CHAPTER IV

TWO MINISTERS, A BARD, A SCHOOLMASTER, AN INNKEEPER, AND OTHERS

MR. JONES, THE MINISTER

Jones is a little, thin, long-skulled, black-haired, pale Congregational minister, with a stammer and a squint. He has a book-shelf containing nothing but sermons and theology, which he has read, and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, which he hopes to read. I suppose he believes in metempsychosis. He is accustomed to say that everything is theology—which is fine; and that theology is everything—which is hard. He tries to love man as well as God, and succeeds in convincing every one of his honesty, generosity, and industry. In the care of souls he fears no disease or squalor or shape of death. But there is a condescension about his ways with men. He calls them the worldliest of God's creatures. But with the Divine he is happy and at ease, and in his pulpit seems to sit on the right hand. Then his Biblical criticism is absent as if it had never been, and he sees the holy things at once as clearly as Quarles and as mystically as Herbert or Crashaw. He speaks of them with the enthusiasm of a collector or of a man of science dealing with a bone or a gas. Like them, he sees nothing but the subjects of the moment. He loves them as passionately and yet with a sense of possession. He gives to them the adoration which he seems wilfully to have withheld from women, pageantry, gardens, palaces—which his speech would have adorned. He lavishes upon them his whole ingenious heart, so that, to those used to the false rhetoric and dull compliment of ordinary worshippers, there is in his sermons something fantastical, far-fetched, or smelling of the lamp. If he has to describe something naked or severe, he must needs give them a kind of voluptuousness by painting the things which they lack, and the lack of which makes them what they are. With Herbert, he might repeat:

My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee, Wherewith whole shoals of Martyrs once did burn, Besides their other flames? doth Poetry Wear Venus' livery? only serve her turn? Why are not Sonnets made of thee? and lays Upon thine altar burnt? Cannot thy love Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise As well as she? Cannot thy Dove Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight? Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same, Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name? Why doth the fire which by thy power and might Each breast does feel, no braver fuel choose Than that, which one day worms may chance refuse? Sure, Lord, there is enough in thee to dry Oceans of ink; for as the Deluge did Cover the Earth, so does thy Majesty; Each cloud distils thy praise, and doth forbid Poets to turn it to another use. Roses and lilies speak thee: and to make A pair of cheeks of them, is thy abuse. Why should I women's eyes for crystal take? Such poor invention burns in their low mind Whose fire is wild, and does not upward go To praise, and on thee, Lord, some note bestow. Open the bones, and you shall nothing find In the best face but filth; when, Lord, in thee Thy beauty lies in the discovery.

It is no matter to him that to the uninspired audience his holy persons appear only exquisite marionettes. His sermons are all of his love for them. Could one leave out the names of prophet and evangelist, they might seem to be addressed to earthly beauties. No eyebrow ever awakened more glowing praise. He takes religion, as he does his severe morality, like a sensuous delight. One might think from his epithets that he was an æsthete, except that he is so abandoned.

When he ventures to speak of men, their very virtues and vices are all handled in such a way that they seem to be his own imaginations. Thus, his drunkard is as unreal and as terrible as a chimera. The words are those of a man who has conceived a drunkard in his own brain, and then, seeing the real thing, has preferred his own conception, and shunned the poor human imitation. Still, he speaks of religious things, of incidents in the life of David or Christ or the Maries, as if he had seen, for example, the Holy Family in some misty barn among his own hills. I have even heard him introduce a farmer whittling a flail of hazel sticks and binding it with willow thongs, in a picture of that scene. This quaintness and clearness are perhaps the result of his not quite healthy asceticism. But even by the farmhouse fire he makes use of them, and will speak of the red or brown hair of scriptural characters, and even of the grey hair and shining eyes of Charity. In hunger or weariness or pain, common people sometimes see things thus: he never sees them otherwise. In the chapel they delight the older labourers, and yet fail because they vanish in the cold night air and "leave not a rack behind." Some hearers, on the other hand, sicken at them, when the blood is noisy in the breast and the brain is warm, as they sicken at drugs.

It is not, therefore, surprising that at one time he had gorgeous earthly dreams. But with an oddity of which nothing will cure him, he is much troubled by this pomp which he desires not to see save in celestial things. And now he allows sleep nightly but a brief victory over him.

THE LANDLORD OF THE "CROSS INN"

A very pretty companion for Jones was Owen, the innkeeper, a robust man of words, who called himself the preacher's best customer, because he needed so much of his charity.

He was a perfect Celt, according to the English superstition. For never was there such a failure who was also such a swaggerer as he. He had fair hair, blue eyes, and a small, elegant beard, which

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild.

He was bullied by a contemptuous wife; he was ridiculed by all his regular customers, rallied by the rest. But the beard was always neat and fair, a symbol of his unconquerable mind. No matter how he was trodden down, he smelt sweet. He had humour, for he could laugh at himself, though he lacked the common gift of being able to laugh at others, and had no repartee. The more lusty the Saturday night thrusts at him, the more vivid was his reply, and it was commonly a piece of egoism and self-exposure, which, if not so long and so wonderfully draped, would have called for a repetition of the very blow he was parrying. Once when he had been sold up and had little more than a wife and a walking-stick in the world, and his position attracted some trifling compliments and condolences from his old harriers, he stood up, and, wielding his stick and motioning to his wife to be silent, gave an inventory of the things he had lost with such decoration as would have abashed an auctioneer. There is a Welsh proverb, "A Welshman keeps nothing until he has lost it"; and the now invisible and inaccessible furniture called up such a tumult of admiration that he cared not that it was no longer his. How rich he looked! As the words flowed on and it was time for his hearers to be going, it was clear that if he had forgotten anything, he had invented more; but though he ended in no better company than that of his wife, who picked something from his coat and held it between the tips of two fingers for his humiliation, he but wiped his forehead and cursed because he had forgotten the ancient horse-trappings of brass that used to hang over the mantelpiece at the —— Arms.

