illimitable.
For such moods of the world are easily shut against us for some small
thing, as the world of the little people was shut against the man in the
tale which Gerald of Wales repeats:—
A priest of Gower, named Elidorus, told Gerald that when he was a
schoolboy he was often beaten by his master. So one day he ran away and
hid himself in a hollow among the alder roots at the edge of a stream.
There he was safe, but had no food. And on the third day two wonderfully
little men came to him and said that if he would come with them, they
would lead him to a happy and pleasant country. He therefore left his
hiding-place and went with the little men through a country of wood and
field and water that was beautiful, although they saw neither sun nor
moon. At last they came to the court of the king, and Elidorus was
presented to him; and, after looking at him carefully, the king gave him
over to his young son. And the people of that country, though they were
wonderfully little, were beautiful in shape and of a fair complexion,
and they wore long hair that fell over their shoulders in the manner of
women. Their horses and hounds were of a suitable size. The little
people ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived on milk, which they
concocted with saffron. They never took an oath; they always spoke the
truth. Nor had they any kind of public worship, but simply kept and
loved good faith. And their language was very much like Greek, as he
afterwards said.
[Illustration: THE STACKS, NEAR TENBY]
The little people often went up into our world, and never returned
without speaking harshly of men for their ambition and want of faith and
constancy. Sometimes Elidorus went up with them. Sometimes he went up
alone, but revealed himself to his mother only, telling her of his life
and of the little people and their country. When he told her that gold
abounded there, she asked him to bring her some golden thing as a gift.
So he stole a golden ball from the son of the king and ran to his mother
with it. But the little people pursued him, and in his haste he stumbled
over the threshold of his mother's door and fell. He lost hold of the
ball, and the little people picked it up and went away, laughing at him
and taunting him. And when he rose up, he was ashamed and angry because
he had stolen the ball. Then he would have gone back to the country of
the little people, but, although he searched for a year, he could never
discover the true path. In course of time he gave up the search and the
hope of returning. He even went back to school and became a priest. But
long afterwards, when he was an old man, he could never speak of his
strange truancy without tears.
_October_
I
The rain and the wind had ceased, and in the garden the Painted Lady
butterflies were tremulously enjoying the blue Michaelmas daisies, and
an old man was gathering seeds of hollyhock, evening primrose, and
foxglove, and putting them into white cups on the garden paths. In the
hedges the bryony coils were crimson and green among thorn and hazel;
the sparrows were thick in the elms, whose branches had snatched straws
from passing waggons; one bare ash tree was all in bud with singing
linnets. Over all was a blue sky, with throbbing clouds of rooks; and
beyond all, over leagues of rocky pastures and grim oaks, the
mountains,—and upon one of them a white flower of cloud or snow, above
which presently rose many clouds, and in the midst of them a narrow pane
of sky full of misty golden light, and behind that a land where Troy is
still defended,—where still Camilla, loving war and maidenhood
eternally, bounds over the unbending corn,—and where, in the hall of a
castle, four-and-twenty damsels are embroidering satin, and the least
lovely of them is lovelier than Gwenhwyvar, the wife of Arthur, "when
she has appeared loveliest at the Offering, or on the day of the
Nativity, or at the feast of Easter."
II
The last village was far behind. The last happy chapel-goer had passed
me long ago. A cock crowed once and said the last word on repose. The
rain fell gently; the stems of the hazels in the thickets gleamed; and
the acorns in the grassy roads, and under the groups of oaks, showed all
their colours, and especially the rosy hues where they had but just
before been covered by the cup. One by one I saw the things which make
the autumn hedges so glorious and strange at a little distance: the
yellow ash trees, with some green leaves; the hoary and yellow willows;
the hawthorns, purple and crimson and green; the briers, with most hips
where there were fewest leaves; the green brambles with red fruit and
black; tall, grey, and leafless thistles with a few small crimson
flowers; the grey-green nettles with purple stems; the ragwort flowers;
and on the long, green, wet grass the fallen leaves shining under red
and yellow oaks; and through the olive lances of hazel the fields
shining in patines of emerald. Doves cooed in the oaks, pheasants
gleamed below. The air was full of the sweetness of the taste of
blackberries, and the scent of mushrooms and of crumbling, wild
carrot-seeds, and the colour of yellow, evening grass. The birches up on
the hills above the road were golden, and like flowers. Between me and
them a smouldering fire once or twice sent up dancing crimson flames,
and the colour and perfume of the fire added themselves to the power of
the calm, vast, and windless evening, of which the things I saw were as
a few shells and anemones at the edge of a great sea. The valley waited
and waited.
