In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales

PREACHER’S WOR(L)D

Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.

John Montague, The Rough Field

1

A Bluffer’s Guide to Welsh

Nonconformity

Bwlch-y-Rhiw chapel, Cil-y-cwm

‘The dark chapels, squat as toads, raised their faces stonily.’¹ They gave ‘an appearance of grey gloom to Welsh life’,² were ‘narrow’, harboured congregations full of ‘black certainties’,³ became the grim fortresses of an oppressive theocracy. At the same time, they were socially pivotal. They staged an incomparable theatre of spiritual struggle and echoed to hymns dangerously capable of bringing even the hardiest atheist to his repentant knees. Or so they still seemed to some writers and readers during the twentieth century. Even today, outrageously cross-dressed as nightclub, or social centre, or bingo hall, they dominate the physical landscape of every town and village. They are the ruined dolmens of some mysterious, departed civilization. Like those great stone faces on Easter Island, they still command physical space, but no longer invite comprehension. Yet to understand the Wales of today we need to be able to read ‘the obsolete map’ of our chapels.⁴ How to establish the relevant co-ordinates, though, if we lack basic bearings? If we don’t have the appropriate compass of historical information? In many respects, present-day Wales’s casual, uncomprehending acquaintance with the chapel-littered landscape of its chapel-ridden past is the legacy of a multifaceted process of secularization, of religious disenchantment. To this the English-language writers of twentieth-century Wales made a small but significant contribution. But the complex ferocity of their passion becomes incomprehensible unless we first know something of the powerful phenomenon that so appalled and allured them. Before, therefore, we approach those writers and their predecessors, it is necessary to attempt some sort of simple ‘map’ of Wales’s holy land, with its Penuels and Bethels, its Seions and its Tabernacles.⁵ This bluffer’s guide, intended for readers of a terminally post-Nonconformist generation, attempts to explain how Protestantism gave rise to Nonconformity, and Nonconformity once took Wales by spiritual storm.

So: what can we say about ‘Protestantism’?⁶ Where, when and how did it begin? What form did it take? How, when and where did it give rise to its chronically obstreperous and fissiparous offspring, Nonconformity? And how did Wales come in (very late) on this astonishing new act? The date is 1517; Wittenberg the place; and it starts as one disaffected Catholic monk’s challenge to his Church. A limited local act of personal conscience, it became the cornerstone of modern secular individualism. But Luther owed more to the past than he could ever see of the future. In nailing his defiant challenge to public theological argument on the door of his church, he was giving expression to a long-standing impulse of reform within Catholicism itself. It had been differently expressed through the ‘heretical’ attempts by Wyclif and Hus to ground faith on every individual’s direct access to the Bible in the vernacular, and in the great Catholic humanist scholar Erasmus’ debunking, through learned application to original biblical sources, of several of the late medieval Church’s lucratively mystified cults and sacraments. Of all that Church’s grotesque excrescences, a particular, and immediate, source of contention with reformers was the cash value placed on salvation by the system of purchase of indulgences to allow the dead earlier release from Purgatory. For them, the turning of priests into brokers signified the way in which the Church as a whole had turned, under the oppressive dominion of the pope, into a greedy, exploitative, power-hungry institution.

The way forward, for Luther as for all reformers, was the way back. In an age when Renaissance humanism was reshaping the world in the image of truths recovered from ancient classical civilization, these Catholic malcontents likewise looked to re-establish their faith on its ur-text, the Bible, on the example of the early primitive Christians, and on the teachings of the great foundational fathers of their Church. In particular, a Luther preoccupied with the issue of salvation looked for authoritative guidance to the Epistles of St Paul, as the insights there offered into the process of salvation had been systematized in the writings of St Augustine of Hippo. The result was the unnerving, and indeed prostrating, discovery of the complete sinfulness and utter worthlessness of every person consequent upon the Fall. No human feature or faculty had been spared. All were damned. Of his own accord, man could do nothing to redeem himself: he was helplessly dependent on God’s grace. But a wrathful God had sacrificed His only Son rather than punish this otherwise irredeemably sinful world, and Christ, alone, could be the channel of grace. Faith in Christ’s atonement for the filth of human sin was central to the process of salvation.

