Welsh Journals

THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER THREE books lately issued-one on the stars, another on the poets that have written about Wales, and the third a small play-book-serve to mark not only the change that is passing over the schools but what is really a change in the spirit of the masters. The routine is there still, and the tape- measure is still applied to the small boys' brains, and the examination day stands like a policeman at the school door; but these things are not what they used to be. One looks back to one's own schooldays-the dour master, the ugly class-room, the callous boys, the vile repressive rod-in-pickle- and is thankful for the change. As for the task- masters, old-style, surely they were what the system made them they, themselves, like the boys they had to subjugate, were victims. If the decent and indecent brutality of some that I remember was original to themselves, then it would be fair to use Dante's Inferno and Dantean epithets in sending them to their doom. The kindest, most effective, most educive master, in my experience, was a German Ph.D., author of a well-known German grammar; and it must be added, a political exile because of his ex-Prussian opinions. The rankest, most futile brute was a typical North Country puritan stiff as a black-board, without a smile in his repertory. May he pay for his too much virtue in the purgatory of martinets I However, this may seem to be making one's personal tyrant into a type and we have to remem- ber that all the old school were not cut in that fashion. Goldsmith must have been a congenial dominic, though he was impatient; and I am sure laughter was allowed in his class. And as Words- worth once showed us, by the most natural of school- master's portraits, in his Matthew of HawkJaeaJ. mountain-idyll, "the man of mirth," was not unheard of in his generation of boys and girls. But now let us turn to our Triad. The first book of the three is Mr. Caradoc Mills' star-book Y Bydoedd Uwchhen-the worlds over- head (P. Jones Roberts, Bangor. Pp. 174. 2s. 6d. nett). It is a true boyhood's deliverer-a well designed primer of the heavens to make the night sky neighbourly to the schoolhouse roof. The second book is Poems of Wales, a notable small brown budget. issued in the Kingsway Series (Pp. 64. Evans Bros., Ltd., London. 6d. nett). Eloquent in both tongues-Welsh and English- By ERNEST RHYS it calls as becomes a lyric primer sent out in time of war, upon the patriot to supply the chief music. The print here, too. is clear, the miniature heads of the poets that appear, such as Ceiriog and Arthur Hugh Clough. are well found, and the get-up and the spirit of the book are alike inspiriting. It is dedicated to Mr. Alfred T. Davies, who has lent some of the striking title-page blocks and while his colleague, O.M.E.. is not named, the book recalls the work he did on his own "-years before Whitehall awoke-in Cymru i'r Plant and other ways-a simple service enough, yet one that helped to clear the way for an education board that does not look at the child as a patent incubated steam-hatched chicken. He does, however, supply the preface to Mr. Mills' star-book; and this preface and the seven opening pages in black-and-white, signally whet the reader's appetite for the text. To open with pictures is a wise induction, seeing that the stars are apt to puzzle the mere earthworm that under- stands the sun only at a Saturday or Sunday angle. without umbra and penumbra. One almost wishes. such is the weakness of the creature, that the book made other Celtic concessions in relating this planet and the Welsh patch on it, to the Solar system. A footnote (that seems to have got out of place in page 32) on Alban Arthan-the winter solstice- tempts us to think as we go on that we shall hear more of the old notions of the stars, and Uys Don and Caer Arianrod, and the shepherd's sky, than we do. The old calendar was a real thing to the farmer, and the sailor's sky was the crude keyboard of the new astronomy. Still, for an expert, Mr. Mills is by no means too abstruse, and he has an eye to Welsh words and allusions. too, as when he pauses to say that it is very likely the word Sidydd." the Zodiac is sib to the Latin sidus." He has a gift of making the hard thing seem eaay-no small matter when one's astronomy and Welsh vocabulary are alike meagre. What he does not trouble to tell, the new schoolmaster who uses the book will, with the aid of a good spy-glass, a star atlas. Sir Robert Ball, Sir Norman Lockyer and others, be able to add. He can point out, as the old Irish tract did, that the sun did not set the same a niarhar na Frainnce"— in the West of France, as it did in Donegal or Mdn. One of the war-songs in the second book. the Kingsway patriots' primer, is Owen Glyndwr's,