Welsh Journals

How THEY EDUCATED JONES. By P. Mansell Jones, with a Foreword by Eugene Vinaver. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1974. Pp. 109. £ 2.50. Professor Vinaver, eminent in French and English literary studies, has edited with taste and judgment, and has slightly rearranged, this post- humous work of P. M. Jones, and has written for it a challenging and authoritative introduction. This is a happy event. Early in the book, P.M., as we all knew him, writes: 'Good parental relationships and consistently loyal ever-increasing friendships have been the sustaining boons of my life.' Professor Vinaver's friendship brought an especial brightness to the years of his rich maturity. He spoke of it to others and often, and this book with its amusing and deprecating title is a crowning product of that maturity. The book has two main themes. P.M. was always profoundly interested in personalities. The exciting parts here are the studies of people who affected his adolescence and early manhood. But, from his term as Professor of French at Bangor to the final years when he was an honoured emeritus visitor to many universities, he became more and more engrossed in the problems of humane studies in school and university. This book is one of his most pondered contributions to that matter. It describes an education from grammar school to postgraduate university thesis that obtained in the first quarter of this century in England and Wales and is not even yet a thing of long ago. The study of modern language and literature could only be deemed of academic status if its main business was philological and scientific. Thus Chairs of French were set up as Professorships of Romance Philology just as later Chairs of Welsh were exalted as Chairs of Celtic. The sterile quality of the training and its poverty are shown here as a painful and bewildering experience, and the account supplements the discussion in the second chapter of The Assault on French Literature, which Professor Vinaver calls 'one of the great books of our time'. A matter closely allied to this which subtly permeates the whole story (much as it does also the Four Quatrains) is the problem of learning to write. It began in the grammar school at Carmarthen where, under the influence of an English master 'with the pellucid softness of his cerulean gaze', 'the poetical seemed the only sort of prose worth writing'. P.M. is severe on this early 'vulgar tendency' and comments: Practically all forms of expression in Wales, especially the widespread arts of preaching and oratory, have a strong rhetorical cast. No nation on earth is, I imagine, more capable of "paying itself with words", as the French say, unless we accept Andr6 Gide's verdict that it is the French themselves. After a first class honours degree in French at Aberystwyth, he found that his college training 'had not enabled or encouraged me to express myself either freely or correctly in English I discovered that, almost literally, I possessed no language'. And even Balliol College, Oxford, where he went in 1914, 'did little or nothing to ease my difficulties as to expression' partly because 'during the whole of my time in College I never crossed the threshold of a lecture room and I had no more than