Then by the roadside I saw a woman of past middle age sitting silently.
Her small head was poised a little haughtily on a blithe neck; her fine,
grey, careful hair spared gloomy white forehead and round ears, which
shone; her full, closed lips spoke clearly of both the sadness of to-day
and the voluptuousness of yesterday. She was beautiful, and not merely
because she had once been a beautiful girl. She had become mortal
through grief, and though I could not see her crown, yet crowned she
was.
Will you always, O sad and tranquil Demeter, sit by the wayside and
expect Persephone?
III
It was the last day of the month, and in a gently heaving land, which
was broken every three or four miles by a sudden, castled crag, Autumn
was perfect, but with just a touch of sublimity added to its beauty by
the thought that, on the next day or the next, winter would fall upon
her unsuspected, as Pizarro and the Spanish cavalry fell upon that noble
Indian, Atahualpa, who had come up to them in peace and meekness and
pomp, upon a golden litter, among thousands of his gentle subjects,
making music and decorated with gold, and expecting to meet the gods.
[Illustration: ST. CATHERINE'S ROCK, TENBY]
The bells of the cattle on broad, yellow lawns were ringing. Squirrels
glowed in the road; the heavy rooks let fall the acorns among the leaves
continually. The last beams of the sun reached now a circle of high
bracken on a far-off hill, and reached it alone and transfigured it with
strong, quiet light; and then made one brown hill seem to be consumed in
a golden glow, while the next hill was sombre; and again devoted
themselves to a group of beeches that shone ruddy, branch and leaf and
bole, and divine and majestic and unrelated to the cattle passing
underneath.
The sun went down; wild-duck and moorhen cried and scudded on the calm,
winding, silver river at my feet; and in a field beyond, that retained
so much liquid and lugubrious light as to seem a green water, some
laughing boys in white and yellow played football, without regarding the
silver and purple, frosty sky, to which, nevertheless, their shrill
voices added something, from which their movements took something, that
was glorious and pathetic. And near by, dark oxen with rocking gait
thrust their horns up into the sky as they approached the bridge.
[Illustration: OLD ROMAN BRIDGE, NEAR SWANSEA]
_November_
The night had almost come, and the rain had not ceased, among the hills
of an unknown country. Behind me, twelve desolate miles of hill and sky
away, was a village; and on the way to it, half-a-dozen farms; and
before me were three or four houses scattered over two or three miles of
winding lanes, with an inn and a church. The parson had just come away
from his poultry, and as his wife crossed the road with her apron over
her head, I asked where the inn was, and whether it had a room ready in
the winter. Two minutes after she had seen me—if she could see me in the
dark lane—she had told me that if the inn had no room, I was not to go
farther, but to stay at the vicarage. But the inn had a bed to spare,
and there was good beer to be had by a great fire in a room shining with
brass and pewter, and overhead guns and hams and hanks of wool; and the
hostess was jocund, stout, and young, and not only talkative but anxious
to be talked to, and she had that maternal kindness—or shall I call it
the kindness of a very desirable aunt?—towards strangers, which I have
always found in Welsh women, young and old, in the villages and on the
moors. So there I stayed and listened to the rain and the fire and the
landlady's rich, humming voice uttering and playing strange tricks with
English. I was given a change of clothing as if I had asked and paid for
it. Then I went to the vicarage, and because I said I loved Welsh hymns
and Welsh voices, the vicar and his wife and daughter, without unction
or preparation or a piano, sang to me, taking parts, some tremendous
hymns and some gay melodies,
Whence banished is the roughness of our years,
which made the rain outside seem April rain. They sang, and told me
about the road I was to follow, until I had to go to my inn.
