A Book of North Wales

by S. Baring-Gould

The Welsh are given the character of being untruthful, but with injustice. They are not more so than the Anglo-Saxon of the lower class. Untruthfulness is a product of oppression and injustice, and doubtless the long martyrdom undergone by the Welsh people forced them to equivocate and seek all manner of subterfuges, but this has passed away—both the occasion and the consequence. The consequence does not always become extinguished when the cause has been removed—not at once—but it tends rapidly to disappear.

Mistresses complain in England that their domestics are untruthful. Of course they are, if the authority over them is unjust. Plautus shows us Davus as a liar through every fibre of his soul, but Davus was a slave. If mistresses will treat their servants as part of their family, and trust them, they, in turn, will be true.

Unfortunately, athletic sports are discountenanced by the preachers in the chapels as well as the walking-out of sweethearts; consequently the discipline of the cricket field and the struggle of the football are not for the Welsh, except in a mining district. Football, however, was formerly a favourite pastime among the Welsh, but as it was principally played on Sundays it was put down with stern severity by the Nonconformist preachers.

PISTYLL-Y-CAIN, DOLGELLEY

Religion is an integral part of the life of the Welshman. There is hardly any of that indifference to it which everywhere prevails in England. With us, in a country place, one quarter of the population goes to church, another quarter to chapel, and a half goes nowhere. That half may live, and does live, a respectable, but it is a godless life. That is not the case in Wales. There two-thirds of its population go to the chapels, one-third to church, and an infinitesimal proportion holds aloof from either. Religion enfolds the Welsh man and woman from infancy. It does much to develop in him the faculty of self-government; it moulds his opinions from the earliest age. But the form of religion he has adopted has its disadvantages. It narrows his view, it cuts him off from much that is wholesome and harmless, and limits his world to his sect. The theatre is taboo. I was in a little town of some 1,200 inhabitants, to which came a strolling company of players, with a programme of perfectly wholesome and, indeed, edifying pieces. It expected to reap a harvest of sixpences and shillings, and announced performances for four consecutive evenings. But no sooner were the placards up than in all the seven chapels the ministers denounced “the play” as a snare of the devil, and warned their congregations to eschew it as a step to damnation. One told an anecdote. A young man with whom he was acquainted went to the theatre, resolved to see a play; but, raising his eyes, he saw written up, “This way to the pit.” Then, conscience-stricken, he withdrew. “But,” said the preacher, “every way—gallery, and stall, and box—lead alike to the bottomless pit.”

The result was that no Dissenters went, no Churchmen either, lest they should offend their “weaker brethren” of the chapel, and the poor players departed not having pocketed enough to pay their expenses for a single night.

The Welsh are, however, a people with the dramatic instinct in them, as is the case with all high-strung, sensitive races. In former times they had their “Interludes,” just as the Cornish had their Miracle and secular plays. In Cornwall there exist still the “Rounds”—great amphitheatres of artificial construction, in which plays were wont to be performed in the open air to crowds of spectators. The Wesleyan Revival killed these plays, and the Rounds are now only employed for great preaching bouts.

The Welsh Interludes were poetic compositions, calling forth the abilities of the village composers. A great many of these still exist, not perhaps excellent in dramatic situations, but some of them of no mean poetic value. The Interlude was the direct offspring of the old Morality, and it was allegorical rather than directly dramatic. We have in English, among our peasantry, still a few of these, such as the “Dialogue between the Serving-man and the Gardener,” and a score of altercations in verse, very generally sung, in Cornwall, between a youth and a damsel, who begin by quarrelling, or with the maiden flouting the young man, and end in reconciliation and a trot off hand-in-hand to be married. There is another, once popular in Cornwall, in which the ghost of a maiden appears to her lover and sets him hard riddles, which he answers. Unless he could answer them she would have drawn him to the grave. Another, again, is that of “Richard Malvine,” where the plot consists in an intrigue carried on between a parson and the miller’s wife. The wife pretends to be ill, and sends for her husband.