It is only some six or seven hours by train from London to Aberystwyth,
but if you will look at the names on a map of the Cambrian railways,
when you begin the Welsh part of your journey, you will seem to be in a
stranger and farther country than that of Prester John. Pwllheli, Cerrig
y Drudion, Gwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro,
Carnedd Fibast, Clynog Fwr, Llan-y-Mawddwy Machynlleth, Duffws, are a
few out of the hundred names in the hills or along the valleys, giving
the near neighborhood of England an effect of more than mid-Asian
remoteness. The eye starts at their look; but if the jaw aches at the
thought of pronouncing them, it is our own wilful orthographical usage
that is at fault; the words, whose sound the letters faithfully render,
are music, and they largely record a Christian civilization which was
centuries old when the Saxons came to drive the Britons into the western
mountains and to call them strangers in the immemorial home of their
race. The Britons of the Roman conquest, who became the Welsh of the
baffled Saxon invaders, and are the Cymry of their own history and
poetry, still stand five feet four in their stockings, where they have
stood from the dawn of time, an inexpugnable host of dark little men,
defying the Saeseneg in their unintelligible, imperishable speech.
I
Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they speak
English as well as Welsh; and they misplace their aspirates, which they
lost under the Normans as the Saxons did. But this did not happen to
them by conquest as it did to the Saxons; they were beguiled of their
h’s when they were cheated with a Welsh-born prince instead of the Welsh
prince they were promised in the succession of their ancient lines.
They had been devout Christians, after their manner, in the earliest
centuries; as the prefix Llan, or Saint, everywhere testifies, the
country abounded in saints, whose sons inherited their saintship; and
at the Reformation they became Calvinists as unqualifiedly as their
kindred, the Bretons, remained Catholics. They have characterized the
English and Americans with their strong traits in a measure which can
be dimly traced in the spread of their ten or twenty national names, and
they have kept even with the most modern ideals quite to the verge of
co-education in their colleges. It is a fact which no Welshman will
deny that Cromwell was of Welsh blood. Shakespeare was unquestionably of
Welsh origin. Henry VII. was that Welsh Twdwr (or Tudor, as the Saeseneg
misspell it), who set aside the Plantagenet succession, and was the
grandsire of “the great Elizabeth,” not to boast of Bloody Mary or Henry
VIII. But if these are not enough, there is the present Chancellor of
the Exchequer, Mr. Lloyd-George, who is now the chief figure of the
English cabinet.
The bad name which their own half-countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis, gave
the Welsh in the twelfth century, clings to them yet in the superstition
of all Norman-minded and Saxon-minded men, so that the Englishman I met
on the way from Edinburgh was doubtless speaking racially rather than
personally when he said that the Welsh were the prize liars of the
universe. I for my part heard no lies in Wales except those I told
myself; but as I am of Welsh stock, perhaps my experience is not wholly
refutive of that Englishman’s position. I can only urge further the
noted philological fact that the Welsh language is so full of imagery
that it is almost impossible to express in it the brute veracities in
which the English speech is so apt. Otherwise I should say that nowhere
have I been used with a more immediate and constant sincerity than in
Wales. The people were polite and they were almost always amiable, but
in English, at least, they did not say the thing that was not; and their
politeness was without the servile forms from lower to higher which
rather weary one in England. They said “Yes,” and “No,” but as gently as
if they had always added “Sir.” If I have it on my conscience to except
from my sweeping praise of sincerity the expressman at Aberystwyth who
promised that our baggage should be at our lodgings in an hour, and did
not bring it in five, I must add that we arrived on the last day of a
great agricultural fair, when even the New York Transfer Company might
have given a promise of more than wonted elasticity.