CHAPTER X

THE BOOK THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN

BY January 26th, 1854, Borrow was back among his friends at Penquite, bursting in upon them lyrically with:

“Behold the man who’s been at Kinmel Dray, Who passed by Kinmel Cres upon his way, And who at Kinmel Worthey made a stay.”

He and Mr. Taylor undertook a long moorland tramp by tor and bog that day to Kilmar, a jagged and precipitous hill behind the Cheesewring, where is the huge rock structure popularly known as “King Arthur’s Bed.” The Arthurian mood, to be developed presently, was already coming upon him. When, next day, he walked to Liskeard, to visit the ex-Mayor once more, and met the worthy Town Clerk, the talk turned from “Jew houses” to King Arthur’s court, and his imaginative vision darted off to the North and the golden traditions of glorious Camelot. On these he brooded while he walked, and while he sat by the roaring fire of hazel faggots in the kitchen of Penquite. Not that he allowed these ethereal matters to engross him entirely, for he was curious about the cost of hazel-wood as fuel—remembering that he had burnt it at the shrine of Isopel, the “Queen of the Dingle,” thirty years gone. So he notes: “Hazel faggots, 10s. a hundred, at 30 lbs.”

Going about among the natives, he disdained no unconsidered trifle of lore and knowledge. Cornish phrases struck his fancy, such as “bread baked in the clome”—in earthenware “kettles” on the open hearth, covered with burning peat, bread of such a rare flavour and quality, indeed, as twentieth-century man cannot conceive, even in St. Cleer, where the “machine-baked” variety is now hawked by half a dozen enterprising bakers from the neighbouring towns. There is another Cornish delicacy which does persist; it is known as “thunder and lightning”—a _soupçon_ of sugar syrup over the clotted cream of the country. “Poor old Philp,” he records one of his relatives as narrating among the characteristics of a local notoriety—“Poor old Philp used to like ‘triggle’ over cream.”

One story given to him by Mr. Taylor was of an old man who built himself a hovel of turf on Kilmar Tor. In the winter of 1814 there was a great snow-storm, and the old man’s hut was buried in the drifts for two nights and two days. When they dug him out they found that he had been in bed all the time, and declared that it was “the longest night I ever knawed; I thought t’d never end.”

There was another dinner party at the old house of his forefathers. He ploughed to Tredinnick through the drizzle of a “soft” Cornish day. “Ben’t got wet, ha’ thee?” was the salutation of William Borrow, aged seventy, welcoming him to the homestead. One of his few stumbling-blocks was the Cornish dialect. “My relations are most excellent people,” he wrote to his wife, “but I could not understand more than half of what they said.” The simplicity of their mode of life was a surprise to him, and probably a pleasant one; he found no affectation of gentility among them. Wealth to the extent of £70,000 was reported to be in the united hands of the family, but the head of it, Henry Borrow, “lives in a house in which there is not a single grate—nothing but open chimneys.”

Discussions about the character and attributes of the pixies were constant. Henry could hardly tell him whether he believed in the pixies or not; but he did believe in the Durdy Dogs, having himself heard them giving tongue. If Henry had confessed to a faith in pixies, he need not have been ashamed of his intellectual company. The belief was shared by no smaller a person than the redoubtable Hawker of Morwenstow, who saw and chased a pixy two years later as he rode through a gorge on the way home from Wellcombe. He relates how he felt himself “flush and then grow pale” when he saw a “brown, rough shape” start up among the furze bushes, and how, “remembering St. Thomas’s word that every spirit must crouch to the Sign,” he made the sign in the air before urging his horse towards the creature—which, of course, escaped!

Pixies, legends, and philology, however, all took a place in his keen inquiries secondary to authentic recollections of his father’s youth. He makes full notes of two anecdotes related to him. Henry Borrow’s account of the Menheniot Fair affray, as the traveller pencilled it down, is full of delicious filial exultation, which is repeated in another story, narrated to him by Thomas Borrow, of Lamellion, and thus set forth:

“My father.—At one time, at Bodmin Bridge, was a big, bony man six foot high, the terror of everybody at Plymouth and Devonport. My father fought him at Liskeard, just by a butcher’s shop. My father struck him a blow which sent him staggering across the street into a cooper’s shop. He got up and came on again, saying, ‘Where is Borrow?’ ‘Here I am,’ said my father, and struck him another blow which knocked him down, after staggering six yards. He was dreadfully sick, and did not ask for Borrow again.”

There is a pathetic as well as a humorous interest in these explorations of Cornish memory for traces of the father who had died in so much doubt as to the future of this son, and so much well-justified scepticism about the prospect of his maintaining himself on his “Armenian or other acquirements.”

