During his Welsh wanderings Borrow was more than ever the philologist let loose. His joy was unbounded in the discovery of persons who said to him “Dim Saesneg,” signifying that they did not understand English, in the exercise of his Welsh upon them, in their astonishment that there should be one tall Englishman striding through Wales who could speak to them in their own vernacular. His Welsh has been criticised with a certain degree of justice. It was book-learnt. But it was a sufficiently good working medium to enable him to get into closer touch with the people than he could have done with English alone. When he was reciting Welsh verses on the top of Snowdon, a native asked him whether he came from Brittany. The variation which the Celtic language underwent in its journey through Cornwall into Armorica is surprisingly slight. The present writer was sailing once in a boat off the coast of Finistère with two Breton fishermen, exploring certain grottoes inhabited by the korrigans, which take the place of pixies in Brittany, and found some difficulty in reconciling their French with any standard known to him. But, they said, if against his next visit he would learn to speak “Ouelsh,” some interesting and profitable discourse would be easy. And they might have been, for all their appearance, two dark-eyed denizens of Mevagissey or the Cardigan coast.
If Borrow had only a literary acquaintance with the language, he had a spiritual affinity with the land and the people. Welshmen admit that “Wild Wales” is one of the finest books on their country ever produced, either by Welsh or English writers. Indeed, it could hardly fall short of that, being the work of a man fascinated by his subject, who maintained a high pitch of enthusiasm for every phase of it, whether he was escorting his ladies to see fine prospects in the neighbourhood of Llangollen or making excursions with John Jones, the Methodist weaver, or visiting simple cottages to drink milk and talk with their inhabitants of the works of the Bards and Mystics over which he had pored long years ago in the corporation library at Norwich, or entertaining rough miners with ghost stories in mountain hostelries.
While the best episodes of the tour are given in the book, the incidents recorded in his diary and omitted from the published work possess one or two features of interest. For instance, as Dr. Knapp points out, the interview with the Irishman on the road between Cerrig y Drudion and Cernioge Mawr would have been much improved in point of realism if Borrow had included in it the words of the song, “Croppies, lie down!” and the objurgations of the patriotic fiddler on each verse of this pæan of the detested Orangemen. The scene appeared in this form in his original draft. But there were reasons, already set out, why he did not want just at this time to declaim to the public:
“Whoop! Protestants, whoop!
And drink full of hope,
Bad luck to the Devil, Pretender, and Pope!
And down, down, Croppies, lie down!”
That truculent song, which had been “the delight of the young gentlemen of the Protestant Academy of that beautiful old town” of Clonmel, would not have been the delight of the British people at large when “Wild Wales” was issued from the press, and Borrow had learnt enough to know that. The other principal omission from the book is the Ghost Story of Lope de Vega. We may accept without regret the fact that he did not print the account of the duel on Wimbledon Common between Colonel Lennox and the Duke of York, which has nothing to do with anything in particular. But the Ghost Story was originally set in a most suitable framework, and would have read well. He always maintained that it was facile princeps among ghost stories, and, with due homage to the Society for Psychical Research, one may admit that his judgment was not far wrong. He got the tale from an English translation of the Romance, El Peregrino en su Patria, published in London in 1738. He told it to a company of miners assembled in the inn of Guter Vawr, with whom he had some difficulty at first in getting upon terms of amity. Borrow may have lacked colloquial knowledge of the Welsh language, but he had something which was better: he appreciated with the keenest relish its musical charm, and he admired it without stint. He understood the people and their ways of thought, and could accommodate himself to their habits. He idolised their heroes and poets. Thus he got outside himself more in “Wild Wales” than he succeeded in doing in any other book, and the observation has been very justly made upon it that it is an itinerary rather than an autobiography. Nevertheless, it throws an interesting light on some facets of his character, and is a book which his friends must love because it displays him in happier moods and under warmer skies than most of his writings.
The clouds lowered again after the exaltation of the Welsh tour. He returned from the mountains and the bards, from the rarefied atmosphere of Snowdonia and the warmth of his welcome by a Celtic society, to sordid disputes and wordy warfares about his new book, “The Romany Rye.” It was exactly four years before that Murray had begun imploring him to “give the new volumes the finishing touches.” He had been “touching” them with a vengeance, and the finish was not at all to Murray’s taste. He completed the task soon after his arrival in Yarmouth, and packed off the manuscript to Albemarle Street. That respectable thoroughfare was next door to being scandalised by the contents of the parcel. True, Murray put his criticisms in a friendly way, but they were strong criticisms, and they were backed by literary opinions of some weight. But Borrow had experienced a surfeit of critics, and his anger was supreme. He told Murray he had given him the manuscript on condition that it should not pass out of his hands, and complained that it had been shown round among several people. He declared that he was not anxious to publish it, a statement from which the usual discount must be subtracted. He proceeded to describe it as “one of the most learned works ever written” (this with Mrs. Borrow as his mouthpiece, for decency’s sake), and his manifesto then diffused itself in renewed attacks on the foes of “Lavengro,” refusal to have anything to do with Murray’s suggestion for a book on Russia, and a denunciation of England as an ingrate country. “It owed much to him, and he owed nothing to it.”