His voice, whether he sang or spoke, was of wide range and exquisite adjustment, and he spoke with care and gusto, as if he loved his native tongue. Under its influence, he respected nobody of any importance. Thus, he was once pretty justly thrashed; when, having tired his chastiser by his patience, he remarked at great length that he supposed the other did not know who he was, and the splendour of his manner overcame his heated companion. No sooner had he got home than he gave a rapturous description of how one had given another a thrashing down the road. He did it so well that he was asked whether he was the beater. "No," said he bravely, "it happened that I was beat."

Had he lost by a bargain, had he taken a bad coin unawares, had he been worsted in argument, he could so rant that he moved every one, and himself obviously first of all, and made the worse appear the better. He kept a genealogical tree in constant use by pruning and watering, and though there was not only a prince but a poet in it, I think he gloried less in the old splendour of his family than in the length of its fall, as who should say he had once been so high that he was "from morn to dewy eve" in falling.

When first I saw him, he had just come into the "Cross Inn." It was mid-day; the weather was cold and wet; and since he never liked to see a man drinking by himself, and the shepherds coming down from the mountains to market had called pretty often, he was not sober. He told me that his was a fine house—the finest in the village, and therefore in the county; and that it had not paid the former tenant well, who had, in fact, sold but eighteen gallons of beer in a month. He was going to do better than that, he said; to make a beginning, he was going to drink that quantity himself. I asked for brandy. He had not a drop, and explained that he had a weakness for it himself—took a drop very often; and that therefore, to get out of temptation, he had finished his stock on the night before. "But," said he, "I have upstairs such a bed as you—pardon me—never slept in yet."

"I have no doubt," said I, and sat down.

But when he heard that I was walking across Wales, and had therefore tried many beds, he insisted that I should see the thing. It was the finest in the village—in the county—in Wales—"I don't see why I should not say in the whole world." Truly it was a noble bed, in a great, empty, raftered, uncarpeted room; the wood all darkened oak, with a dusky gleam; the hangings ample and of a rich crimson stuff; the purity of the linen splendid. If a royal person or a poet had not slept in it, "that was their misfortune." He stood by, awed and reverent, beholding the bed. I was not his equal in eloquence, and he echoed my praise with an elaborate "of course": and for the sake of hearing some of the words he loved, he finally invited me to spend a night in the bed, "as his guest," so he magnificently said.

All his family were of the same temper. His father and mother had gone to London years ago, and, at seventy years of age, to the infirmary of a workhouse....

The aged paupers sat in a long, grey, motionless, and silent row—like a sculptured frieze, or like persons expecting to be photographed—under the wall of a church. Before them was a strip of grass, one emerald half of which shone so that it seemed of an element like flame; for it was pure, insubstantial colour; and into this, as the paupers saw, the tide of the shadow of the church gradually ate. Beyond the grass was the infirmary, and alongside it a yellow road, and on that a hearse. Watching this and the paupers, a crowd of persons, with uninterested, inquisitive eyes and bowler hats, stuck their noses through the railings which ran between the busy street and the infirmary. Motor cars brayed, hooves clattered.

Presently three men carried out a coffin, containing the remains of Mrs. Owen, and shoved it into the hearse. "God love me, what a coffin!" said one of the crowd. But the frieze of paupers were silent and motionless in the long grey row—all but the husband of the corpse. He, like the others, seemed to stare at the hearse with fixed gaze, and in a loud voice he remembered what a bonny woman the corpse had been, and in particular how, while a travelling musician played in the village street, when she was past fifty years of age, she had locked herself into the kitchen and danced, having spread a mat to deaden the clicking of her merry clogs; and he had watched her, unobserved. The story and his uncontrolled, bleating voice raised a laugh under the bowler hats; and the old men lifted their heads and straightened themselves and laughed; and most loudly and grimly of all laughed Owen, while he remembered the cottage in sight of the beacons of Breconshire; and the hearse rolled out and the crowd removed.

MR. ROWLANDS, THE MINISTER

Rowlands, another minister, is six feet and two inches in height, seventeen stone in weight, and has a voice which is in proportion. When he stands up, one supposes that he can never sit down; when he sits down, one supposes that he can never stand up. Every one of his attitudes seems to be final. Only when he is moving is his ponderosity a little less than divine; for he moves with an odd briskness, so that, from behind, he is like a large schoolboy on some urgent business. His mind is subject to similar changes of aspect. In domestic life no one is less awful than he; and were he not good-tempered, cheerful, frolicsome, and humorous as well, he would be one of the most mirth-provoking of mankind. On children he leaves no impression but that of weight, and in spite of his black clothes, he once reminded a child (with a shrill voice) of Atlas upholding the world.