Borrow became increasingly anxious to see the wild country on the rock-bound north coast before he left the Duchy for London. Letters from Mrs. Pollard mention his desire to inspect “King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagell.” On February 1st he left Penquite for Tredinnick, to spend a last day and night with the Borrow family there, and to brood again over the memories of his father which the little old house awoke. It was the only night he had slept at Tredinnick; he had been previously “much affected on being taken upstairs, at the remembrance of his father, and shed tears.” After breakfast the next day he set off for a rough cross-country ride, mounted on a horse named Triumph, and accompanied by his cousin, Nicholas Borrow. By way of the road he had twice traversed with Miss Taylor, past Doniert’s grave, by Redgate, and along the valley of the lonely Dreynes river, they cantered to Bolventor and the Jamaica Inn. The derelict village of Bolventor consists at the present time mainly of a large building set in a square of grass-grown cobbles—the erstwhile famous Jamaica Inn. Now deprived of a licence, and selling mineral waters to casual and disconsolate wayfarers or thirsty cyclists, this hostelry, at the time of Borrow’s visit, was a place of some importance—a coaching house upon the main road between London and Falmouth. Not many years before it had been busy day and night with scenes such as those described in the account of the inn in “The Romany Rye,” where Lavengro acted as hostler and clerk of the stables. The coaches clattered over the cobble-stones, and the square echoed with the cries of jarveys and postilions, and the rattle of harness, and the champing of bits. It was already beginning to decline in 1854; for the railway was building far to the south, and a new line of traffic was being opened up.

The two horsemen; now within sight of the greatest hills of Cornwall, Brown Willy and Rough Tor, left the road and struck across the heath in the direction of the mountainous northern horizon. “We then proceeded,” wrote Borrow, “over moor and moss, till we came to a stream, which we forded. It was rocky and dangerous.” If this was, as I suppose, Hanter Gantick, the great ravine in which the Lanke river roars down between banks composed of huge aggregations of granite boulders, the description was not too bold. Even in his wildest adventure, he could hardly have attempted to get a horse across a worse place. “We then ascended another hill, on the top of which we saw at a distance an inhabited country.” The eminence was probably Rough Tor moor, and the cultivated land the undulating country to the north of the central wild. Whichever of the cluster of hills it was, it could not have failed of interest for Borrow. They provided him with hut circles, with a great Logan stone encrusted with Druidical superstitions, the court or “hall” of King Arthur which he had been discussing at Liskeard with Mr. Jago, and the remains of a chapel to St. Michael, whose gate arch was removed some twenty years before to make a doorway for the Britannia Inn, near Altarnun! Having seen his cousin through the wilderness, and pointed out to him the Pisgah sight of “an inhabited country,” Nicholas Borrow bade him an affectionate farewell, and returned with the horses to Tredinnick, while George set out on foot alone to reach Camelford. “I passed by a place called Carn Long, and, striding forward, found myself at Camelford before I expected. A wilder journey over moss and moor I never made.” The “moss,” by which he betokens the bogs in the neighbourhood of Brown Willy, is a notorious great hindrance to travellers who would otherwise ascend these hills in much larger numbers.

The extraordinary scenery and the romantic associations of the country upon which he was now entering amply repaid him for the toils and pains of his day’s scramble across the backbone of Cornwall. He was in King Arthur’s land. At Camelford he trod a battlefield ten centuries old, for here it was that Egbert the Saxon met the Britons of the West in 823. Borrow did not linger in the quaint old town, but pushed on towards Tintagel by way of Slaughter Bridge already mentioned, which inherited its grisly name from that “last weird battle in the West,” where Mordred fell and Arthur received his mortal hurt. Enthusiastic local authorities, more confident than the general, are able to give the date of the conflict as A.D. 543. “At last I reached Tintagel, about 6.30 p.m., and went to an inn (the Wharncliffe Arms), kept by Symmonds,” to whom he had been recommended from Penquite. After such a day he was glad of its shelter and of the creature comforts it offered to a tired man on a cold February night.

