'The Bard is a Very Singular Character': Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture
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'The Bard is a Very Singular Character': Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783164073 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 06/14/2010 |
| Series: | Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Tradition in Wales |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 250 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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'The Bard is a Very Singular Character'
Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture
By Ffion Mair Jones
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2010 Ffion Mair JonesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7083-2296-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
... ydd wyv yn covio imi weled mewn ty hên garwr imi, pan oeddwn yn vachgen, amryw gopïau o Drïodd, wedi eu dodi y'nglud ar welydd ei neuadd. Peth cyfredin oedd hyn, meddai ev, yn yr hên amserodd; ni deallwn wrth hyn vod ein hên deidau yn caru doethineb yn well o lawer no 'u heppil. Pwy ynawr á ry 'nglud ar wàl ei barth unpeth à vo nag yn dysgu, nag yn arwyddo doethineb? neb ar à wn i. Gweled amryw bethau o'r vath hyn, yn enwedig Triodd Llelo Llawdrwm o'r Coetty, ar wal fenestr neuadd vy hên garwr, á dynoedd vy serch i gyntav at ddarllen hên iaith vy ngwlâd, a chwilio ei hen ysgrivèniadau; ac ni bu vychan y diddanwch à gevais yn yr hên lyvrau Cymreig. Yr wyv yn credu hyn yn vy nghalon, pe bai rhai pethau o'r natur hyn mewn print i'w dodi ar welydd mewn tai, y tynai hyny sylw llawer dyn ieuanc at bethau gwell nog y sydd yn awr vynychav yn cael eu gosod o'u blaen; ac nid cywilydd y byddai i ambell hên ddyn pengaled, a phengaled y gwelav i pob hên ddynion, ystyried ei bod hi 'n llawnoed bellach iddo ve neu hithau ymarver ychydig â doethineb.
(... I remember seeing at the house of an old relation of mine, when I was a boy, several copies of Triads glued on to the walls of his hall. This was a common practice, he said, in the olden days; we understand from this that our old forefathers loved wisdom much more than their progeny do. Who nowadays glues on to the walls of his home anything which teaches or denotes wisdom? Nobody as far as I know. It was seeing several things of this kind, especially the Triads of Llelo Llawdrwm of Coety, on the window-wall of the hall of my old relation that first induced me to read the old language of my country and to seek out its ancient writings; and the pleasure I had from the old Welsh books was not small. I believe this in my heart – that if some things of this nature were available in print to be set up on the walls of houses, it would draw the attention of many a young man to better things than are most frequently put before them nowadays. And there would be no shame in it if a few stubborn old men, and I find all old men stubborn, were to consider it high time now for him (or her) to practise a little wisdom.)
The words quoted above appear in the guise of an introduction by Tomas ab Ieuan of Tre'r-bryn (fl. second half of the seventeenth century) to 'Llyvyr Triodd Beirdd Ynys Prydain' (The Bards of the Isle of Britain's Book of Triads), which was published in the third volume of The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (1801–7). They were, of course, composed by Iolo Morganwg, as were the series of triads which followed them. Ab Ieuan's words portray two very different, semi-fictional worlds: the world in which he was brought up as a child and the present in which he writes. He remembers his noble ancestors, who lived in halls ('neuadd[au]') and whose moral conduct was perfectly regulated by a code solidified in the (ancient) literary genre of the 'Triad'. Triads, he suggests, were widely known and their wisdom-giving advice followed in this putative age (rather curiously in view of their strong mnemonic structure) as a result of their being attached in written form to the walls of the homes of the nobility. In ab Ieuan's contemporary world of moral depravity, however, wisdom is unknown and unpractised. As a remedy for this state of affairs he suggests the mimicking of the noblemen's ancient practice of affixing copies of triadic literature on to the walls of their halls. Triads should be printed and distributed widely and displayed on the walls of the more prosaic and lowly houses ('tai') of his contemporaries. This desire to unearth the supposed literary and moral marvels of the 'olden days' ('yr hên amserodd') and propel them into the present through the modern techniques of print culture represents one of Iolo Morganwg's own principal obsessions as a literary producer. In ab Ieuan's appeal for print rather than manuscripts we glimpse a model for much of Iolo's life work: his endeavour to shift one form of written culture – that of the manuscript – into another – the more modern medium of print – largely in order to stimulate wisdom and moral uprightness. Thus did he characterize the new vogue for reading among his fellow Welshmen in 'A Short Review of the Present State of Welsh Manuscripts', the essay which prefaced the first volume of The Myvyrian Archaiology:
A taste for books in their own language is now reviving, and gains considerably amongst the Welsh; than which nothing can more effectually secure their morals, and consequently their happiness; especially as there are not, and we hope never will be, in our language, any such immoral and otherwise pernicious publications, as in most other countries are the bane of morality, and of social happiness.
