William Ridgeway, Edmund C. Quiggin and William J. Gruffydd

“ He had certainly the loftiest imagination of all the poets of five centuries, and his influence on the Welsh people can be gauged by the fact that a good deal of his idiom and dialect has fixed itself indelibly on modern literary Welsh. Besides the hymns, he wrote a religious epic, Theomemphus, which is to this day the national epic of evangelical Wales. Even as Goronwy Owen is the father of modern Welsh poetry in the old metres, so William Williams is the great fountain-head of the free metres, because he set aflame the imagination of every poet that succeeded him. ”

“ No writer before or after him has used the Welsh language with such force and skill, and he will ever remain the stylist whom all Welsh writers will strive to imitate. The magic of his work has endowed the stately idiom of Gwynedd with such glamour that it has now become the standard idiom of Welsh prose. ”

“ He was a young man of conspicuous merit, and one of the most charming poets of Wales, his poems being especially free from the conceits, trivial commonplaces, and complicated metres of the professional bards, while full of a gay humour, a love of nature and a delicate appreciation of women. The Welsh poets went on circuit like their Irish brethren, staying in each place according as hospitality was extended to them. ”

“ He raised them from the neglect into which they had fallen, and caused them to be, till this day, the vehicle of half the poetical thought of Wales. But he was in no way a representative of his age; he, like Milton, sang among a crowd of inferior poets themes quite detached from the life of his time, so that he also, like his English brother, lacks “human interest.” After Dafydd ab Gwilym, he is the greatest poet who sang in the old metres, and the influence of his correct and fastidious muse remains to this day. ”

“ Indeed, there is an infinitely greater difference between Dafydd ab Gwilym and Gruffydd ab yr Ynad Coch than there is between him and any poet writing in the alliterative metres in the 19th century. So that we must suppose that at the time when the poets of North Wales still sang of war and mead-drinking in a style and diction that was an inheritance from the times of the Gododin, the poets of the South, unharassed by wars, were developing a new poetry of their own, a poetry that had relinquished for ever the Old Welsh models and was at last in line with the great poetical movements of Europe. ”

“ Just as the dialects of Low German in the middle ages were overshadowed by the more brilliant literary dialect of the south, so Scotch Gaelic was from the outset seriously handicapped by the great activity of the professional literary class in Ireland. We may say that down to the beginning of the 18th century the literary language of the Highlands was the Gaelic of Ireland. During the dark days of the penal laws and with the extinction of the men of letters and their patrons in Ireland, an opportunity was given to the native Scottish muse to develop her powers. ”

“ Prose, 1550–1750.—One of the most striking features of Welsh literature is the almost entire absence of prose between 1300 and 1550. The genius of the people has always been an eminently poetical and imaginative one, and the history of Wales, politically and socially, has always been a fitter subject for poetry than for prose. ”

“ When the Welsh muse emerges again from the darkness of this interval she is no longer of the North; the new poets are drawn from the Welshmen of the South, a land which had practically ceased to be a part of an independent Wales shortly after the Norman conquest of England. We find, too, that the poetry which poured forth from the Welsh bards of the south is of an altogether different type, it is modern in all its essentials, in diction, in language, and, comparatively speaking, in sentiment. ”

“ But it is apparent to any one reading these tales that the writers or compilers, as Matthew Arnold has suggested, are “pillaging an antiquity, the secret of which they do not fully possess.” The foundations of the tales are the old Celtic traditions of the gods and the older heroes, and they clearly show Goidelic influence both in the persons they introduce and in their incidents. The tales would at first exist only in oral tradition, and after the advent of Christianity the characters they contain lost their title of divinity and became simply heroes—warriors and magicians. ”

“ And, moreover, we are constantly struck by the lack of sustained effort which prevented the filid from producing great epics in verse. Dramatic material is abundantly present in the old epics, but it has never been utilized. As one might expect from the vernacular literature of Ireland, these romances are pervaded by a keen sense of humour. We feel that the story-teller is continually expecting a laugh and he exaggerates in true Irish fashion, so that the stories are full of extravagantly grotesque passages. ”

