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.
WINDY DAY, NEAR LLANRUG
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.
MORNING MISTS, NEAR TREFRIW
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.
DISTANT VIEW OF BETTWS-Y-COED