The fascinations of Tintagel are many and oddly mingled. The very air seems full of wraiths; the solid and substantial characters of mediæval history have their ghosts hovering about these rugged hills, no less than the more ethereal spectres of the heroes of Arthurian myth. Tintagel Castle, on the heights to the west, to which Borrow turned next day, is an ancient ruin standing on a wonderful site. It has been familiar to most people for a long time as one of the wildest and most picturesque scenes in England, and the impression may remain the same to-day in the minds of those who are imaginative enough to be able to blot out of the picture the incongruous achievements of the modern hotel-builder. But it was not so well known to any but Cornishmen when Borrow visited it, for that was long before the iron road had reached within thirty miles of it. The fable of Arthur’s birth in the impregnable fortress, Dundagil, whose remains now stand gaunt and silent on their rocky eminence, may be dismissed by a date. The architecture of the original castle was Norman; the rebuilding took place in the thirteenth century. There is now a great gulch 200 feet wide between the cliff where the two principal courts stood and the “island”; it was formerly much narrower, and is reputed to have been spanned by a drawbridge. Yet it is pleasant to dream, as Borrow did and as Tennyson did when he lived at Boscastle a year or two later meditating his Idylls, that this was the veritable scene where the blameless King held court, and the Knights of the Round Table served him. Tennyson has shackled the Arthurian legend to Tintagel with links that can never be broken. And it is also pleasant to recall the more authentic and more historical connections of the place—that twelfth century when the Castle was a great stronghold, when the little chapel of St. Julitta was founded upon the height to the west of the island; those days in the thirteenth century when Tintagel was in such height of glory, when David Prince of Wales, seeking refuge in his struggle with Henry the Third, received the hospitality of its Cornish lord. It is not a far cry across the Bristol Channel, past Lundy, to the coast of Wales, and as he looked northward over the grey sea, Borrow could hardly have resisted the customary emotions that the thought of Wales created in him, with his memories of the procession of the bards from Ab Gwylim by Elis Wyn to Gronwy Owen.

But this was rich ground for him, and he was fully employed in absorbing impressions of men and events, past and present, which he briefly recorded in the two notebooks that were afterwards meant to be expanded into his work on Cornwall. There was the quaint harbour of Boscastle near by; there was Forrabury minster, the “silent tower of Bottreux,” with its bell-legend—the story of the peal of bells which an Earl of Bottreux presented to Forrabury in order that its music might rival that of Tintagel, the wreck of the ship which conveyed them from London just off the shore while Tintagel was sounding the curfew, the warning rung for mariners on that grim lee shore by the buried bells when a storm is approaching from the Atlantic. There was the lovely waterfall of St. Knighton’s Kieve. Borrow had a taste in waterfalls, and was eloquent in describing them, though unscientific, as Dr. Russel Wallace has pointed out. The venerable evolutionist, remarking on the progress of his doctrine, illustrated it by the fact that so great a writer as George Borrow could speak of a waterfall as being in all details as it was “‘since the day of creation, and will probably remain to the day of judgment.’” There were other associations—political in kind—which would not have rejoiced him so exceedingly; he had no great love for politicians, especially of the Whig sort who had controlled most of the forty odd pocket boroughs of Cornwall. Bossiney was one of them, the hamlet close to Tintagel, whose chief claim to utility after it ceased to return two members to Parliament was that it contained a smithy.

On the wild coast to the west, at that time almost inaccessible and unknown—where now the tripper in his thousands hears the music of the Atlantic on Trebarwith Strand—he spent three days, walking long distances and reaching as far west as Pentire Point, which guards the Bay of Padstow. On the return journey he took the inland road, through St. Minver and Egloshayle (“the church by the stream”), where, to avoid the evils of continual tidal bores, a pious fifteenth-century parson got up a subscription to build the noble bridge of seventeen arches that spans the River Camel. At Pengelly, close to the celebrated slate quarries of Delabole, he made the last entry in his Cornish journal. He is sitting in the little parlour of the old Delabole Arms, and sees two prints on the wall with inscriptions in French: “Le Revd. Dr. Amour,” and “A l’Amour il faut se rendre.” “In the latter print,” says he, “quite an angelic _petit maître_. The March of Gentility has reached Pengelley!”

Having packed up his things at Penquite and said good-bye to his Cornish relations, he turned his face eastwards, and was in London on February 10th.

To lovers of Borrow, even to mere admirers of his genius, it must always be a cause of regret—vain enough, but none the less sorrowful—that among his numerous failures was the failure to write the book on Cornwall advertised when “The Romany Rye” was published. Perhaps a reason or two may not be far to seek. It has already been seen that “Lavengro,” on which he had expended the labour of years, was received with icy indifference by the public and with torrid hostility by the critics. The fate of his darling book did much to embitter several years of his life. The visit to Cornwall broke into this grey period like a burst of sunshine into a wintry day; it was warm and friendly there, redolent of beautiful memories of the father he adored; the simple and hospitable people he met were full of homely kindness, with just a piquant suspicion of hero-worship; the country itself was full of charm. The whole experience interested, even inspired him, and no one can doubt that while he was in Cornwall, and for some time after he left it, he fully intended that the promised book should be written. He had talked over the project with the Taylors at Penquite; later he arranged the matter with John Murray.

