“Certainly,” was the answer.
“Well, but look you,” said the unblushing old culprit, “I would not take a dozen new sermons like yours for this one old sermon of mine.”
“No, nor I,” chimed in a gruff old deacon. “Oh yes, and look you, I should like to hear it again; but as for yours, I never heard it before, and I do not want to hear it again.”
But then the Language! Of course the language had a great deal to do with this preaching power, we do not mean generally, but particularly; on all hands the Welsh is acknowledged to be a wonderful language. A Welshman will tell you that there is no language like it on the face of the earth, but that is a testimony borne by many scholars who are not Welshmen; perhaps there is no other language which so instantly conveys a meaning and at the same time touches emotion to the quick. True, like the Welshman himself, it is bony, and strangers to its power laugh somewhat ignorantly at its never-ending succession of consonants. Somebody has said that the whole language is as if it were made up of such words as our word “strength,” and if the reader will compare in his mind the effect of the word power as contrasted with the word strength, he will feel something of the force of the language, and its fitness for the purposes of impression; but still this conveys but a poor idea of its great attributes.
It is so literal that the competent hearer, or reader, instantly realizes, from its words, things. Well do we remember sitting in Wales with a group of Welsh ministers and Welshmen round a pleasant tea-table; we were talking of the Welsh language, and one of our company, who had perhaps done more than any one of his own country for popular Welsh literature, and was one of the order of eminent Welsh preachers of whom we are speaking, broke forth: “Oh!” he said, “you English people cannot see all the things in your Bible that a Welshman can see; now your word ‘blessed,’ it seems a very dear sweet thing to an Englishman and to a Welshman, but a Welshman sees the thing in the word, ‘Gwyn ei fyd,’ that is, ‘a white world—white,’ literally, white their world; so a Welshman would see there is a ‘white world’ for the pure in heart, a ‘white world’ for the poor in spirit, a ‘white world’ for them who are reviled and persecuted for righteousness’ sake; and when you read, ‘Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity,’ the Welshman reads his Bible and sees there is a ‘white world’ for such a one, that is, all sin wiped out, the place quite clean, to begin again.”
This is not all. We are not intending to devote any considerable space to a vindication of the Welsh language, but, when we speak of it with reference to the effects it produces as the vehicle of Oratory, it is necessary to remark that, so far from being,—as many have supposed who have only looked at it in its strange combination of letters on a page, perhaps unable to read it, and never having heard it spoken,—so far from being harsh and rugged, coarse or guttural, it probably yields to no language in delicious softness, in melting sweetness; in this it has been likened to the Italian language by those who have been best able to judge. Lord Lyttleton, in his “Letters from Wales,” says, that when he first passed some of the Welsh hills, and heard the harp and the beautiful female peasants accompanying it with their melodious voices, he could not help indulging in the idea that he had descended the Alps, and was enjoying the harmonious pleasures of the Italian Paradise. And as we have already said, there has long prevailed an idea that the Welsh language is a multitude of consonants; but indeed the reverse is the case; the learned Eliezer Williams says, in his “Historical Anecdotes of the Welsh Language,” “The alphabet itself demonstrates that the charge of a multiplicity of consonants is fallacious, since, whether the number of letters be reckoned twenty-two or twenty-four, seven are vowels; there remain therefore a more inconsiderable number than most of the European languages are obliged to admit . . . . Y and w are considered as vowels, and sounded as such; w is pronounced like o u in French in the word oui.” To persons ignorant of the language, how strange is the appearance, and how erroneous the idea of the sound to be conveyed by dd, ll, ch, but indeed all these are indications of the softening of the letter; in a word, the impressions entertained of the harshness of the language are altogether erroneous.
The supposition that the Welsh language is made up of consonants is more especially singular from the fact that it possesses, says a writer in the Quarterly Review, what perhaps no other nation has,—a poem of eight lines in which there is not a single consonant. These verses are very old, dating from the seventeenth century;—of course the reader will remember that the Welsh language has seven vowels, both w and y being considered and sounded as such. This epigram or poem is on the Spider, and originally stood thus,—
“O’i wiw ŵy i weu e â;—o’i iau Ei wyau a wea,
E wywa ei wê aua, A’i weau yw ieuau ia.”
To this, the great Gronwy Owen added a kind of counter change of vowels, and the translation has been given as follows:—
“From out its womb it weaves with care
Its web beneath the roof;
Its wintry web it spreadeth there—
Wires of ice its woof.“And doth it weave against the wall
Thin ropes of ice on high?
And must its little liver all
The wondrous stuff supply?”