In his everyday life he is a learned, happy child. His curiosity is matched by his credulity. He is the victim not only of tradesmen, but of beggars. He cannot keep his coat clean, and that he sews on his own buttons is apparent from the fact that he seldom has more than one or two of those decorations. He knows every one in his neighbourhood—miners, farmers, parsons, and the resident Englishmen—and knows and loves them so well that he never condemned any one except for cruelty. For he seems to have started life with such a strong belief in the sinfulness of men, that he has ever since been pleased and surprised by this one's goodness and the amiability of that one's badness. He might, in truth, have spoken of himself in something like the words of that fine, possibly Welsh poet of the seventeenth century, Thomas Traherne:

A learned and a happy ignorance Divided me From all the vanity, From all the sloth, care, pain, and sorrow that advance The madness and the misery Of men. No error, no distraction I Saw soil the earth or overcloud the sky.

I knew not that there was a serpent's sting Whose poison shed, On men, did overspread The world; nor did I dream of such a thing As sin, in which mankind lay dead. They were all brisk and living wights to me, Yea, pure and full of immortality.

Joy, pleasure, beauty, kindness, glory, love, Sleep, day, life, light, Peace, melody, my sight, My ears and heart did fill and freely move. All that I saw did me delight. The universe was then a world of treasure, To me an universal world of pleasure....

His own verses, by the way, are not so good, for, like all Welsh ministers, he writes a hundred lines of verse every day, perhaps to avoid being thought singular.

He makes a fine figure of Charity in his old age, with his preoccupied blue eyes under a brow that is marked only by three lines like three beams thrown upward by a sun. He has a large, joyous, curving mouth, side-whiskers, careless beard, large feet.

He has but one touch of sentiment. Nearly half a century ago he fell in love with a pretty woman, and unsuccessfully; yet, though she is known to be married and still alive, he has come to have for her memory a grandfatherly tenderness, regarding her as a white and careless girl, in spite of time. For the rest, so warm and radiant is he, that I remember the peculiarity of Kai. "When it rained hardest, whatever he carried remained dry for a handbreadth above and a handbreadth below his hand, and when his companions were coldest, it was to them as fuel with which to light their fire."

But in the pulpit—whether it is a whim or an atonement or merely a recollection of his years at a theological college—he always makes an attempt to dust the wrinkles of his waistcoat. In every other way he makes his week-day self incredible to a stranger. He justifies and makes use of his size more than any man I ever saw. Seeing him in the pulpit, it seems fitting that he should live there day and night, so necessary a pillar is he to the dull, small chapel, though, when holding out his arms, as often he does, he threatens to demolish the little arches and poor windows and to create something more splendid in their place. Going there once in his absence, a visitor remarked to a deacon that they had made some changes in the building; and asking what had gone from there, he was told, "Oh, only Mr. Rowlands."

Standing there, he undertakes to speak on behalf of the Deity, whose ways he explains, and by a magnificent self-conceit supposes that his own stature and voice are fitting symbols to mortals incapable of apprehending things more august. For a time, indeed, during the singing of the hymns, there is a geniality as of lightning about his face. He smiles; he tosses his head with the joy of the song, and may even be supposed to feel, not without sympathy, that the mighty music says things which were not dreamed of by prophets or apostles.

When he reads a lesson, it is plain to see that above all other Gods he loves "the Lord that smiteth." He opens his mouth and rejoices in the rich and massy Welsh. He makes no attempt at mere clear reading, which would be of no use to an imaginative audience, that is familiar with the Bible; but, raising and lowering his voice, now hurrying as if to a precipice where all will be overthrown, now creeping as if he feared what is to come, he makes the chapter anew, creating it as if he were sculptor or musician. I suppose he uses nearly as many musical notes as if he sang; but the result differs from singing, as prose from poetry; and so noble is the prose that it suggests only one possible answer to the question which, like a school-man, he once asked, Whether the music of the spheres be verse or prose? Yet, if the note of the lesson is melancholy, full of the dreariness of moving over the void and creating, the note of the sermon is triumphant, or if not triumphant it is minatory, or if not minatory it is scornful, and at times a listener expects to see him wrapped in a cloud and carried away from an undeserving and purblind race.

The medium of what English people would call his rhetoric is the "hwyl," an exuberant, impassioned, musical modulation of the voice, and, to compare great things with small, comparable to the very finest intoning to which has been added (if we can suppose it) a lyrical, egotistical indulgence in all moods of pity, scorn, tenderness, anger, sorrow, joy, anxiety and hope. It can be familiar or lofty. It is as powerful as harp and song together; and the force of it often arises from the fact that what is heard is rather the musical accompaniment of the man's thought than the thought itself. Hence its terrible and lovely purposes, and the many sentiments with which it is shot, and the dubiousness of the loftier passages, as in the verses which the bards recited before Arthur and only one man understood them, except that they were in Arthur's praise.

I have seen him so thunder that I thought of the Llewelyns and Glyndwr, and forgot that the castles fester no longer with Englishmen, and

aerea ramis dependet galea et prato gravia arma quiescunt,

and for the moment, thought he was a man. No actor ever stormed and swelled so, because no actor yet played the part which he played. It was a chant; yet it was too uncontrollable for a chant. If you call it declamation, you must admit that to declaim a man shall first go to Medea, that she

Having drawn that weakness from his limbs Which torpid now and chilly there abode, Through every vacant artery may force The green and joyous sap of thriving plants,— Juice of crushed stalks mixed with their ropy gums, And purpled bright with strength from berry and grape, Full of a stinging, swift, and masterful Vivacity.

