Gruffydd was more heroic, and it brought forth more numerous and more musical poets. When Owen Gwynedd baffled the attempts of Henry II., his praises were sung by many poets besides Gwalchmai and Cynddelw. His ally, Rhys ab Gruffydd, was celebrated by his poets Seisyll and the White Bard of Brecon. Two princes were poets as well as leaders of armies, -Howel ab Owen Gwynedd, and Owen Cyfeiliog, the accomplished and patriotic prince of Powys. Cynddelw lived to join the host of poets who sang of the victories and of the power of Llywelyn the Great. And among these there was at least one,-Dafydd Benfras, -who was among the still greater number of the poets who thronged into the court of the last Llywelyn. There is a tradition, -the shadow of later legislation thrown back upon Edward's time, that the conqueror caused the Welsh bards to be massacred. It is true that the conquest caused literary stagnation for nearly half a century, and Gruffydd ab yr Ynad Coch (Gruffydd the son of the Red Justice) Red Justice) mourned, a lonely figure between the two periods, the fall of the last Llywelyn. The conquest of Wales put an end to Welsh prose as well as to Welsh poetry. Brut y Tywysogion, written at Aber Conway or Strata Florida, is brought to an abrupt end in 1282. the princes, and to have aimed at developing a literature unconnected with politics. They met in three famous eisteddfods, and it was soon apparent that the spent strength of the struggle for independence was revived in a passionate love for all that was beautiful in the Wales of the time. Among a bright host of poets, Rhys Goch stands pre-eminent for his descriptions of the beauty of Glamorgan, and Dafydd Nanmor for his charming and pure descriptions of women. The most famous of all is Dafydd ab Gwilym, representing all the clements of the Golden Age,-pathos and naturalness, love of woman's beauty and a still more passionate delight in the beauty of nature, artistic delight in colour and a wide sympathy which gives wisdom to his counsels and geniality to his satire. While Dafydd ab Gwilym was gathering all flowers to lay on golden Ivor's tomb, younger poets and students were flocking under the banner of Owen Glendower. Love and beauty were still sung, but lit erature became more earnest and into closer connection with the political and social problems of the time. With Iolo Goch, the poetry of the Golden Age becomes martial again. Iolo sings the praises of Owen Glendower, and, like contemporary English poets, idealises the labourer and describes the plough. With the death of Owen Glendower, Welsh poetry again lost its martial character, and an attempt was made at returning to the love poetry of Dafydd ab Gwilym. But the old naturalness was gone, and it was in vain that Dafydd ab Edmund, in the Carmarthen eisteddfod of 1451, tried to revise poetry by enforcing a code of rigid laws of alliteration. Early in the fifteenth century the last unmistakable notes of the Golden Age were struck by Tudur Aled, one of the greatest and the last of the poets of mediæval Wales. The Golden Period is characterised by intensity and by variety. During the poetical life of Dafydd ab Gwilym there was an outburst of song that, for the intensity of delight in all earthly beauty, has never been equalled in the literature of Wales. Birds, flowers, and beautiful women take the place of priests and knights. The poet no longer lingers over battle-scenes or over the death-scenes of princes, he is watching the mountain mist, or the morning lark, or the seagull "like a lily bathed in dew." His hours of prayer are no longer spent in a monastery, he describes the grander monastery of the forest. The delight in the beauty of nature was, perhaps, too intense to last; but it produced descriptions of nature and of woman's beauty that are the glory of the literature of mediæval Wales. As the Golden Period is characterised by intensity while at its best, it is characterised by variety during its rise, and especially during its decline. The exquisitely tender love-poems of Dafydd Nanmor and the stirring war odes of Gruffydd Llwyd, the ruggedness of the northern Rhys Goch and the melody of the southern, the boisterous horse-play of Guto'r Glyn and the polished satire of Lewis Glyn Cothi, the licentiousness of Madog Dwygraig and the religious earnestness of Sion Cent, -we find them all during a short but very prolific period. The accession of the Tudors and their attempts at Anglicising Wales precipitated still tinged with poetic eloquence, the Welsh Bible was translated. A new beginning. After the accession of the Tudors a great change comes over Welsh literature. It begins anew, its poets seems to belong to a wholly different race. The ease and melody and grandeur have disappeared; and we are among minor poets who are trying to manufacture poetry with infinite labour, slavishly observing the elaborate rules laid down by their greater and nobler predecessors. Occasionally the description of nature, by the sheer exhaustiveness of minute painting, rises into poetry; but the successors of Tudur Aled and Gruffudd Hiraethog abound in common-places, in redundancies, and in exceedingly prosaic descriptions, dulness long drawn out in order to satisfy the inexorable rules of alliteration. A A new class had taken possession of Welsh literature. The higher classes had been drawn, by the Tudor policy, into the literary as well as into the political life of England. In higher and official circles, Welsh literature was as much discouraged as it