they came, a party of four, Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, little Queenie and
Johnson, to Chester on July twenty-seventh. Of Chester the Doctor made
short work. He was more interested in a grammar school held in part
of the Abbey refectory than in aught else, and wrote particularly,
“The Master seemed glad to see me.” Of course the Master was glad, for
was not Johnson the greatest man of his day? There is not one word
for the quiet beauty of the Dee, no mention of Cheshire cheese, and
nothing about Chester ale, which perhaps Johnson found as bad as did
Sion Tudor. Of their sojourn in Chester we get a more lively picture
from Mrs. Thrale’s comment on the entry in the Doctor’s journal than
from the journal itself. Johnson wrote, “We walked round the walls,
which are compleat.” Mrs. Piozzi observed, “Of those _ill-fated_
walls Dr. Johnson might have learned the extent from any one. He has
since put me fairly out of countenance by saying, ‘I have known _my
mistress_ fifteen years, and never saw her fairly out of humour but
on Chester wall’; it was because he would keep Miss Thrale beyond
her hour of going to bed to walk on the wall, where from the want of
light, I apprehended some accident to her,--perhaps to him.” Probably
nine-year-old “Miss Thrale” did not mind being kept beyond her hour of
going to bed by a stout gentleman who was her devoted slave!
The next day they entered Wales, dined at Mold and came to Llewenni.
Mrs. Thrale’s cousin, Robert Cotton, was living at Llewenni Hall, which
in 1817, after having been one thousand years in possession of the
family, was torn down. At Whitchurch, a few miles away, is an alabaster
altar monument to one of the Salusbury’s who owned this hall, Sir John,
or Syr John y Bodiau (“Sir John of the Thumbs”). This ancestor of
Mrs. Piozzi was not only distinguished by two thumbs on either hand,
but also by a giant’s strength. With his bare fist he is supposed to
have slain a white lioness in the Tower of London. Since then white
lionesses have all disappeared. Sir John of the Thumbs also killed a
mythical beast in a lair below a near-by castle, and overthrew a famous
giant. Is it any wonder that Mrs. Thrale, with such a forefather,
should sometimes have painted things _plus beau que le vérité_, and
that, even as her ancestor was fond of pulling up trees by the roots
when he had nothing better to do, his descendant should once in a while
give truth a little tug?
But if Mrs. Thrale had a distinguished progenitor, she had an even
more distinguished ancestress, for there at Llewenni Hall lived “Mam
Cymru,” the Mother of Wales. This Catherine de Berain’s first husband
was a Salusbury, her second husband was Sir Richard Clough. The second
daughter of the second marriage married Salusbury of Bachycraig,
and from this marriage Mrs. Piozzi was descended. Later, Catherine
de Berain became the third wife of Maurice Wynne, who was her third
husband. It is said that on the way home from the funeral of her first
husband, Wynne asked her to marry him. She had to refuse, however, as
Sir Richard Clough had asked her on the way _to_ the church. But she
assured him that she was not superstitious about the number 3, and
agreed to give Wynne the next opportunity. She kept her word.
When the Welsh used to speak of a rich person, they did not say “rich
as Crœsus” but “rich as a Clough.” On July thirtieth, Johnson and the
Thrales visited a remarkable house built by Sir Richard, the second
husband of “Mam Cymru.” On the thirty-first day they drove to the
Cathedral of St. Asaph, once the even smaller church of Llanelwy, to
which Giraldus Cambrensis in his tour in 1188 referred as “paupercula.”
About that time this tiny cathedral was changed from wickerwork or wood
to stone. On the same day they saw the Chapel of Llewenni, founded by
one of the Salusburys, where Johnson was surprised because the service,
read thrice on Sundays, was read only once in English.