“ The writers whom we have been discussing are practically unknown save to those who are able to read them in the original. Now we have to turn our attention to a man whose works have never been popular in the Highlands, but who nevertheless plays a prominent part in the history Macpherson’s “Ossian.” of European literature. Though the precise origin of the Fenian cycle may remain a moot-point to all time, the development of the literature centring in the names of Finn and Ossian is at any rate clear from the 11th century onwards. ”

“ It is the practice to speak of the dark-complexioned people of France, Great Britain and Ireland as “black Celts,” although the ancient writers never applied the term “Celt” to any dark-complexioned person. To them great stature, fair hair, and blue or grey eyes were the characteristics of the Celt. The philologists have added to the confusion by classing as “Celtic” the speeches of the dark-complexioned races of the west of Scotland and the west of Ireland. But, though usage has made it convenient in this work to employ the term, “Celtic” cannot be properly applied to what is really “Gaelic.” ”

“ The medieval romances form by far the most attractive part of Irish literature, and it is to them that we shall first turn our attention. Two main groups of stories have to be distinguished. The one is the Ulster cycle, with Conchobar and Cúchulinn as central figures. The other Medieval
romances. is the Southern or Leinster-Munster cycle, revolving round Finn and Ossian. Further stories dealing with mythological and historical personages will be mentioned in their turn.
The Ulster cycle may be regarded as Ireland’s most important contribution to the world’s literature. ”

“ Ireland has always been a pastoral country. In early times no native coins were in circulation: the land belonged to the tribe. Consequently a man’s property consisted mainly of cattle. Cattle-raids were an event of daily occurrence, and Sir Walter Scott has made us familiar with similar expeditions on the part of the Scottish Highlanders in the 18th century. Hence it is not a matter for surprise that the theme of the greatest Irish epic is a cattle-raid. ”

“ The Highlands, perhaps for the first time in history, formed a compact whole and settled down to peace and quietude. A remarkable outburst of literary activity ensued, and the latter half of the 18th century is the period which Scottish writers love to call the golden age of Gaelic poetry. But before we attempt to deal with this period in detail, we must examine the scanty literary products of Gaelic Scotland prior to the 18th century. ”

“ We have already seen what powers were attributed to satirical poets in Ireland in medieval times, and though bodily disfigurements were no longer feared in the 18th century, nothing was more dreaded, both in Ireland and Scotland, than the lash of the bard. Hence many of Rob Donn’s compositions have lost their point, and opinions have been greatly divided as to his merits as a poet. His collected poems were first published in 1829, a second edition appeared in 1871, and in 1899 two new editions were issued simultaneously, the one by Hew Morrison, the other by Adam Gunn and Malcolm Macfarlane. ”

“ The Gaelic movement, which has thriven largely on account of its anti-English character, would have a much better chance of galvanizing the ancient language of Ireland if it were not for the supreme difficulties of Irish spelling and phonetics. Of the hundreds of thousands of persons who attend the classes of the League not more than one or two per cent. at the outside arrive at any state of proficiency. Presbyterian Gaels in Scotland are taught to read the Bible but Irish Catholics are not encouraged to do so. ”

“ In connexion with Macdonald’s Jacobite songs it will be well to mention here the name of a kindred spirit, John Roy Stuart (Iain Ruadh Stiubhart) . Stuart was a gallant soldier who was serving in Flanders with the French against the English when the rebellion broke out. He hurried home and distinguished himself on the field of battle. After Culloden he gave vent to his dejection in two pathetic songs, one on the battle itself, while the other deals with the sad lot of the Gael.
The only poet of nature who can claim to rival Macdonald is a man of a totally different stamp. ”

“ He was regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest poet that North Wales had ever produced, and some would set him up as a rival even to Dafydd ab Gwilym himself. He would probably have produced much greater poetry had he understood that the cywydd and the other metres were strait and shackled enough without the cymeriadau and other devices which he introduced, or at least sanctioned and made popular. He begins many of his cywyddau and odes with the same letter; he is the chief among Welsh formalists, but in spite of his self-imposed restrictions he is a great poet also. ”

