Welsh Journals

Taliessin THROUGH Logres. Charles Williams. Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1938. 6s. It used to be said that crossword puzzles were educative In that sense, so, most emphatically, is Taliessin Through Logres. Read this book by all means, but first arm yourself with a Malory, a Keats, a Dante, a Swinburne, a Milton, a Wordsworth and a Yeats (prose as well as poetry)-writers mentioned by Mr. Williams in his notes and, to take no undue risks, add also, I suggest, the works of Spenser, Blake and Lawrence, The Golden Bough, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, C. S. Lewis's Pilgrim* s Regress and Mr. Williams's earlier works. The Malory is all-important, but despite Taliessin a knowledge of the Welsh primitives is not, I think, presumed. Now examine carefully the map of Europe and the Near East, the map of the organic body, given in Mr. William's book. (The warfare, complete with all modern conveniences, which is at the moment taking place between the breasts and under the left armpit of the organic body can, I feel, be safely ignored). Now you are ready for your first reading of the poems. I suggest that you take, them, for the first time, in the following order: "Prelude", "The Vision of the Empire", The Last Voyage", "Taliessin in the School of Poets Taliessin on the Death of Virgil", Taliessin at Lancelot's Mass the three Palomides poems, and the rest ad lib. What you will get out of Mr. Williams's essay in moral and historical allegory will depend largely on you. If Mr. Williams wanted to produce a more constant effect, he has failed by over-elaboration and mystification. But he cannot have wished to speak to the people or even, after Zarathustra, to companions." And, although this is an ambitious work, he certainly did not want to persuade. There is no persuasion in this book because there is no conviction none, that is, unless you cherish the superstition that persuasion belongs to the expression and conviction to the thing expressed. Mr. Williams's limitations are the limi- tations that are too common to-day if only he understood his own importance he could be very important indeed. As it is, we have to be content with an intellectual richness inadequately articulated in a rather wooden narrative style. scarcely improved by allusion and word-play and flights of descriptive eloquence. Even after you have worked out the symbols-Lupercal and Lateran and Blanche- fleur and Helayne and the rest-you will not be moved considerably even by a lavish poem like The Son of Lancelot" (in which Mr. Williams undoubtedly writes). For however eloquent the descriptions of the external apparatus of a symbolism the eloquence is bound to miss fire if the symbolism itself is felt to be inorganic. Intellectual art arm-fasted to the sensuous is clearly not enough. DAVIES ABERPENNAR. BOOKS RECEIVED A HISTORY OF WALES FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE EDWARDIAN CONQUEST. Sir John Edward Lloyd. Third Edition (Two Volumes). Longmans, Green & Co. 30s. ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO. THE STORY OF THE MONTGOMERYSHIRE CHARTISTS. Islwyn Nicholas. Gwasgy Seren Gocb, Aberystwyth. 6d. THE POET AND SOCIETY. Philip Henderson. Martin Seeker & Warburg. 7s. 6d.