THE BOOK THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN
BY January 26th, 1854, Borrow was back among his friends at Penquite,
bursting in upon them lyrically with:
“Behold the man who’s been at Kinmel Dray,
Who passed by Kinmel Cres upon his way,
And who at Kinmel Worthey made a stay.”
He and Mr. Taylor undertook a long moorland tramp by tor and bog that day
to Kilmar, a jagged and precipitous hill behind the Cheesewring, where is
the huge rock structure popularly known as “King Arthur’s Bed.” The
Arthurian mood, to be developed presently, was already coming upon him.
When, next day, he walked to Liskeard, to visit the ex-Mayor once more,
and met the worthy Town Clerk, the talk turned from “Jew houses” to King
Arthur’s court, and his imaginative vision darted off to the North and
the golden traditions of glorious Camelot. On these he brooded while he
walked, and while he sat by the roaring fire of hazel faggots in the
kitchen of Penquite. Not that he allowed these ethereal matters to
engross him entirely, for he was curious about the cost of hazel-wood as
fuel—remembering that he had burnt it at the shrine of Isopel, the “Queen
of the Dingle,” thirty years gone. So he notes: “Hazel faggots, 10s. a
hundred, at 30 lbs.”
Going about among the natives, he disdained no unconsidered trifle of
lore and knowledge. Cornish phrases struck his fancy, such as “bread
baked in the clome”—in earthenware “kettles” on the open hearth, covered
with burning peat, bread of such a rare flavour and quality, indeed, as
twentieth-century man cannot conceive, even in St. Cleer, where the
“machine-baked” variety is now hawked by half a dozen enterprising bakers
from the neighbouring towns. There is another Cornish delicacy which
does persist; it is known as “thunder and lightning”—a _soupçon_ of sugar
syrup over the clotted cream of the country. “Poor old Philp,” he
records one of his relatives as narrating among the characteristics of a
local notoriety—“Poor old Philp used to like ‘triggle’ over cream.”
One story given to him by Mr. Taylor was of an old man who built himself
a hovel of turf on Kilmar Tor. In the winter of 1814 there was a great
snow-storm, and the old man’s hut was buried in the drifts for two nights
and two days. When they dug him out they found that he had been in bed
all the time, and declared that it was “the longest night I ever knawed;
I thought t’d never end.”
There was another dinner party at the old house of his forefathers. He
ploughed to Tredinnick through the drizzle of a “soft” Cornish day.
“Ben’t got wet, ha’ thee?” was the salutation of William Borrow, aged
seventy, welcoming him to the homestead. One of his few stumbling-blocks
was the Cornish dialect. “My relations are most excellent people,” he
wrote to his wife, “but I could not understand more than half of what
they said.” The simplicity of their mode of life was a surprise to him,
and probably a pleasant one; he found no affectation of gentility among
them. Wealth to the extent of £70,000 was reported to be in the united
hands of the family, but the head of it, Henry Borrow, “lives in a house
in which there is not a single grate—nothing but open chimneys.”
Discussions about the character and attributes of the pixies were
constant. Henry could hardly tell him whether he believed in the pixies
or not; but he did believe in the Durdy Dogs, having himself heard them
giving tongue. If Henry had confessed to a faith in pixies, he need not
have been ashamed of his intellectual company. The belief was shared by
no smaller a person than the redoubtable Hawker of Morwenstow, who saw
and chased a pixy two years later as he rode through a gorge on the way
home from Wellcombe. He relates how he felt himself “flush and then grow
pale” when he saw a “brown, rough shape” start up among the furze bushes,
and how, “remembering St. Thomas’s word that every spirit must crouch to
the Sign,” he made the sign in the air before urging his horse towards
the creature—which, of course, escaped!
Pixies, legends, and philology, however, all took a place in his keen
inquiries secondary to authentic recollections of his father’s youth. He
makes full notes of two anecdotes related to him. Henry Borrow’s account
of the Menheniot Fair affray, as the traveller pencilled it down, is full
of delicious filial exultation, which is repeated in another story,
narrated to him by Thomas Borrow, of Lamellion, and thus set forth:
“My father.—At one time, at Bodmin Bridge, was a big, bony man six
foot high, the terror of everybody at Plymouth and Devonport. My
father fought him at Liskeard, just by a butcher’s shop. My father
struck him a blow which sent him staggering across the street into a
cooper’s shop. He got up and came on again, saying, ‘Where is
Borrow?’ ‘Here I am,’ said my father, and struck him another blow
which knocked him down, after staggering six yards. He was
dreadfully sick, and did not ask for Borrow again.”
