I cannot remember getting so much pleasure from a book. It is not just its beauty, the handmade paper, the quarter leather, the engraving of the Rhaeadr Falls cut in purple into the cover cloth of something the size of an atlas. These are accidental details (as, I note bemusedly, is the fact that it costs £300 more than the current value of my car). For this, quite simply, is the funniest book I have read in years.
Its godfather seems to have been Napoleon, whose wars sealed Europe off to the Romantics. In other words, he deprived them of their fixes of the Sublime, the Picturesque, the Prospects of Infinity; the Emperor deprived them of mountains. So where were they to go? ‘Scotland,’ Dr Tegai Hughes observes in an introduction remarkable for its dry humour, ‘might be more familiar and enticing, but Wales was a good deal more accessible.’ Accessibility mattered, for they were coming on foot; also, something which mattered almost as much to them, walking was socially acceptable there (there was, wrote De Quincey, ‘no sort of disgrace attached in Wales, as too generally upon the great roads of England, to the pedestrian style of travelling’).
And Wales was cheap. Its inns cost a third of what English inns charged, though they soon caught up, as over the Border came the most bizarre invaders the old principality had ever known: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Shelley, with assorted wives, sisters, friends, radical politics, and, of course, notebooks.
Until then the only travellers in Wales had been drovers, itinerant preachers, and the odd English king at the head of an army (though James II, frantic for a male heir, did come to soak his testicles in a holy well: it worked). The men of the 18th century had taken a distant interest, for there was a lot to be interested in, like druids and bards and castle ruins. ‘The ruins came equipped with dimly understood historical associations,’ murmurs Dr Hughes. So Gray was able to write about Edward I’s massacre of the bards, which had never occurred, and Blake to declare that Adam and Noah had both been druids. But the Romantics were different: they bounded into Wales, the way the training SAS now bounds into the Brecon Beacons.
Creatures of quite extraordinary physical fitness, the writers climbed the mountains, Wordsworth climbing Snowdon at midnight, and the popular poet Mrs Felicia Hemans spending a whole night on Cader Idris in the hope of seeing visions, which she duly achieved. Mr Heman, perhaps not unexpectedly, had earlier done a runner. As for the rest, they paced the moorlands, got rained on, got lost (Coleridge on the way to Tintern Abbey ) and misspelt the place names, thereby ensuring gainful employment in the years to come as Eng. lit. scholars puzzled over where the blighters had actually been.
But they all faced one problem. The old Welsh heroes were romantic figures, so they could agonise excitedly over Caractacus and Llywelyn and Glyndwr, for these were all safely dead. The Welsh people they met were not. ‘The society in Wales is very stupid,’ wrote Shelley:
They are all Aristocrats and Christians, but that as I tell you I do not mind in the least; the unpleasant part of the business is that they hunt people to Death who are not so likewise.
The curious thing is that the burglar, at whom Shelley had fired at in return, had also done his share of hollering, ‘By God, I will be revenged! I will murder your wife. I will ravish your sister.’ Shelley seems to have encountered the only English-speaking burglar in North Wales. For almost everyone else he, and the others, encountered was monoglot Welsh, so the Romantics would not have understood a word they said. This, however, did not stop Coleridge airily pronouncing that to the peasants of North Wales ‘the ancient mountains, with all their terrors, are pictures to the blind, and music to the deaf’. Or Southey, encountering those of South Wales, to say, ‘These creatures were somewhat between me and the animals, and were as useful to the landscape as masses of weed or stranded boats.’ Blimey. The Romantics, as human beings, do not come well out of this book, being revealed as racists, prigs and hysterics, and it would have been fascinating had it been possible to include some Welsh reactions to them. As it was, one Welsh vicar was so irritated by Wordsworth that he took a knife to him.
But the greatest ordeal the Welsh had to face since Edward I was to come. They had still to be talked at by George Borrow. His appearance was bad enough, this white-haired giant with an umbrella, but Borrow had also taught himself to speak Welsh, only with an accent so peculiar that 60 years on an old lady remembered, as a child, her terror at hearing it. Hughes, stretching his definition of Romantic, includes an extract from Borrow in full linguistic cry after a Welsh lady who until then had been peacefully knitting (‘the general occupation of Welsh females’).
This book cries out for popular publication. It is a classic of comedy.