What is the meaning of this unique festival of poetry and song? Mr. Lloyd George, who had escaped from the din of battle outside, and the jeers of the Goths and Vandals who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand the Fourth Form, said, amidst laughter, that there was no budget to raise taxes for the upkeep of the Eisteddfod. Then he continued, “The bards are not compelled by law to fill up forms. There is no conscription to raise an army from the ranks of the people to defend the Eisteddfod’s empire in the heart of the nation. And yet, after the lapse of generations, the Eisteddfod is more alive than ever. Well, of what good is she? I will tell you one thing—she demonstrates what the democracy of Wales can do at its best. The democracy has kept her alive; the democracy has filled her chairs; the sons of the democracy compete for her honours. I shall never forget my visit to the Llangollen Eisteddfod two years ago. When crossing the hills between Flintshire and the valley of the Dee, I saw their slopes darkened with the streams of shepherds and cottagers and their families going towards the town. What did they go to see? To see a man of their nation honoured for a piece of poetry.… And the people were as quick to appreciate the points as any expert of the Gorsedd, and wonderfully responsive to every lofty thought.” Yes, unlike any other gathering in the world, the Eisteddfod is all that. Long ago in the latter half of the eighteenth century Iolo Morganwg stated the objects of Welsh bardism,—“to reform the morals and customs; to secure peace; to praise (or encourage) all that is good or excellent.” This national festival is the popular university of the people, it is the centre of Welsh nationalism, the feast of Welsh brotherhood. Only listened to in this spirit can one understand what it means when an Eisteddfodic throng, after the crowning of the bard, rises to sing “Hen Wlad fy Nhadau,”—
“Old land that our fathers before us held dear.”
VIII
Cambrian Cottages
In the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” from the “Mabinogion,” one of the great books of the imaginative literature of the world, it is not a very pleasant picture which we get of a Welsh home. Yet the Welsh cottage home of to-day is a treasure of beauty and orderliness. Doubtless this picture from the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” in its realistic detail, making allowances for certain Norman influences at work upon the various stories of the “Mabinogion,” is a true one. The strength and rustiness of the colouring of the house of Heilyn Goch, the blackness of the old hall, the upright gable out of the door of which poured the household smoke, the floor inside full of puddles and slippery with the mire of cattle, the boughs of holly spread on the floor, and at one side of the hall an old hag making a fire, the yellow calf-skin it was a privilege for any one to get upon, the barley bread and cheese and milk which, after the people of the house had entered,—a ruddy, curly-headed man with faggots on his back, and a pale slender woman,—they were given to eat;—all, I say, forms a picture rude, coarse, strong in its primitive detail of twelfth-century Cymric household life. Something more, too, it suggests. As Matthew Arnold says, “The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the ‘Mabinogion,’ is how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the side of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely.”
There are other pictures, too, in the “Mabinogion” of early Welsh household life, pictures which one must question because of their luxury and general magnificence, features evidently due to the strong Norman influence one finds at work almost throughout these stories. No picture could be more rich and more beautiful than that in the “Dream of Maxen Wledig,” where Helen is found by the Emperor’s messenger sitting in the old castle hall at Carnarvon. These are the tales of the splendid, barbaric youth of a people, filled with the vividness, the crowding, the vitality of youth, and touched to an even more magnificent beauty by another hand which was deliberate and Norman—stories divinely disregardful of what might have been intelligible; in their mystery and wonder full of the life of the young. Barbaric touches, magic, fantastic elements, crude life, gorgeous colouring,—all this and thrice more than this does one find in the “Mabinogion.”
At first dreaming,—for dream one must over the cottages of Wales if one is ever truly to enter them,—these homes of a more recent time would seem to have suffered a loss in vividness, in interest, so immeasurable that there could be no gain to balance against it. Gone are the mystery and the semblance of splendour; the sense of adventure and the strong, wild life of these earlier centuries are forever vanished. Yes, gone they are, and gone they were before ever a rédacteur took down one of the tales of the “Mabinogion” from report that was already becoming but tradition. Purposely did I select the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” for not only in closeness to human reality, but also in architectural detail, do I believe it to be an exact picture of early Welsh home life. After the sordid picture of the hall, the description of the rainstorm comes but as a reinforcing touch of truthfulness: “And there arose a storm of wind and rain, so that it was hardly possible to go forth with safety. And being weary with their journey, they laid themselves down and sought sleep. And when they looked at the couch, it seemed to be made but of a little coarse straw … with the stems of boughs sticking therethrough, for the cattle had eaten all the straw that was placed at the head and at the foot. And upon it was stretched an old russet-coloured rug, threadbare and ragged; and a coarse sheet, full of slits, was upon the rug, and an ill-stuffed pillow, and a worn-out cover upon the sheet. And after much suffering from … the discomfort of their couch, a heavy sleep fell on Rhonabwy’s companion. But Rhonabwy, not being able either to sleep or to rest, thought he should suffer less if he went to lie upon the yellow calf-skin that was stretched out on the floor. And there he slept.” Undoubtedly here even the slit sheet is a touch of Norman elegance.
In the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” not in the far more beautiful “Dream of Maxen Wledig,” with its elaborate interior descriptions, do we find something like prototype for the Welsh cottage of to-day: the fire made against the gable end, even as it is now in the cottages, the sleeping accommodations at the opposite ends. This is the arrangement still of the vast majority of the cottages. Originally probably there were no windows other than, it may be, little slits—“wind-eyes” they were called with that relevant quaintness characteristic of early speech—such as we see to this day in old Welsh barns. In the “Mabinogion” story of Geraint, with its white stag, its divergent sense of the forest and of a bustling town life and the beautiful Gwenhwyvar, there is reference to glass windows: “And one morning in the summer time they were upon their couch, and Geraint lay upon the edge of it. And Enid was without sleep in the apartment, which had windows of glass. And the sun shone upon the couch. And the clothes had slipped from off his arms and his breast, and he was asleep. Then she gazed upon the marvellous beauty of his appearance, and she said, ‘Alas, and I am the cause that these arms and this breast have lost their glory and the war-like fame which they once so richly enjoyed.’” Are any lines in Tennyson’s “Enid” taken from this “Mabinogion” tale, that story upon which Tennyson’s widest popularity was founded, more vivid than this beautiful romantic touch? Undoubtedly these glass windows which revealed the manly beauty of Geraint in overthrow were glass lattices. They could not have been very common, and considerably later they were followed by wooden lattices in general use in the Welsh cottage, and still occasionally to be found to-day. I have found them several times in the dairy-rooms of old cottages in North Wales. Norman influence was at work in this story of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century from the “Mabinogion.” Sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century it was that the lattice window of the cottage came in, nor did it go out of use until the end of the seventeenth century. The window was a double frame—just as it is most frequently now—filled with woven diamond lattice. Within were wooden shutters opening inwards. A distant view or sketch of the leaded panes of to-day or of the diamond lattice of a long ago yesterday reveals no difference between the two, so closely has the type of window been kept, as, for example, the little, old-style windows of Beddgelert and Carnarvon.