For the blood of a declaimer of seventy does not travel so by ordinary ways. Nor can a declaimer, as he does, build up for the imagination an earth, with sky and mountains, within a little chapel, for the sake of showing how the lightning vaults and impales the unjust man. At other times his words rise up and circle and make fantastic architecture, as real as dreams, for the terror of the soul that for the time is forced to dwell therein. And though the substance of his sermon is but anecdote, biblical reference, exhortation, warning, picturesque logic built upon some simple religious theme, men and women weep under this divine bullying. A man, listening outside the chapel, put his hand to his head to make sure that his hat was on, so stiffly his hair stood up.

"Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth....

"He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet.

"And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind.

"He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies...."

Once he paused long, towards the end of a sermon, while the thunder withdrew with a terrible solemnity which he envied; and he did not hesitate to follow the thunder with the words, "It has been said," and so to end.

THE POACHER

One who used to come in late, years ago, was Gwilym Pritchard, the poacher.

I wish to make a nice distinction between poachers and poachers. The man who is nothing but a poacher I regard as one only in the strict literal sense. Such a man is rare to-day. Formerly he went to the woods as another man went to the Bar. He lived like a gentleman upon other men's venison, and was beneath the pleasure of salt-pork broth. He would swagger about the hamlet with a deer on his back. The deer was but a carcass at sixpence the pound to him. He has lately stooped to dictate his autobiography, which may be bought over the counter. A less majestical note was never sounded. He turned gamekeeper, and no doubt touched his cap for half-a-sovereign, and stared at his palm for a crown. He is, in short, "one of God's creatures." But the nobler one I have in mind seemed to bear high office in the scheme of the natural world. A mighty man, capable of killing anything and of sparing anything too, he was a true scholar in his kind. The pedants who peep and botanise and cry "allium" or "cnicus" to one another in the awful woods, and the sublime enthusiasts who cannot see the earth for the flowers, were equally beneath him. He would give twelve hours a day at least to the open air, as a scholar to his books. Thus he had acquired a large erudition which would probably have exhausted a whole field of inquiry if written down. It is fortunate that faultless observers like this hand down nothing to posterity, since it leaves us in these latter days free to feel ourselves discoverers when we come upon what hundreds have known during the last thousand years. In the case of this man, the knowledge came out not so much in speech—of which he was economical—as in infinite tact,

Wearing all that weight Of learning lightly like a flower.

It was shown in the way he stepped in the woods, in the way he laid his ear to the bare ground (not the grass) to ascertain a distant noise of footsteps. I have seen him lose a wood-pigeon by an interrupted aim, and, standing without sound or motion, shoot the bird, that returned to its branch, enchanted by the absence of hostile sounds; for his very clothes were more the work of nature than the tailor, and matched the trees like a hawk or a November moth. His belief in the earth as a living thing was almost a superstition. I shall not forget how he took me to a hilltop one autumn day, when the quiet gave birth to sound after sound as we listened and let our silence grow. By a process of elimination he set aside the wind, the birds, the falling leaves, the water, and tried to capture for my sake the low hum which was the earth making music to itself. And what I heard I can no more describe than the magic of an excellent voice when once it is silent. "Depend upon it, that means something," he said. "And now——" there was a sharp report and a hare that I had not noticed bounded as if it had fallen from a great height, and lay dead.

Having been caught once, I remarked that his captor must have been a clever man. "A fool," he replied—"a fool. He'd been after me a hundred times, and I had fooled him all but once." It was at one time his practice to deliver a tithe of his poached game at the cottages of the sick, infirm, or poor, _as a present from the Squire_, a notoriously ungenerous man. His occupation had made him indifferent to the future or the past. None ever chattered less about past happiness and future pain. He seemed to owe a duty to the present moment of which he partook as if he were eating ripe fruit. Even a piece of drudgery or a keen sorrow never drove his intelligence backward or forward; pain he took as some take medicine, on trust. Thus he was a small, though not a poor, talker. Venturing once to greet him pleasantly with the long beginning of a story, when I found him seated without any visible occupation, and noticing his irritation, I said that I had supposed he was not doing anything; to which he answered "Yes, nothing!" and continued. At one time of his life he heard that a considerable sum of money had been left to him. A year later, the foundering of a ship left his fortunes unchanged; and on the afternoon of the news, he shot every pigeon at which he raised his gun. Birds of prey he would never shoot, even to show his skill. Jackdaws were always spared; he used to say that there was "a bit of God" in that bird. It was noticeable, too, that here and there he spared game birds, though he despised the race. I have seen him raise his gun and drop it again, not without a sigh as the bird flew off, observing that there was "something in the bird" which stayed his hand. In men, as in birds and beasts, he was anxious to see individuality, and loved the creature that possessed and used it. The only time I ever saw him use contempt was towards a beggar who had soiled his calling by theft. A good beggar, a good thief, anything beyond which "the force of nature could no further go," he reverenced. And he was a good poacher, glorying in the name. He died polishing the white steel on his gun.

