platform with the sea dim and vast and muting the song to its own
greater music, is to have felt in the Welsh spirit what no tongue can
describe,--it is to understand the meaning of the word “hwyl,” that
untranslatable word of a passionate emotionalism.
All that went on behind the scenes the audience could not know. They
saw only those considered by the adjudicators fit to survive. They did
not see the six blind people, for even the blind have their place in
this great festival, who entered the little school-room off Abergele
Road to take the preliminary tests, the girl who played “The Harmonious
Blacksmith,” and, shaking from excitement and holding on to her guide,
was led away unsuccessful. They did not see the lad who played “Men of
Harlech” crudely, his anxious ageing, work-worn mother sitting beside
him, holding his stick and nodding her head in approval. All they heard
were a selected two who were considered by the judges fit to play,
a man both blind and deaf who performed a _scherzo_ of Brahms and a
Carnarvon sea-captain, now blind, who played on the violin. The quiet
of the one-time sea-captain’s face laid against the violin, the peace
and pleasure in the lines about the sightless eyes, would have repaid
the whole audience--even if the violinist had not been an exceptionally
good player--for listening.
One of the inspiring and amusing events of the week was the discovery
of a marvellous contralto. A young girl, shabbily dressed and ill at
ease, came out to sing. Everything was being pressed forward towards
the crowning of the bard, one of the great events of the Eisteddfod.
People were impatient, and somewhat noisy. But as the girl began to
sing they quieted down, then they listened with wonder, and in a minute
you could have heard a pin drop in that throng of ten thousand. Before
she had finished singing, “Jesu, Lover of my Soul,” the audience knew
that it had listened to one of the great singers of the world. When she
had finished her song and unclasped her hands, she became again nothing
more than an awkward, silly, giggling child whom Llew Tegid had to hold
by the arm.
The audience shouted, “What’s her name?”
“Maggie Jones,” he replied; “that begins well.”
“Where does she come from?” demanded the crowd.
“Police station,” answered Llew Tegid lugubriously.
The audience roared with laughter and demanded the name of the town.
Maggie Jones is the daughter of Police Superintendent Jones of
Pwllheli. Perhaps in the years to come the world will hear her name
again.
There are children at these Eisteddfodau whose little feet can scarce
reach the pedals of a harp. Even the robins singing up in the high
pavilion roof who had joined in the music from time to time, trilling
joyously to Handel’s “Oh, had I Jubal’s Lyre,” twittered with surprise
that anything so small could play anything so large. But no one of
the thousands there, even the children, grew tired for an instant,
unless it was these same robins, who were weary at times because of the
cheerless character of some of the sacred music sung in competition and
themselves started up singing blithely and gladly as God meant that
birds and men should sing. The robins twittered madly when some sturdy
little Welshman stepped into the penillion singing, accompanied by the
harp, no more to be daunted than a child stepping into rope skipping.
When the grown-ups had finished, two little children came forward and
sang their songs, North Wales style.
The afternoon was growing later and later; it was high time for the
name of the bard of the crown poem to be announced. At last, with due
pomp, the name of the young bard was announced. Every one looked to see
where he might be sitting. He was found sitting modestly in the rear of
the big pavilion, and there were shouts of “Dyma fo!” (here he is). Two
bards came down and escorted him to the platform, where all the druids,
ovates, and bards were awaiting him. The band, the trumpeter, the harp,
and the sword now all performed their service, the sun slanting down
through the western windows on to this bardic pageant. The sparrows
flew in and out of the sunlight, unafraid of the dragons that waved
about them and the bands that played beneath them, and the great sword
held sheathed over the young bard’s head. The sword was bared three
times and sheathed again as all shouted “Heddwch!” The bard was crowned
and the whole audience rose to the Welsh national song.
What is the meaning of this unique festival of poetry and song? Mr.
