CHAPTER VIII

“SUCCESS TO OLD CORNWALL!”

BORROW’S only journey to the land of mystery and legend from which his family sprang was made in 1853. It came about curiously. An incident occurred, soon after he had taken up his residence in lodgings at Yarmouth, which demonstrated both his personal courage and the easy terms on which he always was with the water. {146} In the midst of a terrible storm he dashed into the sea, himself saved one life from an overturned boat, and assisted to rescue the rest of the people in danger. He became the local hero of the hour, and an account of his gallantry was printed in the _Bury Post_.

The Borrows of Cornwall had been mainly a home-keeping race. The connection of George’s branch with the parent stem had been completely severed half a century before, and the inhabitants of the Caradon Hills had altogether lost sight of old Tom Borrow and his life. Now, however, the _Plymouth Mail_ reprinted from the Bury paper a paragraph about the Yarmouth affair, and in process of time it was read at St. Cleer. The appearance of a person by the name of Borrow in this heroic shape was discussed with curiosity. Putting two and two together, the Cornishmen came to the conclusion that this celebrated author and saviour of drowning men could be none other than the son of that Tom Borrow whose claim to fame among them was that he had knocked down the headborough at Menheniot Fair.

Many of the name were in the district. Henry Borrow, of Looe Down, was a son of another Henry, George’s uncle, and therefore a cousin of the Romany Rye. Henry had a daughter, Ann, married to Mr. Robert Taylor, of Penquite, a person of some consideration in the locality. The upshot of the discussion was that Mr. Taylor was requisitioned by the rest of the family to invite the celebrity to Cornwall. In a letter of acceptance, Borrow expressed the pleasure it gave him to receive such an invitation, and the delight he felt in knowing that there were still some who remembered his honoured father, who, he said, had as true a Cornish heart as ever beat.

Thus he spent the Christmas of 1853 in the county of which he was in the truest sense native; and of this atmosphere, most genial to him, he breathed eagerly. Borrow never accomplished the book he proposed to write about Cornwall. An advertisement of it was published at the end of “The Romany Rye,” when he was fresh home from his visit and full of the romance he had absorbed in the westernmost peninsula of England. But, like many of his plans, it failed to come to anything. If it had been written, it would probably have been as full of good things as his Welsh book, and a better whole, since it was a smaller and more manageable subject. It will be possible presently to attempt to indicate the kind of work this might have been.

He left Yarmouth on December 23rd, and, this time not disdaining the services of the detested railway, was able to reach Plymouth at midnight. In that day Plymouth was the western terminus of the railway system. Brunel’s great bridge, which carries the iron road at a dizzy altitude across the Tamar from Devonshire into Cornwall, was not raised till six years later, and people who adventured into the land of giants and saints, pilchards and pasties, must complete their journey by coach. Having slept a night at the Royal Hotel in Plymouth, Borrow found that the Christmas traffic had crowded the coach, and he arrived at the Borrovian determination to walk to Liskeard, on the main road eighteen miles away, the nearest town to his objective among the hills. Leaving his luggage to be carried on by the mail, he “threw his cloak on his arm (a very old friend which had seen some thirty years’ service, the constant companion of his travels”), and trudged off to Devonport, across the Tamar by the ferry, and along the enchanting sylvan highway to the town whose representative in Parliament was just then laying about the “Puseyites” in a fashion most agreeable to Borrow.

There was a little stir in the bookish circles of the old Cornish borough among whom Mr. Taylor had spread the news that Borrow was coming, and a small party assembled to meet him and lionise him. These were drawn up under the porch of Webb’s Hotel as the huge figure strode into view. There was the ex-Mayor, Mr. Bernard Anstis. There was the Town Clerk, Mr. James Jago, a connection of the Borrows by marriage. There were his own relations. Happily, under these new auspices, he dropped his affectation of objection to be lionised, and took wine with his worshippers at the hotel in quite a conventional manner. Then, after tea with the Jago family, he and Taylor mounted horseback and rode off to Penquite, four miles away, to spend an old-style rural Christmas. “A hospitable reception, with a log on the fire” was Borrow’s own word for it—a brief but hearty tribute to the effect it had upon him. On Christmas Day he walked from Penquite to St. Cleer Church, about which his notebooks mention that it lacked an organ (as it does to this day), but that there was a fiddler in the gallery. Returning over the noble expanse of St. Cleer Down, he was introduced to a family of relations by marriage—the Pollards—and in the afternoon walked to their residence at Woolston to have lively talk of travel with two sons who had been in Australia, and to discuss the prehistoric memorials of the district, which he describes as “Druid stones.” All the Borrows have left St. Cleer, but the Pollards are in possession of Penquite.

