THE LAND OF ELIS WYN
IN these years of the fulness of his manhood, the wandering spirit
possessed and compelled Borrow. It dragged him all over the United
Kingdom in search of such adventure and distraction as he could find. He
allowed his work on “The Romany Rye” to be held up by the scheme of a
tour in Wales. With his wife and Miss Clarke he spent the summer and
autumn of 1854 in the land of the Cymry. This expedition was on
different lines from any he had ever undertaken before. He was far more
tractable than of old, far more “civilised” than when, in his youth, he
had roamed the highways and lived in the hedges and the inns. He was far
more comfortable, but also sadly less dramatic than while rummaging the
peninsula for gypsy lore. He went about these travels with a much less
romantic spirit than he had manifested in his Cornish journeys.
Wales—its literature, its history, its language, and its bards—had been a
passion of his life. When he set about making its personal acquaintance,
the heat of the amour had cooled off, and he became a tourist rather than
a picaro. Some years later he published a full record of his travels and
experiences. At that time the world was far less interested in George
Borrow than it had been, and few people took the trouble to compare “Wild
Wales” with his other books. But a later generation, which has found a
new interest in him, has made many comparisons. One of the commonest
observations is that the new book differs from its predecessors in that
it is a mild and pleasant record of travel; idiosyncrasies and
angularities are there, it is true, but the book is not all fads and
angles. Many reasons have been given for this. One of the most
ingenious is that Borrow was accompanied by two ladies who knew exactly
what he was doing, and that he dared neither seek the vulgar adventures
that give colour to his other works, nor invent them in order to add
purple patches where they seemed necessary for artistic effect. One
declines to adopt this theory. Borrow may have been somewhat restrained
by the presence of his wife and her daughter while he lived with them at
Llangollen. But he was often away for considerable periods on walking
excursions, and, in the latter part of his tour, when he tramped through
Wales from north to south, he was entirely alone. There could have been
no restraint upon him then. He was at liberty to seek out the most
disreputable company he pleased, to consort with gypsies, or tinkers, or
the scum of the earth—if it can be admitted without treason that Wales
contains any scum. That Borrow was induced by the influence of his
womenkind to moderate the tone of his writing is a thing one cannot
believe: he returned at the end of the year to their company at Yarmouth,
to add some of the most vitriolic passages to “The Romany Rye.”
Two sets of circumstances may more fitly account for the character of
“Wild Wales.” One is that Borrow had idealised Wales in his mind, and
that he went about it determined to see only what was good and noble in
the country and its people. His early enthusiasm for its language had
given birth to an extraordinary passion for its literature, and a
hero-worshipping devotion to its great ones. To him there were no
mountains like the Welsh mountains of which he had dreamed in his boyhood
among the fenlands of Norfolk. To him there were no princes to be
compared with the Welsh chieftains who resisted the tide of Saxon
aggression. He might pretend as stoutly as he pleased that the
Anglo-Saxon race was the flower of the earth, that there were no finer
fellows in the records of chivalry than the English prize-fighters, and
that there was no nectar to be mentioned with English ale. But when, as
in Cornwall and Wales, he was among the Celts from whom he sprang, all
this superficial structure of association tumbled down, and his true and
native soul breathed its proper atmosphere. Wales was all good to him.
His delight and admiration were unfeigned. They appear in the book, and
they appear equally in the notes unused in the book, which Dr. Knapp has
preserved.
The second set of circumstances relates to the date at which the book was
published. It did not appear till 1862. By that time (he would have
been the last man to admit it) some home-truths had been forced upon
Borrow. He had discovered that the game he played with the public in
“Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” was not worth the candle. He wanted to
write a popular book, and to regain some of the ground he had lost. The
public did not like his anti-Popery screeds; he deliberately excised
anything that could offend them in that respect, as will be seen. The
public did not care twopence about his gypsies and would rather be
without them. He deliberately avoided any reference to the gypsies of
Wales, though they were perhaps the most interesting and the most
intelligent of the Romany tribes inhabiting the British Isles.
During his Welsh wanderings Borrow was more than ever the philologist let
loose. His joy was unbounded in the discovery of persons who said to him
“Dim Saesneg,” signifying that they did not understand English, in the
exercise of his Welsh upon them, in their astonishment that there should
be one tall Englishman striding through Wales who could speak to them in
their own vernacular. His Welsh has been criticised with a certain
degree of justice. It was book-learnt. But it was a sufficiently good
working medium to enable him to get into closer touch with the people
than he could have done with English alone. When he was reciting Welsh
verses on the top of Snowdon, a native asked him whether he came from
Brittany. The variation which the Celtic language underwent in its
journey through Cornwall into Armorica is surprisingly slight. The
present writer was sailing once in a boat off the coast of Finistère with
two Breton fishermen, exploring certain grottoes inhabited by the
korrigans, which take the place of pixies in Brittany, and found some
difficulty in reconciling their French with any standard known to him.
