He was like an evangelist, in a way, and his meetings were in the broad
sense religious, though he had long since left his church, not because
its ministers were always condemning him, but for the same reasons
that Tolstoy left his church. His evangel was that of liberty. He had
written a number of little songs. One of them, set to the tune of an
old hymn he had heard in Wales as a boy, had a noble effect when
the crowd sang it. It was the _Gad im Deimle_. His wife, who is an
accomplished musician, had transposed its minors into majors, and in
its strains, as they were sung by the men in his shops,--and there was
singing for you!--or by the people in his political meetings, there was
all the Welsh love of music, all the Welsh love of liberty, and a high
and pure emotion in the chorus:
Ever growing, swiftly flowing,
Like a mighty river
Sweeping on from shore to shore,
Love will rule this wide world o’er.
It was his Welsh blood, this Celtic strain in him, that accounted for
much that was in his temperament, his wit, his humor, his instinctive
appreciation of art, his contempt for artificial distinctions, his
love of liberty, his passionate democracy. Sitting one evening not
long ago in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons I saw the
great Welsh radical, David Lloyd George, saw him enter and take his
seat on the government bench. And as I looked at him I was impressed by
his resemblance to someone I had known; there was a strange, haunting
likeness, not in any physical characteristic, though there was the same
Welsh ruddiness, and the hair was something like--but when Mr. Lloyd
George turned and whispered to the prime minister and smiled I started,
and said to myself: “It is Jones!”
XXIII
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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