Art. 3.-EARLY WELSH POETRY.

1. Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards, translated into English, etc. By Evan Evans. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764.

2. The Four Ancient Books of Wales. By W. F. Skene. Two vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868. 3. The Literature of the Kymry. By Thomas Stephens. Second edition. London: Longmans, 1876.

4. The Black Book of Carmarthen. Reproduced and edited by J. Gwenogvryn Evans, M.A., D.Litt. Printed at the Editor's Private Press, 1907.

THE early singers of no other race, perhaps, enjoy a renown so tantalisingly disproportionate to what is known of their actual work and personal history as the ancient bards of the Kymry. Taliesin, Aneirin, Llywarch the Old, Merlin, and the rest, are, to the average English reader of poetry, poetry, but so many fantastic and fabulous names. Even to the mass of their own countrymen in Wales, one fears, they are not much more. The most famous of them by name, 'the sage enchanter Merlin,' who cuts so brave a figure in the medieval literature of wizardry, is the most difficult among them all to identify and accredit as a poet. To the modern world Merlin is all but a creature of pure myth-an alleged bard of the sixth century, who, transformed into a prophet and a magician, comes to be imported into the Arthurian legends to lend the necessary touch of weird mystery to the story of Arthur's birth. The 'great Taliesin,' again, whom Gray invokes to hear, 'out of the grave,' strains that breathe a soul to animate his clay,' has left behind him few, if any, songs in which we can be sure that we hear his own authentic strains. Aneirin has fared somewhat better at the hand of time, and of the critics; a celebrated elegiac poem is, with some confidence, ascribed to him. Yet, scanty and insecure though the evidence is which enables us to regard these men as bards of the sixth century at all, the traditions of the bardic order' in Wales extend further back even than their era. For the group of bards of which Taliesin

is the fabled head are alleged to have inherited their poetic art and craft from the nameless Druids of preRoman Britain. Whatever the truth about the poetry of the Druids may be, their right to a place in the temple of Fame is certainly indefeasible, for Roman historians of the first repute bear testimony to their prestige and power among the ancient Celts. So well established, indeed, is their renown that they have been admitted even to the Comtist Calendar, where, with Ossian-another spirit called out of the vasty deeps of Celtic tradition-they figure among the primitive heroes of theocratic civilisation.'

The religious culture of the Druids has been the subject of much ingenious, and not unfruitful, speculation. Their alleged proficiency in the art of poetry has been no less eagerly, though, perhaps, not quite so dispassionately and profitably debated. A persistent tradition, dating back to a very early time, includes poetical inspiration among the gifts of the Druids. When Milton, in 'Lycidas,' reproaches the Muses for having deserted their playground

' on the steep

Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,'

he is echoing a traditional association which is at least as old as Lucan. Milton, indeed, has much to answer for on the score of this familiar line. It contributed as much as, if not more than, anything else to the use, in the eighteenth century, of the term 'druid' as a synonym for poet or bard. The mid-eighteenth century poets, especially those who deliberately imitated Milton, discovered in druid' a word full of a vague romantic charm. Hence even James Thomson, who had so unromantic a conceit of his outward appearance, at least, as to describe himself as 'more fat than bard beseems,' is dignified by Collins with this name in the well-known elegy beginning

'In yonder grave a Druid lies.'

Mason, in his dramatic poem 'Caractacus' (1759), makes a

* The passage in the ‘Pharsalia' (book i, 447 seq.), in which the Bards and the Druids are linked together, is well known.

Druid the choragus of a band of British bards; while Cowper, in his Table Talk,' desiring to emphasise how

A terrible sagacity informs
The poet's heart,'

tells us unhesitatingly that not only

but that

' in a Roman mouth the graceful name Of prophet and of poet was the same,'

'British poets, too, the priesthood shared, And every hallowed Druid was a bard.'

Poetic usage dies hard; and, in modern times, so unconventional a singer as Browning cannot help making the Druid both bard and priest, as when, in 'The Two Poets of Croisic,' he says:

'boys from door to door

Sing unintelligible words to tunes

As obsolete; "scraps of Druidic lore,"

Sigh scholars, as each pale man importunes
Vainly the mumbling to speak plain once more.'

When all is told, however, modern scholarship will have it that no single scrap of Druidic lore' in poetry has come down to us, and that we possess no authentic evidence whatever of the bardic culture of the Druids. 'There is no proof,' say the authors of The Welsh People,'* of any formal connexion between the Druidic priesthood and the bardic system as it appears in Wales in the twelfth century.' And it is to the twelfth century that those Mss. belong which furnish us with our first considerable body of authentic remains of the early poetry of the Kymry.