There is a pathetic as well as a humorous interest in these explorations
of Cornish memory for traces of the father who had died in so much doubt
as to the future of this son, and so much well-justified scepticism about
the prospect of his maintaining himself on his “Armenian or other
acquirements.”
Borrow became increasingly anxious to see the wild country on the
rock-bound north coast before he left the Duchy for London. Letters from
Mrs. Pollard mention his desire to inspect “King Arthur’s Castle at
Tintagell.” On February 1st he left Penquite for Tredinnick, to spend a
last day and night with the Borrow family there, and to brood again over
the memories of his father which the little old house awoke. It was the
only night he had slept at Tredinnick; he had been previously “much
affected on being taken upstairs, at the remembrance of his father, and
shed tears.” After breakfast the next day he set off for a rough
cross-country ride, mounted on a horse named Triumph, and accompanied by
his cousin, Nicholas Borrow. By way of the road he had twice traversed
with Miss Taylor, past Doniert’s grave, by Redgate, and along the valley
of the lonely Dreynes river, they cantered to Bolventor and the Jamaica
Inn. The derelict village of Bolventor consists at the present time
mainly of a large building set in a square of grass-grown cobbles—the
erstwhile famous Jamaica Inn. Now deprived of a licence, and selling
mineral waters to casual and disconsolate wayfarers or thirsty cyclists,
this hostelry, at the time of Borrow’s visit, was a place of some
importance—a coaching house upon the main road between London and
Falmouth. Not many years before it had been busy day and night with
scenes such as those described in the account of the inn in “The Romany
Rye,” where Lavengro acted as hostler and clerk of the stables. The
coaches clattered over the cobble-stones, and the square echoed with the
cries of jarveys and postilions, and the rattle of harness, and the
champing of bits. It was already beginning to decline in 1854; for the
railway was building far to the south, and a new line of traffic was
being opened up.
The two horsemen; now within sight of the greatest hills of Cornwall,
Brown Willy and Rough Tor, left the road and struck across the heath in
the direction of the mountainous northern horizon. “We then proceeded,”
wrote Borrow, “over moor and moss, till we came to a stream, which we
forded. It was rocky and dangerous.” If this was, as I suppose, Hanter
Gantick, the great ravine in which the Lanke river roars down between
banks composed of huge aggregations of granite boulders, the description
was not too bold. Even in his wildest adventure, he could hardly have
attempted to get a horse across a worse place. “We then ascended another
hill, on the top of which we saw at a distance an inhabited country.”
The eminence was probably Rough Tor moor, and the cultivated land the
undulating country to the north of the central wild. Whichever of the
cluster of hills it was, it could not have failed of interest for Borrow.
They provided him with hut circles, with a great Logan stone encrusted
with Druidical superstitions, the court or “hall” of King Arthur which he
had been discussing at Liskeard with Mr. Jago, and the remains of a
chapel to St. Michael, whose gate arch was removed some twenty years
before to make a doorway for the Britannia Inn, near Altarnun! Having
seen his cousin through the wilderness, and pointed out to him the Pisgah
sight of “an inhabited country,” Nicholas Borrow bade him an affectionate
farewell, and returned with the horses to Tredinnick, while George set
out on foot alone to reach Camelford. “I passed by a place called Carn
Long, and, striding forward, found myself at Camelford before I expected.
A wilder journey over moss and moor I never made.” The “moss,” by which
he betokens the bogs in the neighbourhood of Brown Willy, is a notorious
great hindrance to travellers who would otherwise ascend these hills in
much larger numbers.
The extraordinary scenery and the romantic associations of the country
upon which he was now entering amply repaid him for the toils and pains
of his day’s scramble across the backbone of Cornwall. He was in King
Arthur’s land. At Camelford he trod a battlefield ten centuries old, for
here it was that Egbert the Saxon met the Britons of the West in 823.
Borrow did not linger in the quaint old town, but pushed on towards
Tintagel by way of Slaughter Bridge already mentioned, which inherited
its grisly name from that “last weird battle in the West,” where Mordred
fell and Arthur received his mortal hurt. Enthusiastic local
authorities, more confident than the general, are able to give the date
of the conflict as A.D. 543. “At last I reached Tintagel, about 6.30
p.m., and went to an inn (the Wharncliffe Arms), kept by Symmonds,” to
whom he had been recommended from Penquite. After such a day he was glad
of its shelter and of the creature comforts it offered to a tired man on
a cold February night.
