Welsh people

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now among the Welsh people the elements of stability, of unity, are strong, but those of progress or differentiation are weak. Then as regards the people’s social condition in general, it exhibits few of those disheartening extremes which are so often to be met with in our large towns, but presents, with slight deviations, a general level of moderate elevation. ”

“ The Welsh are truly a people, in spite of their ancient subjugation, and deserve to be treated as such, all the more for their loyalty to the British Crown, and for the remarkable partiality which they seem to entertain towards the Prince of Wales, whose dignity I discovered to be something more, after all, than a mere fiction of heraldry. ”

“ Nevertheless the confusion of authority in South and Mid-Wales increased considerably as time went on; for not only did Norman barons marry Welsh heiresses, but occasionally a Welsh chieftain would win back a Norman-Welsh lordship by marriage, and present the anomalous spectacle of a Welshman holding Welsh land as a direct vassal of the King of England in entire independence of his district Prince. But these occasional amenities among the higher aristocracy but little affected the mass of the Welsh people, who stood aloof with lowering and uncompromising sullenness. ”

“ At our very doors, however, there is a small nation of largely different blood and of wholly different speech from our own; a nation forming a part of our own kingdom, even more closely than the Scotch or the Irish, and yet in some respects further from us in mind and habit of life than either; a nation marked rather by the poetical and artistic, than by the mechanical and practical temperament—the ancient and noble Welsh people. It would hardly be reasonable to expect from the Welsh exactly the same kind of success in life which we often find in English workmen ”

“ The Welsh pride themselves on hanging on. They are a nation that has never been whipped. Every people has its characteristics. “You can't beat the Irish” is one slogan, “You can't kill a Swede” is another, and “You can't crowd out a Welshman” is a motto among the mill people.
I didn't want to leave Wales when my parents were emigrating. Though I was not quite eight years old I decided I would let them go without me. The last act of my mother was to reach under the bed, take hold of my heels and drag me out of the house feet first. ”

“ They all seem to dwell morbidly on death and its surroundings, ignoring the lighter and happier side of life altogether. And any one who did not know Wales might imagine from reading these tales that the Welsh were a sullen and silent people, given to solitude and brooding. Nothing could be further from the truth; they are a lively and gregarious race and never seem to cease talking amongst themselves. Nobody is fonder of junketing than a Welshman or Welshwoman, nothing in the way of an outing comes amiss ”

“ As it seems to me that the bulk of the Welsh people would have to be described as short-skulls, it would be very gratifying to see those who are wont to refer freely to the dark-complexioned long-skulls of Wales catch a respectable number of specimens. ”

“ II THE MIGHTY MONSTER AFANG
After the Cymric folk, that is, the people we call Welsh, had come up from Cornwall into their new land, they began to cut down the trees, to build towns, and to have fields and gardens. Soon they made the landscape smile with pleasant homes, rich farms and playing children.
They trained vines and made flowers grow. The young folks made pets of the wild animals' cubs, which their fathers and big brothers brought home from hunting. Old men took rushes and reeds and wove them into cages for song birds to live in. ”

“ English people have a tendency to underestimate, or rather to take into small consideration, the wide gulf which, not only in former days, but to some extent even yet, divides the two countries. They are apt to think that after the abortive rising of Glyndwr, provided even this stands out clearly in their minds, everything went smoothly and Wales became merely a geographical expression with an eccentric passion for maintaining its own language. ”

“ Every one of the three valley roads of Beddgelert is filled with incidents of Welsh legend and folk-lore. Even in our materialistic age the credulous spirit abides here in this mountain-bred people, quick, lively, romantic. The village is filled with lovely legend and quaint lore; in the farmhouses among the hills heroic stories are still told about Arthur and songs sung to Welsh melodies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As regards the Crusades the Welsh in the Middle Ages do not seem to have been great rovers or much given to doing business on great waters; [Pg 49] always, of course, excepting Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd, the discoverer of America!
Giraldus on the Welsh people.
“These people,” says Giraldus, alluding to the Welsh, “are light and active, hardy rather than strong, and entirely bred up to the use of arms; for not only the nobles, but all the people are trained to war, and when the trumpet sounds the husbandman rushes as eagerly from his plough as the courtier from his Court. ”