It may seem that one lingers over the details of a visit which was but a small incident in Borrow’s life. The excuse must be offered that, if one could but penetrate the mystery of what may be called the Spirit of Old Cornwall, one would be in possession of the key to much that is mysterious in Borrow. He had inherited it fully, and it shaped many of his most pronounced characteristics. Here, if anywhere and at any time, he was at home—far more at home than his father had ever been; what freak of atavism may not account for that? Where eyes look out upon a world of wonder and of miracle, where even yet magic and supernatural intervention have their sway in that world’s affairs, and there is an underworld of faery, where strange Celtic words are of common use and wont, the philological, legend-loving wanderer was in a fitting atmosphere.

Not many people remain in Cornwall now who can remember Borrow, but a few years ago I found memories of the man and his eccentricities still lively among old inhabitants. Borrow amazed them not only by his personal peculiarities, but by his intellectual superiority to “they Borrowses.” There were many Borrows round about, small farmers, excellent and worthy undistinguished people, the friends and equals of their neighbours; the staggering fact was that such a wonder, such a celebrity, such a walking encyclopædia of information on matters of which they had never heard, should have sprung from the Borrow stock. His “curious ways” were subject of remark, but his popularity rose superior to his manners: in a few short weeks he obtained a reputation for liveliness hardly second to that of his father.

I have been told that he roamed the Caradons in all weathers without a hat, in search of sport and specimens, antiquities and dialects. He often carried a gun. If a bird that fell to him dropped in a moorland pool, he would plunge in after it and come out dripping water and beaming triumph. Little parties he attended at Penquite, at the vicarage, at the houses of friends in Liskeard, were

“. . . As merry As, first, good company, good wine, good welcome Can make good people.”

He himself kept the fireside circle roaring with his constant flow of gypsy songs and stories. But it was an essential point that the parties should not be genteel. “Lavengro” had not long been written, and he was then engaged upon its sequel. Shortly he was to be writing—if it were not already written—that chapter of the Appendix on “gentility-nonsense.” It was, in fact, just the zenith of the anti-gentility campaign. Once he went from Penquite into Liskeard to dine with Mr. Bernard Anstis. The despiteful demon seized him at the ex-Mayor’s hospitable board. Gentility showed its cloven hoof in some form or other; in the midst of dinner Borrow protested silently against the apparition by keeping his handkerchief in his pocket and dragging out for ostentatious use the old, greasy, rust-stained, powder-grimed rag he kept about him for cleaning his gun during expeditions on the moors. He seemed, said one, now departed (John Abraham, of Liskeard), who related to me this story, to be “perpetually repeating to himself old Burton’s maxim that ‘of all vanities and fopperies, to brag of gentility is the greatest.’ Yet he was proud of the fact that his father derived from what he called the Cornish ‘_gentillâtre_.’” Mr. Taylor was a member of a card club in Liskeard, to which belonged the doctors and lawyers and other professional gentlemen of the town. Borrow was taken in to play cards with them. But it was far too tame for him. While they settled down to their rubber, he stole out to explore the back slums of the town, “picking up all the disreputable characters he could find, working off his knowledge of ‘cant’ on them, and getting out of them what he could.”