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF CARNARVON CASTLE
_From an engraving by Cuitt_]
He was dissatisfied not only with the order of Welsh services, but
also with the behaviour of Welsh rivers. On this day he writes: “The
rivers here are mere torrents which are suddenly swelled by the rain to
great breadth and great violence, but have very little constant stream;
such are the Clwyd and the Elwy.” About Welsh rivers Johnson makes a
great many remarks. He is as scornful of them as an American is of the
Thames. Mrs. Piozzi says that his “ideas of anything not positively
large were ever mingled with contempt.” He asked of one of the sharp
currents in North Wales, “Has this _brook_ e’er a name?” “Why, dear
Sir, this is the _River_ Ustrad.” “Let us,” said Dr. Johnson, turning
to his friend, “jump over it directly, and show them how an Englishman
should treat a Welsh river.” Johnson was always of opinion that when
one had seen the ocean, cascades were but little things. He used to
laugh at Shenstone most unmercifully for not caring whether there was
anything good to eat in the streams he was so fond of. “As if,” says
Johnson, “one could fill one’s belly with hearing soft murmurs, or
looking at rough cascades!”
It would be difficult to make a summary of all the objects Johnson
called “mean” in North Wales. Among them were towns, rivers, inns,
dinners, churches, houses, choirs. It is safe to say that the great
Doctor could not rid himself altogether of English prejudices against
the Welsh and all things Welsh. George Borrow’s experience on the
summit of Snowdon was not at all unusual, except that in this instance
an Englishman in the presence of English people became the champion of
the Welsh. Undoubtedly Johnson was influenced in his contempt not only
by his English feeling, but also by the fact that he was a true son of
the eighteenth century, with all that century’s emphasis on power, on
size, on utility.
Yet Johnson was not totally incapable of appreciating the romantic
scenery of Wales. Some part of it, the more cultivated, he seems
to have felt, for on the very next day there is this record: “The
way lay through pleasant lanes, and overlooked a region beautifully
diversified with trees and grass.” It mortified Mrs. Thrale because
Mr. Thrale, a lover of landscapes, could not enjoy them with the great
Doctor, who would say, “Never heed such nonsense, a blade of grass is
always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another. Let us, if
we _do_ talk, talk about something; men and women are my subject of
enquiry; let us see how these differ from those we have left behind.”
However, Johnson was certainly not insensible to the beauty of nature.
In describing his emotions at the sight of Iona, he wrote: “Whatever
withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the
distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the
dignity of thinking beings.” In his tour in the Hebrides he welcomed
even the inconveniences of travelling, such as wind and rain, when they
meant finer scenery and more pictures for the mind.
Much on this same August second was found “mean,” including Mrs.
Thrale’s gift to the romantic old clerk of the parish church of
Bachycraig where Mrs. Thrale’s father was buried. The day following,
on their arrival in Holywell, Johnson had to admit that the town was
“neither very small nor very mean.” He was amazed and impressed by
the yield of water from St. Winifred’s Well, and the number of mill
wheels the water turned. But when they went down by the stream to see
a prospect, Johnson adds very specifically that he “had no part” in
it. He was vastly more interested in some brass and copper works, in
_lapis calaminaris_, in pigs of copper, and in some ironworks where he
saw iron half an inch thick “square-cut with shears worked by water,”
and hammers that moved as quick “as by the hand.” One has a curious
feeling that, were the Doctor suddenly translated to this world again,
foundries would interest him vastly more than any natural panorama.
In this Johnson was truly a man of his times, which were epoch-making
because of their new interest in the mechanics of industry, their
gigantic industrial impulse. Without a word for the singular beauties
of Holywell, without reference to the legend of St. Winifred or mention
of the ruins of the Abbey, he concludes his journal for August third:
“I then saw wire drawn, and gave a shilling. I have enlarged my notion,
though not being able to see the movements, and not having time to peep
closely, I know less than I might.”
Another feature of the land impressed him favourably, the houses of
country gentlemen. “This country seems full of very splendid houses,”
he notes on August fourth, after visiting a Mr. Lloyd’s house near
Ruthin, where he had been to see the castle. He writes quite at length
on the ruins of Ruthin and ends characteristically, “Only one tower had
a chimney, so that there was [little] commodity of living. It was only
a place of strength.” It was on this day that the keep of the castle,
when he heard that Mrs. Thrale was a native of North Wales, told her
that his wife had been a Welshwoman, and had desired to be buried at
Ruthin. “So,” said the man, “I went with the corpse myself, because I
thought it would be a pleasant journey, and indeed I found Ruthin a
very beautiful place.”