LLEWELLYN, THE BARD

Of Llewelyn, the bard, I cannot decide whether he most loves man or men. He is for ever building castles in the air and filling them with splendid creatures, whom he calls men. Then he laments that he cannot find any like them on hill or in valley: when, straightway, he will meet some human being, old friend or passing stranger, on the road or in a shop, and away go the phantoms of his castles, and he is wild in adoration of the new thing he has found. His grandmother, by the way, was called a fairy's child, though the truth seems to have been that her mother was a gipsy girl. Perhaps that is why he has no creed but many creeds, and was looked upon with great favour by the Calvinists until they found that he liked the Church as well. Yet I think that he likes men truly because they remind him of something he has read or dreamed, or because they make him dream; herein somewhat resembling the fellow who paid much court to another because he reminded him of the late Duke of ——, and he was a lover of dukes. Or he is like some that have seen processions of phantoms and say that sometimes the phantoms are simply fairies speaking an unknown tongue, but that sometimes several have the faces and voices of some among the dead whom they used to know. Why he is so glad to be among us at the farmhouse I have not discovered, but I suppose we remind him of Hebrew prophets or Greekish kings, for of our established merits he takes no thought.

I think he wastes so much pity for Annie of Lochroyan that other maids find him passionless, and he grows tender over Burd Ellen and Cynisca as their lovers never did. Arthur and Gwalchmai and Gwenhwyvar, the most unreal and unliving of all the persons of literature, please him most. In a world where all things are passing, he loves best those things which, having past and having left a ghost of fame behind, can live for ever in minds like his. In London he saw but a place where marsh and river and woods had been and might be again; or where

Sometimes a lily petal floated down From dear, remote pools to the dreary town;

where the gulls flew over in the mournful January light; where a few friends had fires and lamps and books—their light faintly flickering in tremendous gloom and making one faint reality in the place; where wind and rain sometimes brought the past again; for the very touch of rain and wind beckoned to him, as it is fabled that the foam driven from waters that cover old towns will draw the unwary whom it touches into the deeps.

He himself professes to care only for his own childhood and youth; only he is aware, as not every one is, that the childhood began in Eden, and is ages old, so that, after all, the few years that make middle age do not count for much. His life and his way of looking at it remind me of a story of a young Eastern prince. Every day, from his early childhood, a story-teller had told him a tale. But, soon after he was sixteen, the story-teller came to him, and, falling on his knees, told him that he had no more stories to tell. The young prince fell into a rage and swore that he would kill the man if, in a week, he had no new story ready. And the story-teller, who was very old and unwilling to die, went into the desert and neither ate nor drank, and made a plan by which to save his life. So he returned to the young prince, who asked if he had a new story, and he said that he had. And the prince bade him tell the story; and he began to speak, and told the prince the story which he had told him first, when he was a small child; and the prince was pleased. And until the old man died, he never told a story which he had not told before; and the prince was always pleased.

His poetry, if it could be understood, might be counted great, and perhaps it is so in a world where trees and animals are reverenced in a way which is hardly dawning here. He is a kind of mad Blake. He sees the world from among the stars, and those who see it from an elevation of five or six feet, and think that they see it as it really is, are not satisfied. He would make human the stars and seasons; he would make starry the flowers and the grass. He would have it that the world is but a shadow of Blake's "Real and Eternal world": that we who are shadows cling to the superstition that we are not, and have but prejudiced and fearful ears for his prophecies. He sees the world as a commonwealth of angels and men and beasts and herbs; and in it, horrible discords that we others scarcely hear seem to him to strike the stars.

Each outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from the brain doth tear; A skylark wounded on the wing Doth make a cherub cease to sing.

After all, in matters of the spirit, men are all engaged in colloquies with themselves. Some of them are overheard, and they are the poets. It is his fortune that he is not overheard, at least by men.

Yet how much would he sacrifice could he but write a few verses in the old Welsh manner,—but a few verses like those he repeats as lovingly as others would their own. First, there is the elegy on Gwenhwyvar by Griffith ap Meredith ap Davydd:

The wearer of white and green, of red and blue, Is now in the painful fold of death. The Church conceals her—she whom velvet so adorned. Wearer of velvet, We mourn with tears now that the flush of her beauty has faded, Now that the wearer of velvet and red is no more.

That he praises for its clear-eyed simplicity, its mournfulness direct as the cry of a child, as the bravery of this is as direct as the laughter of a child (it is by a poet who was also a prince):

I love the time of summer, when the charger Of the exulting chief prances in the presence of a gallant lord, When the nimbly moving wave is covered with foam, When the apple tree is in flower, And the white shield is borne on my shoulder to battle.

This, also, for its simple pride:

The men who went to Cattraeth were men of name: Wine and mead out of gold was their drink: Three men, and threescore, and three hundred, with golden torques.

How often will he repeat "with golden torques"!

But (and here some will reconsider their opinion that he is a fool, or one "not wise" as the pleasant Welsh phrase goes) there is no one that can laugh more loudly than he; or sing a song more happily; or join more lustily than he in hunting on foot, over the craggy hills, some fox which the farmer can never shoot when he comes for the turkeys in November; and in the heat of the run he will curse the hounds for gaining on the fox, and the fox for running no faster, saying that the worst of fox-hunting is that it is so one-sided, since the fox is not allowed to rejoice at the end with hounds and men.