Borrow met at St. Cleer a kindred spirit in the vicar, Berkeley. This was an Irishman of the North—not to put too fine a point on it, an Orangeman,—a man of some pretensions to learning and a great “original,” as they might say in Cornwall. Berkeley’s militant Protestantism was quite as fierce as Borrow’s. But for a certain Irish cob, as he tells us, Borrow might have become a mere philologist. It was in Ireland that he first developed the taste for petty adventure which he now indulged to the full in the wilds of Cornwall. Here was common ground. Berkeley piled coals on the fire of his anti-Papist enthusiasm. The good vicar was, withal, convivial in disposition, exiled among a people cloaking their essential kindness under a serious demeanour, and exceedingly abstemious. He was open-hearted and open-handed when he had money, which was not always. He suffered once at the hands of ruthless bailiffs. As a burning Protestant, he was on amicable terms with the Dissenters, who formed the majority of his parishioners in Methodist Cornwall; he was a bitter enemy of Ritualism, and “Popery” was his _bête noire_. This piquant personality presided over the destinies of the parish of St. Cleer at a time when the fortunes of the Church of England reached their lowest ebb in Cornwall, and the Methodist societies flourished like the green bay-tree. It is related that for a considerable time the only regular attendant at church, in addition to the parson, was a schoolmaster of episcopal sympathies, who walked a mile and a half of a Sunday morning to hear Berkeley’s denunciation of the Papists echoing through an empty building.

Berkeley was one of those Irish Protestants to whom Borrow had paid tribute as a “most remarkable body of men who during two centuries have fought a good fight in Ireland in the cause of civilisation and religious truth . . . where . . . though surrounded with difficulties of every kind, they have maintained their ground; amidst darkness they have held up a lamp, and it would be well for Ireland were all her children like these, her adopted ones.” This is highly controversial ground, upon which there is no need to enter, save for the purpose of remarking that the man who had recently written that was like to be a friendly soul to Berkeley. And during his stay in Cornwall he was frequently at the vicarage. He would, as Berkeley related to Dr. Knapp in the character-sketch he reproduces, “suddenly spring from his seat and walk to and fro the room in silence; anon he would clap his hands and sing a gypsy song, or perchance would chant forth a translation of some Viking poem; after which he would sit down again and chat about his father, whose memory he revered, as he did his mother’s.” {154} He had the “Horrors” more than once. He told Berkeley that these attacks of depression were the result of the attempt made by a gypsy crone to poison him, as related in “Lavengro.” The vicar and his wife visited Penquite one evening, and found Borrow sitting, sunk in despair, by the side of a huge fire, taking no notice of person or thing. He remained wrapped in his mood of melancholy for hours, and was only roused from it when Mrs. Berkeley sat down at the piano and softly played some old Scots and Irish airs. Then, after a while, he jumped up and danced about the room, and began to shout a joyous melody. The “Horrors” had been conjured away, and he was another man. He made up for his previous obsession by giving the company liberally of his best, pouring out good stories and side-splitting anecdotes as fast as he could recite them. And, as Mrs. Berkeley was leaving the room, he said to her, “Your music was as David’s harp to my soul.”

One of the sources of Borrow’s pride in his father was his long and loyal service as a soldier; he had no respect for people who beat the sword into a ploughshare. Berkeley records his retort upon a young man who was telling how he had retired from the army because “the army was—aw—no place for a gentleman now.”

“I should judge,” said Borrow, “that it was rather the other way.”

“Aw—what do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Why, this: that the army is no place for a man who is not a gentleman, and that such a person was right in leaving it.”

Borrow was fortunate, apparently, in the occasions of some of these Johnsonian fulminations. It is not everybody who would endure the treatment so mildly as did the ex-army officer, or that latitudinarian don who is reported once to have met Borrow at Dr. Hake’s house. The pundit preached at Borrow for some time, so runs the tale, and, when he had finished, Borrow thumped the table with his fist, crying, “Sir, you’re a fool!” As _Punch_ very justly remarked about this prodigious narrative, because the article in which it appeared was in praise of Borrow, Borrow’s rudeness was made to appear to be “the end of the don for ever . . . there was no appeal.” Yet the don probably had a case, and if the article had been in praise of him, Borrow would certainly have been made to appear the fool. He has suffered not a little from the ill-regulated enthusiasm of admirers who insist on counting his petulance and his outbursts of boorishness as his minor virtues instead of his major vices.

A quaint commentary on anecdotes of this sort is Berkeley’s assertion that Borrow often repeated to him the answer he received from an old prize-fighter in reply to the question, “What is the best way to get through life quietly?”—“Learn to box, and keep a civil tongue in your head.” Surely the most illuminating example of pure precept without example that can be unearthed in all literature. Berkeley shared the common fate of Borrow’s associates who supposed that a successful writer would care to discuss other writers. The genial vicar found how good a hater his visitor was; he displayed his spleen against the Martineaus; he foamed over the inoffensive Mrs. Stowe. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was then the fashion, and Berkeley sang its praises. Borrow showed great excitement, and presently exploded invective against “a lot of Uncle Toms and Tomfools!” When he cooled down he had the grace to apologise for his vehemence.

