Borrow returned from the Mount on foot to Mousehole, and two days later started upon an expedition to the most impressive part of the Cornish coast—the Logan Rock and Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the spot where Charles Wesley is reputed to have written his famous hymn:
“Here on a narrow neck of land
’Twixt two unbounded seas I stand.”
The traveller, however, says very little about the magnificent scenery, and a great deal about the companion of his travels. In “The Romany Rye,” when Lavengro has succeeded in divorcing his old friend Murtagh from the disreputable trade of a thimble-engro, it will be remembered that, in order to elevate the Irish boy’s spirits, he induces him to tell a story.
“Cheer up, man,” said I, “and let’s have the story, and let it be about Ma-Coul and the salmon and his thumb.”
But the tale of the finding of Finn-Ma-Coul in Veintry Bay, his servitude of Dermod David Odeen, his cooking of the salmon, the blister on his skin, his discovery of all witchcraft by the sucking of his thumb, and all the rest of it, was not related to Lavengro in the ’twenties by Murtagh at Horncastle Fair. It was told to him on the Cornish cliff paths by one Cronan, the Irish guide who was conducting him to the Logan Rock, as the Notebook shows, and inserted after Borrow got back to Norfolk to lend the colour of romance to the end of “The Romany Rye.” Of Cronan’s fairy stories, one is cited at length—the tale of the Clog Vreach, or the parti-coloured stone, under the heading, “An Irish Fairy Tale, told on a Wild Road by a Wild Native.” [185] It is a tale of a drunken blackguard and tyrannical landlord, who vowed that he would shoot all the fairies to be found on the moor where the Clog Vreach stood. He went there and fired off all his ammunition, but when he returned his body was bent, his tongue was hanging out, and his servants, seeing that he was next door to dead, put him to bed, and four people poured raw brandy down his throat all night. After that it is not surprising to learn that in twenty-four hours his body had turned black and life had left him. Cronan did not attribute his death to this remarkable prescription, but rather to the vengeance of the supernatural powers. “And,” says he, “a very fitting end it was for a person who was a tyrant and interfered with the fairies.”
These things seem to have occupied Borrow on the journey to the exclusion of all else. Before he left the district, however, he made some extracts from the register of Paul Church, recording the death of a Keigwin killed by the Spaniards in 1595, and the death of Dolly Pentreath (entered in her married name of Dorothy Jeffery) in 1777. He had hunted up an old man of eighty at Mousehole, who in his boyhood had seen and heard Dolly Pentreath, and he had made a long list of Cornish words taken down from the lips of aged persons in that village. No doubt the Cornish book was intended to include a vocabulary of the old tongue.
I do not know of any evidence that Borrow had made a study of the Cornish language in previous years, but his command of Welsh, and in a less degree his knowledge of the three variants of Gaelic, made almost the whole of the Cornish words surviving, in names of places and people, and in peculiarities of local dialect, easily understood of him. There is a general resemblance between Cornish and Welsh about which, I am told, all writers agree, though they differ as to its exact extent. But the truth is probably not far from the statement of Sir John Dodridge, who in 1630 said of the Cornish: “They have a particular language called Cornish (although now much worn out of use), differing but little from the Welsh and the language of the Britaines of France.” Mr. Henry Jenner, F.S.A., in his admirable “Handbook of the Cornish Language,” states that Welsh, Cornish, and Breton “may be said to be as near together as three separate languages can well be, but to have drifted too far apart to be accounted three dialects of the same language.”
The principal differences between Cornish and Welsh can be stated very briefly. The following points show the main divergences between the Cornish of the later literary remains and the Welsh of the books and newspapers of the present day:—
(a) Certain grammatical differences, such as the occasional use of an indefinite article, never employed in Welsh.
(b) A number of variations in vocabulary, in which Cornish will often be found to have used a word current in contemporary Breton in place of one current in contemporary Welsh. This is not surprising, even if it be not assumed that the language was taken into Brittany from England, for the relations between the shipping ports of Cornwall and Brittany were exceedingly close, especially those relations of contraband traffic so dear to the hearts of the writers of romance.