Nevertheless, divine grace was still completely unpredictable in its movements. It could not be simply guaranteed by faith, enticed by priests, magicked up by sacraments, or guaranteed by any Church. So what meaningful function could be performed by any of these? What even was the role of faith? Was it a consequence of grace or somehow a condition of it? How did one know one was saved? If one had been saved, was a fall from grace possible, and if so how? What kind of sacrament was the Eucharist – what was the meaning of the bread and wine? Were images allowable? Or music? If God dealt unpredictably with individuals, couldn’t He visit His grace on women as well as men? And didn’t His unforeseeable actions make a mockery of social distinctions? If reading the Bible was the sole route to Christ, then what about those who could not read Latin Scripture? Or could not read at all? And what of those who could, but whose understanding differed from that of Luther? What was the role of baptism? Could one be meaningfully baptized as an infant, or only as a convinced, committed, adult? If one was predestined to damnation, what did it matter whether one lived a good life or not? And if one was of the ‘elect’, how could morality matter, there being no correspondence between it and salvation? How were the elect to live in a sinful, condemned world? Should they live alone or in groups? If in groups, what form should they take? What forms of worship should they follow? How should they relate to each other? Or to the secular state? Should they respect its authority? Could God bestow His grace on a whole people? If so, could there be a chosen people? Was the Bible all-sufficient? If not, could other textual sources of authority be accessed only through new educational institutions? These are simply a few of the questions to which Luther’s stand gave rise. The history of Protestantism is the turbulent, sometimes violent, and still unfinished history of the explosive working out of a bewildering array of different answers. That sprawling, untidy, frequently unedifying but utterly absorbing history is also very much the history of the emergence of the modern order. It is luridly evident and influentially active, for instance, in the USA: and every bit as much in its secular as in its disturbingly sectarian forms.

Protestantism, as it came to be known, may have begun with Luther, but it quickly exceeded his grasp as it began to display its inexhaustible innate capacity for quarrelling violently not just with the Catholic Church but with itself. Already within a quarter-century of Luther’s first challenge, the civil war of Protestantism had displayed its full dizzying repertoire of variations. The menu of sectarian possibilities ranged from the grimly awesome authoritarianism of the severe Swiss experiments in the building of godly communities by Zwingli and Calvin to the wilder extremes of the Anabaptists (insistent on adult baptism by total immersion), with their penchant, by turns violent and captivatingly peaceful, for many forms of communal sharing. A ‘Reformed’ Protestanism split from Lutheranism. The main disagreement turned around holy communion. Lutherans retained the Catholic belief in the miraculous transformation (transubstantiation was the technical term) of bread and wine into Christ’s flesh and blood. The Reformed Protestants (from whom British Protestants are descended) regarded the communion as commemorative of Christ’s sacrifice. It reinforced faith, and instantiated the work of grace: it was ‘a means of sanctification for the elect who are already incorporated into Christ’.⁷ John Calvin, a great divider of the elect from the goats and grimly unbending believer in predestination, became the effective instigator of a Reformed, as distinct from the original Lutheran, Protestantism and the patron saint of British Protestants. His systematized formulation of Luther’s insights, coupled with his extraordinary experiment in constructing a godly social order, exerted an immense fascination. Even the Anglican Church succumbed to it, and most evangelical sects vied with each other in their devotion to the formidable city boss of theocratic Geneva.

Also significant for the long-term development of Protestantism was the distinction between movements favouring strong central organization (the synodic structure subsequently to be dubbed Presbyterianism) and those who stressed the complete autonomy of each local gathering, or church. The former were naturally more inclined than the latter to think, like the Catholic Church, in terms of serving large communities and territories. They thus tended to become more readily involved in negotiations, and accommodations, with existing state powers. During the sixteenth century, northern Europe was slowly, and often violently, transformed as different versions of Protestantism steadily penetrated and undermined existing societies. Various rulers, motivated no doubt by a mixture of spiritual and pragmatic concerns, converted to one or other of the more stable and tractable – and politically advantageous – forms of this new faith. Not the least enticing aspect of it was the opportunity it offered rulers to break free from papal authority and to finance new initiatives, designed to consolidate their new-found power, by the expropriation of Church lands and funds.

