Part 4

Now it was plain that this was one of the results of the saints’ unsaintly emphasis upon a family-tree. Certainly a man has a right to as many ancestors as he can compass. But thereafter, when I saw the usual clusters of “aps” and “Griffyevanjoneses,” I experienced a reluctant and fluttering sensation within accompanied by external haste to get elsewhere. Just one other epitaph, by reason of its brevity, caught my pencil:--

Here lies John Shore, I say no more; Who was alive In sixty-five.

IV

_Dr. Johnson’s Tour of North Wales_

“What should we speak of When we are as old as you? When we shall hear The rain and wind beat dark December, how In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse The freezing hours away? We have seen nothing.”

Even the motion of driving in a post-chaise captivated the fancy of Dr. Johnson, for he said, “If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation.” Mrs. Piozzi, who, except for that of prettiness, fulfilled these requirements both as a brilliant conversationalist and owner of a post-chaise, asked her beloved Doctor why he doted on a coach. Johnson’s reply was, that in the first place the company was shut in with him “and could not escape as out of a room,” and that in the second place, he could hear all the conversation in a carriage. Any lamentations while travelling thus he considered proof of an empty head or tongue that wished to talk and had nothing about which to talk. “A mill that goes without grist,” he exclaimed, “is as good a companion as such creatures.” As for himself, he felt no inconvenience upon the road and he expected others to feel none. He allowed nobody to complain of rain, sun, or dust. And so greatly did he love this act of going forward that Mrs. Thrale (Mrs. Piozzi) said she could not tell how far he might be taken before he would think of refreshments.

Yet the impression which Macaulay gave of Johnson’s attitude towards travelling is the one generally held: “Of foreign travel and of history he spoke with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance. ‘What does a man learn by travelling? Is Beauclerk the better for travelling? What did Lord Claremount learn in his travels, except that there was a snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?’” History has proved that Macaulay could be brilliantly inaccurate; certainly in this estimate of Johnson he was so. In still another passage Macaulay says that Dr. Johnson “took it for granted that everybody who lived in the country was either stupid or miserable.” The first twenty-seven years of his life Johnson spent in small country towns and, although he was sometimes miserable, because he was wretchedly poor, he was never stupid.

It was the young traveller whom he censured, not the mature traveller or travelling in general. It was characteristic of him to say, “I never like young travellers; they go too raw to make any great remarks.” Indeed, so grave was his sense of the value of travel that he took it upon himself to rebuke Boswell, as Boswell records: “Dr. Johnson expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the Wall of China. I catched it for the moment, and said I really believed I should go and see the Wall of China had I not children, of whom it was my duty to take care. ‘Sir,’ (said he), ‘by doing so you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times as the children of a man who had gone to view the Wall of China. I am serious, sir.’”

In his college days Johnson may not have had the same reasons as the young poet Keats for going “wonder-ways,” but reasons he had. With the Doctor, perhaps even more truly than with Keats, curiosity was “the first passion and the last.” While an undergraduate he was heard to say, “I have a mind to see what is done in other places of learning. I’ll go and visit the universities abroad. I’ll go to France and Italy. I’ll go to Padua.” Twice he urged Boswell “to perambulate Spain,” and of their tour to the Hebrides everybody knows. There was talk of his going to Iceland, and for a time the great Doctor discussed travelling around the world with two friends.

Of the existence of the journal of Johnson’s tour in North Wales even Boswell did not know. This journey was begun by the Thrales and the Doctor leaving Streatham at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning of July 15, 1774. On their way they stopped at Litchfield at the house of Dr. Darwin, psychologist, poet, and grandfather of Charles Darwin, of whose roses Mrs. Piozzi wrote, “I have no roses equal to those at Litchfield, where on one tree I recollect counting eighty-four within my own reach; it grew against the house of Dr. Darwin.”

