Christmas Evans, the Preacher of Wild Wales. Edwin Paxton Hood
than any one of his own country for popular Welsh literature, and was one of the order of eminent Welsh preachers of whom we are speaking, broke forth: “Oh!” he said, “you English people cannot see all the things in your Bible that a Welshman can see; now your word ‘blessed,’ it seems a very dear sweet thing to an Englishman and to a Welshman, but a Welshman sees the thing in the word, ‘Gwyn ei fyd,’ that is, ‘a white world—white,’ literally, white their world; so a Welshman would see there is a ‘white world’ for the pure in heart, a ‘white world’ for the poor in spirit, a ‘white world’ for them who are reviled and persecuted for righteousness’ sake; and when you read, ‘Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity,’ the Welshman reads his Bible and sees there is a ‘white world’ for such a one, that is, all sin wiped out, the place quite clean, to begin again.”
This is not all. We are not intending to devote any considerable space to a vindication of the Welsh language, but, when we speak of it with reference to the effects it produces as the vehicle of Oratory, it is necessary to remark that, so far from being—as many have supposed who have only looked at it in its strange combination of letters on a page, perhaps unable to read it, and never having heard it spoken—so far from being harsh and rugged, coarse or guttural, it probably yields to no language in delicious softness, in melting sweetness; in this it has been likened to the Italian language by those who have been best able to judge. Lord Lyttleton, in his “Letters from Wales,” says, that when he first passed some of the Welsh hills, and heard the harp and the beautiful female peasants accompanying it with their melodious voices, he could not help indulging in the idea that he had descended the Alps, and was enjoying the harmonious pleasures of the Italian Paradise. And as we have already said, there has long prevailed an idea that the Welsh language is a multitude of consonants; but indeed the reverse is the case; the learned Eliezer Williams says, in his “Historical Anecdotes of the Welsh Language,” “The alphabet itself demonstrates that the charge of a multiplicity of consonants is fallacious, since, whether the number of letters be reckoned twenty-two or twenty-four, seven are vowels; there remain therefore a more inconsiderable number than most of the European languages are obliged to admit. … Y and w are considered as vowels, and sounded as such; w is pronounced like o u in French in the word oui.” To persons ignorant of the language, how strange is the appearance, and how erroneous the idea of the sound to be conveyed by dd, ll, ch, but indeed all these are indications of the softening of the letter; in a word, the impressions entertained of the harshness of the language are altogether erroneous.
The supposition that the Welsh language is made up of consonants is more especially singular from the fact that it possesses, says a writer in the Quarterly Review, what perhaps no other nation has—a poem of eight lines in which there is not a single consonant. These verses are very old, dating from the seventeenth century;—of course the reader will remember that the Welsh language has seven vowels, both w and y being considered and sounded as such. This epigram or poem is on the Spider, and originally stood thus—
“O’i wiw ŵy i weu e â;—o’i iau Ei wyau a wea,
E wywa ei wê aua, A’i weau yw ieuau ia.”
To this, the great Gronwy Owen added a kind of counter change of vowels, and the translation has been given as follows:—
“From out its womb it weaves with care
Its web beneath the roof;
Its wintry web it spreadeth there—
Wires of ice its woof.
“And doth it weave against the wall
Thin ropes of ice on high?
And must its little liver all
The wondrous stuff supply?”
A singular illustration of the vowel power in a language ignorantly supposed to possess no vowels.
And these remarks are not at all unnecessary, for they illustrate to the reader, unacquainted with the language, the way in which it becomes such a means of immediate emotion; its words start before the eye like pictures, but are conveyed to the mind like music; and yet the bony character of the language, to which we have referred before, adds to the picture dramatic action and living strength. What a language, then, is this for a competent orator to play upon—a man with an imaginative mind, and a fervid and fiery soul! Then is brought into play that element of Welsh preaching, without knowing and apprehending which there would be no possibility of understanding the secret of its great power; it is the “hwyl.” When the Welsh preacher speaks in his best mood, and with great unction, the highest compliment that can be paid him, the loftiest commendation that can be given, is, that he had the “hwyl.” “Hwyl” is the Welsh word for the canvas of a ship; and probably the derivation of the meaning is, from the canvas or sails of a ship filled with a breeze: the word for breeze, awel, is like it, and is used to denote a similar effect. Some years since, when the most eminent Welsh preacher we have recently seen in England, at an ordination service, was addressing his nephew in a crowded church in the neighbourhood of London, he said, “And, my dear boy, remember you are a Welshman; don’t try to speak English, and don’t try to speak like the English.” A great many of his hearers wondered what the good man could mean; but both he and his nephew, and several others of the initiated, very well knew. He meant, speak your words with an accent, and an accent formed from a soul giving life and meaning to an expression. This, we know, is what the singer does—this is what the musician tries to do. All words are not the same words in their meaning; the Welsh preacher seeks to play upon them as keys; the words themselves help him to do so. Literally, they are full of meaning; verbally, he attempts to pronounce that meaning; hence, as he rises in feeling he rises in variety of intonation, and his words sway to and fro, up and down—bass, minor, and soprano all play their part, a series of intonings. In English, this very frequently sounds monotonous, sometimes even affected; in Welsh, the soul of the man is said to have caught the hwyl—that is, he is in full sail, he has feeling and fire: the people catch it too. A Welsh writer, describing this, quotes the words of Jean Paul Richter: “Pictures during music are seen into more deeply and warmly by spectators; nay, many masters have in creating them acknowledged help from music.” Great Welsh preaching, is very often a kind of wild, irregular chant, a jubilant refrain, recurring again and again. The people catch the power of it; shouts rise—prayers! “Bendigedig” (“blessed,” or synonymous with our “Bless the Lord!”) Amen! “Diolch byth!” and other expressions, rise, and roll over the multitude; they, too, have caught the hwyl. It is singular that, with us, the only circumstances and scenes in which such manifestations can take place, are purely secular, or on the occasions of great public meetings. The Welshman very much estimates the greatness of a preacher by his power to move men; but it does not follow, that this power shall be associated with great apparent bodily action. The words of John Elias and Williams of Wern consumed like flames, and divided like swords; but they were men of immense self-possession, and apparently very quiet. It has always been the aim of the greater Welsh preachers to find out such “acceptable”—that is, fitting and piercing—words, so that the words alone shall have the effect of action.
But, in any account of Welsh preaching, the place ought never to be forgotten—the scenery. We have said, the country is losing, now, many of its old characteristics of solitude and isolation; the railways are running along at the foot of the tall mountains, and spots, which we knew thirty years since as hamlets and villages, have now grown into large towns. It has often been the case, that populations born and reared amidst remote mountain solitudes, have possessed strong religious susceptibilities. The Welshman’s chapel was very frequently reared in the midst of an unpeopled district, likely to provoke wonder in the mind of the passing stranger, as to whence it could derive its congregation. The building was erected there because it was favourable to a confluence of neighbourhoods. Take a region near to the spot where Christmas Evans was born—a wild, mountainous tract of country, lying between the counties Brecon and Cardigan; for long miles, in every direction, there are no human habitations—only, perhaps, here and there, in a deep dingle, some lone house, the residence of a sheep farmer, with three or four cultivated fields in its