Part 5

On their way back to the English border again, they passed through Bangor, where Johnson must have been happy in finding that “the quire is mean!” On August twenty-eighth they were once more with hospitable Mr. Myddleton. Here they stayed for over a week, and the journal contains, among other things, a long note about a Mr. Griffiths. The addition of the name of his estate or village fails to identify him now; looking for a Griffiths or a Jones in Wales, even a particular Jones or Griffiths, is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Perhaps the present limitation to a dozen patronymics is a blessing for courts of law, but it is baffling for the curious-minded man. The historian finds the old Welsh John ap Robert ap David ap Griffith ap Meredith ap David ap Vauchan ap Blethyn ap Griffith ap Meredith, and so on for a dozen more “aps,” easier for purposes of identification.

On their homeward way Johnson was enthusiastic about Wrexham and its “large and magnificent” church, one of the Seven Wonders of Wales. On the seventh of September they came to Chirk Castle, but I cannot find that they went into this residence, a place which undoubtedly would have delighted Johnson more on account of its “commodity of living” and solid grandeur than because one of its heiresses was the unamiable Warwick Dowager who had married Addison. They left for Shrewsbury after they had viewed the little waterfall of Pistyll Rhaiadr, where the Doctor remarked only upon its height and the copiousness of its fall. If Johnson had been an up-to-date Cambrian railway tourist, he could not have entered and left North Wales in more approved style, for he came in by way of Chester and left by way of Shrewsbury. Safely out of Wales they journeyed homeward through Worcester, probably Birmingham, and Oxford. On September twenty-fourth there is this simple record: “We went home.”

It is to be remembered that on this tour Johnson lacked the companionship of the faithful Boswell. Yet the scantiness of the diary and its critical attitude cannot be accounted for wholly on this ground, but were due, I think, far more to the fact that the Doctor was thoroughly English in prejudice. Tobias Smollett’s feeling in “Humphrey Clinker,” for example, is even more English and uncomplimentary. All through his tour of the Hebrides, though he denounced Scotland and all things Scottish, called the Scotch liars and their country naked, yet the Doctor had an uneasy conviction of their superiority. As far as Wales was concerned, he simply did not consider this country of Arthur, of bard and of poet, this country of an indestructible nationalism, worthy his serious interest. Had he lived in Shakespeare’s day his concern would have been much greater, his respect more solicitous.

On the first visit to Mr. Myddleton the preservation of the Welsh language had been discussed. In his journal for that date Dr. Johnson wrote, “Myddleton is the only man, who, in Wales, has talked to me of literature.” He was visiting people who, almost universally, were supremely indifferent to Wales and all things Welsh. In other words, he was visiting the upper or ruling classes. It is not so many years ago that the children of the gentry were still not allowed to learn Welsh for fear their English accent might be spoiled. Now, happily, they are taught Welsh, a fact which not only improves the relationship between them and the working classes, but also is contributing generously to a revival of all that is best in Welsh song and literature. Even a prince of the blood royal learns Welsh and speaks it.

Dr. Johnson was in Wales at a time when the intellectual interests of Welshmen were most flagging, that is, just before the introduction of the Welsh Sunday Schools which, with their educational rather than exclusively religious function, gave impulse to a period of modern Welsh literature. Not only in chronology but also in importance, the establishment of the Welsh Sunday School must take precedence of Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations of the “Mabinogion.” Yet what Macpherson’s “Ossian” did for Scotland in the seventies in arousing interest, Lady Guest did for Wales in 1838. It is possible, if one can presuppose the impossible, that with these translations in hand Dr. Johnson’s journal would have been very different. However, one is fearful that, fortified even with Lady Charlotte’s beautiful translations, there would have been passages in the authentic Welsh “Mabinogion” as angrily rejected by him as Macpherson’s imposture was. Johnson said that he never could get the meaning of an Erse song explained to him. He asked a young lady who had sung such a song what it was about, and she replied that it was for the entertainment of the company. He explained that it was its meaning he could not understand, whereupon she answered that it was a love song. And that was all the intelligence, Johnson said, that he could get.