After passing through several towns on their route to North Wales they came, a party of four, Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, little Queenie and Johnson, to Chester on July twenty-seventh. Of Chester the Doctor made short work. He was more interested in a grammar school held in part of the Abbey refectory than in aught else, and wrote particularly, “The Master seemed glad to see me.” Of course the Master was glad, for was not Johnson the greatest man of his day? There is not one word for the quiet beauty of the Dee, no mention of Cheshire cheese, and nothing about Chester ale, which perhaps Johnson found as bad as did Sion Tudor. Of their sojourn in Chester we get a more lively picture from Mrs. Thrale’s comment on the entry in the Doctor’s journal than from the journal itself. Johnson wrote, “We walked round the walls, which are compleat.” Mrs. Piozzi observed, “Of those _ill-fated_ walls Dr. Johnson might have learned the extent from any one. He has since put me fairly out of countenance by saying, ‘I have known _my mistress_ fifteen years, and never saw her fairly out of humour but on Chester wall’; it was because he would keep Miss Thrale beyond her hour of going to bed to walk on the wall, where from the want of light, I apprehended some accident to her,--perhaps to him.” Probably nine-year-old “Miss Thrale” did not mind being kept beyond her hour of going to bed by a stout gentleman who was her devoted slave!

The next day they entered Wales, dined at Mold and came to Llewenni. Mrs. Thrale’s cousin, Robert Cotton, was living at Llewenni Hall, which in 1817, after having been one thousand years in possession of the family, was torn down. At Whitchurch, a few miles away, is an alabaster altar monument to one of the Salusbury’s who owned this hall, Sir John, or Syr John y Bodiau (“Sir John of the Thumbs”). This ancestor of Mrs. Piozzi was not only distinguished by two thumbs on either hand, but also by a giant’s strength. With his bare fist he is supposed to have slain a white lioness in the Tower of London. Since then white lionesses have all disappeared. Sir John of the Thumbs also killed a mythical beast in a lair below a near-by castle, and overthrew a famous giant. Is it any wonder that Mrs. Thrale, with such a forefather, should sometimes have painted things _plus beau que le vérité_, and that, even as her ancestor was fond of pulling up trees by the roots when he had nothing better to do, his descendant should once in a while give truth a little tug?

But if Mrs. Thrale had a distinguished progenitor, she had an even more distinguished ancestress, for there at Llewenni Hall lived “Mam Cymru,” the Mother of Wales. This Catherine de Berain’s first husband was a Salusbury, her second husband was Sir Richard Clough. The second daughter of the second marriage married Salusbury of Bachycraig, and from this marriage Mrs. Piozzi was descended. Later, Catherine de Berain became the third wife of Maurice Wynne, who was her third husband. It is said that on the way home from the funeral of her first husband, Wynne asked her to marry him. She had to refuse, however, as Sir Richard Clough had asked her on the way _to_ the church. But she assured him that she was not superstitious about the number 3, and agreed to give Wynne the next opportunity. She kept her word.

When the Welsh used to speak of a rich person, they did not say “rich as Crœsus” but “rich as a Clough.” On July thirtieth, Johnson and the Thrales visited a remarkable house built by Sir Richard, the second husband of “Mam Cymru.” On the thirty-first day they drove to the Cathedral of St. Asaph, once the even smaller church of Llanelwy, to which Giraldus Cambrensis in his tour in 1188 referred as “paupercula.” About that time this tiny cathedral was changed from wickerwork or wood to stone. On the same day they saw the Chapel of Llewenni, founded by one of the Salusburys, where Johnson was surprised because the service, read thrice on Sundays, was read only once in English.

He was dissatisfied not only with the order of Welsh services, but also with the behaviour of Welsh rivers. On this day he writes: “The rivers here are mere torrents which are suddenly swelled by the rain to great breadth and great violence, but have very little constant stream; such are the Clwyd and the Elwy.” About Welsh rivers Johnson makes a great many remarks. He is as scornful of them as an American is of the Thames. Mrs. Piozzi says that his “ideas of anything not positively large were ever mingled with contempt.” He asked of one of the sharp currents in North Wales, “Has this _brook_ e’er a name?” “Why, dear Sir, this is the _River_ Ustrad.” “Let us,” said Dr. Johnson, turning to his friend, “jump over it directly, and show them how an Englishman should treat a Welsh river.” Johnson was always of opinion that when one had seen the ocean, cascades were but little things. He used to laugh at Shenstone most unmercifully for not caring whether there was anything good to eat in the streams he was so fond of. “As if,” says Johnson, “one could fill one’s belly with hearing soft murmurs, or looking at rough cascades!”