had been encouraged before. worldly reward for him in the new times, Welsh poet complains that there is no henceforth the delight in Welsh poetry must be its own reward. The higher classes were amply rewarded for their desertion of the literature of their own country, they saw the Welsh soldier and the Welsh gentleman honoured in English literature, they saw Lear and the radiant Cymbeline and Owen Glendower described by the greatest of English dramatists. the decline of the Golden Period. Tudur Aled is the last great figure of the age of true poetry. We find him at the Caerwys eisteddfod of 1524, but if his poems showed that an age of giants had gone, most of the poets who surrounded him showed that an age of dwarfs was coming. There were sure signs of decline. One was the elaboration of alliterative rules, now so complicated that technical skill inevitably took the place of the old naturalness. Another sign of decline was the appearance of grammars and dictionaries, invariably the products of a declining age. Still another was the presence of the satirist, the satirical triads mostly belong to the degenerating time. One The influence of the poetry of the Golden other sign of decline I might mention, Age was great and lasting. It is true that the perfection of prose style. The poetry little of it The poetry little of it was printed; but every poet of the Golden Period was developing, or made a copy, for his own use, of some of degenerating, into prose. In the middle of the most famous odes of Dafydd ab Gwilym this development, while prose style was and his immediate successors. At the end The Welsh people, unable to understand the language of their rulers and deserted by their own leaders, began to develope a new literature of their own. This new literature rose under two influences,--that of earlier Welsh literature, and that of contemporary English literature. of his book of treasures, the peasant poet, with becoming modesty, wrote feeble imitations of his own. The poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries successfully imitated the form of the older poetry, but it was at rare intervals that a poet like Huw Morus caught echoes of their music. It was only once perhaps, and that on the eve of the new period, that their grandeur is found,-in Goronwy Owen. of 1536-1730. The influence of contemporary The Period English literature was still greater. Translations. Educated Welshmen pitied the ignorance and superstition of their countrymen; and, during the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the popular pious books of England were translated into Welsh, very often into perfect Welsh prose. In Elizabethan times, in addition to the Bible and the English Book of Common Prayer, Bishop Jewel's Apology for the Church of England was translated by Morus Cyffin. In Puritan times Rowland Vaughan translated Bishop Bailey's Practice of Piety. And when Puritanism had been driven from power, Stephen Hughes gave Welshmen Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. One characteristic of the period of translations is the unbroken decline of the old alliterative Welsh poetry. The bards of the second eisteddfod of Caerwys, 1568, had something of the old grace; the poets of the seventeenth century could make their alliterative lines exceedingly musical; but, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the alliterative poetry had sunk to the lowest depths of prosaic bathos, and the only characteristics of a bard were a knowledge of alliterative rules and beautiful penmanship. At the same time, as is always the case, prose style was rapidly developing, and, it reached its perfection in Theophilus Evans' Mirror of the Chief Ages, and in Ellis Wyn's Bard of Sleep. Prose at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in Charles Edwards' History of the Unfeigned Faith and Morgan Llwyd's Book of the Three Birds, is poetical and eloquent, often obscure from excess of imagination; at the end of the century it is terse, clear, and picturesque. It would be unjust, however, to regard the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or centuries of no originality. It was a period of translation, of apprenticeship, but it often strikes a note prophetic of the period that is to follow. Sion Tudur describes contemporary Elizabethan life, and may almost be regarded as the first student of the life of Wales in all its aspects; Rees Prichard, ignoring the beauty of the literary language that had been the language of the prince and his poet, wrote living verses in the dialect of the vale of Towy; Edward Morris, followed by Edward Richard and Richard and William Wynn, threw aside the fetters of alliteration, and wrote poems which are hardly equalled, even in the Period of Awakening, for melody and grace. During the period of translations the influence of Welsh literature on England was slight as compared with the mighty influence of Welsh mediæval literature; still George Herbert helped to give English thought the religious meditation which is so characteristic of Wales, and Henry Vaughan did much to call the attention. of Englishmen to a beauty they had not yet seen, the beauty of wild nature. The Awakening, 1730-. When the eighteenth century was about half way through, there were unmistakable signs of a new life in Wales. The desire for education was shown by the numbers who crowded into Griffidd Jones' evening schools. The "awakening," as it is fitly called, first took a literary form. Dr. W. O. Pughe made educated Welshmen