Henry VIII of England was not slow to take advantage of this intriguing new game, despite having been awarded the honorific ‘Defender of the Faith’ by Rome in his younger days. But, attracted though he undoubtedly was, when taking the irrevocable step in 1534, by the political potential of this new kind of ecclesiastical arrangement, he was also fully aware that in espousing Protestantism he would be riding a particularly dangerous, monarch-eating tiger. As contemporary post-Lutheran European history showed, this new faith could not be trusted: it quickly mutated into disturbingly radical forms. A year after Henry’s declaration of ecclesiastical independence, polygamous Anabaptists (Baptists), drunk on the Spirit, gathered in expectation of the Last Days at the ‘New Jerusalem’ of the German town of Münster and were massacred in bloody confrontation with papal forces. The town’s name became synonymous with anarchy: it was to ring ominously in the minds of the faithful of every Church and sect for two centuries. Lutheranism itself was already evolving into a relatively conservative form of Protestant settlement. Through the agency of such key figures as Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, the new state Church of England took a similarly cautious form. Careful to steer clear of evangelical radicalism, adopting and carefully adapting much of the framework of the Church it was deposing, including its priesthood and the sanctity of ritual and image, it nevertheless held firm to the essentials of Protestantism. Salvation could come to thoroughly corrupt man only through God’s grace, made available through Christ’s sacrificial atonement for human sin; the Gospel (consequently translated early into Welsh as well as English) was the sole, divine source of authority; the holy trinity of faith were the Bible, preaching and prayer. Even in this most eventually latitudinarian of settlements, the pulpit threatened to upstage the altar, while in other powerful Protestant sects it completely replaced it.

While Elizabeth I reinforced the new English Church as a bulwark against the kind of Counter-Reformation extremism introduced briefly by Mary Tudor, and James I further consolidated Anglican moderateness in the wake of his early experience of fiercely Calvinistic Protestantism in his native Scotland, unrest grew among those individuals who felt the English settlement fell well short of a real cleansing of the medieval Church. Extremists in the eyes of Anglicans, these Puritans could legitimately claim to belong to the mainstream of European Protestantism. Not as yet fully separated from the Anglican Church, they were not infrequently aggressive in the voicing of their discontent, and worked towards complete purification, citing the early Christian church as their model and inspiration. Of their number was one Welshman destined to be regarded, centuries later, as the unconscious founder of Welsh Nonconformity. John Penry was inclined towards what became known as the Congregationalist, or Independent, model of Church organization (the Welsh Annibynwyr). Its members, gathered together by a common impulse of faith, worshipping without benefit of priest, image or ritual, prayerfully concentrating on the reading and interpretation of Scripture, held their ‘congregation’ to be an ‘independent’, self-sufficient unit. They would owe no authority to any larger, centralized structure or body. The potential social radicalism of such an anti-authoritarian and individualistically egalitarian spiritual movement alarmed the authorities. Baited beyond endurance by the inflammatory ‘Marprelate’ tracts wrongly attributed to John Penry, the Anglican authorities ordered his execution in 1593.

Over fifty years later, Penry’s fellow Independent, Oliver Cromwell, was to deflect the course of history briefly by establishing a Puritan state regime. During that half-century, the initially inchoate evangelical impulses and movements had come to take much firmer, more distinct shape, partly in reaction against Anglicanism’s sharp turn back in the direction of Catholicism under Charles I and his Archbishop Laud. On the more radical wing of the Puritan alliance were the Independents and alongside them the socially even more subversive Baptists. Also believers in single, gathered churches, they laid stress on adult baptism by total immersion and emphasized that anyone, however uneducated, who had been moved by the Spirit, could preach the Word. The right wing was most powerfully represented by the Presbyterians who, as their names suggested, favoured a strongly centralized, firmly structured Church organization and an educated ministry capable of offering authoritative leadership. The worship of all sects was based on the defiant Protestant assertion ‘Every man his own priest’, but only the more radical, such as the Baptists, allowed women as well as men to proclaim this gospel.

Almost as violently intolerant of each other as they were of Anglicanism and Catholicism, such sects in their turn readily splintered, under the pressure of opportunity, into a bewildering variety of turbulent movements, each of which exposed new, increasingly radical facets of basic Reformation theology. One such opportunity was provided by the gathering together of Puritans in Cromwell’s all-conquering New Model Army, a great talking shop and cauldron of libertarian ideas as well as a formidable fighting force. Democracy, primitive communism, free love, messianism, millenarianism, freedom of the press: all these ideas and more surfaced in this heady atmosphere that encouraged intellectual experiment. Particularly threatening were the new ‘liberated’ women who thronged some of the more radical sects, threatening the overthrow of the patriarchal ecclesiastical, social and political order. These were a particularly vocal and turbulent presence in Quakerism, one of the many new, mostly ephemeral groupings that were formed and one of the few to survive. Following earlier experimental ‘enthusiasts’ like the Familists, they trusted in nothing save the Inner Light of God’s illuminating presence. This made them scornful of all social niceties or rank, and anarchically inclined them towards disruption of any and every form of worship. Like many of the Puritans (and indeed the Anglicans) of the period, they believed themselves to be living in the Last Days before the Second Coming of Christ, and so felt called to prepare society for the millenarian revolution that was imminent. Exasperated by his failure to bring any of these sects to the discipline of order, Cromwell, the ‘strong man’ styling himself ‘Protector’, established himself as Puritan dictator and retained supreme power until his death in 1658.