It would be difficult to make a summary of all the objects Johnson called “mean” in North Wales. Among them were towns, rivers, inns, dinners, churches, houses, choirs. It is safe to say that the great Doctor could not rid himself altogether of English prejudices against the Welsh and all things Welsh. George Borrow’s experience on the summit of Snowdon was not at all unusual, except that in this instance an Englishman in the presence of English people became the champion of the Welsh. Undoubtedly Johnson was influenced in his contempt not only by his English feeling, but also by the fact that he was a true son of the eighteenth century, with all that century’s emphasis on power, on size, on utility.

Yet Johnson was not totally incapable of appreciating the romantic scenery of Wales. Some part of it, the more cultivated, he seems to have felt, for on the very next day there is this record: “The way lay through pleasant lanes, and overlooked a region beautifully diversified with trees and grass.” It mortified Mrs. Thrale because Mr. Thrale, a lover of landscapes, could not enjoy them with the great Doctor, who would say, “Never heed such nonsense, a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another. Let us, if we _do_ talk, talk about something; men and women are my subject of enquiry; let us see how these differ from those we have left behind.” However, Johnson was certainly not insensible to the beauty of nature. In describing his emotions at the sight of Iona, he wrote: “Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.” In his tour in the Hebrides he welcomed even the inconveniences of travelling, such as wind and rain, when they meant finer scenery and more pictures for the mind.

Much on this same August second was found “mean,” including Mrs. Thrale’s gift to the romantic old clerk of the parish church of Bachycraig where Mrs. Thrale’s father was buried. The day following, on their arrival in Holywell, Johnson had to admit that the town was “neither very small nor very mean.” He was amazed and impressed by the yield of water from St. Winifred’s Well, and the number of mill wheels the water turned. But when they went down by the stream to see a prospect, Johnson adds very specifically that he “had no part” in it. He was vastly more interested in some brass and copper works, in _lapis calaminaris_, in pigs of copper, and in some ironworks where he saw iron half an inch thick “square-cut with shears worked by water,” and hammers that moved as quick “as by the hand.” One has a curious feeling that, were the Doctor suddenly translated to this world again, foundries would interest him vastly more than any natural panorama. In this Johnson was truly a man of his times, which were epoch-making because of their new interest in the mechanics of industry, their gigantic industrial impulse. Without a word for the singular beauties of Holywell, without reference to the legend of St. Winifred or mention of the ruins of the Abbey, he concludes his journal for August third: “I then saw wire drawn, and gave a shilling. I have enlarged my notion, though not being able to see the movements, and not having time to peep closely, I know less than I might.”

Another feature of the land impressed him favourably, the houses of country gentlemen. “This country seems full of very splendid houses,” he notes on August fourth, after visiting a Mr. Lloyd’s house near Ruthin, where he had been to see the castle. He writes quite at length on the ruins of Ruthin and ends characteristically, “Only one tower had a chimney, so that there was [little] commodity of living. It was only a place of strength.” It was on this day that the keep of the castle, when he heard that Mrs. Thrale was a native of North Wales, told her that his wife had been a Welshwoman, and had desired to be buried at Ruthin. “So,” said the man, “I went with the corpse myself, because I thought it would be a pleasant journey, and indeed I found Ruthin a very beautiful place.”

