Читать книгу Wild Wales: The People, Language, & Scenery - Borrow George - Страница 3

In 1860 Borrow’s interest in Wales and Welsh literature had specially been shown by the publication of his English version of “Gweledigaethau y Bardd Cwsg,” a curious kind of allegory in the form of a vision, written in the early years of the eighteenth century by a Welsh clergyman named Ellis Wynne. The English reader of Borrow’s works will remember the allusion made to this book. As might have been expected, Borrow’s translation of this Welsh prose classic is not very trustworthy, and it has been superseded by the translation of Mr. R. Gwyneddon Davies, published in 1897. A characteristic matter connected with Borrow’s translation is that in the Quarterly Review for January 1861 he himself reviewed it anonymously, and not without appreciation of its merits – a method which may be recommended to those authors who are not in sympathy with their reviewers. The article showed a great deal of what may be called Borrovian knowledge of the Welsh language and Welsh literature, and perhaps it is not ungenerous to say a good deal of Borrovian ignorance too. For never was Nature’s love of whim in the fashioning of individuals more delightfully exemplified than in the case of Borrow’s irresistible desire for scholarship. Nothing whatever had he of the temperament of the true scholar – nothing whatever of the philologist’s endowment, and yet to be recognized as a scholar was the great ambitious dream of his life. I wish I had time to compare his disquisitions upon the Welsh language and literature in this article with a very rare little book on the same subject, the “Sketch of the History of the Welsh Language and Literature,” by a remarkable man as entirely forgotten now as Borrow is well remembered – Thomas Watts of the British Museum. In the one case we get nebulous speculation and fanciful induction based upon Borrovian knowledge; in the other, a solid mass of real learning accompanied by the smallest possible amount of speculation or fanciful induction.

Borrow had a certain something of Mezzofanti’s prodigious memory for words, accompanied by the great Italian’s lack of philological science. It may be remembered in this connection that Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake in his reminiscences in Notes and Queries of a relation of mine, the late Mr. James Orlando Watts, says that the learned recluse used to express a good deal of humorous contempt of Borrow’s “method of learning languages from dictionaries only,” without any grammatical knowledge. And these strictures, if we consider them, will explain much in regard to the philological disquisitions in “Lavengro,” “The Romany Rye,” and “Wild Wales,” where the knowledge is all “dictionary knowledge.” But it was not the shaky philology that caused “Wild Wales” to fall almost dead from the press. What, then, was the cause? It arose from the fact, as I hinted above, that “Wild Wales” belongs to a different kind of autobiographic narrative from “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” and also, if the truth must be said, from “The Bible in Spain.”

At the period when Borrow wrote this book the great and vigorous renascence of the Cymric idea, the new and deep interest that Welshmen are now taking in the preservation of the Welsh tongue, had not begun. That Borrow did not live to this day, when Welsh is much more spoken among the cultivated class than in his time, is to be lamented. With regard to this revival, whatever may become of it (whether the Welsh language can really be made to survive in the great linguistic struggle for life, which will be one of the principal features of the twentieth century), no one will deny that it is a language which from the poetic side as well as from the historic ought to survive. If I tread here upon dangerous ground, I may yet venture to say that one great obstacle against the spread of the Welsh language beyond Wales is the strange orthography. It is difficult for a person unacquainted with Welsh to believe that the sounds represented by such awkward arrangements of consonants as Welsh displays are otherwise than unmusical. And yet as a matter of fact those sounds are very musical. It may be remarked here that there is another language spoken in Europe which suffers from the same misfortune in regard to phonetics – the Magyar language. I have elsewhere in a novel, whose scene is partly laid in Hungary, made a character speak of the disappointment expressed by the traveller in Central Europe, when crossing the Austrian frontier into Hungary by rail, at the sight of the Hungarian names with which the stations become suddenly placarded. German is an ugly-looking language enough, but in this respect it is nothing to the Hungarian. And yet it would be hard to find in the whole of Europe a more musical tongue than that which is represented by the uncouth consonantal syllables. It is not a little striking too that between the Cymric race and the Magyar race there are many points of likeness; one of these is the intense love of music displayed by the two, another is the blending of poetic imagination with practical sagacity. The Magyars have been called a race of lawyers, but their love of law-points and litigation is not greater than that of the Welsh, and yet how poetical is each race to the core!

With regard to languages – to survive will in the present century mean to spread. Languages that do not spread will be crushed out. People who talk glibly about the vast expansion of the English language all over the world do not seem to realize that it is not the excellence of a tongue which makes it survive and causes it to spread over the earth, but the energy, military or commercial, of the people who speak it. It is not the excellence of the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton that has carried it all round the globe, but the busy energy of the commonplace people who migrated for the most commonplace ends imaginable, and took the language with them, and then increased and multiplied, building up new English-speaking communities. It is for this reason that the English language seems destined to become, if not the “universal language,” at least the lingua franca of the world. And nothing is more pathetic than to observe the dread among Continental nations that this will be the case in the future; and nothing is more humorous than the passionate attempts to invent artificial languages, Volapük, Esperanto and what not, to do the work that the English language is already doing all over the sea, and will, apparently, soon be doing all over the land.

I dwell here upon this interesting subject in order to say that if Welsh does not survive it will not be because it is not a fine language, but simply because Destiny has decreed that it shall share the fate of many another language spoken at present much more widely than Welsh.