Welsh Journals

taste, and generally chooses its symbols with an unerring certainty; because the canon is here, be it noted, not beauty but utility. There was a revival of artistic conscientiousness in the 18th century." Excellent, that's the place where we can dispose of Goronwy Owen. The public in Wales, as represented by the Church, used to be notoriously unmindful of great Welshmen." Better and better, lets' stick Goronwy on that spot. It would be foolish and extremely dangerous to make ado about this convenient way of dis- posing of our dead, and I, for my part, am very willing that Goronwy Owen's remains should be thus decently treated. There was indeed a serious danger at one time that he would become the symbol of the ne'er-do-weel, a scare-crow to frighten away the more unconventional of our pastors, but let me here and now pay Noncon- formist Wales a tribute which it will be rather shy of accepting,-it has always relaxed the rules in favour of genius, which is another proof that the so-called respectable man is saved by his instincts. And our appreciation of Goronwy is not one of those things of which Wales need be ashamed. But Goronwy Owen is not dead, and our lofty and pretentious monuments mark no grave. The contribution which he made to the literary life of Wales is more potent in its effect in 1923 than it was in the eighteenth century. When the University of Wales was at last established, and the reaction of learning upon literature be- gan to be felt for the first time for two centuries, Goronwy's work was waiting, ready to hand, to become the model and inspiration of a new Wales. And, let there be no mistake, a literary revival here means a new nation with a greater and more conscious pride in itself and a surer hand upon its destinies; and a Wales with a diseased and moribund literature, as the Wales of the 19th century was, is a country that shuffles along the back alleys, averting its eyes from the gaze of the nations. Whenever a craftsman in words and ideas honestly and con- sciously chooses the hard-won good and rejects the facile bad, he shows himself a disciple of the revival of literature which is now working amongst us, and therefore deriving his ultimate inspiration from the work of that extraordinary parson who found life tolerable in his English parishes only by consoling himself with that craft which, as a craft, was the most nobly conceived in Europe, the art of the pencerdd. Gwynn Jones may be a greater poet than Goronwy, but he simply would not have existed as a poet if Goronwy had not lived before him. Morris Jones may be a greater scholar, but the love of clean work and honest, exact thought, which distinguishes his scholarship, would have had little to feed on if that other Anglesey man had not made himself a burden to his friends by borrowing grammars and dictionaries,-and forgetting to return them. And at a further re- move, the essentially romantic genius of Williams Parry would have languished in a shy imitation of Ceiriog if there had not been prepared for him a better way by a great classicist. And so life flows from inspiration to achievement, and the poet who, very rightly, is to the unpoetical man in the street a symbol conveniently dead, yet lives in superabundant vitality in the work of to-day. It is, indeed, appropriate that 1923 should commemorate Goronwy's birth, and 1869, surely the nadir of Welsh literature, his death. I said that Goronwy was also the symbol of the rejected Welshman. We must take his own testimony as evidence of what his {worldly ambition really was, and why should we imagine that he was insincere? According to what he himself passionately and frequently states, he desired nothing better than to serve Wales as a parish priest. He was rejected, and it is con- venient for us Welshmen and mightily soothing to our feelings to pretend that Wales did not want him because the bishops were English, and, alternatively, as they say in the courts, that his character was such that preferment in Wales was impossible. On these two very ingenious defences I wish to make this comment. Had Wales itself no responsibility for its Anglican bishops, and are we in any material respect better in 1923 than in the eighteenth century? It is true that our bishops are no longer English (though their home life and the tongue of their children are rather more English than in the 18th century), but let us take what corresponds in cultural value to the Church of that time, namely, our educational system, and let us ask ourselves the question, seriously if we are capable of it, whether our educational bishops show any more decided preference for Welsh- men than the Anglican bishops of the 18th century. To every century its own folly; to every back its own rod. And, finally, it might be asked whether Wales in Goronwy's time demanded a higher standard of sobriety in its parsons than England. It is certain that Goronwy had little difficulty in finding a curacy in England, and one does not hear that his character was a serious obstacle to his work as a parson in that country. The truth is that the son of the Welsh jobber of Anglesey had less snobbery to fight against in England than in Wales. Here, too, Goronwy is something more than a symbol. His treatment by his fellow country- men could be regularly and closely paralleled in every period of Welsh history. Wales only loves its children if they are successful in something more immediately useful than poetry and devo- tion to ideas, and, having discounted such services, it can easily find plenty of comfortable excuses. Yesterday, it was English bishops and drink; to-morrow, who can say what it will be ?