George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

“Only a little son of ours,” said the astute Mrs. McCoyle.

The visiting giant then asked for something to eat, and she said she would give him a cake such as they were in the habit of eating, and presented him with an iron platter.

McCoul crunched it to powder between his teeth, and swallowed it with the utmost relish.

Then McCoyle, assuming the part his wife had invented for him, and pretending to be the son of a mighty father, offered to take McCoul out to his father’s playing-ground and show him the ball with which he played. Having reached the place, McCoyle directed the visitor’s attention to a round crag of rock, weighing something more than a ton, which he said was his father’s skittle-ball. “Can you do anything with that?” he asked.

McCoul seized it, threw it a mile high, and caught it again.

“Well done!” cried the crafty McCoyle. “Let’s see you do it again.”

And as he threw the rock up into the sky again, McCoyle went behind him and gave him a push which sent him over the cliff, where he was dashed in a thousand pieces.

“Such an end,” says the tale, “may all those have who come over the water expressly, as the Scottish giant did, to bully the decent people of Man.”

In Cornwall Borrow found the ancient language dead; in the Isle of Man he found it rapidly dying out of common use, and not much cultivated for literary purposes. The Church services in Manx were being discontinued. Deploring all this greatly, he still went on studying it. He was no lover of Methodists—placing them in one of his comprehensive categories with “Whigs, Muggletonians, and Latter-day Saints.” But his political and religious prejudices did not interfere with his love of the Celtic tongues or his devotion to poetry in any form, and when he had nothing else to do he sat in his lodgings and read Killey’s translation into Manx of the Methodist Hymn Book. Killey’s other chief work was the translation of Parnell’s “Hermit.” Why anybody should want to translate that highly overrated piece of Queen Annery into any language at all, it is hard to say. His choice of subjects, however, did not deter Borrow from paying homage to him and going to see his daughter, with whom he had a discussion on the effects of Methodism in the island. It was summed up in the best Borrovian oracular manner: “The Methodists have done much good in Man,” he said to her, “but their doctrines and teaching have contributed much to destroy the poetical traditions of the people.” This dictum was very like that which R. S. Hawker proclaimed of the Methodists in Cornwall. But Hawker did not allow that they had done any good at all. Wesley, he said, caused the Cornish people to “change their Sins and called it conversion. . . . With my last Breath I protest that the Man Wesley corrupted and depraved instead of improving the West of England. . . . The Vices of the Body are not after all, bad as they are, so hateful as the Sins of the Mind.” Borrow was nearer the truth than Hawker. But it may be doubted whether the spread of Methodism had much, if anything, to do with the evanishment of old poetic traditions; the march of industrialism and the increasing fluidity of population were the real culprits.

Borrow trod the red path and explored the black glen—whose magnificence he did not praise too highly—and inspected carvals, climbed walls to look at carved stones, sketched with Henrietta, and generally enjoyed himself for several weeks. It was the autumn of the fall of Sebastopol. The news reached the island on September 10th, and provoked some of Borrow’s most fiery denunciations of politicians and soldiers—the offence being that the French had taken the Malakoff and the British had been repulsed from the Redan. “The war might have been gloriously settled nearly a year ago by the English, and they have got all the credit of the affair, but for the inactivity and indecision of that miserable creature Raglan, the aristocratical leader of the English and the secret friend of the Russians. . . . Much shouting in Douglas and firing of guns in the harbour, though for what reason it would be difficult to say.”