To a large extent, Iolo saw his own vocation in life as furthering a revival in aid of the 'proper ends of genuinely civilizing our successive generations'.
Yet, to pinpoint Iolo Morganwg's place in relation to a shift from manuscript to print culture is no straightforward task. The passage quoted above displays the complexity of his position and the ambivalence of his attitude towards the enterprise of printing. In the first instance, and most strikingly, Iolo did not evangelize in his own voice but, rather, engaged in an act of ventriloquism which allowed him to convey his views in the guise of a Glamorgan manuscript collector of an earlier generation. This in one respect validated the act of printing by offering it a historical precedent (just as the nobleman's practice of committing the oral triadic literature to parchment validated the act of writing in the passage from ab Ieuan's introduction). The desire to publish was not a new-fangled, modern ambition, but one of long standing. That ab Ieuan failed to realize this desire conferred upon Iolo, the man who succeeded on his behalf, a greater degree of achievement. In securing the printing of ab Ieuan's work, Iolo had not only unearthed ancient literature (of contemporary value), but had also realized ab Ieuan's cherished dream of public dissemination. Iolo thus comes of age as a specialist in the manuscript culture of his county and country, just as ab Ieuan's professed vision is achieved. Nonetheless, the dynamics of public and private remain problematic. Iolo may have expected some degree of contemporary recognition for his contributions to The Myvyrian Archaiology, yet the sense of standing back from direct production and authorship remained strong in this, as in other, published works in which he was involved. Like Chatterton and Macpherson before him, Iolo chose literary forgery as a prime mode of expression, creating spurious prose chronicles, aphoristic literature, a bardic grammar and a rich body of Welsh poetry in both strict and free metres, a small portion of which was published during his lifetime or shortly after his death. His choice may be seen as the result of the pervasive 'anxiety of reception' which beset poets and authors of the Romantic age: fear of an increasingly impersonal and anonymous reading 'public' and a desire instead to 'speak to and for the people'. Habermas's seminal study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, demonstrates how the dynamics of the 'public' were radically transformed during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Britain, France and Germany. As royal courts lost their 'central position in the public sphere, indeed [their] status as the public sphere', that sphere instead began to '[cast] itself loose as a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion'. In English coffee-houses, French salons and German Tischgesellschaften (table societies) and Sprachgesellschaften (literary societies), authors were called upon to discuss their work, usually prior to publication, before an audience not determined by social class. As the practice of nobles offering patronage to authors was abandoned, firstly for subscription (which 'maintain[ed] certain features of the personal character') and lastly for publication addressed to a 'general public, completely unknown to the author', poets and other authors became increasingly apprehensive about the way in which their productions might be viewed. For instance, Wordsworth was beset by 'an almost paranoid fear that poets were at the mercy of a hostile reading-public'. Blake, himself a keen critical annotator of the literary productions of contemporaries, sought to present his own works on densely packed pages of print in which 'there [was] no room left to write anything more'. The printed page of Blake's works, among them Jerusalem, presented itself as 'a wall of words' in which there remained no space to record a critical reading by a member of the feared bourgeois public.
