Cylchgronau Cymru

THE PERSONALITY OF TOWNS. SIR Thomas Browne in the Religio Medici," says it is the common wonder of all men how, among so many millions of faces, there should be none alike. Now, contrary, I wonder as much how there should be any. He that shall consider how many thousand several words have been care- lessly, and without study, composed out of twenty- four letters withal, how many hundred lines there are to be drawn in the portract of one Man, shall easily find that this variety is necessary and it will be very hard that they shall so concur as to make one portract like another." And if this is true of his outward nature, how far more obviously is it so of what we perhaps wrongly term his personality,where the opportunities of variation are indeed infinite. Now of late years we have become accustomed to the rediscovery of an old truth, which Holy Church has been preaching imperturbably for the last 1800 years and more, that a community has a soul of its own no less than an outward form; a soul that is something more than the result of an addition sum applied to all its component souls. We have dignified Professors writing at length upon the psychology of crowds we have eminent musicians informing us that the great art of folk song is a communal art (an opinion which I firmly disbelieve) we have Professor Royce in his latest book going so far as to say that individual salvation is only possible in and through the mediation of the beloved community"; we have-but enough of these learned and estimable men-we have, I think, sufficient excuse for the heading of this paper. We may be allowed to apply those wise and charm- ing words of Sir Thomas Browne to communities, in the outward forms of Towns, and to proceed in further papers to draw a few portracts of some of the towns in Wales, not only in their accidental vesture of place, nor even their purposed vesture of buildings, but also, to beg every question that we wish, as they really are. Of course there is no sane man who, in his heart, can really doubt that every town has a personality of its own. Or if there be such an one he has only to think of the towns that he knows, putting side by side such as he considers most alike and then stand back for a moment and see how they differ, not only in accidentals, but in their very essence. Let him take for instance the two towns of Brighton and Bournemouth; superficially there is much that is alike between them. They are both south country seaside towns, catering almost exclusively for the wealthy and leisured class invalids and their relations abound in them, and fashionable Doctors are daily reaping the consequent harvests; moreover, in both these towns it is the visitors themselves, or at all events the visitors and their dependents, who really produce the towns' peculiar atmosphere, and yet how entirely different are their two per- sonalities. Brighton is flamboyant, perhaps a little vulgar; its dress parade is a thing to marvel at its hotels are immense in their luxury of plush and gold; Jewish magnates are everywhere, flaunting their costly wives and super-excellent cigars. Brighton has never forgotten that is Georgian it seems to call upon our wonder to stand and deliver on the spot, and like the King, its virtual founder, it is always a little too frankly bourgeois in its love of ostentation. But Bournemouth wears its wealth with a differ- ence it is more reticent; it knows that to pro- claim an enormous income at the top of one's voice is bad form-it is simply not done. Of course it lets you know that it is wealthy, but its methods are subtler, more gentlemanly-or should I say more ladylike, for Bournemouth is more a lady than a gentleman. She is like some expensive grande dame, who, because poverty has never even loomed upon her horizon, can affect just a little to despise wealth. Her dress is modest though very good, so modest that only another woman can tell its real expensive- ness. It is more than likely that she prefers a carriage to a motor. A dress parade is to her unthinkable and the Jewish magnate with his afore- said wife and cigars would merely excite in her a little shiver of distaste. And yet there must be many visitors who at different times of the year are to be found at both places. The truth must be that each town has a personal atmosphere of its own that is strong enough to absorb and transmute the individual characters of her visitors. Let the doubter take other groups of similar towns, Oxford and Cambridge, Bangor and Carnarvon, Bath and