Next day, after paying what I liked at the inn, and promising the
hostess that I would learn Welsh, I walked for twenty miles over stony
roads gleaming with rain upon the white thorns and bloom on the sloes,
and through woods where nothing brooded solemnly over grey moss and
green moss on the untrodden, rotten wood, and up dry, ladder-like beds
of brooks that served as paths, over peat and brindled grass, and along
golden hazel hedges, where grew the last meadow-sweet with herb-robert
and harebell and one wild rose, and above little valleys of lichened ash
trees; and sometimes beneath me, and sometimes high above, the yellow
birches waved in the rain, like sunset clouds fettered to the ground and
striving and caracoling in their fetters.
Again I came at nightfall to a strange farmhouse, and was honoured by
being asked into the kitchen; again I was given dry clothes. The juicy
mutton broke up like game. The farmer sang to me from the Welsh
hymn-book and from a collection of old Welsh songs, in a room which was
none the worse for a portrait of Miss Maud Millett, "The Soldier's
Farewell," and the presence of a fierce-thoughted, mild-eyed young
minister, who was the most majestic man I have seen since I first saw
the shop-walkers at Maple's—the kind of man whom one supposes that the
animals observe, and so learn to temper their contempt for us. This man
had the strange whim to call the devil a gentleman, a poor distinction
which I could not understand until he showed me a passage, that should
be highly interesting to gentlemen and the residue of mankind, in one of
the Iolo MSS. Beginning at the beginning, the MS. declares that Adam's
eldest son was ungenteel, "a low vassal"; but Seth and Abel were
genteel. The angels also, the tenth grade, who fell from heaven, were
ungenteel, "through pride, which is the principal characteristic of
weakness." Continuing, the writer says of Noah's sons that one was a
lord, the second a gentleman, the third a servile clown. Either the
usual order of the sons is changed, or Ham was held to be a gentleman
because from him was descended Nimrod, and all destroyers are gentlemen.
If this be true, then Japheth was a "servile clown,"—in spite of the
fact that he was "the first who made a targe with a lake in it, to
signify that he and his brothers possessed the whole world," inventing
heraldry,—merely in order that ungentility might have a common fount.
And thus we see that descent is efficacious to all except descendants of
Japheth (or Ham), and that therefore the genealogies are waste paper,
and a popular pursuit which has hitherto been regarded as harmless is
proved to be also fraudulent.... Then he went back to his books, which
he allowed me to see. They were pretty, uncut editions of the profane
classics; theology, Welsh history, and _Grimm's Fairy Tales_—all thumbed
and pencilled. Frowning above was a photograph of Spurgeon, and a
picture of Whitman from a chance number of an English weekly.
When I left on the next morning early, the farmer was threshing with an
oaken flail in his barn; but he stepped out to tell me what he knew of
the way through the bogs and over the hills,—for there was no road or
path,—and to beg me not to go, and to ask me to pay what I had paid at
my former inn, for my lodging.
[Illustration: VIEW NEAR MUMBLES, SWANSEA]
The next twenty miles were the simplest and most pleasant in the world.
For nearly the whole way there was a farm in every two miles. I had to
call at each to ask my way. At one, the farmer asked me in and sat me by
his peat fire to get dry, and gave me good milk and butter and bread,
and a sack for my shoulders, and a sense of perfect peace which was only
disturbed when he found that I could not help him in the verses he was
writing for a coming wedding. At another, the farmer wrote out a full
list of the farms and landmarks on my way, lest I should forget, and
gave me bread and butter and milk. At another, I had but to sit and get
dry and watch an immeasurably ancient, still, and stately woman, her
face bound with black silk which came under her chin like a stock, and
moving only to give a smile of welcome and goodwill. At another, they
added cheese to the usual meal, and made the peat one golden cone upon
the hearth, and brewed a pale drink which is called tea. Sometimes the
shrill-voiced women, with no English, their hair flying in the wind,
came out and shrieked and waved directions. In one of the houses I was
privileged to go from the kitchen, with its dresser and innumerable jugs
and four tea-services, to the drawing-room. It was a change that is
probably more emphasised in Wales than elsewhere, since the kitchens are
pleasanter, the drawing-rooms more mysterious, than in England, I think.
The room was cold, setting aside the temperature, and in spite of
crimson in the upholstery and cowslip yellow in the wall-paper and
dreary green on the floor. There was a stuffed heron; a large pathetic
photograph of man and wife; framed verses; some antimacassars, and some
Bibles.... The room was dedicated to the unknown God. The farmer did not
understand it; he admired it completely, and with awe, reverencing it as
a priest his god, knowing that it never did him any good, and yet not
knowing what evil might come if he were without it.
