| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: George Borrow - the Man and his Work
Author: Walling, R. A. J.
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "George Borrow - the Man and his Work" ***
Transcribed from the 1908 Cassell and Company edition by David Price.
_By the Same Author_
A
Sea Dog of Devon
A Life of Sir
John Hawkins
With Introduction by Lord Brassey
6s. net
* * * * *
_Cheap Edition of GEORGE_
_BORROW’S_ “_THE BIBLE_
_IN SPAIN_.” 8_d._ _net_
_cloth_, 1_s._ 6_d._ _net leather_
* * * * *
CASSELL AND CO., LTD.
[Picture: George Borrow by Henry Philips pinxt; Emery Walker photo]
GEORGE BORROW
THE MAN AND HIS WORK
* * * * *
BY
R. A. J. WALLING
_Author of_ “_A Sea Dog of Devon_”
* * * * *
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
* * * * *
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
MCMVIII
* * * * *
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
* * * * *
PREFACE
ONE writing of Borrow since the publication of Dr. W. I. Knapp’s “Life,
Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow” (Murray, 1899) must of
need acknowledge the invaluable services conferred upon the student by
that monumental work. Its store of documents is the harvest of a
lifetime of devoted labour, and it bridges many a yawning gulf which
aforetime left the Borrovian explorer disconsolate. In this monograph,
where Dr. Knapp is directly quoted, the fact is generally mentioned
either in the text or by way of footnote; but it seemed fitting that
there should be some more definite expression of my indebtedness to his
affectionate diligence in those long and fruitful researches, which alone
have made possible a consecutive story of Borrow’s life.
An inquiry into the Cornish origin of the Borrow family, into the
circumstances of Borrow’s visit to the home of his forbears, and of his
tour in Cornwall, was responsible for the inception of the present book.
The astonishing contrast between the Borrow of the common conception and
Borrow as he really was in the flesh and in the spirit gradually forced
itself upon me. Borrow has been popularly regarded in two lights. Many
people have had a vague idea that if he was not a gypsy he was “half a
gypsy, or something of the sort.” More instructed opinion has accepted
his affection for East Anglia, the country of his birth, and his
glorification of Anglo-Saxonism, as sufficient evidence that he was
himself an Anglo-Saxon. Both views are wrong. He was of Celtic origin;
his genius was Celtic, though its attributes were modified by many
influences. Here is the explanation of many things in Borrow’s life and
work which can be explained in no other way. If the part of the book
referring to his Cornish associations appears to be out of proportion to
the rest, my excuse lies here also.
Further, the Cornish episodes are those least known in Borrow’s life. My
object has been, so far as the narrative is concerned, to strengthen the
connecting links between those portions of his career which he set forth
in his autobiographies, rather than to re-traverse ground where he
himself trailed the pen.
Gratitude must be expressed for much assistance given to me in the
elucidation of obscure points and in the tracing of documents. First, I
am indebted to Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, not only for liberty to draw
upon his rich store of recollections of his friend, but for much advice,
assistance, and suggestion, the value of which it is difficult to
overestimate. No little of the revival of interest in Borrow and the
subjects with which he dealt is due to the vogue given to “gypsyism” in
literature by the extraordinary success of that wonderful novel,
“Aylwin,” and the fascinations of its heroine, Sinfi Lovel, of whom Mr.
Watts-Dunton and Borrow conversed during those walks commemorated in Dr.
Gordon Hake’s sonnet:
While he, Lavengro, towering by your side,
With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,
Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride
To tell the legends of the fading race—
As at the summons of his piercing glance,
Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,
While you called up that pendant of romance
To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
Your Amazonian Sinfi’s noble story!
Mr. Francis Edwards, of Marylebone, has generously given permission for
the reproduction of exceedingly interesting passages from unique copies
of Borrow’s books in his possession. To the kindness of Mrs. Ford, of
Pencarrow, is due some of the additional information about the relations
of Borrow with her husband, Richard Ford. For East Anglian memories I
have consulted, among others, Mr. William Dutt, of Lowestoft, and Mr.
William Mackay, of Oulton. Family documents and reminiscences have been
contributed by Mr. W. H. Borrow, of South Hampstead; Mr. E. Pollard, of
Penquite; Mr. William Pollard, of Woolston, and, above all, by Dr.
Reginald Taylor, of Gray’s’ Inn Road (son of the “gallant girl” of the
’fifties in Cornwall), to whom my thanks are due especially for the
material of the detailed account of Borrow’s Cornish tour.
In the biographical sense, the most important new matter is the
correspondence between Borrow and Sir John Bowring, supplied by the
courtesy of Sir John’s sons, Mr. Lewin B. Bowring, of Torquay, and Mr. F.
H. Bowring, of West Hampstead. This throws a little light on the
mysterious “Veiled Period.” The quarrel between Borrow and Bowring will
possibly never be explained quite fully; the correspondence now
summarised or printed for the first time shows that for more than twenty
years Bowring was a good friend of Borrow—“my only friend,” as he said in
1842. Judgment on the merits of the dispute, so far as the evidence can
be taken at present, must go against Borrow.
I have entered with some diffidence upon the discussion of Borrow’s
“gypsyism”; any degree of confidence which may appear is the offspring of
the enthusiastic aid afforded to me by Mr. R. A. Scott-Macfie, the
secretary of the Gypsy Lore Society.
R. A. J. W.
Plymouth,
_October_, 1908.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1. THE WIND ON THE HEATH 1
2. A WANDERING YOUTH 21
3. PUBLISHER’S HACK AND HEDGESMITH 46
4. BORROW AND BOWRING 67
5. IN FOREIGN PARTS 85
6. THE SUMMER HOUSE AT OULTON 106
7. “LAVENGRO” AND HIS CRITICS 128
8. “SUCCESS TO OLD CORNWALL!” 146
9. A GALLANT GIRL AND HER FAMILY 168
10. THE BOOK THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN 189
11. THE LAND OF ELIS WYN 208
12. LONDON AGAIN 224
13. DEATH OF MRS. BORROW 238
14. THE PASSING OF THE ROMANY RYE 251
15. BORROW’S GYPSYISM 264
16. BORROW’S BOOKS 293
17. CHARACTERISTICS 337
INDEX 349
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
GEORGE BORROW _Frontispiece_
_After the Portrait by Henry Phillips_, _by
permission of Mr. John Murray_, _the owner of the
Painting_.
PAGE OF BORROW’S DRAFT OF “THE ZINCALI” _page_ 276
_By permission of Mr. Watts-Dunton_.
PORTION OF PAGE OF BORROW’S COPY OF THE “ROMANTIC _page_ 331
BALLADS” WITH HIS MS. REVISION
_By permission of Mr. Francis Edwards_
CHAPTER I
THE WIND ON THE HEATH
“WHAT is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?” . . . “There’s night
and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother,
all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very
sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”
THE speakers were two young men, met casually on breezy Household Heath
outside the city of Norwich; the time towards sunset on a fine evening;
the year at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The tall young
Englishman who questioned and the lithe swart gypsy who answered were
friends of some years’ standing, but of infrequent intercourse. The one,
with an absorbing curiosity in all things rare and strange, especially in
rare and strange dialects and languages, the other, with a gypsy’s agile,
half-developed intellect and pagan philosophy, had a common bond in their
love of The Wild and their passion for pugilism and horse-dealing.
The quality of this friendship was peculiar, but not more remarkable than
the manner of its origin. Norman Cross, on the North Road, is a lonely
place, remote from the trafficking of the world, peopled mainly now by
ghosts. In the year 1810 it was the home of several thousands of
sorrowful men. There was enacted the sequel of many an incident in the
world-tragedy of the Great Conflict, for on that solitary cross-road the
Government had built sixteen prisons to hold six thousand Frenchmen,
human spoil of war, and fenced them round with a palisade. Outside were
barracks for the militia who guarded the prisoners and captives, and
wooden houses for the officers who commanded the militia. It was a
fantastic environment for an episode which determined the career and
directed the effort of such genius as was latent in a boy of seven.
In one of the wooden huts on the roadside dwelt Captain Thomas Borrow, a
Cornishman, adjutant of the West Norfolk Militia. With him were his
wife, formerly Ann Perfrement, the descendant of Huguenot refugees, and
their two sons, John, aged ten, and George, aged seven. The younger boy,
even at that age, was fond of self-communion, of solitary wandering; shy
of normal relations with his fellows and prone to scrape acquaintance
with the oddest people he could find. He absorbed impressions readily;
he never forgot what he saw or heard. He observed how the unhappy
prisoners earned some scanty comforts by straw-plaiting; his dark face
was often lit up by the light of the bonfires on which callous authority
threw the dainty work of French fingers, prohibited and condemned because
it interfered with the prosperity of the Bedfordshire straw industry. He
was one of the astonished listeners to the adventure of the French
officer who hid himself in a refuse bin and was shot out of prison and
collected by the scavengers. He picked up the friendship of a
snake-collector, who told him the tale of the King of the Vipers, and
made him a present of a toothless snake, which thereafter he carried
about in his bosom as a pet.
This companion of his lonely excursions was with him on the day when he
strolled into a green lane where the gypsies had encamped. With it he
turned the tables on the pair of vagabonds who threatened to assault him
and drown him in the toad pond for prying into their tents; and, for his
supposititious occult power over a poisonous reptile, he was endowed by
them with the title of “sapengro,” or snake-master. Who had been, one
moment before, a “young highwayman” and a “Bengui’s bantling” {3} became
a “precious little gentleman” and a “gorgeous angel” when the snake
“stared upon his enemy with its glittering eyes”; and presently was
introduced with ceremony to their son, a lad of thirteen, ruddy and
roguish of face, with whom he swore eternal brotherhood.
The gypsies camped in the green lane at Norman Cross were of the mighty
tribe of Smith, and the roguish lad was Ambrose. It was Ambrose Smith
who figured thereafter in the writings of the little sapengro as Jasper
Petulengro. It was he who uttered the pæan of the sun, moon and stars,
and the wind on the heath, when George Borrow met him eight or nine years
afterwards near the encampment outside the city of Norwich.
George was then a youth pretending to learn law in the respectable office
of Simpson and Rackham, in Tuck’s Court, but was far more ardently
engaged in studying the by-products of human society and threading the
byways of literature. He had been wandering on the heath until he “came
to a place where, beside a thick furze, sat a man, his eyes fixed
intently on the red ball of the setting sun.” The conversation, which
may be found in the twenty-fifth chapter of “Lavengro,” is one of the
most remarkable and most poetical dialogues in the English tongue. It
strikes with perfect accuracy the keynote of George Borrow’s life. The
whole chapter is a microcosm of Borrow, his philosophy, his morals, and
his tastes. Its exordium is a passionate statement of his efforts in
search of the heart of things, his pursuit of the elusive answer to the
eternal Question. Its middle includes some reflections on philological
research, mingled in Borrow’s incomparable manner with the pathos of
failure and the humour of success. It has its fling at the
metaphysicians. It reports in vivid words the earnest sermon of a field
preacher; it describes with great wealth of comparison and eloquence the
singing of a hymn on that Norfolk moor by a crowd of commonplace people
elevated to a pitch of intense feeling by religious enthusiasm: a hymn
which echoed in the ears of the listener many times in after years when
in the great cathedrals of the world he was disappointed with religion
decked out in all the panoply of pomp and circumstance; its peroration is
Mr. Petulengro’s immortal pronouncement on the problem of mortality—and
its epilogue is the gypsy’s invitation to his brother to “put on the
gloves, and I will try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be
alive.”
This is the very essence of Borrow—languages, religion, hedge-philosophy,
and pugilism. The only element missing from the mixture is one of his
characteristic outbursts in praise of the brown ale of old England.
“There’s likewise a wind on the heath” lets us some way into the heart of
Borrow’s secret.
The little sapengro of Norman Cross, the inquisitive youth who discussed
Death with Jasper Petulengro, and was boxed out of the mood of morbid
introspection, in which he declared, “I would wish to die,” into a
healthy appreciation of the sweetness of Life, played many parts in his
long career. He became scoffing sceptic, Bible missionary and
Papist-hater, traveller, and recluse, philologist and poet. But his
principal service to his day and generation and to their posterity had
nothing to do with philosophy or religion, with belabouring “Romanisers”
or with evangelical propagandism, with topography or with languages, or
with poetry in the academic sense. It had everything to do with his
wanderings in green lanes, his “love of Nature unconfined,” his
acquaintance with the gypsies, his passion for The Wild, and his devotion
to the ruder athletics. Many an artist imagines that he would make a
reputation as a man of business; many a wizard of accounts has secret
dreams of literary fame. Borrow had an impotent desire for scholarship
and the celebrity of learning; but he laboured better than he knew. His
invaluable bequest is to be disinterred from the numerous pages of five
books, dug out from a mass of irrelevance and banality; and its
inspiration will be found in the words of Mr. Petulengro: “There’s
likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would
wish to die?” {6}
The man who, preaching from this text, imposed worship on the
English-speaking world, was intensely alive, intensely egoistic. Often
“engrossed with the sufferings of himself and of his soul,” as one has
written of his hero Byron, he yet had a keen outlook upon that part of
society in which he could move freely, and, as he saw intensely, was able
to produce intense impressions of his visions upon his readers. He was a
strange, romantic, wayward, irresponsible man—irresponsible, that is, to
any but his own code of honour, manliness and virtue.
He was a very Don Quixote of letters. He went about the world tilting at
every windmill he encountered; not infrequently he would construct
windmills on which to break his lance. If he was often unhorsed and
maimed, that did not matter; it merely made his next onslaught more
severe. In one of his contests with persons who had offended him he
speaks of them as malignant pseudo-critics, by whom he would not allow
himself to be poisoned. “No, no! he will rather hold them up by their
tails, and show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from
their broken jaws.” Possibly only a man who had been worsted in his
battle could have been guilty of this. But—_furor arma ministrat_; this
was Borrow on the war-path against his critics. The true Borrovian likes
to think of Borrow at another period and in different circumstances. It
was a crabbed literary person who mangled and was mangled in this
fashion. The lover of his genius pictures him otherwise—the young and
handsome and vigorous Lavengro, stalking over the high roads and the
byways of England, disputing with scholar or with gypsy, camping in
lonely dingles, conjugating Armenian verbs with Isopel Berners. He has
six feet three inches of height. His hair is white, but he has the
complexion of healthy youth, and eyes dark and deep as mountain tarns.
He revels in the friendship of gypsies and all the vagrants of earth, and
cares for few other friends. He would rather sing ballads in the tent of
a Romany chal than be entertained in the palace of a prince; he prefers
the society of a prize-fighter to the converse of any duke. Recall his
picture of himself:
“A lad who twenty tongues can talk,
And sixty miles a day can walk;
Drink at a draught a pint of rum,
And then be neither sick nor dumb;
Can tune a song and make a verse,
And deeds of northern kings rehearse;
Who never will forsake a friend
While he his bony fist can bend;
And, though averse to brawl and strife,
Will fight a Dutchman with a knife;
Oh, that is just the lad for me,
And such is honest six-foot-three.”
Or, again, in his riper age, as he is described by Mr. Egmont Hake (Dr.
Gordon Hake’s fourth son)—a huge figure of a fine old man, eccentric of
humour, rich beyond measure in the experience from which he drew
anecdote, full of quaint whimsy and natural conceit. He was, says Mr.
Hake (_Athenæum_, August 13th, 1881), “a choice companion on a walk,
whether across country or in the slums of Houndsditch. His enthusiasm
for nature was peculiar; he could draw more poetry from a widespreading
marsh with its straggling rushes than from the most beautiful scenery,
and would stand and look at it with rapture.” He rejoiced in a
hedge-alehouse, or a coaching inn; he was moved to passionate delight by
local reminiscences of highway robbers, vagrom scoundrels, pugilists, and
vagabonds of all degrees; good beer was a poem to him. Under all these
impressions he expanded nobly; contact with conventional respectability
shrivelled him up; his _bête noire_ was “gentility.” His strength and
vigour remained unimpaired almost to the end of his life; at seventy he
would break the ice on a pond and plunge in to bathe.
No man less fit than this for literary controversy was ever born into the
world. It was an evil fate that launched him upon those sordid
disputations disfiguring the Appendices to “The Romany Rye,” from which
the “blood and foam” passage I have quoted is drawn.
Few men bringing to the literary mart so slight a cargo as Borrow brought
have obtained so great a price for it. Some of his work, judged by any
conventional standard, is remarkably poor. The best of it, judged by the
only proper standard (which is entirely unconventional) is so good that
immortality might be predicted for it by a person inclined to take the
risk of being confuted in some remotely future incarnation. A great
number of the enterprises in which Borrow dissipated many years of his
life may be dismissed as of no literary importance and of no possible
value to any other son of man. His philology, _quâ_ philology, is
grossly unscientific; its uses are, in fact, not scientific but artistic.
They reside in the quaint hues it helped him to mix on his palette, the
whimsical, half-serious, half-humorous disquisitions into which an
unusual word would lead him, the ease with which it enabled him to
glorify his picture with the tints of foreign skies and the forms of
strange men. If we are to assess his linguistic achievements by their
practical and immediate results, the years Borrow spent upon them were
squandered. The seeds of his philological learning,
“Like Hebrew roots, were found
To flourish most in barren ground.”
They produced a meagre crop of translations, of no consequence either as
exercises or as poetry. But that would be a perverse view to take of
Borrow’s studies. Their virtue was not in their verbal fruits, but in
the quality they added to his later work. For example, those “deeds of
northern kings rehearsed” were rehearsed a great deal better by other
people, and the works of Elis Wyn had been more efficiently dealt with by
a Welshman. But would the shining history of Isopel Berners have been as
glorious if Lavengro had not been the sort of man to compare her with
Ingeborg, the northern queen who engaged and defeated in single combat
each of her long string of redoubtable brothers? Or would not the
fascinating converse of Lavengro with the Methodist preacher, Peter
Williams, have lost half its charm if the young man had not been able to
talk familiarly with him of Master Elis Wyn and the Bardd Cwsg? It is
the reflected colour of all this word-learning that gives it a high place
in Borrow’s development.
He began to study languages almost before he was out of frocks. He did
not find his _métier_ till he was thirty-eight: “The Zincali; or, The
Gypsies of Spain” was published in 1841. This was late for a man who had
been so deeply devoted to the pen. His processes were slow, too. His
other books of any significance numbered only four, and they occupied
twenty-one years in gestation. “The Bible in Spain” was dated 1842,
“Lavengro” appeared in 1850, “The Romany Rye” in 1857, and “Wild Wales”
in 1862. Much was concentrated in these few works, laboriously
elaborated as they were, and produced with horrible pangs of travail.
They crystallised—if such a term may be used of Borrow—the experiences of
a long life of wandering through the world, and they recorded the
opinions collected or developed by a self-centred man of violent
prejudices. They provide an almost unparalleled conglomeration of good
and bad, of false and sound. They commit inexcusable crimes against
every canon of taste—and they have in them the true stuff of poetry and
romance. The glamour of these last is over them all. The poetry of
Borrow, one of the most natural poets who have written in English, takes
its spring in the keen observation and appreciation of the elemental joys
found in Nature’s least-trodden ways, and the elemental humours of her
least sophisticated children. It recalls Sidney’s epigram of the
excellent poets that never versified and the versifiers that need never
answer to the name of poets. For Borrow’s verse, on the whole, is
villainous, and much of his prose is truest poetry. He restored to us,
at any rate for a time, the picaresque element in romantic literature,
and revived our indulgent fondness for the good-humoured villains of low
life.
With the jovial virtues of Le Sage, however, Borrow combined in a
remarkable way some of the quaintest characteristics of Sterne. The mark
of “Shandyism” is strong upon portions of his work—but let it be said at
once that the philo-pugilist Borrow is absolutely free from any taint of
the pornographic _double entendre_ of the Rev. Laurence Sterne, M.A.
Captain Tom Borrow often rivals My Uncle Toby, and the battle with Ben
Bryan in Hyde Park may be compared as a staple reminiscence with the
Siege of Namur; but there is no Widow Wadman in “Lavengro.” Ab Gwilym
becomes in some points as delightful as Slawkenbergius, and there are
episodes in “The Bible in Spain” and “Lavengro” which may compare with
the stories of the Dead Ass and of Lefevre, the Monk and Maria; but it
can be said of Borrow’s books with more truth than a sententious critic
once said it of Sterne’s, that they may be submitted to the taste,
feeling, good sense, and candour of the public “without the least
apprehension that the perusal of any part of them will be followed by
consequences unfavourable to the interests of society.” It may be a
negative virtue that a book fails “to bring the blush of shame to the
cheek of innocence”; but, for what it is worth, any book of Borrow’s has
that merit.
Interesting as these comparisons may be to his admirers, Borrow must not
be judged by any purely literary standards. One discerning critic, Mr.
Thomas Seccombe, has observed that he “wrote with infinite difficulty.”
That is evident in almost every page. He had no fatal facility in
composition. He developed no graces of style. The man who loves
Stevenson is probably a man who will also love Borrow, but for reasons
quite apart from style. Borrow’s awkward forms and ugly lapses were
calculated to make Stevenson’s delicately tuned literary organism shudder
in its marrow. Their likeness lies in their love of Out-of-Doors, their
capacity for discovering and enjoying the unusual adventure in the
commonplace environment.
I doubt whether Borrow definitely and consciously copied his style from
anybody, or modelled it on any man’s writings; but if we are to go
anywhere for his master we must go to Defoe, whose “wondrous volume” was
his “only study and principal source of amusement” in his very small
boyhood at East Dereham. How he apostrophises the wizard! “Hail to
thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee?
England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could spare
them easier far than Defoe, ‘unabashed Defoe,’ as the hunchbacked rhymer
styled him.” England may not owe to Defoe all that Borrow declares she
does of her “astonishing discoveries both by sea and land,” and her
“naval glory,” but she certainly owes to him some of the gift that Borrow
bestowed upon her. George had many other points of resemblance to the
“illiterate fellow” of Swift’s satire besides this—that they were both at
divers times accused of being illiterate fellows, and both answered back
with compound interest of invective. Both were not only writing men, but
also men of action. Both prided themselves something unduly upon their
philological attainments. Both did late in life the literary work that
won them lasting fame. Above all, they shared what Defoe wittily
described as his “natural infirmity of homely, plain writing.” That is,
they had command of a tense, nervous, vigorous English without ornate
excrescences or fanciful refinements of any kind—the style which is
greatest because it is no style at all, the style which bites into the
mind and irritates the imagination. Both were able to give
verisimilitude to the most fantastical narratives; both were masters of
the form of autobiographical fiction. The parallel may finish with the
remark that neither of them was a bookish man.
Borrow was not even a great reader. He spent many hours among books—but
such books! They were mainly collections of ballads picked from a
variety of languages fit “to add a storey to the Tower of Babel,” the
detritus of the libraries he visited. He was fond of an uncommon book,
whatever its intrinsic merit, but he was fonder of an uncommon human
being. Men were his books. A ghostly procession of the authors with
whom Borrow had hobnobbed—leaving out of account his investigations in
shady paths on behalf of the Newgate Calendar—would afford a motley
spectacle of tatterdemalions, the rag, tag, and bobtail of literature.
He had inflated ambitions of scholarship, but, in fact, he had received
only an ill-regulated education, and his taste refused all conventional
rules as inventions of the Devil.
The Bible, Shakespeare in a lesser degree, and Defoe most of all—these
were his classics. No bad assortment, either; but the restriction of
one’s reading to these three would hardly testify to a catholic taste.
His favourite poet was Byron. The two are as unlike in most particulars
of their dispositions and careers as two heirs of mortality can be; but
it is not difficult to realise that Byron’s life and poetry would touch
deep springs in the nature of Borrow. Like Byron, he worked all his
affections, all his passions, all his prejudices into the very texture of
his books, and in them ran through all the gamut of his most violent
emotions. Like Byron, he had a fond weakness for melancholy—what Goethe
called “the hypochondriac humour.” As in the case of Byron, his
melancholy alternated with spasms of furious elemental rage, expressed in
the unbridled vituperation of his fellow men. So that, though no two
characters more widely different figure in literary history, there were
points of contact and bases of agreement between them. It was, indeed, a
soul attuned to Borrow who wrote:
“’Tis sweet to win, no matter how, one’s laurels,
By blood or ink; ’tis sweet to put an end
To strife: ’tis sometimes sweet to have our quarrels
Particularly with a tiresome friend:
Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels;
Dear is the helpless creature we defend
Against the world: and dear the schoolboy spot
We ne’er forget, though there we are forgot.”
The lines may be said to depict Borrow in some of his best-known
aspects—winning laurels by blood and ink, quarrelling with tiresome
friends, rejoicing in the good things of life, defending his dependents,
and treasuring the memories of his childhood.
He threw himself into his works in such a fashion that it is impossible
to elucidate them without reference to his personal career, or to
understand his proceedings without reference to his books. They are all
more or less in the autobiographical form, and they are all more or less
real autobiographies: how much more and how much less it is often
difficult to say. The secret of the books, the reason for the
fascination they exert upon mankind, must be found in the man; his own
secret must be sought in two directions. One has already been
indicated—his love of The Wild. From his gypsies and wanderers, his
hedge-tinkers and vagroms, all the denizens of the heath and the green
lanes—the society which began to vanish with the enclosure of the English
fields, and is fast disappearing from the land,—material unpromising and
uncongenial enough to the general, Borrow contrived to extract fine
poetry and mildly thrilling romance.
And how was it that a man whose pet weakness was his idolatry of the
Anglo-Saxons, who joyed in thinking himself representative of what was
best and manliest in a race whose aversion from the Romany is so
pronounced, was the man of all others in England who seemed to get into
closest touch with the gypsies, to understand them and to be understood
of them? Perhaps a little because of his philological craze and the
avidity with which he set himself to pick up their language. But the
real explanation is that, in fact, Borrow was no Anglo-Saxon at all. His
vainglorious boasts of Anglo-Saxon breeding were based on nothing more
substantial than the fact that his father and mother happened to be
living in Norfolk at the time when he came into the world. He was a Celt
of Celts. His genius was truly Celtic. His father was a Cornishman
whose family had resided in the West-country peninsula—Lord Courtney’s
“emerald, set in a sapphire sea”—for many generations, and was a Cornish
and therefore a Celtic family to the very tips of its numerous fingers.
His mother was of French descent. Here was a pretty parentage for a
bluff and hearty champion of optimistic and progressive Anglo-Saxondom!
Borrow was fond of Norfolk: the rest was affectation. He had all the
Celtic characteristics—the quick and lively imagination, the poetic
temperament, the intensely emotional nature, the tendency to melancholy.
The only writer who, within my knowledge, has laid effective stress on
this is Mr. Watts-Dunton. Borrow loved the wide level landscapes, the
marshes and broads of East Anglia, just as FitzGerald did, a descendant
of Irishmen who was born in the East. Various reasons conspired to
produce this affection. Norfolk was the scene of his boyish exploits.
