Welsh Journals

GEORGE Henry Borrow-" English travel- ler, linguist, and author," as the Encyclo- paedia Britannica, with its usual cold, conventional accuracy, describes him, in the man- ner they do with trees and shrubs in Kew Gardens, was undoubtedly as fine a tramp as ever walked the high and bye roads of England. Since the glorious days of the Troubadours, he must also have be n the first peer of the realm of that strange and wayward brotherhood in his eccentric learning and scholarship. And, perhaps with the single exception of a living Welshman (a poet) who has in our own days belonged to the wandering craft of the open road, a premier amongst them during that period in literary gifts. His high avocation as a scholar gipsy was re- vealed to him by the Lord through the mean agency of a publisher, one Sir Richard Phillips (probably a Welshman) who employed him and very nearly starved him, as apparently he did most of his other employees. To escape the doom of a Chatterton, as Theodore Watts- Dunton says, "this Norfolk man, considerably more than six feet in height a highly trained athlete, with a countenance of extraordinary im- pressiveness, if not of commanding beauty-Greek in type with a dash of Hebrew-­on one memor- able May evening in 1825, left his squalid London lodgings, with bundle and stick, to begin life on the roads." The Lord be praised for it, and let the devil, Sir Richard Phillips, put in his claim if he has a mind to. For Borrow's decision of despair gave English literature one of the dozen greatest autobiographers of the ages. The very competent writer of the article in the "Times Literary Supplement" on the occasion of the centenary of Borrow's birth (was it Watts- Dunton or Clement Shorter?), declared that the author of Lavengro "is entitled to rank with St. Augustine, Cellini, Pepys, Rousseau, and Franklin; and, for truthfulness, it is very prob- able, if we could estimate it properly, that he would have to be put at the top of the class." A very great tribute indeed, but in spite of all the whims and changes of fashion, there are many of us who would unhesitatingly agree in the verdict. We are not at the moment, however, celebrat- ing any centenary or other date in connection with Borrow's life. I have only to call attention to the fact that there has just been published (of course by the house of Murray), under the editorship of Prof. H. Wright of Bangor, a hitherto unknown or shall I say undiscovered-book by this "Celtic Bards, Chiefs and Kings. George Borrow. (John Murray, 1928). A "NEW BORROW"* by T. Huws Davies strange genius, the second of his books relating solely to Wales. The fact of primary importance for Welshmen, from the domestic point of view, is that long before the had made the acquaintance of the generosity of Sir Richard, before the heath and the open country and the wind that blows over them had called to him and he had re- sponded with the impulsiveness and the abandon ot a mighty lover, he had, with the assistance of a somewhat ridiculous old Welsh groom in Norwich, learnt Welsh "in his way," and had become acquainted in a most ambling and dis- cursive way with Welsh literature and history. What Welshman who has ever read the de- lightfully whimsical nineteenth chapter of Laven- gro, will ever forget his account of his initiation into these mysteries? "At the period to which I allude, I was just, as I may say, entering upon life; I had adopted a profession, and-to keep up my character, simultaneously with that pro- fession, the study of a new language; I speedily became a proficient in the one, but ever remained a novice in the other: a novice in the law, but a perfect master in the Welsh tongue." "Yes, very pleasant times were those, when within the womb of a lofty deal desk, behind which I sat for some eight hours every day, transcribing (when I imagined eyes were upon me) documents of every description in every pos- sible hand, Blackstone kept company with Ap Gwilym-the polished lawyer of the last century who wrote long and prosy chapters on the rights of things with a certain wild Welshman who some four hundred years before that time indited im- mortal cowydds and odes to the wives of Welsh chieftains. And by what strange chance had Ap Gwilym and Blackstone, two personages so exceedingly different, been thus brought to- gether." Ap Gwilym remained to the end one of his real passions, and how often did he declare that, in hiis opinion, he was "the greatest poet- ical genius that had appeared in Europe since the revival of literature." I often wonder what would have happened if this six foot three of mixed Scandinavian and Cornish flesh and blood, could, on a tour in Wales, have turned in to listen to one of Mr. G. T. Williams's lectures on lolo Morganwg's forgeries. Lavengro had another good reason for his un- dying attachment to Wales. On his "gypsying" in 1825, in a dingle in 'Shropshire, he was "drabbed" (poisoned) with a cake by the gipsy woman, Hearne, and his life was saved by an old itinerant ..Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, and his lovely wife, Gwen. He spent a whole week with them, and parted from them some-