He says himself that he has “no abstract love for what is low, or what the world calls low.” Certainly there is nothing low in his familiars, as he presents them, at least nothing sordid. It may be the result of unconscious idealisation, but his Gypsies have nothing more sordid about them than wild birds have. Mrs. Herne is diabolical, but in a manner that would not be unbecoming to a duchess. Leonora is treacherous, but as an elf is permitted to be. As for Jasper and Mrs. Petulengro, they are as radiant as Mercutio and Rosalind. They have all the sweetness of unimprisoned air: they would prefer, like Borrow, “the sound of the leaves and the tinkling of the waters” to the parson and the church; and the smell of the stable, which is strong in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” to the smell of the congregation and the tombs.
CHAPTER XXVIII—WALKING TOURS
When Borrow had almost finished “The Romany Rye” he went on a visit to his cousins in Cornwall. The story of his saving a man’s life in a stormy sea had reached them, and they sent him an invitation, which he accepted at Christmas time in 1853. He stayed for a fortnight with a cousin’s married daughter, Mrs. Anne Taylor, at Penquite Farm, near Liskeard, and then several days again after a fortnight spent on a walk to Land’s End and back. In his last week he walked to Tintagel and Pentire. He was welcomed with hospitality and admiration. He in turn seems to have been pleased and at his ease, though he only understood half of what was said. Those who remember his visit speak of his tears in the house where his father was born, of his sitting in the centre of a group telling stories of his travels and singing a Gypsy song, of his singing foreign songs all day out of doors, of his fit of melancholy cured by Scotch and Irish airs played on the piano, of his violent opinions on sherry and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” of his protesting against some sign of gentility by using a filthy rag as a pocket handkerchief, and that in a conspicuous manner, of his being vain and not proud, of his telling the children stories, of one child crying out at sight of him: “That is a man!” He made his mark by unusual ways and by intellectual superiority to his rustic cousins. He rode about with one of his cousin’s grandchildren. He walked hither and thither alone, doing as much as twenty-five miles a day with the help of “Look out, look out, Svend Vonved,” which he sang in the last dark
stretches of road. Mr. Walling was “told that he roamed the Caradons in all weathers without a hat, in search of sport and specimens, antiquities and dialects,” but I should think the “specimens” were for the table. He talked to the men by the wayside or dived into the slums of Liskeard for disreputable characters. He visited remarkable and famous places, and was delighted with “Druidic” remains and tales of fairies.
Thus Borrow made “fifty quarto pages” of notes, says Knapp, about people, places, dialect, and folk lore. Some of the notes are mere shorthand; some are rapid gossipy jottings; and they include; a verse translation of a Cornish tale.
A book on Cornwall, to have grown out of these notes, was advertised; but it was never written. Perhaps he found it hard to vivify or integrate his notes. In any case there could hardly have been any backbone to the book, and it would have been tourist’s work, however good. He was not a man who wrote about everything; the impulse was lacking and he went on with the furious Appendix to “The Romany Rye.”
In 1854 he paid a much longer visit to Wales. He took his wife and daughter as far as Llangollen, which he used as a centre during August. Then he had ten days walking through Corwen, Cerrig-y-Drudion, Capel Curig, Bangor, Anglesey, Snowdon, Beth Gelert, Festiniog, and Bala. After three weeks more at Llangollen, he had his boots soled and his umbrella mended, bought a leather satchel with a lock and key, and put in it a white linen shirt, a pair of worsted stockings, a razor, and a prayer book, and with twenty pounds in his pocket and his umbrella grasped in the middle, set out on a tour of three weeks. He travelled through the whole length of Wales, by Llangarmon, Sycharth, Bala, Machynlleth, Devil’s Bridge, Plinlimmon, Pont Rhyd Fendigaid, Strata Florida, Tregaron, Lampeter, Pumpsaint,
Llandovery, Llangadog, Gwynfe, Gutter Fawr (Brynamman), Swansea, Neath, Merthyr, Caerphilly, Newport, and Chepstow. He had loved the Welsh bards and Wales from his boyhood up, and these three months kept him occupied and happy. When at Llangollen he walked during the day, and in the evening showed his wife and stepdaughter a view, if he had found one. His wife reported to his mother that she had reason to praise God for his condition.
Borrow was happy at seeing the places mentioned by the bards and the houses where some of them were born. “Oh, the wild hills of Wales,” he exclaimed, “the land of old renown and of wonder, the land of Arthur and Merlin!” These were the very tones of his Spanish enthusiasm nearly twenty years ago. He travelled probably without maps, and with no general knowledge of the country or of what had been written of it, so that he did not know how to spell Manorbier or recognise it as the birthplace of Gerald of Wales. He remembered his youth, when he translated the bards, with complacent melancholy. He sunned himself in the admiration of his inferiors, talking at great length on subjects with which he was acquainted and repeating his own execrable verse translations. “Nice man”—“civil man”—“clever man . . . has been everywhere,” the people said. In the South, too, he had the supreme good fortune to meet Captain Bosvile for the first time for thirty years, and not being recognised, said, “I am the chap what certain folks calls the Romany Rye.” Bejiggered if the Captain had not been thinking it was he, and goes on to ask after that “fine young woman and a vartuous” that he used to keep company with, and Borrow in his turn asked after Jasper—“Lord!” was the answer, “you can’t think what grand folks he and his wife have become of late years, and all along of a trumpery lil which somebody has written about them.” He also met an Italian whose friends he had last seen at Norwich, one whom he had found at Corunna.
It is no wonder that it seemed to him he had always had “the health of an elephant,” and could walk thirty-four miles a day, and the last mile in ten minutes. He took his chance for a night’s lodging, content to have someone else’s bed, but going to the best inn where he had a choice, as at Haverfordwest.