Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd

It is impossible within the space at my command to follow Mr. Watts-Dunton into Wales, or through those Continental journeys described by Dr. Hake in ‘The New Day.’ I can best show the impression that Alpine scenery made upon him by quoting further on the end of ‘The Coming of Love.’ But with regard to Wales, it seems necessary that a word or two should be said, for it is a fact that the Welsh nation has accepted ‘Aylwin’ as the representative Welsh novel. And this is not surprising, because, as many Welsh writers have averred, Mr. Watts-Dunton’s passionate sympathy for Wales is as sincere as though he had been born upon her soil. The ‘Arvon’ edition is thus dedicated:—

“To Ernest Rhys, poet and romancist, and my very dear friend, this edition of ‘Aylwin’ is affectionately inscribed.

It was as far back as those summer days when you used to read the proofs of ‘Aylwin’—used to read them in the beautiful land the story endeavours to depict—that the wish came to me to inscribe it to you, whose paraphrases of ‘The Lament of Llywarch HËn,’ ‘The Lament of Urien,’ and ‘The Song of the Graves’ have so entirely caught the old music of Kymric romance.

When I described my Welsh heroine as showing that ‘love of the wind’ which is such a fascinating characteristic of the Snowdonian girls I had only to recall that poetic triumph, your paraphrase of Taliesin’s ‘Song of the Wind’—

Oh, most beautiful One!
In the wood and in the mead,
How he fares in his speed!
And over the land,
Without foot, without hand,
Without fear of old age,
Or Destiny’s rage.

* * *

His banner he flings
O’er the earth as he springs
On his way, but unseen
Are its folds; and his mien,
Rough or fair, is not shown,
And his face is unknown.

Had I anticipated that ‘Aylwin’ would achieve a great success among the very people for whom I wrote it, I should without hesitation have asked you to accept the dedication at that time. But I felt that it would seem like endeavouring to take a worldly advantage of your friendship to ask your permission to do this—to ask you to stand literary sponsor, as it were, to a story depicting Wales and the great Kymric race with which the name of Rhys is so memorably and so grandly associated. For although my heart had the true ‘Kymric beat’—if love of Wales may be taken as an indication of that ‘beat’—the privilege of having been born on the sacred soil of the Druids could not be claimed by me, and I feared that in the vital presentation of that organic detail, which is the first requisite in all true imaginative art, I might in some degree be found wanting. You yourself always prophesied, I remember, that ‘Aylwin’ would win the hearts of your countrymen and countrywomen; but I knew your generous nature; I knew also if I may say it, your affection for me. How could I then help feeling that the kind wish was father to the kind thought?

But now that your prophecies have come true, now that there is, if I am to accept the words of another Welsh writer, ‘scarcely any home in Wales where a well-thumbed copy of “Aylwin” is not to be found,’ and now that thousands of Welsh women and Welsh girls have read, and, as I know by letters from strangers, have smiled and wept over the story of their countrywoman, Winifred Wynne, I feel that the time has come when I may look for the pleasure of associating your name with the book.

Moel Siabod and the River Lledr

Sometimes I have been asked whether Winifred Wynne is not an idealised Welsh girl; but never by you, who know the characteristics of the race to which you belong—know it far too well to dream of asking that question. There are not many people, I think, who know the Kymric race so intimately as I do; and I have said on a previous occasion what I fully meant and mean, that, although I have seen a good deal of the races of Europe, I put the Kymric race in many ways at the top of them all. They combine, as I think, the poetry, the music, the instinctive love of the fine arts, and the humour of the other Celtic peoples with the practicalness and bright-eyed sagacity of the very different race to which they are so closely linked by circumstance—the race whom it is the fashion to call the Anglo-Saxon. And as to the charm of the Welsh girls, no one who knows them as you and I do can fail to be struck by it continually. Winifred Wynne I meant to be the typical Welsh girl as I have found her—affectionate, warm-hearted, self-sacrificing, and brave. And I only wish that my power to do justice to her and to the country that gave her birth had been more adequate. There are, however, writers now among you whose pictures of Welsh scenery and Welsh life can hold their own with almost anything in contemporary fiction; and to them I look for better work than mine in the same rich field. Although I am familiar with the Alps and the other mountain ranges of Europe, in their wildest and most beautiful recesses, no hill scenery has for me the peculiar witchery of that around Eryri. And what race in Europe has a history so poetic, so romantic, and so pathetic as yours? That such a country, so beautiful in every aspect, and surrounded by such an atmosphere of poetry, will soon give birth to its Walter Scott is with me a matter of fervid faith.”

As to the descriptions of North Wales in ‘Aylwin,’ they are now almost classic; especially the descriptions of the Swallow Falls and the Fairy Glen. Long before ‘Aylwin’ was published, Welsh readers had been delighted with the ‘AthenÆum’ article containing the description of Mr. Watts-Dunton and Sinfi Lovell walking up the Capel Curig side of Snowdon at break of day.

Fine as is that description of a morning on Snowdon, it is not finer than the description of a Snowdon sunset, which forms the nobly symbolic conclusion of ‘Aylwin’:—

“We were now at the famous spot where the triple echo is best heard, and we began to shout like two children in the direction of Llyn Ddu’r Arddu. And then our talk naturally fell on Knockers’ Llyn and the echoes to be heard there. She then took me to another famous sight on this side of Snowdon, the enormous stone, said to be five thousand tons in weight, called the Knockers’ Anvil. While we lingered here Winnie gave me as many-anecdotes and legends of this stone as would fill a little volume. But suddenly she stopped.