Memory of the Cromwellian dictatorship, and the chaos that had preceded and ended it, reinforced the Anglo-Catholic Charles II’s determination not only to restore the state supremacy of the Anglican Church but to police all sects quite rigorously. The result was a series of punitive and exclusionary measures, in part a tit-for-tat response to like measures against non-evangelical Anglicans introduced by Cromwell’s regime and implemented with considerable vigour in Wales by a small cadre of Welsh Puritans of genius among whom were Walter Cradoc, William Erbery, Morgan Llwyd and Vavasor Powell. The Dissenters, as they were known for their dissent from the established order of Church and State, were turned into ‘Nonconformists’ by their failure to conform to the set of laws branded the Clarendon Codes passed by Charles II’s Parliament between 1661 and 1665 and effectively excluding them from recognized social life. They were forced to hold their meetings – customarily held in houses or barns rather than churches – at a set distance from parish churches. In consequence, they were banished to the wilds, and also debarred from admission to the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as from political or other state service. It was this period of persecution that effectively resulted in the consolidation of a diffuse collection of sects into clear denominations bound, by common exclusion, together into a community dubbed ‘Nonconformist’ for its refusal to conform to the state Church. And with the easing of some legal restrictions from 1685 onwards they hastened to build, for the first time, fixed abodes – simple, whitewashed meeting houses – for their previously refugee faith. They continued, however, to be excluded from all positions of power and prestige, with the result that their energies were diverted, over the coming century and more, into work and business. They therefore by insensible degrees became important architects of the new bourgeois social and economic order, while their academies – alternative ‘universities’ – eschewed all conventional ‘classical’ learning, pioneering instead the study of the science not only of Physics or Chemistry but of the social and political order. But as the original flame of intense evangelical fervour burned somewhat lower, and the old Dissenting sects, now denominations, became more tolerantly rational and socially integrated during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, so, true to the essential spirit of Protestantism, new evangelical movements emerged both from the ranks of Dissent and within the Anglican Church. The most disruptively influential of these was Methodism. But before attending to that inflammatory phenomenon that emerged during the second half of the eighteenth century and was of such great eventual moment in the development of nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity, we need to summarize the history, to this point, of early Puritanism and Dissent in the country.⁸

By the time of the relaxing of the exclusionary laws following the accession of James II to the throne in 1685, only approximately a marginal fifth of the Welsh population favoured the Puritan, or Dissenting, cause. Down to Cromwell’s period and beyond, the Welsh had remained faithful not only to Anglicanism but to conservative religious practices rooted in the ‘Old Faith’ of Catholicism. Puritanism had penetrated Wales only as far as the border regions of Wrexham and Gwent, and it was from these regions that the extraordinary group of evangelicals emerged who became Cromwell’s Puritan satraps in Wales. The names of Walter Cradoc, Vavasor Powell, William Erbery and Morgan Llwyd were eventually to ring like a Puritan litany in the ears of nineteenthcentury Nonconformist faithful. Such retrospective beatification contrasted with Interregnum association of them by Welsh Anglicans with alien oppression of established priests, ignorant, vulgar, tub-thumping, and ruthless discrimination against all who did not measure up to their demanding evangelical standards. Yet, despite subsequent Restoration counter-repression the small, precarious, Puritan congregations in Wales managed to thrive and grow, so that by the end of the seventeenth century, both the Independents and (more slowly) the Baptists had firmly established a network of chapels. Thus Nonconformity began its slow but inexorable advance from its beach-head along the Wales– England border into the heartland of Wales. No doubt part, at least, of its appeal lay in its openness to the socially excluded, its warm embrace of craftsmen, tradesmen and others below the horizon of polite society’s regard. It was these outsiders who helped facilitate Nonconformity’s advance, as it helped facilitate their eventual social and political advancement. From its very beginnings in the Puritan sects, Nonconformity had had a (partly unconscious) potential for effecting socio-political reform, even for fomenting revolution.