'In the twelfth century,' wrote Matthew Arnold long ago,t there began for Wales, along with another burst of national life, another burst of poetry; and this burst literary in the stricter sense of the word-a burst which left, for the first time, written records. It wrote the records of its predecessors, as well as of itself.' These records, he continues, 'touch that primitive world of which they profess to be the voice,' and the true critic is not he

* By Sir John Rhys and Sir D. Brynmor-Jones (first ed., p. 255).

who, like Mr Nash,* wants to make the twelfth century the real author of the whole poetry, one may say, of the sixth century as well as of its own,' but he who can detect that precious and genuine part in' these documents which touches the primitive Celtic world. Modern Welsh scholarship has done much to show that even Nash, 'the ablest disparager,' as Arnold calls him, of the antiquity of Welsh bardic remains, was not altogether a wrong-headed critic. Many so-called sixth century productions, especially the mythological poems associated with the name of Taliesin, have been indisputably proved to be of comparatively late origin. But, even when all that is either obviously, or presumably, spurious has been cleared away from these poems, there remains much that points to a very remote antiquity. Most historians find in the sixth and seventh centuries alone conditions that would adequately account for such an outburst of bardic

song.

It is impossible, at any rate, to ignore-as a startingpoint to any investigation-the list of great bardic names so long and so confidently dated to that period. Even in the Chronicle attributed to Nennius, which cannot have been compiled later than the first quarter of the ninth century, we read that, about the year 550 of our era, 'Talhaearn, Aneirin, Taliesin, Bluchbard, and Cian were famous in British poetry.' 'Bluchbard' is a name that has baffled the most ingenious critics, but the others are sufficiently familiar to prevent any difficulty about including them in the authentic bardic roll. English poets, fascinated by certain high-sounding names, have indeed taken some liberties with the bardic records, for not every Welsh name which, even under the most honourable auspices, has been admitted to the calendar of the Muses is entitled to that distinction. When Gray, for example, makes his 'Bard' lament,

'Cold is Cadwallo's tongue

That hush'd the stormy main;

Brave Urien sleeps upon his craggy bed;
Mountains, ye mourn in vain

Modred, whose magic song

Made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topp'd head,'

The late D. W. Nash, author of Taliesin, or the Bards and Druids of Britain' (1858), a volume distinguished by much knowledge and critical acuteness, whose excessive iconoclasm is subjected by Arnold to some characteristic raillery.

he goes beyond the limits of all poetic license in his use of traditional names. None of the three British worthies here celebrated is known to have had any repute as a poet. Gray, probably, was confused by the data furnished to him by his Welsh informant or informants, and not only mistook Modred, the villain of the Arthurian romances, for Myrddin, or Merlin, but made bards of two Welsh princes who only had bards in their service. For Evan Evans, to whom Gray was largely indebted for the scanty traditional matter upon which he based his famous Ode,* mentions, in his Dissertatio de Bardis,' 'Tristfardd, the bard of Urien Reged,' and 'Avan Verddig, the bard of Cadwallon ap Cadvan,' among the poets who flourished about the same time as Taliesin, Aneirin, and Llywarch Hên.

No account, however brief, of the early poetry of Wales would be complete without a word of tribute to the work in which Evan Evans-'the Long Bard' (Y Prydydd Hir), as he styled himself, and is still called in the Principality-sought, first of all Welshmen, to direct the attention of English readers to the buried treasures of Kymric poetry. Evans deserves a place-humble it may be, but not altogether unimportant-among those who contributed something to that new interest in remote and archaic forms of literature which was so marked a feature of the early Romantic revival in the eighteenth century. That movement drew much both from 'Gothic,' or Scandinavian, and from Celtic sources, and 'the frugal note of Gray' echoes snatches of song caught from both these distant shores of old romance. Evan Evans was not only known to Gray, but was also a correspondent of Bishop Percy. Above all, he was ambitious to give the world more authentic examples of the primitive Celtic genius than Macpherson had just done in his so-called Ossianic poems. He had, however, little chance against the astute Scotsman, who, gauging well the sentimental and melancholy mood of the age, dressed up his matter in a rhetorical style that took Europe by storm, and so dwarfed

Although not published until 1764, the Ms.' of some work from Evans' hand was, we learn from a letter of Dr Wharton, in Gray's hands by July 1760, and may have reached him by 1757.' (Note in Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury.')