There was strong probability, as a Welsh traveller in 1682 expressed it, of Welsh being “English’d out of Wales, as Latin was barbarously Goth’d out of Italy.” From the time of the Great Rebellion, however, the condition of the Welsh language began to improve, and it is possible greatly to overrate the difficulties with which Johnson met in coming to know the life of the people. Impatiently he had exclaimed, “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.” But from any evidence in his journal Johnson did not consider it worth his while to discover how much the Welsh really do differ from the English. The visible physical fact with which he was confronted was the dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-complexioned Welshman of medium stature, very Spanish-looking, sometimes almost Oriental. What he heard were voices quite distinct from the English, quiet and pure in enunciation. What he must have felt--if he felt the Welsh as distinct, except in inferiority--was a race as different as the south is from the north, sensitive, imaginative, excitable, deeply impressionable to everything that is beautiful, as capable of the “howl” as the Irish, yet more critical, of an intellectual independence which makes Roman Catholicism unwelcome to the Welsh, with a shrewdness that is the logic of success in money-getting, a captive race with minds which can never be servile. Yet in a letter to Boswell announcing that he had visited five out of the six counties of North Wales, Dr. Johnson wrote: “Wales is so little different from England, that it offers nothing to the speculation of the traveller.” Johnson was capable, too, of taunting Boswell with the sterility of Scotland. He had a certain strain of contrariness in him, “tonic” some call it, which made him emphasize the undesirable features of a country or a personality. Three years after this journey, forgetting even his interest in castles, he was able to say: “Except the woods of _Bachycraigh_, what is there in Wales that can fill the hunger of ignorance, or quench the thirst of curiosity?”

[1] Heb Duw, Heb Dym (Without God, Nothing), Duw a’ diggon (God and plenty) would be more correct Welsh and a better translation.

V

_Welsh Folk-Lore_

Many and attractively full of poetry are the superstitions still living in the solitary Welsh hills. One day I encountered a hillside woman while we were looking for a hilltop church. She was in great distress, breathless and flapping her apron. Now there is a Welsh legend that bees were created in paradise, and her bees were running away. Apparently, this worldly, heartless creature had no intention, if an apron could prevent it, of allowing her bees to go back to heaven. Fairyland is Cambria in Wales, if you will let me juggle with my words in this fashion, for I do not know how to express it otherwise. And yearning for continued love and life, even with the bees, is the breath of the phantom and spirit world called “Fairyland.” Although the instinct of faith in the supernatural may be primitive and the Welsh of to-day highly civilized, yet supernatural belief is still ineradicated among the people. Their childish tales, often so hard to understand, are full of a haunting race life. Conviction, for example, that fairies are the souls of dead mortals, mortals not good enough for heaven or bad enough for hell,--at least the thought is a gentle one, and as such not to be despised. And to their gentle masters the fairies themselves seem to have given an uncommon devotion. If fairies are troublesome, one can sometimes get rid of them by changing one’s residence. But not so with these Welsh fairies! Like the family servant for whom every one longs, they stick closer than a brother. Even going into England will not drive Welsh fairies away from those they love. Matthew Arnold should have considered this when he was studying the Celtic temperament, and denouncing it for its inconstancy, for the essence of all that is Celtic is the Welsh fairy.

One is a little of the opinion of the youth, who, when he first saw the Lady of the Lake, thought she was a goose. That is what I thought of my first fairies, and still think of them. Yet, in this day and generation, it is something to have seen a fairy at all! It was dusk, and I had come through a tiny hill village, where white cottages were gleaming in the dark, and light shining on garden walls. It was so quiet that I could hear pine needles dropping on the ground, and the wind talking in the branches of the rain, still miles distant upon the sea. The noise of a tardy bumblebee, hurrying homeward in the dark, fairly boomed in my ears, and the sounds of shale rock slipping down the hillside came and went mysteriously. Through lighted windows I caught glimpses of evening comfort, of a bright fire glowing with peat, whose aroma was everywhere on the soft air, of dressers and tridarns, brave with countless ornaments, of a grandfather’s clock whose wise old face shone with light, of children’s heads about the supper table.

But a higher hill was calling me, and an adventure of whose nature I had not even dreamed. I turned off the road by a Wesleyan chapel and mounted a steep path. Up, up, up I went around the side of a green hill, sometimes listening to the night stir of the birds, sometimes startled by a brown rabbit, leaping for cover. Out beyond, the mountains of Snowdonia were piled height on height, all washed in sepia depth upon a sky, moonless, but brilliant with stars. I hastened, for I was eager to reach the pine-crowned summit. Up there would be no sound except the wind in the trees, and once in a while some homely noises from the villages in the valley below: the sharp bark of a dog, the bleating of a lamb, the closing of some cottage door, a resonant “good-night.”

Once on the hilltop, I lay down to rest, listening to the soft flight and hooting of some young owl, and feeling the grass cool and deep to my head and hands. As I lay there, eyes half closed, I heard some one coming up the path. Nearer and nearer drew uncertain footsteps and the tapping of a cane over loose stones. I sat up quickly, and there in the dark was an old woman, a cane in one hand, a basket in the other. Something cried piteously from the basket and I asked what it was. The old crone said that it was a kitten, and showed me a sack in which something else, tied up, squirmed and mewed. But she did not open the bag. After a due amount of greeting and curtseying, the old woman went on. I noticed that she kept looking back as she followed the path over the crown of the hill.