But, they said, if against his next visit he would learn to speak
“Ouelsh,” some interesting and profitable discourse would be easy. And
they might have been, for all their appearance, two dark-eyed denizens of
Mevagissey or the Cardigan coast.
If Borrow had only a literary acquaintance with the language, he had a
spiritual affinity with the land and the people. Welshmen admit that
“Wild Wales” is one of the finest books on their country ever produced,
either by Welsh or English writers. Indeed, it could hardly fall short
of that, being the work of a man fascinated by his subject, who
maintained a high pitch of enthusiasm for every phase of it, whether he
was escorting his ladies to see fine prospects in the neighbourhood of
Llangollen or making excursions with John Jones, the Methodist weaver, or
visiting simple cottages to drink milk and talk with their inhabitants of
the works of the Bards and Mystics over which he had pored long years ago
in the corporation library at Norwich, or entertaining rough miners with
ghost stories in mountain hostelries.
While the best episodes of the tour are given in the book, the incidents
recorded in his diary and omitted from the published work possess one or
two features of interest. For instance, as Dr. Knapp points out, the
interview with the Irishman on the road between Cerrig y Drudion and
Cernioge Mawr would have been much improved in point of realism if Borrow
had included in it the words of the song, “Croppies, lie down!” and the
objurgations of the patriotic fiddler on each verse of this pæan of the
detested Orangemen. The scene appeared in this form in his original
draft. But there were reasons, already set out, why he did not want just
at this time to declaim to the public:
“Whoop! Protestants, whoop!
And drink full of hope,
Bad luck to the Devil, Pretender, and Pope!
And down, down, Croppies, lie down!”
That truculent song, which had been “the delight of the young gentlemen
of the Protestant Academy of that beautiful old town” of Clonmel, would
not have been the delight of the British people at large when “Wild
Wales” was issued from the press, and Borrow had learnt enough to know
that. The other principal omission from the book is the Ghost Story of
Lope de Vega. We may accept without regret the fact that he did not
print the account of the duel on Wimbledon Common between Colonel Lennox
and the Duke of York, which has nothing to do with anything in
particular. But the Ghost Story was originally set in a most suitable
framework, and would have read well. He always maintained that it was
_facile princeps_ among ghost stories, and, with due homage to the
Society for Psychical Research, one may admit that his judgment was not
far wrong. He got the tale from an English translation of the Romance,
_El Peregrino en su Patria_, published in London in 1738. He told it to
a company of miners assembled in the inn of Guter Vawr, with whom he had
some difficulty at first in getting upon terms of amity. Borrow may have
lacked colloquial knowledge of the Welsh language, but he had something
which was better: he appreciated with the keenest relish its musical
charm, and he admired it without stint. He understood the people and
their ways of thought, and could accommodate himself to their habits. He
idolised their heroes and poets. Thus he got outside himself more in
“Wild Wales” than he succeeded in doing in any other book, and the
observation has been very justly made upon it that it is an itinerary
rather than an autobiography. Nevertheless, it throws an interesting
light on some facets of his character, and is a book which his friends
must love because it displays him in happier moods and under warmer skies
than most of his writings.
The clouds lowered again after the exaltation of the Welsh tour. He
returned from the mountains and the bards, from the rarefied atmosphere
of Snowdonia and the warmth of his welcome by a Celtic society, to sordid
disputes and wordy warfares about his new book, “The Romany Rye.” It was
exactly four years before that Murray had begun imploring him to “give
the new volumes the finishing touches.” He had been “touching” them with
a vengeance, and the finish was not at all to Murray’s taste. He
completed the task soon after his arrival in Yarmouth, and packed off the
manuscript to Albemarle Street. That respectable thoroughfare was next
door to being scandalised by the contents of the parcel. True, Murray
put his criticisms in a friendly way, but they were strong criticisms,
and they were backed by literary opinions of some weight. But Borrow had
experienced a surfeit of critics, and his anger was supreme. He told
Murray he had given him the manuscript on condition that it should not
pass out of his hands, and complained that it had been shown round among
several people. He declared that he was not anxious to publish it, a
statement from which the usual discount must be subtracted. He proceeded
to describe it as “one of the most learned works ever written” (this with
Mrs. Borrow as his mouthpiece, for decency’s sake), and his manifesto
then diffused itself in renewed attacks on the foes of “Lavengro,”
refusal to have anything to do with Murray’s suggestion for a book on
Russia, and a denunciation of England as an ingrate country. “It owed
much to him, and he owed nothing to it.”
