A Language Between Prosperity and Identity, The Contested History of Welsh

“ We find the same statements amply corroborated by the evidence of Mr Symons, another of her Majesty's inspectors. He observes:—
"The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to overestimate its evil effects. It is the language of the Cymri, and anterior to that of the ancient Britons. It dissevers the people from intercourse which would greatly advance their civilisation, and bars the access of improving knowledge to their minds. ”

“ The bi-lingual speech is the great educational difficulty of Wales. To get an entrance into literature and science requires a knowledge of English; or, if not of English, then of French or German. But the Welsh language stands in the way. Few literary or scientific works are translated into Welsh. Hence the great educational difficulty continues, and is maintained from year to year by patriotism and Eisteddfods.
Possibly the difficulties to be encountered may occasionally evoke unusual powers of study; but this can only occur in exceptional cases. While at Bangor Mr. ”

“ The sooner the Welsh language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political, social life of Wales, the better; the better for England, the better for Wales itself. Traders and tourists do excellent service by pushing the English wedge farther and farther into the heart of the principality; Ministers of Education, by hammering it harder and harder into the elementary schools. Nor, perhaps, can one have much sympathy with the literary cultivation of Welsh as an instrument of living literature ”

“ The one is regarded as a new friend to be acquired for profit's sake; the other as an old one, to be cherished for himself, and especially not to be deserted in his decline. Probably you could not find in the most purely Welsh parts a single parent, in whatever class, who would not have his child taught English in school ”

“ In the first place, as long as the Welsh language cannot reckon, among its literary treasures, the principal portion of the good elementary books of instruction which have long been employed in England, and are still issuing from the English press, it is obviously impossible to place the education of the Welsh on the same level as that of their Saxon neighbours. Not only should the best English books be translated into Welsh—we mean for the instruction and amusement of the middle and lower classes,—but translations might be made most advantageously from other tongues ”

“ Unity has arisen in spite of the bilingual difficulty. Rather more than one half of the people now habitually speak English. For three centuries an Act—a dead letter from the beginning—ordered all Government officials to speak English; for many generations, until recently, Welsh children were not taught Welsh in schools, and they could not be taught English. ”

“ Not only do we find the main grievance in their reports to be the ignorance of the children in the English language, but the prevalent feeling, all over Wales, is, that these gentlemen have gone out of it nearly as wise, concerning the actual knowledge of the people, as they came into it: and that, could the examinations have been conducted by them in the Welsh tongue, their reports would have assumed a very different character. What? complain of children not twelve years of age for not comprehending questions addressed to them in a foreign language? ”

“ It is not our intention to go into any discussion upon the political bearings of this state of things: we will only observe, that the gentry and clergy of Wales having mainly carried on their studies in the English language, and having been anxious to do so as a mark of distinction from their humbler neighbours, not only has the Welsh language remained almost stationary since the time of the conquest, but the national mind, the intelligence of the common people, has never kept pace with that of England. ”

“ As we have had occasion already to observe, Parliament was not an indigenous growth in Wales, but a foreign importation. It was never evolved out of the political consciousness of the people. Moreover, all that the Welsh people knew {173} about it up to that time was that it was the foreign body which passed laws making such drastic alterations in the customs of their country, forbidding them to speak Welsh, forbidding them to go to Mass, and most unfairly and inexplicably ordering that the whole of the father's estate was to go to the eldest son. ”

“ They grudged the poor-rate before, even when their own overseer paid it away to poor old lame Davy or blind Gwinny; but now that it reaches them by a more circuitous route, and in the altered form of loaves or workhouse support, they seem to lose sight of it, and fancy that it stops by the way, in the pockets of these "strange" new middlemen, as we may call them, thrust in between the farmers and their poor and worn-out labourers.
The prevalence of the Welsh language perpetuates the ignorance which is at the root of the mischief. ”

