Mr. Rowlands, the Minister
Rowlands, another minister, is six feet and two inches in height, seventeen stone in weight, and has a voice which is in proportion. When he stands up, one supposes that he can never sit down; when he sits down, one supposes that he can never stand up. Every one of his attitudes seems to be final. Only when he is moving is his ponderosity a little less than divine; for he moves with an odd briskness, so that, from behind, he is like a large schoolboy on some urgent business. His mind is subject to similar changes of aspect. In domestic life no one is less awful than he; and were he not good-tempered, cheerful, frolicsome, and humorous as well, he would be one of the most mirth-provoking of mankind. On children he leaves no impression but that of weight, and in spite of his black clothes, he once reminded a child (with a shrill voice) of Atlas upholding the world.
In his everyday life he is a learned, happy child. His curiosity is matched by his credulity. He is the victim not only of tradesmen, but of beggars. He cannot keep his coat clean, and that he sews on his own buttons is apparent from the fact that he seldom has more than one or two of those decorations. He knows every one in his neighbourhood—miners, farmers, parsons, and the resident Englishmen—and knows and loves them so well that he never condemned any one except for cruelty. For he seems to have started life with such a strong belief in the sinfulness of men, that he has ever since been pleased and surprised by this one's goodness and the amiability of that one's badness. He might, in truth, have spoken of himself in something like the words of that fine, possibly Welsh poet of the seventeenth century, Thomas Traherne:
A learned and a happy ignorance
Divided me
From all the vanity,
From all the sloth, care, pain, and sorrow that advance
The madness and the misery
Of men. No error, no distraction I
Saw soil the earth or overcloud the sky.
I knew not that there was a serpent's sting
Whose poison shed,
On men, did overspread
The world; nor did I dream of such a thing
As sin, in which mankind lay dead.
They were all brisk and living wights to me,
Yea, pure and full of immortality.
Joy, pleasure, beauty, kindness, glory, love,
Sleep, day, life, light,
Peace, melody, my sight,
My ears and heart did fill and freely move.
All that I saw did me delight.
The universe was then a world of treasure,
To me an universal world of pleasure....
DISTANT VIEW OF CARNARVON BAY
His own verses, by the way, are not so good, for, like all Welsh ministers, he writes a hundred lines of verse every day, perhaps to avoid being thought singular.
He makes a fine figure of Charity in his old age, with his preoccupied blue eyes under a brow that is marked only by three lines like three beams thrown upward by a sun. He has a large, joyous, curving mouth, side-whiskers, careless beard, large feet.
He has but one touch of sentiment. Nearly half a century ago he fell in love with a pretty woman, and unsuccessfully; yet, though she is known to be married and still alive, he has come to have for her memory a grandfatherly tenderness, regarding her as a white and careless girl, in spite of time. For the rest, so warm and radiant is he, that I remember the peculiarity of Kai. "When it rained hardest, whatever he carried remained dry for a handbreadth above and a handbreadth below his hand, and when his companions were coldest, it was to them as fuel with which to light their fire."
But in the pulpit—whether it is a whim or an atonement or merely a recollection of his years at a theological college—he always makes an attempt to dust the wrinkles of his waistcoat. In every other way he makes his week-day self incredible to a stranger. He justifies and makes use of his size more than any man I ever saw. Seeing him in the pulpit, it seems fitting that he should live there day and night, so necessary a pillar is he to the dull, small chapel, though, when holding out his arms, as often he does, he threatens to demolish the little arches and poor windows and to create something more splendid in their place. Going there once in his absence, a visitor remarked to a deacon that they had made some changes in the building; and asking what had gone from there, he was told, "Oh, only Mr. Rowlands."
Standing there, he undertakes to speak on behalf of the Deity, whose ways he explains, and by a magnificent self-conceit supposes that his own stature and voice are fitting symbols to mortals incapable of apprehending things more august. For a time, indeed, during the singing of the hymns, there is a geniality as of lightning about his face. He smiles; he tosses his head with the joy of the song, and may even be supposed to feel, not without sympathy, that the mighty music says things which were not dreamed of by prophets or apostles.
ON THE RIVER SEIONT, CARNARVONSHIRE—EVENING GLOW
When he reads a lesson, it is plain to see that above all other Gods he loves "the Lord that smiteth." He opens his mouth and rejoices in the rich and massy Welsh. He makes no attempt at mere clear reading, which would be of no use to an imaginative audience, that is familiar with the Bible; but, raising and lowering his voice, now hurrying as if to a precipice where all will be overthrown, now creeping as if he feared what is to come, he makes the chapter anew, creating it as if he were sculptor or musician. I suppose he uses nearly as many musical notes as if he sang; but the result differs from singing, as prose from poetry; and so noble is the prose that it suggests only one possible answer to the question which, like a school-man, he once asked, Whether the music of the spheres be verse or prose? Yet, if the note of the lesson is melancholy, full of the dreariness of moving over the void and creating, the note of the sermon is triumphant, or if not triumphant it is minatory, or if not minatory it is scornful, and at times a listener expects to see him wrapped in a cloud and carried away from an undeserving and purblind race.
The medium of what English people would call his rhetoric is the "hwyl," an exuberant, impassioned, musical modulation of the voice, and, to compare great things with small, comparable to the very finest intoning to which has been added (if we can suppose it) a lyrical, egotistical indulgence in all moods of pity, scorn, tenderness, anger, sorrow, joy, anxiety and hope. It can be familiar or lofty. It is as powerful as harp and song together; and the force of it often arises from the fact that what is heard is rather the musical accompaniment of the man's thought than the thought itself. Hence its terrible and lovely purposes, and the many sentiments with which it is shot, and the dubiousness of the loftier passages, as in the verses which the bards recited before Arthur and only one man understood them, except that they were in Arthur's praise.
I have seen him so thunder that I thought of the Llewelyns and Glyndwr, and forgot that the castles fester no longer with Englishmen, and
aerea ramis
dependet galea et prato gravia arma quiescunt,
and for the moment, thought he was a man. No actor ever stormed and swelled so, because no actor yet played the part which he played. It was a chant; yet it was too uncontrollable for a chant. If you call it declamation, you must admit that to declaim a man shall first go to Medea, that she
Having drawn that weakness from his limbs
Which torpid now and chilly there abode,
Through every vacant artery may force
The green and joyous sap of thriving plants,—
Juice of crushed stalks mixed with their ropy gums,
And purpled bright with strength from berry and grape,
Full of a stinging, swift, and masterful
Vivacity.
For the blood of a declaimer of seventy does not travel so by ordinary ways. Nor can a declaimer, as he does, build up for the imagination an earth, with sky and mountains, within a little chapel, for the sake of showing how the lightning vaults and impales the unjust man. At other times his words rise up and circle and make fantastic architecture, as real as dreams, for the terror of the soul that for the time is forced to dwell therein. And though the substance of his sermon is but anecdote, biblical reference, exhortation, warning, picturesque logic built upon some simple religious theme, men and women weep under this divine bullying. A man, listening outside the chapel, put his hand to his head to make sure that his hat was on, so stiffly his hair stood up.
"Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth....
"He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet.
"And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind.
"He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies...."
Once he paused long, towards the end of a sermon, while the thunder withdrew with a terrible solemnity which he envied; and he did not hesitate to follow the thunder with the words, "It has been said," and so to end.