But most of all do I miss such a treatise as should have grown out of his exploration of the Tintagel country, speculating in what degree he would have adopted the Cornish theory of Arthur, what he would have made of the mass of tradition and romance that has collected about that stretch of coast. One may imagine how his mind would have followed the legend of Arthur from its birthplace in the Far North down through his beloved Wales to the spot on which he stood before the crumbling walls of Dundagil, out of whose silent ruins Tennyson’s imagination was about to construct his marvellous picture of the stately halls of Camelot. Borrow’s would have been a vastly different story from Tennyson’s idealisation of the mystery of Arthur’s life, and still more startling would have been its contrast with the version of the master-mystic of these parts, the immortal Vicar of Morwenstow. [205] This in spite of the fact that, as Hawker said, he worked into his poem “The Record and Rationale of Keltic Cornwall, the rock, barrow, moor, mountain all there, with the spirit of our fathers rehearsing their intent”—for Hawker’s Catholic theology would have been anathema to the Papist-hater, Borrow, and the man who wrote supporting the Bull of Pius IX., promulgated that very year, would inevitably have been placed on the Borrovian index. Borrow would rather have harked back to Walter Mapes, and beyond him to Malory, and beyond him to Geoffrey of Monmouth. His Arthur’s mother would have been the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and Uther would have been his father. His Arthur would have wed the daughter of Leodegraunce, King of Camelyard; the Table Round—the most valuable accretion which Cornwall has given to the legend—would have been Arthur’s wedding present from Leodegraunce, who would have received it from Uter Pendragon, for whom it would have been made by Merlin, Prince of Enchanters. Camelot would have been Camelford, and not Winchester, nor Queen Camel in Somerset; and we might have had a discussion of the question what Shakespeare meant when he made Kent in King Lear say to the Duke of Cornwall:
“Goose, if I had you upon Sarum Plain,
I’d drive ye cackling home to Camelot.”
The argument in favour of Queen Camel is that on the moors in that neighbourhood it is customary to breed geese; but then, geese are among the common objects of the Cornish moors.
We should not have lacked, either, some examination of the scanty literature of Old Cornwall, of the Pascon Agan Arluth, the Passion of Our Lord, of the trilogy of poems on The Beginning of the World, the Passion, and the Resurrection. We should have heard of the Miracle Plays, which continued to be performed in the amphitheatres or “rounds” of Cornwall well into the seventeenth century—the ancient drama of Meriasek, Duke of Brittany, and the corrupt sixteenth-century masque of “The Creation of the World, with Noah’s Flood”; and we should have been told with approval of these plays that, like those of Brittany, they were far more reverent and more decent than the corresponding performances in the English and French languages.
Such a book, in Borrow’s inimitable prose, with the interludes and dialogues whose supreme merit Ford was quick to perceive, would have been invaluable. The subject is so luxuriant in interest and so novel that it might well have had a far greater success than anything he had written since “The Bible in Spain.” But its only place is on the long list of the Unwritten Books of the world, a literary ellipsis deplored but never to be filled.
CHAPTER XI
THE LAND OF ELIS WYN
In these years of the fulness of his manhood, the wandering spirit possessed and compelled Borrow. It dragged him all over the United Kingdom in search of such adventure and distraction as he could find. He allowed his work on “The Romany Rye” to be held up by the scheme of a tour in Wales. With his wife and Miss Clarke he spent the summer and autumn of 1854 in the land of the Cymry. This expedition was on different lines from any he had ever undertaken before. He was far more tractable than of old, far more “civilised” than when, in his youth, he had roamed the highways and lived in the hedges and the inns. He was far more comfortable, but also sadly less dramatic than while rummaging the peninsula for gypsy lore. He went about these travels with a much less romantic spirit than he had manifested in his Cornish journeys.
Wales—its literature, its history, its language, and its bards—had been a passion of his life. When he set about making its personal acquaintance, the heat of the amour had cooled off, and he became a tourist rather than a picaro. Some years later he published a full record of his travels and experiences. At that time the world was far less interested in George Borrow than it had been, and few people took the trouble to compare “Wild Wales” with his other books. But a later generation, which has found a new interest in him, has made many comparisons. One of the commonest observations is that the new book differs from its predecessors in that it is a mild and pleasant record of travel; idiosyncrasies and angularities are there, it is true, but the book is not all fads and angles. Many reasons have been given for this. One of the most ingenious is that Borrow was accompanied by two ladies who knew exactly what he was doing, and that he dared neither seek the vulgar adventures that give colour to his other works, nor invent them in order to add purple patches where they seemed necessary for artistic effect. One declines to adopt this theory. Borrow may have been somewhat restrained by the presence of his wife and her daughter while he lived with them at Llangollen. But he was often away for considerable periods on walking excursions, and, in the latter part of his tour, when he tramped through Wales from north to south, he was entirely alone. There could have been no restraint upon him then. He was at liberty to seek out the most disreputable company he pleased, to consort with gypsies, or tinkers, or the scum of the earth—if it can be admitted without treason that Wales contains any scum. That Borrow was induced by the influence of his womenkind to moderate the tone of his writing is a thing one cannot believe: he returned at the end of the year to their company at Yarmouth, to add some of the most vitriolic passages to “The Romany Rye.”
Two sets of circumstances may more fitly account for the character of “Wild Wales.” One is that Borrow had idealised Wales in his mind, and that he went about it determined to see only what was good and noble in the country and its people. His early enthusiasm for its language had given birth to an extraordinary passion for its literature, and a hero-worshipping devotion to its great ones. To him there were no mountains like the Welsh mountains of which he had dreamed in his boyhood among the fenlands of Norfolk. To him there were no princes to be compared with the Welsh chieftains who resisted the tide of Saxon aggression. He might pretend as stoutly as he pleased that the Anglo-Saxon race was the flower of the earth, that there were no finer fellows in the records of chivalry than the English prize-fighters, and that there was no nectar to be mentioned with English ale. But when, as in Cornwall and Wales, he was among the Celts from whom he sprang, all this superficial structure of association tumbled down, and his true and native soul breathed its proper atmosphere. Wales was all good to him. His delight and admiration were unfeigned. They appear in the book, and they appear equally in the notes unused in the book, which Dr. Knapp has preserved.
The second set of circumstances relates to the date at which the book was published. It did not appear till 1862. By that time (he would have been the last man to admit it) some home-truths had been forced upon Borrow. He had discovered that the game he played with the public in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” was not worth the candle. He wanted to write a popular book, and to regain some of the ground he had lost. The public did not like his anti-Popery screeds; he deliberately excised anything that could offend them in that respect, as will be seen. The public did not care twopence about his gypsies and would rather be without them. He deliberately avoided any reference to the gypsies of Wales, though they were perhaps the most interesting and the most intelligent of the Romany tribes inhabiting the British Isles.