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 Cædmon—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 protégé 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.
CHAPTER XXXI—“WILD WALES”: STYLE
“Wild Wales” having been written from a tourist’s note books is less flowing than “The Bible in Spain” and less delicate than “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.” A man is often called an “individual,” the sun is called “the candle of God.” A book just bought is “my late literary acquisition.” Facts such as “I returned to Llangollen by nearly the same way by which I had come,” abound. Sentences straight from his note book, lacking either in subject or predicate, occur here and there. At times a clause with no sort of value is admitted, as when, forgetting the name of Kilvey Hill, he says that Swansea town and harbour “are overhung on the side of the east by a lofty green mountain with a Welsh name, no doubt exceedingly appropriate, but which I regret to say has escaped my memory.”