My attention was diverted from her by the approach of more footsteps. It was a boy, a very large boy, and in his hand I could clearly see a school-bag, ridiculously small for such a big lad, in which he, too, carried something. Behind him walked a huge dog, feathered on back and legs so heavily that his shaggy hair trailed on the ground. I heard something cry from the little bag, and I asked what it was. The lad replied in Welsh that it was a kitten. I could see him smiling as he stood his ground. Except in Welsh there was nothing further for me to do. Under the most favourable circumstances it is a great deal to do anything at all in Welsh, and with my heart beating rapidly and my tongue growing dry, I did not feel that I could do anything more in any language. We were silent while the little thing kept on “miaowing,” and this boy, like an ordinary boy, hitched about for a few moments, kicking stones from the path, and then went on, followed by the dog.

Erect and uneasy, I continued to sit up. Just as dog and boy were out of sight I heard some one else stumbling up the path and a faint kitten-like noise. I began to be afraid of those kittens being carried one after one over this desolate hilltop. It suggested a little the enchantments in the “Mabinogion,” only in the “Mabinogion” mice and not kittens played the leading part. I got up and fled before this experience should have a chance to become the beginning of some enchantment. But already I felt as if a spell were upon me, and even when I was quite far away from the kitteny place, I was still in a strange condition of excitement. One feels a natural dislike for any sort of hilltop enchantments, and I did.

I was making considerable speed in my Welsh-soled boots and feeling more like an ordinary person, when the path took a sharp turn and I saw something strange in front of me. Down below ran the road, hard enough to be a fact, and lighted by the clear glow of the stars. If only one could always be sure of what is coming in this world, such a turning as I had taken would be like Keats’s beauty, “a joy forever.” But alas! close at my own right hand, very distinct, unmistakably clear, rose something my eyes had never met before: a chimney with no house attached to it. And on the treeless meadow in front of this apparition I saw the old woman leaning on her stick and the boy sitting beside his dog. Clearly the spell had worked. But how I struggled out from under this enchantment is another story.

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. In gowns of green, blue, white, and scarlet they dance on moonlit nights. If they like you they will bestow blessings on you, and are frequently called “mothers’ blessings” because mothers are glad to have such little ones. But if one speaks unkindly of them, one will get into trouble. And here, whether one be talking of fairies or of mortals, who cannot always avenge themselves as readily as fairies, is a lesson worth remembering.

Elves, according to the Welsh,--I have seen only a picture of one drawn by a Welsh miner,--also live on goblin food and wear foxgloves when they have any particularly hard work to do. The Queen of the Elves is none other than the Shakespearean fairy spoken of by Mercutio, who comes

“In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the forefinger of an alderman.”

No one who has _not_ seen a fairy can have any idea how difficult it is to draw the line between history and story. The difficulties of the folklorist are as nothing,--for his is the scientific spirit,--compared with the trouble the real fairy hunter has in the open. Nowadays, of course, no one believes everything or possibly anything he is told. But in times past mankind seems to have been gifted with a more intimate faith in and knowledge of some things than we have to-day. For example, people used to know Satan better and were more afraid of him. An honest Welsh farmer saw him lying across the road with his head on one wall and his tail on the other. The Devil was moaning horribly, which in this uncomfortable position would not be strange for any one.

In criticism of Welsh fairies there is one thing to be said. They not only have a rather practical-joking sort of humour, but they also have very little sense of equity. A man may do his best for them, and then they repay him in the end by a trick. A Welsh piper was coming home in the gray of the evening, and had to cross a little running stream, from which he saw only the shadowed hillside and heard only the voice of the wind. But when he had travelled beyond the hill, music became audible, and, turning, instead of the knoll he had been looking at, there was a great castle with lights blazing and music playing and the sound of dancing feet. He went back and was caught in the procession coming out from its doors and taken in to pipe to them. He piped for a day or so, but he was anxious to return to his people, and the fairies seemed to understand. They said they would let him go if he would play a favourite tune. He played his best, they danced fast and furiously. And at last he was set free on the dark hillside, with only the voice of the wind for company. He went home hastily, but when he entered his father’s house no one knew him. An old man awoke from a doze by the fire, and said that he had heard, when a boy, of a piper who had gone away on a quiet evening and never come back again. That was over a hundred years ago.

