Had Ab Gwilym Been So Dead To Every Feeling Of
Gratitude And Honour As To Play The Part Which The
Story makes him
play, he would have deserved not only to be emasculated, but to be
scourged with harp-strings
In every market-town in Wales, and to be
dismissed from the service of the Muse. But the writer repeats
that he does not believe one tittle of the story, though Ab
Gwilym's biographer, the learned and celebrated William Owen, not
only seems to believe it, but rather chuckles over it. It is the
opinion of the writer that the story is of Italian origin, and that
it formed part of one of the many rascally novels brought over to
England after the marriage of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the third
son of Edward the Third, with Violante, daughter of Galeazzo, Duke
of Milan.
Dafydd Ab Gwilym has been in general considered as a songster who
never employed his muse on any subject save that of love, and there
can be no doubt that by far the greater number of his pieces are
devoted more or less to the subject of love. But to consider him
merely in the light of an amatory poet would be wrong. He has
written poems of wonderful power on almost every conceivable
subject. Ab Gwilym has been styled the Welsh Ovid, and with great
justice, but not merely because like the Roman he wrote admirably
on love. The Roman was not merely an amatory poet: let the shade
of Pythagoras say whether the poet who embodied in immortal verse
the oldest, the most wonderful, and at the same time the most
humane, of all philosophy was a mere amatory poet. Let the shade
of blind Homer be called up to say whether the bard who composed
the tremendous line -
"Surgit ad hos clypei dominus septemplicis Ajax" -
equal to any save ONE of his own, was a mere amatory songster.
Yet, diversified as the genius of the Roman was, there is no
species of poetry in which he shone in which the Welshman may not
be said to display equal merit. Ab Gwilym, then, has been fairly
styled the Welsh Ovid. But he was something more - and here let
there be no sneers about Welsh: the Welsh are equal in genius,
intellect and learning to any people under the sun, and speak a
language older than Greek, and which is one of the immediate
parents of the Greek. He was something more than the Welsh Ovid:
he was the Welsh Horace, and wrote light, agreeable, sportive
pieces, equal to any things of the kind composed by Horace in his
best moods. But he was something more: he was the Welsh Martial,
and wrote pieces equal in pungency to those of the great Roman
epigrammatist, - perhaps more than equal, for we never heard that
any of Martial's epigrams killed anybody, whereas Ab Gwilym's piece
of vituperation on Rhys Meigan - pity that poets should be so
virulent - caused the Welshman to fall down dead.
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