The fascinations of Tintagel are many and oddly mingled. The very air
seems full of wraiths; the solid and substantial characters of mediæval
history have their ghosts hovering about these rugged hills, no less than
the more ethereal spectres of the heroes of Arthurian myth. Tintagel
Castle, on the heights to the west, to which Borrow turned next day, is
an ancient ruin standing on a wonderful site. It has been familiar to
most people for a long time as one of the wildest and most picturesque
scenes in England, and the impression may remain the same to-day in the
minds of those who are imaginative enough to be able to blot out of the
picture the incongruous achievements of the modern hotel-builder. But it
was not so well known to any but Cornishmen when Borrow visited it, for
that was long before the iron road had reached within thirty miles of it.
The fable of Arthur’s birth in the impregnable fortress, Dundagil, whose
remains now stand gaunt and silent on their rocky eminence, may be
dismissed by a date. The architecture of the original castle was Norman;
the rebuilding took place in the thirteenth century. There is now a
great gulch 200 feet wide between the cliff where the two principal
courts stood and the “island”; it was formerly much narrower, and is
reputed to have been spanned by a drawbridge. Yet it is pleasant to
dream, as Borrow did and as Tennyson did when he lived at Boscastle a
year or two later meditating his Idylls, that this was the veritable
scene where the blameless King held court, and the Knights of the Round
Table served him. Tennyson has shackled the Arthurian legend to Tintagel
with links that can never be broken. And it is also pleasant to recall
the more authentic and more historical connections of the place—that
twelfth century when the Castle was a great stronghold, when the little
chapel of St. Julitta was founded upon the height to the west of the
island; those days in the thirteenth century when Tintagel was in such
height of glory, when David Prince of Wales, seeking refuge in his
struggle with Henry the Third, received the hospitality of its Cornish
lord. It is not a far cry across the Bristol Channel, past Lundy, to the
coast of Wales, and as he looked northward over the grey sea, Borrow
could hardly have resisted the customary emotions that the thought of
Wales created in him, with his memories of the procession of the bards
from Ab Gwylim by Elis Wyn to Gronwy Owen.
But this was rich ground for him, and he was fully employed in absorbing
impressions of men and events, past and present, which he briefly
recorded in the two notebooks that were afterwards meant to be expanded
into his work on Cornwall. There was the quaint harbour of Boscastle
near by; there was Forrabury minster, the “silent tower of Bottreux,”
with its bell-legend—the story of the peal of bells which an Earl of
Bottreux presented to Forrabury in order that its music might rival that
of Tintagel, the wreck of the ship which conveyed them from London just
off the shore while Tintagel was sounding the curfew, the warning rung
for mariners on that grim lee shore by the buried bells when a storm is
approaching from the Atlantic. There was the lovely waterfall of St.
Knighton’s Kieve. Borrow had a taste in waterfalls, and was eloquent in
describing them, though unscientific, as Dr. Russel Wallace has pointed
out. The venerable evolutionist, remarking on the progress of his
doctrine, illustrated it by the fact that so great a writer as George
Borrow could speak of a waterfall as being in all details as it was
“‘since the day of creation, and will probably remain to the day of
judgment.’” There were other associations—political in kind—which would
not have rejoiced him so exceedingly; he had no great love for
politicians, especially of the Whig sort who had controlled most of the
forty odd pocket boroughs of Cornwall. Bossiney was one of them, the
hamlet close to Tintagel, whose chief claim to utility after it ceased to
return two members to Parliament was that it contained a smithy.
On the wild coast to the west, at that time almost inaccessible and
unknown—where now the tripper in his thousands hears the music of the
Atlantic on Trebarwith Strand—he spent three days, walking long distances
and reaching as far west as Pentire Point, which guards the Bay of
Padstow. On the return journey he took the inland road, through St.
Minver and Egloshayle (“the church by the stream”), where, to avoid the
evils of continual tidal bores, a pious fifteenth-century parson got up a
subscription to build the noble bridge of seventeen arches that spans the
River Camel. At Pengelly, close to the celebrated slate quarries of
Delabole, he made the last entry in his Cornish journal. He is sitting
in the little parlour of the old Delabole Arms, and sees two prints on
the wall with inscriptions in French: “Le Revd. Dr. Amour,” and “A
l’Amour il faut se rendre.” “In the latter print,” says he, “quite an
angelic _petit maître_. The March of Gentility has reached Pengelley!”
Having packed up his things at Penquite and said good-bye to his Cornish
relations, he turned his face eastwards, and was in London on February
10th.
