A new edition of a collection of 17 short stories comprising the author's characteristic scathing portrayals of the life and customs of the Welsh Nonconformists of his time, with an introduction by the editor. First published in 1916.

Argraffiad newydd o gasgliad o 17 stori fer yn cynnwys portreadau deifiol nodweddiadol o'r awdur o fywydau ac arferion Gymry Anghydffurfiol ei oes, ynghyd â rhagair gan y golygydd. Cyhoeddwyd gyntaf yn 1916.

The Welsh Nonconformist tradition appears to be on the point of extinction. There are now no denominational colleges left in a land where schools and academies once mushroomed to supply an educated ministry to meet the spiritual needs of a majority of the population. Today’s minority of chapel-goers is numerically insignificant and lacking in influence.

The collapse of an intellectual and devotional tradition – one which runs from John Penry and Vavasor Powell in the seventeenth century to Tudur Jones and Pennar Davies in the twentieth – poses a more disturbing threat to Welsh cultural continuity than the loss to our built heritage signaled by the weekly list of chapel closures. Some of these Nonconformist leaders would be Saints in another tradition: Pennar Davies, for example, to name just one of the twentieth century’s brilliant last flowering of Nonconformist ministerial talent who served their dwindling congregations of 'visible saints' with unsurpassed distinction.

When Caradoc Evans lobbed his first grenade at Welsh Nonconformity with the publication of My People in 1915 – Capel Sion followed a year later – that tradition had reached the height of its numerical and hegemonic strength. So different is the context of its publication to the place of Nonconformity in Welsh society today that historians as well as literary critics need to study his grotesque stories as evidence that such a tradition could become so corrupted by power. For by reducing religious experience to the Word, and by giving worship an elevated pulpit as its sole focus, nineteenth-century Nonconformity lacked any means of checking, in John Harris’s characteristically elegant phrase, 'the cruel and the overbearing, the avaricious and the self-righteous' members of its ministry.

At the height of the First World War, many Nonconformist ministers were no more than party apparatchiks for David Lloyd George, that Welsh prototype of a twentieth-century dictator. There can be no doubt that the conduct of these ministers made a mockery of a tradition which professed charity and humility, sincerity and compassion. All power corrupts, and the absolute power exercised by some Nonconformist divines in late-Victorian and Edwardian Wales had corrupted absolutely.

In the end, however, Capel Sion has to be judged primarily as art and not as social documentation. Re-reading these stories, with John Harris as a guide, reminds us that the art of Caradoc Evans was as flawed as its subject matter.

David Barnes

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Gellir defnyddio’r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.