During the early part of the eighteenth century, the Anglican priesthood in Wales included in its ranks moderate evangelicals concerned to bring their congregations to salvation through direct experience of the Bible. That meant first teaching them to read, and so Griffith Jones, at Llanddowror, established what became known as a ‘Sunday School’, in which even the poorest of his parishioners could learn this socially as well as spiritually priceless skill. Such innovations coincided with the emergence – on the Continent and in America quite as much as in England – of a tsunami of evangelical fervour. In Wales it was to wash up a quite extraordinary sequence of Calvinist enthusiasts, all still faithfully contained within the confines of the Anglican Church. Daniel Rowland, William Williams Pantycelyn and the arrestingly controversial Howel Harris – the combined force of these three driven, eruptive, charismatic figures, all endowed with the same astonishing spiritual zeal but blessed with very different gifts, was to change Wales utterly.⁹ Through their marathons of peripatetic preaching, their organization of experimental religious communities, and the incomparable, visceral splendour of their hymns they shifted Wales completely off its old, settled axis. In this early period, women converts outnumbered men, and Methodism was sympathetic to the expression of female experience. The most brilliant examples are the Welsh-language hymns of Ann Griffiths of Dolwar Fach, the erotic love poems of an ecstatic who saw ‘Christ rising in April … his nakedness like a tree’, while her flesh trembled ‘at the splendour of a forgiveness / too impossible to believe in, yet believing’.¹⁰ The emotional excesses into which some Methodists could fall were viewed by the unsympathetic as dangerously Dionysiac. In Wales, as in England, these new evangelical believers were sniffily referred to as ‘Enthusiasts’ by a rational society alarmed at such mob displays of unbridled passion.

But it was the term ‘Methodists’ that eventually prevailed, because it precisely identified one vital element in their success. Whatever the giddy spiritual transports to be experienced through their preaching, the leaders of this new sect shrewdly realized how quickly they were likely to evaporate. They accordingly laid great store on methodically constructing a system of meetings designed to underpin, reinforce and develop the initial enthusiasm. In the ‘seiat’, for example, the faithful gathered on a regular basis to revisit and share the experience of spiritual awakening and to subject it to the scrutiny of calmer understanding in order to integrate it into a mature state of lasting faith. In their combination of raw confessional testimony and analytical reflection, these ‘seiadau’ have been said to anticipate the modern model of psychotherapeutic counselling. Unremarkable in social class or background, called from plough or forge, the Welsh Methodists’ uncontrollable preachers were vivid proof of the explosive spiritual potential of everyman (and indeed woman). But still, they remained loyal sons of the Anglican Church. It was left to a new generation, headed by the formidable Thomas Charles of Bala, to declare unilateral independence. In 1811 the Methodists – increasingly dismayed that an English government, terrified into harshly reactionary policies by the French Revolution, treated them, along with the Nonconformists, as a threat to the social and political order and subjected them to severe policing – halfreluctantly declared themselves to be, indeed, a denomination apart. In Wales, they became known as the Calvinistic Methodists, or Welsh Presbyterians, because, true to the synodic or Presbyterian model, they did not recognize the sovereignty of each congregation. Instead, they established a rigidly centralized organization of chapels, and added to their ‘seiadau’ a hierarchical framework of local, regional and national assemblies. A denomination with no exact English equivalent, during the nineteenth century they played a powerful – but always uneasy – part in the Ascendancy of Nonconformity in Wales.

During the Revolutionary period, some of the old Welsh Dissenters of the founding Nonconformist denominations had indeed emerged as social and political radicals.¹¹ Theirs was a brief flowering of Dissenting rationalism before their denominations responded to the impact, and challenge, of Methodism by reverting (though not completely) to their Calvinist roots. That rationalism found particularly cutting political expression through the medium of Unitarianism, a form of belief that was anathema to all of Calvinist persuasion and evidence of the slide towards liberalism to which old Nonconformity, as its conservative stalwarts were very aware, was ever prone. If St Augustine of Hippo stood behind Calvin, then it was Arius, another towering intellectual figure of the early Church, who stood behind the Unitarians. At the time when exploratory understanding of the Christian mysteries had not yet hardened into orthodox ecclesiastical doctrine, the whole issue of the Incarnation and the paradoxical divinity and humanity of Christ was hotly debated, along with the riddle of the Trinity. Arius’ solution was to reject the Trinity completely, as simply a device of human nonsense, and to insist that Christ was not God-Man but a Man, whose perfection was prophetic of all human possibility. Since followers of his theology rejected the Trinity in favour of a unitary view both of the Godhead and of Christ’s nature, they came eventually to be designated Unitarians, as well as Arians, and to be viewed by mainstream evangelical Christians as atheists. Both their theology and their social anathematization naturally inclined them to a radicalism that found social, political, intellectual and artistic expression. Frank Lloyd Wright, that American architect of genius and of Welsh lineage, came from a family originally native to ‘Y Smotyn Du’. A region of the Teifi Valley in Cardiganshire, this hot spot of Unitarianism became a ‘black spot’ on the otherwise unblemished Nonconformist Wales in the eyes of the nineteenth-century evangelicals. Appropriately enough, Dylan Marlais Thomas was named for his uncle Gwilym Marles, a noted Unitarian preacher. As for the late eighteenth-century radical Welsh Unitarians who dangerously favoured the French Jacobin cause, they included Iolo Morganwg, inspired fabricator of Welsh cultural nationhood and founder of the Gorsedd, and David Williams, who actually joined the French revolutionaries in Paris and, following through on the logic of Unitarianism, ended up a Deist. Both were intellectual descendants of Richard Price, the Welsh Arian whose rational defence of a contractual model of government and subsequent Messianic welcoming of the French Revolution in a sermon ‘On the love of our country’ (1789) had provoked Edmund Burke to produce Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the great classic of political reaction.