But in all this intercourse with the lively Orangeman, of course, Borrow is to be seen only on one side, and that not the best, of his many-sided character. It was his controversial side. Berkeley, not native, had little intimate knowledge of Cornwall. Just one fact appears in his reminiscences which may fitly bridge the gulf between these episodes and Borrow’s real adventures. He liked to pore over the register of St. Cleer Church, where the names of so many Borrows were inscribed, and one day was sent into transports of delight by the discovery of a marriage record in which the woman’s name was Jenefer—a name commoner in Cornwall aforetime than at present. “Can you not see?” he cried. “It is Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife!”

Borrow, who wrote that fine passage about Stonehenge, which has been already quoted (p. 54), who waited for sunrise over that silent plain under the portal of giants, could not fail to be fascinated by the archæological riches of his father’s native place. Particularly was he entranced by the Trevethy Stone—alternatively “Trethevy.” Few parishes in the kingdom can boast a prehistoric structure of so elaborate a kind as this huge cromlech, few parish roads so great a store of relics of bygone art and ancient piety as the mile or so of parish road that Borrow traversed in order to reach it. It is at once the finest and the least-known cromlech in the West of England, and in a splendid state of preservation. The walls are four huge slabs of granite, only one of which has departed from the perpendicular; the roof is a fifth huge slab, in one corner of which is a round hole that has formed the theme of many a heated archæological discussion. If, as is supposed, the ancients (who without the assistance of machinery dealt with such enormous weights as these) first constructed great earthworks, and then pulled the rocks into position by rolling them up the slopes upon the trunks of fir-trees, the hole may have been used for the attachment of the ropes upon which the army of workmen hauled. Or the hole may be the work of weather, which has wrought such pixy-pranks in granite, as may be observed in the Devil’s Cheesewring not far off. The Trethevy cromlech must have been the memorial, and probably the burial-place, of some great chieftain. Whatever the grave or the cairn contained, it was, like all the other monuments of the kind, rifled ages ago, and nothing but the silent stones is left.

Borrow says of his sensations when he saw it, “A thrill came over me as I surveyed this gigantic erection.” He does not tell us what his speculations were as to the origin of the hole; but after he had climbed to the top and carefully measured every stone, he put his arm through the hole, and shouted, “Success to Old Cornwall!” He spares us the obvious comparison between the Eleusinian Mysteries and the rites of the Mên-an-tol, or holed stone, administered to Druidic neophytes.

From Penquite it was not a far cry, for a man who walked five miles in an hour with ease, to the great brown-backed hill of Caradon, seamed all along its foot with the wounds inflicted by centuries of miners. Caradon is twelve hundred feet high, and gives a wonderful prospect over two counties. From its summit, on a clear day, the Atlantic to the North and the Channel to the South are the limits of vision. Across the narrow gorge intervening strode the hat-less pedestrian of six-feet-three, looking like some nineteenth-century giant Caradon swallowing up the miles of bracken and heath, to the round hill where the Devil’s Cheesewring was piled, examining with curiosity, just below the peak, the hut of one Daniel Gumb. Gumb was no gnome, no pixy, no mythical person, as his name might almost betoken, but a veritable person in the flesh, stonemason and mathematician, who had carved in the block of granite that formed the roof of his dwelling-place a problem of Euclid. There are the squares and triangles remaining to this day to attest both his scholarship and his craft. On a heath near by, Borrow was shown three stone circles which carried his mind back three thousand years at least (Sir Norman Lockyer may be able to say how much more), “the Hurlers”—according to quaint tradition the petrified bodies of groups of profane persons who played the ancient Cornish game of hurling on a Sunday. There is one stone pillar a little distance to the south of the circles, which is said to have been the messenger who was going to St. Cleer for ale when the sudden petrifaction took place. This looks, however, like an excrescence of modern humour, probably conceived by a foreigner, since natives would joke with reluctance on such a subject. Sunday is a golfless day in Cornwall even now. Another and a less ribald version of the story was given to Borrow at Woolston. It related that while the hurlers were gathered where the three circles now are, on Cradock Moor there was a giant, who held in his hand a golden ball, which he was to throw over the tower of St. Cleer Church, and the first of the hurlers to find it was to possess it. The giant shared the fate of the other Sabbath-breakers, and is to be seen to this day on the moor in the form of “The Longstone”—an old round-headed cross.