Lloyd George, who had escaped from the din of battle outside, and the
jeers of the Goths and Vandals who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand the
Fourth Form, said, amidst laughter, that there was no budget to raise
taxes for the upkeep of the Eisteddfod. Then he continued, “The bards
are not compelled by law to fill up forms. There is no conscription to
raise an army from the ranks of the people to defend the Eisteddfod’s
empire in the heart of the nation. And yet, after the lapse of
generations, the Eisteddfod is more alive than ever. Well, of what good
is she? I will tell you one thing--she demonstrates what the democracy
of Wales can do at its best. The democracy has kept her alive; the
democracy has filled her chairs; the sons of the democracy compete for
her honours. I shall never forget my visit to the Llangollen Eisteddfod
two years ago. When crossing the hills between Flintshire and the
valley of the Dee, I saw their slopes darkened with the streams of
shepherds and cottagers and their families going towards the town. What
did they go to see? To see a man of their nation honoured for a piece
of poetry.… And the people were as quick to appreciate the points as
any expert of the Gorsedd, and wonderfully responsive to every lofty
thought.” Yes, unlike any other gathering in the world, the Eisteddfod
is all that. Long ago in the latter half of the eighteenth century Iolo
Morganwg stated the objects of Welsh bardism,--“to reform the morals
and customs; to secure peace; to praise (or encourage) all that is good
or excellent.” This national festival is the popular university of
the people, it is the centre of Welsh nationalism, the feast of Welsh
brotherhood. Only listened to in this spirit can one understand what
it means when an Eisteddfodic throng, after the crowning of the bard,
rises to sing “Hen Wlad fy Nhadau,”--
“Old land that our fathers before us held dear.”
VIII
_Cambrian Cottages_
In the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” from the “Mabinogion,” one of the great
books of the imaginative literature of the world, it is not a very
pleasant picture which we get of a Welsh home. Yet the Welsh cottage
home of to-day is a treasure of beauty and orderliness. Doubtless this
picture from the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” in its realistic detail, making
allowances for certain Norman influences at work upon the various
stories of the “Mabinogion,” is a true one. The strength and rustiness
of the colouring of the house of Heilyn Goch, the blackness of the old
hall, the upright gable out of the door of which poured the household
smoke, the floor inside full of puddles and slippery with the mire of
cattle, the boughs of holly spread on the floor, and at one side of the
hall an old hag making a fire, the yellow calf-skin it was a privilege
for any one to get upon, the barley bread and cheese and milk which,
after the people of the house had entered,--a ruddy, curly-headed man
with faggots on his back, and a pale slender woman,--they were given to
eat;--all, I say, forms a picture rude, coarse, strong in its primitive
detail of twelfth-century Cymric household life. Something more,
too, it suggests. As Matthew Arnold says, “The very first thing that
strikes one, in reading the ‘Mabinogion,’ is how evidently the mediæval
story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully
possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the side
of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of
materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering
tradition merely.”
There are other pictures, too, in the “Mabinogion” of early Welsh
household life, pictures which one must question because of their
luxury and general magnificence, features evidently due to the strong
Norman influence one finds at work almost throughout these stories.
No picture could be more rich and more beautiful than that in the
“Dream of Maxen Wledig,” where Helen is found by the Emperor’s
messenger sitting in the old castle hall at Carnarvon. These are the
tales of the splendid, barbaric youth of a people, filled with the
vividness, the crowding, the vitality of youth, and touched to an
even more magnificent beauty by another hand which was deliberate
and Norman--stories divinely disregardful of what might have been
intelligible; in their mystery and wonder full of the life of the
young. Barbaric touches, magic, fantastic elements, crude life,
gorgeous colouring,--all this and thrice more than this does one find
in the “Mabinogion.”
At first dreaming,--for dream one must over the cottages of Wales
if one is ever truly to enter them,--these homes of a more recent
time would seem to have suffered a loss in vividness, in interest,
so immeasurable that there could be no gain to balance against it.