Even in their period, such figures were few and wholly unrepresentative of mainstream, Calvinistic old Dissent. But they were also premonitory, exemplifying a trend in the older Nonconformist tradition that would find expression in the radical Welsh Liberal politics of the chapels during the later nineteenth century, the Christian socialism of the turn of the century, and the theological and social liberalism of early twentieth-century post-Calvinist Welsh Nonconformity. With the commitment of Methodism to a Nonconformist future, however, the future of Welsh Nonconformity during the nineteenth century was very firmly set on a Calvinist course that entailed steering well clear at first of any social or political engagement, and thus passively supporting the status quo, but later veered decisively in the direction of a widespread social and political interventionism. It was to refashion Wales.

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Nineteenth-century Nonconformity, that remarkable phenomenon, has had a bad press. So much so it might consider retaining the services of Max Clifford. Prominent among its bad-mouthers were many of twentieth-century Wales’s brilliant generation of writers in English, their secular jeremiads betraying their origin in the culture they deplored. Their anathematizations followed hot on the heels of those of Welshlanguage writers of roughly the same period. Pompous, bullying preachers; lying, lustful, avaricious, hypocritical deacons; morally constipated chapel members; chapel stooges of industrial robber barons: these became stock characters in a liberationist carnival of scorn. They were staged as the twisted products of a stifling culture; ‘withered roots’ in Rhys Davies’s phrase. The fair-minded might add that these writers, self-professed liberationists, were only replicating the ferocity with which the denominations had in their heyday attacked each other, the Anglican Church, and, of course, the hated Catholics. And then there was the complex question of their attitudes towards the Irish, the Jews, colonial natives, the rural poor, the industrial proletariat – and women: the lowering patriarch character of this culture is undeniable.¹² Add to that the harsh treatment of backsliders, sexual transgressors, ‘deviants’ and all the other numerous strayers from the straight and narrow.

Posterity has become almost pruriently fascinated by the ‘secret sins’ of Nonconformity. The culture is understandably seen as existing in a chronic state of denial – denial of the havoc wrought by religious mania on both ministers and flocks, the seedy alliance between chapel prestige and social power, the mental deformations caused by moral and spiritual strait-jacketing, the lives wrecked by stigmatization, the secret drinking, the simmering violence of socially excluded groups and classes, the buoyant rates of illegitimate births sadly footnoted by the pathetic record of bungled abortions, and of course the thriving market in double standards. One is left dismayed at the ‘guilty silence’ of the pulpits. Infanticide and suicide statistics offer the darkest evidence of the ‘grotesque brutalities … hidden amongst the images of happy contented families’: modern historians find ‘the level of violence which existed within many marriages is shocking’. And as has been pithily remarked: ‘If the graffiti left on hymn books are any evidence of the matters which occupied the minds of Welsh youths, there was … public evidence of … preoccupation with the sensual.’¹³

The litany of charges is long, whatever the mitigating historical circumstances, the legitimate defences, the scrupulous qualifications, and the persuasive counter-claims to be cited. But in the end, it is back to the extraordinary, compelling power of Nonconformity one comes – to its deep penetrative power, nowhere more evident than in the creative writings of its alienated twentieth-century sons and daughters. In their parricidal attacks, they replicated their natal culture’s values. Alternatively, one might say they turned Nonconformity’s most powerful weapon – rhetoric – against itself. The obsessive, repetitive, ferocity of their onslaught is reminiscent of the Russian aristocracy’s desperate attempts to dispose, terminally, of Rasputin. Nineteenth-century Nonconformity was truly hegemonic, colouring consciousness and not just institutionally dominant. Such a powerful psychic hold did it continue to exert, long after its theological and institutional power had waned, that it could appear to be unkillable.