Borrow’s books not only took a long time to write, but had a bad habit of
hanging about after they had been written. Many things happened before
“The Romany Rye” appeared to a bewildered public, holding the critics “up
by their tails.” In the meantime, the Romany Rye himself had been
wandering again. He was, as De Quincey said of Descartes, “as restless
as a hyena.” In 1855 he took his wife and Miss Clarke to another
out-of-the-way corner of Celtic Britain—the Isle of Man. Making Douglas
his headquarters, he explored the country thoroughly, generally alone and
on foot. He was on the look-out for the material for another book,
which, as in the case of the Cornish volume, remained a project. He did
get as far as the title, “Bayr Jairgey and Glion Doo: The Red Path and
the Black Valley,” and prepared an introduction for it.
The Isle of Man was at that time, in the literary sense, an unoccupied
country, and Borrow would have worked over a fertile field of virgin soil
if he had carried out his purpose. There was no Manx Society; there was
no Manx _Miscellany_. The Runes were there for him to decipher and
describe; the poetry and the history of the island were at his disposal
to exploit. “In lone farmhouses and cottages situated in gills and
glens” were the “smoke-stained volumes” of “carvals” in manuscript, poems
of the people, which he diligently searched out while penetrating the
recesses of the island. The carvals—_Anglice_, carols—are mostly on
Biblical subjects and of no great antiquity. Borrow got possession of
two volumes and examined the contents of many. He had only a slight
acquaintance with the Manx language, but his general knowledge of Gaelic
stood him in good stead as he puzzled his way through the carval of
“Joseph,” or of “David and Goliath,” or of “The Evil Women,” of which
last he remarks that it is written in dispraise of the sex and recalls
the poem of Simonides on the same subject. It is the work of an
eighteenth-century smuggler named Moore, whose misogyny was displayed in
an original fashion—by picking out all the bad characters of the feminine
persuasion in the Holy Scriptures and relating their most wicked deeds.
Borrow says it “is a curious piece, and must certainly have found its way
abroad without clerical sanction.” He was not more interested in these
effusions than in the scanty printed literature of the island—such as the
ballads of “Brown William” and “Myle Charaine.” The former (“Ilian Dhu”
in the vernacular) commemorates one John William Christian, a Receiver of
the Isle of Man, who at the time of the Restoration was executed on
Hangoe Hill because he had surrendered to Cromwell. {218} Borrow
translated this poem, and also the ballad of “Myle Charaine,” the miser,
which he entitles “Mollie Charane.” His version was published in _Once a
Week_. He was fond enough of it to go hunting for the miser’s
descendants on a lonely curragh, much to the amazement of the good
people, who could not understand that the possession of an ancestor who
happened to have been mentioned in a poem was any good reason for the
invasion of their privacy. His keenest taste, however, took him much
farther back into the mists of the past than the balladists of the
eighteenth century. Was not the early history of the island a record of
the lives and deeds of his beloved Danes and Norsemen? Were not their
sepulchral monuments to be seen in the Runic stones? And, more distant
still, were there not the legends and the fragments of half-lost songs of
Finn, the Celtic hero whose exploits are celebrated in so many lands? He
had encountered Finn in Ireland. He had found him in Cornwall under the
wing of the Irish guide, Cronan. Here he met him again. Walking with
Borrow on Snaefell, a miner of Laxey, James Skillicorn (who was the donor
of one of his two volumes of carvals) recited a Manx tradition of Finn—“a
mighty man of valour and a swift runner.”
There were two giants (so the tale ran) rejoicing in the name of Finn; of
these, Finn McCoul, a huge giant, was Scottish, and Finn McCoyle, a
lesser giant, was Manx. The Scots Finn, hearing rumours of the fame of
the Manx Finn, and feeling some jealousy, decided to visit him in order
that they might try their strength. So he waded across from the
southernmost point of Scotland to the northernmost point of the island.
Finn’s wife answered the door to him, and was at once stricken with
amazement and fear at his gigantic proportions. She saw that her
husband, who was inside lying on the bed, would be no match for him, and
therefore told him that McCoyle was not at home.
“Who is the great fellow lying on the bed?” asked McCoul.
“Only a little son of ours,” said the astute Mrs. McCoyle.
The visiting giant then asked for something to eat, and she said she
would give him a cake such as they were in the habit of eating, and
presented him with an iron platter.
McCoul crunched it to powder between his teeth, and swallowed it with the
utmost relish.
Then McCoyle, assuming the part his wife had invented for him, and
pretending to be the son of a mighty father, offered to take McCoul out
to his father’s playing-ground and show him the ball with which he
played. Having reached the place, McCoyle directed the visitor’s
attention to a round crag of rock, weighing something more than a ton,
which he said was his father’s skittle-ball. “Can you do anything with
that?” he asked.
