Morgan Rhys and Others

SWALLOW FALLS, BETTWS-Y-COED

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....

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 withall 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.

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 wasquite 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 seeanything, 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.

FAIRY GLEN, BETTWS-Y-COED

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.

CHURCH POOL, BETTWS-Y-COED

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 hearThe rain and wind beat dark December, how,In that our pinching cave, shall we discourseThe freezing hours away?

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 butone 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.

MINER'S BRIDGE ON RIVER LLUGWY

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 otherbehind. 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.

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