And here is one of his imitative songs, reduced to its lowest terms by a translator:

She is dead, Eluned, Whom the young men and the old men And the old women and even the young women Came to the gates in the village To see, because she walked as beautifully as a heifer.

She is dead, Eluned, Who sang the new songs And the old; and made the new Seem old, and the old As if they were just born and she had christened them.

She is dead, Eluned, Whom I admired and loved, When she was gathering red apples, When she was making bread and cakes, When she was smiling to herself alone and not thinking of me.

She is dead, Eluned, Who was part of Spring, And of blue Summer and red Autumn, And made the Winter beloved; She is dead, and these things come not again.

AZARIAH JOHN PUGH

One of the most inspiriting of our fire-siders at the farmhouse is a young schoolmaster named Azariah John Pugh, and called, in the Welsh fashion, almost invariably, Azariah John.

He is mainly English and partly Spanish; he was born in England, but having a Welsh name, he boasts much of his country, as he has elected to call Wales. But in truth he belongs to no time or place. He cares nothing for the house he lives in, for the village, or for any place he ever saw. Yet are we never tired of hearing his rich sentiments about them all. If only he be far away from it, there is no place known to him which he will not magnify with words which others do not easily use even for their true loves. Probably he would like to like them; but that very liking seems to be due to his feverish wide reading in books that are full of sentiments he admires and would borrow, if he could. Thus, of old cities, rivers flowing past famous places, mountains of beauty or story, the white cliffs of the south, the whin-red moorland of Wales, old gardens, solemn woods, all solitudes, fading races, sunsets, fallen greatness in men and things, old books, old beer, poverty, childhood ... of all these he will talk as if he had discovered them to the world, though it may be doubted whether he knows them at all. Yet is he a magnificent echo of the genuine lovers of these things, and he is so sorrowfully anxious to be believed that to some of us he has seemed to be the true heir, though defrauded of his inheritance, of all beauty and all antiquity. He is for ever speaking of "remembering afresh and with pleasure ancient matters," though he knows that even he cannot remember them with pleasure, and that no experienced man ever does so. He is so young that he has nothing to forget. But in his own esteem he is old now, and shakes his head over the light-heartedness of old men, saying, "If they were as old as I am——"

He speaks so suavely that the plain man wonders that he has never felt as deeply himself. Before his patriotism, the patriot is abashed. The lover of the quiet life, in his presence, is persuaded that himself can hardly be said to love it. No lover repeats more fondly—

And I would send tales of forgotten love Late into the lone night, and sing wild songs Of maids deserted in the olden time.

He thus deceives every one but himself, and that one exception is the real cause of his unhappiness. He cannot avoid his affectations. He only finds them out when they are full-grown and most noisily and hungrily abroad in every man's ears, and then he has to maintain them, wearily but with an apparent gaiety. Pity even will not hurt him. It is his genial air: he rejoices in it as a pigeon, leaning and raising her wing to expose her tender side, rejoices in summer rain, and as languidly; and then again he is furious at it, and cultivates brutality, drinks much beer, and uses many oaths, of which he wearies and comes again to the old tap.

The ghosts of the subtle emotions which we say make up modernity have come into his brain, and they are so many that he has become, if not a theatre, at least a mortuary, of modernity. But the nervous strain of any real passion in his neighbourhood obliges him to be rude or to run away. Real passion was always scandalously ill done: he would have no lover die less romantically than Romeo.

And as his thoughts, so are his acts, except that they are few. He has been to Rome, the Bay of Spezzia, Windermere; he has walked along the Pilgrim's Road to Canterbury. He has learned to work badly in metal and wood. He has had whims and drugs enough to win an appreciation from Mr. Arthur Symons. He has written poems under the influence of something in his stomach; but either he cannot read them, or they are not fit to be read. He wrote one, I remember, about a girl who worked a story in tapestry while her lover played on a harp the melody which told the same story. He wrote a sermon on the death of John Jones because a hundred persons of that name die every day, and he wished to praise the average man, out of a whimsical distaste for his late less fantastic likings. He has had friends and has been left by them; or, as he says, after the Welsh poet,

The brave, the magnanimous, the amiable, the generous, and the energetic Are as stepping-stones to the bard.

He has made love, and he has been scorned; the sad tunes of

Old unhappy far off-things And battles long ago

are accordingly most dear to him, and in his gayest moments he will murmur some sad melody like "The Marsh of Rhuddlan" or "My Johnny was a shoemaker." I have heard him repeat this strange poem of Taliesin's as if he were a reincarnation of the bard:

Primary chief bard am I to Elphin, And my original country is the region of the summer stars; Idno and Heinin called me Merddin, At length every King will call me Taliesin. I was with my Lord in the highest sphere, On the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell; I have borne a banner before Alexander; I know the names of the stars from north to south.... I have been with my Lord in the manger of the ass; I strengthened Moses through the water of Jordan; I have been in the firmament with Mary Magdalene; I have obtained the muse from the cauldron of Ceridwen; I have been bard of the harp to Lleon of Lochlin; I have been on the White Hill, in the court of Cynvelyn; For a day and a year in stocks and fetters, I have suffered hunger for the Son of the Virgin. I have been fostered in the land of the Deity, I have been teacher to all intelligences, I am able to instruct the whole universe, I shall be until the day of doom on the face of the earth: And it is not known whether my body is flesh or fish....