Two days later they dined at Mr. Myddleton’s, of Gwaenynog, the gentleman who raised the unwelcome monument to Johnson’s memory before the Doctor had had a chance to die, and while he still considered himself very much alive. This memorial is on the site at Gwaenynog where Johnson used to stroll up and down. It reads: “This spot was often dignified by the presence of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., whose moral writings, exactly conformable to the precepts of Christianity, gave ardour to Virtue and confidence to Truth.” Perhaps it is not strange that Johnson was not pleased with the monument. He wrote to Mrs. Thrale, “Mr. Myddleton’s attention looks like an intention to bury me alive. I would as willingly see my friend, however benevolent and hospitable, quietly inurned. Let him think, for the present, of some more acceptable memorial.”

To the Doctor death was always an enemy who would, he knew, outwit him in the end, a terrifying presence against which he struggled. “But who can run the race with death?” he cries despairingly. This premature memorial must have revolted everything in him, for to him “the whole of life” was but keeping away the thoughts of death. Even a dark road troubled him.

Leaving Llewenni on August eighteenth, they started definitely forward on their journey. They passed through Abergele, “a mean little town,” to Bangor, where they found “a very mean inn.” Certainly meanness is accumulating in Wales! Johnson had the instinctive contempt for things Welsh which so many English people hold. But, after finding Lord Bulkely’s house at Bangor also “very mean,” this is the point in the great Doctor’s journal where the lover of Wales may take heart.

There was one contrivance of the hand and mind of man which impressed Dr. Johnson tremendously. Where such works of the Creator as Snowdon, for example, failed, where the mystery of this land of legend passed him by, castles succeeded by virtue of their size, the strength of their walls, the completeness of their equipment. In Denbigh, Johnson had eagerly tried to trace the lines of that “prodigious pile” of a castle. So much of the comment we get in this neglected Welsh journal and in Johnson’s other writings seems to summarize itself in two words: size and power. He told Mrs. Piozzi to get a book on gardening, since she would stay in the country, feed the chickens, and starve her intellect, “and learn,” he said, “to raise the _largest_ turnips, and to breed the _biggest_ fowls.” It was in vain that Mrs. Piozzi told him that the goodness of these dishes did not depend upon their size.

From Beaumaris Castle to Carnarvon there is a crescendo of praise, ending in the memorable words about Carnarvon: “To survey this place would take much time. I did not think there had been such buildings; it surpassed my ideas.” Of Beaumaris, Johnson wrote: “The Castle is a mighty pile.… This Castle corresponds with all the representatives of romancing narratives. Here is not wanting the private passage, the dark cavity, the deep dungeon, or the lofty tower. We did not discover the well. This is the most compleat view that I have yet had of an old Castle.” And then came four last delighted words, “It had a moat.”

Nor was the next day, August twentieth, less of a success. After meeting with some friends they went to see the castle in Carnarvon, which Johnson describes as “an edifice of stupendous magnitude and strength; it has in it all that we observed at Beaumaris, and much greater dimensions, many of the smaller rooms floored with stone are entire; of the larger rooms, the beams and planks are all left; this is the state of all buildings left to time. We mounted the Eagle Tower by one hundred and sixty-nine steps, each of ten inches. We did not find the well; nor did I trace the moat; but moats there were, I believe, to all castles on the plain, which not only hindered access, but prevented mines. We saw but a very small part of the mighty ruin, and in all these old buildings, the subterraneous works are concealed by the rubbish.”

When Johnson and the Thrales were on their way from Llewenni to Bangor, they passed through Conway. The Doctor was much exercised in Conway because of the plight of an Irish gentlewoman and her young family who could get no beds to sleep in, but the one feature in this rare old town which might have impressed him, its castle, he did not notice in the journal. Built by the same architect who planned Carnarvon, it has much of its grace and is in some respects even more beautifully placed. With its machicolated towers, its vast banqueting-hall, Queen Eleanor’s oratory, and the river washing at its foundations, it is still a wonderful old pile. On the return trip Johnson makes a short, practical note to the effect that the castle afforded them nothing new, and that if it was larger than that of Beaumaris, it was smaller than that of Carnarvon. Carnarvon was the largest, and the Doctor was not to be weaned from it any more than from the idea that Mrs. Thrale ought to raise the largest turnips.