Gone are the mystery and the semblance of splendour; the sense of
adventure and the strong, wild life of these earlier centuries are
forever vanished. Yes, gone they are, and gone they were before ever a
_rédacteur_ took down one of the tales of the “Mabinogion” from report
that was already becoming but tradition. Purposely did I select the
“Dream of Rhonabwy,” for not only in closeness to human reality, but
also in architectural detail, do I believe it to be an exact picture
of early Welsh home life. After the sordid picture of the hall, the
description of the rainstorm comes but as a reinforcing touch of
truthfulness: “And there arose a storm of wind and rain, so that it
was hardly possible to go forth with safety. And being weary with
their journey, they laid themselves down and sought sleep. And when
they looked at the couch, it seemed to be made but of a little coarse
straw … with the stems of boughs sticking therethrough, for the cattle
had eaten all the straw that was placed at the head and at the foot.
And upon it was stretched an old russet-coloured rug, threadbare and
ragged; and a coarse sheet, full of slits, was upon the rug, and an
ill-stuffed pillow, and a worn-out cover upon the sheet. And after
much suffering from … the discomfort of their couch, a heavy sleep
fell on Rhonabwy’s companion. But Rhonabwy, not being able either to
sleep or to rest, thought he should suffer less if he went to lie upon
the yellow calf-skin that was stretched out on the floor. And there
he slept.” Undoubtedly here even the slit sheet is a touch of Norman
elegance.
In the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” not in the far more beautiful “Dream of
Maxen Wledig,” with its elaborate interior descriptions, do we find
something like prototype for the Welsh cottage of to-day: the fire
made against the gable end, even as it is now in the cottages, the
sleeping accommodations at the opposite ends. This is the arrangement
still of the vast majority of the cottages. Originally probably there
were no windows other than, it may be, little slits--“wind-eyes”
they were called with that relevant quaintness characteristic of
early speech--such as we see to this day in old Welsh barns. In the
“Mabinogion” story of Geraint, with its white stag, its divergent
sense of the forest and of a bustling town life and the beautiful
Gwenhwyvar, there is reference to glass windows: “And one morning in
the summer time they were upon their couch, and Geraint lay upon the
edge of it. And Enid was without sleep in the apartment, which had
windows of glass. And the sun shone upon the couch. And the clothes
had slipped from off his arms and his breast, and he was asleep. Then
she gazed upon the marvellous beauty of his appearance, and she said,
‘Alas, and I am the cause that these arms and this breast have lost
their glory and the war-like fame which they once so richly enjoyed.’”
Are any lines in Tennyson’s “Enid” taken from this “Mabinogion” tale,
that story upon which Tennyson’s widest popularity was founded, more
vivid than this beautiful romantic touch? Undoubtedly these glass
windows which revealed the manly beauty of Geraint in overthrow were
glass lattices. They could not have been very common, and considerably
later they were followed by wooden lattices in general use in the
Welsh cottage, and still occasionally to be found to-day. I have found
them several times in the dairy-rooms of old cottages in North Wales.
Norman influence was at work in this story of the late twelfth or early
thirteenth century from the “Mabinogion.” Sometime in the fourteenth
or fifteenth century it was that the lattice window of the cottage
came in, nor did it go out of use until the end of the seventeenth
century. The window was a double frame--just as it is most frequently
now--filled with woven diamond lattice. Within were wooden shutters
opening inwards. A distant view or sketch of the leaded panes of to-day
or of the diamond lattice of a long ago yesterday reveals no difference
between the two, so closely has the type of window been kept, as, for
example, the little, old-style windows of Beddgelert and Carnarvon.
And the beauty out upon which these old windows look is ever the
same--Eryri, Eagle’s Eyrie, is this land of North Wales. Peak,
precipice, lake, rushing stream, valley, forest lie always before
one, sometimes shrouded for a while by the mist, again pricked out in
indescribable altitude of mountain or whiteness of falling water before
eyes that cannot fail to wonder at their beauty. In the fourteenth book
of the “Prelude,” Wordsworth writes of the ascent which he and his
Welsh friend made of Snowdon from Beddgelert at dawn, and we may, if
we have not been in that mountain-cupped heart of Wales to hear it for
ourselves, hear with Wordsworth the mounting
“roar of waters, torrents, streams,
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!”