In Norfolk lived the mother he worshipped. There he met the wife who was
his truest friend and finest comrade. But the spirit of East Anglia, the
Teutonic tradition, did not preside over Borrow’s destiny and direct his
moral and intellectual fortunes. It was the spirit of Old Cornwall, its
remote hills peeping out of vales of mystery towards an empyrean where
every cloud breathed legend, the land of weird imaginings, of saintly
lore, and chivalric romance. The bluff and blunt and downright
John-Bullery that Borrow affected was but a pose; the heat of the fires
of the Underworld creeps up into his work, and the pale light of the
Overworld shines down upon it. He is constantly on the brink of moral
tragedy and ever listening to the rumble of the spiritual upheaval. What
stirs him most to eloquence and deep feeling is Celtic Ireland or Celtic
Wales, the wild music of the speech of Murtagh the Papist gossoon, the
“noble mountains, green fields, and majestic woods” of the Cymric land.
Many peculiarities of Borrow, on a superficial examination, seem to offer
flat contradiction to this view. His “Poperyphobia” appears to be
difficult to reconcile with his unquestionable sympathy with the Celtic
spirit of Ireland. He affects the Orange hue; whenever he sees a
Catholic head he hits it. We need not seek far for the explanation. His
mother was of a Huguenot family which had been driven out of France by
the persecutions of the Catholic Church: Borrow idolised his mother.
Further, it never mattered to him whether an injury was two days or two
centuries old; he hated the offender just the same. His father had
quarrelled, long before George was born, with a gentleman named Hambly.
To the end of his life Borrow swore that a person named Hambly could
never be good. His adulation of violent sports and his pathetic belief
in the immaculate supremacy of the English in all athletics are other
facts which on the surface may seem to upset the theory of an obsessing
Celtic mysticism. But even here his ancestry counts for much. The
Cornish were ever devoted to athletic contests; their cousins the Welsh
are in one of the realms of sport unparalleled and unapproachable.
Borrow’s good-ale-of-old-England fetish surprised the decent and sober
people of Wales, and his “wishy-washy tea” is the national beverage of
Cornwall. But his devotion to malt liquor was a part of his protest
against “gentility-nonsense” and “temperance-canting,” about which he
raved with even more than usual violence and incoherence. In the
mid-Victorian age in which he wrote, the glorification of beer-swilling
was as un-“genteel” as even Borrow could have desired.
All these idiosyncrasies, however, count for little beside the deeper
characteristics of Borrow’s life and work, over which the Celtic genius
reigned. Racial traits were strongly marked in him, and he is a standing
refutation of Mr. George Moore’s dictum that “the land makes the Celt,”
and that it is not a question of race. In this heredity we must look for
the beginnings of any proper view of Borrow.
CHAPTER II
A WANDERING YOUTH
THE Borrows of Tredinnick, in the parish of St. Cleer, were proud Cornish
yeomen. For centuries they had occupied the same house and farmed the
same land. Now they have been scattered over the world, in true Cornish
fashion, and there is not a Borrow left in the district.
Tredinnick is a little old house in a hollow, about a mile north-west of
St. Cleer Church, near Liskeard, among the hills of Eastern Cornwall. It
is a long, low, stone-fronted building of two storeys, backed by a row of
tall elms standing at the roadside, with an apple orchard behind, and the
ground at the side sloping away into a deep valley of orchards and
meadows. The place is quite unpretentious; the farm is little more than
fifty acres in extent, and the house has lost in the lapse of time the
neatness that would have shown in the abode of Borrow’s _gentillâtre_.
Still, for a farmhouse, it is commodious. It has walls two feet thick,
and in the long, raftered, slate-floored kitchen are deep window-seats,
and an open hearth and chimney-corner, the crock-hook depending in the
midst. Lavengro would have rejoiced in such a place. The dining-room
and sitting-room are on the other side of the entrance, and
communicate—respectable but undistinguished rooms.
In this home was born, in December, 1758, Thomas, father of George
Borrow. He was a posthumous child. We have a very fair picture of him
in the opening chapters of “Lavengro.” We see him in youth, the
favourite of his mother, whose special care of him was the cause of
jealousy in his six brothers. We learn that shortly after he was
eighteen his mother died, and he adopted “the profession of arms, which
he followed during the remainder of his life.” But Lavengro, candidly
stating that he knows little about the early life of his father, does not
tell us the circumstances in which he left the homestead at Tredinnick,
after bringing to a disastrous end his apprenticeship to one Edward
Hambly, a maltster. He is described as “cool and collected, slow to
anger, though perfectly fearless, patient of control, of great strength,
and, to crown all, a proper man with his hands.” This may in some
measure account for the adulation of prize-fighting which in “Lavengro,”
as Mr. Birrell has pointed out, scandalised “the religious world” that
had welcomed with such effusive joy “The Bible in Spain.” George Borrow
inherited a love of adventure and a fondness for “the noble art,” and
probably also the aversion from “gentility” apparent in the lines with
which his autobiography opens. Yet it is strange that he was really
proud of his gentle descent, proud of his Cornish father and his
little-landed ancestry, and proud of the French extraction of his mother
and the small and delicate hands he got from her.
The manner of departure of Lavengro’s father out of Cornwall had an
intimate connection with that properness of his with his hands. He was
at Menheniot Fair with a party of youths from Liskeard, three or four
miles distant, when a row arose between young Menheniot and young
Liskeard; probably some breeze of incident blew upon the embers of a
village feud. Slow as he was to anger and patient of control, Borrow
nevertheless entered with zest into the fray, for he headed the Liskeard
party and brought the struggle to a climax by knocking down the
constable. Thereafter, fearing the consequences of his adventure, he
departed from the ancestral roof-tree, and began the wandering life which
he was leading when he met the mother of Lavengro. And small wonder at
his flight, for the constable he knocked down was none other than his own
master, the head-borough, Edward Hambly. The date of the scrimmage was
July 28th, 1783. He disappeared for five months. In December he turned
up at Bodmin and enlisted in the Coldstream Guards, who had a recruiting
party there under Captain William Morshead, later the celebrated general.
The captain, knowing his antecedents, did all he could to prevent the
enlistment, but without success.
Thomas Borrow may well have recalled the constable of Menheniot in later
years when he did battle in Hyde Park with “big Ben Brain” (read Bryan),
giving that celebrity a little useful practice for the contest in which
he became “champion of England, having conquered the heroic Johnson,” and
paving the way for the friendship to which all such encounters should
lead. Bryan, wrote George in after years, “expired in the arms of my
father, who read the Bible to him in his later moments.” What marvel
that “Lavengro” is a medley of religion and beer-drinking, prize-fighting
and philosophy?
Thomas vanished for several years into the privacy of a private of the
Coldstreams. Such a man, however, was not likely to remain permanently
in the obscurity of the ranks. He climbed steadily. After eight or nine
years, spent mostly with the regiment in London, he emerged into view
again as a sergeant, and in 1792 was transferred to the West Norfolk
Militia, whose headquarters were at East Dereham. This was the origin of
all we hear later about the pretty little town of “D—.”
At Dumpling Green, near by, resided Miss Ann Perfrement, sweet and twenty
when Sergeant Borrow marched into her perspective. She was the daughter
of a farmer who had descended from a Huguenot family, immigrants to
Norfolk among many others—including the Martineaus—after the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes. Miss Perfrement was occasionally engaged to act
minor parts in plays performed at Dereham by companies sent to the
country towns from the Theatre Royal in Norwich. Her stage presence
fascinated the Sergeant, who had reached the age of thirty-eight proof
against all feminine blandishments. He pursued his courtship of the
amateur actress with ardour and success. She accepted him, and a most
happy union began with their wedding on February 11th, 1793.
The movements of a regiment, even of militia, in those stirring days were
apt to be incalculable. The West Norfolks threaded the United Kingdom
from end to end, combining the swiftness of a bishop with the unexpected
evolutions of a knight upon the chessboard. Sergeant Borrow got his
commission as captain and adjutant in 1798; in 1800, either at Chelmsford
or Colchester, was born his elder son, John, who became first a military
officer and then an artist, and was one of Haydon’s pupils. In 1803 he
was back in Norfolk, recruiting. At East Dereham, on July 5th in that
year, George Borrow opened his eyes upon a world of which he was to see
so much more than falls to the lot of most sons, even of soldiers.
This bundle of potentialities was named George in honour of the King his
father served, and Henry after a Cornish uncle. The first few years of
his life were spent, like those of the young Sternes, at the tail of the
regiment, marching and countermarching in Essex, Kent, and Sussex,
wandering from barracks to barracks as the exigencies of the army
dictated in that day of Napoleonic scares. At the age of six he returned
to “pretty D—,” and there received some of the vivid impressions he has
reproduced in indelible colours upon the earlier pages of “Lavengro”—the
dignified rector and Philo, the clerk, reading “their respective portions
of the venerable liturgy,” and rolling “many a portentous word
descriptive of the wondrous works of the Most High”; and the “Lady
Bountiful, leaning on her gold-headed cane.” There he revelled in the
boy’s first flush of delight over “Robinson Crusoe,” and imbibed the
germs of that worship of Defoe which shines in all his work.
The next peregrination of the family was to Norman Cross, where George
met the snake-catcher and received from him the present of the fangless
viper with which he contrived so effectually to subdue the wrath of old
Gypsy Smith and his evil-looking mort, who “wore no cap, and her long
hair fell on either side of her head like horse-tails half way down her
waist; her skin was dark and swarthy, like that of a toad.” We know how
he was named “Sapengro,” and how brotherhood was sworn between him and
the gypsies’ son Ambrose, who figures immortally as Jasper Petulengro.
The sojourn at Norman Cross lasted fifteen months. Then, in July, 1811,
the regiment returned to East Dereham, where George took his introduction
to the science of languages. The embryo “polyglot gentleman” laid a
sound foundation upon Lilly’s Latin Grammar. However, their wanderings
were by no means at an end. For years there was to be little rest and
small possibility of regular schooling. In 1812 the West Norfolks were
moving again—marching through the Midlands and the North by slow stages
towards Edinburgh, stopping a month or two here and there. For example,
at Huddersfield they billeted long enough for George to be sent to the
local school. The conditions of such a life were hardly favourable to
the development of scholarship upon conventional lines. How valuable
they were to the cultivation of the kind of genius that lay behind the
forehead of George Borrow it is difficult to overestimate. He
assimilated rich and varied experience through every pore. He acquired
the love of a roving life, the passionate devotion to the road, that
never left him till the end of his days. His father was a wanderer
before he was born; he was a wanderer himself throughout his boyhood. It
was fit training for the man who was afterwards to be dubbed “the
Wandering Jew of Literature.”
In April of 1813 the West Norfolks descended upon Edinburgh, Captain
Thomas on horseback leading the van, and Mrs. Borrow and her boys
bringing up the rear in a “po’-shay.” There were many gay days of
military merry-making at Edinburgh Castle before, in the autumn, John and
George were entered at the High School. Probably they spent only one
session at the academy of classical learning which had, a generation
earlier, turned out so great a genius as Sir Walter Scott.
There is not much in Borrow’s record of the time to illustrate that
session, or to show what point in his youthful struggle with the dead
languages the incipient philologist reached. Here, as ever, his
interests were in the by-paths of life and learning. David Haggart was
more to him than the ministrations of his painstaking master, Mr. Carson.
Borrow had a catholic and withal a discriminating taste in vagabonds. It
manifested itself even at this early age. Just as in later years he was
fascinated by the personality of John Thurtell, so was he charmed at
Edinburgh by that weird brigand Haggart, who enlisted in the West
Norfolks as a drummer-boy, having been unearthed at Leith Races by one of
Captain Borrow’s recruiting sergeants. The drummer-boy whom George made
his companion subsequently became burglar, highway robber, murderer, and
prison-breaker, and only suspended his nefarious activities at the end of
the hangman’s rope in the year 1821.
The regiment left Edinburgh for home in 1814, on the cessation of the
war. The mustering-out took place at Norwich, where feastings and
congratulations were the order of many days. George’s parents lodged at
the Crown and Angel Inn, while he was sent to the Grammar School. This
time there was some hope that he might be able to continue his studies
undisturbed. Napoleon prevented its realisation by escaping from Elba
and getting the Norfolk militiamen sent to Ireland, where sympathetic
disturbances were occurring. They did not embark at Harwich, however,
until after the battle of Waterloo. From Cork they went to Clonmel, and
George had his first taste of the fascinating country whose very name
always seemed to exercise a spell upon him. At Clonmel he was sent to
school, and began to learn Greek. What was of greater consequence, he
met a wild Irish boy, the Murtagh who figures so finely in “Lavengro.”
Murtagh taught him Erse in return for a pack of cards. But even more
important still, it was here that he learned to ride on horseback and
picked up the love of horse-flesh which was one of the grand passions of
his life. Oh, that cob!—on which he rode round the Devil’s Mountain—“may
the sod lie lightly over the bones of the strongest, speediest, and most
gallant of its kind.”
The wanderings of the elder Borrows finally ceased in 1816. After the
Irish campaign, they returned to Norwich to settle down, and took a house
in Willow Lane. George, now thirteen, was sent again to the Grammar
School to receive his first regular course of “education.” Fortunately,
the process was quite unable to interfere with his natural development.
It was hardly possible that a boy who had been beating about the roads
and townships of the three kingdoms ever since he could toddle, had
learnt snake-charming and the Irish language, explored the mysteries of
gypsyism and horse-dealing, and picked up such a collection of odds and
ends of lore as reposed in his retentive brain, should comfortably
abandon his vagrom modes of thought and life for the mechanical lessons
and the conventional ways of a Grammar School ruled by a martinet. His
wander-years had quite unfitted him for methodical study, and he found
even less interest in the common pursuits of the school than does the
average healthy rascal of thirteen. Consequently, he had no soft corner
in the heart of the “head,” Edward Valpy, a pedagogue of the ancient
style who had no toleration for intransigence, and never risked the
spoiling of the child by any economy of the rod.
George had some Latin and a little Greek, picked up at Huddersfield and
Edinburgh and Clonmel, but he had probably found Murtagh a more congenial
authority than the excellent Lilly, and his Erse was more than his Greek.
Now that his body was moored to the desk at Norwich, his mind wandered
wantonly from the languages he had to study to those for which, in the
Valpeian _régime_, there was no provision. With his never-failing
capacity for picking up the quaintest and most out-of-the-way people to
be found about him, he made the acquaintance of Father D’Éterville, the
“elderly personage . . . rather tall and something of a robust make,” who
wore “a snuff-coloured coat and drab pantaloons . . . an immense frill,
seldom of the purest white, but invariably of the finest French cambric,”
and told the young student that if he wished to be a poet he should
emulate Monsieur Boileau rather than the vagabond Dante! The Rev. Thomas
D’Éterville was a French _émigré_ who had come over in 1792, and had
qualifications from the University of Caen. With him George studied
French and Italian, and made a beginning of Spanish.
Among his contemporaries drilled and thrashed by Valpy were several men
who obtained varying degrees of fame in the world of thought and action.
The Grammar School boys of the time included James Martineau, Sir
Archdale Wilson, and Rajah Brooke of Sarawak. Their achievements were
considerable, but it is, in one mind at all events, an open question
whether Borrow’s did not excel them all. Certainly no man of them made
so many idolatrous friends, and probably no man so many bitter enemies.
George was no ordinary schoolboy. His devotion to learning was intense,
but peculiar to himself. In his boyish pranks and recreations he was
just as unconventional. On one occasion, the wander-fever having seized
him, he communicated it to three friends of his own age. They decided to
run away from school, with some wild idea of emulating the feats of his
favourite Robinson Crusoe. The plan, worked out by Borrow, was that they
should escape to the Norfolk coast and take any ship that would convey
them out of England. Till they could find some convenient means of
emigration, they proposed to conceal themselves in a lair upon the shore,
and to subsist by forays upon the portable and comestible property of the
people of the district. The adventure began early in the morning and
terminated within a few hours. They were discovered some dozen miles
away by a gentleman who recognised one of them, and ignominiously
restored to the affection of their parents—and the insatiable wrath of
Valpy. The “head” took Borrow, as the ringleader, and flogged him
severely. It was said that for this purpose the culprit was “horsed” on
the back of Martineau, and that the punishment was so bad that Borrow had
to keep his bed for a fortnight. George could with difficulty forget a
slight or forgive an injury, real or imaginary, and Dr. Knapp declares
that he hated Martineau ever afterwards, and up to the time of his death
would never visit any house where he knew he must meet the theologian.
It is true that he did not care to meet Martineau, but the reason
assigned for his aversion must be given up as a fable. Martineau
ridiculed the story, and asserted with every show of truth that he never
“horsed” Borrow.
Dr. Jessopp was another of his schoolfellows. He has an anecdote of
Borrow appearing at school one day, his face stained brown with walnut
juice, and of Valpy, inquiring sententiously, “Borrow, are you suffering
from jaundice, or is it only dirt?”
Such hours of leisure as were not occupied by D’Éterville and his French
and Italian, or by the explorations into Spanish and the Romany, were
given up to his worship of Nature and his devotion to sport. He fished
in the Yare at Earlham, and went fowling over the surrounding fields and
marshes with “a condemned musket bearing somewhere on its lock in rather
antique characters, ‘Tower, 1746.’” But, above all, he haunted Harford
Bridge. For at Harford Bridge did not the amazing John Thurtell reside?
This son of a respectable alderman of Norwich had been in warlike
adventures abroad, but now that the wars were over had returned to his
native parts to get such entertainment out of life as a man might to whom
every form of sport came gaily welcome, and the more violent it was the
more gaily. So distinguished a patron of the prize-ring and so ungenteel
a gentleman was certain to make a strong appeal to young Borrow, who made
his acquaintance and acquired from him the art of boxing. As we have
seen, his father, the captain, had been a bruiser when occasion demanded,
and had fought Ben Bryan. His fondness for the sport was hereditary. He
developed it during his visits to Thurtell, and it never left him. One
of the kinds of “canting nonsense” denounced in the Appendix to “The
Romany Rye” is the “unmanly cant”—a phrase in which he summed up all
objections to the practice of fisticuffs. His mentor in the noble art is
lightly sketched in “The Zincali” in connection with the description of a
prize-fight. The “terrible Thurtell, lord of the concourse,” made a sad
ending. He committed the murder which inspired the familiar ballad of
“William Weare”:
“He cut his throat from ear to ear,
His brains he battered in;
His name was Mr. William Weare,
He lived in Lyon’s Inn.”
Thurtell induced Weare, who had relieved him of £400 at a gaming-table,
to drive to Elstree in Hertfordshire, where he disposed of him in the
artistic fashion just related. One of his companions turned King’s
evidence, and he was hanged at Hertford in 1823. {34}
So, learning his grammar at school, visiting D’Éterville at Strangers’
Hall for French and Italian, trespassing on the grounds of the admirable
Mr. Gurney in search of fish, being initiated into the art and mystery of
pugilism, strolling to Thorpe, and Eaton, and Cringleford, George passed
two years. He was fourteen when he saw the fight depicted in “The
Zincali.” The next year he was one of the spectators at the great annual
Tombland Fair, when he encountered once more the gypsy Ambrose Smith, and
went with him to the encampment on Mousehold Heath, discoursing by the
way of the quality of beauty, as exemplified in the person of Tawno
Chikno and the earl’s daughter who fell in love with him, and making the
acquaintance of the weird old hag “whose name was Herne and she came of
the hairy ones.” While the gypsies remained in camp on Mousehold Heath,
the lad visited them frequently, and was introduced by Jasper—terribly
angering his mother-in-law, Mrs. Herne—into the mysteries of the Romany
language. His extraordinary facility in acquiring and retaining words
obtained for him the nickname of Lavengro, or “word-fellow.”
George left school in 1819, and was articled to the firm of Simpson &
Rackham, solicitors, of Tuck’s Court, Norwich, apparently on the advice
of his friend Roger Kerrison, son of a substantial citizen. Though it is
clear that he never entertained any enthusiasm for the profession, he
diligently pursued his studies at the irksome desk. They were not,
however, those of the law, but of languages and poetry. By devoting
himself to his parchments and his law books, and seeking to fill the
station of life to which he had been dedicated, he might have made an
indifferently bad country solicitor. Thank heaven, nothing was further
from his thoughts. He was taken specially under the wing of the head of
the firm, William Simpson, then Town Clerk, and an excellent good fellow.
George lodged in his house in the Upper Close. Tuck’s Court, where he
sat at the desk, was nearly opposite the old Norfolk Hotel.
It was not long before he added another to his strange gallery of
cronies—a Welsh groom employed by a gentleman living at the end of the
court, a queer, mis-shapen man, the butt of George’s fellow-clerks, who
hailed his every appearance with the ballad of:
“Taffy was a Welshman,
Taffy was a thief.”
To Borrow, however, he was not a freak of nature, sent by a kindly
Providence to lighten the laborious hours of Simpson & Rackham’s office,
but a man who knew the Welsh language, and might assist him in learning
it. In return for his help, George induced the other boys to cease their
persecution, and declared that this had the effect of releasing the
Welshman from the horns of a dilemma—for he was cogitating whether “to
hang himself from the balk of the hayloft or to give his master warning.”
So he won his way into the epic of “Dafydd ab Gwilym” and the songs of
the Welsh bards.
Borrow’s adventures were now of a character different from those of his
schoolboy days. He began to enter upon profound intellectual waters.
His mania for languages grew upon him. We have already seen him
acquiring Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and Erse. He now set
about Welsh, Danish, and other tongues, and in pursuit of German he fell
in with William Taylor. The meeting had an important influence upon his
development. Taylor was a scholar of fine parts, a man deeply versed in
German literature at a time when, as Professor Dowden has said, “German
characters were as undecipherable to most Englishmen as Assyrian
arrow-heads.” He was the friend of Southey, whom he entertained in
Norwich at the house, No. 21, King Street, which was the resort of all
the wit and learning that centred in the city. Taylor found young Borrow
a man after his own heart, took to him readily, and offered to teach him
German. It is hardly necessary to say that George accepted such an
invitation, nor that he learnt a good deal more than German at the feet
of Taylor, whose views on most questions were advanced and unrestricted.
The scholar was an agnostic in matters of religion, and an iconoclast in
many sorts. His great failing was drunkenness: he ultimately became a
sot.
Miss Martineau wrote that:
“In Taylor’s old age . . . his habits of intemperance kept him out of
sight of the ladies, and he got around him a set of ignorant and
conceited young men, who thought they could set the world right by
their destructive propensities. One of his chief favourites was
George Borrow, as George Borrow himself has given us to understand.
When this polyglot gentleman appeared before the public as a devout
agent of the Bible Society in foreign parts, there was one burst of
laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days.”
Professor Dowden has pleasantly reminded us of the delight Harriet
Martineau took in “pricking a literary windbag”; sometimes she pricked
more substantial things, and her rapier broke. At any rate, she is
hardly a good witness on the subject of Borrow, for no love was lost
between the families.
And Taylor, at the time when he took up George, was a man of some
consequence in the literary world, apart from “the little Academe” of
Norwich. He knew his Kotzebue, his Goethe, his Schiller, his Klopstock;
he was in himself a reference library of what was then outlandish
knowledge. He raised a bright light above the intellectual circle of the
city, in spite of the sarcasm of Harriet Martineau, who rallies his
eccentricity, his “defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had
rescued him from it, information, given as certain, that ‘God Save the
King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon”—and so forth. But
his solid claim to consideration is good; he lives as “the
Anglo-Germanist” of Borrow’s books rather than as “godless Billy Taylor.”
I have taken leave to doubt that Borrow’s melancholy was the fruit of the
theological opinions he acquired from Taylor. Effort has been made to
trace all his sufferings to this association, and to the moral
disintegration that is supposed to have set in as the result of his
intercourse with an atheist. It seems to me an unfair and regrettable
imputation. Borrow was destined to go through his Werterian period, and,
child of the Celtic spirit that he was, it was bound to be a period of
acute strain and stress. He felt all things intensely. If he had not
encountered the mocking philosophy of “Billy Taylor” through personal
contact, he would have met it elsewhere. It could no more be missed by
the youth of 1820 than by the youth of a later century.
What we know with certainty of Taylor is that he was the earliest scholar
and critic to divine what there was in George Borrow and to encourage his
literary bent. We have to be grateful to him for that. He wrote to
Southey:
“A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s ‘Wilhelm Tell,’
with a view of translating it for the Press. His name is George
Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity;
indeed, he has the gift of tongues and, though not yet eighteen,
understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.”
The catalogue of Borrow’s languages is thus largely and rapidly extended.
We need not stay to inquire how he obtained them all, nor need we assume
that his acquaintance with them was in any sense complete or scientific.
It was probably little more than a dictionary acquaintance; he had an
extraordinary facility for getting the rudiments of a language in a few
weeks with little more assistance than the dictionary could supply. His
Welsh and Danish studies are the most important to notice here; they had
a considerable influence upon the course of his life during the few years
now approaching. “Ab Gwilym” and the ballads of the Norsemen obsessed
him.
A personage visited Taylor at Norwich in the year 1821 to whom this sort
of young man could not fail to be interesting. It was John Bowring, on a
business mission to the city. Borrow was a guest at a dinner party given
by Taylor in July of that year, when Bowring was present with Lewis
Evans, a Welsh doctor who had physicked the army in Spain during the
Peninsular War. The philological mood was strong on Borrow—and Bowring
was certainly a considerable philologist. He had recently made one of
his long journeys on the Continent, combining business pains with
literary joys in his accustomed manner, and had compiled an anthology
which he described as a “Specimen of Russian Poets.” This collection it
was which inspired the present of a diamond ring, conferred on him by
Alexander I. A man of such stamp must naturally have appeared something
of a hero in the eyes of this youth. Why is it that he makes anything
but a heroic figure in Borrow’s works?
Rightly or wrongly—wrongly, as I think—in after years the “Norwich young
man” considered himself to have received much injury at the hands of
Bowring. Consequently, Bowring became the most vicious and most
worthless scoundrel that ever wore shoe-leather. This was Borrow’s way:
he was a prince of haters. The poet and linguist, the diplomatist, the
political disciple of the illustrious Jeremy Bentham, was melted down
into the Old Radical of the Appendix to “The Romany Rye,” and caricatured
in the postboy’s story at the end of “Lavengro.” No accurate view of
Bowring can be acquired from these acerbitous descriptions; line must be
altered and colour modified with great liberality. Bowring may have made
pretensions that could not be sustained, but his proper pretensions were
certainly far greater than Borrow, in the berserking spirit that
possessed him twenty years afterwards, was ready to admit. The polite
tag with which he headed the eleventh chapter of the Appendix was:
“This very dirty man with his very dirty face
Would do any dirty act which would get him a place.”
Borrow’s lively account of the dinner party, written with Archilochian
bitterness, cannot be read without many reservations. He makes out
Bowring a literary pirate and a morally reprehensible cheat, a fraudulent
ignoramus, trading for cheap glory on other people’s lack of knowledge,
claiming an acquaintance with languages and poetry which he does not
possess—evading conversation that will test his assertions, and dodging
all the keen questions of the young Solon who tells the tale. Borrow
poses him with his Red Rhys of Eryry, with his Ghengis Khan, and with his
Koran. Finding that Borrow knows nothing of the Slavonic languages,
Bowring immediately becomes garrulous on the subject of Slavonic lore and
literatures; when in later years they meet again and Borrow has the
Slavonic languages at the tip of his tongue, Bowring hurriedly changes
the subject! That deductions have to be made from such an account of the
matter is obvious; they may well be generous.