At last, as I left landmarks behind in the rain, I reached a poor little
house where a family of sixteen sat round the peat or went about their
work, all preserving that easy dignity when their poverty is under the
eyes of a stranger which I have ever found among the Welsh. Of his own
accord, the farmer came with me over the worst part of my way—two
apparently trackless miles—until I came to a road at last. He spoke no
English; and yet I had, and think he had, a wonderful sense of
satisfaction in our companionship of an hour, as he led me over
undulating, boggy lands intersected by rivers,—which looked a little way
off like an unpeopled continent in miniature, with lake and hill and
stream,—and along the edges of steep crags that rose sheer from black
brooks and grey foam, and above hollows inhabited by perfect, golden
birches. It was a land which always comes back to me when the same cold
rain, on the top of a London omnibus, beats the face and blurs the
hurrying crowd and makes the ears tingle. Once, the rain stopped, and
the air was calm, as we passed among decaying oaks, which were as a
church full of men when the organ begins, and we no better than any one
of them.... He accepted money with as little offence as the others had
given when they refused it. As a rule, I would rather drop a sovereign
by the road than offer a man sixpence who has nothing of the lackey
about him, though imitativeness has compelled me to do otherwise.
[Illustration: PENNARD CASTLE, GLAMORGANSHIRE]
As he left me, a mist which he had probably foreseen suddenly cloaked me
and hid everything except the road and its green edges, where the
gentlest of winds shook the rain on the feathered grasses, but could not
make it fall. The road was a river, shallow but swift, and for four
miles there was not a house visible, except when the mist divided for a
minute and showed, far away, a fair, shining, unshadowed valley, and a
white house and motionless sheep, which I saw as a departed spirit might
for a moment behold the earth; for the world was gone like last year's
clouds. Yet again, the mist rose a little and showed lawns with a lovely
dim light over the grass, as if the lawns had a light of their own which
also made them seem aloof. And strangely sufficient was the mist, the
hard road, and the moist stick in my hand, when my mood changed as when
at night bells clash as if they were building the cathedral again with
their noise, and we watch its pinnacles thus made among the stars, and
joyously they clash so that we believe they will never cease; and
suddenly they cease and slowly toll. For the inn glimmered close by, and
I heard the rustle of many sheep, and my brain began to prepare itself
for meeting men again.
_December_
Twenty miles from the sea, a little river leaves an underground lake,
flows through a cave, and falls radiant from the darkness among steep
rocks, and takes a course like a man's thoughts when they have the joy
of an unknown impulse and no certain aim. There, the river always talks
of Spring. It winds and studies all the country round,—castle and farm
and inn and old graves,—with many sharp digressions, which I suppose it
could not have done without, any more than I in a similar case. Now it
shines and curves gently and looks over its bank at the cattle, and now,
changing its voice, it is gloomy and intent among mossy stones, and now
it leaps and is all foam over a ladder of crag. Suddenly it enters a
steep, wooded valley, and falling over a perpendicular cliff, it is
richly embowered, and always remembers Summer, and begins to please the
trout where it swirls with shuddering foam or runs swiftly in the
middle, and gloomily and slow under the alder roots. But in the wood,
where birch and oak and hornbeam stand over it, it gains a look of great
and growing age which mountain rivers have, and a shadow besets its
cheerfulness, so unlike the happy prime of English waters among cowslip
meadows. When it leaves the wood it is a masterly, full-grown stream
that can turn a mill-wheel. Then it begins to pause in deep pools under
shadowy bridges, where the otter slides for a moment over a slippery
ledge and then can hide his path for fifty yards. There the girls stand
and dip their vessels, and think for a minute while the vessels fill,
and raise them again, spilling some, and show that the black water can
shine as when it left the mountain ten miles away.
Leaving a hamlet near one bridge, the river runs through such a lonely
land that even on stormy nights it is heard only by the groups and
groves of oaks that guard the stony and tussocky pastures. Here and
there, on either hand, a brook adds a murmur to its music. A throbbing
flock of lapwings for ever wheels and gleams and calls over it. The
royal fern basks on its edge. And there Autumn abides.
