Welsh Journals

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VOLUME XVI WELSH OUTLOOK IT is only the fool who laughs at and derides the wild dreams and the unconscious vanities of the young men of a nation. If "the youths sihali faint and be weary and the young men utterly fail," then disaster is as inevitable as the fall of the leaves. Still, while retaining the highest respect for a thermometer as a scientific instrument, one is permitted to smile if some unaccountable upward rush of the mercury bursts the containing glass. We must admit that we very definitely smiled in reading some of the articles on the very interesting and remarkable special page of this year's St. David's Day issue of the Western Mail. Mr. Ambrose Bebb con- tributed an article on "A National Party-the Risorgimento of the Welsh Nation." We recog- nise Mr. Bebb as a most acute observer and a most challenging critic of the forces and tend- encies at work in our national life to-day. He has also been fortunate enough to have been brought in contact with the same forces at work elsewhere under very different con- ditions. What we expect of such a man is a real sense of perspective, which has been very aptly defined as "intelligent obser- vation of the appearance of similar objects from short and long distances, respectively, and at different angles." And yet some of Mr. Bebb's observations in his article remind us irre- sistibly of the "flatness" of the cave-dweller's art. When he writes "Thanks to the National Party, Nationalism has come to us (in Wales) and has most probably come to stay," he leads inno- cent folks into temptation to giggle,-and to give Where there is no vision the people perish NOTES OF THE MONTH THE APRIL 1929 offence in this way to the innocents, is, as he will know, a very black sort of sin. In fact, the whole article is coloured, or perhaps we ought to say, discoloured, with this tinge of extravagance. The same is true, though not quite to the same degree, of Mr. Peate's article on the "Literary Outlook" in Wales. Of course it is well-informed and cultured. Mr. Peate's name is good security for these qualities. It is strange, therefore, that he should lapse on occasion into the vulgar strain of the post-prandial orator, who invariably used to declare that Wales possessed "the finest sys- tem of secondary education on earth." In Nature, the croakers-raven and toad may be taken as random instances-seem to be endowed with end- less persistence of energy and mythical longevity, whereas early songsters and gay grasshoppers lead lives which never remotely come within the realms of insurable possibilities. Critics, young and old. should remember that there are alterna- tives both to the raven and the premature song- ster, to the toad and the grasshopper. Prophecy is not a completely discredited science, but in its application the moderates win all the time. A bee in the bonnet can prove as much of an incon- venience to a modern mechanic as to an ancient cavalier. A CORRESPONDENT writes Your editorial note in the last issue of The Welsh Outlook, on the very urgent sub- ject of the ebb in literary activities in the native language of Wales, missed its point. It did not attempt to give any indication of the causes re- NUMBER IV