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"Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be." One has only to let one's memory begin to fetch passages from Byron striking the same note as that passage from Llywarch Hen, and she will not soon stop.
It has all through it a sort of intoxication of style a Pindarism, to use a word formed from the name of the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the power of style seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating effect; and not in its great poets only, in Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian, does the Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but in all its productions:
So we may safely say of the Celts that the fickleness for which they were famed in Roman times was not a racial, but a temporal or epochal defect. This very quality, in old Welsh literature, is more than once given as a characteristic of extreme age; "I am old, bent double; I am fickly rash." says Llywarch Hen. I think that gives the clew to the whole position.
In both cases, the fact that the descriptive poems are put in the mouth, in Wales of Llywarch, in Ireland largely of Oisin, led to the ascription at an early date of the whole literature to Llywarch and Oisin.
But this much is true, I think: out of this poetry, the occasional intelligible flashes of it, rings out a much greater note than any I know of in our Welsh literature since: a sense of much profounder, much less provincial things: the Grand Manner, of which we have had echoes since, in the long centuries of our provincialism; but only I think echoes; but you shall find something more than echoes of it, say in Llywarch Hen, in a sense of heroic uplift, of the titanic unconquerableness that is in the Soul; and in Taliesin, in a sense of the wizardly all-pervadingness of that Soul in space and time: Now Math he was a famous wizard of old means 'sort, 'kind'; and so implies such ideas as 'differentiation, 'heterogeneity. To say that you were enchanted by Math before you became immortal, is as much as to say that before the great illumination, the initiation, one is under the sway of this illusionary world of separatenesses; as for being 'enchanted by Gwydion, that name is, I suppose, etymologically the same as the Sanskrit Vidya, or Budha; he is the 'Purifier' of those 'Five Battalions of 'Celfyddon, the word is 'artists, 'skillful ones'; but again I imagine, it is connected with the word Celi, 'occult' or 'secret'; so that being 'enchanted by' him would mean simply, being initiated into the Occult Wisdom.
Historically, they still march with Cadwallader, with Llewellyn, with Glendower; sing with Aneurin, Taliesin, old Llywarch: individually, they are in the heart of the injury done them thirty years back or thrilling to the glorious deed which strikes an empty buckler for most of the sons of Time.
The Romans turned it into Uriconium; but after their departure, it was captured and burnt to the ground by a party of raiding West Saxons, and its fall is graphically described in the wild old Welsh elegy of Llywarch the Aged. The ruins are still charred and blackened by the West Saxon fires.
"Hast thou heard what Avaon sung, The son of Taliesin, of the recording verse? The cheek will not conceal the anguish of the heart." "Didst thou hear what Llywarch sung, The intrepid and brave old man? Greet kindly, though there be no acquaintance."
He is claimed by the Welsh bards as one of their heroes, and there can be no historic objection to such a claim. Llywarch Hen sang of his death "In Llongborth Geraint was slain, A brave man from the region of Dyvnaint, And before they were overpowered they committed slaughter." Tennyson's version of the legend is mainly taken from the Mabinogion.
But the Celtic melancholy is struggling, fierce, passionate; to catch its note, listen to Llywarch Hen in old age, addressing his crutch: O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water. flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love? O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after that they have drunken? Is not the side of my bed left desolate?
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