When it reaches the next village, the river is so yellow and poisonous
that only in great floods dare the salmon come up. There, with two other
rivers, it makes a noble estuary, and at the head of that estuary and in
the village that commands it, the old and the new seem to be at strife.
On the one hand are the magnificent furnaces; the black, wet roads; the
ugly houses, that have the one pleasing virtue of not pretending to be
anything else, with their naïvely chosen names, such as "Bryn Gwyn Bach"
and Mazawattee Villa; the cheap and pretentious chapels; yet all of them
filled with people bearing the old names,—the women called Olwen,
Myfanwy, Angharad,—loving the old songs, theologies, histories. I heard
of one man there who once heard part of _Robinson Crusoe_ told on a
winter night. For a year he struggled and learned to read, and found no
version in Welsh. Then he went to London, and while he helped to sell
milk, learned to read English, and came back home with a copy of the
desirable book.
[Illustration: OLD CASTLE KEEP, CARDIFF]
On the other hand, there is the great water, bent as if it were a white
arm of the sea, thrust into the land to preserve the influence of the
sea. Close to the village stands a wooded barrow and an ancient camp;
and there are long, flat marches where sea-gulls waver and mew; and a
cluster of oaks so wind-worn that when a west wind comes it seems to
come from them as they wave their haggish arms; and a little desolate
white church and white-walled graveyard, which on December evenings will
shine and seem to be the only things at one with the foamy water and the
dim sky, before the storm; and when the storm comes the church is
gathered up into its breast and is a part of it, so that he who walks in
the churchyard is certain that the gods—the gods that grow old and
feeble and die—are there still, and with them all those phantoms
following phantoms in a phantom land,—a gleam of spears, a murmur of
arrows, a shout of victory, a fair face, a scream of torture, a song,
the form of some conqueror and pursuer of English kings,—which make
Welsh history, so that to read it is like walking in that place among
December leaves that seem never to have lived and been emerald, and
looking at the oaks in the mist, which are only hollows in the mist,
while an ancient wind is ceaselessly remembering ancient things.
APPENDIX
For those who care to go into some of the art questions suggested by the
illustrations and their originals, we have included a short appreciative
criticism by Mr. A. J. Finberg. From experience we have found that the
general reader and art-lover derives enhanced pleasure from having
certain qualities brought to his notice. The art expert also may find
some interest in the artist's point of view and methods of working.
A. & C. BLACK.
A NOTE ON MR. FOWLER'S LANDSCAPES
By ALEXANDER J. FINBERG
When Rudyard Kipling's stories first gripped the imagination of the
reading public, it became the fashion among a certain set of profound
thinkers to go about asking whether such writings could really be
regarded as works of art. The author's extraordinary powers of
observation, his insight, his skill in telling his story and in
impressing the imagination of his readers, could not be gainsaid; yet
the thin shrill voices kept on repeating: "But is it art?"
I do not wish to pretend that the artist whose paintings have been
reproduced in this volume can fairly be compared with Mr. Kipling. Mr.
Robert Fowler does not aspire to fill such a place in the world of art
as Mr. Kipling fills in the world of politics and letters. But
incidentally there happen to be some few points in common between the
two men. Neither of them cares a brass button for the formulas of the
critics. Neither is oppressed by the weight of precedent and authority.
They both look at things with their own eyes and weave the texture of
their works out of their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations. They
draw their inspiration from life rather than from the books or pictures
of other men. They seem to hold that almost any material is capable of
treatment. The one has boasted that he has found nothing "common or
unclean," and the other that he has never seen an ugly thing in his
life. And the parallel will be complete enough for my purpose when all
the art critics of the kingdom begin to gird at Mr. Fowler's landscapes
for their lack of artificiality, and to ask, as the book-reviewers asked
of the Kipling stories: "But is it art?"