And it falls strangely from this wandering voice that calls itself a man. It is comic and it is terrible. He alone seems to feel the true sadness of them: flatterers and low comic persons tell him that he is but a vessel come into the world to be filled with all the sorrows that have been. Truly, all that has passed, is.

Nevertheless, we love him for his gross natural self, for so we think his only convincing affectation, the only one which he displays with some consistency by the fireside; and we know, as the world does not know, how costly and passionate affectations are.

MORGAN RHYS AND OTHERS

I should like to win some charity for Morgan Rhys, the descendant of a prince, a bard and a tin-plater. Charity it must be; for, in truth, he is something of a Celt in the bad, fashionable sense of that strange word, and is somewhat ridiculous beside the landlord of the "Cross Inn." An orphan, he lived as the only child in the large house of a distant relative, reading everything, playing half-heartedly at games, yet now and then entering into them with such enthusiasm that he did what he liked and won a singular reputation. He went seldom to a chapel, and when he went, did something more than escape boredom, by the marvellous gift of inattention which enabled him to continue his own chain of thought or fancy from beginning to end of the service. He was quite unhindered by hymn, prayer, or sermon, and accepted what he heard, as elderly persons accept fairies, without even curiosity. The death of others made him helpless for a time, but he did not reason about the fact: his own death he at all times contemplated without fear; what he feared, if anything, was the fear of death.

These things would not be remarkable, if he had not been at the same time an impressionable, submissive child, incapable of listening to argument, indeed, but of an unsatisfied sentimentality that might have been made much use of by a priest. His abstraction from things to which he was indifferent was wonderful. He was delighted and fascinated by abstraction itself, and finding a thing uninteresting, he could at once withdraw into a sweet, vaporous, empty cave. Thus, he was praised at school for his calmness during punishment, which, he says, on many occasions he never felt at all.

When a child of five he had been left alone for half a day in a remote chamber of a great house, and at nightfall was found sitting at a window that commanded an orchard and a lawn, and when he did not rise to greet his friends, and was questioned, merely said "Look!" Nobody could see anything, or rather, they saw everything as usual: nor could he explain. He always remembered the incident, and could not explain it. There was no fairy, no peculiar light or gloom. Yet he admitted that he was intoxicated by the mere trees and the green lawn. In the same way he was often found listening to silence. He did not pretend to hear strange music. It was the voluptuousness of sheer silence. At home, in the fields, at school, he would cry: "There!" So far as any one could see, there was nothing. To shut his eyes was not to see amply and clearly, but to see infinite purple darkness, which he vastly loved. He would ask friends whether they remembered this place or that on a certain day, and if they did, could never have them share his pleasure at the recollection; and for this whim he was scolded and ridiculed.

But at the age of sixteen or seventeen, poetry gave him a second world in which he thenceforward moved with a rapture which I do not often observe in the religious, while in religious matters he remains so pure a sceptic that he has never yet learned that there is anything about which to be sceptical. This so-called matter-of-factness in combination with a rich imaginativeness is perhaps a Welsh characteristic. I remember a farmer in Cardiganshire, with the blood of a lamb on his wrist, singing a fine hymn very nobly; and though I cannot like such a mystic, I admire him. In the same way will Rhys turn from ribaldry to a poem by Mr. Yeats. But he valued poetry not so much because it was full of music for ear and spirit, though that he loved; not so much because it was the first discoverer of Nature and Man, though that he well knew, as because it revealed to him the possibility of a state of mind and spirit in which alone all things could be fully known at their highest power, and that state was his most cherished aim, and poetry helped him to achieve it. Along with love of poetry went a curious study of appearances and illusions. He was never tired of considering them; of trying to elucidate the impressionism of the eyes and the other senses; of trying to know what there was in tree or face or flower which many measurements, scientific descriptions, photographs, and even pictures did not exhaust. So many trees he saw were scarcely more than nothing, though close by and in clear air: what were they, he asked. He had never any answer. "If only we could think like that!" he said once, pointing to a fair, straight hawthorn that stood, with few branches and without leaves, on the mountain side. And he came to hope for a state in which he and the trees and the great estuary near his house, the flowers, the distant white cottages, should become all happily arranged in as perfect a pattern as that made with iron dust by a magnet—all filling their places, all integral parts of a whole, and important because they were.

One evening he came into the farmhouse in deep excitement because (as he said) he had been part of the music of the spheres. He had walked through village after village, over the mountains and along the rivers, under great motionless white clouds. The air had been so clear that every straw of the thatch gleamed separately. He had passed through the lonely places with a sense of passing through a crowd because the rich spring air had been so much a presence. The men labouring or idling in the fields had seemed to be seraphic and majestic beings; the women smiling or talking by the gates were solemn and splendid. When at last he descended into this valley, he saw the wood smoke rising gently and blue from all the houses, as if they had been a peaceful company smoking pipes together. He had looked at the sky, the flushed mountain sheep, the little stony lanes that led steeply up to farmyard and farm, the jackdaw making suitable music high up in the cold bright air, the buzzard swirling amidst the young bracken, and he had approved, and had been approved, in ecstasy. And on that day the mazes of human activity had been woven into a rich pattern with the clouds and the hills and the waters for the pleasure of the gods, and were certainly for once fitted to the beauty and harmony of the universe. Thus he spoke in ejaculations, to our great joy, though not without giving us a fear that he would spoil it by something inapposite. But merely remarking that he had seen the parson feeding his boar and that the harmony between them also was complete, he became silent, and for a time the whole world shimmered and darkened as if it had been some tapestry which Rhys had made. The most pious member of the party, a Christian if ever there was one, remarked that he "wished he had felt like that sometimes." To which Rhys replied that he could not possibly wish that, as he would then be damned like himself: and the other agreed.

