A Book of North Wales

by S. Baring-Gould

It is not my intention to describe scenery, perhaps because as I have not slept on Cader Idris I lack the proper afflatus, but also because that of Cader Idris and of the Mawddach valley has exercised better pens than mine.

Instead of dilating on the scenery I will here give a few remarks on the characteristics of the Welsh people, for whom I entertain a great liking.

The Englishman accustomed to life in country districts cannot fail to be impressed with the intellectual superiority of the Welsh peasant to the English country bumpkin. The Welsh of the labourer and small farmer class are brighter, quicker, keener than those occupying the same position in Saxon land. The working man has an intellect higher developed than the little farmer in England. This, in a measure, is due to his being bilingual. The acquisition of a second tongue undoubtedly gives flexibility to his mind. No English labourer dreams of learning another language than his own, but the Welsh peasant must do this, and this fact gives to his mind aptitude for fresh acquisitions, and affords a spur to learning. He reads more, above all, thinks more. He leads an inner life of thought and feeling; he is more impulsive and more sensitive. He is more susceptible to culture, more appreciative of what is poetical and beautiful, and does not find in buffoonery the supreme delight of life.

The horse-play, the boisterous revelry that characterise the enjoyment of country Hodge and Polly, as well as town-bred ’Arry and ’Arriet, when taking a holiday, are never present on a similar occasion among the Welsh. The great gatherings of the latter are their Eisteddfods, and not races and football matches. They assemble in thousands to hear music and poetry, and such gatherings are entirely free from the vulgarities and riot of a collection of Anglo-Saxons out for a junketing.

A friend of mine, an incumbent for many years in a purely Welsh parish, who was transferred at length to one that was more than half English, remarked on the difference to me.

There had been an entertainment in a neighbouring place, and the English performers had given music-hall songs of a vulgar type, not without double entendres, which were rapturously applauded by those of the audience who were of English blood, whereas the Welsh sat mute and disgusted. And my friend said to me, “Such an entertainment would have been impossible in a purely Welsh village. The Welshman has a sense of decorum and a higher standard of taste, which would make him shrink from such an exhibition. But possibly it may be this coarseness and animality that have made the Englishman so masterful and so successful. It is the outward token of the tremendous vital force within, that makes him carry everything before him, undeterred by shyness, unhampered by sensitiveness, the qualities which hold back the Celt from the rough-and-tumble struggle of life.”

It is the old story of the round-heads and the long-heads, as revealed to us by the barrows on our wolds and moors. The most ancient inhabitants of Britain had well-developed skulls, with plenty of brains in them; had delicate chins and finely formed jaws, every token that the race was one of a gentle, highly strung quality. But it was trampled under foot by an invasion of round-heads, bullet-shaped skulls, with beetling brows, and jaws that speak of brute force.

That the Welsh are more moral than the English cannot be maintained. The Celtic idea of marriage was not that of the German, and woman in Celtic lands did not stand so high in dignity and in popular esteem as Tacitus shows us was the case among the Teutons. The Welsh laws allowed a man to divorce his wife and marry another if she were unfruitful, and for other reasons that seem to us frivolous.

A Welsh courtship is not conducted in the same manner as in England. There is not, or rather was not till recently, any walking-out of couples together; that was denounced from the chapel pulpits as indecorous. But with the consent or connivance of the parents of a young woman the suitor would come at night to the window of the damsel he affected, and scratch at it with a stick or throw at it a little gravel. Then she would descend, open the door, and the pair would spend the greater part of the night together on the sofa in the parlour, with, as a young man who had gone through the experience informed me, a bottle of whisky, a Bible, and a currant cake on the table before them. Some deny the whisky, some the Bible, but all allow that refreshment is necessary when the session is carried on to the small hours of the morning.