To lovers of Borrow, even to mere admirers of his genius, it must always be a cause of regret—vain enough, but none the less sorrowful—that among his numerous failures was the failure to write the book on Cornwall advertised when “The Romany Rye” was published. Perhaps a reason or two may not be far to seek. It has already been seen that “Lavengro,” on which he had expended the labour of years, was received with icy indifference by the public and with torrid hostility by the critics. The fate of his darling book did much to embitter several years of his life. The visit to Cornwall broke into this grey period like a burst of sunshine into a wintry day; it was warm and friendly there, redolent of beautiful memories of the father he adored; the simple and hospitable people he met were full of homely kindness, with just a piquant suspicion of hero-worship; the country itself was full of charm. The whole experience interested, even inspired him, and no one can doubt that while he was in Cornwall, and for some time after he left it, he fully intended that the promised book should be written. He had talked over the project with the Taylors at Penquite; later he arranged the matter with John Murray.
Then came distractions. When he returned from the land of saints and pixies to London and the east, it was to resume work upon that Appendix in which he was pouring out the overflowing vials of his wrath upon his critics, upon the army of his mortal enemies, upon the mythical myriads of those whom he supposed to be placing obstacles in the path towards official employment which he desired to tread. He filled his letters and bored his friends with the mournful burden of his complaint against Governments and authorities, lords and notabilities, who to his distorted imagination seemed to be in league against the interests and prosperity of George Henry Borrow. Amid these glooms the ray of sunshine faded. In London he had none of the liveliness that possessed him in the West; morose and melancholy moods alternated with savage outbursts against his foes—even though he spent a considerable part of his time in so cheerful a haunt as the library of the British Museum, looking for material with which to confute and confound them. At last “The Romany Rye” came out. It was as great a failure as “Lavengro.” Its reception disheartened him for literary work, and the Cornish book receded farther into the distance. Finally, his adventures in Wales intervened, and he chose rather to write of them than of the smaller subject of which he might have made a better book, fine as “Wild Wales” unquestionably is.
There was so much good material in his Cornish tour, and in the lore and gossip which he drank in so avidly, that the disjointed notes of his impressions do only create a thirst for more. In his printed works there are but few references to the Duchy in the West. There is the passage in “Lavengro” where he speaks of his father’s Cornish descent, and quotes the proverb, “In Cornwall are the best gentlemen.” And in “Wild Wales” there is another adage which he had picked up in the West—the “proverb in the Gerniweg . . . which was the language of my forefathers, saying, ‘Ne’er leave the old way for the new’”—the theme, by the way, of a Cornish ballad given in Llhuyd’s Archæologia Britannica and translated by Borrow. That is all. The book he would have written on this land of miracles and fairies, of Celtic legend, of the last struggles of the British race in England against their Germanic conquerors, the land where the language of the ancient people was spoken within the memory of gossips with whom he conversed, where the very names of people and places were fragrant of the old order, where
“By Tre, Pol, and Pen,
You may know the Cornishmen,”—
such a book would have been worth having. A Celt in mind and blood and bone, he would have written it with sympathy, and he would have found it a subject not nearly so keenly exploited as the Wales of which he afterwards wrote, or the Manxland where he compiled similar journals in a later year.
Within the comparatively brief time he allowed himself, Borrow saw a great deal that was characteristic of Cornwall. It is a county of many characters, with industries and employments various if small. Its patriotic toast is: “Fish, Copper, and Tin.” To this triple sentiment agriculture might be appropriately added. Borrow saw them all. He saw farming in the hills in his own family and among their friends. He watched tin and copper mining in the Caradons, and saw how the West-countrymen
“. . . . From the bleak Cornubian shore
Dispense the mineral treasure which of old
Sidonian pilots sought,”
as the imaginative Akenside has it. Mount’s Bay was encircled by legends of the Phœnicians and their voyages to the “Cassiterides” for tin. At Newlyn—long before it became the most bepainted village in three kingdoms—and at Mousehole with his friend Burney, he saw the fishing industry in full operation. We should have had from him many a burst of the dialogue of which he was a consummate master—as with Henry Goodman, the nonagenarian of Tremar, and with the old men he met in Dolly Pentreath’s parish of Paul—and the Cornish language, once spoken throughout the South of England, would have been discussed, if not in sufficiently learned style to satisfy the expert, at any rate in a way that would have made for the entertainment of mankind at large.
We have read of his Cornish father’s prowess in “the art of fisticuffery,” and might certainly have looked for a spirited account of the affair at Bodmin Bridge when the terror of all Plymouth and Devonport was vanquished, and another of the fracas at Menheniot Fair. But we should probably also have had an essay upon an art which has always been far more popular in Cornwall than boxing—that is, the art of wrestling. We may be sure he would have expressed his patriotic preference for the Cornish over the Devonshire style. He might have agreed with Touchstone that “breaking ribs” was not sport for ladies, but he would have regretted its decline because it was a vigorous and manly game, and he would have fastened upon the career of the great wrestler Polkinghorne, whose contest with the Devonshire hero Cann, on Tamar Green at Devonport in 1826, was a Homeric battle worthy the pen of him who discoursed of that great fight in which Thurtell was “lord of the concourse.” He would have given us the true inwardness of “the Cornish hug” and the “Flying Mare,” and might even have cited the ballad of Will Treffry and Little Jan, whose untimely end left sorrowing the lady who was to have been his bride that very day:
“Then, with a desperate toss,
Will showed the Flying Hoss,
And Little Jan fell on the tan,
And never more he spake.
Oh, Little Jan, alack!
The ladies say, Oh, woe’s the day!
Oh, Little Jan, alack!”