WALES AND WELSH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 179, 30 July 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

WALES AND WELSH.

A NATION'S SOUL THROUGH ENGLISH EYES,

(By CYRANO.)

And the dark mountain maid That dreams for ever in the wizard shade, Hymning her heroes there. —William Watson. Of the "Celtic fringe" of England, Walee is the part that seems—from a distance at any rate —least mysterious and alien to the Englishman and makes the smallest appeal to his imgination. Geography and history explain most of this difference between his conception of Wales and his conception of Ireland or the Highlands of Scotland. Wales is smaller than either of her sisters, and more closely connected with England. There has been no war between England and Wales since before Henry Tudor came to the throne to consolidate for ever the union between the countries. Armed trouble with Scotland dates as recently as 1745, and there is no need to go into recent events In Ireland. All the clan system of the Highlands, the romance that has accreted round the Stewarts, the fact that Scotland was a separate kingdom until James I.'s time and to this day has laws of its own, the interpretative genius of Burns and Scott —all these and other factors have given Scotland a standing different from that of Wales in the mind of the Englishman and of tho overseas Briton. Many of us in the outer seas, indeed, gave little thought to Wales until Lloyd George appeared on the scene. Beauty and Interest. In this little country, as Mr. H. V. Morton shows us in the latest of his fascinating "Search" books,* is a mine of infinite interest. The writing of history on landscape is heavy in Wales. No territory of its size contains eo many Norman castles. The traveller may trace there with his eyes history from Roman times, and even beyond, down through the periods when the Welsh fought for their freedom with England. He may see in Cardiff —"the only beautiful city that has grown out of the Industrial Revolution" —an inhabited castle containing remains of Roman buildings. He may worship in a church that dates back to before Augustine. He may see at the Eisteddfod, that national festival of music and poetry, the present industrial age linked witli that of the Druids. And Wales is, despite its coal mines and factories, an enchantingly beautiful country. Mountains dominate it—a land of hills and sea and valleys and streams, of nestling towns and old farms, by far the greater part of it still unspoiled by industrialism. And it is inhabited by an ancient people alien to Englishmen in speech and

thought, though, as Mr. Morton is careful to say over and over again, not unfriendly. As he goes from one part of the British Isles Mr. Morton seems to improve his method of combined description and interpretation. It is a method of his own, and it is highly successful, for three reasons: he has a proper historical background, he approaches a subject with real sympathy, and he can write. I am tempted to linger over some of his descriptions of Welsh scenery, but I must confine myself to his interpretation of tho Welsh people. For what makes Mr. Morton's books, and especially his later ones, particularly valuable, is that ho is not content with sightseeing. He tries to get into the hearts and souls of people. In Wales he visited farmhouses and miners' cottages, talked to snepherds and antiquarians, and generally wandered off the beaten track of char-a-bancs. Bringing sympathy and understanding with him, he was received everywhere with the same qualities. The Welsh, ho says, are reticent in the presence of strangers, but if the approach is made in tho right way they soon become friendly. But tho unimaginative English business man gets nowhere when he tries to "cultivate the native." "He talks to a man who can see corpselights as if he was talking to a mechanic in his factory. He does not know that his mind, outlook and background are as different from them as oil from water. But they know it." The natives protect themselves by a rush of words. They tell the stranger what they think he would like to hear, and he finds out that some of their statements are not quite accurate, and goes home and says in his haste that all Welshmen are liars.

A Barrier of Mind. The Welsh are proud, emotional and paesionate, and more akin to the Latins than to the English. They are poets and musicians, and their romantic temperament puts a barrier between themselves and their neighbours. An experience of Mi - . Morton's illustrates vividly a difference that accounts for much of the failure of the Englishman to understand the Celt, and especially the Irish. When ho visited a school in Caernavonshire the headmaster assembled a choir of girls to sing for him. "Girls," said the music master, "we have with us today a great musician, who has come all the way from London to hear you sing. I want him to go back to London and say he has heard the best girls' choir in all Wales." Mr. Morton explains that ho knows nothing about music, but as he sat there uncomfortably he reflected that the master was "not so much a liar as a dramatist." The man's sense of tho dramatic was too strong to allow him to pass off the visitor as an ordinary tourist. Mr. Morton met Lloyd George and told him of the incident" and Mr. Lloyd George laughed and said that his interpretation was quit" right. Besides, by so describing the visitor thu master inspired his class. The girls sang beau-