It may perhaps seem strange that I should imagine that Mr. Fowler's
vivid and accomplished paintings are likely to provoke such an
objection. But the temptation to judge by precedent, to test new things
by their likeness to the old, is a very strong one. This is especially
the case in matters of pictorial art. A picture that does not startle us
out of our conventional grooves of thought seems to us to be the most
natural thing in the world. We reward it for its complaisance by saying
that it is like nature. But when we are confronted by an unconventional
rendering of nature, we give expression to our ruffled feelings by
saying, either that it is unnatural, or that it is not art. At the
present time so much attention has been given to the careful study of
nature's aspects that few are likely to overlook or deny the astonishing
accuracy of Mr. Fowler's transcripts. On the other hand, those who have
a great fondness for pictures are apt to feel that his work is too much
like nature and not enough like other works of art. The design in his
pictures is often so subtle and elusive that it either seems accidental
or else is overlooked. The art is often so artfully concealed that the
astonished critic is tempted to ask, "But is it art?" I know the
temptation is very real, because—I may as well confess it—because I have
succumbed to it myself.
When first I saw some of Mr. Fowler's paintings—it was at the end of
1903, in the Goupil Gallery in London—I was struck by the accuracy with
which Mr. Fowler had reproduced his visual impressions of nature. The
work didn't look as though it had been done by a human being. "If I had
been told that these results had been produced by some new process of
colour photography I should have believed it," I wrote on the spur of
the moment. The artist seemed to have cut himself off so completely from
the art of the past, to have de-humanised himself, so to speak, that it
was perhaps natural for me to compare his methods of work with the cold
impassivity of a machine. But, though natural enough, such an impression
touches only on the most superficial aspect of Mr. Fowler's art. Unless
it is treated merely as the first step towards a more intimate
investigation, it is likely even to be misleading.
In the rough and tumble of everyday life we are often enough compelled
to act upon our first hurried impressions. It is one of the greatest
privileges of art to give us opportunities for correcting these first
impressions, for disciplining and training our very faculties of
perception. The art critic who understands his business will therefore
be jealous of his right to amplify his first impressions of an artist's
work by a more searching investigation. He will not overvalue a
reputation for consistency, if only he can develop his half-truths into
more fully articulated conceptions; he will be courageous enough to say
to-day what he thinks to-day, and to-morrow what he thinks to-morrow.
What, then, is the result of a more prolonged experience of this
artist's work? what are the essential qualities that I find in his work,
when I have done what I can to rid myself of the conscious and
unconscious prejudices that colour so inevitably one's first
impressions?
In the first place, I think it is evident that Mr. Fowler is a painter
who loves nature more than pictures—a much rarer thing than many people
would suppose. Most painters learn to be original by imitating other
artists. Mr. Fowler never seems to give us echoes of other men and of
other men's works. His paintings are the immediate outcome of an
overpowering desire to embody his own feelings and sensations. To many
artists nature is interesting only in so far as she furthers their
business of making pretty pictures. But the man who painted "The Stacks,
Tenby," regarded nature as something more than the mere raw material of
art. He seems to have said to himself, "Nature is greater than all our
artifices," and to have abandoned himself to the might and splendour and
incommensurability of the great mother. The tricks of the trade are all
forgotten or abandoned. Here is no cunning artifice of line, no obvious
formula of design. The scene itself speaks to us from the canvas: the
art and the artist are forgotten.
It is the same with canvas after canvas. In the early morning scene of
"Conway from Benarth" we forget that it is a painted scene that we have
before our eyes, so resistless is the eloquence of the sleeping towers
and hills. But this concealment of himself is the very triumph of the
artist.
How rare is this power of self-suppression only those who have passed
much of their time in the company of artists and pictures can fully
realise. You will meet hundreds of clever, dexterous artists before you
will find one sincere enough to efface himself in his work, to stand
aside and let his subject speak to you for itself.
It seems to me that the largeness and peace of nature appeal most
forcibly to the artist. Such pictures as the "Conway Estuary near
Gogarth Abbey," "Llandudno Bay—a Nocturne," "A Sunny Field near
Llanberis," are so musical with the respite and peace that the artist's
soul found there. But whatever note she touches nature seldom finds him
unresponsive. "Conway Castle and Quay" lazily dozing in the noon-tide
heat, the cliffs like sleeping dragons guarding the lonely shore of the
"Barmouth Estuary," the sullen gloom of "Moelwyn," the glamour and
enchantment as of fairyland in the "Silvery Light on Conway Shore," the
rush and resounding din of "The Swallow Falls,"—all these experiences
has the artist lived through and stamped for us on the canvas.