To lovers of Borrow, even to mere admirers of his genius, it must always
be a cause of regret—vain enough, but none the less sorrowful—that among
his numerous failures was the failure to write the book on Cornwall
advertised when “The Romany Rye” was published. Perhaps a reason or two
may not be far to seek. It has already been seen that “Lavengro,” on
which he had expended the labour of years, was received with icy
indifference by the public and with torrid hostility by the critics. The
fate of his darling book did much to embitter several years of his life.
The visit to Cornwall broke into this grey period like a burst of
sunshine into a wintry day; it was warm and friendly there, redolent of
beautiful memories of the father he adored; the simple and hospitable
people he met were full of homely kindness, with just a piquant suspicion
of hero-worship; the country itself was full of charm. The whole
experience interested, even inspired him, and no one can doubt that while
he was in Cornwall, and for some time after he left it, he fully intended
that the promised book should be written. He had talked over the project
with the Taylors at Penquite; later he arranged the matter with John
Murray.
Then came distractions. When he returned from the land of saints and
pixies to London and the east, it was to resume work upon that Appendix
in which he was pouring out the overflowing vials of his wrath upon his
critics, upon the army of his mortal enemies, upon the mythical myriads
of those whom he supposed to be placing obstacles in the path towards
official employment which he desired to tread. He filled his letters and
bored his friends with the mournful burden of his complaint against
Governments and authorities, lords and notabilities, who to his distorted
imagination seemed to be in league against the interests and prosperity
of George Henry Borrow. Amid these glooms the ray of sunshine faded. In
London he had none of the liveliness that possessed him in the West;
morose and melancholy moods alternated with savage outbursts against his
foes—even though he spent a considerable part of his time in so cheerful
a haunt as the library of the British Museum, looking for material with
which to confute and confound them. At last “The Romany Rye” came out.
It was as great a failure as “Lavengro.” Its reception disheartened him
for literary work, and the Cornish book receded farther into the
distance. Finally, his adventures in Wales intervened, and he chose
rather to write of them than of the smaller subject of which he might
have made a better book, fine as “Wild Wales” unquestionably is.
There was so much good material in his Cornish tour, and in the lore and
gossip which he drank in so avidly, that the disjointed notes of his
impressions do only create a thirst for more. In his printed works there
are but few references to the Duchy in the West. There is the passage in
“Lavengro” where he speaks of his father’s Cornish descent, and quotes
the proverb, “In Cornwall are the best gentlemen.” And in “Wild Wales”
there is another adage which he had picked up in the West—the “proverb in
the Gerniweg . . . which was the language of my forefathers, saying,
‘Ne’er leave the old way for the new’”—the theme, by the way, of a
Cornish ballad given in Llhuyd’s _Archæologia Britannica_ and translated
by Borrow. That is all. The book he would have written on this land of
miracles and fairies, of Celtic legend, of the last struggles of the
British race in England against their Germanic conquerors, the land where
the language of the ancient people was spoken within the memory of
gossips with whom he conversed, where the very names of people and places
were fragrant of the old order, where
“By Tre, Pol, and Pen,
You may know the Cornishmen,”—
such a book would have been worth having. A Celt in mind and blood and
bone, he would have written it with sympathy, and he would have found it
a subject not nearly so keenly exploited as the Wales of which he
afterwards wrote, or the Manxland where he compiled similar journals in a
later year.
Within the comparatively brief time he allowed himself, Borrow saw a
great deal that was characteristic of Cornwall. It is a county of many
characters, with industries and employments various if small. Its
patriotic toast is: “Fish, Copper, and Tin.” To this triple sentiment
agriculture might be appropriately added. Borrow saw them all. He saw
farming in the hills in his own family and among their friends. He
watched tin and copper mining in the Caradons, and saw how the
West-countrymen
“. . . . From the bleak Cornubian shore
Dispense the mineral treasure which of old
Sidonian pilots sought,”
as the imaginative Akenside has it. Mount’s Bay was encircled by legends
of the Phœnicians and their voyages to the “Cassiterides” for tin. At
Newlyn—long before it became the most bepainted village in three
kingdoms—and at Mousehole with his friend Burney, he saw the fishing
industry in full operation. We should have had from him many a burst of
the dialogue of which he was a consummate master—as with Henry Goodman,
the nonagenarian of Tremar, and with the old men he met in Dolly
Pentreath’s parish of Paul—and the Cornish language, once spoken
throughout the South of England, would have been discussed, if not in
sufficiently learned style to satisfy the expert, at any rate in a way
that would have made for the entertainment of mankind at large.