Two days later they dined at Mr. Myddleton’s, of Gwaenynog, the
gentleman who raised the unwelcome monument to Johnson’s memory before
the Doctor had had a chance to die, and while he still considered
himself very much alive. This memorial is on the site at Gwaenynog
where Johnson used to stroll up and down. It reads: “This spot was
often dignified by the presence of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., whose moral
writings, exactly conformable to the precepts of Christianity, gave
ardour to Virtue and confidence to Truth.” Perhaps it is not strange
that Johnson was not pleased with the monument. He wrote to Mrs.
Thrale, “Mr. Myddleton’s attention looks like an intention to bury
me alive. I would as willingly see my friend, however benevolent and
hospitable, quietly inurned. Let him think, for the present, of some
more acceptable memorial.”
To the Doctor death was always an enemy who would, he knew, outwit him
in the end, a terrifying presence against which he struggled. “But who
can run the race with death?” he cries despairingly. This premature
memorial must have revolted everything in him, for to him “the whole
of life” was but keeping away the thoughts of death. Even a dark road
troubled him.
Leaving Llewenni on August eighteenth, they started definitely forward
on their journey. They passed through Abergele, “a mean little town,”
to Bangor, where they found “a very mean inn.” Certainly meanness is
accumulating in Wales! Johnson had the instinctive contempt for things
Welsh which so many English people hold. But, after finding Lord
Bulkely’s house at Bangor also “very mean,” this is the point in the
great Doctor’s journal where the lover of Wales may take heart.
There was one contrivance of the hand and mind of man which impressed
Dr. Johnson tremendously. Where such works of the Creator as Snowdon,
for example, failed, where the mystery of this land of legend passed
him by, castles succeeded by virtue of their size, the strength of
their walls, the completeness of their equipment. In Denbigh, Johnson
had eagerly tried to trace the lines of that “prodigious pile” of a
castle. So much of the comment we get in this neglected Welsh journal
and in Johnson’s other writings seems to summarize itself in two
words: size and power. He told Mrs. Piozzi to get a book on gardening,
since she would stay in the country, feed the chickens, and starve her
intellect, “and learn,” he said, “to raise the _largest_ turnips, and
to breed the _biggest_ fowls.” It was in vain that Mrs. Piozzi told him
that the goodness of these dishes did not depend upon their size.
From Beaumaris Castle to Carnarvon there is a crescendo of praise,
ending in the memorable words about Carnarvon: “To survey this place
would take much time. I did not think there had been such buildings;
it surpassed my ideas.” Of Beaumaris, Johnson wrote: “The Castle is
a mighty pile.… This Castle corresponds with all the representatives
of romancing narratives. Here is not wanting the private passage, the
dark cavity, the deep dungeon, or the lofty tower. We did not discover
the well. This is the most compleat view that I have yet had of an old
Castle.” And then came four last delighted words, “It had a moat.”
Nor was the next day, August twentieth, less of a success. After
meeting with some friends they went to see the castle in Carnarvon,
which Johnson describes as “an edifice of stupendous magnitude and
strength; it has in it all that we observed at Beaumaris, and much
greater dimensions, many of the smaller rooms floored with stone are
entire; of the larger rooms, the beams and planks are all left; this is
the state of all buildings left to time. We mounted the Eagle Tower by
one hundred and sixty-nine steps, each of ten inches. We did not find
the well; nor did I trace the moat; but moats there were, I believe, to
all castles on the plain, which not only hindered access, but prevented
mines. We saw but a very small part of the mighty ruin, and in all
these old buildings, the subterraneous works are concealed by the
rubbish.”
When Johnson and the Thrales were on their way from Llewenni to
Bangor, they passed through Conway. The Doctor was much exercised
in Conway because of the plight of an Irish gentlewoman and her
young family who could get no beds to sleep in, but the one feature
in this rare old town which might have impressed him, its castle,
he did not notice in the journal. Built by the same architect who
planned Carnarvon, it has much of its grace and is in some respects
even more beautifully placed. With its machicolated towers, its vast
banqueting-hall, Queen Eleanor’s oratory, and the river washing at
its foundations, it is still a wonderful old pile. On the return trip
Johnson makes a short, practical note to the effect that the castle
afforded them nothing new, and that if it was larger than that of
Beaumaris, it was smaller than that of Carnarvon. Carnarvon was the
largest, and the Doctor was not to be weaned from it any more than from
the idea that Mrs. Thrale ought to raise the largest turnips.
