Much more than in any of his other books Borrow is the hero in "Wild
Wales"--a strange black-coated gentleman with white hair striding over
the hills and along the rivers, carrying an umbrella, asking innumerable
questions and giving infinite information about history, literature,
religion, politics, and minor matters, willing to talk to anyone, but
determined not to put up at a trampers' hostelry. The Irish at Chester
took him for a minister, the Irish reapers in Anglesey took him for a
priest and got him to bless them in Latin while they knelt. All wondered
to hear the Saxon speaking or reading in Welsh. A man who could speak
Spanish addressed him in that language as a foreigner--"'I can't tell you
how it was, sir,' said he, looking me very innocently in the face, 'but I
was forced to speak Spanish to you.'" At Pentre Dwr the man with the
pigs heard his remarks on pigs and said: "I see you are in the trade and
understand a thing or two." The man on the road south to Tregaron told
him that he looked and spoke like the Earl of Leicester.
He reveals himself also without recourse to impartial men upon the road.
The mere figure of the tall man inquiring for the birthplaces of poets
and literally translating place names for their meaning, is very powerful
in holding the attention. He does not conceal his opinions. Some were
already familiar to readers of Borrow, his admiration for Smollett and
for Scott as a writer, his hate of gentility, Cavaliers, Papists, France,
sherry, and teetotalism. He had some bad ale in Wales, and he had some
Allsopp, which he declared good enough for the summer, and at Bala one of
his best Welshmen gave him the best of home-brewed, "rich and mellow,
with scarcely any smack of the hop in it, and though so pale and delicate
to the eye nearly as strong as brandy." The Chester ale he spirted out
of the window after the Chester cheese. To his subjects of admiration he
also adds Robert Southey, as "not the least of Britain's four great
latter poets, decidedly her best prose writer, and probably the purest
and most noble character to which she has ever given birth"; but this was
when he was thinking of Madoc, the Welsh discoverer of America. I should
be sorry to have to name any of the other "four poets" except Byron.
Another literary _dictum_ is that Macpherson's "Ossian" is genuine
because a book which followed it and was undoubtedly genuine bore a
strong resemblance to it. An opinion that shows as fully as any single
one could Borrow's vivid and vague inaccuracy and perversity is this of
Snowdon:
"But it is from its connection with romance that Snowdon derives its
chief interest. Who when he thinks of Snowdon does not associate it with
the heroes of romance, Arthur and his knights? whose fictitious
adventures, the splendid dreams of Welsh and Breton minstrels, many of
the scenes of which are the valleys and passes of Snowdon, are the origin
of romance, before which what is classic has for more than half a century
been waning, and is perhaps eventually destined to disappear. Yes, to
romance Snowdon is indebted for its interest and consequently for its
celebrity; but for romance Snowdon would assuredly not be what it at
present is, one of the very celebrated hills of the world, and to the
poets of modern Europe almost what Parnassus was to those of old."
Who associates Snowdon with Arthur, and what Arthurian stories have the
valleys and passes of Snowdon for their scenes? what "poets of modern
Europe" have sung of it? And yet Borrow has probably often carried this
point with his reader.
Borrow as a Christian is very conspicuous in this book. He cannot speak
of Sir Henry Morgan without calling him "a scourge of God on the cruel
Spaniards of the New World. . . . On which account God prospered and
favoured him, permitting him to attain the noble age of ninety." He was
fond of discovering the hand of God, for example, in changing a
nunnery--"a place devoted to gorgeous idolatry and obscene lust"--into a
quiet old barn: "Surely," he asks, "the hand of God is visible here?" and
the respectful mower answers: "It is so, sir." In the same way, when he
has told a man called Dafydd Tibbot, that he is a Frenchman--"Dearie me,
sir, am I indeed?" says the man, very pleased--he supposes the man a
descendant of a proud, cruel, violent Norman, for the descendants of
proud, cruel and violent men "are doomed by God to come to the dogs." He
tells us that he comforted himself, after thinking that his wife and
daughter and himself would before long be dead, by the reflection that
"such is the will of Heaven, and that Heaven is good." He showed his
respect for Sunday by going to church and hesitating to go to
Plynlimmon--"It is really not good to travel on the Sunday without going
into a place of worship." He wished, as he passed Gwynfe, which means
Paradise,--or _Gwynfa_ does; but no matter,--that he had never read Tom
Payne, who "thinks there's not such a place as Paradise." He lectures a
poet's mistress for not staying with her hunchbacked old husband and
making him comfortable: he expresses satisfaction at the poet's late
repentance. After praising Dafydd as the Welsh Ovid and Horace and
Martial, he says:
"Finally, he was something more; he was what not one of the great Latin
poets was, a Christian; that is, in his latter days, when he began to
feel the vanity of all human pursuits, when his nerves began to be
unstrung, his hair to fall off, and his teeth to drop out, and he then
composed sacred pieces entitling him to rank with--we were going to say
Caedmon--had we done so we should have done wrong; no uninspired poet
ever handled sacred subjects like the grand Saxon Skald--but which
entitle him to be called a great religious poet, inferior to none but the
_protege_ of Hilda."
(Here, by the way, he omits to correct the plural unity of the "Quarterly
Reviewer.")
But perhaps these remarks are not more than the glib commonplaces of a
man who had found Christianity convenient, but not exactly sufficient. In
another place he says: "The wisest course evidently is to combine a
portion of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the
philosophy of the publican and something more, to enjoy one's pint and
pipe and other innocent pleasures, and to think every now and then of
death and judgment--that is what I intend to do, and indeed is what I
have done for the last thirty years." Which is as much as to say that he
was of "the religion of all sensible men": which is as much as to say
that he did not greatly trouble about such matters.
In the cognate matter of patriotism Borrow is superficially more unsound
in "Wild Wales." At Birmingham railway station he "became a modern
Englishman, enthusiastically proud of modern England's science and
energy"; at the sight of Norman castles he felt no Norman enthusiasm, but
only hate for the Norman name, which he associated with "the deflowering
of helpless Englishwomen, the plundering of English homesteads, and the
tearing out of Englishmen's eyes"; but when he was asked on Snowdon if he
was a Breton, he replied: "I wish I was, or anything but what I am, one
of a nation amongst whom any knowledge save what relates to money-making
and over-reaching is looked upon as a disgrace. I am ashamed to say that
I am an Englishman." And at Gutter Fawr he gloomily expressed the
opinion that we were not going to beat the Russians--"the Russians are a
young nation and we are an old; they are coming on and we are going off;
every dog has its day." But this was mere refractoriness. England had
not asked his advice; she had moreover joined forces with her old enemy,
France: the patriot therefore hoped that she would perish to fulfil his
own prophecy that she must. And after the vaticination he sat down to a
large dish of veal cutlets, fried bacon and potatoes, with a jug of ale,
and "made one of the best suppers he ever made in his life," finally
"trifling" with some whisky and water. That is "the religion of every
sensible man," which is Lord Tennyson's phrase, I believe, but my
interpretation.