Corralling the Goat
The Mask of Merlin. By Donald McCormick. (Macdonald, 42s.) To the Welsh, of course, Welsh rarebit is merely cheese-on-toast. Like the Spaniards after Bizet, they have been doing their best to live up to their image ever since Matthew Arnold invented the Celtic twilight, but, with a peasantry and bourgeoisie decidedly more reminiscent of their French counterparts than of any Fairy Folk, with a vernacular tradition which is the very reverse of twilit, and with much of the (English- christened) magic the defensive reaction of an undervalued people finding its voice in a quest for parity of esteem, the strain is sometimes too great.
Mr. McCormick, searching for the essence of Lloyd George, goes bundling and sermonising in the mountains and brings back strange fruit. He has much to say of interest and value (though event on his forte, the sexuality of Dissent, some comparison with, say, Wessex or Yorkshire, might have weakened his apparent conviction that humanity undergoes a qualitative change west of Offa's Dyke), but the whole suffers a subtle distortion. The Goat looks out from the dust- cover, swathed in the bogus finery of the Gorsedd, and the reader is perilously led up a misty Snowdonia of equally bogus racial psy- chology. The absence of regional discrimination and rigorous social analysis would be disconcert- ing were it not typical of so much writing on Wales. The entirely inappropriate shade of Aneurin Bevan lurks in the margin .(`Vermin among the Ermine' is one splendid chapter- heading); Lloyd George's background is cheer- fully related to that of industrial South Wales (which is like linking Jennings Bryan to Detroit); the modes of the man are compared to the modes of Anglo-Welsh writing—a comparison guaran- teed to lop ten years off the life of every articu- late spokesman for both the twin but riven cultures of Wales. One of the author's sources is the very Report of 1847 whose bilious incom- prehension created modern Welsh anglophobia, and the historian he cites in his bibliography is, perhaps appropriately, a liberal English historian of colonialism. It is somehow symptomatic that hwyl is invariably rendered as hwl. This is Wales through the Looking Glass.
We could see more clearly, perhaps, were we less bedevilled by this Merlin claptrap and the brilliant nonsense of Keynes. Even at the height of the Black-and-Tan campaign, L. G. could startle his Cabinet colleagues with a fierce polemic against landlordism and, in some essen- tials, he never wholly outgrew the agrarian populism which nurtured, him. Dr. Kenneth Morgan, in his scholarly and perceptive study, takes us back to social realities. In the process, he has written a book which will surely become a cornerstone of modern Welsh historiography.
His achievement is considerable. If one accepts the definition of a classic as something frequently quoted but never read, then the Liberal age is surely the classic age of Welsh history. With an
approach and a technique both impeccably con- temporary, Dr. Morgan has cut through a jungle
of partisan and pietistic writing. He has tried to create a synthesis in the absence of the mono- graphic work normally considered essential and, inevitably, his work has its limitations. It is, primarily, a parliamentary survey, supported by some preliminary probing of the social context.
A total revaluation of this seminal period will require a generation of historical work. But, within its limits, Dr. Morgan's achievement is definitive.
In 1800, Wales, still an undeveloped country with a social structure radically different from England's in several important particulars, was essentially a squirearchy, with a tiny Dissenting fringe. The population explosion (in Wales, as i
in Ireland, largely a rural phenomenon) and n• dustrialisation, which, for the first time in Welsh history, created urban concentrations essentially Welsh in character, completely disrupted this social order. In little more than a generation. through the turmoil of social change, of Rebecca and Chartism, the vast majority of the Welsh broke away from the pays legal of their gentry and embraced Nonconformity. In a style strik• ingly similar to that of the so-called non-historic peoples of central Europe, a new nationality took shape, forming around class and linguistic lines. The energies released by the franchise re- forms of 1867 and 1884-85 gave this social revolution a political form. The interests of ex- eluded classes, such as the tenantry and artisanate, fused with that of the excluded re- ligion, Dissent, to create, under the direction of a new but increasingly self-confident native bourgeoisie, an apparently coherent national in' terest, that of the excluded nation, Wales.
Its impact upon the political world Dr. Mor- gan traces, with massive documentation, through the development of an atomistic but recognis. able Welsh parliamentary group after the first Nonconformist lodgment in 1868, and through the molecular change in the structure of Liberal representation, to the advent of democracy and the political destruction of the squirearchy in the 1880s. Incisive sketches of the new leaders—men like the tenant-farmer's son T. E. Ellis with his Fabian vision of a Welsh socialist folk-democracy within Rhodes's Commonwealth Federation or like Stuart Rendel, one of those rare but familiar Englishmen who become so Welsh they make the Welsh feel slightly alien, together with the miners' leader Mabon and that prototype of a tycoon, D. A. Thomas, Lord Rhondda, as well as L. G. himself, enliven his chronicle.
But the political achievement of this momen- tary nationalism was partial, ambiguous and maimed, and it has left a bitter legacy. Yet it revitalised Wales. Nonconformist radicalism was the instrument with which a people which had lost its 'natural elite' levered itself out of primi- tivism into modern society. This was Wales's age of enterprise, which witnessed a renaissance in Welsh literature and the arts which is still in train, the construction, from scratch, of an edu- cational structure from primary schools to uni- versity and that massive entry of the Welsh into Public life, of which the career of the Llanystumdw,y lawyer was the most striking, example.
In his early days, for all his personal brilliance, David Lloyd George was a characteristic repre- sentative of one sector of this complex move- ment, and a great deal of his later career can be interpreted in terms of it. Certainly, understand- ing will not come from the pursuit of hobgoblins. 1-. G. was not the product of Mr. McCormick's broken society'; on the contrary, his was the victorious society, emerging from the cracking shell of the old. Those, like Keynes, who saw him rooted in nothing were merely afflicted with a peculiarly English blindness to that social transformation which is documented by Dr. Morgan's admirable book—the change which rendered obsolete the celebrated entry in the En- cyclopaedia Britannica: 'For Wales, see England.'
GWYN A. WILLIAMS
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