Much more than in any of his other books Borrow is the hero in “Wild Wales”—a strange black-coated gentleman with white hair striding over the hills and along the rivers, carrying an umbrella, asking innumerable questions and giving infinite information about history, literature, religion, politics, and minor matters, willing to talk to anyone, but determined not to put up at a trampers’ hostelry. The Irish at Chester took him for a minister, the Irish reapers in Anglesey took him for a priest and got him to bless them in Latin while they knelt. All wondered to hear the Saxon speaking or reading in Welsh. A man who could speak Spanish addressed him in that language as a foreigner—“‘I can’t tell you how it was, sir,’ said he, looking me very innocently in the face, ‘but I was forced to speak Spanish to you.’” At Pentre Dwr the man with the pigs heard his remarks on pigs and said: “I see you are in the trade and understand a thing or two.” The man on the road south to Tregaron told him that he looked and spoke like the Earl of Leicester.

He reveals himself also without recourse to impartial men upon the road. The mere figure of the tall man inquiring for the birthplaces of poets and literally translating place names for their meaning, is very powerful in holding the attention. He does not conceal his opinions. Some were already familiar to readers of Borrow, his admiration for Smollett and for Scott as a writer, his hate of gentility, Cavaliers, Papists, France, sherry, and teetotalism. He had some bad ale in Wales, and he had some Allsopp, which he declared good enough for the summer, and at Bala one of his best Welshmen gave him the best of home-brewed, “rich and mellow, with scarcely any smack of the hop in it, and though so pale and delicate to the eye nearly as strong as brandy.” The Chester ale he spirted out of the window after the Chester cheese. To his subjects of admiration he also adds Robert Southey, as “not the least of Britain’s four great latter poets, decidedly her best prose writer, and probably the purest and most noble character to which she has ever given birth”; but this was when he was thinking of Madoc, the Welsh discoverer of America. I should be sorry to have to name any of the other “four poets” except Byron. Another literary dictum is that Macpherson’s “Ossian” is genuine because a book which followed it and was undoubtedly genuine bore a strong resemblance to it. An opinion that shows as fully as any single one could Borrow’s vivid and vague inaccuracy and perversity is this of Snowdon:

“But it is from its connection with romance that Snowdon derives its chief interest. Who when he thinks of Snowdon does not associate it with the heroes of romance, Arthur and his knights? whose fictitious adventures, the splendid dreams of Welsh and Breton minstrels, many of the scenes of which are the valleys and passes of Snowdon, are the origin of romance, before which what is classic has for more than half a century been waning, and is perhaps eventually destined to disappear. Yes, to romance Snowdon is indebted for its interest and consequently for its celebrity; but for romance Snowdon would assuredly not be what it at present is, one of the very celebrated hills of the world, and to the poets of modern Europe almost what Parnassus was to those of old.”

Who associates Snowdon with Arthur, and what Arthurian stories have the valleys and passes of Snowdon for their scenes? what “poets of modern Europe” have sung of it? And yet Borrow has probably often carried this point with his reader.

Borrow as a Christian is very conspicuous in this book. He cannot speak of Sir Henry Morgan without calling him “a scourge of God on the cruel Spaniards of the New World. . . . On which account God prospered and favoured him, permitting him to attain the noble age of ninety.” He was fond of discovering the hand of God, for example, in changing a nunnery—“a place devoted to gorgeous idolatry and obscene lust”—into a quiet old barn: “Surely,” he asks, “the hand of God is visible here?” and the respectful mower answers: “It is so, sir.” In the same way, when he has told a man called Dafydd Tibbot, that he is a Frenchman—“Dearie me, sir, am I indeed?” says the man, very pleased—he supposes the man a descendant of a proud, cruel, violent Norman, for the descendants of proud, cruel and violent men “are doomed by God to come to the dogs.” He tells us that he comforted himself, after thinking that his wife and daughter and himself would before long be dead, by the reflection that “such is the will of Heaven, and that Heaven is good.” He showed his respect for Sunday by going to church and hesitating to go to Plynlimmon—“It is really not good to travel on the Sunday without going into a place of worship.” He wished, as he passed Gwynfe, which means Paradise,—or Gwynfa does; but no matter,—that he had never read Tom Payne, who “thinks there’s not such a place as Paradise.” He lectures a poet’s mistress for not staying with her hunchbacked old husband and making him comfortable: he expresses satisfaction at the poet’s late repentance. After praising Dafydd as the Welsh Ovid and Horace and Martial, he says:

“Finally, he was something more; he was what not one of the great Latin poets was, a Christian; that is, in his latter days, when he began to feel the vanity of all human pursuits, when his nerves began to be unstrung, his hair to fall off, and his teeth to drop out, and he then composed sacred pieces entitling him to rank with—we were going to say CÆdmon—had we done so we should have done wrong; no uninspired poet ever handled sacred subjects like the grand Saxon Skald—but which entitle him to be called a great religious poet, inferior to none but the protÉgÉ of Hilda.”

(Here, by the way, he omits to correct the plural unity of the “Quarterly Reviewer.”)

But perhaps these remarks are not more than the glib commonplaces of a man who had found Christianity convenient, but not exactly sufficient. In another place he says: “The wisest course evidently is to combine a portion of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the philosophy of the publican and something more, to enjoy one’s pint and pipe and other innocent pleasures, and to think every now and then of death and judgment—that is what I intend to do, and indeed is what I have done for the last thirty years.” Which is as much as to say that he was of “the religion of all sensible men”: which is as much as to say that he did not greatly trouble about such matters.

In the cognate matter of patriotism Borrow is superficially more unsound in “Wild Wales.” At Birmingham railway station he “became a modern Englishman, enthusiastically proud of modern England’s science and energy”; at the sight of Norman castles he felt no Norman enthusiasm, but only hate for the Norman name, which he associated with “the deflowering of helpless Englishwomen, the plundering of English homesteads, and the tearing out of Englishmen’s eyes”; but when he was asked on Snowdon if he was a Breton, he replied: “I wish I was, or anything but what I am, one of a nation amongst whom any knowledge save what relates to money-making and over-reaching is looked upon as a disgrace. I am ashamed to say that I am an Englishman.” And at Gutter Fawr he gloomily expressed the opinion that we were not going to beat the Russians—“the Russians are a young nation and we are an old; they are coming on and we are going off; every dog has its day.” But this was mere refractoriness. England had not asked his advice; she had moreover joined forces with her old enemy, France: the patriot therefore hoped that she would perish to fulfil his own prophecy that she must. And after the vaticination he sat down to a large dish of veal cutlets, fried bacon and potatoes, with a jug of ale, and “made one of the best suppers he ever made in his life,” finally “trifling” with some whisky and water. That is “the religion of every sensible man,” which is Lord Tennyson’s phrase, I believe, but my interpretation.