And seeming such, it was duly subjected to overkill in the work of many English-language writers of Wales during the first half of the twentieth century. Some of their seminal rhetorical strategies are the subject of this book, but before we mistake their fiction for the fact, it is only fair to give even the ‘saints’ their due by attempting a snapshot of chapel culture in its sometimes blowsy nineteenth-century prime. In what follows, Nonconformity is granted the unhistorical privilege of getting its retaliation in first. The result is inevitably more of an airbrushed product than a warts-and-all portrait.

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Folk architecture they’ve been called, those simple early Dissenting buildings, those whitewashed examples of ‘vernacular’ Welsh architecture, those ‘granaries of the spirit’. As for their nineteenth-century descendants, the Nonconformist chapels, it is tempting to write off many of the later examples, in their bling and stony self-satisfaction, as the dated products of conspicuous consumption. In reality, the story of their construction is shamingly different. Chapel members were living precariously far above their means when they invested in these elaborate structures. ‘Build them and they will come’ was their motto. Before Ferndale in the Rhondda Fach was half-developed, four chapels had been built accommodating 2,200 people.¹⁴ No doubt the builders were egged on by interdenominational rivalry. Nevertheless, these chapels were also heroic acts of faith by congregations of struggling working people scarcely able to pay their ministers a living wage. They are also monuments of a new, mass imagination, fired by spurious scholarship about the designs of Old Testament tabernacles and sanctuaries. Conforming, in accordance with Nonconformist theology, to no single uniform design, and expensively customized, they were nevertheless produced on an industrial scale by this extraordinary new foreign society deposited, cuckoo-like, by industrialism in previously rural Wales. Eventually, these chapels were to be seen by the most thoughtful of their leaders as Respectability advertised in stone, the spiritually decadent deposits of a merely religiose society shamed and angered by the infamous Blue Books Report of 1847 into conspicuous conformity with Victorian values. Modernizing leaders intent on economic and scientific progress also emerged to steal the flame from the altar of Methodism and rekindle it in ‘the form of a utilitarian gas-jet’.¹⁵ But part of the chapels’ original function had been to supply the heart of a heartless capitalism. Through them, the proletariat and the rural masses could enter an alternative society, dwell in a parallel universe. And there, for roughly the first half of the century, chapel members remained, while their chapels tripled in number to keep up with an exploding industrial population. One a week they opened, and then sometimes four a week after 1850, to a rhythm set by a sequence of great revivals. For many years past they have been closing at much the same rate.

As the nineteenth century progressed, emphasis within Welsh Nonconformity shifted from a preoccupation with the spiritual state of the individual to a concern for the welfare of the collective. Protestantism had been founded on a fearsome truth. At the core of every individual was the isolated soul. And one day it would stand naked and alone, directly answerable to its Creator, without the mediating presence of either priest or Virgin and saints. But this hard, radical individualism was complemented from the outset by a communitarianism; because emphasis was also placed on those structures of mutual support and spiritual reinforcement, the ‘gathered’ congregations of true believers. And some Protestant denominations were inclined to take a step yet further in the direction of the social. Encouraged by the Old Testament concept of God’s ‘chosen people’, they dreamt of a whole society dedicated – and indeed covenanted – to observing the Lord’s will.

In nineteenth-century Wales, the shift of emphasis from the personal to the social resulted in the creation of ‘the Nonconformist nation’. There were several factors responsible for this development. By ignoring sectarian differences in the interests of associating Nonconformity as a whole with the ignorance and vice that was supposedly rife amongst the common people of Wales, the Blue Books Report welded the denominations together into a single outraged body bent on advertising its injured virtue. A similar sense of solidarity was formed in the countryside as denominations joined together to resist the oppressive alliance between ‘foreign’ landowners and a ‘foreign’ Church; and a spirit of shared resistance also grew in the new industrial centres as workers began to register the ‘feudal’ character of the new exploitative order. And then, as the best and the brightest of the next generation of ministers was sent to be educated to an advanced level at progressive institutions such as Glasgow University, new philosophies began to impact on Nonconformist consciousness. Particularly influential was the philosophy of Hegel. It seemed to offer, for minds infected by nineteenth-century imperial confidence in Progress, a version of ‘evolution’ that was a most welcome antidote to the troubling Darwinian version.

