Читать книгу Wild Wales: The People, Language, & Scenery - Borrow George - Страница 7

Those who have seen much of the writing fraternity of London or Paris, know that the great mass of authors, whether in prose or in verse, have just as much and just as little individuality – have just as much and just as little of any new and true personal accent, as the vast flock of human sheep whose bleatings will soon drown all other voices over land and sea. They have the peculiar instinct for putting their thoughts into written words – that is all. This it is that makes Borrow such a memorable figure. If ever a man had an accent of his own that man was he. What that accent was I have tried to indicate here, in the remarks upon his method of writing autobiographic fiction. Vanity can make all, even the most cunning, simple on one side of their characters, but it made of Borrow a veritable child.

If Tennyson may be accepted as the type of the man without guile, what type does Borrow represent? In him guile and simplicity were blent in what must have been the most whimsical amalgam of opposite qualities ever seen on this planet. Let me give one instance out of a thousand of this.

Great as was his love of Wales and the Welsh, the Anglo-Saxonism – the John Bullism which he fondly cherished in that Celtic bosom of his, was so strong that whenever it came to pitting the prowess and the glories of the Welshman against those of the Englishman, his championship of the Cymric race would straightway vanish, and the claim of the Anglo-Saxon to superiority would be proclaimed against all the opposition of the world. This was especially so in regard to athletics, as was but natural, seeing that he always felt himself to be an athlete first, a writing man afterwards.

A favourite quotation of his was from Byron —

Frederick Sandys, a Norfolk man who knew him well, rarely spoke of Borrow save as a master in the noble art of self-defence.

It was as a swimmer I first saw him – one of the strongest and hardiest that ever rejoiced to buffet with wintry billows on the Norfolk coast. And to the very last did his interest in swimming, sparring, running, wrestling, jumping remain. If the Welshman would only have admitted that in athletics the Englishman stands first – stands easily first among the competitors of the world, he would have cheerfully admitted that the Welshman made a good second. General Picton used to affirm that the ideal – the topmost soldier in the world is a Welshman of five feet, eight inches in height. Such a man as the six-feet-three giant of Dereham knew well how to scorn such an assertion even though made by the great Picton himself. But suppose Borrow had been told, as we have lately been told, that the so-called “English archers” at Crecy and Agincourt were mainly made up of Welshmen, what a flush would have overspread his hairless cheek, what an indignant fire would have blazed from his eyes! Not even his indignation on being told, as we would sometimes tell him at “The Bald-faced Stag,” that Scottish Highlanders had proved themselves superior to their English brothers-in-arms would have equalled his scorn of such talk about Crecy and Agincourt – scenes of English prowess that he was never tired of extolling.

But you had only to admit that Welshmen were superior to all others save Englishmen in physical prowess, and Borrow’s championship of the Cymric athlete could be as enthusiastic and even as aggressive as the best and most self-assertive Welshman ever born in Arvon. Consequently I can but regret that he did not live to see the great recrudescence of Cymric energy which we are seeing at the present moment in “Cymru, gwlad y gân,” – an energy which is declaring itself more vigorously every day, and not merely in pure intellectual matters, not merely in political matters, but equally in those same athletics which to Borrow were so important. Sparring has gone out of fashion as much in the Principality as in England and Scotland; but that which has succeeded it, football, has taken a place in athleticism such as would have bewildered Borrow, as it would have bewildered most of his contemporaries. What would he have said, I wonder, had he been told that in this favourite twentieth-century game the Welsh would surpass all others in these islands, and save the honour of Great Britain? No one would have enjoyed witnessing the great contest between the Welsh and the New Zealand athletes at the Cardiff Arms Park on the 16th of last December with more gusto than the admirer of English sparring and of the English pugilistic heroes, from Big Ben Bryan to Tom Spring. No one would have been more exhilarated than he by the song with which it opened —

“Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn anwyl i mi.”1

But one wonders what he would have said after the struggle was over – after Wales’s latest triumph over the Saxon record of physical prowess. One can imagine, perhaps, his mixed feelings had he been a witness of that great athletic struggle which is going to be historic – the immortal contest in which after England had succumbed entirely to the Colonials, the honour of the old country was saved by Wales at the eleventh hour. His cheek would have glowed with admiration of the exploits of the only footballers whose names will be historic, and being historic must be mentioned in connection with his own Welsh pages, – I mean the names of Travers, of Bush, of Winfield, of Owen, of Jones, of Llewellyn, of Gabe, of Nicholls, of Morgan, of Williams, of Hodges, of Harding, of Joseph, and the names of the two Pritchards. Whatsoever might have been his after-emotions when provincial patriotism began to assert itself, Borrow would in that great hour of Cymric triumph have frankly admitted, I think, that for once England’s honour was saved by Wales.

The following is a list of the works of George Borrow —

Faustus, His Life, Death [from the German of F. M. von Klinger], 1825; Romantic Ballads [from the Danish of Öhlenschläger, and from the Kiempé Viser], and miscellaneous pieces [from the Danish of Ewald and others], 1826; Targum, or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects, 1835; The Talisman of A. Pushkin, with other pieces [from Russian and Polish], 1835; New Testament (Luke), Embéo e Majaró Lucas.. El Evangelio segun S. Lucas, traducido al Romani, 1837; The Bible in Spain, 3 vols., 1843; The Zincali (Gypsies in Spain), 2 vols., 1841; Lavengro, 1851; The Romany Rye, 2 vols., 1857; The Sleeping Bard, translated from the Cambrian British, 1860; Wild Wales, 3 vols., 1862; Romano Lavo-Lil: Word-Book of the Romany, 1874; Násr Al-Din, Khwājah, The Turkish Jester [from the Turkish], 1884; Death of Balder [from the Danish of Ewald], 1889.

The Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow, by Knapp (W. I.), appeared in 1899.