“ We will now only endeavour to sketch the history of Welsh literature from these early centuries down to our own times, and to show how the Celtic people of Wales have developed a literature true to their own genius, and how that literature stands to this day both a minister to the culture of the Welsh people and a sure indication of it.
1. Early Latin Writers.—The works now known as those of Gildas (q.v.) and Nennius (q.v.) are written in Latin; they throw considerable light on the origin of Welsh romantic literature and on the history of the earlier poems. ”

“ Most of his poems deal with love in the spirit of the medieval writers of France and of Provence, but with this very important difference, that the French writers must base their reputation on their treatment of love as a theme, whereas Dafydd’s claim to fame is based on his treatment of nature and of out-door life. In many cases, indeed, love is only a conventional peg whereon he may hang his observations on nature, and Welsh literature may claim the distinction of having had its Wordsworth in the 14th century. ”

“ The poems of Bleddyn Vardd, or Bleddyn the Bard, which have come down to us are all short eulogies and elegies. One of the latter on Llywelyn ab Gruffydd is a good example of the elaborate and artificial nature of Welsh versification.
The most illustrious name among the poets of this century is Gruffydd ab yr Ynad Coch, “Gruffydd, son of the Red Justice,” who wrote many religious poems of great merit. His greatest work, however, is the elegy to Llywelyn ab Gruffydd, the last prince of Wales. It is easily first among all the elegies written in the Welsh language. ”

“ Apart from a well-meant but wholly inadequate version of Schiller’s Tell, the only non-religious work which can be termed literature existing in a Gaelic translation is a portion of the Arabian Nights, though fragments of other classics such as Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare have appeared in magazines. The one-sided character of Gaelic literature, in addition to exercising a baneful influence on Highland character, has in the long run of necessity proved adverse to the vitality of the language. The best standard of Gaelic is by common consent the language of the Scriptures. ”

“ At the present day the Irish of Leinster has vanished entirely, and we have unfortunately no records of it. But in the other three provinces the vernacular still lives, and we find the Irish of Munster, Connaught and Ulster marked off from one another by well-defined peculiarities. In general it may be stated that the south of Ireland is more conservative than the north. In Munster there is a tendency to shift the word-stress from the initial syllable to a heavy derivative syllable, e.g. -ān. This does not take place in Connaught, whilst in Ulster the tendency is to shorten the vowel. ”

“ Not only are relics of La Tène culture found in Ireland, but the oldest Irish epics celebrate tall, fair-haired, grey-eyed heroes, armed and clad in Gallic fashion, who had come from the continent. The Celts in Italy, in the Balkan, in France and in Britain, overspread the Indo-European peoples, who differed from themselves but slightly in speech. The Celts represented Indo-European q by p, whilst the Greeks, Illyrians, Thracians, Ligurians, and aborigines of France, Britain and Ireland represented it by k, c or qu. The Umbrian-Sabellian tribes had the same phonetic peculiarity as the Celts. ”

“ But now the labours of Zeuss and others who have made a study of Celtic philology furnish us with much safer canons of criticism than existed in 1849, when even a learned Welshman, the late Thomas Stephens, who did more than any one else to establish the claims of his country to a real literature, doubted the authenticity of a large number of the poems said to have been written by Taliessin, Aneirin, Myrddin and Llywarch Hen, who are supposed to have lived in the 5th century. ”

“ We find, therefore, in this period that poetry flourished mostly in the North under Gruffydd ab Cynan, and prose in the south under Rhys ab Tewdwr, where the new enthusiasm for the old Welsh legends resulted in the Geoffrey of Montmouth. History of Britain of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which is an expansion of the books attributed to Gildas and Nennius. It was written in Latin sometime before 1147, and is dedicated to Robert, earl of Gloucester, the grandson of Rhys ab Tewdwr. ”

“ But as the tragedy deepens we read how this woman, dowered with beauty and goodness and nobility of lineage, is simply used as a pawn in a political game, and the full force of the tragedy falls on her own undeserving head. ”