Hegel developed a complex teleological philosophy at the heart of which lay a belief in the Absolute’s steady evolution towards ever more complete self-consciousness through a dialectical History powered by the World Spirit. Advanced ethical human societies were the supreme product of this dynamic cosmic process. Hegelian philosophy proved particularly attractive to the Welsh. Painfully aware of their inferiority to the English as far as practical and material progress was concerned, they could take comfort in the belief that in ethical and spiritual matters they were far in advance of their mighty neighbours. Indeed, the superior light of the little Welsh Nonconformist nation seemed destined to shine on poor benighted peoples throughout Britain’s far-flung Empire. As a result of such developments as these, Welsh Nonconformity’s shift in the direction of the social had, by century’s end, become so extreme and so complete that to the hostile secular witnesses of the twentieth century the chapels seemed to have little more to offer than a moral and social orthodoxy that stifled every expression of the individual spirit.

And yet it had all begun so differently. Preoccupied with personal salvation, Nonconformists were, for the first half of the nineteenth century, prevented by their strict Calvinism from addressing the distressing economic, social and political conditions produced by a predatory new industrial capitalism. Thereafter, as well as providing emotional safety valves for a population worked to the limits of its endurance, the chapels became the bases of a popular resistance movement. Nonconformist leaders and elders looked to politics and social reform as instruments not only of immediate social betterment but of eventual human improvement. They targeted the ogres of popular oppression: rural landlords, the established church, the demon drink. They took reactionary politics by the throat and forced concessions out of it. They provided downtrodden people with the platform shoes that allowed them, too, to walk tall. They produced five periodicals, twenty-five quarterlies, eight weeklies, totalling a circulation of 120,000.¹⁶ Through these they provided forums for sophisticated intellectual debate, forged a powerful rhetoric for political engagement, opened windows onto a wider, even international world. The affairs not only of Europe and the USA but of the Crimea, the Balkans and the South American republics were knowledgeably reported and passionately debated. Gwilym Hiraethog was an acquaintance of Mazzini and in touch with Kossuth.

In this progressive mode nineteenth-century Nonconformity, however dark its alter ego, has its undeniably impressive, even heroic, aspects. Its overriding concern with the individual, however, and with that individual’s direct personal responsibility to his Creator, made it uneasy with every form of sustained collective action, state-sponsored or otherwise, and with any strong identification with social class. When, therefore, worsening industrial experience gave rise to mass proletarian consciousness, the defensive solidarities of unionism and the new secular religion of Socialism, Nonconformity became alienated from its own natural constituency, the ordinary people. Simultaneously, the social advancement it had itself helped make possible, both through the inculcation of socially profitable virtues and its effective political interventions, resulted in class distinctions. These manifested themselves not only within the chapels but also between chapel members and growing sections of the working community that had been Nonconformists’ historic power base.

A far more complex phenomenon than is popularly realized, late nineteenth-century Nonconformity was fully aware of these and other problems, and in responding to them revealed the many very different tendencies within its nature.¹⁷ The response of the liberals and progressivists, eager to meet this new social consciousness on something like its own terms, took forms such as the preaching of a Social Gospel. But fundamental to the analysis of conservatives was a sense of a fall from grace, a declension from that golden age Nonconformists had supposedly known at the century’s beginning. They hankered after the High Calvinism that had provided the chapels with a huge, irresistible impetus of growth following the defection of the Methodists from the Anglican Church and their forging by John Elias, spiritual warlord of Anglesey – that ‘Methodist chapel without a roof ’ – into a new army for the Lord. This hardening of the theological line had been reinforced by a threat from a new quarter – from the followers of John Wesley, who (contrary to both Luther and Calvin) believed that fallen man had retained, by God’s grace, residual power to initiate his own search for salvation. The belated arrival of the Wesleyan Methodists in Wales had also added a dramatic edge to the rhetoric of a group of preachers whose genius as saintly showmen continued to awe and fascinate later generations. Prominent among them were such pulpit giants as John Elias, John Jones Talysarn, Henry Rees and Williams o’r Wern, while over them towered the Himalayan figure of the one-eyed wonder, Christmas Evans, reputed to be not far off seven foot in height.

This was the beginning of the nineteenth-century cult of the preacher ‘aflame with the fire of God’,¹⁸ consistent with belief in inspiration by the Holy Spirit. Festivals could feature several hour-long sermons delivered in climactic succession. Not all performers were stars. There was a preacher for every occasion, from the ordinary journeyman (‘pregethwr at iws gwlad’) to the superstars of the Big Meetings (cyrddau mawr).¹⁹ The gifted ones were the pin-up boys of their age. Posters of the ‘hoelion wyth’, the ‘big nails’ securing the fabric of Nonconformity, featured them arranged fetchingly as a tree of life. Their fanzines were the anthologies of sermon highlights and the hagiographic biographies (cofiannau), although, worried by the charisma of their heroes, some of these publications went to great pains to stress the humble piety evidenced in their intense devotions and ordinary daily