Taffy by GK Chesterton

I DO not understand Welshmen.  When we say we do not understand such-and-such a person, we usually mean that he has been making himself a nuisance.  He has been bothering us in some way; and the puzzle of his motives and further intentions has become a practical one.  I do not mean anything of the kind here: I mean barely what I say.  The distant Trojans never injured me.  Taffy never came to my house or stole any part of the provisions.  On the contrary, historically speaking, I went to Taffy’s house and took away a good deal of what belonged to him. [I have been saying this for years] I do not think that Taffy is a thief; I do not even know enough about him to be sure of the preliminary statement that he is a Welshman.  I mean, quite simply and ingenuously, that I know nothing about Wales — not even (for certain) that there is such a place.  I went, indeed, a few weeks ago to a curious place full of rocks; and the people there said it was Wales.  But, then, other people said that these people were very sly, and that you could not believe anything they said.  But, then, as I did not believe the second people who did not believe the first people, it all came back to the same comfortable condition as before, which is one of blank and disinterested nescience.  It is a condition I am in with regard to a large number of things in this world.  I keep my faith for the things of another world.  About this world I am a complete agnostic.

But in this particular case of ignorance I rather fancy that I am not alone.  I think that the great majority of Englishmen have no real notion of the Welsh type or spirit, whatever it is.  They have conceptions of the Scot and the Irishman, false conceptions, but always containing some lines of a true tradition.  The Englishman does, so to speak, understand the Scotchman even when he misunderstands him.  The Englishman does know what the Irish are, even while he demands indignantly of heaven why they are.  The stingy Puritan in plaid trousers is a very crude and unjust version of that queer blend that makes the Scot — the combination of a certain coarseness of fibre with great intellectual keenness for abstract and even mystical things.  Still, it is a version; the prose and poetry of the Scot remain in the caricature.  The picture of Paddy at Donnybrook leaves out all the subtlety and self-tormenting irony that are mixed up with the pugnacity of the Irish.  Still, the Irish are pugnacious; the Englishman has got the leading feature right.  He knows that, for all his economics, the Scotchman often has a bee in his bonnet, and he knows that the Irishman generally has a wasp in his — a thing that will sting itself or anyone else merely for fun or glory.

In these cases, the caricature, though stiff, highly coloured, antiquated, and largely false, tells the remains of several truths.  But who on earth has ever seen a caricature of a Welshman? In Punch and such papers we never see anything but pictures of a Welshwoman — as if there were no males in that peculiar country with the rocks.  Even the woman is only marked as Welsh by wearing an extraordinary costume, rather like that of Cinderella’s supernatural godmother.  Without the artist suggesting any costume at all, one would recognize the very silly portraits of Irishmen with long upper lips, in the style of apes.  Without any plaid trousers to assist the mind, one could spot the stiff beards and rocky cheek-bones of the Scotchmen of Charles Keene.  But if you took away the Welshwoman’s extraordinary hat, there would be nothing whatever to show that she was a Welshwoman.  We have not in our minds a Welsh type to make fun of.  It is interesting to remember that apparently Shakespeare had.

This state of entire non-understanding (as distinct from misunderstanding) of the Welsh seems to me just now to be not only unique, but important and rather serious.  For, unless I am very much mistaken, Wales is going to play some peculiar, and perhaps dominant, part in the developments of our extraordinary time.  If the Welsh begin to influence us without our having yet even begun to imagine them, we shall have the whole Irish business over again; the gradual or imperfect understanding of a thing in the process of wrestling with it in the dark.  The indications of such a movement in Wales (wherever it is), the suggestion of the growing influence of Welshmen (whoever they may be), is something that comes to us rather by widely distributed happenings and hints than in any theatrical example.  Some, however, would call Mr. Lloyd George a theatrical example; he has been called even more extraordinary things.  And in that degree the thing is true.  Mr. Lloyd George is very much more genuine and sincere and formidable in his capacity as leader of the little Welsh nation than he is in any of the other capacities in which he is foolishly praised and ridiculously reviled.  But to anyone who really has an eye for history in action, the smallest strike secretary in a Welsh railway or colliery bulks much bigger in the present picture than Mr. Lloyd George.  And it has been in Wales that many of the most dramatic and effective labour revolts have happened: above all it was in Wales that they presented peculiar features of their own, bad or good, which marked them out from the whole temper and habit of England in recent times.  The modern theory of animals was challenged in the episode of the ponies in the mines.  The modern theory of Jews was challenged in the violent Anti-Semite riots of the last few weeks.  Things fierce and unfamiliar, things lost since the Middle Ages, are coming upon us out of the West.

As the curious incident of the quarrels between Welshmen and Jews has been mentioned, I will take the opportunity here of correcting a curious mistake that clings to the minds of numbers of my correspondents.  There is in particular a gloomy gentleman in America who keeps on asking me how my Anti-Semite prejudice is getting on, and generally displaying a curiosity about how many Hebrew teeth I have pulled out this week, and how often a Pogrom is held in front of my house.  He appears to base it all on some statement of mine that Jews were tyrants and traitors.  Upon this basis his indignation is eloquent, lengthy and (in my opinion) just.  The only weakness affecting this superstructure is the curious detail that I never did say that Jews were tyrants and traitors.  I said that a particular kind of Jew tended to be a tyrant and another particular kind of Jew tended to be a traitor.  I say it again.  Patent facts of this kind are permitted in the criticism of every other nation on the planet: it is not counted illiberal to say that a certain kind of Frenchman tends to be sensual.  It is as plain as a pikestaff that the Parisian tradition of life and letters has a marked element of sensuality.  It is also as plain as a pikestaff that those who are creditors will always have a temptation to be tyrants, and that those who are cosmopolitans will always have a temptation to be spies.  This has nothing to do with alleging that the majority of any people falls into its typical temptations.  In this respect I should imagine that Jews varied in their moral proportions as much as the rest of mankind.  Rehoboam was a tyrant; Jehoshaphat was not.  In what is perhaps the most celebrated collection of Jews in human history, the proportion of traitors was one in twelve.  But I cannot see why the tyrants should not be called tyrants and the traitors traitors; why Rehoboam should not cause a rebellion or Judas become an object of dislike, merely because they happen to be members of a race persecuted for other reasons and on other occasions.  Those are my views on Jews.  They are more reasonable than those of the people that wreck their shops; and much more reasonable than those of the people who justify them on all occasions.

From The Uses of Diversity by GK Chesterton all of which can be read here for free

I was given a copy of this book by Hugh last week and strangely thought to myself, I wonder if there is anything about Wales in here!