McCoul seized it, threw it a mile high, and caught it again.
“Well done!” cried the crafty McCoyle. “Let’s see you do it again.”
And as he threw the rock up into the sky again, McCoyle went behind him
and gave him a push which sent him over the cliff, where he was dashed in
a thousand pieces.
“Such an end,” says the tale, “may all those have who come over the water
expressly, as the Scottish giant did, to bully the decent people of Man.”
In Cornwall Borrow found the ancient language dead; in the Isle of Man he
found it rapidly dying out of common use, and not much cultivated for
literary purposes. The Church services in Manx were being discontinued.
Deploring all this greatly, he still went on studying it. He was no
lover of Methodists—placing them in one of his comprehensive categories
with “Whigs, Muggletonians, and Latter-day Saints.” But his political
and religious prejudices did not interfere with his love of the Celtic
tongues or his devotion to poetry in any form, and when he had nothing
else to do he sat in his lodgings and read Killey’s translation into Manx
of the Methodist Hymn Book. Killey’s other chief work was the
translation of Parnell’s “Hermit.” Why anybody should want to translate
that highly overrated piece of Queen Annery into any language at all, it
is hard to say. His choice of subjects, however, did not deter Borrow
from paying homage to him and going to see his daughter, with whom he had
a discussion on the effects of Methodism in the island. It was summed up
in the best Borrovian oracular manner: “The Methodists have done much
good in Man,” he said to her, “but their doctrines and teaching have
contributed much to destroy the poetical traditions of the people.” This
dictum was very like that which R. S. Hawker proclaimed of the Methodists
in Cornwall. But Hawker did not allow that they had done any good at
all. Wesley, he said, caused the Cornish people to “_change_ their Sins
and called it conversion. . . . With my last Breath I protest that the
Man Wesley corrupted and depraved instead of improving the West of
England. . . . The Vices of the Body are not after all, bad as they are,
so hateful as the Sins of the Mind.” Borrow was nearer the truth than
Hawker. But it may be doubted whether the spread of Methodism had much,
if anything, to do with the evanishment of old poetic traditions; the
march of industrialism and the increasing fluidity of population were the
real culprits.
Borrow trod the red path and explored the black glen—whose magnificence
he did not praise too highly—and inspected carvals, climbed walls to look
at carved stones, sketched with Henrietta, and generally enjoyed himself
for several weeks. It was the autumn of the fall of Sebastopol. The
news reached the island on September 10th, and provoked some of Borrow’s
most fiery denunciations of politicians and soldiers—the offence being
that the French had taken the Malakoff and the British had been repulsed
from the Redan. “The war might have been gloriously settled nearly a
year ago by the English, and they have got all the credit of the affair,
but for the inactivity and indecision of that miserable creature Raglan,
the aristocratical leader of the English and the secret friend of the
Russians. . . . Much shouting in Douglas and firing of guns in the
harbour, though for what reason it would be difficult to say.”
Borrow’s patriotism was of a peculiar kind. He had the type of mind
which was generally “agin the Government,” and few of the operations of
British statesmanship, either at home or abroad, gave him any
satisfaction. Yet there never was a man who took more pride in the fact
that he was an Englishman. The sight of The Rock moved him to paroxysms
of patriotism. When he begins a paragraph, “O, England!” the experienced
reader knows what to expect, and all Radicals and other subversive
persons may “stand clear,” as they say at sea. But even they will
forgive him because the quality of his martial music is so high.
“O England! long, long may it be before ere the sun of thy glory sink
beneath the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous clouds
are now gathering rapidly round thee, still, still may it please the
Almighty to disperse them, and to grant thee a futurity longer in
duration and still brighter in renown than thy past! Or, if thy doom
be at hand, may that doom be a noble one and worthy of her who has
been styled the Old Queen of the Waters. May thou sink, if thou dost
sink, amid blood and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more than
one nation to participate in thy downfall! Of all fates, may it
please the Lord to preserve thee from a disgraceful and a slow decay;
becoming, ere extinct, a scorn and a mockery for those selfsame foes
who now, though they envy and abhor thee, still fear thee, nay, even
against their will, honour and respect thee.”
Nor will the reader be shocked or surprised to learn that these somewhat
unpacific and heathen sentiments formed “part of a broken prayer for my
native land, which, after my usual thanksgiving, I breathed to the
Almighty ere retiring to rest that Sunday night at Gibraltar.” Like many
other Englishmen, he seemed to find more to admire in the institutions
and the character of his country when he was at a distance than when he
was at home.
The principal authority for the Manx incidents is Dr. Knapp, who gives
fully the journals of the tour from which some extracts have been made.