A few miles in upon the moor to the north, Borrow twice visited the very heart and centre of Cornish romance—the lonely mountain pool of Dozmary. Set high among the wild, uncultivated hills, the pool breathes mystery. It is hundreds of feet above the river that winds down the combes: whence comes the water? The love of magical solutions for natural conundrums is deep-rooted. Colloquial opinion has held the pool in awe, reported it fathomless; and at the present day, to explain a lake at the top of a hill, with no visible intake of water, by saying it is fed from the inexhaustible reservoir of the peat in the surrounding country, is not held by some people to be facing the question adequately. But the spiritual and legendary mysteries of Dozmary were far more attractive to Borrow. It is reputed to be the original setting of two of the great legends of the world—the Passing of Arthur, and the Penance of Tregeagle.

Standing on the silver strand that belts the lake, on a moonlit night of such winter weather as Borrow found in the hills, it is easy to reconstruct the ritual of the Mort d’Arthur, either on the lines of Malory or those of Tennyson, to erect stately scenes and silent processionals, to enact the temptation of Bedivere, to select the clump of flags in which he hid the brand Excalibur, to see his three journeys to the shore, and finally to watch the whirling and flashing of the blade as it left his hand and curved over the water, where rose that arm

“Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him Three times, and drew him under in the mere.”

It is easy to imagine the last scene of all—Arthur coming

“Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked, Larger than human on the frozen hills,”

the funeral barge appearing on the waters, bearing the three queens, the commencement of the voyage into the unknown, to the island valley of Avalon. By the cold moonlight the spectacle fits the frame, for all distances are magnified and the awkward corners of daylight fact are obscured by the mysterious glamour. It is not the setting Tennyson has given to the Idyll, but it mates the story as told by Malory in his re-rendering from the French. It is not far over the hills to Slaughter Bridge, where Arthur is said to have received his mortal wound in combat with Sir Mordred; it is a dozen miles or so to King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagel.

Fascinating as the great allegory is in any setting, it may be assumed, quite safely, that Borrow was even more keenly interested in the other, wilder, fiercer legend of Dozmary—the legend of Tregeagle. For, though he exclaimed his pleasure at detecting a resemblance between the names Jenefer and Guinevere in the parish records of St. Cleer, and afterwards made a journey to the Arthurian country to the north—when he passed by Caerleon on his tour through Wales, he did not turn aside to dream of the Round Table, but contented himself with mentioning Caerleon as “at one time one of the most considerable towns in Britain,” and went on to explain that whisky really was a corruption of the Erse word for water, and that meticulous accuracy would describe the fiery spirit as usquebaugh!

The Penance of Tregeagle was a very different matter. It is a variant of the universal Satanic legend. Tregeagle is a prototype of the immemorial man who makes compact with the Father of Evil, the bargain in this case being a hundred years of earthly pleasure in return for his soul immortal. The parable is an answer to the tragic question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Tregeagle was a shepherd, who, dissatisfied with his share of the good things of earth, expressed a petulant wish to possess all he could see. The Devil appeared to him in guise of Knight, arrayed in black armour, carrying a black lance, riding a black horse, accompanied by two black hounds of hell. The stranger challenged Tregeagle’s desire; for the forfeit of his soul at the end of a hundred years, he should have during those hundred years a castle and broad lands and endless riches. The shepherd accepted the terms; the Black Knight sounded his terrible horn and rode away, with the black hounds (which dominate the story in all its versions) snarling at his horse’s heels. In some form or other the dog is nearly always associated with the Satanic legend. In the Faust stories the Spirit of Evil is introduced as a dog. In “Tam o’ Shanter,”

“There sat Auld Nick in shape o’ beast, A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large.”

