‘Iron Curtain’ is a term well understood today, but long I before that had ever been heard of, I had learnt the meaning of the Wall of Brass. It was in the course of a, conversation with a friend—a Welshman and a countryman. He was speaking of the squire of a certain neighbourhood not far from his own home. A man who had been popular with his tenants at a time when certain others of his class in Wales decidedly had not. But he had never mastered the Welsh tongue although he was of Welsh stock and it had been the language of his forbears. ‘And do you know’, said my informant, ‘the language was like a wall of brass between him and his neighbours ‘.

Mr Saunders Lewis, in one of his collected essays, ‘Tragedy’, refers to a similar instance and one having peculiar pathos. It concerns George Powell of Nanteos, the scion of an old Welsh family that had become anglicised by the middle of last century as had so many others. This young man’s natural tastes were literary and artistic and all round him there grew and throve a living culture, soon to break forth into the Welsh literary renaissance initiated by Sir John Morris Jones and carried forward into our own day. Yet of that life and that culture he knew nothing.

And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom. The rich man died also, and was buried in hell…

Of all conceptions which we can shape of the world—the world as profane, perverse, corrupt, and condemned by God—the truest, I think, is that offered by the Beloved Disciple when he tells us that All that is in the world is the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. Lust of the eyes, rousing in man an inward distaste for what he has, and making him crave and seek after what he lacks; pride of life, exalting a man above himself, instilling contempt for others, and causing forgetfulness of God; lust of the flesh, enslaving a man to his senses and luring astray his reason through the enticements of voluptuousness. These, St Augustine says, are the three plagues which have overspread the world and tainted the healthiest parts of it. Lust of the eyes the desire to have—the root of all evils and specially of injustice. Pride of life, a foe of charity which leads men even to godlessness. Lust of the flesh, the source and spring of impure pleasures and scandalous excesses. My brothers in Christ, it is my conviction that riches as misused by the world feed every one of these wretched lusts, and that the most general and natural cause of men’s injustice and pride and sensuality is that they are either rich or enamoured of riches.

Some years ago, during a classical congress which we attended, my wife in conversation with a fellow member, an intelligent woman, well connected, well read and widely travelled, happened to say that I had devoted some of my leisure to translating specimens of Welsh literature, and the reply was: “Is there any Welsh literature to translate?”’

The story was told by Sir Idris Bell in the broadcast talk he gave to introduce a series on ‘The Literary Tradition of Wales’ (reprinted in The Welsh Review, Winter, 1947), and the question is, as he says, typical and significant. Welsh is spoken today by close on a million people; its literature has more than a thousand years of unbroken tradition, and can claim poets such as Dafydd ap Gwilym and Tudur Aled who need fear no comparison with any European contemporaries; and the modem revival of Welsh writing has, in such men as T. Gwynn Jones, B. Williams Parry and Saunders Lewis, falsified any idea that Welsh is antique—and useless. Yet these facts are constantly received with incredulity. A summary account of books and periodicals that have appeared in the last few months may, then, help to complete the picture of Wales this number of Blackfriars is designed to give.

The silver jubilee in 1947 of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (The Welsh League of Youth, which has today over eighty thousand members) was an important event in Welsh life and was fittingly celebrated by the publication of Y Llinyn Arian (Urdd Office, Aberystwyth, 15s.), an anthology of original work by Welsh writers, painters and musicians, which is evident proof of the vitality of Wesh culture.