It is clear that, at the time, the young man entertained none of these
opinions about Bowring, for he sought his help in a troublesome period of
his own life, and was ready to engage in a literary collaboration with
him. What actually happened was that, as a result of this meeting at the
hospitable board of William Taylor, Borrow was induced to pursue even
with greater ardour than before his translations from the Celtic and the
Norse languages. It may have been largely a waste of time. Possibly
George would have done better either by sticking to his law books or by
cultivating his bent for original composition; but that was no fault of
Bowring, from whom he received inspiration and encouragement in a course
of study that was exceedingly congenial to him.
He went on delving in the musty old folios of the Corporation Library.
Their yellow pages were more precious to him than aught in the world; the
songs he puzzled out of the “Danica Literatura” were sweeter than the
“Celestial syrens’ harmony
That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres.”
True delight to him was the acquisition of Anglo-Saxon, the improvement
of his Welsh and Scandinavian; the sum and crown of bliss was to pore
over Llhuyd’s “Archæologia Britannica” and to translate Olaus Wormius—of
whom he became so desperately fond that in a fit of youthful freakishness
he adopted the signature “George Olaus Borrow.” His pencilled notes are
still to be seen on the margins of the ancient tomes so generously handed
over to his tender mercies by the city authorities.
Meanwhile, piles of notebooks and manuscripts were growing in the house
in the Upper Close; the rhymed translation of “Ab Gwilym” and English
versions of the old Norse ballads were proceeding laboriously but
steadily. To the industry of the bookworm was added the passion of the
author. “Ab Gwilym,” Olaus Wormius, and William Taylor in the aggregate
were far too strong an influence for worthy Mr. Simpson of Tuck’s Court
to counteract. Wigs and parchment could not stand against philology and
poetry. Whatever notions Borrow ever entertained about pursuing the law
as a profession gradually paled before the _furor scribendi_. Thomas
Campbell was editing Colburn’s _New Monthly_, and Taylor wrote to him on
behalf of Borrow. The result was the appearance in the magazine of a
rhymed English version of Schiller’s ballad, “Der Taucher,” which was
signed “G. O. B.”—the “O” standing for the Olaus of his adoption. This
represented all that Campbell did for him. Borrow was more successful
with Sir Richard Phillips, the editor and proprietor of _The Monthly
Magazine_, to whom his name was also introduced by Taylor. In the late
months of 1823 several poetical translations appeared in the _Monthly_.
It must be confessed that they hardly reached even to the merit of
mediocrity. During the same period Borrow was hard at work translating
Klinger’s “Faustus” and other matters. It was not a sanitary life for a
youth of twenty. The inevitable consequences were ill-health, morbid
melancholy, and a particularly turbid period of Werterism, during which
threats of suicide were frequent. All this has been laid at the door of
William Taylor. It would be far more appropriate to charge it upon
Klinger, Olaus Wormius, and Ab Gwilym. Borrow contrived very effectually
“to suck melancholy out of a song.”
This, of course, was very unsatisfactory preparation for the career of a
respectable solicitor in a cathedral city. His father protested in vain.
Before the noble old captain died, leaving the brothers dependent on
their own resources (since he had been able to make provision only just
sufficient for his widow), George had decided that his association with
the law should be determined at the same time as his apprenticeship.
Roger Kerrison had already departed to London, and Borrow wrote to him
there:
“If ever my health mends, and possibly it may by the time my
clerkship expires, I intend to live in London, write plays, poetry,
etc., abuse religion, and get myself prosecuted; for I would not for
an ocean of gold remain any longer than I am forced in this dull and
gloomy town.” {45}
Borrow’s father died on February 28th, 1824. A month later, within a day
or two of the expiry of his articles, George was on the coach bound for
London, accompanied by a little green box full of manuscripts, and in his
pocket a letter of introduction from William Taylor to Sir Richard
Phillips, the publisher. He had burnt his legal boats and destroyed his
youthful bridges; he was fairly started upon the literary life.
CHAPTER III
PUBLISHER’S HACK AND HEDGESMITH
BORROW’S “literary” life in London—where he lodged at 16, Millman Street,
Bedford Row, with his friend Kerrison—was a period of the deadliest and
most miserable drudgery. No author is a man of genius to his publisher,
as Heine tells us. Borrow was certainly not a man of genius to Sir
Richard Phillips, and their association for about ten months was a time
of strain and irritation to both. Consequently, in Borrow’s opinion,
Barabbas was Sir Richard Phillips. He lives only as “the publisher” in
“Lavengro,” in which he is pictured as a subject fit merely for the odium
and execration of the human race. Discount from this estimate of Sir
Richard is highly necessary. He appears to have been a moderately
inoffensive person, whose chief weakness was metaphysics, and a
worse-assorted pair than he and Borrow it would be hard to imagine.
What was the literary ammunition with which Borrow expected to bring the
publisher of _The Monthly Magazine_ to his feet? It consisted wholly of
translations and versifications. Their intrinsic merit was very slight,
and there was no market for them. Some might be useful to fill up an odd
corner, but they were certainly no staple commodity for a person
intending to get a living by literature. Under the combined disadvantage
of unmarketable wares and an uncongenial temperament, Borrow might well
have considered himself lucky to be taken on by Phillips as a factotum to
do the scavenging of his business. But while they were together the
youth tasted the bitterest cup and fed on the hardest crust that Grub
Street had to offer to the worshippers of the Muses. It had been more
humane if Phillips had repeated to Borrow the advice which Mr. Wilcox,
the bookseller, offered to Dr. Johnson when he proposed to live as an
author: “You had better buy a porter’s knot.” Hard physical exertion
would have served him better than the labour he endured, this child of
The Wild, cooped up in London compiling criminal records or translating
philosophical treatises into the German language.
Phillips had just retired from the business of pure publishing, which was
a gloomy fact in the prospect of Borrow’s cargo of ballads. He retained
_The Monthly Magazine_, it was true, and had started a pretentious
periodical under the resounding title of _The Universal Review or
Chronicle of the Literature of all Nations_, apparently in the hope—which
proved vain—that it would provide a career for his son. This was the
_Oxford Review_ which figures in the pages of “Lavengro.” The actual
editor was the redoubtable William Gifford, and the work of which
superfluous copies lay about on the floor in such prodigal profusion was
his translation of Juvenal. The incongruity of such an atmosphere for
the kind of genius that possessed young Borrow! With a pathetic belief
in the potency of Danish ballads to move the stoniest heart and draw
guineas from the tightest purse, he introduced the subject. Phillips
would have none of it, and when his visitor began to declaim of
“Buckshank bold and Elphinstone,
And more than I can mention here,”
he stopped him, saying that “it was very pretty indeed, and beat Scott
hollow, and Percy too”—but nobody then cared for Percy, nor for Scott
either, save as a novelist. If Borrow could produce something which
should rival the merits of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” by Legh Richmond,
there might be a chance of doing business. The young aspirant for
literary fame searched London for a copy of the book which he was
recommended to imitate, and, when he found it, discovered that he could
by no possibility do anything like it, for it was a religious book,
“written from the heart,” and Borrow had to confess to the publisher that
he did not know much about religion in an intimate way. The only thing
to do was to accept that which the publisher was prepared to offer him,
the task of reviewing books for the new periodical, and of collating
records of “Celebrated Trials.”
Another enterprise was undertaken by Borrow, which in itself was
sufficient to prove his undoing even if the life had been congenial to
him. Phillips was the author of a work of philosophy entitled “The
Proximate Causes of the Material Phenomena of the Universe.” In an ill
moment the new recruit engaged to translate this portentous tome into
German for publication. Shades of Olaus Wormius and Ab Gwilym! Borrow’s
German was the first stumbling-block. It was good enough to enable him
to read German works and to turn German into English, but to work with it
as a colloquial tongue was quite a different matter. In this respect he
had contracted to do the impossible. But even if his German had been
perfect he would have been a fish out of water, for he knew nothing of
metaphysics. This is not the place to discuss the value of Sir Richard
Phillips’s book, which has doubtless taken up some dusty nook on a
library shelf for its permanent and undisturbed place of residence. But
it was enough for Borrow to be told that nobody could understand his
German version: in his opinion the cause of that did not reside so much
in his imperfect acquaintance with the language as in the folly of the
author. Borrow did not understand him and his terminology; consequently,
the theories and the language of Sir Richard Phillips were equally
absurd. The contumely poured upon the publisher in “Lavengro” was
probably not fully deserved. A German edition of the Philosophy,
translated by Theobald and Lebret, appeared at Stuttgart in 1826, and,
for what it was worth, the Germans succeeded in understanding this. But,
for the rest, if Borrow was treated no worse than other publishers’ hacks
were treated, his lot was no more pleasant. Phillips was exigent about
the work for which he paid so meanly, and none too kindly in his manner.
Even about the “Celebrated Trials,” which was the enterprise George liked
best of them all, Borrow was worried in an unconscionable fashion.
Of course, there was another life than this: his own private life, his
intercourse with such friends as he had already in London and with the
new acquaintances he made during his unconventional wanderings about the
city. His brother John, the artist, reached London on April 29th,
commissioned to induce Benjamin Haydon to paint the portrait of a Mr.
Robert Hawkes, who was Mayor of Norwich in 1822. John had been asked to
do the portrait himself, but distrusted his powers and preferred that the
commission should go to Haydon. George went with his brother to
interview “the painter of the Heroic,” who was not by way of painting
provincial mayors as a matter of preference, but was in the chronic state
of impecuniosity which made the fee of a hundred pounds an irresistible
bait. The mission was successful. Haydon went down to Norwich, and
executed a portrait of the worthy Mr. Hawkes “striding under a Norman
arch out of the cathedral.” The Norman arch seems to have been suggested
locally, and it appealed strongly to Haydon’s sense of the grandiose,
though many people may be inclined to agree with George that the mayors
of the day, as a rule, would have been better painted issuing from The
Chequers or The Brewers Three.
Whatever distractions he could discover or invent, Borrow’s life was
miserable, and brought on severe attacks of melancholia, which he first
described as “the Horrors” and afterwards as “the Fear.” “What a life!
What a dog’s life!” he tells us he would exclaim after “escaping” from
the presence of the publisher. His woes, real and imaginary—and a great
many of them were the effect of his morbid imaginings—drove him to
desperate thoughts. After his brother’s visit, Knapp tells us, he wrote
to Kerrison: “Dear Roger,—Come to me immediately. I believe I am dying.”
He was probably very far from dying, but Kerrison had an idea that George
was liable to suicidal impulses, did not like assuming the responsibility
for such an irresponsible person, and shifted his lodgings. The mood
passed, and Borrow went on hawking his ballads among the publishers of
London with no more success than before. He relates how he called on
“glorious John” twenty times without success. We are not to place too
much reliance upon the exactitude of this statement. Meanwhile, the
“Celebrated Trials” was going on. It was a tremendous compilation, with
little of Borrow’s own work in it. Its 3,600 pages represented nearly a
year’s adventures among the bookstalls and the files of old newspapers
and fly-sheets. One piece of characteristic literary work with which he
endowed the world was his translation of Klinger’s “Faustus,” which
shortly appeared. This had been done at Norwich in the Simpson & Rackham
days. Finally, the book of “Trials” was completed, and the _Universal
Review_ died of inanition. “I did not like reviewing at all . . . I
never could understand why reviews were instituted,” says Lavengro. And
he continued to detest reviewers and reviewing to the end of his days.
In 1853, when Whitwell Elwin was deputising for Lockhart as editor of the
_Quarterly_, he met Borrow. Their interview, Elwin’s son tells us, was
characteristic of both: “Borrow was just then very sore with his slashing
critics, and, on someone mentioning that Elwin was a _quartering_
reviewer, he said, ‘Sir, I wish you a better employment!’”
At the death of the _Universal Review_, his relations with Phillips came
to an end. He had little money and no resources. Once more he resumed
the weary round, tramping in search of purchasers for his translations,
and gradually approaching a condition of penury, but maintaining his
attitude of aggression and independence. It is into this brief period
that he has worked some of the most effective scenes of “Lavengro,” the
friendship with the old apple-woman who had a stall on London Bridge, and
with the Armenian merchant to whom he suggested that his wealth should be
devoted to the liberation and aggrandisement of Armenia. Languages and
poetry still obsessed his dreams. But audacious poverty at last bit a
deeper wound than could be salved by poetry, and he resolved, only just
too late, to accept an engagement the Armenian had offered him. It was
sharp upon his disappointment at finding that the Armenian had taken him
at his word, and gone away bent upon the conquest of Persia, that,
returning from an excursion to Greenwich, Blackheath, and Shooter’s Hill,
in the course of which he came upon the “Petulengros” in camp, he saw a
notice in a bookseller’s window, “Wanted, a Novel or Tale.” “Lavengro”
relates how he shut himself up from the 13th to the 18th of May, and
wrote “The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell,” which he sold to the
bookseller for twenty pounds.
How much of all this is truth and how much is fiction it is difficult to
determine. There is probably a basis of fact for it. Borrow, with all
his imagination and all his romance, was not an inventive writer, and
though the idea of “Joseph Sell” may have been suggested by the history
of “Rasselas,” it is more probable that by some stroke of luck of this
kind he did obtain the money with which to set out on his tour of the
English roads. The circumstance that no “Life of Joseph Sell” has ever
been discovered is nothing to set against this probability, and against
the feeling with which Lavengro narrates its inception and
accomplishment. Borrow’s love of mystification entirely accounts for it.
There was a choice between saying exactly what he did, what his tale or
history was entitled, and obscuring the whole matter by a fictitious
name; and it would not have been Borrow if he had not chosen the latter
course. By whatever work, he did obtain money enough to allow him to
shake the dust of London off his shoes and begin those wanderings through
English rural districts which provided the adventures described in the
second and better half of “Lavengro.”
Borrow was big and strong and a magnificent walker; never before, as Mr.
Watts-Dunton has said, had there appeared on English roads so
majestic-looking a tramp, with bundle and stick. He went south-west to
Salisbury Plain, and there is a powerful account in “Lavengro” of sunrise
at Stonehenge. The only thing to compare with it is Thomas Hardy’s
prose-poem of the same magical place by moonlight. One cannot read
without a thrill the passage where, “taking off my hat I advanced slowly,
and cast myself with my face upon the dewy earth in the middle of the
portal of giants. The spirit of Stonehenge was strong upon me.”
There is little, of importance to Borrow’s own life, to decipher in the
story of his wayfaring which is not incorporated in the book itself.
Perhaps one of the most weird of his adventures was the encounter with
the scholar and gentleman afflicted by the “touching” mania; one of the
most sensational the attempt made by Mrs. Herne, the gypsy crone, to
poison him with a doctored cake; one of the most impressive his meeting
with the Welsh Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife,
Winifred—Peter Williams who suffered tortures untold because he imagined
that in his boyhood he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. He
met Romanist missionaries, who at that time were very active on the
highways and byways of England; dog-fighters and prize-fighters;
everywhere out-of-the-way adventures occurred to him. He bought the
stock-in-trade of Jack Slingsby, a hedgesmith and tinker, who was afraid
to remain on the roads because of the enmity of the terrible bully,
Blazing Bosvile, alias the Flaming Tinman; and in the course of his
wanderings in search of business, he pulled up in Mumper’s Dingle, where
was enacted the romance of Isopel Berners. The scene is said to have
been identified as Mumber Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire.
In all the writings of Borrow there is but one episode of love. This
romantic wanderer, so far as he informs us or we can ascertain, had been
only once in love in nearly forty years, and that for a few weeks; nor
was he then so deeply immersed that he took any particular pains to bring
the lady to his own way of thinking. But this one episode has endowed
English literature with a figure which takes a proud place in the gallery
of fair women, the figure of Isopel Berners. Like everything else in
Lavengro’s life, his sweetheart must be remarkable, his courtship must be
unconventional, the adventure must have a vague and misty ending.
Watch Isopel as she descends, with her donkey and cart, behind the
Flaming Tinman and Moll, his mort, into Mumper’s Dingle, where Lavengro
has camped.
“Dashing past the other horse and cart, which by this time had
reached the bottom of the pass, appeared an exceedingly tall woman—or
rather girl, for she could scarcely have been above eighteen. She
was dressed in a tight bodice and a blue stuff gown; hat, bonnet, or
cap she had none, and her hair, which was flaxen, hung down on her
shoulders unconfined; her complexion was fair, and her features
handsome, with a determined but open expression.”
In conversation with the Flaming Tinman, who is working himself up to the
proper pitch of a quarrel with the amateur tinker, the tall girl remarks
that she would engage to thrash that weedy-looking youth with one hand.
Forth bursts Lavengro, with his eternal Norse lore: “‘You might beat me
with no hands at all,’ said I, ‘fair damsel, only by looking at me—I
never saw such a face and figure—both regal—why, you look like Ingeborg,
Queen of Norway; she had twelve brothers, and could lick them all, though
they were heroes:
“‘On Dovrefeld, in Norway,
Were once together seen
The twelve heroic brothers
Of Ingeborg, the queen!’”
A pretty invocation, indeed, to a hawker travelling with a donkey-cart!
“None of your chaffing, young fellow,” said the tall girl, “or I will
give you what shall make you wipe your face; be civil, or you will
rue it.”
Lavengro admitted that he was “perhaps a peg too high,” and offered her
“something a bit lower.” It was a Romany couplet. The rage of the tall
girl, whilom Queen Ingeborg, may be imagined when she found herself
associated with the gypsies; there is no despite of gypsies quite so deep
as that of the English of the “lower orders,” as they might say at
Marlborough. And, after a little more of Lavengro’s solemn chaff:
“Before I could put myself on guard, she struck me a blow on the face
which had nearly brought me to the ground.”
Fit exordium to the love-story of travelling hawker and hedge-tinker, to
be promoted later by lessons in Armenian given by the Knight of the
Solder-iron to the Damsel of the Donkey-cart. And the scene that
follows—Lavengro’s fight with the Flaming Tinman, who transferred his
mortal enmity for Jack Slingsby to the temporary owner of Jack Slingsby’s
stock-in-trade—is a fit sequel. The heroic combat was the real beginning
of the courtship. “The tall girl” saw foul play on the part of the
Tinman, and immediately became “the young man’s” champion and assumed the
office of his second. It was by her advice, after he had been knocked
off his legs several times by the Tinman’s flashing fist, that, instead
of fighting with his left, he got in the blow with his “long right” that
settled the hash of Blazing Bosvile. The Tinman and his mort took
themselves off after this discomfiture, leaving Lavengro and Isopel
Berners in undisputed possession of the Dingle.
We learn little about Isopel in details of fact, except that she was born
in “Long Melford workhouse,” and put “out to service,” where she
experienced all the joys that were usually stored up in service for
workhouse girls in the early part of the nineteenth century. When her
mistress attempted to knock her down with a besom, Belle knocked down the
mistress with her fist. So she went back to the Great House, was put in
a dark cell, and fed for a fortnight on bread and water. At her next
essay to serve she was no more fortunate; this time she knocked down her
master for being rude to her, and had to fly the house. A travelling
hawkeress, going the roads with silk and linen, took a fancy to her, and
carried her on many journeys. Belle protected her from insult and
violence; in return the old woman, at her death, left the girl her stock.
She was thus in business on her own account, and casually travelling with
the Bosviles, when she fell in with Lavengro.
In his erratic way, Borrow paints a charming idyll of the few succeeding
weeks during which they lived in the Dingle: an idyll of natural beauty,
and a picture of such womanly modesty and strength of character as to
make Isopel Berners one of the heroines the heart cherishes. The
uneducated Amazon, the feminine pugilist, who can take her own part in
any quarrel, is by nature a modest girl, a woman with the finest
perceptions and the most delicate instincts; she has a vein of poetry in
her composition which gives her a certain affinity with the wandering
philologist, who has in turn a vein of chivalry in his. While she dwells
in her tent and he in his, while she goes up and down the neighbourhood
on her business, and Lavengro stays in the Dingle to make new shoes for
her donkey, Isopel is all the time dreaming what might have been. For
all his chivalry, the young man is strange and plain-spoken, rarely
paying a compliment, never making an advance, boring her with
philological disquisitions, talking of things indifferent to her,
pestering her with Armenian declensions, or sitting dull and silent while
he sips the tea she has made for him. Here is a characteristic passage:
“I took another cup; we were again silent. ‘It is rather
uncomfortable,’ said I at last, ‘for people to sit together without
having anything to say.’
“‘Were you thinking of your company?’ said Belle.
“‘What company?’ said I.
“‘The present company.’
“‘The present company? Oh, ah!—I remember that I said one only feels
uncomfortable in being silent with a companion when one happens to be
thinking of the companion. Well, I had been thinking of you the last
two or three minutes, and had just come to the conclusion that, to
prevent us both feeling occasionally uncomfortable towards each
other, having nothing to say, it would be as well to have a standing
subject on which to employ our tongues. Belle, I have determined to
give you lessons in Armenian.’”
Which he proceeds forthwith to do. What was a girl to make of a man like
that? When that Lavengro’s heart was sore thereafter for the lack of
Belle Berners, he had to thank his moroseness and his Armenian nouns for
it.
So proceeded, without passion, without even a symptom of philandering on
either side, the Romance of Mumper’s Dell—dreadfully misunderstood by the
postilion who sheltered there in the thunderstorm, and by Mrs. Chikno
when the gypsies encamped near by—but never advancing, so far as the two
chief actors were concerned. It is continued from the last volume of
“Lavengro” into the first volume of the “Romany Rye.” In the latter, for
a hundred pages we are waiting upon some development of it; but it is as
elusive as a pixy. We continually tremble upon the brink of a
declaration. Take this scene, powerful but inconclusive. Upon the
departure of Mr. and Mrs. Petulengro, after their visit of ceremony:
“Then you are going?” said I, when Belle and I were left alone.
“Yes,” said Belle; “I am going on a journey; my affairs compel me.”
“But you will return again?” said I.
“Yes,” said Belle; “I shall return once more.”
“Once more,” said I. “What do you mean by once more? The
Petulengros will soon be gone; and will you abandon me in this
place?”
“You were alone here,” said Belle, “before I came, and I suppose you
found it agreeable, or you would not have stayed in it.”
“Yes,” said I. “That was before I knew you; but having lived with
you here, I should be very loth to live here without you.”
“Indeed,” said Belle. “I did not know that I was of so much
consequence to you. Well—the day is wearing away—I must go and
harness Traveller to the cart.”
He does some little service for her, as harnessing the donkey and putting
the bundles into the cart. The narrative proceeds, and the chapter ends
thus:
“I put the bundles into the cart, and then led Traveller and the cart
up the winding path to the mouth of the dingle. Belle followed. At
the top I delivered the reins into her hands, we looked at each other
steadfastly for some time. Belle then departed, and I returned to
the dingle, where, seating myself on my stone, I remained for upwards
of an hour in thought.”
Great is ellipsis—but romance cannot live by ellipsis alone. The next
chapter begins, “On the following morning,” and is a spirited account of
a feast of roast sucking-pig in the gypsy encampment!
There is never room for a doubt that Lavengro was by this time fairly in
love with Belle. But there is also no room for doubt that Belle had
realised that he was not for her, nor was she for him. Their ways lay
apart. Belle’s way was the broad road of the Atlantic to America, where
she hoped to conduct her life free from the disadvantages that attended
the career in England of a workhouse girl with a name which, as Lavengro
had told her, belonged to the nomenclatures of the ancient aristocracy.
His way was through many strange lands, through a life of adventure and
turmoil, to an old age of mingled glory, hypochondria, and megrims. So
that Belle had resolved to nip the romance in the bud, and her last
journey from the Dingle was made with the purpose of selling her donkey
and cart and her silks and linens, and going to Liverpool to take ship
for the New World. She returned once more, as she had promised. It was
late at night; Lavengro was asleep in his tent; but he had banked up the
fire, and placed the kettle over it. The little noise of her arrival
woke him, and he dressed so as to go out and unharness her donkey. Now
that it was all impossible, and Belle had made her irrevocable decision,
Lavengro, of course, came to the point. On their last day together, he
set her conjugating the Armenian verb _siriel_, and when he had worried
her through it, told her that the English equivalent of _siriel_ was “to
love.” And, in his whimsical, moonshiny, teasing way, having driven
Isopel to tears, he suddenly proposed to her that they should be off
together to America, settle down in some forest, and conjugate the verb
_siriel_ conjugally!
And, as there was never a doubt that Lavengro had managed to get himself
in love with Belle, so there was never a doubt that Belle was strongly
tempted to acknowledge that she loved this strange fellow of six feet
three with the black eyes and the white hair and the long right arm, who
could beat Blazing Bosvile and make donkey shoes, and mend kettles and
talk all the languages that were heard in the Tower of Babel. But well
for Belle’s peace of mind that she resisted the temptation; for Lavengro,
the constitutional wanderer, would have led her a pretty life when they
had buried themselves in the depths of an American forest to conjugate
Armenian verbs!
The next morning he set off with his friend Jasper for a horse fair,
leaving Belle behind. “On arriving at the extremity of the plain, I
looked towards the dingle. Isopel Berners stood at the mouth; the beams
of the early morning sun shone full on her noble face and figure. I
waved my hand towards her. She slowly lifted up her right arm. I turned
away, and never saw Isopel Berners again.”
For while Lavengro was away Belle departed from the Dingle, and left
never a trace behind her. Now that he had lost the treasure upon which
he had set so small a price, Lavengro was very sore at heart, and would
have given much to recall her and to consummate his day-dreams. But all
that he ever heard of her again was in a letter addressed by her to “the
young man in Mumper’s Dingle.” Herein she explained why she had refused
his offer, which, if he had made it in the early part of their
acquaintance, she would have accepted. She proffered him some very good
advice about his manners, told him she thought he was a bit mad at
bottom, gave him a lock of her glorious hair, and left this maxim with
him: “Fear God, and take your own part.” Which was so much to Lavengro’s
liking that he made it the motto of the second portion of his life-story,
“The Romany Rye”; and there it is to this day under his name, and over
the imprint of Mr. Murray.
Was Isopel Berners a reality, and did Borrow meet her in Mumper’s Dingle?
Or is the whole of this history an invention? Dr. Knapp’s elaborate
researches do not help us much, because there is no documentary evidence
about the episode. He can merely tell us that Borrow did make such a
journey, did buy a tinker’s stock-in-trade, and did live in Mumper’s
Dingle. So that we must look for internal evidence.
I have no doubt that Isopel Berners was a reality, and a very substantial
one; I have no doubt that she was extraordinarily tall, strong, and
beautiful; and that her hair was wonderfully fine. I do not insist that
she was either as tall, as strong, or as beautiful as she is painted in
“Lavengro”; for Shorsha had a habit of exaggerating—it was one of the
many constitutional defects of his character; he could not help it.