“ Unlike any of the half-bred English gentlemen who literally infest Wales, and become nuisances and living grievances to the people—building their pretensions to superiority and fashion, on a sneering self-sufficiency, and scorn of customs and peculiarities merely because they are Welsh—he gave them all credit for what was really estimable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence the occasional affront to the remains of antiquated single folk, who had been perhaps of a temperament which rendered them unpopular.
The Welsh being generally of an affectionate disposition, courtship, as I have said, is a thorough-going business. To any but a people of the strongest moral and religious tendencies, some of their customs would prove dangerous in the extreme; but no people so link love and religion. ”

“ Of course, you will meet with too many who will tell you that the only way to do this is to encourage the present fatal tendency of Cambria to live solely on her remembrances. Meanwhile, however, the invincible army of progress, with the tramp of doom to effete nationalities, marches steadily and irresistibly on; and the Welsh, as a distinct race, if not better led and advised, will, by the deadly error of seeking “the living among the dead,” simply become a people of the past. ”

“ It is the beautiful present, the cry of the sheep upon the mountain-sides, the church bells ringing from their little bell-cots and sounding sweetly in valleys and on highland meadows, the very flowers of the roadsides,—foxglove, bluebell, heather,—that keep one lingering in Wales or draw one back to that land again. There are little churches of twelfth-century foundation, gray or washed white,—their golden glowing saffron wash of long ago unrenewed by the Welsh of to-day. ”

“ The least credulous may look at fairy and goblin food in the woods and fields, and their gloves, the foxglove, growing beside the road. And their animals, their sheep, their horses, their dogs are visible on many a dim hillside. The Welsh speak of these little people as the fair folk or family—“y Tylwyth Teg.” And well do they deserve the name. Sometimes they are spoken of as the fair folk of the wood or the fair folk of the mine. ”

“ As a Welshman, familiar with the condition of his own country, he solemnly warned the authorities against provoking a man who, though of only moderate estate, was so powerful and so popular among his own people. ”

“ It is not to the point that the field of their exploits was a small one, and the people who cherish their memory [Pg 84] a small people,—so much more, rather, the honour, seeing the odds against which they contended with such rare tenacity; nor, again, is it to their discredit that English historians have done as a rule scant justice to the vigour of the old Welsh warriors. “Good wine needs no bush.” The surface and the tongue of Wales to-day are sufficient evidence to the vitality of its people and their martial prowess in the days of old. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My goodness, Quinny, you ought to bring that fellow, John Marsh, to Wales for a few months. That 'ud cure him of his Slop about nationality. I came to Wales, determined to like the Welsh, and I've failed. That's all. I've failed hopelessly. I told myself that it was absurd to believe that a whole nation could be as bad as English people say the Welsh are ... but it isn't absurd ... of the Welsh anyhow. They're all that everybody says they are, only about ten times worse. I've been all over this country one time and another, and they're simply ... mean. They're a dying race, thank heaven! ”

“ The modern unity of the Welsh people—seen occasionally in a function of the University, or at a national Eisteddvod, or in a conference of the County Councils—has become a fact in spite of many difficulties. ”

“ XII GIANT TOM AND GIANT BLUBB
Everyone who has read anything of Welsh history—though not of the sort that is written by English folks—knows also that Cornwall is, in soul, a part of Wales. Before the Romans, first, and the Saxons, next, invaded Britain, the Cymric people lived all over the island, south of Scotland.
They were the British people, and nobody ever heard the German name, "Wales," which means a foreign land; or the word "Welsh," which refers to foreigners, until men who were themselves outsiders came into Britain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The discordant cry of the extreme nationalist is occasionally heard, with its glorification of all that is vulgar and unworthy of preservation in the Welsh tradition. But this wins little sympathy. As a whole the people have seen a fairer vision than that of an independent Wales: the vision of a Commonwealth living a life of ordered prosperity ”

“ Practically every characteristic possessed by the Welsh makes for love of home. Their very shyness drives them through the house door to the fireside, before all that is best can be revealed. Sensitive, full of feeling, gay and melancholy by turns, they are like their own hills, now sombre and now bright. It is temperament that makes the music of the Welsh cottage, its picturesqueness, its romance. Without the Cymric temperament there could have been no Welsh revivals, no invincible Lloyd George, no Eisteddfodau. The delicacy of the woman, who is always the home-maker, inheres in the Celt. ”