“Cleanliness is with me so near to godliness that it is not remarkable that in my hurry I mistook one for the other.”
So we went on and climbed Cader Idris, and found the ancient grave of rocks in a mystic circle, whose meaning lies buried with the last Druid, who would perhaps have told you they were—
“Seats of stone nevir hewin with mennes hand
But wrocht by Nature as it ane house had bene
For Nymphes, goddis of floudes and woodis grene.”
And we saw afar the beautiful scene, “where fluddes rynnys in the foaming sea,” as Gawain Douglas sings, and where, between the fresh water and salt, stands a village, even where it stood in earliest Cymric prehistoric dawn, and the spot where ran the weir in which the prince who was in grief because his weir yielded no fish, at last fished up a poet, even as Pharaoh’s daughter fished out a prophet. I shall not soon forget that summer day, nor the dream-like panorama, nor the ancient grave; nor how the younger professor lay down on the seat of stone nevir hewin with mennes hand, and declared he had a nap,—just enough to make him a poet. To prove which he
wrote a long poem on the finding of Taliesin in the nets, and sent it to the Aberystwith newspaper; while I, not to be behindhand, wrote another, in imitation of the triplets of Llydwarch Hen, which were so greatly admired as tributes to Welsh poetry that they were forthwith translated faithfully into lines of consonants, touched up with so many w’s that they looked like saws; and they circulated even unto Llandudno, and, for aught I know, may be sung at Eistedfodds, now and ever, to the twanging of small harps,—in sœcula sæculorum. Truly, the day which had begun with a witch ended fitly enough at the tomb of a prophet poet.
III. THE GYPSIES AT ABERYSTWITH.
Aberystwith is a little fishing-village, which has of late years first bloomed as a railway-station, and then fruited into prosperity as a bathing-place. Like many parvenus, it makes a great display of its Norman ancestor, the old castle, saying little about the long centuries of plebeian obscurity in which it was once buried. This castle, after being woefully neglected during the days when nobody cared for its early respectability, has been suddenly remembered, now that better times have come, and, though not restored, has been made comely with grass banks, benches, and gravel walks, reminding one of an Irish grandfather in America, taken out on a Sunday with “the childher,” and looking “gintale” in the clean shirt and whole coat unknown to him for many a decade in Tipperary. Of course the castle and the wealth, or the hotels and parade, are well to the fore, or boldly displayed, as Englishly as possible, while the little Welsh town shrinks quietly into the hollow behind. And being new to prosperity, Aberystwith is also a little muddled as to propriety. It would regard with horror the idea of allowing ladies and gentlemen to bathe together, even though completely clad; but it sees nothing out of the way when gentlemen in pre-fig-leaf costume disport themselves, bathing just before the young ladies’ boarding-school and the chief
hotel, or running joyous races on the beach. I shall never forget the amazement and horror with which an Aberystwithienne learned that in distant lands ladies and gentlemen went into the water arm in arm, although dressed. But when it was urged that the Aberystwith system was somewhat peculiar, she replied, “Oh, that is a very different thing!”
On which words for a text a curious sermon might be preached to the Philistiny souls who live perfectly reconciled to absurd paradoxes, simply because they are accustomed to them. Now, of all human beings, I think the gypsies are freest from trouble with paradoxes as to things being different or alike, and the least afflicted with moral problems, burning questions, social puzzles, or any other kind of mental rubbish. They are even freer than savages or the heathen in this respect, since of all human beings the Fijian, New Zealander, Mpongwe, or Esquimaux is most terribly tortured with the laws of etiquette, religion, social position, and propriety. Among many of these heathen unfortunates the meeting with an equal involves fifteen minutes of bowing, re-bowing, surre-bowing, and rejoinder-bowing, with complementary complimenting, according to old custom, while the worship of Mrs. Grundy through a superior requires a half hour wearisome beyond belief. “In Fiji,” says Miss C. F. Gordon Cumming, “strict etiquette rules every action of life, and the most trifling mistake in such matters would cause as great dissatisfaction as a breach in the order of precedence at a European ceremonial.” In dividing cold baked missionary at a dinner, especially if a chief be present, the host committing the least mistake as to helping the proper guest to the proper piece in the proper way would
find himself promptly put down in the menu. In Fiji, as in all other countries, this punctilio is nothing but the direct result of ceaseless effort on the part of the upper classes to distinguish themselves from the lower. Cannibalism is a joint sprout from the same root; “the devourers of the poor” are the scorners of the humble and lowly, and they are all grains of the same corn, of the devil’s planting, all the world over. Perhaps the quaintest error which haunts the world in England and America is that so much of this stuff as is taught by rule or fashion as laws for “the élite” is the very nucleus of enlightenment and refinement, instead of its being a remnant of barbarism. And when we reflect on the degree to which this naïve and child-like faith exists in the United States, as shown by the enormous amount of information in certain newspapers as to what is the latest thing necessary to be done, acted, or suffered in order to be socially saved, I surmise that some future historian will record that we, being an envious people, turned out the Chinese, because we could not endure the presence among us of a race so vastly our superiors in all that constituted the true principles of culture and “custom.”