The reason is very simple for this faith about Isopel Berners, the
prototype of Queen Ingeborg, who, as Mr. Birrell has said, need fear
comparison with no damsel that ever lent sweetness to the stage, relish
to rhyme, or life to novels. Borrow never created a character. He has
left many portraits; but to imagine an Isopel Berners, to invent the
incident, was as impossible for him as flying. The romance of Isopel
Berners would never have been written if George Borrow, when he was
travelling England on foot upon the money he earned by writing “Joseph
Sell” and by mending kettles, had not met Isopel’s prototype in Mumper’s
Dingle.
The adventures of the rest of this year of 1825 may be told very briefly.
Borrow left the Dingle when it appeared certain that he would see no more
of Isopel, and, with money borrowed from Jasper Petulengro—or rather
forced by his gypsy friend upon an unwilling recipient—bought a fine
horse and set off wandering again. His roadside encounters, with the
bee-keeper and brewer of mead, with the gentleman who had learnt Chinese
by the aid of the hieroglyphics on teapots, and all the rest of them,
being more or less impersonal and extraneous to his own history, may be
left for consideration in connection with “The Romany Rye.” He took a
situation for a time as assistant in a stable-yard at a coaching
inn—having abandoned the tinker’s craft and given the pony and
stock-in-trade to his gypsy friends,—ultimately sold his horse at
Horncastle Fair, and tramped back to Norwich, where his mother was
living.
CHAPTER IV
BORROW AND BOWRING
WE now have Borrow a youth of twenty-two. His life has been full of
weird adventure, but to all appearances quite unprofitable in any worldly
sense. His future is nebulous. Dreams are dreamed; visions are
vanished. He seems to be farther from fame and fortune than when he set
off in the coach for London, with the green box in the boot carrying his
Danish ballads and his “Ab Gwilym.” His castles in the clouds have come
crashing to earth in irremediable ruin.
Borrow was indignant with a scurvy world which had treated him harshly.
The plain truth was that the world had no feeling about him at all, one
way or the other. He had nothing to sell that anybody wanted to buy, and
no means of making a living. He had a long road to travel before he
found himself. In 1825 he went home to Norwich a failure, with the sense
of defeat very strong upon him. The mother who was at once his best
adviser and sincerest worshipper was not likely to chide his folly as the
father had done. She was ready to receive him with demonstrations of
love, and to share her little with him. This was part of the ignominy
which he hated—that he was obliged to impose himself upon the household
in Willow Lane. In a world out of joint, the cursed spite was that he
could do nothing to set it right.
Long time he struggled hard to lift himself out of this rut. He
continued to fail. When at last he did succeed, these years became to
him a horrible nightmare. He would not speak of them; he tried not to
think of them. He resolutely refused to permit the public a glimpse into
the sordid secrets they contained. From 1825 to 1832 he lived a life of
which he wished nobody to know anything. Out of some correspondence
between him and Richard Ford arose the phrase, “the Veiled Period.” Ford
implored him to lift the veil a little and allow his admirers to know
what he was doing. There were many reasons why he declined to do so. He
endeavoured to puzzle the public about it, and perhaps succeeded partly
in mystifying himself. He suggested a kind of vague romance of
wanderings in remote parts of Europe. Some of the suggestions were
founded on a slight basis of fact; that is all that can be said for them.
As to the facts: there is no doubt that he did buy a horse with money
lent to him by Ambrose Smith, and sell it at a profit. As in the case of
Isopel, it may not be unwise to allow some discount off the published
accounts of the transaction. Very possibly the horse was not such a fine
horse as that noble animal with whose assistance Lavengro electrified the
jockeys at Horncastle Fair; perhaps the profit on the sale was not so
great as it was made to appear in “The Romany Rye.” But there was such a
transaction. Ambrose Smith reminded him of it, long years afterwards,
when he visited the great author at Oulton.
Soon after his return to Norwich, he was busy again about his literary
schemes. He tried to sell copies of his translation of Klinger, which he
took from the publisher in lieu of payment for the work. While with
Phillips in London, he had projected a volume of poetical translations of
Danish ballads. The plan then came to naught. Now he printed the book
in Norwich by subscription, after a correspondence with Allan Cunningham
about it. Cunningham was full of admiration for the old songs drawn from
the “Kjaempe Viser.” “Swayne Vonved” was his favourite, and it remained
Borrow’s own pet throughout life. Five hundred copies of the “Romantic
Ballads” were printed, of which 200 were subscribed for. These, at ten
and sixpence a copy, paid all the expenses of the issue. There was an
arrangement under which the London publisher, John Taylor, took the rest
and placed his imprint on the title-page. Cunningham gave the young poet
a great deal of good advice about promoting the interests of the book.
He neglected it, with characteristic self-sufficiency. He had published
ballads, and if the great public did not share Mopsa’s affection for
ballads in print, the nineteenth-century Autolycus could not help it, and
would be content with what he could get out of the local subscribers in
Norwich.
In 1826 he was in London, and in correspondence with Benjamin Haydon
about sitting for a figure in one of his pictures—possibly the “Mock
Election.” In the course of the correspondence Borrow speaks of
proceeding presently to the South of France. This is the first hint of
those brief travels on the Continent which became magnified by the
pervading haze into world-wide wanderings. “Were you ever at Kiachta?”
Bowring asked him in a letter some years later. He was never within some
thousands of miles of Kiachta. In 1826 he probably did go tramping
through part of Europe, but he did not reach the East, as some confused
references in the books suggest. The tale of Murtagh in “The Romany Rye”
may incorporate some of his adventures. At any rate, that alluring
narrative was certainly not given to Borrow in the year 1825 at
Horncastle Fair. There is clear evidence of that in the fact that a
portion of it was picked up nearly thirty years later in very different
circumstances.
The real itinerary of the tour of 1826 is probably by way of Paris on
foot to Bayonne; across the Pyrenees into Spain; Pamplona, the Riviera,
Italy, Genoa, and thence home by ship. Slight traces can be found of
such a journey. There is the lightly-touched meeting with Vidocq in
Paris. That delectable rascal’s career always had a strong fascination
for Borrow, whose appetite for picturesque blackguards was greedy.
Vidocq at this time was fifty years of age. A quarter of a century of
adventure as a showman, a soldier, a galley-slave, and a highwayman had
terminated in 1812 with his appointment to the head of a detective office
in Paris, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. By the
year 1825 the authorities were persuaded that the principle was
unworkable, and dismissal ended Vidocq’s career of corruption and
swindling. If Borrow met him in Paris the next year, therefore, he found
his hero a free lance. The _Mémoires_ of M. Vidocq, which appeared in
1828, and are probably at least as trustworthy as Baron Munchausen, were
among Borrow’s favourite reading; his relish for literature, embloomed
with the flowers of crime and perfumed by the breath of criminals, had
been cultivated by the compilation of the “Celebrated Trials,” and it
never left him. Vidocq and Peyrecourt loom large in passages of his
works; whether they made so great a figure in his actual experiences in
France is another question. He appears to have met Baron Taylor at
Bayonne, and naturally found in the “picturesque and romantic” voyager a
congenial companion. From these lofty associations the descent on the
other side of the Pyrenees to Quesada {72} and his “Army of Faith,” the
gang of frontiersmen who were helping themselves freely in the name of
the Church, was sudden and severe. But Borrow seems to have fallen even
further, for there is a dim suggestion of his imprisonment at Pamplona,
of his emergence from gaol in a state of beggary, and his succour at the
hands of a party of gypsies whose patteran he followed in the mountains.
He tramped eastwards, ultimately brought up at Genoa, penniless, and was
assisted by some person or persons unknown to get ship for England.
This is as far as Dr. Knapp has been able to trace the elusory course of
the Wandering Jew of Literature. The theory that he acted as the
travelling commissioner of a London newspaper finds no support. By 1827
he was back in Norwich, keeping his mother’s small household accounts,
visiting the Tombland Fair to inspect “Marshland Shales,” the glorious
chieftain of all the equine race, grubbing for booksellers, writing
articles for newspapers. It was a mean and anxious way of life,
abominable to Borrow, who hated poverty and was ashamed of it. Therein
may be sought the real reason why he “veiled” these years of his life.
His next appearance in the literary arena is in the distinguished company
of Dr. John Bowring.
The Bowring episode in Borrow’s life is one of its most remarkable and
least explicable features. Bowring seems to have been a good friend to
Borrow for many years, to have engaged with him in literary
collaboration, and to have exerted himself in various directions on his
behalf. His reward, so far as Borrow’s works go, is a scurrilous sketch
of himself in “Lavengro,” a long denunciation in the Appendix to “The
Romany Rye,” and the bitter hatred of a man who knew how to hate as
fiercely as he could love intensely. The whole story of their severance
is obscure, but there can be little doubt that Borrow was entirely in the
wrong, that the charges he made against Bowring of treachery and
falsehood were baseless, and that of many people pilloried in Borrow’s
books Bowring was among the least deserving such scurvy treatment. We
have observed already the circumstances of the first meeting between
Borrow and Bowring at Taylor’s house in Norwich. We shall see that
Bowring came to his rescue when he was in the sorest straits, and was, in
fact, doing much to help him during part of the “veiled period.”
It has been the writer’s fortune to secure {73} a series of letters from
Borrow to Bowring, which throw much light upon his schemes and modes of
life in the last three of those mysterious years between his return from
the Continent and his engagement by the Bible Society. He did not remain
long in Norwich. In 1829 he was in London, residing at No. 17, Great
Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and deeply employed about certain
translations of Scandinavian poetry which were to form the basis of a new
book on more elaborate lines than those of the “Romantic Ballads.”
Bowring and Borrow had a plan for issuing in collaboration a collection
of English versions, with interpretations, of those Northern poets whom a
purblind public, not yet obsessed by the Scandinavian spirit in poetry
and music, resolutely disregarded and despised. This was the “literary
project” of which the world heard so much in the Appendix. The
arrangements went so far that a prospectus of the work was put out. The
title proposed was “The Songs of Scandinavia,” and the collection was to
be published in two volumes octavo. The project remained a project, and
the niche left by expectant librarians for the two octavo volumes was
never filled. But in connection with the negotiations and arrangements
between Borrow and Bowring a correspondence occurred which is full of
interest and contains one or two characteristic bits of Borrovian humour.
Incidentally, the letters, if taken in sequence, and read together with
another one of the year 1842, show that, up to a time not far ante-dating
the publication of “The Romany Rye,” with its gross attack on Bowring,
the two men were on the best possible terms. Indeed, in 1842 Borrow
speaks of his old collaborator as “my oldest, I may say my only, friend.”
{75}
It were greatly to be wished that the sordid dispute with Bowring might
be numbered among the delenda of Borrow’s history, but some mention of it
will be necessary. Unhappily, no satisfactory explanation can be given
which is at all flattering to Borrow. For these letters prove
conclusively that he introduced into “Lavengro” and its sequel opinions
about Bowring which he certainly did not hold at the time of which he was
writing.
In 1829 their Scandinavian scheme was in the tideway. They had written
and they had met for the discussion of their plans; Borrow had done a
great deal of translation. He was exceedingly anxious that at any rate
the first volume should appear at once; for, as he said in a letter
written on the last day of the year, he was “_terribly afraid of being
forestalled in the Kiampe Viser by some of those Scotch blackguards_, who
affect to translate from all languages, of which they are fully as
ignorant as Lockhart is of Spanish.” The italicised passage is
underlined in Borrow’s letter; it is a curious foretaste of some of the
choicer invective which he afterwards bestowed on Scott and the Scots,
and of his disagreement with Lockhart. The preparations were hurried on
with a view to the appearance of the first part of the book in February.
The drafting of the prospectus was left to Borrow, and on January 8th
(1830) he sent a copy to Bowring for his inspection, inviting “the
correction of your master-hand.” He had, he said, “endeavoured to frame
a Danish style,” but was not sure whether he had succeeded. “Alter, I
pray you,” he exclaimed, “whatever false logic has crept into it, find a
remedy for its incoherencies, and render it fit for its intended
purpose.” There follows a delightful touch of egotism. He has, he
explains, had a rising headache for two days, which has “almost”
prevented him from doing anything. But, he adds with fine nonchalance,
“I sat down this morning and translated a hundred lines of the ‘May
Day’”—as though a hundred lines of English verse were a trifle which he
threw off without effort, _malgré_ his “rising headache.”
Bowring examined the prospectus, made what revisions he thought
necessary, and sent it back.
“I approve of the prospectus in every respect,” wrote Borrow (January
14th). “It is businesslike, and there is nothing flashy in it. I do not
wish to suggest one alteration.” He goes on to describe the energy with
which he is working, and speaks of having rendered four hundred lines in
one day! The last paragraph of this letter displays Borrow in a
different attitude towards reviews and reviewing from that which he
adopted in after years. “When you see the foreign editor,” he tells
Bowring,
“I should feel much obliged if you would speak to him about my
reviewing Tegnér, and inquire whether a _good_ article on Welsh
poetry would be received. I have the advantage of not being a
Welshman. I would speak the truth, and would give translations from
some of the best Welsh poetry; and I really believe that my
translations would not be the worst that have been made from the
Welsh tongue.”
But this condition of things, in which the romantic ferment caused by
Steffens and Oehlenschläger in Denmark was to be reproduced in England by
Borrow’s translations, did not last long. Difficulties arose in
connection with the publication of the proposed book, and the enthusiasm
paled as the year progressed. The two volumes receded from view; the
twin mountain in labour finally brought forth a review article of some
forty pages. This was despatched in the summer to the _Foreign Quarterly
Review_, was held back for twelve months, and appeared at last in the
number for June, 1831. In this Bowring wrote in lively style on Danish
and Norwegian literature, and Borrow supplied sixteen specimens of verse.
In the meantime, Bowring was doing what he could to assist his _protégé_
to some profitable employment. He sent him an ancient manuscript which
Grundtvig, the Danish poet, wanted to have transcribed. Borrow said
(June 7th) the task would not be overpaid at £49, but as he was “doing
nothing particular” at the time, and might learn something from it, he
would do it for £20. Bowring also exerted his influence to get him work
in the magazines. During the summer of 1830, Borrow flitted from Great
Russell Street to No. 7, Museum Street, and in the autumn, went to
Norwich for a holiday. In the letter (September 14th) in which he tells
Bowring of his proposal to leave London for Norwich, we get the first
hint of a project which now and then flashed through his mind for a year
or two—that of entering the military service: “I have thought of
attempting to get into the French service, as I should like prodigiously
to serve under Clausel in the next Bedouin campaign.” This remained a
thought, though, as we shall see, other plans of the same character went
a little further. In the same letter he complained that he was very
unwell, but traced his malady to ennui and unsettled prospects, and hoped
that cold bathing in October and November would prove of some service to
him. There is no reference in this correspondence to one task which he
himself asserts he achieved in 1830. That was the translation of Elis
Wyn. At the instance of “a little bookseller of my acquaintance” in
Smithfield, he rendered from the Welsh Wyn’s, “Visions of the Sleeping
Bard.” This was the nearest approach he made to the promise of literary
success; but even here his malign fate dogged him. When the little
bookseller saw the translation, he begged off the bargain on the plea
that “the terrible descriptions of vice and torment would frighten the
genteel part of the English public out of their wits. . . . Myn Diawl! I
had no idea till I read him in English that Elis Wyn had been such a
terrible fellow!” The sly dig at the “genteel” public may be reasonably
attributed to the bookmaker rather than to the bookseller.
Before he departed from London, Borrow, returning some books to Bowring,
utters (September 17th) one of those ejaculations on public affairs which
he subsequently inserted as tags to many of his letters: “More
Revolutions, I see. The King of Saxony has run away, and the Kent
peasantry are burning stacks and houses. _Where will all this end_?”
A dozen plans for carving a way to undying fame and modest fortune, all
equally futile, were built up and fell down about this time. Apparently
Borrow could not rid himself of the delusion that a hungry world was
waiting to devour the beauties of the Gaelic Bards, if only they were
served up in a suitable form for general consumption. He launched at the
devoted heads of the Highland Society of London a scheme under which the
Society was to employ (and pay) him for two years in translating the
Gaelic Bards into English verse. The scheme left the Highland Society as
cold as the Bards would have left the reading world. He turned his
artillery upon the British Museum. The Codex Exoniensis was to be
copied; he applied for the work, but without success. It was done in
1831 by one of the regular officials of the Museum. Discouraged but not
dismayed, he sought other employment in Bloomsbury, and asked Bowring to
put in a word for him. The Doctor pointed out that in his position it
was necessary to go about such a matter with discretion. It would not do
for him to originate an application, but if the authorities of the Museum
could be induced to seek his opinion, he would give Borrow such a
character as would “take you to the top of Hecla itself. You have
claims, strong ones, and I should rejoice to see you niched in the
British Museum.” But this design failed like the rest. In a letter to
Bowring he described himself, with melancholy eloquence, as “drifting
upon the sea of the world, and likely to be so.” To Borrow there was “no
fiercer hell than failure”; but the inferno was of his own creation. His
greatest failure was the failure to realise that there was no sort of
demand for the work he insisted on doing, and that its intrinsic value
was far below the standard at which he placed it.
Compelled thus to abandon his literary ambitions for the present, he
turned his efforts in another direction. He began the pursuit of a
shimmering phantom over which, in the course of his life, he contrived to
waste a great deal of valuable time. Upon what he based the idea does
not appear, but Borrow seems to have imagined that he had some claim to
official employment abroad. It did not much matter whether the work was
made for him by the British Government or by a foreign State, so long as
he should be given the opportunity of displaying his philological prowess
in foreign parts. After the appearance of the joint article in the
_Foreign Quarterly_, as Bowring seemed to be able to do nothing for him
at the British Museum, Borrow asked him to see what he could do towards
getting him a post under the Belgian Government. Bowring made the
application, but without success; the Belgians were not at the moment in
need of any English assistance, however talented. Borrow keenly
recognised his friend’s diligence in the matter, and turned his heaviest
artillery on the Ministry at Brussels, who were so obstinately blind to
the advantages of having Mr. George Borrow in their service. They did
not seem, he said in a letter to Bowring written from Willow Lane,
Norwich, and dated September 11th, 1831, either to know or to care for
the opinion of the great Cyrus, whose advice to his captains he quoted
from Xenophon: “Take no heed from what countries ye fill up your ranks,
but seek recruits as ye do horses, not those particularly who are of your
own country, but those of merit.” Belgium, having failed to appreciate
the worth of George Borrow, at once became the most contemptible nation
on earth:
“The Belgians will only have such recruits as are born in Belgium,
and when we consider the _heroic_ manner in which the native Belgian
army defended the person of their new sovereign in the last conflict
with the Dutch, can we blame them for their determination? It is
rather singular, however, that, resolved as they are to be served
only by themselves, they should have sent for 50,000 Frenchmen to
clear their country of a handful of Hollanders, who have generally
been considered the most unwarlike people in Europe, and who, if they
had had fair play given them, would long ere this time have replanted
the Orange flag on the towers of Brussels and made the Belgians what
they deserved to be—hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
This sardonic outburst is one of the earliest samples of the polemical
style which Borrow was to develop so strongly in later years.
As he could neither go to fight Bedouins under Clausel nor enter the
Belgian service in Europe, it appears to have occurred to his friend
Bowring that he might care to follow in his father’s footsteps, and that
the British service might suit him at a pinch. If Borrow would like to
purchase a commission, Bowring offered to introduce his name to the War
Secretary. Borrow replied that his name had been down for several years
for the purchase of a commission, but he had never had sufficient
interest to procure an appointment. He would not now mind serving in the
militia if they were to be embodied for service in Ireland (“that unhappy
country”), but he wished to leave the question open for a few months in
order to see whether something more promising turned up. If he had not
secured employment within two or three months, he would then ask Bowring
to redeem his promise in the matter of the War Secretary, and to
recommend him to a corps in one of the Eastern colonies on the plea that
he was “well grounded in Arabic” and had some talent for languages:
“I flatter myself that I could do a great deal in the East, provided
I could once get there, either in a civil or military capacity.
There is much talk at present about translating European books in the
two great languages, the Arabic and Persian. Now, I believe that
with my enthusiasm for these tongues I could, if resident in the
East, become in a year or two better acquainted with them than any
European has been yet, and more capable of executing such a task. . .
.”
This letter concluded with a postscript in which he requested that his
best remembrances might be presented to Mrs. Bowring and to Edgar, their
son; and, he added, “tell them they will both be starved.
“There is now a report in the street that twelve corn-stacks are
blazing within twenty miles of this place. I have lately been
wandering about Norfolk, and I am sorry to say that the minds of the
peasantry are in a horrible state of excitement. I have repeatedly
heard men and women in the harvest-field swear that not a grain of
the corn they were cutting should be eaten, and that they would as
lieve be hanged as live. I am afraid all this will end in a famine
and a rustic war.”
Reform staved off the “rustic war,” and other things intervened to
prevent Borrow from carrying out his half-formed intention of becoming a
military man.
CHAPTER V
IN FOREIGN PARTS
“ROMANCE brought up” the year 1832. It was a year full of events with an
important bearing on the course of Borrow’s life. In the first place, he
became acquainted with the Skeppers, of Oulton Hall, near Lowestoft. The
introduction to this family issued in a friendship with Mr. Skepper’s
sister, the widow of a young naval officer named Clarke. In Mrs. Clarke,
a woman somewhat older than himself—she was thirty-six and he was
twenty-nine—he met the woman who was to bring into his life its fairest
influence and its rarest happiness. But the story of this romance must
be postponed for a few pages in order to the relation of a sequence of
affairs without which it cannot be understood. They resulted from sundry
conversations about Borrow—between the Skeppers and the Rev. Francis
Cunningham, Rector of Pakefield, and in turn between Cunningham and
Joseph Gurney, his brother-in-law, from whose meadows at Earlham George
had fished in boyhood.
Both Cunningham and Gurney were interested in the work of the Bible
Society, and between them the idea was hatched of employing Borrow’s
philological learning in its behalf. The Society happened at the moment
to be looking for a man to superintend the printing of the New Testament
in Manchu. There were many negotiations, and ultimately the engagement
was consummated which made Borrow’s modest fortune.
To go to St. Petersburg on this business of the Bible Society’s was an
adventure after Borrow’s own heart. He had passed through some
exceedingly stormy waters, and in this employment he found a secure and
congenial harbour. He could well afford to regard lightly the critical
attitude of certain people in Norwich, who did not forget to recall the
episode of “godless Billy Taylor.” Their temper was reflected in the
letter of Harriet Martineau referring to Borrow as a “polyglot
gentleman,” and remarking that his appearance as “a devout agent of the
Bible Society” evoked “one shout of laughter from all who remembered the
old Norwich days.” Borrow did not like their laughter, and he did not
forgive their contempt. But for the time he was too busy with the
actualities of his new situation to trouble about them, and too elated
with his suddenly brightened prospects to be cast down by the jeers of
the scornful.
He was going a journey into a far country, and he was going on a more or
less philological errand. His task was to undertake the production in
the Russian capital of the Manchu version of the Sacred Books made by
Lipotsof. Invited to London to see the officials of the Society, he set
off in high spirits—and on foot. The long road stretched for a hundred
and twelve miles between Norwich and London—that road which some ten
years before he had travelled by coach with the little green box of
poetical translations. He now tramped it in 27½ hours, and his expenses
_en route_ amounted to fivepence halfpenny! This feat was one of his
favourite boasts. It was, in its way, a remarkable achievement. Few
big, healthy young men would care to undertake such long-sustained
exertion on a pint of ale, half a pint of milk, a roll of bread, and two
apples. But such is Borrow’s tale of his commissariat arrangements on
this expedition.
The Society desired him to learn the Manchu language before he set out
for Russia. They gave him six months for the purpose. Even for a
meteoric philologist like Borrow, who swallowed a language by memorising
its dictionary, six months meant short commons. He could not possibly
acquire more than a nodding acquaintance with that most difficult of the
tongues of Babel. However, he set about his task with zeal.
There is one amusing passage in the correspondence between him and the
Secretary of the Bible Society. Observe the true Borrovian spirit
asserting itself in the letter where he expresses pleasure at the
prospect of “becoming useful to the Deity, to man, and to myself.”
Observe the solemn admonition of the good secretary, when he perceived
that a sense of human frailty was not one of Borrow’s most striking
characteristics: “Doubtless you mean the prospect of glorifying God.”
Thereafter, the Borrovian spirit was subdued (in correspondence) to the
proper standard of orthodoxy.
At the end of June, 1833, he set sail for St. Petersburg, by way of
Hamburg, and was highly delighted with the Russian capital. He made his
way into the acquaintanceship of a number of literary people, in whose
society he found congenial entertainment. Among them he speedily
established for himself quite a reputation. It was here that he began
his long friendship with Hasfeldt, which produced a prolific
correspondence. Hasfeldt was a Dane attached to the Russian Government,
and a linguist of attainments, who added to his income by the teaching of
European languages. He conceived a remarkable fondness for “tall
George,” as he called him; the affection was returned as fully as Borrow
could return a friendship, and that was in much higher measure than many
estimates of him suggest. He met Russian scholars, and found many
opportunities for extending his philological studies in the direction of
the Oriental languages.
His work on the Chinese version was hard and long. He had to use German
printers, who did not always feel for the task the enthusiasm which
Borrow expected everybody to throw into anything in which he himself was
concerned. They had to be bribed with vodka, and other things, in order
that progress might be secured. The Bible Society presumably swallowed
the vodka in their delight at the energy Borrow displayed, and they
passed a resolution to pay him any expenses to which he might be put in
the execution of the commission. He had to furbish up an old fount of
type in the Chinese character, that had been lying rusting in a cellar
for many years, and to get everything in order himself, because, of
course, it was impossible to obtain compositors who knew anything of the
Manchu. He even turned printer. So keen was the zest with which he
entered into the work that he submitted a proposal to the Society to
undertake the distribution of the books when they were printed, going
overland to China, and looking in upon the Tartars on the way! Without
doubt he would have done it but for the fact that the Russian Government
refused to grant him a passport for the purpose. It is characteristic of
Borrow that years afterwards he said, and doubtless thought, that he had
been overland to China.
The work of printing done, he paid a hurried visit to Moscow, gathering
impressions for the description of the Kremlin to be found in “The Bible
in Spain,” and on September 9th, 1835, he left St. Petersburg for
England, having spent the previous night in a solemn leave-taking of
Hasfeldt. While in St. Petersburg hard at work, and feeling run down, he
had “the Horrors” several times, but affected to have found a cure for it
in the shape of strong port wine. It was during his stay in Russia that
the news arrived of the death of his brother John in Mexico. He had
discovered other activities to occupy him besides the translation of the
Testament into Chinese. He turned homilies of the Church of England into
Russian and Manchu, and did translations of some of the sacred Buddhist
books from Manchu into English. He conceived at the moment no high
opinion of the Buddhist philosophy. “You will be surprised,” he writes
to the Rev. F. Cunningham, “that Satan by such inconsistent trash should
have been able to ensnare the souls of millions!” If that had been read
in the Martineau household there might have been another “burst of
laughter.” It was while he was in St. Petersburg, too, that he published
his “Targum,” a collection of poetic translations from thirty different
languages and dialects. When Pushkin, the poet, after Borrow’s
departure, received a presentation copy of this book, he expressed his
great regret that he had not met the author.
