Welsh Journals

A ROMANTIC GRAMMARIAN. TIE romantic movement in literature, which cul- minated in England at the beginning of the last century, and began to influence Wales at the beginning of the twentieth century, has effectively discrowned the grammarian. To-day he is regarded by the average man of culture as a mere satellite of the poet and of the artist in words, a labourer who picks up and arranges, more or less clumsily, the precious words and the gems of expression which the imaginative writer has scattered in his path. First of all," we say glibly, comes Shakespeare, creating anew then comes Abbot, describing that creation," but Abbot's work is not for the poets, but for the philologists. In arranging and describing Shakespeare's creation, he sets up, not a model for the future, but a mirror for the past; he is not, in other words, an artist but a scientist, not a maker but a recorder, not a master but a slave. He merely settles hoti's business," and draws his lines around "oun and the enclitic de." We look upon our grammarian just as we regard the policeman-a protector of the sober and law-abiding, a restrainer of the freer and more original spirits. We cannot in this review attempt to show how thoroughly vicious and erroneous this view is. It has led to all manner of excesses and crudities it has, by a process of differentiation, made the student of pure literature into a tattler about Harriet." and helped to bring about that destruction of historical perspective which has so signally vitiated the literary criticism that followed the romantic movement. It has also, on the principle of giving a dog a bad name, made the grammarian an object of well-deserved ridicule and disgust: it has ensured the predominance, in this field of knowledge, of the most labouriously unimaginative race in Europe, and the most docile under restraint, namely the Germans. It is therefore with very special cordiality that we welcome a Welsh Grammar from the pen of one who can imagine as well as record, thus keeping up the tradition which, before the influx of our Anglo- German educational ideas, had always governed the writing of Welsh grammar. The old grammarians, such as Gruffudd Roberts who wrote in 1567, and their followers up to the late Emrys ap lwan, could write the higher grammar that is, they made their researches from above the average level of the writers, and not, as our modern grammarians do, from below. They were creators as well as recorders; in their own province, they helped to make the lan- guage as truly as Dafydd ap Gwilym and Dr. Morgan did. A Welsh Grammar. Historical and Comparative." by J. Morris Jones, MA., Professor of Welsh at the University College of North Wales. Bangor; late Research Fellow of Jesus College. Oxford. Phonology and Accidence. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1919. Pp. xxvii-477. 13/6 nett. 131 Professor Morris Jones's Grammar, then, being in the true apostolic succession, may be read by anyone who has the slightest taste for language, as he would read a new contribution to literature. It stands as truly at the beginning of a new epoch as at the end of an old one it claims to direct the future as surely as it claims to show the past. It does this, it is true, in accordance with a certain principle which those who know Prof. Morris Jones's work will recognise at once,-namely, the assumption that the nineteenth century followed vicious and ignorant guides, and deliberately turned its back upon the historical and recognised ideals of the language, the prose and verse of the masters from the time of the Mabinogion to that of Goronwy Owen. On this first assumption is based a second, that the laborious grammarian who thus shut the door upon the glory of the past, Dr. W. 0. Pughe. was a blunderer, unworthy of the consideration of the modern scholar. These are, we venture to suggest, the two basic assumptions of this book, and it is against them that most Welsh criticism, ignorant and otherwise, will probably be levelled. It is unnecessary for us to offer an opinion upon this point, but we may call attention to one very simple fact which critics of Prof. Morris Jones's methods will not or cannot see that is, that no kind of analogy can be established between English and Welsh in this respect, because no one grammarian has been able to exert such an influence over the English language as Dr. Pughe did over the Welsh, and because, in the second place, the English language is practically settled for ever, is now in its oM and dignified days, living on the treasures, which it has by hook or crook, accumulated,-and even in language there is some kind of a Statute of Limitations. Welsh however is now, we confidently assert, in the most vigorous stage of its growth it is still young and plastic enough to refine itself, and to throw off its vicious accretions it is a language still in the making, and now, if ever, is the time to break away the chains which Dr. Pughe and his contemporaries forged for it. In English, we may not now go back to the old spelling ake, which a false and Pughe-like etymology changed into ache, but surely we Welshmen are not to be tied to things like the following, which we quote at random from Dr. Pughe translation of Paradise Lost. (I. L. 651.) 0 Rialluoedd anfarwolion, 0 Anorfodolion, ond gan Ner pob nerth, Er nad oedd wael yr ymdrech, er mor hyll Y ddamwain, mal y profa y He hwn, Ac hyn yr hyll gyfnewid cas o son Ond pa ryw fryd rhagsyniawl a deimlai ofn 0 Dduwiau y fath ymgyrch, ac o sawl Fel hyn a sefynt byth y gellynt mor Adnabod encil ?