Then came distractions. When he returned from the land of saints and pixies to London and the east, it was to resume work upon that Appendix in which he was pouring out the overflowing vials of his wrath upon his critics, upon the army of his mortal enemies, upon the mythical myriads of those whom he supposed to be placing obstacles in the path towards official employment which he desired to tread. He filled his letters and bored his friends with the mournful burden of his complaint against Governments and authorities, lords and notabilities, who to his distorted imagination seemed to be in league against the interests and prosperity of George Henry Borrow. Amid these glooms the ray of sunshine faded. In London he had none of the liveliness that possessed him in the West; morose and melancholy moods alternated with savage outbursts against his foes—even though he spent a considerable part of his time in so cheerful a haunt as the library of the British Museum, looking for material with which to confute and confound them. At last “The Romany Rye” came out. It was as great a failure as “Lavengro.” Its reception disheartened him for literary work, and the Cornish book receded farther into the distance. Finally, his adventures in Wales intervened, and he chose rather to write of them than of the smaller subject of which he might have made a better book, fine as “Wild Wales” unquestionably is.

There was so much good material in his Cornish tour, and in the lore and gossip which he drank in so avidly, that the disjointed notes of his impressions do only create a thirst for more. In his printed works there are but few references to the Duchy in the West. There is the passage in “Lavengro” where he speaks of his father’s Cornish descent, and quotes the proverb, “In Cornwall are the best gentlemen.” And in “Wild Wales” there is another adage which he had picked up in the West—the “proverb in the Gerniweg . . . which was the language of my forefathers, saying, ‘Ne’er leave the old way for the new’”—the theme, by the way, of a Cornish ballad given in Llhuyd’s _Archæologia Britannica_ and translated by Borrow. That is all. The book he would have written on this land of miracles and fairies, of Celtic legend, of the last struggles of the British race in England against their Germanic conquerors, the land where the language of the ancient people was spoken within the memory of gossips with whom he conversed, where the very names of people and places were fragrant of the old order, where

“By Tre, Pol, and Pen, You may know the Cornishmen,”—

such a book would have been worth having. A Celt in mind and blood and bone, he would have written it with sympathy, and he would have found it a subject not nearly so keenly exploited as the Wales of which he afterwards wrote, or the Manxland where he compiled similar journals in a later year.

Within the comparatively brief time he allowed himself, Borrow saw a great deal that was characteristic of Cornwall. It is a county of many characters, with industries and employments various if small. Its patriotic toast is: “Fish, Copper, and Tin.” To this triple sentiment agriculture might be appropriately added. Borrow saw them all. He saw farming in the hills in his own family and among their friends. He watched tin and copper mining in the Caradons, and saw how the West-countrymen

“. . . . From the bleak Cornubian shore Dispense the mineral treasure which of old Sidonian pilots sought,”

as the imaginative Akenside has it. Mount’s Bay was encircled by legends of the Phœnicians and their voyages to the “Cassiterides” for tin. At Newlyn—long before it became the most bepainted village in three kingdoms—and at Mousehole with his friend Burney, he saw the fishing industry in full operation. We should have had from him many a burst of the dialogue of which he was a consummate master—as with Henry Goodman, the nonagenarian of Tremar, and with the old men he met in Dolly Pentreath’s parish of Paul—and the Cornish language, once spoken throughout the South of England, would have been discussed, if not in sufficiently learned style to satisfy the expert, at any rate in a way that would have made for the entertainment of mankind at large.

We have read of his Cornish father’s prowess in “the art of fisticuffery,” and might certainly have looked for a spirited account of the affair at Bodmin Bridge when the terror of all Plymouth and Devonport was vanquished, and another of the fracas at Menheniot Fair. But we should probably also have had an essay upon an art which has always been far more popular in Cornwall than boxing—that is, the art of wrestling. We may be sure he would have expressed his patriotic preference for the Cornish over the Devonshire style. He might have agreed with Touchstone that “breaking ribs” was not sport for ladies, but he would have regretted its decline because it was a vigorous and manly game, and he would have fastened upon the career of the great wrestler Polkinghorne, whose contest with the Devonshire hero Cann, on Tamar Green at Devonport in 1826, was a Homeric battle worthy the pen of him who discoursed of that great fight in which Thurtell was “lord of the concourse.” He would have given us the true inwardness of “the Cornish hug” and the “Flying Mare,” and might even have cited the ballad of Will Treffry and Little Jan, whose untimely end left sorrowing the lady who was to have been his bride that very day:

“Then, with a desperate toss, Will showed the Flying Hoss, And Little Jan fell on the tan, And never more he spake. Oh, Little Jan, alack! The ladies say, Oh, woe’s the day! Oh, Little Jan, alack!”

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.