On days like this, he stepped over the edge of the world and saw the gods leaning from the stars among the clouds, and perhaps the loneliness that followed appalled him. For these days flew fast. And so he tried to fortify himself by mingling warmly with the life of every day in the village, where his reputation was for generosity, hard drinking, and perfect latitude of speech. He stimulated the trade-unionist, the parson, the minister, the bard. But he could not live both lives. The worldly one was the more difficult and he gave it up, and only made spasmodic and gross attempts to return to it. He began to shrink not only from all men but from all outward experience, and to live, as only too easily he could, upon his own fantasy. He was "surprised" when he saw men in the street. A million people, all different and their differences so much the more difficult because they were not acknowledged, frightened him. So his advocacy of certain humane measures and his support of some enthusiasms sounded as if they came from an angel, a fiend, or a corpse. As will happen with men who love life too passionately, he was often in love with death. He found enjoyment in silence, in darkness, in refraining from deeds, and he longed even to embrace the absolute blank or death, if only he could be just conscious of it; and he envied the solitary tree on a bare plain high up among the hills, under a night sky in winter where the only touch of life and pleasure was the rain. And now, with his fantastic belief that the corpse is life's handiwork and its utmost end, he is humanised only by a dread of the blank to which he is going:

When we shall hear The rain and wind beat dark December, how, In that our pinching cave, shall we discourse The freezing hours away?

He has made a heaven and he fears it.

Once there came to him and to the farmhouse a ghost from the north. He was a tall, black-haired, white-faced man, with high curved brow, straight fleshy nose, perfect firm lips, and bony chin. Was he soldier or scholar or priest? asked one and another. His face was vigilant, of childlike freedom of expression, and yet of boundless mystery in repose. When he spoke, he had fire, dignity, rapidity, ease, fertility of ideas, and everything of the orator except that his speech was simple. He could move a Welsh multitude with politics as a wind moves the corn, yet he did so but once, because "it was a blackguard game." Distinguished from the rest only by his white tie, in the pulpit he looked a Loyola and was a Chrysostom; yet he stood there but once or twice, to bury a noble man. He was master of an English style that was like Newman's in simplicity, music, and weight, yet published but one pamphlet that was wrung from him by a needy cause in a week, and never did anything to disabuse a public that praised him for it. His handwriting, in any haste, was that of a leisured and proud monk. His deep voice had a kind of flame-like hum of passion in it; he always used it in the service of the beautiful and the true. I heard him laugh only once, and then the depth which he discovered for a moment disturbed me so that I distrusted all laughter afterwards: it was like a nymph emerging from a deep cave. In scorn, in ignorance, in mere contentedness, he never uttered a word. He is content to be the light and the rest of a few scholars and a hundred miners, and to be the faithful, unhonoured Levite of the mighty dead, of whom not one, or prince or bard, had a virtue which he has not, except it were a strong right arm and the will to make a war in which to use it for the service of the liberty and integrity of Wales, for these alone of mortal things he passionately loves.

Lastly, there is at the farmhouse still a memory of that poet, great discoverer of manuscripts and splendid human being—Iolo Morganwg—also herbalist, lover of liberty and of the Revolution in France, a mighty walker, who would ride in no man's coach, and having been given a horse, drove it before him for a long way, and complained that a horse was wearisome. He learned his alphabet from the tombstones which his father made. In his youth, in the middle of the eighteenth century, he thought of going to America to search for the Welsh colony left five hundred years before by Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd, whom Southey strove to sing. He was stone-mason, bookseller, land-surveyor and (in slave-owning days) seller of sugar "uncontaminated by human gore." Eighty years ago he was to be seen "on the highways and byways of Glamorgan—an elderly pedestrian of rather low stature, wearing his long grey hair flowing over his high coat-collar, which by constant antagonism had pushed up his hat brim into a quaint angle of elevation behind. His countenance was marked by a combination of quiet intelligence and quick sensitiveness; the features angular, the lines deep, and the grey eye benevolent but highly excitable. He was clad in rustic garb: the coat blue, with goodly brass buttons, and the nether integument good homely corduroy. He wore buckles in his shoes, and a pair of remarkably stout well-set legs were vouchers for the great peripatetic powers he was well known to possess. A pair of canvas wallets were slung over his shoulders, one depending in front, the other behind. These contained a change of linen and a few books and papers connected with his favourite pursuits" (the study and collection of old Welsh manuscriptions for the illustration of Welsh history). "He generally read as he walked, 'with spectacles on nose,' and a pencil in his hand serving him to make notes as they suggested themselves. A tall staff, which he grasped at about the level of his ear, completed his travelling equipment." And in this chair, they say, he spent a night, sleeping and reading alternately.

Outside, by the window, is the village idiot, with a smile like the sound of bells ascending from a city buried in the sea.