Borrow reached London on the 18th September, and went down to Norfolk,
feeling anxious again about his future, and hoping that the Bible Society
would be able to find some further employment for him. He was not
disappointed. The Society had not yet given up hope that they might find
a way to send him to China, but in the meantime they resolved to
commission him to Portugal. On November 2nd they passed a resolution
that he should be asked to go to Lisbon and Oporto to inquire about
“means and channels for promoting the circulation of the Holy Scriptures
in Portugal.” {91} Here is the origin of two of his books, of which one
was “The Bible in Spain.” On November 6th he sailed from London,
touching at Falmouth on the 8th, and was at Lisbon on the 13th. He was
to confer with one Wilby about the work; but, Wilby being away, Borrow
consoled himself with the company of Captain Heyland, of the 35th Foot,
whose acquaintance he had made on the voyage. With him he made several
trips, upon one of which he met the _bohémienne_ landlady of Cintra.
During this first expedition to the Peninsula, he set up relations with
the gypsies of Spain, which provided the germ of the first of his books
that attracted anything like general attention. At Badajoz he
encountered a gypsy tribe, by whom he was detained ten days. In that
time he had translated the Gospel of Saint Luke into the Câlo, or Spanish
gypsy language, and the version was subsequently printed by the Bible
Society. One of the Romany chals, Antonio Lopez, accompanied him most of
the way to Madrid, delaying three days at Merida in a gypsy house.
Antonio finally went off with a gitana. Borrow bought a donkey from the
girl, and rode on the animal’s back as far as Talavera, where he sold it
to a Toledo Jew whom he met on the road. The rest of the journey to
Madrid he did by the diligence, like a common Christian.
By the time of his arrival there, he had formed a definite project of
printing the New Testament in Spanish and in Spain, without comment or
note of any sort. The law would prohibit the circulation of such a book
if it were printed outside and brought into the country. It was decided
to use the current Catholic version, in order not to excite any more
prejudices than could be helped, and to sell cheaply, and thus to spread
the book among people who had never seen it before. This was a time in
Spain of constant political excitement, chronic Ministerial change, and
periodical revolution; and Borrow had much trouble in getting official
recognition for the enterprise, without which he might as well have left
it alone. But the way was smoothed for him by Sir George Villiers, the
British Minister, and at the end of twelve months he returned to England
with an active campaign mapped out in his mind, for which he soon
obtained the approval of the Society. In a letter to his mother about
this, he remarked that his “ordination” would be put off till his return.
This is the first and the last that we hear of any proposal to enter the
Church.
On his way out to Spain the second time, he happened across Santa Coloma,
the Carlist, who is frequently met with hereafter in his Spanish
adventures. “The Bible in Spain” relates very closely the events of the
next two years—his wanderings and escapes, his enterprise in Madrid,
where he set up a bookselling shop, his imprisonment for insulting the
Government and the Catholic Church—an offence of which he was quite
innocent, for such was not his method at the time. The trouble was
brought on him by an evangelical firebrand, named Lieutenant Graydon, who
led Borrow into one of his scrapes with the Peninsular powers by claiming
to be associated with him in the work of the Bible Society. Borrow’s
imprisonment resulted in a declaration by him in the Spanish Press,
directed against Graydon. He said that neither himself nor the Bible
Society was actuated by any enmity against either the Government or the
Catholic clergy of Spain, and concluded by avowing himself the sole agent
of the Society in the Peninsula. Out of this grew an estrangement
between Borrow and the Society. It happened that Graydon was one of the
pets of Mr. Brandram, joint secretary of the Society, and was actually
regarded as one of their agents, though he received no pay, being the
holder of a Government pension. He was an enthusiastic evangelist, who
seems to have lacked nothing save discretion, but manifested this defect
by fierce attacks upon the Catholic faith in its stronghold, instead of
contenting himself with prosecuting the primary work of the Society,
which was the distribution of the unadulterated Scriptures. In the
event, Graydon was withdrawn from Spain, but it was expressly stated that
this step was taken only in the interests of his own safety, and that the
Society would pass no judgment on the merits of the dispute between him
and Borrow until Graydon had returned to England and had an opportunity
of vindicating himself. Borrow at the same time was ordered to cease
issuing his advertisement. It is difficult to judge a man like Graydon.
His good faith in all he did can hardly be doubted, but there is no
question that the result of his ill-timed action was to put an end to the
work of the Society and the circulation of the Bible in Spain for many
years.
The relations between Earl Street and Borrow grew more strained, and very
soon he had practically a command to come to London. He packed up and
returned, but such was the force of his character that he fascinated Earl
Street into sending him to Spain a third time. He was only home a month
or two, and got back to the Peninsula on the last day of 1838. But the
mission was not of much further use, for there had been another change of
Ministry in the meanwhile, and Borrow and the Society were again out of
official favour.
He proceeded to Seville, settling there for a purpose, as we shall
presently see. In the sunlit southern city he was encountered by an
English traveller, who has left a most entertaining account of him. This
was Lieutenant-Colonel Elers Napier, in whose “Excursions along the
Shores of the Mediterranean” appears the remarkable figure of a Man of
Mystery, who is easily identified as Don Jorge—though apparently Napier
never learned who he was. Borrow, six feet three, with piercing black
eyes, snowy head, and swarthy, hairless face, made a profound impression
on his new friend—and we may be sure that he omitted nothing that would
deepen it. He showed off all his best points and maintained a rigid
silence upon the question of his identity, so that in Napier’s
recollections he assumes almost supernatural proportions, and is
described throughout as “The Unknown.” He revealed all his miscellaneous
acquaintance with languages, Occidental and Oriental. He conversed with
the Colonel in Spanish, in Latin, in French (“the purest Parisian
accent”), in Italian. He spoke English perfectly, but did not appear to
be an Englishman. He was even as conversant with Hindu as the
Anglo-Indian himself; he seemed, Napier says, to know everything and
everybody, but was apparently known to nobody himself. His almost magic
power over the gypsies, his familiarity with their patois and their
customs, the way in which they almost worshipped him when he took Napier
by night for a visit to one of their weird encampments, added to the
marvel.
But the real significance of the visit to Seville is not to be sought in
the archives of the Bible Society or in the jottings of Colonel Napier.
Borrow’s friendship with Mrs. Clarke, of Oulton, arose in the fashion
already mentioned. His long absences from England did not impair it, and
in 1838 it developed in peculiar circumstances, which were the subject
from time to time of scandal utterly unfounded, and of gossip more or
less impertinent and irrelevant. Whether Borrow, during the years from
1832 to 1838 nurtured dreams of any relation closer than friendship it is
hardly possible to determine. He was not “a marrying man,” and probably
the sober little romance that ended in their wedding was a thing of
sudden growth. That theory is encouraged by a passage in his
correspondence as late as 1838, when he told his friend Usóz that it was
better to suffer the halter than the yoke, and expressed his conviction
that bachelordom was the better kingdom for him. But at the end of the
same year, during his stay in England, he visited his friends at Oulton,
and found a state of affairs that doubtless altered his judgment.
The business of Mrs. Clarke, who was the principal heiress of the Oulton
Hall estate, was in a highly complicated condition. She had none but
professional advisers, save Borrow, and leant with obvious relief upon
his friendship to guide her through a puzzling maze of family disputes.
It would be wearisome to attempt to follow the controversies about the
disposition of the property. They finally involved Chancery proceedings,
and Dr. Knapp asserts that Mrs. Clarke’s solicitors advised her that it
would be well for her to disappear for a time. The reason for this
counsel is obscure, but the fact that it was followed is important. Mrs.
Clarke consulted Borrow about it, with the result that her evanishment
took the form of a journey to Spain, accompanied by her daughter
Henrietta. The fact created an amazing quantity of idle speculation and
not too generous suggestion. The plan was arranged in March, 1839.
Borrow was then in Madrid, and immediately posted off to Seville to
prepare a house for the reception of the two ladies, having given them
some useful hints, drawn from his long experience of Spain, as to the
household gods they ought to bring with them. They arrived in June, and
were installed at No. 7, Plazuela de la Pila Seca, which Borrow had
modestly furnished and was himself occupying.
The little wind of scandal that played about this arrangement will not
disturb the equanimity of those who know their Borrow. The _ménage_ was
unquestionably a little difficult to explain to the Spaniards to whom
explanation was necessary, and to this difficulty Dr. Knapp attributes
Borrow’s expedition to Tangier at the end of August. This was the trip
with which “The Bible in Spain” suddenly closed down in the approved
Borrovian style. The scandal was of short duration and small effect.
But in after years other suggestions were made, including the highly
improbable and offensive one that Mrs. Clarke was at this time pursuing
Borrow with the object of matrimony, and “travelled over half Europe in
search of him.” Another friendly theory advanced was that Borrow’s
proceedings were governed by mercenary motives, and that he married Mrs.
Clarke because she had an income of three or four hundred a year.
Meanwhile, the quarrel with the Bible Society was dragging its slow
length along. The correspondence is confused and in general
uninteresting, except that it shows how Borrow’s attitude towards Earl
Street had altered since the time when he climbed down before the
protests of the good secretary in the first days of their association.
He was on his feet now.
He felt surer of his ground than when he was at his wits’ end for
employment and subsistence. Consequently his native impatience of
restraint came out. The Bible Society never gauged their man. In one
despatch to Earl Street, Borrow had said of a certain enterprise that
“his usual good fortune accompanied them.” “This,” replied Mr. Brandram,
“is a mode of speaking to which we are not well accustomed; it savours,
some of our friends would say, a little of the profane. . . . Pious
expressions may be thrust into letters _ad nauseam_, and it is not for
that I plead; but is there not a _via media_?” The breach grew wider and
severance was ordained; it was consummated very shortly after Borrow’s
return to England at the beginning of the next year.
The visit to Tangier occupied some five or six weeks. Borrow returned to
Seville at the end of September, and set to work compiling notes and
making transcripts for his book on the Gypsies of Spain. The enterprise
was assisted by diligent friends, such as Bailly, {99a} Usóz, {99b} and
Gayangos. {99c} The fruits of their curious researches among dusty and
neglected bookshelves may be seen in the long translations from archaic
Spanish authors in “The Zincali.” It was a Spaniard who invented the
epigram on the virtues of old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old
friends to trust, and old books to read. But we may be excused for
excluding from the category of books which have the bouquet of old
crusted port the discourses of Dr. Sancho de Moncada and others to which
Borrow has treated us so liberally.
He spared time from these labours and from the task of settling up with
the Bible Society to pay considerable attention to Mrs. Clarke and
“Hen”—the affectionate diminutive given to her daughter Henrietta. The
widow had found Seville, as Borrow promised her it should be, “a most
agreeable retreat,” where “the growls of her enemies could scarcely reach
her.” The ladies enjoyed to the full the startling change from the life
of the English fens to that of the sunny and many-hued Spanish city.
They realised his prophecy that it would be a delicious existence where,
“during the summer and autumn, the people reside in their courtyards,
over which an awning is hung. A very delicious existence it is—a species
of dream of sunshine and shade, of falling water and flowers.” And,
incidentally, of course, a very fit setting for such love-making as came
to be done: the weather is always fine when people are courting, as a
modern sage has remarked. Not much more than a month after his return
from Morocco, Borrow had proposed marriage to Mrs. Clarke, and had been
accepted. The arrangement was to a certain extent a “convenient” one for
both parties. With little prospect of further employment by the Bible
Society, and only a precarious hold on any profitable literary work,
Borrow had no glowing future before him. Mrs. Clarke felt the need of a
man to manage affairs for her at Oulton. Still, there is ample evidence
that this was a fortuitous concourse of circumstances, and that it had
little to do with the marriage. The warm English friendship had become
more intimate as the years passed, and there was nothing more natural
than this sequel when they were thrown together in the “delightful
existence” in which she hid from her “enemies” at Seville.
Having decided to cross the Rubicon, Borrow determined that the sooner it
was done the better. There was to be no “sweet, reluctant, amorous
delay.” He began at once to make preparations for the return to England
in order that they might be married in their own country. One of the
first steps to be taken to this end was to procure his passport from the
Alcalde. Why this official disapproved of Borrow cannot be affirmed. As
a son of the True Church he may have conceived a prejudice against the
Protestant colporteur; he may have been infected by the “spy” mania; he
may have been merely anxious to display his own importance. At any rate,
he resolved to give the _Ingles rubio_ as much trouble as possible to
remove himself and his party out of Spain. He raised questions about the
validity of Borrow’s papers, refused the passport, and would not be
pacified by the offer of fees, “lawful or unlawful,” to quote Borrow, who
sent to him apparently under the impression that authority, though a
stubborn bear, might be led by the nose with gold, as the clown said to
Autolycus. When Don Jorge himself went to the office to inquire into the
matter, he was told to go away. Instead he continued to investigate the
motives of the Alcalde, who thereupon threatened to carry him to prison.
Borrow dared him to do so—and he did it. This was his third acquaintance
with the inside of a Spanish gaol. He sent a reassuring note to Mrs.
Clarke, and had a message taken to the British Consul. Colonel Napier
had noticed earlier in the year that the police kept sharp eyes on
Borrow, and attributed it to the suspicion that he was (of all things in
the world!) a Russian spy. There was clearly something in the suggestion
that he was under espionage, for while he was in prison his house was
searched for papers. Nothing “compromising” being found, he was released
the next night.
His indignation at this outrage reached white heat, and did not die down
for months. His insistence upon redress detained Borrow in the country
much longer than he had proposed to stop. Once having got his knife into
Spanish officialdom, he twisted it round till he had gouged out his pound
of flesh. And even then, after he had returned to England, and the knife
was no longer available, Spanish officialdom received very severe
treatment from that even more terrible weapon, his pen. From Seville he
set working all the diplomatic machinery that an injured Briton could
influence; he went to Madrid on the business; he wrote incessantly and
exhaustively about it. His return to England and his marriage had to
wait until he had settled accounts with the impertinent Alcalde de
Barrio, who had laid sacrilegious hands upon a subject of her Britannic
Majesty—and that subject George Borrow. While ambassadors and consuls
and State secretaries were busily employed in official correspondence on
his behalf, he proceeded with the work on the “Gypsies,” and did not get
away from Spain till April, 1840.
The embarkation of the colporteur and his party upon the _Royal Adelaide_
steamer at Cadiz was an impressive ceremony. Borrow was taking a long
farewell of Spain, and he was not going home without souvenirs of his
residence there. In the previous year he had purchased the Arab horse
celebrated in his books as “Sidi Habismilk” (being interpreted, “My Lord
Mustard”). The retinue at Cadiz included not only Mrs. Clarke and
Henrietta, but also Sidi Habismilk and Hayim ben Attar, “the Jew of Fez,”
Borrow’s servant. {103} They touched at Lisbon, where General Cordova
came on board—not on business of State, but in search of a consignment of
cigars that had been sent to him in the care of the captain. Borrow
wrote an amusing sketch of the General and two Secretaries of Legation
stowing Havana cigars in their pockets “with all the eagerness of
contrabandista.” {104} The vessel arrived in the port of London on April
16th, and the party put up at the Spread Eagle, in Gracechurch Street.
As soon as the licence could be obtained, the marriage of “George Henry
Borrow, bachelor,” with “Mary Clarke, widow,” was celebrated at St.
Peter’s Church, Cornhill, and witnessed by John Pilgrim, of Norwich (the
bride’s solicitor) and by her daughter Henrietta. The wedding day was
April 23rd.
There remained a very little business to do in London. He had an
interview with the General Purposes Committee of the Bible Society,
received a letter from Mr. Brandram, saying that there was no sphere open
“to which your services in connection with our Society can be
transferred,” and quickly terminated his relations with Earl Street. In
spite of the little differences that had arisen, there was a generous
reference to Borrow in the Report of the Society for 1840. He was said
to have succeeded “by almost incredible pains, and at no small cost and
hazard,” in his last mission to Spain, and to have assisted in
circulating during five years nearly fourteen thousand copies of the
Scriptures. Thus the Bible Society and Don Jorge said good-bye.
At the beginning of May, Mr. and Mrs. Borrow and Miss Clarke went down to
Oulton. The Hall having been let to a farmer, they took up their
residence in a little house on the margin of the Broad, known as Oulton
Cottage.
CHAPTER VI
THE SUMMER HOUSE AT OULTON
WHEN Borrow went to Oulton he was thirty-seven. The comforts of the
domesticity to which he settled down were sweet, but its joys were of a
very different quality from those golden matrimonial projects of which he
had dreamed in Mumper’s Dingle. He was older, sadder, if not much wiser.
He had modified the scale of his ambitions. He was bent upon the
acquisition of such fame as he could attract through the avenue of
literature, and not disdainful of what local celebrity might come his
way. But though he was not of the temperament to apostrophise with
Cowper—
“Domestic happiness! Thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the Fall!”
there is everything in favour of the supposition that, in marrying Mrs.
Clarke, Borrow wrought better for himself than a man of his temperament
usually has an actuarial expectation of doing in matrimony. Moreover, he
did infinitely better than a great number of literary persons who have
taken the plunge in similar circumstances. There was no such tragedy
about his marriage as befell his friend and neighbour Edward FitzGerald;
indeed, there was no tragedy at all. Its absence is due to Mrs. Borrow’s
remarkable personality, her wifely qualities, unfailing devotion to him
in all his fads and moods and whimsies. She was a perfect “helpmeet”;
she provided him with a buffer to absorb some of the shocks of outrageous
fortune; she was a patient amanuensis and an indefatigable secretary.
The picture one constructs of his wife from the materials—slight
enough—that Borrow himself gives, and from the correspondence extant, is
that of the “flower of wifely patience”—a woman in whom tact has been
developed to such a degree as to become a kind of extra sense. She was
married to one of the queerest specimens of mankind that Nature ever
evolved; yet she secured in their union happiness for both. Her
affection for him was true and deep; it was strong enough even to prevail
over idiosyncrasies that might easily have been fatal to any chance of
domestic peace, to say nothing of marital bliss. She was one of the
women to whom “patience hath such mild composure given” that even Borrow
failed to destroy her equanimity and self-possession. Behind her
hero-worship appears now and then an illuminating gleam of feminine
commonsense—just a shooting ray upon some foible; but whenever it seems
likely to show Borrow in a specifically unfavourable light it is
immediately switched off.
Near the easternmost point of land in England, on the margin of Oulton
Broad, in a spot where the roar of the North Sea could be heard, was the
cottage in which the best of his remaining years were to be passed. Here
he was to prosecute amid the solemn marshland the eternal search for
truth and happiness, and to find that the pursuit was even more difficult
for him than for the majority of mankind. The house contained few rooms,
but sufficient for the requirements of the little family, and its
quietude and isolation were special recommendations to Borrow in the
particular mood in which he then found himself. The scenery was of a
character for which he had strong affection, and the place itself was
linked with one or two of the powerful emotions of his youth. The Broad
stretched away from the end of his garden, and he overlooked it from the
summer-house he built as a study. Behind the house: and almost
surrounding it, were plantations of pine trees. For the rest, only an
occasional tower or windmill broke the level horizon. The scene is
different, more varied, and much fuller of life at the present day, when
the virtues of the Broads as pleasure waters and of the country round as
a residential district have been discovered and exploited. But in
certain hours and seasons it is easy to imagine Oulton as George Borrow
knew it.
Miss Elizabeth Harvey has left us a picture of Borrow as the friends of
this period recalled him. {109} In his wooden pavilion “on the very
margin of the water,” she tells us, “he had many strange old books in
various languages. I remember he once put one before me, telling me to
read it. ‘Oh, I can’t,’ I replied. He said, ‘You ought: it’s your own
language.’ It was an old Saxon book. He used to spend a great deal of
his time in this room, writing, translating, and at times singing strange
words in a stentorian voice, while passers-by on the lake would stop to
listen with astonishment and curiosity to the singular sounds.” A note
on his personal appearance, by the same hand, may help to keep his figure
in mind: “He was six feet three, a splendid man, with handsome hands and
feet. He wore neither whiskers, beard, nor moustache. His features were
very handsome, but his eyes were peculiar, being round and rather small,
but very piercing, and now and then fierce. He would sometimes sing one
of his Romany songs, shake his fist at me, and look quite wild. Then he
would ask, ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ ‘No, not at all,’ I would say.
Then he would look just as gentle and kind, and say, ‘God bless you, I
would not hurt a hair of your head.’” Here was he, then, when he set up
author in real earnest, and induced “glorious John” to publish the first
book that resulted from his adventures in foreign parts. This was “The
Zincali; or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain, with an Original
Collection of their Songs and Poetry, and a Copious Dictionary of their
Language.” Most of the compilation—for such it is, and a desultory
compilation at that—had been made during his five years in Spain. It was
written at odd times, “chiefly in ventas and posadas, whilst wandering
through the country in the arduous and unthankful task of distributing
the Gospel among its children.”
In its published form “The Zincali” was an amalgam of several schemes
that had occurred to the author from time to time during his Spanish
wanderings. He had projected a collection of the rhymes and proverbial
sayings of the gypsies of Spain, inspired thereto by the material he had
gathered at Badajoz and Merida, to which additions were made some years
later at Seville with the assistance of Juan Antonio Bailly, a French
courier with a considerable acquaintance among the Câlé. He had also
proposed a glossary of Câlo and English, which afterwards resolved itself
into a limited vocabulary of words occurring in the songs and sayings
that he and Bailly had collected. Both these schemes were imperfectly
executed. Borrow’s knowledge of the Spanish-gypsy language was quite
empirical, and Bailly’s collections were either written by illiterate
persons, or taken down from the lips of people who spoke a corrupted
jargon. Borrow and Bailly made a large number of translations from
obscure Spanish authors—and this was the material from which “The
Zincali” was constructed. He eked it out with a quantity of
out-of-the-way information and anecdote acquired during his association
with gypsies in England and Russia, and in the course of much
miscellaneous browsing among books. A more unscientific process of
writing “An Account of the Gypsies of Spain, etc.,” it would be hard to
devise. There were half a hundred works of more or less utility which he
might have consulted, and there is no evidence that he had seen more than
a tithe of that number. But, _pari passu_, there is certainly no
evidence that if he had seen them all he would have produced a better
book. In fact, here, as in every other case, his work does not depend
for its charm and its value upon any scientific basis whatever, but upon
the idiosyncrasies of Borrow himself, the mordant style, the quaint
observation, the atmosphere with which he contrives to invest his
subject. “The Zincali” was read at first, as it is read now, not so much
for the accuracy of its history or its philology as for its intrinsic
interest as literature.
Having put together at Oulton these notes, memoranda, rhymes,
translations, descriptions, and scraps of a gypsy vocabulary, Borrow took
the compost to John Murray, who agreed to publish an edition of 750
copies. The book attracted certain minds attuned to the Borrovian
spirit, and it was admitted to display the supreme virtue of originality.
The voice of Murray, above all, was encouraging, and to Borrow that was
the voice of the “Mæcenas of British literature.” In spite of occasional
difficulties, he held Mr. Murray in unfailing honour, and was proud to
have his work sealed with the _cachet_ of Albemarle Street. The close
association of the Murrays with Richard Ford, whose “Handbook” was long
the classic English work on Spain, had important results for Borrow.
Ford was living in retirement at Heavitree, near Exeter—the haven where,
half a century later, George Gissing found rest in his last days—and to
him the manuscript of “The Zincali” was sent for critical observation.
Ford’s knowledge of Spain was extensive and peculiar, and he immediately
perceived in Borrow a man after his own heart, who preferred byways to
highways, was full of curious learning, and invariably took the
unconventional outlook. {112} His criticism of the book was what might
have been expected. It took the form of a regret that Borrow had not
given his readers more of himself “instead of the extracts from those
blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing about gypsies.” But, on
the whole, both Murray and Ford were pleased. So were the reviewers. As
to the public, they bought the work very slowly. It appeared in April,
1841, and by June only three hundred copies had been sold. Murray
explained this genially by declaring that the state of politics had shed
a blight over literature; no book was selling, and Borrow’s only shared
the fate of the rest.
But before this a new enterprise had been designed. It was to be an
account of Borrow’s personal adventures while engaged in the circulation
of the Scriptures in the Peninsula. The scheme appealed strongly to
Ford, and Murray thought well of it. Ford was “delighted” to know that
Borrow meditated such a work. “The more odd personal adventures the
better, and still more so if dramatic; that is, giving the exact
conversations.” “I have given him much advice,” said Ford in a letter to
Addington, “to avoid Spanish historians and _poetry_ like prussic acid;
to stick to himself, his biography, and queer adventures.” And Borrow
wrote to Ford: “I shall attend to all your advice. The book will consist
entirely of my personal adventures, travels, etc., in that country during
five years. I met with a number of strange characters, all of whom I
have introduced; the most surprising of them is my Greek servant, who
accompanied me in my ride of 1,500 miles.” And again: “‘The Bible in
Spain’ is a rum, very rum, mixture of gypsyism, Judaism, and missionary
adventure, and I have no doubt will be greedily read.” Here was the
impulse from which arose “The Bible in Spain.”
The book which gave Borrow his first and greatest vogue was a compilation
based mainly on the letters he had sent home in the form of reports to
the Bible Society. They were unquestionably the most remarkable reports
from a literary point of view, and the most unconventional from a
religious point of view, that had ever been received by the grave and
reverend seniors of Earl Street. The Society had been staggered once or
twice. Borrow’s confession that he was a little “superstitious,” his
reference to the “prophetess” of Manzanares, his “luck”—all these were
foreign phrases, and distasteful to the pundits of the Bible Society.
They chid Borrow; but they put up with him until the final disruption,
and now, when he applied for permission to use his letters in connection
with the new book, they treated him very well. There were some
episodes—the squabble with Graydon among them—for which they were not
anxious to secure more publicity, a very natural feeling; but, Borrow
giving assurances, they “cheerfully forwarded the letters to him.”
The relations between the Bible Society and this astounding missionary of
theirs provide a quaint chapter in literary history. Throughout a great
part of their intercourse with him they seem to have remained in a state
of bland and childlike innocence with regard to the real character and
the actual personality of their agent. They were aware of his
eccentricity, but apparently blind to the causes from which the
eccentricity sprang. This was the quality which gave his letters from
Spain their value for the purposes of the book he now began to edit.
The year 1841 was gloomy, with bad weather and much disease. It was the
year when the murrain first appeared in Great Britain and spread havoc
throughout the agricultural districts. Of all men Borrow was most
delicately affected by the moods of Nature round him, most
sympathetically attuned—wild and fierce where Nature was fierce and wild,
gentle and sunny amid fair meads in fine weather. And during this
miserable year he found it hard to make progress with his writing. Next
spring the change came with a rush, cold and dry, with bright days
merging into a glorious summer. The country called Borrow out. He tells
us that he spent most of his time riding his Arab horse “over heaths and
through the green lanes of my native land,” or staying at home and
fishing for big pike in the ponds near Oulton Broad, or basking in the
sun. He worshipped Sidi Habismilk, and the horse worshipped his master
so manifestly as almost to encourage the belief that Borrow was really a
“horse-wizard.” The Arab followed him about like a dog. But this
magnetism of his was not confined to horses; it was exercised equally
over dogs and cats. Miss Harvey mentions that when Borrow set out from
Oulton for a walk, he was often accompanied by two dogs and a cat.