“ To-day upwards of a quarter of a million men work in the pits, and more than half the total population of Wales is contained in the mining valleys. The majority of these labourers are not Welsh; for to the pits, and to the great ports on the Bristol Channel, immigration has been taking place regularly, and on an enormous scale. Except for the thinly populated counties of Cardigan, Pembroke and Carmarthen, South Wales is no longer Welsh in any sense of the word, and it has ceased to sympathize with the political, the cultural, and the religious ideals of the North. ”

“ Deprive a nation of its language, and deprivation of national consciousness will be relatively easy. But allow the language to live, and no power on earth can ever kill the national spirit. It is therefore not surprising to read in the Act that "No Person or Persons that use the Welsh Speech or Language shall have or enjoy any Manner Office or Fees within this Realm {136} of England, Wales or other the King's Dominions, upon pain of forfeiting the same Offices or Fees, unless he or they use and exercise the English Speech or Language." ”

“ Upon the principle that might is right, nations have been forced from their own soil, but with a most passionate tenacity they have still clung to their native tongue. True, there have been languages which have become extinct, like the nations which have spoken them, by conquest; but the Welsh continues to exist, because either the people who speak it have never been conquered, or it has proved itself superior to conquest. ”

“ It is a speaking and living language, a language without any shallows, a language which seems to compel the necessity of thought before using it. Our language is fast becoming serviceable for all that large part of the human family who speak without thinking. To this state the Welsh can never come. That unaccommodating tongue only moves with a soul behind it.
Thus, it is not the first reason, but it is not unimportant to remember, that, until very recently, the pulpit in Wales has been the only means of popular excitement, instruction, or even of entertainment ”

“ The simple truth is, that the history of the Welsh Church is only a crucial illustration of the invariable and inevitable evils that attend State establishments of religion. It is true that in its case these evils appear in a somewhat aggravated form, from the attempt made by the English Government to treat Wales as a conquered country, and to employ the Church as an agent in the extinction of its language and nationality. ”

“ No people on earth combine so handsomely loyal freedom and the larger patriotism, or hold in purer loyalty to the union of hearts and hands in the British Empire, which the sovereign represents, as do the Welsh.
The Welsh are the oldest of the British peoples. They preserve the language of the Druids, bards, and chiefs, of primeval ages which go back and far beyond any royal line in Europe, while most of their fairy tales are pre-ancient and beyond the dating.
Why the Cymric dragon is red, is thus told, from times beyond human record. ”

“ And so the people of Wales, turning their backs upon this splendid opportunity, began to tread that long road of political failure and futility which made them ultimately a mere appanage of England, and which, but for the efforts of bards and men of letters in the creation of a precious national literature, would have led inevitably to the total extinction of the Welsh nation. ”

“ Of a higher and more attractive, because more national class of meetings, the Eisteddfods of Wales are worthy of record, not because they are likely to become extinct—for they seem at this moment more flourishing than ever—but because the Welsh appear to be the only race, a component part of Great Britain, which has not had its nationality so rubbed out, if one may use the term, by constant intercourse with the English, as to forget that it ever had any national customs. ”

“ A romantic literature, which was destined to leaven the fancy of western Europe, had grown up among this wild people and found an admirable means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh language was as real a developement of the old Celtic language heard by Cæsar as the Romance tongues are developements of Cæsar's Latin, but at a far earlier date than any other language of modern Europe it had attained to definite structure and to settled literary form. No other mediæval literature shows at its outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of the Welsh. ”

“ Art for art, insisted upon in this way, could only end in conventionalizing the very thing it was meant to assist.
Poetry, too carefully nursed and housed, thus fell into a bad way; but luckily meanwhile a new literature was to begin for Wales, along quite other lines, with the Reformation. The translation of the Bible into Welsh by Bishop Morgan in the sixteenth century marks an epoch in the life of the Welsh people and their literature. Therewith the history of the princes and the great lords ends, and the history of the people—and a people mainly peasant, let us remark—begins. ”

