To Mrs. George Borrow
Presteyne, Radnorshire, Monday morning.
Dear Carreta,—I am just going to start for Ludlow, and hope to be at Shrewsbury on Tuesday night if not on Monday morning. God bless you and Hen.
G. Borrow.
When I get back I shall have walked more than 400 miles.
In Wild Wales we have George Borrow in his most genial mood. There are none of the hairbreadth escapes and grim experiences of The Bible in Spain, none of the romance and the glamour of Lavengro and its sequel, but there is good humour, a humour that does not obtain in the three more important works, and there is an amazing amount of frank candour of a biographical kind. We even have a reference to Isopel Berners, referred to by Captain Bosvile as 'the young woman you used to keep company with ... a fine young woman and a virtuous.' It is the happiest of Borrow's books, and not unnaturally. He was having a genuine holiday, and he had the companionship during a part of it of his wife and daughter, of whom he was, as this book is partly written to prove, very genuinely fond. He also enjoyed the singularly felicitous experience of harking back upon some of his earliest memories. He was able to retrace the steps he took in the Welsh language during his boyhood:
That night I sat up very late reading the life of Twm O'r Nant, written by himself in choice Welsh.... The life I had read in my boyhood in an old Welsh magazine, and I now read it again with great zest, and no wonder, as it is probably the most remarkable autobiography ever penned.
It is in this ecstatic mood that he passes through Wales. Let me recall the eulogy on 'Gronwy' Owen, and here it may be said that Borrow rarely got his spelling correct of the proper names of his various literary heroes, in the various Norse and Celtic tongues in which he delighted.[227] But how much Borrow delighted in his poets may be seen by his eulogy on Goronwy Owen, which in its pathos recalls Carlyle's similar eulogies over poor German scholars who interested him, Jean Paul Richter and Heyne, for example. Borrow ignored Owen's persistent intemperance and general impracticability. Here and here only, indeed, does he remind one of Carlyle.[228] He had a great capacity for hero-worship, although the two were not interested in the same heroes. His hero-worship of Owen took him over large tracks of country in search of that poet's birthplace. He writes of the delight he takes in inspecting the birth-places and haunts of poets. 'It is because I am fond of poetry, poets, and their haunts, that I am come to Anglesey.'[229] 'I proceeded on my way,' he says elsewhere, 'in high spirits indeed, having now seen not only the tomb of the Tudors, but one of those sober poets for which Anglesey has always been so famous.' And thus it is that Wild Wales is a high-spirited book, which will always be a delight and a joy not only to Welshmen, who, it may be hoped, have by this time forgiven 'the ecclesiastical cat' of Llangollen, but to all who rejoice in the great classics of the English tongue.