Wales

“ At the end of the reign of Henry III. Wales was a land of shepherd farmers, who knew well how to use the bow and the spear. They were divided into many tribes, but united by their religion and by their love of music, poetry, oratory, and all those arts which depend upon a vivid imagination for their growth. Even to this day the stories that they told are as fascinating to us as they were to the Welsh boys and girls who first heard them as they sat by the rude hearthstone, and heard the wind skirling down the mountain outside the heavily barred door. ”

“ That flashes from its face;
A land where cloud-kissed mountains are,
And green and flowery vales,
Where Poesy lingers like a star:
That land is sunny Wales.
Wales, the wild—the beautiful,
The beautiful—the free;
My heart and hand are thine, O land
Of magic minstrelsy.
And in this mystic land of mine
What dainty maids there be,
Whose faces shine with love divine,
Like sunlight on the sea.
The boasted fair of other climes
That live in songs and tales
Will never be more fair to me
Than those of sunny Wales.
Wales, the wild—the beautiful,
The beautiful—the free ”

“ We visited the Vale of Llangollen, the Vale of Clwyd, the Vale of Conway, saw Bettws-y-Coed, the Pass of Llanberis, and, indeed, the best things in all North Wales, including lakes, rivers, waterfalls, and glorious romance without end. The warm-hearted, impulsive Welsh people almost carried us all off our feet with their unbounded enthusiasm, and the tremendous warmth of their welcome. They are the greatest singers in the world. Indeed, all Wales is one sea of song, and they sing well, and they even dearly love to sing. ”

“ In Wales were the Gwragedd Annwn, elves who loved the stillness of lonely mountain-lakes, and [103] who seldom ventured into the upper world. They had their own submerged towns and battlements; and from their little sunken city the fairy-bells sent out, ever and anon, muffled silver voices. The Gwragedd Annwn were not fishy-finned, nor were they ever dwellers in the sea; for in Wales were no mermaid-traditions, nor any tales of those who beguiled mortals—
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave. ”

“ As Suffolk to Constable and Norfolk to Old Crome, so was North Wales to Cox. He painted well wherever he went—London, Hereford, Yorkshire, Lancashire, or Calais— but it was Wales that he loved and understood best; it was Wales that drew from him his deepest notes of poetry, his noblest sympathy with his kind. He is the greatest interpreter of her scenery and her life. ”

“ The story of the great struggle of Wales for freedom under a Prince of her own is laid, fitly enough, amid the wild scenery that surrounds the highest point in Southern Britain. The whole district of Snowdon, with its grim moorlands and towering heights forming a bulwark to the western shore, breathes an air of freedom, and it was here that the last Llewelyn defied the might of the first English Edward. ”

“ In the long roll of Welsh history which we have been unfolding there are many illustrious names—Cunedda Wledig, Howel Dda, Owen Gwynedd, the Lord Rees, Llewelyn Fawr, and Llewelyn the last Prince of Wales: but of all the men of the Middle Ages no one has so touched the heart and fired the imagination of Wales as Owen Glyndwr. For all Welsh people he stands alone and supreme, the ideal Welshman of all time. ”

“ Henceforward the heroes of Wales were not soldiers, but poets, scholars, and, above all, preachers. A last flicker of the old martial spirit, the old lust of battle, is seen in the struggle between King and Parliament. To write the history of Wales between 1642 and 1649 would simply be to narrate the incidents of the Civil War, for no part of the country played a more prominent part in the contest than did the Principality. Here, however, it must suffice to disentangle from the rest that which was peculiarly Welsh, and to draw attention to a few Welshmen who rendered themselves illustrious. ”

“ Any Englishman's life was safe anywhere, and Wales became one of the most easily governed countries in all the wonderful British Empire.
And in the great world-war, that even children, who read these stories, can remember, Wales, the Land of the Free, the Home of Deathless Democracy, led all the British Isles, colonies, islands, or coaling stations around the wide world, in loyalty, valor and sacrifice. And the handsome son of the King, George, the Prince of Wales, led the descendants of Welsh archers, now called the Fusileers. ”

“ When one asks one’s self whether Surrey, for example, or such a state as Massachusetts in America, could be brought to send its people from every farm, every valley, every hilltop, to a festival thousands strong, day after day for a whole week, one realizes how tremendous a thing this Welsh national enthusiasm is. Educationally nothing could be a greater movement for Wales. To the Welsh the beauty of worship, of music, of poetry are inseparable. Only so can this passion for beauty, which brings multitudes together to take part in all that is noblest and best in Welsh life, be explained. ”

“ The most striking characteristic of the Wales of to-day is its unity—self-conscious and self-reliant. The presence of this unity is felt by all, though it may be explained in different ways. It cannot be explained by race; for the population of the west midlands and the north of England, possibly of the whole of it, have been made up of the same elements. It cannot be explained by language—nearly one half of the Welsh people speak no Welsh. ”

“ In Wales you get fierce frays and frequent shedding of blood; on the borders you get callous cruelty to a prisoner, or the disfiguring of dead bodies—even that of Simon de Montfort, the greatest statesman of the Middle Ages in England—on the battlefield when all passion was spent.
Take the rulers of Wales again. Griffith ap Conan and Llywelyn the Great had the energy and the foresight, though their sphere was so much smaller, of Henry II. And what English king, except Alfred, attracts one on account of lovableness of character as Owen Gwynedd and Owen Cyveiliog and the Lord Rees do? ”

