I
For three days I walked and drove towards Llyn-y-Fan Fach. On the first day I passed through a country of furnaces and mines, and the country had been exquisitely made. The gently swirling lines of hill and valley spoke of the mountains far off, as the little waves and the foam coming up the shore like chain-mail speak of the breakers out in the bay. Every large field that was left unburdened by house or factory had a fair curve in it, and even the odd pieces of land were something more than building sites and suggested their context. But as we passed through, only the highest points gave the curious eye any satisfaction, since the straight lines of houses, the pits and the heaps of refuse, and the enormous factories, obscured the true form of the land. Even so might some survivor of a deluge look upon the fair land he knew; for we lacked the courage to think of hill and valley as having undergone an inevitable change, which in a century might be known to have brought beauty with it, as changes do. Everything was brand-new, but not fresh. A wanton child might have done it all, had he been large and rich and careless enough to do it thus, nec numero nec honore. Or had it been all built to the music of the organ-grinder whom I met playing, for the joy of playing, "The Absent-minded Beggar"? The staring, mottled houses of various stone and brick, which had no character save what comes of perfect lack of character, might have been made by some neglected boy who had only played with penny trains and motor cars and steamers and bicycles. Phlox and foxglove, and sweet-william and snapdragon, and campanula and amber lilies could not make sweet the "rockeries" of hot-looking waste. The streets, named after factory magnates, had been made in long blocks and broken up by the boy, thoughtlessly. The factories themselves, noble as some of the furnaces were by day and night when sweating men moved to and fro before them, were of the same origin. They were mere cavities, and one marvelled that the smoke from their chimneys was permitted to waver and roll in the same way as clouds the most splendid and august. Many were already in places decayed. That they had been glazed only to have the windows pierced by the stones of happy children was all in their favour that could be seen. Their roofs had fallen in, and neither moss nor ivy had had time to grow thereon; the splintered wood was still new and white. Middle-aged men of fifteen and aged men of thirty were in keeping with their ludicrous senility. A millionaire playing at imitating antiquity could have done no worse. The decay was made in Birmingham. Time had been sweated and had done its work very ill. Here and there, indeed, there were scenes which perhaps an unprejudiced mind would have found sublime. There were pools, for example, filled with delicate grass and goldfish amongst it. They were made yesterday, and yet had they fed little brooks for ages they could not have been more shining and serene as sunset poured all its treasury into their depths. Passing one, soon after dawn, and before the night-workers had left the factory, the reeds in it stood up just so that no storied pool had more the trick of antiquity. Near by, one green field, set amidst houses and a factory, was enclosed by abundant but ill-stretched barbed wire, without gate or possible entrance of any kind. In the middle was a tattered notice, warning trespassers. No cloister was ever more inviolate. The grass grew as it liked, and all whom the heavy headstones of the buildings had spared in the rash burial of rural divinities must there have danced; and the grass shone as if with recent festival, and its emptiness hinted at a recent desertion. All the other fields had been carelessly defaced by broken cheap china and tin kettles and rags, and like cattle that have a day to live and are insulted with the smell of their lucky companions' blood, they were dreary and anxious. Footmarks, but not one footpath, crossed them in all directions.... A Battersea kitchen after Christmas is adorned like this land with similar spoiled toys. Their pathos is the same in kind; but here it is worse, because a grown-up person—the original grandeur and antiquity of the land as shown in the one green field—has burst in and marred the completeness of the children's play.
MISTY MORNING, NEAR BARMOUTH
II
At the edge of one village in this country there was a new public-house, the worst of the buildings in the place, because the most impudent. It glittered and stank and was called "The Prince of Wales." Inside, English and some Welsh voices were singing together all of Britain's most loved songs; perhaps "Dolly Gray" predominated, and in its far-floating melody the world-sorrow found a voice; for a harper played on the harp while they sang. The landlord liked to have the harper there, because he drew customers and kept them, and it was clear that he himself, when he had time, loved music, since he took his pipe out of his mouth to hum the last words of a song about a skylark, a dead mother, and some angels. The next song was "The Rising of the Lark," which begins thus:
A LONELY SHORE, BARMOUTH ESTUARY
No one sang except the harper; the landlord frowned, remarked that "Evan was very drunk tonight," and offered to stop the song if we objected, and then began to talk. He said that the harper was a poor sort of man; had been a schoolmaster and was a "scholar"; had been to prison for an unmentioned crime; and was now a man with a wife, whom he supported by odd jobs and by "my own charity, for," explained the host, "I let him have his drinks free." He was fond of his harp, as if it had been a horse or a barrel of beer; and boasted, when drunk, that he knew that he was the sixth of his family who had played the harp, and that same harp, and that he was the last of the true harpers. So we went into the taproom and sat down with fourteen miners and the harper, who was doing his best with "God bless the Prince of Wales."