There is one reward nature gives to those who love her with Mr. Fowler's
self-abandonment, which the illustrations of this volume prove that the
artist has gathered abundantly. He never seems to repeat himself. His
work has something of nature's infinity, her prodigality and
inexhaustible resources. We not only pass from scene to scene, but we
share the myriad adventures of the days and hear the tramp of the
seasons resounding through his pictures.
Mr. Fowler once adorned the walls of his studio with this motto: "The
world has been enough invented: let us discover it." He meant that he
had had the temerity to look at the world for himself, and that he
wanted us also to see something of the glorious things he could
discover—not invent. On another occasion he said: "I always laugh when I
hear people say that my ideal is the camera. They never see the reality
clearly enough in all its beauty to wish to reproduce it in its
entirety. I would willingly be a camera if I could get some of the
wonders I see in the fact." "Go out one of these glorious mornings," he
added, "and look at the scene just as it lies on the retina, and ask
what is wrong with this beautiful thing that one should have to haul in
'memories of _other_ days' and other people's pictures."
Mr. Fowler's landscapes show that he is not one of those who fly to
dreams to satisfy the craving for beauty that exists in every human
breast. The reality, he feels, is infinitely more wonderful than
anything we could imagine. But the full significance of reality is not
displayed on the highway so that even the most careless and indifferent
cannot fail to see it: it is only to the lover that the beauty of
reality is revealed.
In a remarkable article dealing with certain modern developments in the
art of painting which Mr. Fowler has recently published, a passage
occurs which throws considerable light on his own aims as a painter.
After criticising the absence of beauty which is noticeable in many of
the works of the modern impressionists, and commenting on the tendency
of such movements to harden into a formula, he writes: "Perhaps the
demand is unreasonable, but what one would wish to see in the near
future is the work of an artist who uses the brush simply, directly, and
delightfully, and with such a sense of structure that all the finest
_nuances_ of form, even the most vague and distant—whether of cloud or
mountain-side—get built in air as if by magic; whose colour will be so
exquisitely true that, unlike the spectral treatment, no amount of
analysis will disclose its secret; whose luminosity will not depend on
theoretic and mechanical separation of colours, but on a more vivid
visual analysis, and more consistent with the natural handling of a
brush. Added to this one wants—abstracted from the natural scene—the
noble elements of decoration and design. Also a hand so swift and sure
that it is amply able to cope with the quickly-passing phase, and able
to give back, in fact, tint for tint and tone for tone, and reproduce
that inexorable logic and consistence of lighting on which the illusion
of visual Nature herself depends. This will be 'to copy Nature,'"—and to
copy nature is, according to many artists and writers, a thing to be
avoided. "Well," adds Mr. Fowler, "it may be so. If one could only see
it done _once_, one could be a better judge."
It seems to me that the artist has done well to insist upon this point.
We hear so much of the antithesis of Beauty and Nature that we are apt
to forget that beauty may be natural and nature beautiful. Hazlitt and
Ruskin especially were constantly falling into the mistake of making the
distinction between beauty or art and nature far too cutting. "Nature,"
wrote Hazlitt, "is consistent, unaffected, powerful, subtle; art is
forgetful, apish, feeble, coarse. Nature is the original, and therefore
right; art is the copy, and can but tread lamely in the same steps." But
if art is the copy of nature, it is difficult to see how it can be so
absolutely unlike its original as Hazlitt's impassioned rhetoric would
make it out to be. Reynolds was not only a better painter than Hazlitt,
but he proves himself a better critic when he insists that "a
comprehensive and critical knowledge of the works of nature is the only
source of beauty and grandeur"; and when he writes, "The terms beauty,
or nature, are but different modes of expressing the same thing."
Reynolds was therefore consistent when he blamed the Dutch painters—not
for imitating nature, but for copying nature in a one-sided and vulgar
way, and for missing the beauties that intelligent insight and loving
sympathy can always discover.
Mr. Fowler is right in refusing to admit that beauty is unnatural or
that nature is unbeautiful. He is right in maintaining that it is not by
listening to the "fond illusion of his heart" that the poet or the
artist should create for us, but that he should see more clearly into
the nature of reality than the majority of men. In his landscapes, at
least, he has given up—so far as it may be—the desire to
add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
and has resolved to "welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, and frequent
sights of what is to be borne." That such a man should find so much of
beauty and of joy in the world as Mr. Fowler has evidently found is
surely something to be grateful for.
