II
THE old Welsh choirs and singing-parties—and they still do it, though of course foreign music, both the work of the great composers and the ribald stuff of the music halls, is making grand inroads—the old choirs would delight to take such and such a tune for the work of their evening, and sing song after song to it, now a dance, now a war-song, and now a dirge, one after the other; and whichever kind of song they might be singing, you would say that that tune was composed as, and could inevitably be, only suitable for that. You would say that, of course, by its very structure it would be impossible for it to be anything but martial; there was the very pride and beat of war in it; no blood could keep still, no feet forget to march at the sound of it. And then you would change your mind, and know that it could never be anything but a dirge; there as obviously the whole secret of sorrow in it; you were at one, hearing it, with everyone who might be mourning for their dearest dead; and you too, with them, were initiated into marvelous hopes and superhuman certainties and joy—carried out of time wherein men die, into that timelessness wherein they neither die nor are born. And that too would pass, and the singers would bring you into careless summer-evening merriment, and for the life of you, there was no keeping your feet from the shaking and wandering of dance.
One hears the multifold music of the world; the innumerable rhythms and variations of melody; combinations and intricacies many as the thoughts in the minds of terrestrial beings. And of those thoughts themselves, there will be all manner of ranks and no democratic equality. Some will be clansmen, so to say, in the house of merriment, others in the house of grief; mere commonalty of the mind, wearing at any time all the badges of their clan. These are cheap, every-day wayfarers, and stir the same emotion, or bring the same colorlessness, into whatever mind they may enter and whenever they may enter it. Others will be chieftains and tribal leaders, entering with greater circumstance, and imposing a larger subjection. Good or evil, they too bear always their own colors; grief will be grief and joy will be joy; love will be love, and hatred never anything but hatred, of the emotions that follow in their train.
But there are some few archetypal thoughts that you cannot so docket and always rely upon. They are the kings and high bards, standing beyond the limitations of tribe and sept. They will come in what insignia and royal robings they may choose, and rouse up gladness or sorrow, stillness or militancy according to their will. Such thoughts are those of death, of duration, of humanity, of compassion. You have spoken no true nor final word on death, when you have proclaimed him the king of terrors; though indeed, the thought of august death comes often in sorrowful and terrible disguise. Yet behind that dark regalia, what serenity, what unstirred meditative calm, what "peace that passeth all understanding," lie hidden! Compassion, too, comes doubly robed in the purple; dark with the sorrow that is in pity; glowing with the regality and gladness of unity with universal life. It is at once the martial conqueror of the world, boundless in hope and exultation; the sweet ministrant of the wounded, and the mourner at the graves of the fallen.
I think that there are expressions of music that correspond to these supernal and superpersonal thoughts; and that they are in fact simple tunes, and that many of them must be to be found in the folk-music of all nations. They are, as it were, archetypal patterns of song, root rhythms, sprung absolutely from the fountains of feeling, where feeling has not yet been diversified into all its countless forms of pain and delight. I think that the most beautiful of the Welsh airs fall into this class, or into that other corresponding with what we have called the tribal leaders of the thought plane. The Marches of the Men of Harlech, of Glamorgan or Meirionydd—indeed every district in Wales seems to have had its own war-tune in the ancient days—these are always distinctly martial, and there is no possibility of mistaking them or of making them anything else. Y Galon Drom, Anhawdd Ymadael, Morfa Rhuddlan and a thousand others, again, are always dirges; to Gyrru'r Byd o'm Blaen, or to Pwt ar y Bys, you would never dream of doing anything but dance. All have with them a certain distinction and aristocracy in their own kind: about folk-music there is nearly always a bearing and a value, and vulgarity is impossible to the bulk of it. But beyond and higher than these there are those archetypal tunes which stir the source of whatever feeling they may be directed towards; one might mention perhaps Llwyn On the Ash Grove, as a good example. There are hundreds of them among the Welsh airs.
Now the whole point of our inquiry is this—what was the creative or directing mind that brought these things to be? It was not the bard who first chanted the song; it was no one of the thousands of singers who modified and modified it as they passed it on, until presently the fixed tune was evolved, and changes and modifications ceased. These were all instruments in its evolution; but there was also an evolver. For it was brought, if indeed it is a primeval and radical thing, to no haphazard conclusion. The music that you make up is one thing; the music of the spheres is another: though it might happen indeed, that sitting down to compose, there should be revealed to you a measure from the music of the spheres. No doubt that would have happened occasionally—probably only occasionally—with the great transcendent geniuses of music: but then, there was no great transcendent genius, neither Wagner nor Bach nor Beethoven, concerned in the making of the folk-tune. We can posit the soul of Beethoven, wrapt up into the universal soul, hearing immortal immeasurable things, and after, producing some fragment of them in a sonata or a symphony! But what soul was it here, who heard the rhythm and measure of the star-music, and what the mountains are singing in their hearts to make them eternal, and the song that drives the rivers and the rain, and the bardic carol of the sun, and the ineffable yearning of the souls of men, upward towards their divinity and evolutionary destined grandeur—who heard, and set all these things bleakly and magnificently down in the folk-song? I will not apologize for speaking of the folk-song and the sonata in one breath: of the gods also are the mountain and the pansy.
Do we not see here the working of a Soul greater than that of any individual; the soul of the nation; the God that is this people or that? His compositions are marked by a unity, as are those of any composer: you can tell an Irish Air at a hearing, or a Welsh Air. And He, or It, reveals through them greater and deeper things than are known to any individual among his people; ancient memories that they may have wholly forgotten; aspirations after spiritual glories which not one of them may have ever foreseen or hoped for. So all the deepest things that are in the national consciousness may be poured through the playing of these composerless compositions; and we cannot doubt that they remain a most potent link between the people and its hidden divinity.