Grimalkin would, of course, be satisfied with much less pedestrianism
than her master and the dogs, and would turn back home after a quarter of
a mile or so. These diversions occupied him well into the summer. It
was only when the heat and his own laziness began to remind him of
sun-baked Andalusia that the big book came to his mind as a duty to be
done. In actual fact, it would seem that the bulk of the manuscript was
in the hands of Murray by the middle of the year in the form of a fair
copy made by Mrs. Borrow from the letters and from the new connecting
links which the author scribbled, as he says, “higgledypiggledy” on the
blank leaves of account-books and the backs of envelopes.
The book was published in December, 1842, and dated 1843. Ford, whose
interest in it was continuous, had given Borrow much advice; he
prophesied success. “Avoid words; stick to deeds,” was his counsel.
There should be no “fine writing,” but plenty of wild adventure,
“journals . . . sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, rambles, and the interior of
Spanish prisons.” Borrow was to “avoid rant and cant. Dialogues always
tell; they are dramatic, and give an air of reality.” With how much
fidelity Borrow followed this advice needs no emphasis. How accurate was
Ford’s diagnosis of the public taste the sequel demonstrates.
There was a loud chorus of praise from the literary papers. Those who
had approved “The Zincali” called their readers to witness how they had
unerringly detected the trail of true genius. The _Athenæum_ and the
_Examiner_ led the way. Ford wrote a pæan in the _Edinburgh_; the
_Quarterly_ was sorry it had overlooked the “Gypsies,” but made up for
the omission by its reception of “The Bible.” The author became the lion
of the hour; visiting London, he was fêted with ambassadors and “princes
and members of Parliament,” as he wrote to his wife. “On Saturday night
I went to a grand soirée, and the people came in throngs to be introduced
to me. To-night I am going to the Bishop of Norwich, to-morrow to
another place, and so on.” He was overwhelmed with congratulations from
private friends, among whose letters those of Hasfeldt from St.
Petersburg gave him most pleasure. Six editions of the book were sold in
England before the end of the year; it was pirated in America by three
houses; it was translated into French, German, and Russian. Borrow was
the most scintillating star in the literary firmament of 1843.
The book deserved its success. It has all the Borrovian merits and few
of the Borrovian defects. There is the charm of the wonderful style,
which is no style at all, the crisp sentence, the unexpected epithet, the
penetrating phrase, jumpy and abrupt, but compelling the reader to take
the jump and make the sudden halt because it is the only thing to do.
There is the astonishing variety of adventure, of character, of colour,
of scene, the wealth of incident, the compelling force of narrative.
Ford said that Borrow “sometimes put him in mind of Gil Blas; {118} but
he had not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor did he gild the bad.” There
was, he added, a touch of Bunyan in the way in which, like that
enthusiastic tinker, he hammered away at the Devil, or his
man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. It was, in fine, such a book as had
never been placed in the hands of the public which now read it with
tremendous avidity—the public interested in foreign missions, in the
propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts—in a word, “the religious
world.” “The Bible in Spain” coloured with all the hues of romance the
great work of disseminating the Scriptures; it introduced them to new
people and to new scenes; it candied the villainies of gypsies with the
frosted sugar of evangelical effort, and if it recited strange things of
superstitious papists and dubious prophetesses, was not the guide who
introduced these matters to them “a devout agent of the Bible Society,”
whose end justified all the means he sought? The “polyglot gentleman”
was the most piquant sensation that had ever made its way into thousands
of English drawing-rooms.
It was obvious that so great a success must be followed up, and “The
Bible in Spain” was hardly in the press before Borrow was pondering a
scheme for a book to follow it. For many reasons, the matter was long in
maturing. The chief of them, probably, was Borrow’s health. As he grew
older, his innate melancholy deepened into hypochondria, from which he
emerged occasionally with fits of high-strung merriment. At forty years
of age he had lived three ordinary lives. He was irritable and
eccentric, the irresponsible victim of megrims. Success did not sweeten
life for him. While he was the literary lion of London, he growled at
those who fêted and flattered him as though he would devour them. He was
certainly an admirer of George Borrow himself, and he was not displeased
with the flattery; but it left him unsatisfied. Hasfeldt, with whom he
still corresponded, noted his unrest, rallied him, tried to cheer him,
adjuring him to philosophy. But the lack of peace was the effect of a
deeper cause than Hasfeldt’s friendly soul could divine; deeper than
Borrow himself could plumb.
“I did very wrong not to bring you when I came” (so he wrote to his
wife from London, when at the zenith of his social success and at the
nadir of mental and spiritual tribulation), “for without you I cannot
get on at all. Left to myself, a gloom comes upon me which I cannot
describe. . . . My place seems to be in our own dear cottage, where,
with your help, I hope to prepare for a better world. . . . The poor
bird when in trouble has no one to fly to but his mate.”
His condition displayed itself in ridiculous quarrels with his
neighbours, particularly about the conflicts in which their dogs were
involved. It was characteristic of Borrow that he would never admit his
own dog to be in the wrong. One dispute is set out by Dr. Knapp in a
formal correspondence with the vicar of Oulton. The parson described the
Borrow dog as “a beast of a very quarrelsome and savage disposition.”
Borrow retorted that the animal was “a harmless house-dog.” The last
passage of Borrow’s last letter on the subject was:
“Circumstances over which Mr. Borrow at present has no control will
occasionally bring him and his family under the same roof with Mr.
Denniss; that roof, however, is the roof of the House of God, and the
prayers of the Church of England are wholesome from whatever mouth
they may proceed.”
He became absolutely furious when a railway was taken through his estate
and past his house by one of the schemes of Sir Morton Peto.
It was in this temper that he began the book which was to stir
generations into controversy, to arouse bitter criticism and tremendous
recrimination, to destroy for his lifetime the literary reputation that
Borrow had earned—the book destined, in the irony of fate, to be that
upon which such share of immortality as Borrow possesses will probably
rest.
“Lavengro” passed through many mutations while it was planning and
writing. The idea of an autobiography had been suggested by Ford, who
wanted him to publish his “whole adventures for the last twenty years,”
describing the countries he had visited, discussing the languages he
knew, and treating of the people he had lived with. The “reader” who had
pronounced judgment for Murray upon the manuscript of “The Bible in
Spain” had thought it would be well to prefix to that narrative some
pages of autobiographical matter. These hints fructified early, for “The
Bible” had hardly issued from the press before he was suggesting to
Murray another book: “Capital subject: early life, studies and
adventures; some account of my father, William Taylor, Whiter, Big Ben,
etc. etc.”
His first plan was more coherent and more comprehensive than the book in
its published form; it was to be an actual autobiography in three
volumes, the first to take him to the time of his father’s death, the
second to describe his literary life in London and his adventures on the
road, and to proceed to his travels abroad; the third to give his
adventures in Russia and carry him through a journey in Barbary and
Turkey, which yet remained to be undertaken. The first part of the
scheme was faithfully carried out, though Borrow wrote very slowly.
Throughout the early correspondence on the subject with Murray, he
referred to the book as “My Life: A Drama.” It was not till October,
1843, that he mentioned the title “Lavengro: A Biography.” Next month he
told Murray that he had reached his Irish experiences. “I am now in a
blacksmith’s shop in the south of Ireland, taking lessons from the Vulcan
in horse-charming and horse-shoe making.” In January, 1844, he described
it in a letter to Dawson Turner, of Yarmouth, the collector of
manuscripts, as “a kind of biography in the Robinson Crusoe style.”
There was much more difficulty in stringing together the “Lavengro”
episodes than in editing the letters from Spain. He was writing from
memory of matters twenty or thirty years old, not visualising recent
travels with the assistance of documents made on the spot. Further, he
laboured under a sense of the necessity for doing something specially
fine in order that his new book might not endanger the reputation he had
obtained with his last. “People will expect so much,” he wrote to
Murray. “I go on . . . scribbling away, though with a palpitating
heart.” Ford, who visited him at Oulton (January, 1844), was
enthusiastic about the book, but disapproved of Borrow’s scheme for
dropping several years (“the veiled period”—1826 to 1833): “I shall be
most anxious,” he wrote, “to hear you tell your own story and recent
adventures; but first let us lift up a corner of the curtain over _those
seven years_.” Borrow was enthusiastic, too, in the intervals of
sunshine that lit up his melancholy life. “‘Lavengro’ progresses
steadily, but I am in no hurry. It is my third book. Hitherto the
public has said: ‘Good! _Better_!’ I want it to say to No. 3, ‘BEST!’”
It was remarkable that he had been content to remain four years at
Oulton, even though the monotony was varied by occasional visits to
London and tours through East Anglia on his Arab horse. The wandering
spirit which possessed him from the cradle to the grave had been
suppressed with difficulty, and by the aid of circumstances which were
inimical to schemes of travel and adventure. It was not for lack of
effort on Borrow’s part that he did not spend those years in going up and
down the world and to and fro in it. He had hardly begun “The Bible in
Spain” before he was recommencing the kind of campaign which marked the
early ’thirties—worrying Lord Clarendon to get him made a consul or to
engage him in some work abroad for the Government. Lord Clarendon
politely told him that it was “quite hopeless” to ask Palmerston for a
consulship; and apparently Borrow was unable to make any definite
suggestion for the useful employment of his philological learning in any
travelling commission on behalf of the nation. These schemes dropped; he
had dreams of settling in Berlin, and others, provoked by Hasfeldt, of
studying the sagas in Copenhagen; they were succeeded by visions of
travel in North Africa, in search of the wandering sect of the
Dar-Bushi-Fal and the witch-hamlet, Char Seharra, to which there are
mysterious references in the sixth chapter of “The Zincali.” But none of
these enterprises came to a head, and he performed the uncongenial role
of a stay-at-home till, having worked just over a year upon the
manuscript of “Lavengro,” he suddenly determined to take a prolonged tour
abroad. Starting on April 23rd, 1843, he proceeded by way of Paris to
Strasburg and Vienna, travelled through Hungary, Transylvania, and
Rumania to Bucharest, across the Danube, and from Rustchuk to
Constantinople, where he was in September. Thence he went to Salonika,
through Thessaly and Albania to Prevesa, afterwards visiting Corfu and
Venice, returning by Rome, Marseilles, Paris, and Havre to London, which
he reached in the middle of November. Dr. Knapp gives the itinerary.
This is one of the few expeditions of which Borrow left no records save
those worked into late editions of “The Zincali” and into the Hungarian’s
narrative in “The Romany Rye.”
Having satiated his roving demon for a time, Borrow returned to Oulton
and resumed work upon “Lavengro.” By this time he had completed the
first volume, covering the period to his father’s death, which is the
most authentically autobiographical part of the book. Henceforward his
plans underwent a gradual change, and ultimately the original scheme went
completely adrift. Borrow was tossed about in the eddies of his passions
and prejudices as a cork in a whirlpool. “Lavengro” took charge of him.
Progress seemed to be slower than ever; the work dragged more desperately
as the departure from the first plan grew more marked.
He took some consolation in the visit of Ford, already mentioned. “I am
here,” wrote Ford from Oulton Hall, “on a visit to El Gitano: two rum
coves in a queer country.” And he gives, in a letter to Addington
(January 26th, 1844), a delicious picture of the place and their
pursuits:
“This is a regular Patmos, an _ultima Thule_, placed in an angle of
the most unvisited, out-of-the-way portion of England. His house
hangs over a lonely lake covered with wild fowl, and is girt with
dark firs, through which the wind sighs sadly. However, we defy the
elements, and chat over _las cosas de Espana_, and he tells me
portions of his life, more strange even than his book. We scamper by
day over the country in a sort of gig, which reminds me of Mr. Weare
on his trip with Mr. Thurtell (Borrow’s old preceptor). ‘Sidi
Habismilk’ is in the stable and a zamarra now before me, writing as I
am in a sort of summer-house, called _La Mezquita_, in which _El
Gitano_ concocts his lucubrations, and _paints_ his pictures, for his
object is to colour up and poetise his adventures.”
After Ford had left, Borrow wrote to him a letter {126a} which provides
an interesting glimpse at the process of composition of “Lavengro”:
“AN BATUSCHA,—I have got your letter, which I should have answered
sooner had I not been to Yarmouth—not, however, to the house of the
Armenian. Thank you for the pheasants and the caviare which you were
kind enough to send. Almost as soon as I got back from Norwich the
weather became disagreeable—a strange jumble of frost, fog, and wet.
I am glad that during your stay there it has been a little more
favourable. My wife is better, and left her room, but poor Henrietta
is in bed with the same complaint. I still keep up, but not exactly
the thing. You can’t think how I miss you in our chats by the
fireside. The wine, now I am alone, has lost its flavour, and the
cigar makes me ill. I am very frequently by the Valley of the
Shadow, and, had I not summers and jaunts to look forward to, I am
afraid it would be all up with your friend, su Batuscha.
“I still go on with my life, but slowly, lazily. What I write is,
however, good. I feel it is good: strange and wild as it is. I
expect to be in London by the beginning of March, and hope there to
write your review {126b} and receive a cheque from Murray to the tune
of some hundreds. The colt is, however, not bought yet. My wife has
set her face against it, and at present I do not like to press the
matter. She is in delicate health, and believes she has dreamt it
would either kill her or me. At present I may truly call myself _el
necio de la casa_, _pero veremos vir_. She much regrets not having
seen you.
“When I go to London upon whom would you advise me to call? Who is
worth knowing? Now that the old man is dead, I am afraid that a
certain street will not be quite so agreeable as it was. Did the
gypsies tell you where they lived? If I knew I would go and visit
them. I suppose somewhere about Tottenham Court.
“As I returned from Norwich I stopped at Thurton and tasted the wine.
It was really good. When you are next past that way you must taste
it yourself, and give me your opinion. I hope . . . having found
your way to these parts you will frequently favour us with your
company. God bless you. Ever yours,
“GEORGE BORROW.
“_Muchismas espresiones de la parti de mi esposa y de la
Henriqueta_.”
NOTE.—The correspondence with Mr. Murray, to which reference is made in
this chapter, and some of Ford’s letters should be consulted in Dr.
Knapp. Ford’s letters to Addington are reproduced in Mr. Rowland
Prothero’s collection (Murray, 1905).
CHAPTER VII
“LAVENGRO” AND HIS CRITICS
AT this period Borrow suffered frequently from attacks of melancholia;
little vexations upset him terribly. He was more than once assaulted by
roughs while on his way home to Oulton from Lowestoft, and the remedy
that occurred to him was that he should be made a magistrate so that he
might take short measures with the ruffians who infested the woods. He
applied in various quarters for this appointment. But the Whigs were in
and Borrow was a Tory. Neither the influence of Lockhart nor the
admiration which Gladstone entertained for “The Bible in Spain” sufficed
to prevail against the eternal principle of “the spoils to the victors.”
In connection with this episode, as may be imagined, several persons were
placed upon Borrow’s index. Lockhart himself soon got there. When
Ford’s “Handbook for Spain” appeared, the author was exceedingly anxious
that Borrow should write the article on it for the _Quarterly Review_.
No man could have done it with ampler knowledge or invested it with more
absorbing interest than “El Gitano,” as Lockhart dubbed him in the
correspondence on the subject. But the essay Borrow produced, written in
ill-health, and betraying all the evidences of a jaundiced and embittered
mind, was in no sense a review of Ford’s book. It was a long screed
against those persons and tendencies in Spanish politics that aroused his
ire. The extract given by Dr. Knapp is in the very best invective style
of the Appendix. Lockhart behaved exceedingly well in the matter. He
would publish the article in the _Quarterly_ if Borrow would permit him
to insert extracts from Ford’s book in suitable places, so that the
reader might be able to obtain some glimmering of the author’s style and
subject. Borrow petulantly replied that he would not have the paper
tampered with. Lockhart then very properly exercised his editorial
authority, and refused to publish it. He softened the decision by
suggesting that Borrow’s work would make an admirable magazine article,
mentioning periodicals that would be glad to have it. The suggestion was
not adopted, the article remained in proof-sheet in the hands of Murray,
and Lockhart was numbered among the increasing army of Borrow’s mortal
enemies. It was an unhappy sequel to this incident that the friendship
between Ford and Borrow cooled off, and their intercourse ceased
altogether a few years later—by no desire of Ford’s, as the
correspondence shows.
More trouble arose from the obscure dispute with Bowring, in which Borrow
accused him of palming off upon the House of Commons as his own the
Manchu-Tartar version of the Scriptures that Borrow had printed at St.
Petersburg, in order to get for himself the consulship at Canton, while
at the same time affecting to promote the candidature of Borrow for the
post. To any impartial mind the evidence in favour of this theory is
scanty, and the theory itself improbable. That Borrow believed it there
can be no doubt; it tinged his life with added gall and wormwood, and
helped to divert the course and purpose of his book. A further grievance
was the failure of the British Museum trustees to get the funds for a
mission to the Convent of St. Catharine on Sinai in search of the
manuscript of the fourth-century Greek Testament, afterwards acquired by
Tischendorf for Alexander II. of Russia. But it would be tiresome to
follow all the convolutions of Borrow’s tempers and jealousies throughout
these troubled years. They are amply reflected in many portions of the
literary work he was doing.
Time drifted, and it was 1848 before Murray could make a definite
announcement about “Lavengro.” In that year appeared in his “list of new
works in preparation” the following:—“‘Lavengro’: An Autobiography. By
George Borrow, author of ‘The Bible in Spain,’ etc. 3 vols., post 8vo.”
In October the first volume went to press, and then there was more
vacillation about the title of the book. It was advertised in the
_Quarterly Review_ and the _Athenæum_ in November, and December as “Life:
A Drama.” That form was immediately dropped. Borrow was taken ill and
work ceased. In July, 1849, the old advertisement describing it as an
autobiography was restored, though we well know now that by this time it
had ceased to be autobiographical in the conventional sense. Finally the
pangs of labour ended with the year 1850, and “Lavengro—The Scholar—The
Gypsy—The Priest” was delivered to the reading world and to the tender
mercies of the critics in February, 1851.
It will be seen that the autobiographical claim was abandoned at the
last. In the preface, which he accomplished just in time to get it to
press, Borrow modified his description of the book: “In the following
pages I have endeavoured to describe a _Dream_.” Later he denied that he
ever said it was an autobiography, or that he ever authorised anybody
else to say it was; this in spite of the advertisements quoted above, and
of the general impression he had allowed to be created that he was
writing an account of his life.
Yet, in fact, “Lavengro” is little else. It followed faithfully the
original plan throughout the first volume. Then came Borrow’s journey in
the East and his return to accumulate hatreds, nurse revenges, and
conduct wordy war with the battalions of his imaginary foes. And, in
order to vent his spleen upon them, he deliberately altered the tenour of
his book. The episodes of travel on the English roads were already
protracting themselves beyond manageable length when events occurred that
determined him to reject the whole scheme of the two remaining volumes
first designed, and to extend these episodes still further so as to drag
in some of his pet aversions and exhibit them in a disgraceful or
ridiculous light. Particularly did he pour forth the vials of his wrath
upon Bowring, the Old Radical, inserting the incident of the postilion
and his story specially for the purpose.
But while Borrow was down in the summer-house at Oulton writing
marvellous pages on odd scraps of paper, probing profound depths of
speculation, and rising to the dizziest heights of natural eloquence,
while he allowed himself to be possessed and fascinated by the gypsies
and the jockeys, the tramps and the wastrels, the thimble-engroes and the
pugilists, and all the weird company that defile through the haunting
pages of his book, while the development of Catholic missions in England
diverted his ultra-Protestant mind to the machinations of mythical
Jesuits and gave him the figure of the Man in Black; while he piled rage
and scorn upon the devoted head of John Bowring, who added to his other
sins against the Borrovian covenant a characteristically Unitarian
indifference to the “No Popery” cry {132}—all this time “Lavengro” was
not making much progress with his life, the publisher was appealing to
him to hurry, and the hungry printer was sending up pitiable cries for
“copy.” Borrow, having gone off on a branch line, utterly declined to
return. He had occupied nearly two volumes in describing the events of a
few months—from his descent upon London and Sir Richard Phillips to his
sojourn in Mumper’s Dell. He was in the middle of the postilion’s story,
wherein the Old Radical was receiving his shrewdest knocks, when Murray
issued his ultimatum, and Mrs. Borrow was despatched to London with the
last of the manuscript (November, 1850). He had been obliged to break
off abruptly, for Murray threatened, if the book were not finished there
and then, to “throw it up.” Promising himself to complete the narrative
in a sequel, Borrow left “Lavengro” as we have it now. The reviewers and
the reading world, instead of the autobiography in common form which they
had been led to expect, received a picaresque hotch-potch about which the
best they could find to say was that it was “remarkable.”
The almost unanimous verdict of the critics was highly unfavourable. The
_Athenæum_ (whose review was written by Dilke) spoke of the warm
expectations that had been raised and the great disappointment that was
felt; _Fraser_, in which William Stirling (Sir William Stirling-Maxwell)
discussed it, was vigorously satirical about Borrow’s trivial
mystifications, his dashes, dots, and asterisks; _Blackwood_ was “sick of
the Petulengros and their jargon,” and its reviewer acutely perceived the
internal evidence of the changes in plan and disposition which had been
made while the work was in progress. The two persons who found anything
good to say about the book were friends of Borrow—Dr. Gordon Hake and Mr.
W. B. Donne. It is curious that these were the only reviewers who
displayed much prescience in their criticism. Hake took the bold course
of prophecy: “Lavengro’s” roots, he said, would strike deep into the soil
of English letters. Donne perceived that, as he said, the public had
been looking for a second Marco Polo, and were presented instead with a
nineteenth-century Defoe.
In spite, however, of all that could be said in its favour, the public
would have none of “Lavengro.” Three thousand copies of the first
edition were printed. Notwithstanding Murray’s confident prophecy that
it would find a ready sale, it fell almost lifeless, and twenty-one years
passed before another edition was called for. It is a little difficult
to understand the attitude of the public and the Press towards a work
which, in spite of its obvious faults, is one of the most virile and most
entrancing works of English literature. The true explanation is to be
found in the theory suggested by Mr. Watts-Dunton. “Lavengro” was a
complete failure, he said, and its reception by the Press, the
accusations of “lowness and vulgarity,” embittered Borrow. Why was it
that the public of that day considered such books as “Lavengro” and “The
Romany Rye” to be low and vulgar? The fact was that “Lavengro,” issuing
forth in the year of the great Exhibition, made its bow before the most
genteel and most philistine age of Victorian literature. A writer hardly
dared to admit that a man was a man or a woman a woman. We have arrived
at the other extreme in the process of emancipating ourselves from
philistinism, and there is no excuse in Art or Nature for many of the
books written and published at the present time. But the reception of
“Lavengro” was largely due to the mawkish sentiment against which Borrow
hysterically declaimed as “gentility-nonsense,” and we have fortunately
outgrown it. In time readers came to see the extraordinary merits of
Borrow’s books; they bought them as they were re-issued, read them, liked
them, and will go on reading and liking them. Gypsyism has, in fact,
become popular in the genteelest circles.
Many years ago Mr. Watts-Dunton succeeded in throwing a gleam of light
upon Borrow’s own view of the work. He tells us how, when they were
discussing the question of the real nature of autobiography, Borrow
exclaimed, “What is an autobiography? Is it a mere record of the
incidents of a man’s life, or is it a picture of the man himself—his
character, his soul?” And Mr. Watts-Dunton adds observations applying
the inference to Borrow’s book. He points out what we have already
seen—that he sat down to write his own life in “Lavengro,” and that in
the first volume he did almost confine himself to matters of fact. “But,
as he went on, he clearly found that the ordinary tapestry into which
destiny had woven the incidents of his life was not tinged with
sufficient depth of colour to satisfy his sense of wonder. When he
wishes to dive very boldly into the ‘abysmal deeps of personality,’ he
speaks and moves partly behind the mask of some fictitious character.”
“Let it be remembered,” says Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that it was this instinct
of wonder, not the instinct of the mere _poseur_, that impelled him to
make certain exaggerated statements about the characters themselves that
are introduced into his books.”
This view of the eccentricities and purple patches of “Lavengro” and “The
Romany Rye” is interesting, and certainly just to a point. It does not
account for the whole of the leaps that Borrow took in one direction and
another; it does not explain Mr. Platitude, or the Man in Black, or the
Old Radical. The reason for their creation has been already stated. The
“instinct of wonder,” the Celtic imagination, now brooding, now soaring,
does, however, explain much in the books that cannot be explained by
reference to actual facts of the author’s career, and does justify in a
sense his theory of autobiography—that the truest self-revelation may be
found not so much in the mere recital of bare facts as in the impression
of the form of his thought, and in the reflection of the colours that
glow in his soul.
If the year of the great Exhibition was an unfortunate year for the
commercial fortunes of “Lavengro,” the Exhibition itself had certain
irresistible attractions for “Lavengro’s” author. It had drawn to London
a large congregation of the peoples of the earth, and the thought that in
Hyde Park twenty languages were chiming a rare cacophony was too much for
him. He went off to town to see the show, taking his step-daughter with
him. The tall man with the white hair, striding about under the glass
roof, soon began to create a minor sensation, which was by no means to
the liking of Miss Clarke. To see a group of foreigners in converse was
enough for him. He went up to them and addressed them in their own
tongue, and repeated the process so often that it began to be whispered
about that he was “uncanny,” and he excited so much remark that his
daughter thought it better to drag him away.
While Borrow was at Oulton struggling with the composition of “Lavengro,”
quarrelling with the vicar, denouncing Sir Morton Peto, procrastinating
with his publisher, and passing some of the most miserable, if the most
fruitful years of his life, he made an acquaintance which ripened into an
important and valuable friendship. The Misses Harvey introduced the
Borrows to Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, then resident as a physician at Bury
St. Edmund’s—the friendly critic of “Lavengro” already mentioned. Visits
were paid and repaid by the two families at Bury and at Oulton, and a
close association and familiarity grew up. Dr. Hake thus becomes one of
the most trustworthy and most interesting authorities on this portion of
Borrow’s life, and relates many exceedingly suggestive stories
illustrating the varied and strangely contradictory phases of Borrow’s
character. His sketch of the personality of his friend, inscribed in his
“Memoirs,” has often been quoted. Its principal value is that it brings
out with the authority of a medical man the cause of much that frequently
seems inexplicable in Borrow—his native hypochondria, and the reason for
his violent antipathy towards society, and especially “genteel” society:
“Society he loved and hated alike; he loved it that he might be pointed
out and talked of; he hated it because he was not the prince he felt
himself in its midst.” I refer again in this connection to the view
proffered to me by Mr. Watts-Dunton, gleaned from intercourse with Borrow
at a later period of his life, that his denunciation of respectability
and “gentility-nonsense” was simply by way of revenge upon the
Philistines; that he loved real respectability and good repute,
worshipped fame and success, and equally hated insignificance and
failure.