That Iolo shared this anxiety is in little doubt. The practice of withdrawing his claim to authorial rights over his own (forged) productions may be seen as a defence mechanism to lessen his vulnerability to public criticism. It released Iolo to play an editorial role in relation to his own work, a role in which he could be the advocate of the texts which he himself had produced, through a paratext relegated to the foot of the pages or through other editorial apparatus. By parading a host of fictional or semi-fictional figures on the pages of The Myvyrian Archaiology, for example, Iolo freed himself to become the first commentator on, and champion of, his own work. This strategy extended to providing a substantial paratext for his two-volume Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, which was published in 1794 and which he claimed as his own. The notes, in some cases, almost appear to subsume the poetry itself, Iolo again becoming the first annotator of his own work. Added at the end of the second volume is a list of bogus Welsh triads, complete with Iolo's own translation into English and a prefatory 'account'. These have largely been seen as a nod to the druidic and radical faction among Iolo's readership, but another possible function for the material was to distance Iolo's authorial claims to the volume.15 His druidic work had already been presented to the world through the publication of The Heroic Elegies and Other Pieces of Llywarç Hen by his fellow Welshman William Owen Pughe in 1792. To present them again in Poems, Lyric and Pastoral was both to lay his own claim upon them (now that they had attained a public following) and to muddy the waters of his authorial production as a 'self-tutored Journeyman Mason' and poet.
Although Iolo, as an author, feared the bourgeois public, he also readily participated in the act of critical reception in relation to the publications of other authors. If he pre-empted criticism of his own work (rather than prevent it, as Blake did) through his choice of a self-defence mechanism, he still availed himself of the right to figure among the critical and legitimizing voices of the reading public (this time exactly as did Blake). His printed annotations are complemented by manuscript annotations in his hand to an array of published books, an appreciable number of which were composed by contemporaries. An exploration of these annotations shows that Iolo not only benefited and drew inspiration from a wide-ranging literary diet but also, in some cases, vociferously confronted contemporary authors on the pages of their printed books. This again demonstrates Iolo's ambivalent stance in relation to print culture – an attitude which both accepted products of value and use to himself and rejected elements which he found unpalatable. Unwilling to see certain authors flaunting their ideas in print, Iolo's marginalia dispute their acceptance by the literary establishment. In one extreme case, Iolo's annotations to a volume of hymns by Thomas Evans (Tomos Glyn Cothi) built up, through a series of acerbic comments, a sense of challenge to the latter's right to claim authorship of the work. Mired in the controversy of alleged plagiarism, this annotated volume unsettles the authority of its named author and, in Blakeian fashion, 'mount[s] a text of [Iolo's] own in the spaces provided' on the page. Yet, it is not clear that the challenge posed by Iolo's marginalia to printed books represents a meaningful opposition to their influence. Although many of his annotated copies were circulated during his lifetime, they constituted single artefacts and their influence in terms of leading public opinion on a work distributed through the mass medium of print must have been limited. Thus Iolo's manuscript marginalia to printed books oscillate between two extremes. On the one hand, they appear to challenge the authority of the status quo and revel in the right of a private individual to engage critically with the products of print culture. On the other, however, they display a frustrated (and often envious) response to the successes of published authors, especially if they were known to Iolo in person and were active in the Welsh literary and cultural sphere. The question for Iolo, increasingly as old age advanced upon him, was whether he could influence his country's emergent institutions and increasingly 'national' culture through means which were largely marginal – both in his own printed works and through his critical engagement with the work of his contemporaries.
