Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps
the highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they
visit the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing-room floor was frankly
set out on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least
till the lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was
the height of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six
guineas a week for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies
owned it was dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a
dressing-table in one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture
stood sometimes on four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage
of two cats on the back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the
controversy between them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we
never knew what it was about.
Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: “At least _we_
think so,” but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good; and
not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in the
article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost and
size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold
me for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day
before, my actual Cymric youth said, “Then he asked you too little,”
which seemed a _non sequitur_ but was really an unexpected stroke of
logic.
It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno.
They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they
were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose
language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all
that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow
the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by
the kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It
is a loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for
the English lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies,
are never able to produce anything which is not direly mechanical and
vacuous. The native charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the
reach of art remains with the Cymric poets who have resources for its
capture unknown to their English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst
failure in this sort, and the worst offender in giving his reader the
hopes he never fulfils, so that his _Wild Wales_ is a desert of blighted
literary promises. I believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells
largely, perhaps overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the
euphonic changes which leave the spoken word ready for singing almost
without the offices of the composer.