Dr. Hake’s anecdotes illustrate his impatience of much of the kind of
fame and notice he attracted, the outbursts of violence with which he
greeted people who did not appeal to him, and the intensity of his
egoism. Poor Agnes Strickland was anxious to be introduced to him, and,
after expressing her great admiration of his books, she begged to be
allowed to send him a copy of her “Queens of England.” Borrow cried,
“For God’s sake don’t, madam; I should not know what to do with them.”
And, getting up, he said to Mr. Donne, of the London Library, who had
introduced the ill-assorted pair, “What a d— fool that woman is!” There
was Mrs. Bevan, the wife of the Suffolk banker, with whom he went to
dine, Dr. Hake being of the company. Borrow knew that the bank had
dealt, as he thought, rigorously with a friend who was in financial
straits. Mrs. Bevan, who, of course, had no responsibility in this
matter, sat next to Borrow at dinner. Dr. Hake describes her as “a
simple, unpretending woman, desirous of pleasing him,” which she sought
to do by describing the pleasure with which she had read his books.
“Pray, what books do you mean, madam?” said Borrow. “Do you mean my
account-books?” And he rose from the table, walking up and down the room
during dinner, and wandered about the house till the carriage was
ordered. There was Thackeray, whom he met at Hardwicke House, in
Suffolk. Thackeray ventured to ask him whether he had read the “Snob
Papers” in _Punch_. “In _Punch_?” said Borrow. “It is a periodical I
never look at!”
Instances of his boorishness could be multiplied, but it is sufficiently
proved. Let us see what there is on the other side of the account.
There is a tale told by Mr. Ewing Ritchie {140} which illustrates the
fact that Borrow thoroughly detested the practice of snubbing—when he
witnessed it as a third person. A clergyman at the supper table at
Oulton Hall (then let to a tenant who was a Nonconformist) made an
onslaught upon a young Independent minister for holding Calvinistic
opinions. The occasion of this Christian dispute was the more
appropriate as they had all just returned from an undenominational
meeting of the Bible Society, at which Borrow had made a speech. The
minister stood up to the cleric, and told him that the Thirty-nine
Articles to which he had sworn assent were Calvinistic. The reply to
this was that there was a mode of explaining away the Articles: we were
not bound to take the words “in their natural sense.” The young
Nonconformist confessed that he did not understand that way out of the
difficulty, and subsided. Then Borrow stepped into the fray, “opening
fire on the clergyman,” says Mr. Ritchie, “in a very unexpected manner,
and giving him such a setting-down as the hearers, at any rate, never
forgot. All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms was
held up by Borrow to ridicule, and the clergyman was beaten at every
point.” The comment of the young minister to Mr. Ritchie was, “Never did
I hear one man give another such a dressing as on that occasion.” It was
very like to be tremendous when Borrow had his Protestant bonnet on and
at the same time thought he saw a member of the Church he loved making
himself ridiculous.
The interview between Borrow and the Rev. Whitwell Elwin has been
previously mentioned (p. 52). “What party are you in the Church?” he
suddenly exclaimed to the Rector of Booton. “Tractarian, Moderate, or
Evangelical? I am happy to say _I_ am the old High.” “I am happy to say
I am _not_,” replied Elwin. A conversation thus begun with unpromising
differences of opinion about the ethics of review-writing, and continued
in an atmosphere of theological disputation, would ordinarily have ended
in a violent quarrel. Borrow must have been in an especially benignant
mood that day, for he allowed Elwin to throw aspersions upon his
pronunciation of the Norfolk dialect, and yet did not bring the _séance_
to a conclusion with lightning in his eyes, thunder on his brows, and
storms of invective flowing from his eloquent tongue. “Borrow boasted,”
says Elwin, “of his proficiency in the Norfolk dialect, which he
endeavoured to speak as broadly as possible. I told him that he had not
cultivated it with his usual success.” But the clouds cleared, the
protagonists became warm friends, and promised to visit each other. It
does not appear that Elwin ever went to Oulton, but Borrow did go to
Booton, exerted himself to please his hosts by calling upon his stores of
anecdote and adventure, and entranced the children of the rectory by
singing gypsy songs to them. It will be remembered that Elwin was then
editing the _Quarterly Review_ as deputy for Lockhart. He begged Borrow
to “try his hand at an article for the _Review_.” But Borrow was far too
sore with reviews and reviewers to entertain such a proposal; the
incident of Ford’s “Handbook,” too, was recent. “Never!” he cried. “I
have made a resolution never to have anything to do with such a
blackguard trade!”
The Booton episode is related mainly because it offers an opportunity of
referring to a trait of Borrow which has been the subject of strange
misrepresentation. Dr. Jessopp wrote for the _Daily Chronicle_ {142} a
review of a new edition of “The Romany Rye,” in which the following
remarkable passage occurred:
“Of anything like animal passion there is not a trace in all his many
volumes. Not a hint that he ever kissed a woman or ever took a
little child upon his knee. He was beardless; his voice was not the
voice of a man. His outbursts of wrath never translated themselves
into uncontrollable acts of violence; they showed themselves in all
the rancorous hatred that could be put into words—the fire smouldered
in that sad heart of his. Those big bones and huge muscles and the
strong brain were never to be reproduced in an offspring to be proud
of. How if he were the Narses of literature—one who could be only
what he was, though we are always inclined to lament that he was not
something more?”
One does not care to discuss the principal suggestion here involved, save
to say that there is not a tittle of evidence to support it, that it
cannot be believed by any student of some of the most robust and most
virile works in the English language, and that the alleged facts upon
which it is based have been categorically contradicted by Mr. Thomas Hake
(the eldest son of Dr. Gordon Hake) in an interesting letter to Mr.
Watts-Dunton. {143} This gentleman, the author of several novels, who
knew more of Borrow than anyone else, must not be confounded with his
younger brother, Mr. Egmont Hake (mentioned on page 8), the well-known
author of “The Story of Chinese Gordon.” It will be a great pity if Mr.
Thomas Hake does not give us his reminiscences of the author of
“Lavengro.” One point, however, of Dr. Jessopp’s impeachment of Borrow
may be taken up without offence. There is not a hint, says Dr. Jessopp,
that Borrow “ever kissed a woman or ever took a little child upon his
knee.” It is a new demand upon biographers that they shall record, even
by way of hint, the osculatory adventures of their heroes, and possibly
the best reply is that there is certainly no hint that he never kissed a
woman, and there is plenty of testimony to the fact that he was no
misogynist. But if a hint will suffice it may be found in Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s account of the conversation between them and the gypsy
woman Perpinia, whom he warned against smoking tobacco while she was
suckling an infant: “It ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to
smoke at all,” growled Borrow. “Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt
of stale tobacco—pheugh!” The inference is so obvious that one need not
pursue the argument by inversion of the story. When one comes to Dr.
Jessopp’s picture of Borrow in his relation to children, however, there
is a large quantity of direct evidence gathered from many quarters which
proves it to be erroneous. Mr. Thomas Hake, in the letter just cited,
says:
“When our family lived at Bury St. Edmund’s in the ’fifties, my
father, as you know, was one of Borrow’s most intimate friends, and
he was frequently at our house, and Borrow and my father were a good
deal in correspondence (as Dr. Knapp’s book shows), and my impression
of Borrow is exactly the contrary of that which it would be if he in
the least resembled Dr. Jessopp’s description of him. At that time
George was in the nursery and I was a child. He took a wonderfully
kind interest in us all . . . but the one he took most notice of was
George, chiefly because he was a very massive child. It was then
that he playfully christened him ‘Hales,’ because he said that the
child would develop into a second ‘Norfolk giant.’ You will remember
that he always addressed George by that name.”
The truth is that Borrow was exceedingly fond of children. He appealed
strongly to them. No such impression as he made upon the Elwin children
at Booton, upon the boys of Dr. Gordon Hake’s family at Bury, upon the
Cornish children he encountered in 1854 (p. 170), was ever made by a man
who did not understand children and sympathise with them.
The chronicle to the end of 1853 may be very briefly recounted. Borrow’s
mother had been persuaded in 1849 to leave the house in Willow Lane,
Norwich, where she had lived alone ever since his departure for St.
Petersburg, and take up her quarters with the family at Oulton. In the
midst of the writing of “The Romany Rye” in 1853, Dr. Hake ordered
Borrow’s wife not to remain at Oulton during the coming winter. Borrow
himself welcomed the prospect of a change, and in August he and the three
women of his household removed to Yarmouth, where they lived in lodgings
for seven years, except when they were engaged in the excursions which he
presently organised in various parts of the United Kingdom.
CHAPTER VIII
“SUCCESS TO OLD CORNWALL!”
BORROW’S only journey to the land of mystery and legend from which his
family sprang was made in 1853. It came about curiously. An incident
occurred, soon after he had taken up his residence in lodgings at
Yarmouth, which demonstrated both his personal courage and the easy terms
on which he always was with the water. {146} In the midst of a terrible
storm he dashed into the sea, himself saved one life from an overturned
boat, and assisted to rescue the rest of the people in danger. He became
the local hero of the hour, and an account of his gallantry was printed
in the _Bury Post_.
The Borrows of Cornwall had been mainly a home-keeping race. The
connection of George’s branch with the parent stem had been completely
severed half a century before, and the inhabitants of the Caradon Hills
had altogether lost sight of old Tom Borrow and his life. Now, however,
the _Plymouth Mail_ reprinted from the Bury paper a paragraph about the
Yarmouth affair, and in process of time it was read at St. Cleer. The
appearance of a person by the name of Borrow in this heroic shape was
discussed with curiosity. Putting two and two together, the Cornishmen
came to the conclusion that this celebrated author and saviour of
drowning men could be none other than the son of that Tom Borrow whose
claim to fame among them was that he had knocked down the headborough at
Menheniot Fair.
Many of the name were in the district. Henry Borrow, of Looe Down, was a
son of another Henry, George’s uncle, and therefore a cousin of the
Romany Rye. Henry had a daughter, Ann, married to Mr. Robert Taylor, of
Penquite, a person of some consideration in the locality. The upshot of
the discussion was that Mr. Taylor was requisitioned by the rest of the
family to invite the celebrity to Cornwall. In a letter of acceptance,
Borrow expressed the pleasure it gave him to receive such an invitation,
and the delight he felt in knowing that there were still some who
remembered his honoured father, who, he said, had as true a Cornish heart
as ever beat.
Thus he spent the Christmas of 1853 in the county of which he was in the
truest sense native; and of this atmosphere, most genial to him, he
breathed eagerly. Borrow never accomplished the book he proposed to
write about Cornwall. An advertisement of it was published at the end of
“The Romany Rye,” when he was fresh home from his visit and full of the
romance he had absorbed in the westernmost peninsula of England. But,
like many of his plans, it failed to come to anything. If it had been
written, it would probably have been as full of good things as his Welsh
book, and a better whole, since it was a smaller and more manageable
subject. It will be possible presently to attempt to indicate the kind
of work this might have been.
He left Yarmouth on December 23rd, and, this time not disdaining the
services of the detested railway, was able to reach Plymouth at midnight.
In that day Plymouth was the western terminus of the railway system.
Brunel’s great bridge, which carries the iron road at a dizzy altitude
across the Tamar from Devonshire into Cornwall, was not raised till six
years later, and people who adventured into the land of giants and
saints, pilchards and pasties, must complete their journey by coach.
Having slept a night at the Royal Hotel in Plymouth, Borrow found that
the Christmas traffic had crowded the coach, and he arrived at the
Borrovian determination to walk to Liskeard, on the main road eighteen
miles away, the nearest town to his objective among the hills. Leaving
his luggage to be carried on by the mail, he “threw his cloak on his arm
(a very old friend which had seen some thirty years’ service, the
constant companion of his travels”), and trudged off to Devonport, across
the Tamar by the ferry, and along the enchanting sylvan highway to the
town whose representative in Parliament was just then laying about the
“Puseyites” in a fashion most agreeable to Borrow.
There was a little stir in the bookish circles of the old Cornish borough
among whom Mr. Taylor had spread the news that Borrow was coming, and a
small party assembled to meet him and lionise him. These were drawn up
under the porch of Webb’s Hotel as the huge figure strode into view.
There was the ex-Mayor, Mr. Bernard Anstis. There was the Town Clerk,
Mr. James Jago, a connection of the Borrows by marriage. There were his
own relations. Happily, under these new auspices, he dropped his
affectation of objection to be lionised, and took wine with his
worshippers at the hotel in quite a conventional manner. Then, after tea
with the Jago family, he and Taylor mounted horseback and rode off to
Penquite, four miles away, to spend an old-style rural Christmas. “A
hospitable reception, with a log on the fire” was Borrow’s own word for
it—a brief but hearty tribute to the effect it had upon him. On
Christmas Day he walked from Penquite to St. Cleer Church, about which
his notebooks mention that it lacked an organ (as it does to this day),
but that there was a fiddler in the gallery. Returning over the noble
expanse of St. Cleer Down, he was introduced to a family of relations by
marriage—the Pollards—and in the afternoon walked to their residence at
Woolston to have lively talk of travel with two sons who had been in
Australia, and to discuss the prehistoric memorials of the district,
which he describes as “Druid stones.” All the Borrows have left St.
Cleer, but the Pollards are in possession of Penquite.
It may seem that one lingers over the details of a visit which was but a
small incident in Borrow’s life. The excuse must be offered that, if one
could but penetrate the mystery of what may be called the Spirit of Old
Cornwall, one would be in possession of the key to much that is
mysterious in Borrow. He had inherited it fully, and it shaped many of
his most pronounced characteristics. Here, if anywhere and at any time,
he was at home—far more at home than his father had ever been; what freak
of atavism may not account for that? Where eyes look out upon a world of
wonder and of miracle, where even yet magic and supernatural intervention
have their sway in that world’s affairs, and there is an underworld of
faery, where strange Celtic words are of common use and wont, the
philological, legend-loving wanderer was in a fitting atmosphere.
Not many people remain in Cornwall now who can remember Borrow, but a few
years ago I found memories of the man and his eccentricities still lively
among old inhabitants. Borrow amazed them not only by his personal
peculiarities, but by his intellectual superiority to “they Borrowses.”
There were many Borrows round about, small farmers, excellent and worthy
undistinguished people, the friends and equals of their neighbours; the
staggering fact was that such a wonder, such a celebrity, such a walking
encyclopædia of information on matters of which they had never heard,
should have sprung from the Borrow stock. His “curious ways” were
subject of remark, but his popularity rose superior to his manners: in a
few short weeks he obtained a reputation for liveliness hardly second to
that of his father.
I have been told that he roamed the Caradons in all weathers without a
hat, in search of sport and specimens, antiquities and dialects. He
often carried a gun. If a bird that fell to him dropped in a moorland
pool, he would plunge in after it and come out dripping water and beaming
triumph. Little parties he attended at Penquite, at the vicarage, at the
houses of friends in Liskeard, were
“. . . As merry
As, first, good company, good wine, good welcome
Can make good people.”
He himself kept the fireside circle roaring with his constant flow of
gypsy songs and stories. But it was an essential point that the parties
should not be genteel. “Lavengro” had not long been written, and he was
then engaged upon its sequel. Shortly he was to be writing—if it were
not already written—that chapter of the Appendix on “gentility-nonsense.”
It was, in fact, just the zenith of the anti-gentility campaign. Once he
went from Penquite into Liskeard to dine with Mr. Bernard Anstis. The
despiteful demon seized him at the ex-Mayor’s hospitable board.
Gentility showed its cloven hoof in some form or other; in the midst of
dinner Borrow protested silently against the apparition by keeping his
handkerchief in his pocket and dragging out for ostentatious use the old,
greasy, rust-stained, powder-grimed rag he kept about him for cleaning
his gun during expeditions on the moors. He seemed, said one, now
departed (John Abraham, of Liskeard), who related to me this story, to be
“perpetually repeating to himself old Burton’s maxim that ‘of all
vanities and fopperies, to brag of gentility is the greatest.’ Yet he
was proud of the fact that his father derived from what he called the
Cornish ‘_gentillâtre_.’” Mr. Taylor was a member of a card club in
Liskeard, to which belonged the doctors and lawyers and other
professional gentlemen of the town. Borrow was taken in to play cards
with them. But it was far too tame for him. While they settled down to
their rubber, he stole out to explore the back slums of the town,
“picking up all the disreputable characters he could find, working off
his knowledge of ‘cant’ on them, and getting out of them what he could.”
Borrow met at St. Cleer a kindred spirit in the vicar, Berkeley. This
was an Irishman of the North—not to put too fine a point on it, an
Orangeman,—a man of some pretensions to learning and a great “original,”
as they might say in Cornwall. Berkeley’s militant Protestantism was
quite as fierce as Borrow’s. But for a certain Irish cob, as he tells
us, Borrow might have become a mere philologist. It was in Ireland that
he first developed the taste for petty adventure which he now indulged to
the full in the wilds of Cornwall. Here was common ground. Berkeley
piled coals on the fire of his anti-Papist enthusiasm. The good vicar
was, withal, convivial in disposition, exiled among a people cloaking
their essential kindness under a serious demeanour, and exceedingly
abstemious. He was open-hearted and open-handed when he had money, which
was not always. He suffered once at the hands of ruthless bailiffs. As
a burning Protestant, he was on amicable terms with the Dissenters, who
formed the majority of his parishioners in Methodist Cornwall; he was a
bitter enemy of Ritualism, and “Popery” was his _bête noire_. This
piquant personality presided over the destinies of the parish of St.
Cleer at a time when the fortunes of the Church of England reached their
lowest ebb in Cornwall, and the Methodist societies flourished like the
green bay-tree. It is related that for a considerable time the only
regular attendant at church, in addition to the parson, was a
schoolmaster of episcopal sympathies, who walked a mile and a half of a
Sunday morning to hear Berkeley’s denunciation of the Papists echoing
through an empty building.
Berkeley was one of those Irish Protestants to whom Borrow had paid
tribute as a “most remarkable body of men who during two centuries have
fought a good fight in Ireland in the cause of civilisation and religious
truth . . . where . . . though surrounded with difficulties of every
kind, they have maintained their ground; amidst darkness they have held
up a lamp, and it would be well for Ireland were all her children like
these, her adopted ones.” This is highly controversial ground, upon
which there is no need to enter, save for the purpose of remarking that
the man who had recently written that was like to be a friendly soul to
Berkeley. And during his stay in Cornwall he was frequently at the
vicarage. He would, as Berkeley related to Dr. Knapp in the
character-sketch he reproduces, “suddenly spring from his seat and walk
to and fro the room in silence; anon he would clap his hands and sing a
gypsy song, or perchance would chant forth a translation of some Viking
poem; after which he would sit down again and chat about his father,
whose memory he revered, as he did his mother’s.” {154} He had the
“Horrors” more than once. He told Berkeley that these attacks of
depression were the result of the attempt made by a gypsy crone to poison
him, as related in “Lavengro.” The vicar and his wife visited Penquite
one evening, and found Borrow sitting, sunk in despair, by the side of a
huge fire, taking no notice of person or thing. He remained wrapped in
his mood of melancholy for hours, and was only roused from it when Mrs.
Berkeley sat down at the piano and softly played some old Scots and Irish
airs. Then, after a while, he jumped up and danced about the room, and
began to shout a joyous melody. The “Horrors” had been conjured away,
and he was another man. He made up for his previous obsession by giving
the company liberally of his best, pouring out good stories and
side-splitting anecdotes as fast as he could recite them. And, as Mrs.
Berkeley was leaving the room, he said to her, “Your music was as David’s
harp to my soul.”
One of the sources of Borrow’s pride in his father was his long and loyal
service as a soldier; he had no respect for people who beat the sword
into a ploughshare. Berkeley records his retort upon a young man who was
telling how he had retired from the army because “the army was—aw—no
place for a gentleman now.”
“I should judge,” said Borrow, “that it was rather the other way.”
“Aw—what do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Why, this: that the army is no place for a man who is
not a gentleman, and that such a person was right in leaving it.”
Borrow was fortunate, apparently, in the occasions of some of these
Johnsonian fulminations. It is not everybody who would endure the
treatment so mildly as did the ex-army officer, or that latitudinarian
don who is reported once to have met Borrow at Dr. Hake’s house. The
pundit preached at Borrow for some time, so runs the tale, and, when he
had finished, Borrow thumped the table with his fist, crying, “Sir,
you’re a fool!” As _Punch_ very justly remarked about this prodigious
narrative, because the article in which it appeared was in praise of
Borrow, Borrow’s rudeness was made to appear to be “the end of the don
for ever . . . there was no appeal.” Yet the don probably had a case,
and if the article had been in praise of him, Borrow would certainly have
been made to appear the fool. He has suffered not a little from the
ill-regulated enthusiasm of admirers who insist on counting his petulance
and his outbursts of boorishness as his minor virtues instead of his
major vices.
A quaint commentary on anecdotes of this sort is Berkeley’s assertion
that Borrow often repeated to him the answer he received from an old
prize-fighter in reply to the question, “What is the best way to get
through life quietly?”—“Learn to box, and keep a civil tongue in your
head.” Surely the most illuminating example of pure precept without
example that can be unearthed in all literature. Berkeley shared the
common fate of Borrow’s associates who supposed that a successful writer
would care to discuss other writers. The genial vicar found how good a
hater his visitor was; he displayed his spleen against the Martineaus; he
foamed over the inoffensive Mrs. Stowe. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was then the
fashion, and Berkeley sang its praises. Borrow showed great excitement,
and presently exploded invective against “a lot of Uncle Toms and
Tomfools!” When he cooled down he had the grace to apologise for his
vehemence.
But in all this intercourse with the lively Orangeman, of course, Borrow
is to be seen only on one side, and that not the best, of his many-sided
character. It was his controversial side. Berkeley, not native, had
little intimate knowledge of Cornwall. Just one fact appears in his
reminiscences which may fitly bridge the gulf between these episodes and
Borrow’s real adventures. He liked to pore over the register of St.
Cleer Church, where the names of so many Borrows were inscribed, and one
day was sent into transports of delight by the discovery of a marriage
record in which the woman’s name was Jenefer—a name commoner in Cornwall
aforetime than at present. “Can you not see?” he cried. “It is
Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife!”
Borrow, who wrote that fine passage about Stonehenge, which has been
already quoted (p. 54), who waited for sunrise over that silent plain
under the portal of giants, could not fail to be fascinated by the
archæological riches of his father’s native place. Particularly was he
entranced by the Trevethy Stone—alternatively “Trethevy.” Few parishes
in the kingdom can boast a prehistoric structure of so elaborate a kind
as this huge cromlech, few parish roads so great a store of relics of
bygone art and ancient piety as the mile or so of parish road that Borrow
traversed in order to reach it. It is at once the finest and the
least-known cromlech in the West of England, and in a splendid state of
preservation. The walls are four huge slabs of granite, only one of
which has departed from the perpendicular; the roof is a fifth huge slab,
in one corner of which is a round hole that has formed the theme of many
a heated archæological discussion. If, as is supposed, the ancients (who
without the assistance of machinery dealt with such enormous weights as
these) first constructed great earthworks, and then pulled the rocks into
position by rolling them up the slopes upon the trunks of fir-trees, the
hole may have been used for the attachment of the ropes upon which the
army of workmen hauled. Or the hole may be the work of weather, which
has wrought such pixy-pranks in granite, as may be observed in the
Devil’s Cheesewring not far off. The Trethevy cromlech must have been
the memorial, and probably the burial-place, of some great chieftain.
Whatever the grave or the cairn contained, it was, like all the other
monuments of the kind, rifled ages ago, and nothing but the silent stones
is left.
Borrow says of his sensations when he saw it, “A thrill came over me as I
surveyed this gigantic erection.” He does not tell us what his
speculations were as to the origin of the hole; but after he had climbed
to the top and carefully measured every stone, he put his arm through the
hole, and shouted, “Success to Old Cornwall!” He spares us the obvious
comparison between the Eleusinian Mysteries and the rites of the
Mên-an-tol, or holed stone, administered to Druidic neophytes.
From Penquite it was not a far cry, for a man who walked five miles in an
hour with ease, to the great brown-backed hill of Caradon, seamed all
along its foot with the wounds inflicted by centuries of miners. Caradon
is twelve hundred feet high, and gives a wonderful prospect over two
counties. From its summit, on a clear day, the Atlantic to the North and
the Channel to the South are the limits of vision. Across the narrow
gorge intervening strode the hat-less pedestrian of six-feet-three,
looking like some nineteenth-century giant Caradon swallowing up the
miles of bracken and heath, to the round hill where the Devil’s
Cheesewring was piled, examining with curiosity, just below the peak, the
hut of one Daniel Gumb. Gumb was no gnome, no pixy, no mythical person,
as his name might almost betoken, but a veritable person in the flesh,
stonemason and mathematician, who had carved in the block of granite that
formed the roof of his dwelling-place a problem of Euclid. There are the
squares and triangles remaining to this day to attest both his
scholarship and his craft. On a heath near by, Borrow was shown three
stone circles which carried his mind back three thousand years at least
(Sir Norman Lockyer may be able to say how much more), “the
Hurlers”—according to quaint tradition the petrified bodies of groups of
profane persons who played the ancient Cornish game of hurling on a
Sunday. There is one stone pillar a little distance to the south of the
circles, which is said to have been the messenger who was going to St.
Cleer for ale when the sudden petrifaction took place. This looks,
however, like an excrescence of modern humour, probably conceived by a
foreigner, since natives would joke with reluctance on such a subject.
Sunday is a golfless day in Cornwall even now. Another and a less ribald
version of the story was given to Borrow at Woolston. It related that
while the hurlers were gathered where the three circles now are, on
Cradock Moor there was a giant, who held in his hand a golden ball, which
he was to throw over the tower of St. Cleer Church, and the first of the
hurlers to find it was to possess it. The giant shared the fate of the
other Sabbath-breakers, and is to be seen to this day on the moor in the
form of “The Longstone”—an old round-headed cross.
A few miles in upon the moor to the north, Borrow twice visited the very
heart and centre of Cornish romance—the lonely mountain pool of Dozmary.
Set high among the wild, uncultivated hills, the pool breathes mystery.
It is hundreds of feet above the river that winds down the combes: whence
comes the water? The love of magical solutions for natural conundrums is
deep-rooted. Colloquial opinion has held the pool in awe, reported it
fathomless; and at the present day, to explain a lake at the top of a
hill, with no visible intake of water, by saying it is fed from the
inexhaustible reservoir of the peat in the surrounding country, is not
held by some people to be facing the question adequately. But the
spiritual and legendary mysteries of Dozmary were far more attractive to
Borrow. It is reputed to be the original setting of two of the great
legends of the world—the Passing of Arthur, and the Penance of Tregeagle.
Standing on the silver strand that belts the lake, on a moonlit night of
such winter weather as Borrow found in the hills, it is easy to
reconstruct the ritual of the Mort d’Arthur, either on the lines of
Malory or those of Tennyson, to erect stately scenes and silent
processionals, to enact the temptation of Bedivere, to select the clump
of flags in which he hid the brand Excalibur, to see his three journeys
to the shore, and finally to watch the whirling and flashing of the blade
as it left his hand and curved over the water, where rose that arm
“Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.”