The day following this memorable inspection of Carnarvon Castle, they dined with Sir Thomas Wynne and his Lady. Johnson’s comment was brief,--“the dinner mean, Sir Thomas civil, his Lady nothing.” It would seem that Lady Wynne failed to recognize the greatness of her visitor, and, accustomed to a distinguished reception, the great man’s vanity was hurt. Afterwards he made remarks about Sir Thomas’s Lady, in which she was compared to “sour small beer” and “run tea.” Of a lady in Scotland he had said “that she resembled a dead nettle; were she alive she would sting.”

This mean dinner and, we presume, its meaner hostess were but a sorry prelude to a melancholy journey which the party had to take to Mrs. Thrale’s old home at Bodvel. They found nothing there as in Mrs. Thrale’s childhood; the walk was cut down, the pond was dry. The near-by churches which Mrs. Thrale held by impropriation Johnson thought “mean and neglected to a degree scarcely imaginable. They have no pavement, and the earth is full of holes. The seats are rude benches; the altars have no rails. One of them has a breach in the roof. On the desk, I think, of each lay a folio Welsh Bible of the black letter, which the curate cannot easily read.” Over one hundred and thirty years later it was that I made the tour, which I have described for you, of these Welsh churches of early foundation. Mysterious, desolate, dilapidated old places they are; in comparison with the ugly, comfortable nonconformist chapels, spectacles for the prosperous to jeer at.

Mrs. Piozzi tells a story which shows that the great Doctor brought terror to the hearts of the Welsh parsons. “It was impossible not to laugh at the patience Dr. Johnson showed, when a Welsh parson of mean abilities, though a good heart, struck with reverence at the sight of Dr. Johnson, whom he had heard of as the greatest man living, could not find any words to answer his enquiries concerning a motto around somebody’s arms which adorned a tombstone in Ruabon Churchyard. If I remember right, the words were,--

Heb Dw, Heb Dym (Without God, without all) Dw o’ diggon (God is all sufficient).[1]

And though of not very difficult construction, the gentleman seemed wholly confounded, and unable to explain them; till Dr. Johnson, having picked out the meaning by little and little, said to the man, ‘_Heb_ is a preposition, I believe, Sir, is it not?’ My countryman, recovering some spirits upon the sudden question, cried out, ‘So I humbly presume, Sir,’ very comically.”

About Bodvel they found the Methodist “prevalent,” which could not have been a pleasant circumstance to Johnson. With nonconformity the great Doctor had no sympathy. Boswell says that Johnson thought them “too sanguine in their accounts of their success among savages, and that much of what they tell is not to be believed. He owned that the Methodists had done good; had spread religious impressions among the vulgar part of mankind; but, he said, they had great bitterness against other Christians, and that he never could get a Methodist to explain in what he excelled others.”

This unhappy day they concluded suitably by going to Pwllheli, “a mean old town at the extremity of the country,” where they bought something by which to remember its meanness. Pwllheli is still mean, but in a different way, for it has become a noisy watering-resort from which the quiet traveller longs to escape at the first moment to quiet Abersoch or to Llanengan or Aberdaron, where “trippers” cease from troubling and tourists are at rest.

Nowadays, even the most breathless will grant Snowdon a few words of praise--praise for its lakes, awe for its rock-strewn valleys like the valley of the shadow of death. Of the two lakes, Llyn Beris and Llyn Padarn, which receive the waters on the northern slope of Snowdon, Johnson did not think much, for he complained that “the boat is always near one bank or the other.” As for Snowdon itself, the record is, “We climbed with great labour. I was breathless and harassed.” There is no word for all that is romantic or awe-inspiring, not an exclamation for the summit to which have mounted king, poet, priest, bard, wise men, through countless ages--only a record of Queenie’s goats, “one hundred and forty-nine, I think.” Mr. Thrale, Queenie’s father, was near-sighted and could not see the goats, so he had promised the child a penny for every one she showed him. Dr. Johnson, the devoted friend of Queenie, kept the account.