George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

Borrow was clearly no competent critic of his own work. He concludes the Appendix with a pronouncement on the merits and the purpose of “Lavengro,” which, he says, was “written for the express purpose of inculcating virtue, love of country, learning, manly pursuits, and genuine religion—for example, that of the Church of England.” Not the morals of “Lavengro,” not its “patriotism” (which is of a peculiar brand), not its philology, not its theology, give the strange book life. Its value lies in its poetry, its portraits, its atmosphere, its self-revelation, its literary power, and, above all, in that ruling sense of the joy of living which, in spite of all its errant morbidity, is the inspiration of the book. “There’s a wind on the heath, brother. . . Who would wish to die?”

It is a difficult thing for one who is not a Welshman to approach such a book as “Wild Wales” in any useful temper save humility. To attack the subject in the spirit which animated Borrow when he invaded the country would be to court disaster, and the disgrace inevitably attending such an enterprise would be well merited. It is not given to many to carry a charmed life as Borrow did—going into Wales and compelling the admiration of those whom his prickly prejudices and his violent intolerance most offended.

The spell Wales casts over men’s minds, and the hold it has upon men’s hearts, are elusive things. Having no tangible substance, they are yet as real as a battleship. Many people feel them acutely, but are not content to endure and enjoy them. There is a desire, in these definitive days, to analyse, to dissect, to explain them, to label and classify them; but at the slightest touch of the scalpel, at the vision of the quill, they vanish. As with Cornwall, so with Wales—indeed, in many respects they are one,—the charm they wield is a charm of atmosphere, of vague overhanging mysteries and underdwelling romances. Those who feel it are under the magic influence of the Celtic spirit, and it has been well said that “to boast of the Celtic spirit is to confess you have it not.” [320]

I have endeavoured to show that Borrow, in spite of his pose of Anglo-Saxonism, was a true Celt, a very wisp of the Celtic spirit itself. The fact explains everything about his tour in Wales, his intercourse with Welshmen, and his success in achieving a book which they are quite willing to confess is one of the best books ever written about their country. The spell was upon him, and he was content to let it work without attempting to divide it, chemically or mechanically, into its component elements. It worked through the scenery which he described with his peculiar skill, whether of massive mountain and lonely lake, or of sweet vale and tinkling cascade. It worked through the language, which he admired for its wonderful soft music concealed under apparently fortuitous concourses of crabbed consonants. It worked through the character of the people for whom he had so strong an affinity hidden behind all his affectation of downrightishness, John-Bullish egotism and pride. He was completely successful in his tribute to Wales—one of the finest in English literature.

Perhaps this is the most amazing thing in all his amazing career. For Borrow trampled—or appeared to trample—remorselessly on some of the most delicate feelings of Welshmen. His hatred of Rome was hardly greater than his hatred of nonconformity with the Church of England. This peeps out of many a page of “Wild Wales.” Thousands of Welsh people must be aroused to a point just short of fury by his satirical or abusive allusions to Dissenters. But most of them are tempted past the danger-spot by Borrow’s love of Wales and his power to enchant the reader as he himself was enchanted.

A militant Welshman once said to me that Borrow “allowed his hatred of Nonconformity to colour all his descriptions of the people. His pictures of Welsh Nonconformists are terribly exaggerated, and he damaged his book by his want of sympathy with the then budding aspirations of Wales, which have bloomed into the present political and ecclesiastical conditions well known to you.” That may very likely be a true view of the work through Cymric spectacles; yet the same person confessed that he knew no book of the kind which he liked better than “Wild Wales.” The reason was that, in spite of his contempt for the budding aspirations of the Nationalists, Borrow contrived to do the Welsh nation a high literary service by demonstrating its individuality, its distinction, its difference from England, in every line he wrote about it. His border-line is sharp and clear; passing into Wales, he passes into a more ethereal air; passing through Wales he is in a land of enchantment—not vague and misty, consisting of reminders of a distant past, but actual and present, where, pace Mr. Edward Thomas, “they talk of hero and poet as if they had met them on the hills; and, as the poet has said, ‘Folly would it be to say that Arthur has a grave.’”