We have read of his Cornish father’s prowess in “the art of
fisticuffery,” and might certainly have looked for a spirited account of
the affair at Bodmin Bridge when the terror of all Plymouth and Devonport
was vanquished, and another of the fracas at Menheniot Fair. But we
should probably also have had an essay upon an art which has always been
far more popular in Cornwall than boxing—that is, the art of wrestling.
We may be sure he would have expressed his patriotic preference for the
Cornish over the Devonshire style. He might have agreed with Touchstone
that “breaking ribs” was not sport for ladies, but he would have
regretted its decline because it was a vigorous and manly game, and he
would have fastened upon the career of the great wrestler Polkinghorne,
whose contest with the Devonshire hero Cann, on Tamar Green at Devonport
in 1826, was a Homeric battle worthy the pen of him who discoursed of
that great fight in which Thurtell was “lord of the concourse.” He would
have given us the true inwardness of “the Cornish hug” and the “Flying
Mare,” and might even have cited the ballad of Will Treffry and Little
Jan, whose untimely end left sorrowing the lady who was to have been his
bride that very day:
“Then, with a desperate toss,
Will showed the Flying Hoss,
And Little Jan fell on the tan,
And never more he spake.
Oh, Little Jan, alack!
The ladies say, Oh, woe’s the day!
Oh, Little Jan, alack!”
But most of all do I miss such a treatise as should have grown out of his
exploration of the Tintagel country, speculating in what degree he would
have adopted the Cornish theory of Arthur, what he would have made of the
mass of tradition and romance that has collected about that stretch of
coast. One may imagine how his mind would have followed the legend of
Arthur from its birthplace in the Far North down through his beloved
Wales to the spot on which he stood before the crumbling walls of
Dundagil, out of whose silent ruins Tennyson’s imagination was about to
construct his marvellous picture of the stately halls of Camelot.
Borrow’s would have been a vastly different story from Tennyson’s
idealisation of the mystery of Arthur’s life, and still more startling
would have been its contrast with the version of the master-mystic of
these parts, the immortal Vicar of Morwenstow. {205} This in spite of
the fact that, as Hawker said, he worked into his poem “The Record and
Rationale of Keltic Cornwall, the rock, barrow, moor, mountain all there,
with the spirit of our fathers rehearsing their intent”—for Hawker’s
Catholic theology would have been anathema to the Papist-hater, Borrow,
and the man who wrote supporting the Bull of Pius IX., promulgated that
very year, would inevitably have been placed on the Borrovian index.
Borrow would rather have harked back to Walter Mapes, and beyond him to
Malory, and beyond him to Geoffrey of Monmouth. His Arthur’s mother
would have been the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and Uther would
have been his father. His Arthur would have wed the daughter of
Leodegraunce, King of Camelyard; the Table Round—the most valuable
accretion which Cornwall has given to the legend—would have been Arthur’s
wedding present from Leodegraunce, who would have received it from Uter
Pendragon, for whom it would have been made by Merlin, Prince of
Enchanters. Camelot would have been Camelford, and not Winchester, nor
Queen Camel in Somerset; and we might have had a discussion of the
question what Shakespeare meant when he made Kent in _King Lear_ say to
the Duke of Cornwall:
“Goose, if I had you upon Sarum Plain,
I’d drive ye cackling home to Camelot.”
The argument in favour of Queen Camel is that on the moors in that
neighbourhood it is customary to breed geese; but then, geese are among
the common objects of the Cornish moors.
We should not have lacked, either, some examination of the scanty
literature of Old Cornwall, of the _Pascon Agan Arluth_, the Passion of
Our Lord, of the trilogy of poems on The Beginning of the World, the
Passion, and the Resurrection. We should have heard of the Miracle
Plays, which continued to be performed in the amphitheatres or “rounds”
of Cornwall well into the seventeenth century—the ancient drama of
_Meriasek_, Duke of Brittany, and the corrupt sixteenth-century masque of
“The Creation of the World, with Noah’s Flood”; and we should have been
told with approval of these plays that, like those of Brittany, they were
far more reverent and more decent than the corresponding performances in
the English and French languages.
Such a book, in Borrow’s inimitable prose, with the interludes and
dialogues whose supreme merit Ford was quick to perceive, would have been
invaluable. The subject is so luxuriant in interest and so novel that it
might well have had a far greater success than anything he had written
since “The Bible in Spain.” But its only place is on the long list of
the Unwritten Books of the world, a literary ellipsis deplored but never
to be filled.