Poetry, and throws a rainbow radiance over it—the Spirit of Antiquity.  Upon this Borrow and the writer of these lines have often talked.  No man ever felt more deeply than he that part and parcel of the very life of man is the atmosphere in which the Spirit of Antiquity lives.  Irrational the sentiment about this Spirit may be, if you will, but stifled it will never be.  Physical science strengthens rather than weakens the magical glamour of the Spirit of Antiquity.  Even the most advanced social science, try to hate him as it may, cannot dim his glory.  To the beloved poet of the socialists—William Morris—he was as dear, as great and as strong as to the most conservative poet that has ever lived.  Those who express wonderment that in these days there should be the old human playthings as bright and captivating as ever—those who express wonderment at the survival of all the delightful features of the old European raree-show—have not realized the power of this Spirit and the power of the sentiment about him.  What is the use of telling us that even in Grecian annals there is no kind of heroism recorded which you cannot match in the histories of modern countries—even of new countries, such as the United States and the Australias and Canada?  What is the use of telling us that the travels of Ulysses and of Jason are as nothing in point of real romance compared with Captain Phillip’s voyage to the other side of the world, when he led his little convict-laden fleet to Botany Bay—a bay then as unknown almost as any bay in Laputa—that voyage which resulted in the founding of a cluster of great nations any one of whose mammoth millionaires could now buy up Ilium and the golden fleece combined?  The Spirit of Antiquity knows not that captain, and hence the Spirit of Poetry has nothing to say about him.  In a thousand years’ time, no doubt, these things may be as ripe for poetic treatment as the voyage of the Argonauts, or the voyage of the Cymric Prince Madoc, who the romantic lover of Wales, in spite of the arguments of Thomas Stephens, will still believe sailed westward with his fleet and discovered America before Columbus,—returned, and then sailed westward again into eternity.  Now every peak and cliff of Snowdonia, and every matchless valley and dale of the land of the Druids, is very specially beloved by the Spirit of Antiquity.  The land of Druidism—the land of that mysterious poetic religion which more than any other religion expresses the very voice of Nature, is the land painted in this delightful volume—Wild Wales.  Compared with Druidism, all other religious systems have a sort of commonplace and modern ring, even those which preceded it by centuries.  The scenic witchery of Wild Wales is great, no doubt, but it is enormously intensified by the memory of the heroic struggle of the unconquerable remnant of the ancient Britons with the brutal, physical power of Roman and Saxon.  The history of Wales is an epic not to be surpassed for poetry and for romance.  And even these things did not comprise all the points in connection with Wild Wales that delighted Borrow.  For when the student of Welsh history and the lover of Welsh scenery is brought into contact with the contemporary Welsh people, the charm of the land does not fade, it is not fingered away by personal contact: it is, indeed, augmented tenfold.  I have in “Aylwin” dwelt upon the poetry of Welsh common life, the passionate love of the Welsh people for a tiny strip of Welsh soil, the religion of hearth and home, the devotion to wife and children.  In the Arvon edition of that book, dedicated to a Welsh poet, I have said what I had previously often said to Borrow, that, “although I have seen a good deal of the races of Europe, I put the Cymric race in many ways at the top of them all.  They combine, as I think, the poetry, the music, the instinctive love of the fine arts, and the humour of the other Celtic peoples with the practicalness and bright-eyed sagacity of the very different race to which they were so closely linked by circumstance—the race whom it is the fashion to call the Anglo-Saxon.  And as to the charm of the Welsh girls, no one who knows them as you and I do, can fail to be struck by it continually.  Winifred Wynne I meant to be the typical Welsh girl as I have found her—affectionate, warm-hearted, self-sacrificing and brave.”

IV
BORROW’S METHOD OF AUTOBIOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE COMPARED WITH THE METHODS OF DEFOE, WILKIE COLLINS, DICKENS AND THE ABBÉ PRÉVOST

It seems almost necessary that in this desultory talk upon “Wild Wales” I should, before proceeding any further, say a few words upon the book in its relations to two of Borrow’s other autobiographic narratives, “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” and I do not know any literary subject more suggestive of interesting criticism.

Although Borrow always acknowledged Defoe as his master, he had, of course, qualities of his own that were as unlike Defoe’s qualities as they were unlike those of any other writer.  And as this speciality of his has, so far as I know, never been discussed, I should have liked, had space permitted, to give interest to my remarks upon “Wild Wales” by a thorough comparison between Borrow’s imaginative works and Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe.”  This is impossible in the space at my command.  And yet a few words upon the subject I cannot resist indulging in, for it relates to the very core and central light of Borrow’s genius; and I may now never have another opportunity of touching upon it.

I remember a long talk I once had with him upon the method of Defoe as contrasted and compared with his own method in “Lavengro,” “The Romany Rye,” and “Wild Wales,” and the method of other writers who adopt the autobiographic form of fiction.  He agreed with me that the most successful of all stories in the autobiographic form is “Robinson Crusoe,” although “Jane Eyre,” “David Copperfield” and “Great Expectations” among English novels, and “Gil Blas” and “Manon Lescaut” among French novels, are also autobiographic in form.  It is of all forms the most difficult.  But its advantages, if they can be secured without making too many artistic sacrifices, are enormous.  Flexibility is, of course, the one quality it lacks, but, lacking that, it cannot secure the variety of picture and the breadth of movement which is the special strength of the historic form.

The great pupils of Defoe—and by pupils I mean those writers who try to give as much commonplace ἀπάτη as possible to new and striking incidents—Edgar Poe, Wilkie Collins, Gaboriau and others, recognize the immense aid given to illusion by adopting the autobiographic form.

The conversation upon this subject occurred in one of my rambles with Borrow and Dr. Gordon Hake in Richmond Park, when I had been pointing out to the former certain passages in “Robinson Crusoe” where Defoe adds richness and piquancy to the incidents by making the reader believe that these incidents will in the end have some deep influence, spiritual or physical, upon the narrator himself.

Borrow was not a theorizer, and yet he took a quaint interest in other people’s theorizings.  He asked me to explain myself more fully.  My reply in substance was something like this: Although in “Robinson Crusoe” the autobiographer is really introduced only to act as eye-witness for the purpose of bringing out and authenticating the incidents of the dramatic action, Defoe had the artistic craftiness to make it appear that this was not so—to make it appear that the incidents are selected by Crusoe in such a way as to exhibit and develop the emotions moving within his own breast.  Defoe’s apparent object in writing the story was