Transcribed from the June 1906 J. M. Dent edition by DavidPrice,
by GEORGE BORROW
TALK ABOUT “WILDWALES”
BY
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
I have been invited by the editor of this series to say a fewwords upon Borrow’s “Wild Wales.” Theinvitation has come to me, he says, partly because during thelatter days of Borrow’s life I had the privilege as a veryyoung man of enjoying his friendship, and partly because in mystory, “Aylwin,” and in my poem, “The Coming ofLove,” I have shown myself to be a true lover ofWales—a true lover, indeed, of most things Cymric.
Let me begin by saying that although the book is an entirelyworthy compeer of “Lavengro” and “The RomanyRye,” and although like them it is written in theautobiographic form, it belongs, as I propose to show further on,to an entirely different form of narrative from those two famousbooks. And it differs in this respect even from “TheBible in Spain.” Unlike that splendid book, it isjust a simple, uncoloured record of a walking tour through thePrincipality. As in any other itinerary, events in“Wild Wales” are depicted as they actually occurred,enriched by none of that glamour in which Borrow loved to disporthimself. I remember once asking him why in this book hewrote an autobiographic narrative so fundamentally different from“Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye”—whyhe had made in this book none of those excursions into the realmsof fancy which form so charming a part of his famousquasi-autobiographic narratives. It was entirelycharacteristic of him that he p. viiiremained silent as he walked rathersulkily by my side. To find an answer to the queries,however, is not very difficult. Making a tour as he did onthis occasion in the company of eye-witnesses—eye-witnessesof an extremely different temper from his own, eye-witnesses,moreover, whom he specially wished to satisfy andplease—his wife and stepdaughter—he found itimpossible to indulge in his bohemian proclivities and equallyimpossible to give his readers any of those romanticcoincidences, those quaint arrangements of incidents toillustrate theories of life, which illuminate his otherworks. The tour was made in the summer and autumn of 1854;during the two or three years following, he seems to have beenworking upon this record of it. The book was announced forpublication in 1857, but it was not until 1862 that hispublisher, who had been so greatly disappointed by the receptiongiven to “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,”took courage to offer it to the public.
In 1860 Borrow’s interest in Wales and Welsh literaturehad specially been shown by the publication of his Englishversion of “Gweledigaethau y Bardd Cwsg,” a curiouskind of allegory in the form of a vision, written in the earlyyears of the eighteenth century by a Welsh clergyman named EllisWynne. The English reader of Borrow’s works willremember the allusion made to this book. As might have beenexpected, Borrow’s translation of this Welsh prose classicis not very trustworthy, and it has been superseded by thetranslation of Mr. R. Gwyneddon Davies, published in 1897. A characteristic matter connected with Borrow’s translationis that in the Quarterly Review for January 1861 hehimself reviewed it anonymously, and not without appreciation ofits merits—a method which may be recommended to thoseauthors who are not in sympathy with their reviewe