Perhaps there is no reason why the fairies, as well as poor mortals, should not be allowed a natural and happy alternation between badness and goodness. Metaphorically speaking, they are not the only creatures who steal money and butter and cheese, and who whisk away helpless, unbaptized infants. Doubtless a New England Mather--those early New England Mathers were hard on babies--would say that an infant who remained unbaptized long enough to be discovered by a fairy deserved to be stolen. Such an idea could have flourished only in New England. As if it were not bad enough to face the-survival-of-the-fittest test in this life without carrying it over into heaven! I, for one, am not disposed to find fault with the fairies when, as happened in Beddgelert, they led a man into beautiful lodgings. To know what a temptation a beautiful apartment might become, one must have lived, as I have, in that little mountain-cupped village. When the man awoke in the morning after a peaceful night’s rest, he was sleeping on a swamp with a clump of rushes for his pillow. If he had been a nervous, sleepless, modern man, instead of finding fault as he did, he would have been grateful for the night’s sound rest and forthwith tried the swamp again. After this there would have been a “Swamp Cure for Insomnia.”

There are ghosts, too, in Wales, but they are rather spiritless creatures, much easier to catch and not so tricksy as the fairies. Nor do they select prickly furze and stony hilltops as their hiding-places. But on the whole they are difficult to subdue, especially the farm ghosts. While the servants are busy making the butter, the ghost or spirit frequently throws something unclean into the milk or sends the pans spinning around like mad. In one farm the farmer offered a reward of five pounds to any one who would lay their particularly lively spirit. Several people tried it, including an aged priest in whose face the impertinent ghost waved a woman’s bonnet. Finally, the Established Church being unable to cope with this sprightly situation, an Independent minister from Llanarmon coaxed the ghost into the barn. There the spirit, still unsubdued, turned into a lion, a mastiff, and other ferocious beasts, but in no incarnation could it do any harm to the Independent Griffiths. It became discouraged, and the minister persuaded the poor thing to appear in the form of a fly. Perhaps in this incarnation the wretched thing still had hopes of revenge. However, the intrepid Griffiths was too much for it, and it was captured in a tobacco box and borne off, never to trouble the farmer any more.

The death portents in Cambria reveal all the strangeness and lawlessness of the Celtic imagination. No one who does not know the Welsh hills, who has not been on them day after day, can feel the significance of these death portents. One must have travelled on the top and edge of the Welsh mountain world to understand,--have looked out upon a sea of hills gray and barren in their utter colourlessness, and down upon valleys like the valley of the shadow of death. There abyss and altitude are alike full of terrors, of mist before which mind and step falter, of an Unknown which presses home in bodily anguish, which distorts the vision and strikes upon the ear with the outcry of bewildered souls. It is not strange, then, that the Welsh have the most horrible of banshees. It is known as the Gwrach y Rhybin, the old hag of the mist; and a Cyhyraeth which moans dolefully in the night but is never seen; and a Tolaeth which groans or sings or saws, or tramps with its feet, and is also unseen. And there are, besides, the “Dogs of Hell” and the “Dogs of the Sky” and the “Corpse Candle” and the “Goblin Funeral,”--all of them portents of death. Several years ago I came very near seeing one of these portentous dogs. I was on a treeless upland pasture, rich with ruby like a deep agate, with lavender, flecked with emerald-green as musk is freaked with brown; purple, pink, and opalescent in the sunshine that came and went. There were black sheep and white in that pasture, I remember, and some little lambs that straddled with surprise. One rose, stretching and curling its tail with the delicious energy of waking from sleep. I looked down what seemed like a particoloured gulf of greensward into valleys where men and cattle had become dots in size, and up to more fern and heather and altitudes where the curlew cried. It was as I looked up that I saw an impressively large black dog that went through an impossibly small sheep-hole in a sheep-wall. But a wisp of mist came over the Welsh mountain-side, and one never makes an effort to see that sort of thing or to run after it. Hunting rollicking elves and lightfoot fairies is quite a different matter!

One of the most beautiful legends in the Iolo Manuscripts is the story of one of these death portents. There was a lord rich in houses and land and gold. Every luxury of life was his for the asking. One night he heard a voice cry out distinctly three times, “The greatest and richest man of this parish shall perish to-night.” He was aware that there was no other man so great or rich as he, and he sent for the physician and prepared to die. But the night passed and day came and he still lived. At sunrise he heard the bell tolling and knew that some one must have died, and he sent to enquire who it was. It was an old blind beggar who had asked for charity at the lord’s gate and been refused. Then this great lord saw that the voice had come as a warning to him, that his riches were as nothing in comparison with the treasure and wealth which the blind man had in the kingdom of heaven. He accepted the warning and relieved all who were poor or in need. When he died, angels were heard to sing him a welcome, and after his death he was buried, as he had asked to be, in the blind beggar’s grave.