The day following this memorable inspection of Carnarvon Castle,
they dined with Sir Thomas Wynne and his Lady. Johnson’s comment was
brief,--“the dinner mean, Sir Thomas civil, his Lady nothing.” It would
seem that Lady Wynne failed to recognize the greatness of her visitor,
and, accustomed to a distinguished reception, the great man’s vanity
was hurt. Afterwards he made remarks about Sir Thomas’s Lady, in which
she was compared to “sour small beer” and “run tea.” Of a lady in
Scotland he had said “that she resembled a dead nettle; were she alive
she would sting.”
This mean dinner and, we presume, its meaner hostess were but a
sorry prelude to a melancholy journey which the party had to take
to Mrs. Thrale’s old home at Bodvel. They found nothing there as in
Mrs. Thrale’s childhood; the walk was cut down, the pond was dry.
The near-by churches which Mrs. Thrale held by impropriation Johnson
thought “mean and neglected to a degree scarcely imaginable. They
have no pavement, and the earth is full of holes. The seats are
rude benches; the altars have no rails. One of them has a breach in
the roof. On the desk, I think, of each lay a folio Welsh Bible of
the black letter, which the curate cannot easily read.” Over one
hundred and thirty years later it was that I made the tour, which I
have described for you, of these Welsh churches of early foundation.
Mysterious, desolate, dilapidated old places they are; in comparison
with the ugly, comfortable nonconformist chapels, spectacles for the
prosperous to jeer at.
Mrs. Piozzi tells a story which shows that the great Doctor brought
terror to the hearts of the Welsh parsons. “It was impossible not to
laugh at the patience Dr. Johnson showed, when a Welsh parson of mean
abilities, though a good heart, struck with reverence at the sight of
Dr. Johnson, whom he had heard of as the greatest man living, could
not find any words to answer his enquiries concerning a motto around
somebody’s arms which adorned a tombstone in Ruabon Churchyard. If I
remember right, the words were,--
Heb Dw, Heb Dym (Without God, without all)
Dw o’ diggon (God is all sufficient).[1]
And though of not very difficult construction, the gentleman seemed
wholly confounded, and unable to explain them; till Dr. Johnson, having
picked out the meaning by little and little, said to the man, ‘_Heb_ is
a preposition, I believe, Sir, is it not?’ My countryman, recovering
some spirits upon the sudden question, cried out, ‘So I humbly presume,
Sir,’ very comically.”
About Bodvel they found the Methodist “prevalent,” which could not
have been a pleasant circumstance to Johnson. With nonconformity the
great Doctor had no sympathy. Boswell says that Johnson thought them
“too sanguine in their accounts of their success among savages, and
that much of what they tell is not to be believed. He owned that the
Methodists had done good; had spread religious impressions among the
vulgar part of mankind; but, he said, they had great bitterness against
other Christians, and that he never could get a Methodist to explain in
what he excelled others.”
This unhappy day they concluded suitably by going to Pwllheli, “a mean
old town at the extremity of the country,” where they bought something
by which to remember its meanness. Pwllheli is still mean, but in a
different way, for it has become a noisy watering-resort from which the
quiet traveller longs to escape at the first moment to quiet Abersoch
or to Llanengan or Aberdaron, where “trippers” cease from troubling and
tourists are at rest.
Nowadays, even the most breathless will grant Snowdon a few words of
praise--praise for its lakes, awe for its rock-strewn valleys like the
valley of the shadow of death. Of the two lakes, Llyn Beris and Llyn
Padarn, which receive the waters on the northern slope of Snowdon,
Johnson did not think much, for he complained that “the boat is always
near one bank or the other.” As for Snowdon itself, the record is, “We
climbed with great labour. I was breathless and harassed.” There is
no word for all that is romantic or awe-inspiring, not an exclamation
for the summit to which have mounted king, poet, priest, bard, wise
men, through countless ages--only a record of Queenie’s goats, “one
hundred and forty-nine, I think.” Mr. Thrale, Queenie’s father, was
near-sighted and could not see the goats, so he had promised the child
a penny for every one she showed him. Dr. Johnson, the devoted friend
of Queenie, kept the account.