Borrow’s books not only took a long time to write, but had a bad habit of hanging about after they had been written. Many things happened before “The Romany Rye” appeared to a bewildered public, holding the critics “up by their tails.” In the meantime, the Romany Rye himself had been wandering again. He was, as De Quincey said of Descartes, “as restless as a hyena.” In 1855 he took his wife and Miss Clarke to another out-of-the-way corner of Celtic Britain—the Isle of Man. Making Douglas his headquarters, he explored the country thoroughly, generally alone and on foot. He was on the look-out for the material for another book, which, as in the case of the Cornish volume, remained a project. He did get as far as the title, “Bayr Jairgey and Glion Doo: The Red Path and the Black Valley,” and prepared an introduction for it.
The Isle of Man was at that time, in the literary sense, an unoccupied country, and Borrow would have worked over a fertile field of virgin soil if he had carried out his purpose. There was no Manx Society; there was no Manx Miscellany. The Runes were there for him to decipher and describe; the poetry and the history of the island were at his disposal to exploit. “In lone farmhouses and cottages situated in gills and glens” were the “smoke-stained volumes” of “carvals” in manuscript, poems of the people, which he diligently searched out while penetrating the recesses of the island. The carvals—Anglice, carols—are mostly on Biblical subjects and of no great antiquity. Borrow got possession of two volumes and examined the contents of many. He had only a slight acquaintance with the Manx language, but his general knowledge of Gaelic stood him in good stead as he puzzled his way through the carval of “Joseph,” or of “David and Goliath,” or of “The Evil Women,” of which last he remarks that it is written in dispraise of the sex and recalls the poem of Simonides on the same subject. It is the work of an eighteenth-century smuggler named Moore, whose misogyny was displayed in an original fashion—by picking out all the bad characters of the feminine persuasion in the Holy Scriptures and relating their most wicked deeds. Borrow says it “is a curious piece, and must certainly have found its way abroad without clerical sanction.” He was not more interested in these effusions than in the scanty printed literature of the island—such as the ballads of “Brown William” and “Myle Charaine.” The former (“Ilian Dhu” in the vernacular) commemorates one John William Christian, a Receiver of the Isle of Man, who at the time of the Restoration was executed on Hangoe Hill because he had surrendered to Cromwell. [218] Borrow translated this poem, and also the ballad of “Myle Charaine,” the miser, which he entitles “Mollie Charane.” His version was published in Once a Week. He was fond enough of it to go hunting for the miser’s descendants on a lonely curragh, much to the amazement of the good people, who could not understand that the possession of an ancestor who happened to have been mentioned in a poem was any good reason for the invasion of their privacy. His keenest taste, however, took him much farther back into the mists of the past than the balladists of the eighteenth century. Was not the early history of the island a record of the lives and deeds of his beloved Danes and Norsemen? Were not their sepulchral monuments to be seen in the Runic stones? And, more distant still, were there not the legends and the fragments of half-lost songs of Finn, the Celtic hero whose exploits are celebrated in so many lands? He had encountered Finn in Ireland. He had found him in Cornwall under the wing of the Irish guide, Cronan. Here he met him again. Walking with Borrow on Snaefell, a miner of Laxey, James Skillicorn (who was the donor of one of his two volumes of carvals) recited a Manx tradition of Finn—“a mighty man of valour and a swift runner.”
There were two giants (so the tale ran) rejoicing in the name of Finn; of these, Finn McCoul, a huge giant, was Scottish, and Finn McCoyle, a lesser giant, was Manx. The Scots Finn, hearing rumours of the fame of the Manx Finn, and feeling some jealousy, decided to visit him in order that they might try their strength. So he waded across from the southernmost point of Scotland to the northernmost point of the island. Finn’s wife answered the door to him, and was at once stricken with amazement and fear at his gigantic proportions. She saw that her husband, who was inside lying on the bed, would be no match for him, and therefore told him that McCoyle was not at home.
“Who is the great fellow lying on the bed?” asked McCoul.