Sir John Prise: Mediaevalist or Humanist?

The core argument of the essay is that it would be worth setting Saunders Lewis’ important early play, Gwaed yr Uchelwyr, in the context of several anglophone Welsh novels published at the turn of the nineteenth century that sought to assess the relevance of the culture of the indigenous gentry of Wales to the new nation celebrated by the Cymru Fydd movement. It is argued that familiarity with these texts could assist us to grasp the subtlety and rich ambivalence of the play’s ideological stance.

The state of the environment and the passage of time are reflected in the changing colours of the plants around us. Chlorophyll, the green pigment of leaves, captures the energy of sunlight that drives photosynthesis and powers the biosphere. The disappearance of chlorophyll from autumn leaves reveals the yellows and oranges of another family of plant pigments, the carotenoids. Carotenoids protect plants from stresses and are also responsible for the colours of many flowers and fruits. In autumn, the leaves of species such as maples make red and purple anthocyanins, which are members of a diverse family of pigments and defence chemicals. Plants use pigments to send signals to pollinators, dispersers and predators, among which are humans, who have a special physiological and psychological responsiveness to the plant chemistry that colours our world.

This article focuses on three essays published on the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Immanuel Kant by the theologian and scholar, Lewis Edwards, in the Traethodydd between 1846 and 1853. Edwards is considered here as representative of the religious leaders of Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century. His work is examined for evidence of attitudes towards the philosophical developments of the period which could offer an explanation for his failure to defend Welsh language and culture in the face of the spread of English. The article argues that Edwards’ commitment to the speculative reasoning on which contemporary Calvinist theology was based prevented him from responding directly to the intellectual challenge represented by modern thought. In the three articles considered here, which present Kant’s thought as expressed in the first Critique, together with Coleridge’s philosophical theology as it is presented in his Aids to Reflection, we find clear evidence of Edwards’ unwillingness to accept any challenge to Calvinist philosophy. The picture he presents of the work of these two authors is defective and misleading. A major part of both Kant’s Kritik and Coleridge’s Aids is a destructive criticism of the baseless pretensions of speculative reason. Edwards chooses to ignore this entirely, so as to maintain his belief in the power of the human intellect to intuit truth without reference to empirical evidence. It is argued here that this wilful blindness to modern thought was an important factor in motivating the intellectual treason of which Edwards and his contemporaries stand accused. It is also suggested that this treason undermined not only Welsh language and literature, but also the Calvinist religion Edwards was determined to defend. In refusing to face the challenge of modern thought, Edwards left his students with no means of adapting traditional teaching to meet the requirements of a changing sensibility. The eventual result of that was a degree of alienation from the Nonconformist past, the effect of which continues even today

Saunders Lewis’ Williams Pantycelyn (1927) was the most exciting and controversial work of literary criticism to appear in twentieth century Welsh letters. In ten memorable and often brilliant chapters, Lewis analysed the work of the eighteenth century hymnist not according to the usual Protestant norms but in terms of medieval Catholic mysticism on the one hand and the then novel Freudian and Jungian psychology on the other. The book caused a literary and critical storm. Among those who affirmed its counterintuitive nature was the poet T. Gwynn Jones; its thesis was rejected by the philosopher E. Keri Evans while the preacher-poet Moelwyn Hughes found the volume objectionable in the extreme. Such was the power of Lewis’ analysis, however, that for more than a generation it came to embody a new orthodoxy in the scholarly understanding of William Williams. It was not until the 1960s that this orthodoxy began to be overturned. The accompanying essay describes how this process evolved.