Tomos ab Ieuan's introduction to his triads in The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales brings to light another fascinating aspect of Iolo's work in relation to marginalia and to the culture of the printed word in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To a large extent (and surprisingly so) it focuses not on a public domain but rather on a private one. The ancient 'hall' is replaced by modern 'houses', both dwellings in which moral triads are glued, or envisaged as being glued, upon walls. In projecting the triads into the heart of a private as opposed to a public domain, Iolo appears to be bypassing the public sphere entirely. He places his triadic literature in the confines of a private world, a familial domain 'of humanity-generating closeness', in which 'the idea of a personal cultivation as its own end' is more than mere ideology. In so doing he argues for the individual's engagement with the material, irrespective of the age in which it was purportedly composed, and for the reader's cultivation of his (or her) own morality through the inspiration provided by ab Ieuan's diligent labours as a manuscript copyist. He speaks to 'private selves' on issues of 'human' import. This suggests a romantic preoccupation with the individual soul, even though Iolo's chosen mode of communication in many cases, including the ab Ieuan triads in The Myvyrian Archaiology, is a largely didactic, repetitive genre which does not, to all appearances, readily lend itself to inspired expression.
This brings us to one final matter. Iolo's depiction of a modern household whose walls are covered in the moral tenets of bygone days is not simply a vision of the world into which he would wish to propel his creations. It also evokes very strongly the world in which those didactic tenets were created – that is, Iolo's own cottage in Flemingston in the Vale of Glamorgan, which he left at his death overrun with a 'great quantity of books and papers'. Iolo's references to his 'countless disorderly papers' ('aneirif bapirau didrefn') indicate the general state of chaos in which he lived – the material disorder which was paradoxically the scene for the creation of maxims designed to rectify and reform behaviour and morals. They also firmly embed him within a certain socio-economic class. For, in spite of his advanced state of literacy, Iolo, to the very end of his life, lived in material poverty. Forced to labour at his stone-mason's trade in order to provide a living for himself and his family, he not only lacked financial resources but was also perpetually short of time, with the result that many of his innumerable literary projects remained 'castles in the air'. For a man in Iolo's social position, crossing the boundary into the bourgeois public sphere depended not only on inspiration and talent but also on favourable material conditions. At times when he sensed that such conditions were conducive, he could muster the energy and human support to publish a work with some aplomb. Support in such cases invariably came from members of his own immediate family – staunch allies whose help did nothing to compromise Iolo's strong sense of personal pride and reluctance to ask his social betters for material sustenance. For instance, his wife Margaret (Peggy) helped him to distribute Poems, Lyric and Pastoral among its Glamorgan subscribers, and his son Taliesin played a part in marketing Vox Populi Vox Dei!: or, Edwards for Ever!, a pamphlet which included poetry not only by Iolo but also by his daughters Margaret (Peggy) and Ann (Nancy). His daughter Peggy was also mentioned as a potential hand in folding the sheets and sewing covers on to Iolo's proposed second volume of hymns in 1826. Iolo's more confident forays into the public sphere of print culture were thus often accompanied by an entourage of his closest personal relations, people who were intimately acquainted with him and with the conditions in which he produced his literary artefacts. Yet, these swiftly accomplished ventures did not include his forgeries, the secret of which he never disclosed, even to his beloved son Taliesin. The reality of Iolo's work as a writer, even within the private sphere of his Flemingston home, was largely known only to himself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 'The Bard is a Very Singular Character' by Ffion Mair Jones. Copyright © 2010 Ffion Mair Jones. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures,Preface,
Acknowledgements,
List of Abbreviations,
1. Introduction,
2. 'Ai ovn oedd?' (Was it fear?): Iolo Morganwg as editor,
3. 'Ddoe, heddyw, ag yn dragywydd' (Yesterday, today, and everlastingly): Iolo Morganwg as reader,
4. 'Aneirif bapirau didrefn' (Countless disorderly papers): Iolo Morganwg the writer,
Appendices,
Editorial Methods,
I. Thomas Llewelyn, Historical and Critical Remarks on the British Tongue,
II. Iolo Morganwg's books,
III. Taliesin ab Iolo's books,
IV. Language,
V. Literature,
VI. Miscellaneous,
Select Bibliography,