revere their own language. Owen Myfyr spent his hardly-won fortune in collecting Welsh manuscripts. Lewis Morris appealed to the people, now awake to the beauty of With Twm or Nant, barns his songs. were turned into theatres, and Welsh literature seemed to be on the point of developing into the drama. But there was another and a mightier element. A religious revival, of unexampled fervour, had followed Howell Harris' steps. Charles of Bala organised a Sunday school system. So theology became the most important part of the revived and regenerated thought of Wales. It was at first austere and uninviting, but the burning desire for salvation made men pore patiently over bulky "bodies of divinity" and endless theological magazine literature. The discussion of divinity doctrines, carried on enthusiastically in the Sunday schools and during leisure hours, gave exactly the same training as the study of Formal Logic would have given. Before long these two elements, the literary and the theological,-were united. The beauty of the one was added to the strength of the other. Theology was turned into poetry by preacher and hymnwriter: it ceased to be mere definitions, it was given life. The hymn was at first very religious and very wooden; but its development, under the influence of the passion of a people naturally literary, was very rapid. Williams of Pant y Celyn, a farmer in the Vale of Towy, threw into hundreds of hymns the religious experience of one who had an insatiable curiosity, and a poet's delight in beauty, as well as the fervour of conviction. Ann Griffiths, a Montgomeryshire farm girl who died young, composed hymns that are, perhaps, unequalled for their melody and poetic thoughtfulness. Many others took some Biblical truth as the subject of hymns which, owing to their poetic beauty, will live as long as there is one man to speak the Welsh language. When we come to the beginning of this century, the poets become exceedingly numerous; and it is impossible, in an outline sketch, to mention even the most important of them. The two best representatives are, perhaps, Ceiriog and Islwyn. Ceiriog, the bard of the Berwyn, represents the naturalness of modern Welsh poetry. WELSH HISTORY. IN the following numbers, the history of Wales will be told. Political history and the history of literature will be related first. At the same time, as an introduction to the constitutional and economic history that will be told later on, an account will be given of the Welsh laws and of legislation concerning Wales. The articles on the Welsh laws will be written by In Ceiriog, it is pure as the dew, it is the idealisation of a shepherd's life, brimful of tenderness and with the grace of its fashion wonderfully perfect. It reflects faithfully the Welsh adoration of woman, the unending delight in the grandeur of the mountains and the beauty of the vales, and the vigorous striving after higher ideals. It is worth noticing that the education of Wales was the subject in which the most characteristic Welsh poet took greatest interest. Islwyn is an equally good representative of modern Welsh literature, but in its more meditative aspects. Islwyn spent his life among the low hills of western Monmouthshire; he is as natural as Ceiriog, his love of Wales is as intense, but the undercurrent of sadness is nearer the surface. He is maturer, more thoughtful, representing Welsh thought more in its religious than in its literary aspect. These modern poets have the grace of the poetry of the Golden Period, but with a strength of thought and comprehensiveness of vision that are not to be discovered in our mediaval literature. We Whether there are greater poets to come, it is difficult to predict. Judging from what we know of the history of the thought of other nations, it seems probable that Welsh prose is developing into the novel, and Welsh poetry into the drama. have seen the rise of the consciousness of national unity,-this may be represented before long in a Novel that will describe for all ages what the life of Wales is, and in a Drama that will need the union of the genius of lyric Glasynys with that of dramatic that of dramatic Hiraethog. In Welsh literature there are plenty of the elements of the greatest literature. It will be the work of the future to combine them. D. Brynmor Jones, Q.C., M.P. The English laws relating to Wales, from the Statute of Rhuddlan on, will be given, either at length or in an exhaustive summary. ENOCH HUGHES." IN the next number the first chapter of Enoc who PUBLISHED BY -)o(· PRINCIPAL: H. R. REICHEL, M.A., With Eight Professors, Four Lecturers, and Eleven other teachers. Next Session beThe College gins OCTOBER 2nd, 1894. courses include the subjects for the degrees of London University. Students intending to graduate in Medicine at the Universities of Edinburgh or Glasgow may take their first year's course at the College. There are special departments for Agriculture and Electrical Engineering. At the Entrance Scholarship Examination (beginning SEPTEMBER 18th) more than 20 Scholarships and Exhibitions, ranging in value from £40 to £10, will be open for competition. One half the total amount offered is reserved for Welsh candidates. For further information and copies of the Prospectus, apply to JOHN EDWARD LLOYD, M.A., LEARN Ab Owen's Publications. Welsh Classics. HANES Y FFYDD YNG NGHYMRU (History of the Faith in Wales.) By Charles Edwards. Three Pence. DINISTR JERUSALEM (Destruction of Jerusalem.)-Illustrated. By Eben Fardd. Three Pence. |