And with the poet, too, behold an
“Emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity.”
The majestic beauty of these little Alps of Wales seems but to
emphasize the cheerfulness and cosiness of the life man has made for
himself. Indeed, nowhere are valleys greener, more sheltering, more
homelike, more cosey. And the cottages, with their ascending spirals
of peat smoke, the sweet fragrance of their homely life, speak a
language of welcome no one can mistake. Gone are the old barbaric days,
with their rough, strong life, their adventure; gone are the days of
chivalry, with their bright pageant, their luxury, their courtly ways.
Here we may turn a stone of those mediæval days, there touch a fretted
memorial of still earlier times, even before Arthur had come to wake
the world to a new romance and a new and selfless endeavour. Lessened,
cheaper may this humble cottage heritage of the present seem than those
times which have gone their “journey of all days” into the past. But
not so does this sweet homeliness seem to me. Life is gentler, life is
better, perhaps even kindlier within them by the bright hearth where,
for the asking, any one may sit welcomed and at ease. Their purple
roofs are but modest regal seal upon the happiness within. One feels
singularly close to that great mother of us all in these tiny Welsh
cottages, near to what is essential, what is real. Mortals who have not
been dissevered from their proper feeling for houses will realize that
these little homes have sprung, as it were, from the soil, that the
cord binding them to the earth has never been cut.
[Illustration: BEAUMARIS
_From a proof before letters by Turner_]
The “Cyttiau Gwyddelod” or circular huts were the earliest forms of
dwellings of which there are still remains. One finds them in various
places on the meadows lying between and in front of Pen-y-Pass and
Pen-y-Gwyrd where Charles Kingsley loved to stop. There are many other
places, too, one not far out of Barmouth where Tennyson stayed and
where some of the stanzas from “In Memoriam” were written; and some
near Bettws-y-Coed, one of whose valleys, the Lledr, Ruskin called the
most beautiful in the world. The little circular rings of foundation
stones are curiously disappointing, scarcely worth the seeing, except
that, in touching them, it may be one presses a hand’s breadth nearer
to a vanished past. These circular huts lasted through a Roman-British
period, and looked, probably, much like a wigwam, with a circular
foundation wall of stone, wood, or wattle, from four to six feet high,
capped with woven boughs of thatch, and within, a floor diameter from
twelve to twenty-four feet. Gradually the circular hut gave place
to the rectangular, at first with slight improvement in comfort,
as I think the picture of “Rhonabwy” suggests. There was still no
chimney or ingle and the smoke poured out of the open doorway. Yet
in the arrangement described in “Rhonabwy” we have embryonically the
arrangement of to-day. The subdivision of the interior space was still
to come.
The earliest examples extant of the rectangular type are of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Up till three years ago, when
it was destroyed to make room for an extension of the Calvinistic
Methodist Chapel, such a little cottage there still was in Beddgelert,
Ty Ucha. Such a cot there still is in Bettws-y-Coed, Dol y Waenydd;
also Tyddyn Cynal, near Aber Conway, as well as Old Plas, Llanfair
Fechan, to give but a few examples which any lover of Welsh life may
consult for himself. These little cottages are to be distinguished
by their roof principals, which start from the floor, heavy curved
pieces of oak meeting at the ridge in the roof. No doubt the earliest
churches were built in this fashion and the cottages were copied from
them. The churches of old foundation which survive, however, are,
as I have said in the chapter on the little churches of Wales, in
the style the Latin monks dictated and Llewelyn the Great introduced
into Wales,--twelfth-century churches such as those at Llanrhychwyn,
Gyffin, and Caerhûn. Beyond question, Welsh cottages represent a native
influence which antedates that of the oldest churches now extant in
Wales.
