It is to be remembered that on this tour Johnson lacked the companionship of the faithful Boswell. Yet the scantiness of the diary and its critical attitude cannot be accounted for wholly on this ground, but were due, I think, far more to the fact that the Doctor was thoroughly English in prejudice. Tobias Smollett’s feeling in “Humphrey Clinker,” for example, is even more English and uncomplimentary. All through his tour of the Hebrides, though he denounced Scotland and all things Scottish, called the Scotch liars and their country naked, yet the Doctor had an uneasy conviction of their superiority. As far as Wales was concerned, he simply did not consider this country of Arthur, of bard and of poet, this country of an indestructible nationalism, worthy his serious interest. Had he lived in Shakespeare’s day his concern would have been much greater, his respect more solicitous.
On the first visit to Mr. Myddleton the preservation of the Welsh language had been discussed. In his journal for that date Dr. Johnson wrote, “Myddleton is the only man, who, in Wales, has talked to me of literature.” He was visiting people who, almost universally, were supremely indifferent to Wales and all things Welsh. In other words, he was visiting the upper or ruling classes. It is not so many years ago that the children of the gentry were still not allowed to learn Welsh for fear their English accent might be spoiled. Now, happily, they are taught Welsh, a fact which not only improves the relationship between them and the working classes, but also is contributing generously to a revival of all that is best in Welsh song and literature. Even a prince of the blood royal learns Welsh and speaks it.
Dr. Johnson was in Wales at a time when the intellectual interests of Welshmen were most flagging, that is, just before the introduction of the Welsh Sunday Schools which, with their educational rather than exclusively religious function, gave impulse to a period of modern Welsh literature. Not only in chronology but also in importance, the establishment of the Welsh Sunday School must take precedence of Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations of the “Mabinogion.” Yet what Macpherson’s “Ossian” did for Scotland in the seventies in arousing interest, Lady Guest did for Wales in 1838. It is possible, if one can presuppose the impossible, that with these translations in hand Dr. Johnson’s journal would have been very different. However, one is fearful that, fortified even with Lady Charlotte’s beautiful translations, there would have been passages in the authentic Welsh “Mabinogion” as angrily rejected by him as Macpherson’s imposture was. Johnson said that he never could get the meaning of an Erse song explained to him. He asked a young lady who had sung such a song what it was about, and she replied that it was for the entertainment of the company. He explained that it was its meaning he could not understand, whereupon she answered that it was a love song. And that was all the intelligence, Johnson said, that he could get.
There was strong probability, as a Welsh traveller in 1682 expressed it, of Welsh being “English’d out of Wales, as Latin was barbarously Goth’d out of Italy.” From the time of the Great Rebellion, however, the condition of the Welsh language began to improve, and it is possible greatly to overrate the difficulties with which Johnson met in coming to know the life of the people. Impatiently he had exclaimed, “Let us, if we do talk, talk about something; men and women are my subject of enquiry; let us see how these differ from those we have left behind.” But from any evidence in his journal Johnson did not consider it worth his while to discover how much the Welsh really do differ from the English. The visible physical fact with which he was confronted was the dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-complexioned Welshman of medium stature, very Spanish-looking, sometimes almost Oriental. What he heard were voices quite distinct from the English, quiet and pure in enunciation. What he must have felt—if he felt the Welsh as distinct, except in inferiority—was a race as different as the south is from the north, sensitive, imaginative, excitable, deeply impressionable to everything that is beautiful, as capable of the “howl” as the Irish, yet more critical, of an intellectual independence which makes Roman Catholicism unwelcome to the Welsh, with a shrewdness that is the logic of success in money-getting, a captive race with minds which can never be servile. Yet in a letter to Boswell announcing that he had visited five out of the six counties of North Wales, Dr. Johnson wrote: “Wales is so little different from England, that it offers nothing to the speculation of the traveller.” Johnson was capable, too, of taunting Boswell with the sterility of Scotland. He had a certain strain of contrariness in him, “tonic” some call it, which made him emphasize the undesirable features of a country or a personality. Three years after this journey, forgetting even his interest in castles, he was able to say: “Except the woods of Bachycraigh, what is there in Wales that can fill the hunger of ignorance, or quench the thirst of curiosity?”
[1] Heb Duw, Heb Dym (Without God, Nothing), Duw a’ diggon (God and plenty) would be more correct Welsh and a better translation.
V
Welsh Folk-Lore
Many and attractively full of poetry are the superstitions still living in the solitary Welsh hills. One day I encountered a hillside woman while we were looking for a hilltop church. She was in great distress, breathless and flapping her apron. Now there is a Welsh legend that bees were created in paradise, and her bees were running away. Apparently, this worldly, heartless creature had no intention, if an apron could prevent it, of allowing her bees to go back to heaven. Fairyland is Cambria in Wales, if you will let me juggle with my words in this fashion, for I do not know how to express it otherwise. And yearning for continued love and life, even with the bees, is the breath of the phantom and spirit world called “Fairyland.” Although the instinct of faith in the supernatural may be primitive and the Welsh of to-day highly civilized, yet supernatural belief is still ineradicated among the people. Their childish tales, often so hard to understand, are full of a haunting race life. Conviction, for example, that fairies are the souls of dead mortals, mortals not good enough for heaven or bad enough for hell,—at least the thought is a gentle one, and as such not to be despised. And to their gentle masters the fairies themselves seem to have given an uncommon devotion. If fairies are troublesome, one can sometimes get rid of them by changing one’s residence. But not so with these Welsh fairies! Like the family servant for whom every one longs, they stick closer than a brother. Even going into England will not drive Welsh fairies away from those they love. Matthew Arnold should have considered this when he was studying the Celtic temperament, and denouncing it for its inconstancy, for the essence of all that is Celtic is the Welsh fairy.
One is a little of the opinion of the youth, who, when he first saw the Lady of the Lake, thought she was a goose. That is what I thought of my first fairies, and still think of them. Yet, in this day and generation, it is something to have seen a fairy at all! It was dusk, and I had come through a tiny hill village, where white cottages were gleaming in the dark, and light shining on garden walls. It was so quiet that I could hear pine needles dropping on the ground, and the wind talking in the branches of the rain, still miles distant upon the sea. The noise of a tardy bumblebee, hurrying homeward in the dark, fairly boomed in my ears, and the sounds of shale rock slipping down the hillside came and went mysteriously. Through lighted windows I caught glimpses of evening comfort, of a bright fire glowing with peat, whose aroma was everywhere on the soft air, of dressers and tridarns, brave with countless ornaments, of a grandfather’s clock whose wise old face shone with light, of children’s heads about the supper table.