The reproductions of Mr. Fowler's paintings in this volume will serve to
introduce his work to a larger public than that of the habitual haunters
of picture galleries. But this does not mean that the artist is either a
beginner or an unknown man. It is only as a landscape painter that Mr.
Fowler might perhaps be regarded as a new-comer. As a figure painter he
has already established a considerable reputation. His works have been
bought for several of the great Continental collections, and his fine
pictures of "Ariel" and "Eve and the Voices" are among the ornaments of
the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. Still, as a landscape painter Mr.
Fowler is practically a new-comer, and he has so far given the public
few opportunities of becoming acquainted with his powers. A few years
ago he held an exhibition at the Salon Gurlitt in Berlin of some eighty
of his "nature-portraits," as the German critics styled his work, and in
1903 some thirty of his paintings were shown in one of the exhibitions
at the Goupil Gallery in London. He has frequently exhibited figure
subjects at the Royal Academy, but only once, in 1903, has he exhibited
a landscape there. This was a large picture of "Conway Castle." It
formed a notable feature of the Central Gallery, and proved that a new
landscape painter had arisen sensitive, to an extraordinary degree, to
the fugitive and exquisite charms of natural light. Such a picture could
only have been painted by one who had devoted many years of study to
subjects that lie outside the range of the ordinary figure painter.
It was not therefore surprising to find that the artist had painted
something like two thousand studies in the open air before he could
"reproduce that inexorable logic and consistence of lighting" which
characterises the seventy or eighty pictures which are reproduced in the
present volume. For thirty years the figure painter has devoted
fragments of each year to what at first seemed the hopeless attempt to
capture those subtle and elusive beauties of nature which, through
evident lack of swiftness and skill, elude the painters, or, at best,
can only be memorised. Each year had found the artist nerving himself to
fresh efforts by saying to himself, "Nature can be actually reproduced
in paint,—given the ability," and each winter he had returned to his
studio from his campaign among the mountains wondering when, if ever,
that ability would come to him. But gradually the hand has become
quicker and more skilful, the eye more certain. After years of the most
exacting discipline something of the very illusion of the sunbeams
seemed to get on to the canvas, and the artist's hand learned the
cunning of his swift, flying, vivid, suggestive touch—a touch which
sometimes seems like an electric shock received from the tense and
excited vision.
Perhaps it is one of Mr. Fowler's most conspicuous merits that his works
seem to have sprung up spontaneously in response to the artist's
passionate interest in nature's aspects. He has not turned for support
to the formulas of abstract science. He has simply felt a genuine
passion for the truth and beauty of the visible concrete reality, and he
has clung with admirable tenacity and faith to what he has himself felt
and proved to be of worth. For in art, as in every other walk of life,
the enemy of all excellence and of all progress is the tendency to
accept ready-made habits of thought, to go with the crowd, to rely upon
routine and machinery. So few are ready to "pay in their person," to win
their way to a higher standpoint by dint of their own sufferings,
exertions, and failures.
It is this readiness to "pay in his person" that seems to form the
distinguishing note of Mr. Fowler's work. He has discarded all
picture-making formulas, setting himself to put on record as definite a
statement as possible of his own feelings and sensations in the presence
of nature. If only he could get something of what he himself had seen,
he knew it would be beautiful enough. The whole merit of his work thus
springs from his initial, his fundamental determination to see true, and
to paint things in their actual relationship.
Work like that of Mr. Fowler is particularly liable to be misjudged by
an ignorant or hasty glance. It is easy for those who do not consider
what art is to call it artless, and for those who do not see deeply into
the infinite beauty of nature to sneer at it as "a mere transcript of
nature." "As painting is an art," says Reynolds—and he knew what he was
talking about—"they" (the ignorant) "think they ought to be pleased in
proportion as they see that art ostentatiously displayed; they will from
this supposition prefer neatness, high finishing, and gaudy colouring to
the truth, simplicity, and unity of nature." But it is not to the
undiscriminating that Mr. Fowler's work makes its appeal; his aim is
rather to use art than to make a display of it. And such work rewards us
for all the interest we can take in it.
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
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