Upon the Devil’s departure, Tregeagle fell into a trance, and, when he awoke, the moors were changed into waving forests and verdant meadows, and on the hill where Dozmary had been stood a splendid castle. Tregeagle himself was arrayed in knightly costume, and saluted as their lord by a stately retinue.

In the course of his hundred years of prosperity all his fine stock of original sin had black and bloody development. Rapine, murder, and pillage went unchecked; he consummated his crimes by abducting the lovely virgin Goonhylda, daughter of the Earl of Cornwall, and shutting her up in the castle. Her father led an expedition to rescue her, and its arrival at Tregeagle’s gates precisely coincided with the expiration of his hundred years. And as the Earl’s messenger thundered there, the sound of the terrible horn and the sinister baying of hounds was heard; the Black Horseman came riding across the hills, calling upon Tregeagle to surrender himself, for that his bond was due.

Tregeagle, in a palsy of fear, stepped out, and was immediately stricken dead by a bolt from the black clouds that had suddenly o’erspread the scene. A storm raged, a spectre arose from the corpse of Tregeagle and fled into the murk, pursued by the grim huntsman and his hounds. When the storm had passed, the enchantment was over. Castle, forests and meadows had vanished; once more stretched the wide brown moors, glittered the surface of the pool. But Tregeagle was condemned for ever to the service of the Devil, who delights to set him Sisyphean tasks, of which the chief is to drain dry the pool of Dozmary by baling it with a limpet shell which has a hole in the bottom. Let him desist for a moment, and his torture begins; he flies shrieking before the Huntsman and his ghastly hounds. The spectre horseman and his pack are known as “The Devil and his Durdy Dogs.” The punishment of Tregeagle is only a small part of their business. They travel far and wide, not only over the moors but along the sea coasts, and their attentions are most fatal to those who happen to be abroad at night bent on deeds of evil. There is a tale of a herdsman who was on the moor of a winter’s night, and was chased by the Durdy Dogs, which came rushing down from a neighbouring tor. He could not run fast enough to escape, and just as they were close upon him he fell on his knees in prayer. Immediately the dogs stood at bay, howling ferociously. The terrible Huntsman shouted, “Bo Shrove!” (“the boy prays”), and at the word both he and his hounds vanished. {166} Similar legends of the yeth-hounds of Dartmoor are heard in Devonshire. As the black dogs hunt Tregeagle across the Cornish hills, their baying and his cries of agony are heard in lonely cottages at night. One draws closer to the chimney-corner as the wind pelts moaning athwart the waste, when this tradition is related to him by firelight in one of the crofts near by. Crying children are told that they are “roarin’ an’ howlin’ like Tregeagle.”

Borrow was deeply interested, not only in these larger legends of world-celebrity, but in the purely local folklore, the pixy stories of the peasantry. The Cornish pixies—or “piskies,” to use the vernacular—are diminutive fairies, generally dressed in green, very fond of mirth and mischief, some bad, but most good. They mislead men at night, for fun; then the only way to break the spell is for the victim to turn his coat inside out. They play practical jokes; they resemble, now Will o’ the Wisp, now the Scottish brownie, and again Robin Goodfellow; when properly propitiated they sometimes make gifts to their human neighbours of fairy food and fairy goblets. Borrow heard how the pixies mount horses’ heads at nights, and ride them about the fields, making stirrups of their manes; how they work in the mines, and are heard knocking in the levels underground, like the Duegars of northern latitudes; how some of them are under penance, like Tregeagle, to bale dry the pool of Dozmary.

Elizabeth Borrow, his cousin, related this characteristic story to him. A child belonging to poor parents was observed to have developed peculiarities. Among these was the fact that it could never get enough to eat. This is not, one might suppose, a peculiarity of children altogether confined to St. Cleer or even to Cornwall; but this child’s appetite was so abnormal that its relations decided to consult a wise woman about it. The witch told them that she had no doubt it was a pisky. She recommended them to put a large quantity of old shoes on a spit and make the child turn it, even if they had to beat it to compel it to the task. This procedure was adopted, and after a sound thrashing and much complaining the child was heard to say:

“I am four score years and more, But never saw such a roast before.”

Then, as they were too young to have a child over eighty, the parents had proof positive that it was a pisky. The murder being out, after some time it disappeared, and their own child was magically restored to them.