‘Look!’ she said, pointing to the sunset. ‘I have seen that sight only once before. I was with Sinfi. She called it “The Dukkeripen of the TrÚshul.”’

The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance, falling on the cloud-pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes and vapoury films floating and trailing above, turning them at first into a ruby-coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy fire. A horizontal bar of cloud which, until the radiance of the sunset fell upon it, had been dull and dark and grey, as though a long slip from the slate quarries had been laid across the west, became for a moment a deep lavender colour, and then purple, and then red-gold. But what Winnie was pointing at was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where the sun had now sunk behind the horizon. Shooting up from the cliffs where the sun had disappeared, this shaft intersected the bar of clouds and seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose.”

It is no wonder, therefore, that the path Henry Aylwin and Sinfi Lovell took on the morning when the search for Winifred began was a source of speculation, notably in ‘Notes and Queries.’ Mr. Watts-Dunton deals with this point in the preface to the twenty-second edition:—

“Nothing,” he says, “in regard to ‘Aylwin’ has given me so much pleasure as the way in which it has been received both by my Welsh friends and my Romany friends. I little thought, when I wrote it, that within three years of its publication the gypsy pictures in it would be discoursed upon to audiences of 4,000 people by a man so well equipped to express an opinion on such a subject as the eloquent and famous ‘Gypsy Smith,’ and described by him as ‘the most trustworthy picture of Romany life in the English language, containing in Sinfi Lovell the truest representative of the Gypsy girl.’

Since the first appearance of the book there have been many interesting discussions by Welsh readers, in various periodicals, upon the path taken by Sinfi Lovell and Aylwin in their ascent of Snowdon.

A very picturesque letter appeared in ‘Notes and Queries’ on May 3, 1902, signed C. C. B., in answer to a query by E. W., which I will give myself the pleasure of quoting because it describes the writer’s ascent of Snowdon (accompanied by a son of my old friend, Harry Owen, late of Pen-y-Gwryd) along a path which was almost the same as that taken by Aylmin and Sinfi Lovell, when he saw the same magnificent spectacle that was seen by them:—

‘The mist was then clearing (it was in July) and in a few moments was entirely gone. So marvellous a transformation scene, and so immense a prospect, I have never beheld since. For the first and only time in my life I saw from one spot almost the whole of North and Mid-Wales, a good part of Western England, and a glimpse of Scotland and Ireland. The vision faded all too quickly, but it was worth walking thirty-three or thirty-four miles, as I did that day, for even a briefer view than that.’

Referring to Llyn Coblynau, this interesting writer says:—

‘Only from Glaslyn would the description in “Aylwin” of y Wyddfa standing out against the sky “as narrow and as steep as the sides of an acorn” be correct, but from the north and north-west sides of Glaslyn this answers with quite curious exactness to the appearance of the mountain. We must suppose the action of the story to have taken place before the revival of the copper-mining industry on Snowdon.’

Snowdon and Glaslyn

With regard, however, to the question here raised, I can save myself all trouble by simply quoting the admirable remarks of Sion o Ddyli in the same number of ‘Notes and Queries’:—

‘None of us are very likely to succeed in “placing” this llyn, because the author of “Aylwin,” taking a privilege of romance often taken by Sir Walter Scott before him, probably changed the landmarks in idealising the scene and adapting it to his story. It may be, indeed, that the Welsh name given to the llyn in the book is merely a rough translation of the gipsies’ name for it, the “Knockers” being gnomes or goblins of the mine; hence “Coblynau”—goblins. If so, the name itself can give us no clue unless we are lucky enough to secure the last of the Welsh gipsies for a guide. In any case, the only point from which to explore Snowdon for the small llyn, or perhaps llyns (of which Llyn Coblynau is a kind of composite ideal picture), is no doubt, as E. W. has suggested, Capel Curig; and I imagine the actual scene lies about a mile south from Glaslyn, while it owes something at least of its colouring in the book to that strange lake. The “Knockers,” it must be remembered, usually depend upon the existence of a mine near by, with old partly fallen mine-workings where the dropping of water or other subterranean noises produce the curious phenomenon which is turned to such imaginative account in the Snowdon chapters of “Aylwin.”’”

In ‘Aylwin’ Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of giving his readers little pictorial glimpses of Welsh life:—

“The peasants and farmers all knew me. ‘Sut mae dy galon? (How is thy heart?)’ they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met them. ‘How is my heart, indeed!’ I would sigh as I went on my way.

Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in the Principality. Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country. Never a trace of Winifred could I find.

At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to Pen-y-Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that morning.”

His intense affection for Welsh characteristics is seen in the following description of the little Welsh girl and her fascinating lisp:—

“‘Would you like to come in our garden? It’s such a nice garden.’

I could resist her no longer. That voice would have drawn me had she spoken in the language of the Toltecs or the lost Zamzummin. To describe it would of course be impossible. The novelty of her accent, the way in which she gave the ‘h’ in ‘which,’ ‘what,’ and ‘when,’ the Welsh rhythm of her intonation, were as bewitching to me as the timbre of her voice. And let me say here, once for all, that when I sat down to write this narrative, I determined to give the English reader some idea of the way in which, whenever her emotions were deeply touched, her talk would run into soft Welsh diminutives; but I soon abandoned the attempt in despair. I found that to use colloquial Welsh with effect in an English context is impossible without wearying English readers and disappointing Welsh ones.

Here, indeed, is one of the great disadvantages under which this book will go out to the world. While a story-teller may reproduce, by means of orthographical devices, something of the effect of Scottish accent, Irish accent, or Manx accent, such devices are powerless to represent Welsh accent.”