In the Welsh women who sit by the ingle fire of this cottage life
one feels an age-old continuity of home, of the heart of things, of
association, of service, of beauty; the pale slender woman of the
“Dream of Rhonabwy” who entered the hall with the ruddy man; the maiden
with “yellow curling hair” whom, in the “Lady of the Fountain,” Owain
sees through an aperture in the gate, a row of houses on either side
of the maiden; and others who kindle fires and perform the household
tasks, who accoutre the knights, who embroider with gold upon yellow
satin. Much of the colour of that mediæval world is a thing of the
past, but not its women: they are essentially the same, though of a
democratic to-day, simple as Enid in her worn habiliments when Arthur
asked her what expedition this was and she replied, “I know not, lord,
save that it behoves me to journey by the same road that he journeys.”
The woman of to-day knows now what that journey of her mate is, and
still she goes with him, not driven before him, but by his side.
It was on the road that, as I studied these little cottages from week
to week, I encountered the Welshwoman of both an olden romance and a
present world of fact. Very humble little pilgrimages were these of
mine, not made without their diverse experiences of joy and fatigue.
Sometimes it was a little lane I travelled on foot, off the highroad
and through the heart of a farmland, the hedges eight feet high with
honeysuckle and heaven-deep with fragrance; again I dropped down a
hill, heather and foxglove making a royal display in bare places, and
in the distance the bells of Llanycil ringing; or I climbed a hill on
the way to Llangynog, a ridge which seemed the top and the edge of
the world, treeless upland pastures like deep agate rich with ruby,
lavender, brown and freaked with emerald green, purple and pink, and
all opalescent with sunshine, dotted with black sheep and white sheep
and little lambs, some straddling with surprise as they rose stretching
and curling their tails with the delicious energy of awakening. Or,
like Moses, I came down from Nebo, only it was a Welsh Nebo and my
hands were full of peppermints bought for twopence, and children,
rosy-cheeked youngsters in a frenzy of joy, were running about me. Into
strange places may even a cottage gleam lead. Once it took me to that
most primitive of all shelters, a cromlech, where gorse made sunshine
on the hill and heather made a glory, and in a near-by oat-field
pansies bloomed, and, above, a crown of pines sung in the ever-blowing
winds. Or the gleam led me beside some tiny stream, almost invisible,
that found its way like a thread downhill.
“Down from the mountain
And over the level,
And streaming and shining on
Silent river,
Silvery willow,
Pasture and plowland,
Innocent maidens,
Garrulous children,
Homestead and harvest,
Reaper and gleaner,
And rough-ruddy faces
Of lowly labour
I followed the gleam.”
A gleam that led me on and on was this bright-shining, fragrant,
humble cottage life of Wales, with its much-needed assurance, amidst
the sorrows of our present times, that some magic of a life still full
of faith is lived among these solitary hillsides, among busy towns and
in sheltered Welsh valleys. Into human difficulties, too, did my gleam
lead me, as gleams have a way of doing. My first adventure was to find
a cottage called “Buarthau” (pronounced _Bee-ar-thai_). I knew that
it was on the hillside beyond Hendra Farm outside of Dolwyddelan, at
the head of that valley, the Lledr, which Ruskin has called the most
beautiful in the world. A child who spoke very little English summoned
her mother, a pale, slender woman with a baby in her arms, to point
out the cottage to me. The little girl led me and we climbed the steep
hillside. Beside it were wild roses, cool in pink and green; beyond
us was a magnificent view of Siabod, Snowdon, Aran, and Moel Hebog,
becoming with every upward-mounting step more grand. The old roof of
the sixteenth or seventeenth century which I had come to see was partly
destroyed, the large curved principals which came almost to the ground
had been well rubbed and gnawed by the teeth of kine. Under a tree near
a little cottage we ate our luncheon, a tree which accommodatingly
turned itself into a harp. Then we came down, across the Lledr River,
and turned and entered the village where the heart of the place is St.
Gwyddelan’s Church, built about 1500 A.D., with a rood screen removed
from some earlier church, a knocker to claim sanctuary still upon the
door, and warm hay piled high and spread in the sun over the old graves.