As regards the musical scale, this hwyl is mainly monotonous; there is another kind or direction of scale in it, depending on the varying vowel sounds, which, though you chant them upon one musical note, have a certain rise and fall in them proper to themselves. If one imagines the scale of do, re, mi, fa, and the rest as being in a vertical line; then this scale of a, e, i, o, oo, etc., would fall horizontally; we can think of no better way of making a likeness for it. The richness of the vowels will make the music, and therefore the poetry. One can see this by comparing two lines, both popularly supposed to be poetry.
I am monarch of all I survey;
there is no music in that, and if one should attempt to put the hwyl into it, he would be guilty of the sin of untruth, which is the greatest of the crimes against poetry, according to the ancient doctrine of the bards.
I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown
And one would be guilty of the same sin, should one repeat that lifelessly, and without the hwyl that existed around the mind of Keats before the line took verbal form, and out of which magical and alchemic element it was precipitated.
The bard, then, chants his poem, and the words are noted down, and pass from mouth to mouth; and as they pass, the horizontal scale takes on gradually some coloring of the vertical scale, and the chant becomes more and more a tune. The process is natural, and dependent upon no brain-mind; no composer gets to work upon it, and no one inserts in it consciously any ideas of his own. The Dorian mode, which (we quote from Mrs. Mary Davies, an authority on Welsh music) has a minor third as well as a minor seventh; and the Aeolian or la mode, in which the third as well as the sixth and seventh are minor, are still largely in use in Wales; and we believe that these two modes represent a stage in the passing of the chanted poem, or the chant of the poem, into the full-fledged folk-tune. For one will sometimes hear an air which, in the printed collections is given in the arbitrary modern major or minor scales, sung a little differently, according to these older modes; and it would appear that all or nearly all the well-known Welsh national tunes have passed through such or similar stages.
It is here worthy of note that the Welsh hwyl—which is used not only in poetry, but in all the higher levels of prose as well, particularly in pulpit rhetoric—is not found, we believe, elsewhere in Europe, at any rate as a popular custom (for all poets chant and do not say their verses); but it is to be heard in Morocco, along the coast of Northern Africa, in Arabia, Persia, and throughout the East; where also certain of these older modes of music, such as the Dorian, are said to be in vogue to some extent. We imagine that the chant and the music-modes both vary as they go eastward; but it is a gradual growth or differentiation, not an abrupt change. The Persian poet, chanting his Hafiz, and the Welsh preacher, giving out the hymn, have much more in common with each other than either has with the modern conventional drawing-room reciter.
And then there is the national air, the last stage in the growth of that which began with some village bard's arrangement of his deep vowels and diphthongs. Long ago the words were forgotten, or lost all connexion with the tune they gave birth to; because at a certain stage the harpers took the tune up, and sang whatever words to it they might make up for the occasion. Such a tune as All through the Night, for example, would set out with such and such a bard on his wanderings. He would come to a wedding, and play it there, singing extempore verses to it filled full of joy and merriment. Then he would come to a house where there might be one newly dead; and his tune would again be called for; now it would be a dirge laden with mystical wailing and the joy that hides behind wailing. At the village fair it would appear as a dance; in the house of the warward chieftain it would ring and clamor with all the pomp and surging and uplift of the old wild, Quixotic, ridiculous wars. There would be different songs for it on each occasion; one hardly troubled much with the preservation of them, for song was a thing that a gentleman could call upon himself for at any time. Why keep the songs you sang today, when tomorrow you would surely sing other songs as good? Poetry was of all things the cheapest and most general where every other man, as you might say, was a poet.
One hears this kind of thing at the present day. Very few of the Welsh national tunes have any traditional words to them. If there is any special song attached to this tune or that, it will probably be the work of Ceiriog, who may be called the Robert Burns of Wales, or of some individual bard in the last two or three centuries, who sang such and such words to the tune on such an occasion, or in whose tragic or amusing history those words and that tune blended were pivotal, and have passed into a popular tradition.
Generally speaking, the words sung to all these airs are what are called Pennillion—hen bennillion, old verses; a kind of traditional folk-poetry arising no one knows from whom, and commemorating popular wisdom, historical events, personal peculiarities and eccentricities of long dead countryside celebrities, the beauties and delights of this or that locality, and so on. There will be war-songs, love-songs, dance-songs, dirges and nature-songs; a pennill on the three best dancers of Wales, and a pennill on the three prized things of three neighboring villages: the yews of Bettws, the bridge at Llandeilo, the sacred well at Llandybie. Unnumbered are these pennillion; perhaps more many than the tunes themselves to which they may be sung.