“ The population of Wales has not departed across the Atlantic, like that of the Highlands; it remains at home, and a remarkable population it is—very different from the present inhabitants of several beautiful lands of olden fame, who have strangely degenerated from their forefathers. Wales has not only a population, but a highly interesting one—hardy and frugal, yet kind and hospitable—a bit crazed, it is true, on the subject of religion, but still retaining plenty of old Celtic peculiarities, and still speaking Diolch i Duw!—the language of Glendower and the Bards. ”

“ But for this sudden revival of Cymric literature under the patronage of Elizabeth (for the obtaining of which Wales must ever owe a deep debt of gratitude to Bishop Richard Davies, “her second St David”) , there is every reason to believe that the ancient language of the Principality must either have drifted into a number of corrupt dialects, as it then showed symptoms of doing, or else have tended to ultimate extinction, much as the Cornish tongue perished in the 17th century. ”

“ The enthusiastic course of the Methodist movement under Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland and William Williams; the establishment of Welsh Sunday Schools; the founding of the Bible Society under Thomas Charles of Bala; and the revival early in the 19th century of the Eisteddfodau (the ancient bardic contests of music, poetry and learning) , have all contributed to extend the use of the Welsh language and to strengthen its hold as a popular medium of education throughout the Principality. ”

“ It may seem paradoxical, but I contend that for intellectual culture it is a great loss to the Cornish to have abandoned their native tongue. To be bi-lingual is educative to the intellect in a very marked degree. In their determination not to abandon their tongue, the Welsh show great prudence. I have no hesitation in saying that a Welsh peasant is much ahead, intellectually, of the English peasant of the same social position, and I attribute this mainly to the fact of the greater agility given to his brain in having to think and speak in two languages. ”

“ The two languages are taught in the schools, and as living languages. It is clear, on the one hand, that every one should learn English, the language of the Empire and of commerce. It is also clear that, on account of its own beauty as well as that of the great literature it enshrines, Welsh should be taught in every school throughout Wales. ”

“ You have to avoid the danger of giving offence to practical men by retarding the spread of the English language in the principality. I believe that to preserve and honour the Welsh language and literature is quite compatible with not thwarting or delaying for a single hour the introduction, so undeniably useful, of a knowledge of English among all classes in Wales. You have to avoid, again, the danger of alienating men of science by a blind partial, and uncritical treatment of your national antiquities. ”

“ But geography irrevocably settled the destiny of Wales, as it eventually did that of Scotland. If the conditions under which Wales came into partnership were different and the date earlier, that, again, was partly due to its propinquity to the heart of England. Yet with all these centuries of close affinity to England, the Welsh in many respects—I had almost said in most—have preserved their nationality more successfully than the Celts of either Ireland or the North, and in so doing have lost nothing of such benefits as modern civilisation brings. ”

“ Through its factual, historical and cultural programmes, S4C enriches Welsh society. It has, and will continue to have, an important part to play in delivering the vision set out in the Government’s strategy for the Welsh language.
S4C has also greatly contributed to the growth in the independent media sector and to Wales’s wider creative economy. The creative industries make a vital contribution to our economy and have been recognised as a key sector in our plans to lead Wales to economic recovery. ”

“ But the most remarkable phenomenon in modern Wales has been the evident growth of a strong national sentiment, the evolution of a new Welsh Renaissance, which demanded special recognition of the Principality's claims by the Imperial parliament. This revived spirit of nationalism was by outsiders sometimes associated, quite erroneously, with the aims and actions of the Welsh parliamentary party, the spokesmen of political dissent in Wales, yet in reality this sentiment was shared equally by the clergy of the Established Church, and by a large number of the laity within its fold. ”

“ The language difficulty in the Austrian Empire reflects the growing self-consciousness of the Magyars. Everywhere where young peoples are pushing their rights to take equal rank among the nations of the world, the language question is put in the forefront. The politicians of Ireland and Wales have realized the importance of language in asserting nationality, but such engineered language-agitation offers but 6 a feeble reflex of the vitality of the question in lands where the native language is as much in use for all purposes as is English in England. ”