tifully. They sang old songs, a martial song that made Mr. Morton reflect that "a nation has to be defeated quite a lot beforo it can compose good national songs," and then lovely Elizabethan airs —"Merrie England in a faint mist." In that schoolroom he heard "the old romantic and darkly passionate voice of Britain." Survival of a Language. Song and speech—these Welsh characteristics run through the book. The survival of the Welsh tongue as a language of daily use is astonishing. The old Highland speech is-by comparison merely an interesting survival, and the Irish tongue, though it has been made official and compulsory, has not the same practical hold. You come upon spoken Welsh right on the English border. A clergyman with whom I stayed in a lovely valley only a few miles from Oswestry —there were the ditch and mound of a Roman camp on the hilltop behind his house—preached regularly in Welsh. Mr. Morton heard it spoken in the streets and felt that he was in a foreign country. It is part of the Welsh determination to retain their old national' characteristics and culture. Of course, Mr. Morton mentions the famous place name "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch," which means "the Church of St. Mary in a wood of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and near St. Tysilio's cave close to an old cave." Compare our Maori: "Te Taumata-whakatangihanga-o - te-koauau-a-Tamatea-pokai-whenua." ("The hill-brow on which was heard the music of the nose-flute played by Tamatea the explorer of the land.") Some Maoris give a still longer version, which contains Gl letters, but the first is said to be more authentic. Observe how much nicer a name like this looks when it is hyphenated. He offered a drink to anyone who could speak it, and there was a silence until an old man rose and sang it. To sing it would be natural, for music is in the blood of the Welsh. Did the young people find life dull in the towns ?he asked a Welshman. "No, indeed," was the reply. "There is plenty for them to do. There are night classes and we practise for the Eisteddfod. . . A Welshman will sing until his heart breaks." All classes are musical and it may be said that music is to the Welsh what sport is to the English. This same Welshman discussed with Mr. Morton the attitude of the Englishman toward the Welsh. "We are least-liked branch of the Celtic race." He thought the Welsh had an inferiority complex and that the English were more enterprising, more thorough and more consistent. "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief—" the old rhyme had done much harm to Wales. Mr. Morton was to meet an antiquarian who hud a plausible theory that the lines were simply a corruption of a Dutch soiiEc, "Taffy" being "Tayf," tht nil me for the high blackcaps" worn by Dutch prieets.

In Wales also there is an interest in education that recalls the traditional Scottish zeal. "A respect for scholarship runs right through the life of the Welsh, people, and the history of their educational system is that of a popular and democratic demand, for opportunity." Mr. Morton found intellectual interests flourishing among the miners. The Welsh miner is, he says, a proud, sensitive gentleman. "I would like to think, if I had entered a pit at the age of 14 and had grown to manhood in it, that I would retain the outlook and the intellectual curiosity of the average Welsh miner." One workmen's institute recently bought, with money subscribed by the miners in twopences, the great Oxford dictionary, which costs £45, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Miner's Lot. If for nothing but' his warm appreciation of the Welsh coal miner's character and his vivid description of a coal mine, I would wish Mr. Morton's book the widest circulation. Everybody, I have long thought, should either go down a mine, or read about mining; there would then be a different attitude toward the miner. Mr. Morton can never again look at a bucket of coal without remembering what he saw a mile underground. As for the miner's wife, she is "one of the heroines of Great Britain." It was with these impressions and the music of a miners' choir in his ears that Mr. Morton took the road into England, leaving "a beautiful and romantic land, which owes all that is most precious within it to its own courage and initiative," and contains a people that has perhaps changed less than any in the British Isles. *"In Search of Wales," by H. V. Morton, with sixteen illustrations and a map (liethuen).