Welsh Journals

IT may be doubted whether any name, if we except that of the Prime Minister, appeals more widely or more profoundly to the Welsh imagination of to-day than that of Sir Owen Edwards. He was born on Christmas Day, 1858. His parents were Owen and Elizabeth Edwards, his home a small farm, Coed y Pry, in the parish of Llanuwchllyn. He remembers being taken by his father, when very young, into the fields, and taught to know and name the wild flowers. And in general, his love of nature and of art, too, came to him from his father, the mother con- tributing the hard-headed business element in his nature and upbringing. The father was once asked by the local surgeon, "How is it that Owen does so brilliantly?" He has my head, and Betty's tongue," was the prompt reply. And if we interpret the words liberally-make the head stand for the contemplative and aesthetic, and the tongue for the effective and the practical, the jest was profoundly true. In the village National School he rose to the rank of pupil teacher, and early became very fond of reading. He read Shakespeare through during the dinner hours of a hay harvest, when all the other workers would be fast asleep. At the Bala Grammar School the chief influence was the close friendship he formed with David R Daniel and Tom Ellis and to this circle the writer of this article was some- times admitted as a privileged fourth. At Bala College he took a full course, which he concluded as assistant tutor under Ellis Edwards and Hugh Williams. Doctor Lewis Edwards does not seem to have left the deep mark upon Owen Edwards that he did on so many, unless indeed it was from him that Owen Edwards caught his master passion for the literature of Wales. His reading was wide and well directed even then. Like Carlyle, he profited by the library more than by the class-room. He preached for years but was never ordained, though he went the length once of marrying a couple, who have lived happy ever after. Though more than one church sought him for its pastor, his bent was towards learning and teaching. Aberystwyth, Glasgow, and Oxford form a new and separate chapter in the story Reading that was more or less desultory was now succeeded by hard work, too hard perhaps, upon prescribed collegel ines Whereas at Bala he had usually taken a second place (Richard Hughes now of Aberystwyth being first), at Aberystwyth Owen Edwards gained the first place in all England in the London First B.A. examination. While waiting the result of the London Degree Examina- tions, he began a session of very strenuous work at Glasgow, where, by the advice of his teachers Professors Henry Jones and Maccallum, he attended the lectures of Edward Caird and John Nichol. In both classes he took high class prizes, the very first in one of the two. Silvester Home was on the same prize-list. Everybody knows something of Mr. Edwards's brilliant career at Oxford-a Brackenbury Scholarship at Balliol in 1884, the Stanhope Essay Prize, and the Lothian. The SIR OWEN EDWARDS By the Rev. J. Puleston Jones. subject of the one was the Influence of Machiavelli on English Political Thought," and that of the second Thomas Cromwell. Immediately after taking his First Class in Modem History, he left for a tour on the Continent. While on that tour he received the news that he had won the first place in the competition for the Arnold Prize. He was debarred from receiving the prize because he had omitted to take his degree before the result of the essay competition had been announced The subject of the essay was The Reformation in France." There was not then, and I doubt whether there is to-day, anything so good on the subject, produced in English. Rancke's work is of course a translation. If the author were not, partly by his own choice, partly by the demands of his country, condemned to such unremitting toil, we might hope to have these brilliant essays in book form. They would convince those who know Owen Edwards only as a popular writer what high class work he can produce in the realm of pure re- search. The charm of his style is known to all readers, and is equally marked both in English and Welsh but many run away with the idea that he is simply popular. They ought to be given access to works in which he has proved himself a real specialist. Let us still continue to hope that they will yet have the chance of seeing for them- selves what a mistake they have made. Edwards probably does not know as much of Welsh history as John Edward Lloyd, or as much about the Welsh language and its history as John Morris Jones but he too has subjects, and they are not a few either, on which he is a first-hand authority. He carries his scholarship so lightly, with almost an affectation of carelessness, that many people forget that he is a scholar at all. No one would assert that Mr Edwards knew Greek and Latin as the late Sir Edward Anwyl did. Some experts would perhaps deny him the name of scholar in the technical sense in these fields but on the other hand he has an incredible gift of learning with ease in a short time, any language, ancient or modem, sufficiently well to get all he wants out of it. He is master of two languages, English and Welsh, and has an easy working knowledge of several more. These, however, Sir Owen has studied, not in order to write exercises in them, but in order to hear what they have to tell him. I remember him as a very young man learning Sanscrit. In Anglo-Saxon of course he has specialised. Owen Edwards impressed his contemporaries in the University as few have done. To the average prosaic English mind his love of what a wayside acquaintance, a tramp, called Romancin," was a perpetual source of entertainment. But the remarkable thing was that he combined with this a rare genius for accuracy in research and delineation. His tutor, the present Master of Balliol, told me once that Edwards was the only pupil he had ever had to whom he felt he could be of no use. About the same period York-Powell is reported to have said that Edwards was the best man who had passed through the History School in his time.