Welsh Journals

HUGHES'S History of Welsh Meth- odism gives a fairly complete account of John Jones of Edeyrn (1761-1822), one of the most powerful preachers of his generation. It describes how, in the exuberant wildness of his youth, he tried to force his way into a ball which was being held by the gentry of Caer- narvonshire, getting stabbed in the back and nearly losing his life in the adventure. He was then sent by his parents to Mold, where he was apprenticed to a barber, and where three years later a chance visit to a preaching meeting arrested the wildness of his steps and turned his attention to the Gospel. He began to preach in 1784 and Williams Pant-y-Celyn.* By Prof. T. Gwynn Jones. FOR at least a hundred and fifty years, the name of William Williams of Pant-y-Celyn (1717-1791) has been very familiar to most of the inhabitants of Wales, and thousands of Welsh people, all over the globe, still know many of his hymns by heart. Two editions of his works were issued during the last century, the earliest of them with a peculiarly bombastic introduction, and hymns of his are found in all the denominational hymn-books. A Welsh football-field crowd, the audience at an eisteddfod, a play, or a political meeting, will fill up an interval by singing one of his hymns, alternately with Sospan Fach or Show me the way to go home." All of which shows that for quite a long time, at any rate, the role of William Williams, like that of the popular preacher and lecturer, has been that of an enter- tainer. Mr. Lewis rightly states that Williams had no direct influence in the literary development of the last century in Wales. In a footnote, he adds:- It would be well if some of the enemies of the young literature of to-dav were to remember that fact, and if henceforth the., were to abstain from advising us to remember Pantycelyn Though the critics here referred to will no doubt charge Mr. Lewis with having an exaggerated idea of the importance of his own school, the substance of the criticism is quite justified-those who would patronize Williams have never taken him in earnest, as some of those do who are supposed to be disposed of simply by being Williams Pantycelyn." Gan Saunders Lewis. Llundain: Foyle's Welsh Depot, 1927, pp 242. Price, 6s. very soon won for himself a place in the front rank of his contemporaries. By the courtesy of Mrs. James Robertson we pub- lish this month, in the Exiles' Corner, a first instalment from correspondence found amongst his papers. We are glad to be able to promise our readers, in this series, something more than casual sidelights on a famous man. The pictures given of life amongst the early settlers in Georgia are of genuine interest to the historian, and an even deeper value attaches to the insight we obtain from the letters into the psychol- ogy of the men by whom they were written and into the every day thought of those times. advised to remember him. The very few writers ­Mr. Lewis mentions one of them only-who have shown any capacity to understand Williams are yet only middle-aged men, and with the appearance of this book, all of them ought to be prepared fully and gladly to admit that Mr. Lewis, who can yet include himself among the producers of young literature," has brought to his task a fulness of knowledge and understand- ing which was not theirs. This, in fact, is the first study of the subject which is both serious and competent. Briefly, Mr. Lewis, having studied carefully the works of Williams, concludes that he was not so much a religious as a psychological poet, the poet of his own experiences. In his theology and his philosophical ideas, he fully accepted Calvinism, whilst the fruits of his own experi- ence and his thought were wholly non-Calvinistic, yet he never himself discovered the inconsistency. Mr. Lewis claims that Williams was really the first poet in Europe to discover the realm of the subconscious (diymwybod, which is rather un- conscious), and to make it, along with science, the subject of poetry. The question why Wil- liams, with practically nothing to connect him with the old literary tradition of his country, turned to literature at all is answered with the claim that, according to his own theory, litera- ture is a way of living, a means of fully possess- ing life, of seizing experience (p. 35). Starting from an isolation forced upon him, as it were, bv the suppression of the culture and religion of his race, Williams was caught in the religious movement of his period, and having passed through the various stages of conversion, he, in his long poems, hymns and prose works, gives what is the most important text yet offered by literature to science (p. 213)." Tested by the laws of modern psychology, this record is strik- ingly full and regular. The poet's exposure and