Celtic Literature | Page 7

windy corner of a street, and
the morning was not favourable to open-air solemnities. The Welsh, too,
share, it seems to me, with their Saxon invaders, an inaptitude for show
and spectacle. Show and spectacle are better managed by the Latin race
and those whom it has moulded; the Welsh, like us, are a little
awkward and resourceless in the organisation of a festival. The
presiding genius of the mystic circle, in our hideous nineteenth- century
costume, relieved only by a green scarf, the wind drowning his voice
and the dust powdering his whiskers, looked thoroughly wretched; so
did the aspirants for bardic honours; and I believe, after about an hour
of it, we all of us, as we stood shivering round the sacred stones, began
half to wish for the Druid's sacrificial knife to end our sufferings. But
the Druid's knife is gone from his hands; so we sought the shelter of the
Eisteddfod building.
The sight inside was not lively. The president and his supporters
mustered strong on the platform. On the floor the one or two front
benches were pretty well filled, but their occupants were for the most
part Saxons, who came there from curiosity, not from enthusiasm; and
all the middle and back benches, where should have been the true
enthusiasts,--the Welsh people, were nearly empty. The president, I am
sure, showed a national spirit which was admirable. He addressed us
Saxons in our own language, and called us 'the English branch of the
descendants of the ancient Britons.' We received the compliment with
the impassive dulness which is the characteristic of our nature; and the
lively Celtic nature, which should have made up for the dulness of ours,
was absent. A lady who sat by me, and who was the wife, I found, of a
distinguished bard on the platform, told me, with emotion in her look
and voice, how dear were these solemnities to the heart of her people,
how deep was the interest which is aroused by them. I believe her, but
still the whole performance, on that particular morning, was incurably
lifeless. The recitation of the prize compositions began: pieces of verse
and prose in the Welsh language, an essay on punctuality being, if I
remember right, one of them; a poem on the march of Havelock,
another. This went on for some time. Then Dr. Vaughan,--the
well-known Nonconformist minister, a Welshman, and a good
patriot,--addressed us in English. His speech was a powerful one, and

he succeeded, I confess, in sending a faint thrill through our front
benches; but it was the old familiar thrill which we have all of us felt a
thousand times in Saxon chapels and meeting-halls, and had nothing
bardic about it. I stepped out, and in the street I came across an
acquaintance fresh from London and the parliamentary session. In a
moment the spell of the Celtic genius was forgotten, the Philistinism of
our Saxon nature made itself felt; and my friend and I walked up and
down by the roaring waves, talking not of ovates and bards, and triads
and englyns, but of the sewage question, and the glories of our local
self-government, and the mysterious perfections of the Metropolitan
Board of Works.
I believe it is admitted, even by the admirers of Eisteddfods in general,
that this particular Eisteddfod was not a success. Llandudno, it is said,
was not the right place for it. Held in Conway Castle, as a few years
ago it was, and its spectators,--an enthusiastic multitude,--filling the
grand old ruin, I can imagine it a most impressive and interesting sight,
even to a stranger labouring under the terrible disadvantage of being
ignorant of the Welsh language. But even seen as I saw it at Llandudno,
it had the power to set one thinking. An Eisteddfod is, no doubt, a kind
of Olympic meeting; and that the common people of Wales should care
for such a thing, shows something Greek in them, something spiritual,
something humane, something (I am afraid one must add) which in the
English common people is not to be found. This line of reflection has
been followed by the accomplished Bishop of St. David's, and by the
Saturday Review, it is just, it is fruitful, and those who pursued it merit
our best thanks. But, from peculiar circumstances, the Llandudno
meeting was, as I have said, such as not at all to suggest ideas of
Olympia, and of a multitude touched by the divine flame, and hanging
on the lips of Pindar. It rather suggested the triumph of the prosaic,
practical Saxon, and the approaching extinction of an enthusiasm which
he derides as factitious, a literature which he disdains as trash, a
language which he detests as a nuisance.
I must say I quite share the