Borrow’s Welsh, so far as it can be judged from the book, is exceedingly good, considering the circumstances in which it was acquired. His knowledge of “the spoken word” was comparatively slight. His intercourse had been far more intimate with Welsh books than with Welshmen. Indeed, we do not hear of many colloquies between this Welsh scholar and Welsh people until he arrives at the age of fifty. There are only two of any importance mentioned in his works. First in point of date was the episode of the Welsh groom whose acquaintance he gained when serving his articles in Took’s Court. Next was that of the Welsh Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife, described in “Lavengro.” For the rest, Ab Gwilym and the bards were his Welsh mentors. In these conditions, His knowledge of the language became quite remarkable. It was a working medium for him in those parts of the Principality where the phrase “Dim Saesneg” was most often heard. Welshmen tell me that a curious feature of “Wild Wales” is that the Welsh in the first part of the book is more correct than that in the second. As one remarks, it was “the romance of the language which captivated him. He was more familiar with its rugged mountains than with its tender parts. This it was that inspired his passionate regard for Ab Gwilym and Elis Wyn above other Welsh writers.”

Welsh estimates of the Welsh writers whom Borrow most affected are not quite the same as his own. It is said that in a general way his appreciations are just, but that he gives too high a place to Ab Gwilym, who was by no means the chief of the Welsh poets read about 1850. Ab Gwilym’s language is cumbrous, and his manner laborious. He had mastered his art with difficulty, and his work therefore betrays an almost complete lack of spontaneity. Yet his services to Welsh poetry were considerable, for he began a new revival of the bardic art when it had for a long time been under a cloud. He revelled, if with something of grandiosity, in the majestic in Nature, and his Ode to the Thunder is certainly impressive—the language producing a cumulative effect of elemental noise which is exceedingly remarkable. It is hardly surprising that Borrow was attracted to Ab Gwilym, whose satire and invective in the treatment of his rival, Bwa Bach, are echoed in much of Borrow’s own writing. Elis Wyn was a horse of a very different colour, and has a reputation in Welsh literature which even Borrow does not exaggerate. His mystic imaginings are daring in the extreme, and his style is vivid; others than Borrow adjudge the Bardd Cwsg to be equal in many parts to Dante at his highest.

“The Sleeping Bard; or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell; by Elis Wyn, translated from the Cambrian British by George Borrow, author of,” etc., etc., is a rare book now. The copy before me, in its flimsy salmon-coloured paper cover, with its uncut edges and all its evidences of country, job-printing (in spite of John Murray’s imprint), is priced at two guineas. Somehow, its dress seems fitting, Borrovian. One would rather this informality for the weird imaginings and the sulphuric vaticinations of the Denbighshire mystic than any finer guise of print and binding. The gusto with which Borrow attacked a task of this kind is obvious from preface to epilogue. He traces the influence, of Quevedo’s “Visions or Discourses” upon the matter, and the style of Elis Wyn, especially with reference to the character of Rhywun, that symbolical “Somebody,” who complains in the Vision of Death that so much of the villainy and scandal in the world is attributed to him: Rhywun’s forerunner is the Juan de la Encina of Quevedo’s work. He considers, however, that the Welshman’s work is superior to that of the Spaniard.

There can be little doubt that Elis Wyn was acquainted with Quevedo’s “Visions,” either in the original or in the English translation published in London about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The resemblance between the Welsh “Vision of the World” and the Spanish “Interior of the World Disclosed” is too close for any other verdict, the similarity of Elis Wyn’s “Vision of Hell” to Quevedo’s “Sties of Pluto” too remarkable. But Borrow seems to have overlooked or rejected—at any rate, he does not mention—the much greater probability that the composition of this allegory in Welsh was suggested by “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” which was hardly half a century old when “The Sleeping Bard” appeared. A deeply religious minister like Elis Wyn may reasonably be conceived to have been fired with the desire to do for the Welsh people in the Welsh vernacular what the inspired tinker had done in English for the common people of his country.