Welsh Journals

The Celtic Congress, By A. O. Roberts B-A-, LL.B. 0 ACCEPT Ireland's invitation to hold the Celtic Congress in Dublin was at once a privilege-greatly and gladly prized-and something of a risk. Apart from the human pleasure of being welcomed so cordially to a foreign city-a beautiful, nobly battered city at that-our privilege was the greater inasmuch as Baile atha Cliath is now the Celtic capital of the only country with a Celtic government. How would the mild cost we had been content to pay for our Celticism compare with that ghastly sacrifice which Ireland, within recent vivid memory, flinched not from? And would any half- heartedness, any contradictions, divergences, questionings in our unclear federation pass un- challenged and undestroyed the almost ruthless truth-searching, which has been at once both the cross and the eminence of Ireland? The bond is unbroken; rather strengthened and multiplied with Irish ties of charm, of kinship, of encourage- ment, of need and of help; and Saoistat Eireann has-unprecedent event in the history of the Congress !-pressed for our return there again next year. We in Wales, if we had not a national Parliament, could boast an unbroken culture and a language so sure of itself that we are, danger- ously perhaps, happy to let it look after itself; and the mood of sober reality dominant in Irish politics to-day would have little respect for a Welsh nationalist movement founded on an egotistic sentiment or an illusory sense of oppression rather than on the demands, unsatis- fiable otherwise, of that culture to preserve itself and continue to make its unique contribution to the culture of humanity. Mr E. T. John, the President, with a nerve and a confidence that put some of his youthful followers to the blush, in an opening speech, remarkable for the completeness of its sweep, its daring vision, its business-like sense of the situation facing the Celts in general and each of the Celtic countries in particular, instanced the fact of education in Wales as being in peril owing to its non-nationalist control; academic organisations continually betrayed a very pronounced ante-nationalist bias-a bias that would not be corrected until all aspects of Welsh national life lay completely in Welsh hands. The realisation of this fact in Wales convinced the speaker of the "inevitable and probably early establishment of national self- government on Free State lines," which would "involve drastic re-consideration of existing constitutional relations and arrangements. With the establishment of a Free State in Scot- land as well would be precipitated the problem of a league of the Celtic peoples-unavoidable if they would adequately fulfil their functions and their world-wide needs. On the morrow of the pleasant reception on Monday evening, the Congress entered on its more particular tastes. Sir John Morris Jones, who never flinches to lead his hearers to the stiffest heights, but who never fails to lead them there by a delightful path, spoke on Welsh poetry. Epic and dramatic poetry in Wales is meagre in comparison with our lyrical poetry; with the growth of wealthy and crowded com- munities drama--the most social of the arts- has began to flourish-but in prose. The story of the Welsh lyric was traced from the age of the Four Bards (with a twinkling allusion to a Recent Controversy) to the decline of bardism, and the growth of hymn-poetry in the eighteenth century. Professor W. J. Gruffydd, who is ex- hilarating in attack, had something more than a tilt at Matthew Arnold, whose book on Celtic liter- ature "contained almost as many howlers as there are words in it." In his mocking scepticism of the "weird metaphysical imagination called Celticism" Professor Gruffydd struck a chord that responded in many an Irish as well as a Welsh breast. "The greatness of Welsh poetry lies not in its semi-mystical qualities but in what it had in common with the poetry of every other nation"; and one could imagine him silently thanking God that the Celt is as other men. In the discussion on Welsh drama the speaker em- phasised still more amusingly the revolt of the worm who has been impaled on a microscope slide to be studied, analyzed and classified. This was apropos of certain writers of English plays about Welsh life, who simply collected "a lot of queer museum specimens for the amusement of the Englishman." These writers "started with a native knowledge of what an Englishman con- sidered queer and expressed everything in the terms of that queerness." The Irish, who have suffered the stage Irishman as we are beginning to suffer the stage Welshman, expressed their delighted sympathy. The discussion in question had been opened by Mr Saunders Lewis in a paper, the perfection of whose form made it out- standing among the transactions of a remarkable Congress. Mr Lewis at the outset ruled out of consideration Mr J. O. Francis and other writers who, though of Welsh blood and dealing with Welsh life, chose English as their medium and concentrated on Mr D. T. Davies and the Rev R. G. Berry. Mr Francis was, of course, too important to be left out altogether and was admitted into the fold because his works had been translated into Welsh. The present writer ob- jected to being called an "English author," and remarked that while Mr Francis' works were intensely Welsh in everything except the language there were plenty of plays written in Welsh about which there was nothing Welsh except the language. The reaction against being considered "odd" has been carried so far that one Welsh member of the Congress remarked to me that he saw nothing in Welsh poetry to dis- tinguish it from any other poetry except that it was written in Welsh. It is difficult to believe that our preservation of a unique national con- sciousness for so many centuries has been totally unreflected in our literature, or that our