“ There is one other characteristic of modern Wales—a certain pride, not so much in what has been done, but in what is going to be done. Wales is small, though not much smaller than Palestine, or Holland, or Switzerland, and every part of it knows the other. There is a healthy rivalry between its towns and between its colleges; each town can show that it has done something for Wales in the past—by means of its industries, or school, or press. In the strong feeling of unity there is ambition to surpass, and each part lives in the light of the action of the other parts. ”

“ THE WELSH.
Ancient manners are less obliterated by time and the varying modes of life in North Wales, than in most of the other provinces of Britain. In this age of communication and intelligence, few will be credulously eager to imagine that the inhabitants of any one part of our island are materially distinguished in their characters from those of another: yet none can immerge themselves in this romantic country, without being struck by the superior modesty and simplicity of its inhabitants. ”

“ West Wales, between the British Channel and the estuary of the Severn, had yielded to the sword of Ecgberht. But a fiercer resistance prolonged the independence of the great central portion which alone in modern language preserves the name of Wales. Comprising in itself the largest and most powerful of the British kingdoms, it was aided in its struggle against Mercia by the weakness of its assailant, the youngest and feeblest of the English states, as well as by an internal warfare which distracted the energies of the invaders. ”

“ Edward thought that Britain ought to be united: Llywelyn thought Wales ought to be free. Now,happily, we have the union and the freedom.
On the other hand, I should not like you to think that Wales was more barbarous than England, or Llywelyn less civilised than Edward I. Giraldus Cambrensis saw a prince going barefoot, and the fussy little Archbishop Peckham saw that Welsh marriage customs were not what he liked; and many historians, who have never read a line of Welsh poetry, take for granted that the conquest of Wales was a new victory for civilisation. ”

“ But Wales has something besides its wonderful scenery, its eventful history, and its illustrious men of yore to interest the visitor. Wales has a population, and a remarkable one. There are countries, besides Wales, abounding with noble scenery, rich in eventful histories, and which are not sparingly dotted with the birthplaces of heroes and poets, in which at the present day there is either no population at all, or one of a character which is anything but attractive. ”

“ Wales is a country interesting in many respects, and deserving of more attention than it has hitherto met with. Though not very extensive, it is one of the most picturesque countries in the world, a country in which Nature displays herself in her wildest, boldest, and occasionally loveliest forms. The inhabitants, who speak an ancient and peculiar language, do not call this region Wales, nor themselves Welsh. They call themselves Cymry or Cumry, and their country Cymru, or the land of the Cumry. ”

“ And Wales, which seems itself in its nearness now only like a district of England, and that district for the most part wild and but scantily peopled,—can there be anything so remarkable about its pulpit work as to make it either capable or worthy of any separate account of its singularities and idiosyncrasies? To most English people Welsh preaching is a phase of religious life entirely unknown: thousands of tourists visit the more conspicuous highways of Wales from year to year, its few places of public resort or more manifest beauty ”

“ The two ideas which ruled Wales were—the love of order and the love of independence. The danger of the first is oppression; the dangers of the other are anarchy and weakness. Wales was sometimes united, under a Maelgwn or a Rhodri, and the princes obeyed them; oftener, perhaps, the princes of the various parts ruled in their own way. ”

“ The mountains have done much to preserve the independence and the language of Wales, but they have kept her people disunited; and the Welsh needed a long drilling under institutions, which could only grow up in a land less divided by nature, before they could develope their political genius.
Wales, owing largely to its geography, had the misfortune never to be conquered at one fell swoop by an alien race of conquerors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Because the two centuries of apparent settlement and sleep were the period of a silent revolution, more important, if our aim is to explain the living present rather than the dead past, than all the exciting plots and battles of the House of Cunedda from the rise of Maelgwn to the fall of the last Llywelyn. During these centuries, the history of Wales ceases to be the history of princes and nobles, it becomes the history of the people. ”

“ The character of the representation of Wales has entirely changed. The squire gave place to the capitalist, and the capitalist to popular leaders. Wales, whose people blindly followed the gentry in the Great Civil War, is now the most democratic part of Britain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Next to its unity, a characteristic of modern Wales is its democratic feeling. It is a country with a thoughtful and intelligent peasantry, and it is a country without a middle class. There is a very small upper class—the old Welsh land-owning families who once, before they turned their backs on Welsh literature, led the country. They have never been hated or despised, they are simply ignored. Their tendency now is to come into touch with the people, and they are always welcomed. ”

“ The islands of Britain were the furthest point they could reach;for beyond it, at that time, no man had dared to sail into the unknown expanse of the ocean of the west. In the islands of Britain,the mountains of Wales were among the most difficult to win, and it was only the bravest and the hardiest that could make their home among them. ”

“ The Revivalist came in the eighteenth century, and, in the name of Christ, aroused the people of Wales to a new life of thought.
After all this, you will be surprised to learn that many of the old gods still remain in Wales, and much of the old pagan worship. Who drops a pin into a sacred well, or leaves a tiny rag on a bush close by, and then wishes for something? A young maiden in the twentieth century, who sacrifices to a well heathen god. ”

“ The tales one may hear even now in Wales are full of a haunting race life. The Welsh speak of the fairies as the “little folk” or the “fair folk” or “family”—“y Tylwyth Teg.” And well do these little creatures deserve the name, for they are friendly in Wales. Ghosts there are, too, and the death portents, the old hag of the mist and others that groan or moan or sing or stamp with their feet. And there are “Corpse Candles” and “Goblin Funerals.” Shakespeare knew a deal about Welsh folk-lore, but where he got it from no one has yet discovered. ”