On their way back to the English border again, they passed through
Bangor, where Johnson must have been happy in finding that “the quire
is mean!” On August twenty-eighth they were once more with hospitable
Mr. Myddleton. Here they stayed for over a week, and the journal
contains, among other things, a long note about a Mr. Griffiths. The
addition of the name of his estate or village fails to identify him
now; looking for a Griffiths or a Jones in Wales, even a particular
Jones or Griffiths, is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Perhaps
the present limitation to a dozen patronymics is a blessing for courts
of law, but it is baffling for the curious-minded man. The historian
finds the old Welsh John ap Robert ap David ap Griffith ap Meredith ap
David ap Vauchan ap Blethyn ap Griffith ap Meredith, and so on for a
dozen more “aps,” easier for purposes of identification.
On their homeward way Johnson was enthusiastic about Wrexham and its
“large and magnificent” church, one of the Seven Wonders of Wales. On
the seventh of September they came to Chirk Castle, but I cannot find
that they went into this residence, a place which undoubtedly would
have delighted Johnson more on account of its “commodity of living”
and solid grandeur than because one of its heiresses was the unamiable
Warwick Dowager who had married Addison. They left for Shrewsbury after
they had viewed the little waterfall of Pistyll Rhaiadr, where the
Doctor remarked only upon its height and the copiousness of its fall.
If Johnson had been an up-to-date Cambrian railway tourist, he could
not have entered and left North Wales in more approved style, for he
came in by way of Chester and left by way of Shrewsbury. Safely out of
Wales they journeyed homeward through Worcester, probably Birmingham,
and Oxford. On September twenty-fourth there is this simple record: “We
went home.”
[Illustration: A VIEW OF DENBIGH CASTLE
_From an engraving by Boydell, 1750_]
It is to be remembered that on this tour Johnson lacked the
companionship of the faithful Boswell. Yet the scantiness of the diary
and its critical attitude cannot be accounted for wholly on this
ground, but were due, I think, far more to the fact that the Doctor was
thoroughly English in prejudice. Tobias Smollett’s feeling in “Humphrey
Clinker,” for example, is even more English and uncomplimentary. All
through his tour of the Hebrides, though he denounced Scotland and all
things Scottish, called the Scotch liars and their country naked, yet
the Doctor had an uneasy conviction of their superiority. As far as
Wales was concerned, he simply did not consider this country of Arthur,
of bard and of poet, this country of an indestructible nationalism,
worthy his serious interest. Had he lived in Shakespeare’s day his
concern would have been much greater, his respect more solicitous.
On the first visit to Mr. Myddleton the preservation of the Welsh
language had been discussed. In his journal for that date Dr. Johnson
wrote, “Myddleton is the only man, who, in Wales, has talked to me
of literature.” He was visiting people who, almost universally, were
supremely indifferent to Wales and all things Welsh. In other words, he
was visiting the upper or ruling classes. It is not so many years ago
that the children of the gentry were still not allowed to learn Welsh
for fear their English accent might be spoiled. Now, happily, they are
taught Welsh, a fact which not only improves the relationship between
them and the working classes, but also is contributing generously to a
revival of all that is best in Welsh song and literature. Even a prince
of the blood royal learns Welsh and speaks it.
Dr. Johnson was in Wales at a time when the intellectual interests
of Welshmen were most flagging, that is, just before the introduction
of the Welsh Sunday Schools which, with their educational rather than
exclusively religious function, gave impulse to a period of modern
Welsh literature. Not only in chronology but also in importance, the
establishment of the Welsh Sunday School must take precedence of
Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations of the “Mabinogion.” Yet what
Macpherson’s “Ossian” did for Scotland in the seventies in arousing
interest, Lady Guest did for Wales in 1838. It is possible, if one
can presuppose the impossible, that with these translations in hand
Dr. Johnson’s journal would have been very different. However, one
is fearful that, fortified even with Lady Charlotte’s beautiful
translations, there would have been passages in the authentic Welsh
“Mabinogion” as angrily rejected by him as Macpherson’s imposture
was. Johnson said that he never could get the meaning of an Erse song
explained to him. He asked a young lady who had sung such a song what
it was about, and she replied that it was for the entertainment of the
company. He explained that it was its meaning he could not understand,
whereupon she answered that it was a love song. And that was all the
intelligence, Johnson said, that he could get.