It is easy to imagine the last scene of all—Arthur coming
“Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked,
Larger than human on the frozen hills,”
the funeral barge appearing on the waters, bearing the three queens, the
commencement of the voyage into the unknown, to the island valley of
Avalon. By the cold moonlight the spectacle fits the frame, for all
distances are magnified and the awkward corners of daylight fact are
obscured by the mysterious glamour. It is not the setting Tennyson has
given to the Idyll, but it mates the story as told by Malory in his
re-rendering from the French. It is not far over the hills to Slaughter
Bridge, where Arthur is said to have received his mortal wound in combat
with Sir Mordred; it is a dozen miles or so to King Arthur’s Castle at
Tintagel.
Fascinating as the great allegory is in any setting, it may be assumed,
quite safely, that Borrow was even more keenly interested in the other,
wilder, fiercer legend of Dozmary—the legend of Tregeagle. For, though
he exclaimed his pleasure at detecting a resemblance between the names
Jenefer and Guinevere in the parish records of St. Cleer, and afterwards
made a journey to the Arthurian country to the north—when he passed by
Caerleon on his tour through Wales, he did not turn aside to dream of the
Round Table, but contented himself with mentioning Caerleon as “at one
time one of the most considerable towns in Britain,” and went on to
explain that whisky really was a corruption of the Erse word for water,
and that meticulous accuracy would describe the fiery spirit as
usquebaugh!
The Penance of Tregeagle was a very different matter. It is a variant of
the universal Satanic legend. Tregeagle is a prototype of the immemorial
man who makes compact with the Father of Evil, the bargain in this case
being a hundred years of earthly pleasure in return for his soul
immortal. The parable is an answer to the tragic question, “What shall
it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
Tregeagle was a shepherd, who, dissatisfied with his share of the good
things of earth, expressed a petulant wish to possess all he could see.
The Devil appeared to him in guise of Knight, arrayed in black armour,
carrying a black lance, riding a black horse, accompanied by two black
hounds of hell. The stranger challenged Tregeagle’s desire; for the
forfeit of his soul at the end of a hundred years, he should have during
those hundred years a castle and broad lands and endless riches. The
shepherd accepted the terms; the Black Knight sounded his terrible horn
and rode away, with the black hounds (which dominate the story in all its
versions) snarling at his horse’s heels. In some form or other the dog
is nearly always associated with the Satanic legend. In the Faust
stories the Spirit of Evil is introduced as a dog. In “Tam o’ Shanter,”
“There sat Auld Nick in shape o’ beast,
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large.”
Upon the Devil’s departure, Tregeagle fell into a trance, and, when he
awoke, the moors were changed into waving forests and verdant meadows,
and on the hill where Dozmary had been stood a splendid castle.
Tregeagle himself was arrayed in knightly costume, and saluted as their
lord by a stately retinue.
In the course of his hundred years of prosperity all his fine stock of
original sin had black and bloody development. Rapine, murder, and
pillage went unchecked; he consummated his crimes by abducting the lovely
virgin Goonhylda, daughter of the Earl of Cornwall, and shutting her up
in the castle. Her father led an expedition to rescue her, and its
arrival at Tregeagle’s gates precisely coincided with the expiration of
his hundred years. And as the Earl’s messenger thundered there, the
sound of the terrible horn and the sinister baying of hounds was heard;
the Black Horseman came riding across the hills, calling upon Tregeagle
to surrender himself, for that his bond was due.
Tregeagle, in a palsy of fear, stepped out, and was immediately stricken
dead by a bolt from the black clouds that had suddenly o’erspread the
scene. A storm raged, a spectre arose from the corpse of Tregeagle and
fled into the murk, pursued by the grim huntsman and his hounds. When
the storm had passed, the enchantment was over. Castle, forests and
meadows had vanished; once more stretched the wide brown moors, glittered
the surface of the pool. But Tregeagle was condemned for ever to the
service of the Devil, who delights to set him Sisyphean tasks, of which
the chief is to drain dry the pool of Dozmary by baling it with a limpet
shell which has a hole in the bottom. Let him desist for a moment, and
his torture begins; he flies shrieking before the Huntsman and his
ghastly hounds. The spectre horseman and his pack are known as “The
Devil and his Durdy Dogs.” The punishment of Tregeagle is only a small
part of their business. They travel far and wide, not only over the
moors but along the sea coasts, and their attentions are most fatal to
those who happen to be abroad at night bent on deeds of evil. There is a
tale of a herdsman who was on the moor of a winter’s night, and was
chased by the Durdy Dogs, which came rushing down from a neighbouring
tor. He could not run fast enough to escape, and just as they were close
upon him he fell on his knees in prayer. Immediately the dogs stood at
bay, howling ferociously. The terrible Huntsman shouted, “Bo Shrove!”
(“the boy prays”), and at the word both he and his hounds vanished. {166}
Similar legends of the yeth-hounds of Dartmoor are heard in Devonshire.
As the black dogs hunt Tregeagle across the Cornish hills, their baying
and his cries of agony are heard in lonely cottages at night. One draws
closer to the chimney-corner as the wind pelts moaning athwart the waste,
when this tradition is related to him by firelight in one of the crofts
near by. Crying children are told that they are “roarin’ an’ howlin’
like Tregeagle.”
Borrow was deeply interested, not only in these larger legends of
world-celebrity, but in the purely local folklore, the pixy stories of
the peasantry. The Cornish pixies—or “piskies,” to use the
vernacular—are diminutive fairies, generally dressed in green, very fond
of mirth and mischief, some bad, but most good. They mislead men at
night, for fun; then the only way to break the spell is for the victim to
turn his coat inside out. They play practical jokes; they resemble, now
Will o’ the Wisp, now the Scottish brownie, and again Robin Goodfellow;
when properly propitiated they sometimes make gifts to their human
neighbours of fairy food and fairy goblets. Borrow heard how the pixies
mount horses’ heads at nights, and ride them about the fields, making
stirrups of their manes; how they work in the mines, and are heard
knocking in the levels underground, like the Duegars of northern
latitudes; how some of them are under penance, like Tregeagle, to bale
dry the pool of Dozmary.
Elizabeth Borrow, his cousin, related this characteristic story to him.
A child belonging to poor parents was observed to have developed
peculiarities. Among these was the fact that it could never get enough
to eat. This is not, one might suppose, a peculiarity of children
altogether confined to St. Cleer or even to Cornwall; but this child’s
appetite was so abnormal that its relations decided to consult a wise
woman about it. The witch told them that she had no doubt it was a
pisky. She recommended them to put a large quantity of old shoes on a
spit and make the child turn it, even if they had to beat it to compel it
to the task. This procedure was adopted, and after a sound thrashing and
much complaining the child was heard to say:
“I am four score years and more,
But never saw such a roast before.”
Then, as they were too young to have a child over eighty, the parents had
proof positive that it was a pisky. The murder being out, after some
time it disappeared, and their own child was magically restored to them.
CHAPTER IX
A GALLANT GIRL AND HER FAMILY
“THE Pollards,” praised as a “very fine family” in Borrow’s notebooks,
lived at Woolston, in the neighbouring parish of St. Ive. He told them
they reminded him of Spaniards. “The gallant girl” of eighteen, who rode
with him over the countryside, Mr. Taylor’s daughter, afterwards married
Mr. Edward Pollard, and came into possession of Penquite. Miss Taylor
was a notorious horsewoman. She owned at one time a very spirited horse,
on which she used to ride every Sunday to church at St. Cleer. There was
no mounting that horse in the ordinary way, and she invariably got into
the saddle with one leap. Outside the church gate there would always be
a crowd of people assembled to
“See the young lady
Get up on her horse”
when she started home for Penquite. Of that family circle round William
Pollard, who was head of the house at Woolston during Borrow’s visit,
alternately amazed, bewildered, and enchanted by the visitor, two sons
and two daughters still survive. {168} A charming lady of great age, the
daughter, has clear recollections of the events of half a century ago.
Her impression of “the walking lord of gypsy-lore,” as Dr. Hake called
him, is of “a very tall, silvery-headed man of middle age, with wonderful
brown eyes, remarkably handsome and well-knit. He seemed to know
something about everything. The fact we marvelled at was that, being
acquainted with so many languages, he did not confound one with another.
He appeared to be a wild, romantic person, a being of whom we had never
seen the like before; his energy was unbounded—he almost lived in the
open air, though it was in the depth of a bitter winter.”
It has already been indicated that the winter of 1853–4 was unusually
severe—at any rate for Cornwall, where the climate is generally as soft
as that of Ireland. The hills and tors ascending to the north of the
country in which Borrow was staying were mantled in white during the
greater part of his visit. The clear air at these altitudes seemed to
inspirit him; he was a very different person from the Borrow who had
nursed his grievances and been tormented by his melancholy demons on the
marshes of Oulton. “One morning,” said Mrs. Edey, “after an
exceptionally heavy fall of snow during the night, he was up with the
earliest light, ploughing his way through the drifts to Woolston, where
he commandeered one of my brothers to be his companion for a whole-day
ramble over the snow-bound moors. And, said my brother, he sang as he
walked the songs of half-a-dozen nations from the time they left almost
without interruption, till they returned.”
There are two interesting passages in her story throwing a sidelight upon
his relations with children. On his frequent walks from Penquite to
Woolston he was wont to pass a certain desolate, abandoned mine. On the
side of its premises was a little rough stone building, occupied as a
cottage by a poor woman with a large family. The children’s
poverty-stricken condition attracted his notice, and he regularly took
with him in his pocket some bit of food to present to them as they stood
looking out for the arrival of the tall stranger with the white hair.
One of the children was customarily posted on the roadside to watch for
him, and this one was dubbed by Borrow “the little sentinel.” Again, at
dinner with some legal light of the district, he was suddenly missed
during dessert, and a search revealed him in a remote room surrounded by
the children of the house, whom he was amusing by his stories and
catechising in the subjects of their studies and pursuits. He excused
his absence by saying that he had been fascinated by the intelligence of
the children, and had forgotten all about the dinner. More than once he
expressed a high opinion of the mental average of Cornish children.
Penquite, the “substantial stone house on a hillside,” where Borrow
stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taylor in 1854, is a characteristic
Cornish farmhouse of the older and better sort—the native home of yeomen.
The parish road ascends a steep hillock in the direct and uncompromising
manner which is the distinctive mark of an old way, beaten out before the
era of enclosure and before the development of wheeled traffic. At the
top a thicket of pine and beech trees stands sentinel beside the
“court-gate,” beyond which the road, curling to the south, brings one to
a view of orchard land speckled with snowdrops, white gates, cedars of
rich green, a slated house, French windows gleaming in the sun, and a
garden sloping towards the stream at the bottom of the valley.
This was the destination to which Shorsha, the horse-wizard, and Robert
Taylor, the Cornish farmer, cantered up on Christmas Eve of 1853. The
Taylors left it in 1877, handing the farm on to Edward Pollard, who had
married their only daughter. At Mrs. Pollard’s death (1904), the
property passed into the hands of her eldest son, Edward. It was this
eldest son who answered my pull at the bell-knob under the ancient
granite porch, and gave me a real welcome. He has added a section to the
house at the back, but the southern front remains as it has been for many
generations. Here was the old low-ceiled parlour where Borrow and
Berkeley, the Irish vicar, discussed the comparative beauty and virtue of
Cornish women and Irish women; beyond, the stone-flagged kitchen where he
got his “hospitable reception, with a log on the fire.” But the march of
science has partly spoilt the venerable kitchen. It has left the settle
from which Shorsha’s long legs stretched to the blaze, but it has filled
up the open hearth and put a modern kitchen range in its place. Mr.
William Pollard is the son of one of that “fine family” at Woolston with
whom Borrow discoursed of Australia, whence two of the young Pollards had
just returned that Christmas. In the early ’fifties Australia was a name
to conjure with; Ballarat was a magic incantation. Two of the five
Pollard sons adventured there, and it was one of the two that I visited
Woolston to see.
Mr. Pollard, in his ninetieth year, was a prisoner in a canopied bed, but
with a mind clear and logical, and full of memories and interests.
Scattered around him were newspapers and books, and one of the books a
contemporary of Borrow himself. “A very strange, wild person,” was his
introductory description of Borrow; “a very tall, upstanding man, wiry
and lithe, with a strong face and snow-white hair. He looked fit for
anything, and I believe he was—that he feared no man nor devil. I
remember the first evening he came here. We had tea in the parlour, and,
farmhouse fashion, we had some roast beef on the table, which my father
carved. After tea, somebody suggested that he should sing a song. He
did sing it, and a weird, wailing, outlandish song it was. No—not a
gypsy song. . . . Maybe it was the song of Swayne Vonved. He got up and
waved his arms as he sang of his hero’s adventures, he fought an
imaginary foe, and finally, as he worked himself into a fervour of
passionate song, he seized the carving-knife from the table and swished
it round his head. We all drew back, and some of us were glad when the
song was over and he dropped that carving-knife and sat down. His voice
was tremendous—‘as big as Tregeagle’s,’ as we say in Cornwall.”
Not only the legendary lore and the ancient language of Cornwall
interested Borrow; he was equally attracted by the physical
characteristics of the peninsula, and impressed by the great wealth lying
dormant in the incalculable masses of granite on the moors. “If I were a
rich man,” he exclaimed, “I would buy up all this granite; it will be
wanted one day.” The demand for Cornish granite in various great public
works and the present activity of the quarries at the Cheesewring
illustrate his foresight.
The Woolston people were particularly struck by Borrow’s intense
enthusiasm for the legend and the poetry of the North. He himself
relates how, on a walking tour farther west, he faced eight dreary miles
on a rainy evening, solacing himself by singing:
“Look out, look out, Swayne Vonved!”
the Danish ballad he had translated more than thirty years before. At
Woolston he made the Vikings live again for them. “He gave us Odin and
Thor without ceasing.” There never could have been so much Norse
mythology in that part of Cornwall before. Some of the ladies seem to
have fallen in love with his hair, but could not summon up courage to beg
a lock; and one of them saved his combings and preserved them in
tissue-paper for years.
The keen, almost boyish, delight which Borrow took in everything he saw
and heard in the hills, and his complaisance towards the company he met,
are remarkable in the man whose odd misanthropic fancies and wretched,
paltry miseries we have been watching during many pages. The contrast is
vivid indeed. In Cornwall Borrow was both pleased and pleasing—with
occasional outbursts such as the display of spleen against “Uncle
Tomfools”—whether he were riding with “the gallant girl” over the snowy
country, listening to her superstitions about magpies—
“One for sorrow, two for mirth;
Three for a wedding, four for death” {174a}
—or visiting patriarchal villagers at Tremar to hear their stories of
pixies and foxes, {174b} or attending rural dinner parties, with all the
neighbourhood beaten up in his honour. Some of the pixy stories have
been given. The attitude of the countryside towards the fox in that day
was shockingly unorthodox. He was vermin to be destroyed whenever and
wherever discovered: did he not wreak incalculable damage in the farmyard
by various and subtle devices, such as taking his brush in his teeth and
whirling round like a teetotum under the poultry perches, till the
unhappy fowls, rendered dizzy by the unaccustomed spectacle, fell an easy
prey to his rapacious appetite? How a fox was shot and the murderer
brought his victim for admiration both of the brush and the deed, is
related without the turning of a hair. The crime was so common as to be
merely a habit; Mr. Baring-Gould, in his story of Parson Jack Russell,
has given a similar account of the ethics of certain districts in
Devonshire about the same period.
Borrow revealed his curiosity and enthusiasm in many ways. On one
occasion a young lady named Every was of the party at Woolston. Part of
the conversation turned—as it inevitably would where Borrow was
concerned—on Cornish names and their derivations. The girl asked him if
he could tell her anything about her name. His mind flew at once to the
one Every or Avery whose career was familiar to him, that Captain John,
of Plymouth, the fierce pirate of the Eastern Seas, the mortal enemy of
John Company, who was reputed to have become a king in Madagascar—one of
the choicest villains in the history of the world. “I said that the most
celebrated person who ever bore it was a buccaneer, whereupon she
informed me that her grandmother had told her that she was descended from
a famous pirate.” And he adds the suggestive commentary, “Very pleasant
party!” {176}
One of the most interesting gatherings arranged for him, of course, was
the family dinner party at the old farmhouse of Tredinnick, where his
father was born. According to Berkeley, who was among the guests, nearly
all the Borrows of the district were present, and George was highly
excited, with his mind constantly running upon the father whom he had
worshipped. The circumstances of the feast and the memories it aroused
were too much for him; he ceased to be merry and talkative, and closed up
his store of song and story; instead of exerting himself to amuse his
friends, he sat with restless glance wandering around the rooms in which
old Captain Tom had spent his boyhood; his eyes were moist. Suddenly he
left the party and burst into the open air—meeting with an ugly tumble
over a low wall into the yard. “Well,” said he to Berkeley as they
parted for the night, “we have shared the old-fashioned hospitality of
old-fashioned people in an old-fashioned house.” He was overwrought to
an extraordinary extent, and the excitement, together with the shock of
his little accident, brought on an indisposition that kept him laid up
all next day.
Having been a little more than a fortnight at Penquite, he began his
walking tour through Cornwall to the extreme west. At Mousehole, not far
from the Land’s End, lived one Burney, an officer of the coastguard, who
was a distant connection of the family. Taylor had given Borrow a letter
of introduction to him. “You can only see Cornwall or know anything
about it by walking through it,” he wrote to his wife. The secrets of
Cornwall, the conditions of its detachment, the spell of its romance, can
only be penetrated by the man who “the known track . . . deserts, and has
a by-way of his own.” He must explore its hills and combes, and its
remoter villages for their archæological treasures—whether of the
prehistoric races who have left their mark upon its sad grey stones, or
of the saints and heroes of the early Christian time, or of the authors
and the actors of its Mystery Plays—and he must know the simple folk of
its ancient blood to probe the riches of their lore. Even Borrow hardly
turned far enough aside from the beaten paths to get more than a very
general impression of the country; but he was a man who observed readily
and absorbed eagerly.
Nicholas Borrow, his cousin, was his topographical mentor and guide on
many expeditions, and, now that he was leaving for the West, accompanied
him on horseback across country to set him in the main road. He saw
Tremewth, where his father’s comrade, Thomas Honey, lived on the top of
the hill, and the field near Redgate containing the grave of King Doniert
(or Dungerth), the lord of the Western Britons in the ninth century, with
its broken pillar and Latin inscription. Parting with his cousin, he
walked on to Lostwithiel, the end of his first day’s journey, took his
ease in the Talbot Inn, and feasted on roast fowl and bacon. The ancient
stannary town, with its shire hall dating from the thirteenth century,
and its memories of the Civil War—when Essex stabled his horses in the
church, and his troopers brought a horse to the font and with a mock
baptism sardonically gave it the name of Charles—produced mingled
emotions in Borrow’s mind, for, in spite of his militant Protestantism,
he was a staunch Tory and a Royalist. Turning aside to see the hoary
Castle of Restormel, which had been a ruin since the time of Edward the
Third, he recorded some vivid impressions of the neighbourhood as “the
most beautiful he ever saw.”
They will not appear exaggerated to those who have approached it as
Borrow did through the wonderful Glyn Valley, by the road which follows
the river brawling down from its moorland birthplace towards the sea at
Fowey. The second day he covered twenty-four miles to Truro. The sight
of a cairn on a hill top “brought the Spirit of Old upon my mind.”
_Antiquis debetur reverentia_ was always a potent principle with Borrow;
nevertheless, the modern Protestant within him sometimes got the better
of the antiquary. On the previous day he had seen a cross, and examined
it. This monument “seemed to have been raised by some Puseyite. The
base contained a nonsensical inscription to the effect that it had been
erected on a place which had been devoted to ‘Druidic Idolatry.’ The
Druids were no idolaters, though the Papists are.” {179} It was
darkening to evening when he passed through Grampound, one of the minute
derelict boroughs of Cornwall, whose disfranchisement in 1821 was the one
and only result of Lord John Russell’s first agitation against electoral
corruption. The appearance of The Dolphin Inn, looking snug with its
lighted windows and air of warmth and comfort, was a strong invitation to
a tired wayfarer who had more often than most men
“. . . by care oppressed
Found in an inn a place of rest.”
He looked wistfully at it, but withstood the temptation (with the
assistance of Swayne Vonved), and pushed on through the rainy night to
Truro, and to dinner and bed at the Royal Hotel.
In the morning he inspected the town, and visited the church—which no
longer exists save as a fragment built into the northern side of Benson’s
great cathedral—and then started again for the West. His walk extended
no farther than ten miles that day. On his arrival at Redruth, one of
the centres of the mining district, he was arrested by the great hill of
Carn Brea, to the north-west of the town. Its noble summit is one of the
most striking features of the landscape viewed from any part of West
Cornwall, and it is the haunt of many legends—mostly unauthentic and
nearly all ridiculous. The entertaining old Borlase, in his “Antiquities
of Cornwall,” invented a grotesque set of theories about the origin of
the curiously-shaped rocks that strew the long length of the hill’s
crest. Borlase saw Druids everywhere, and Druidical sculpture in every
freak Nature had played through countless centuries with the granite
which she found so pliable. It was inconceivable in his time that the
“basins” and channels in the rocks of Carn Brea could have been merely
the result of “weathering,” as the geologists inform us now they must
have been. “In yonder grave a Druid lies” was predicated by Borlase of
every mound he saw. One perceives that Borrow adopted all his theories
without modification. On Carn Brea he was not merely on a magnificent
precipitous hill, with a wide-stretching view away to the Atlantic on the
north; he was in the midst of a thousand memories of the past; the
“Spirit of Old” came upon him again; white-robed priests defiled along
the heather, and performed their sacrificial rites upon the granite
altars. The notes he made about Carn Brea were, says he, “written on the
top of the sacrificial rock. In the upper basin, the horrid place of
sacrifice, there are outlets for the blood to stream down. There seem to
be about eight basins in all.” William Borlase himself could have
accomplished nothing better than that.
On January 12th he set off from Redruth towards Penzance in torrents of
rain. Just above Rosewarne he came across a gypsy caravan, and of
necessity must go to find its inhabitants and talk with them. A dark
woman addressed him; he asked her her name in Romany. She pretended at
first not to understand, but finally answered him. Presently her
husband, “a remarkably knavish-looking personage,” put out his head and
began to discourse with him. He told him that their name was Bosvile.
It will be remembered that the “Flaming Tinman” of Mumper’s Dingle was
called Bosvile. The Bosviles, or Boswells, as they were called in later
days, were, in fact, a well-known tribe of gypsies in the West of
England. Another family, real Cornish in all their associations, formed
a branch of the ubiquitous Smiths. In 1866 they departed from England
almost in a body for America, where most of the Stanleys and the Coopers
had already gone.
While talking with Bosvile and his mort, Borrow heard the sound of
fiddles in an adjoining tent, and was invited to join the company, for
doubtless his perfect knowledge of the language and his unfailing
fascination over the gypsies had overcome all their first suspicions; but
he told them that he was “mokhado” (muddy and dirty), gave them a
four-penny piece, and departed. He went through Hayle, then, and now,
one of the Cornish homes of industry, which he contemptuously dismisses
as “a filthy place.” Reaching Penzance in the evening, he dined at the
Union Hotel, and held converse with a mining agent, whom he discovered to
be “a sensible man, full of Cornish patriotism.”
On the 13th he turned up Mr. Burney at Mousehole, one of the quaintest
fishing villages among the hundred peppered round the Cornish coast, and
found him excellent company. There is just a glimpse in his memoranda of
the kind of miscellany Borrow might have given to the world if he had
ever written his book on Cornwall—a mixture of travel and religion,
legend and dialogue, philology and adventure. A page or two would
certainly have been occupied by the story which Burney told him the first
day they met of his doings on the West Coast of Africa—many naval
officers of the mid-century could relate good stories of slave-chasing in
those regions—and especially of the triumphant expedition to the town of
a native king, who at first resisted their demands, his capital being
fortified and defended by thirty guns of sorts. The essence of the tale
was that while the palaver was in progress Burney’s gunner went round and
drenched the touch-holes of all the thirty defending pieces. Borrow
returned to Penzance that night: again, had the book been written, we
should doubtless have been in possession of the full narrative of the
experiences of that mining agent who had been in Greenland; but he is
only just dotted down, a bare, unclothed lay figure in the surviving
Notes. For the rest of his time in West Penwith, Borrow was the guest of
Mr. Burney, exploring the country of Dolly Pentreath, who in the
eighteenth century had spoken the Cornish language, and examining the
traces there remaining of the Spanish expedition against the Cornish
coasts in 1595. On the Sunday he went to church at Paul (where Dolly
Pentreath was buried), and in the evening “read the Bible and prayers to
the family” of Burney.
There was, of course, a trip to St. Michael’s Mount, the show-place of
those parts, that castle on an island in Mount’s Bay, which approaches in
singularity and beauty, if it does not quite reach the glory of, its
namesake Mont St. Michel on the coast of Normandy. Borrow went with
Burney by boat from Mousehole, and observed with curiosity the points of
greatest interest on the island and about the buildings—the bastion by
which the Parliamentarians were said to have entered when they attacked
the place during the Civil War, the chapel within the castle, and the
stone vault underneath it in which a skeleton was found. Full of his
scheme for the book on Cornwall, he made his memoranda as he went in
order that the impressions might be quite fresh. Just as he set down old
William Borlase’s superstitions “on the top of the sacrificial rock” at
Carn Brea, so he records that his notes on St. Michael’s Mount were
written in the vault.
Borrow returned from the Mount on foot to Mousehole, and two days later
started upon an expedition to the most impressive part of the Cornish
coast—the Logan Rock and Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the spot where Charles Wesley
is reputed to have written his famous hymn:
“Here on a narrow neck of land
’Twixt two unbounded seas I stand.”
The traveller, however, says very little about the magnificent scenery,
and a great deal about the companion of his travels. In “The Romany
Rye,” when Lavengro has succeeded in divorcing his old friend Murtagh
from the disreputable trade of a thimble-engro, it will be remembered
that, in order to elevate the Irish boy’s spirits, he induces him to tell
a story.
“Cheer up, man,” said I, “and let’s have the story, and let it be
about Ma-Coul and the salmon and his thumb.”
But the tale of the finding of Finn-Ma-Coul in Veintry Bay, his servitude
of Dermod David Odeen, his cooking of the salmon, the blister on his
skin, his discovery of all witchcraft by the sucking of his thumb, and
all the rest of it, was not related to Lavengro in the ’twenties by
Murtagh at Horncastle Fair. It was told to him on the Cornish cliff
paths by one Cronan, the Irish guide who was conducting him to the Logan
Rock, as the Notebook shows, and inserted after Borrow got back to
Norfolk to lend the colour of romance to the end of “The Romany Rye.” Of
Cronan’s fairy stories, one is cited at length—the tale of the Clog
Vreach, or the parti-coloured stone, under the heading, “An Irish Fairy
Tale, told on a Wild Road by a Wild Native.” {185} It is a tale of a
drunken blackguard and tyrannical landlord, who vowed that he would shoot
all the fairies to be found on the moor where the Clog Vreach stood. He
went there and fired off all his ammunition, but when he returned his
body was bent, his tongue was hanging out, and his servants, seeing that
he was next door to dead, put him to bed, and four people poured raw
brandy down his throat all night. After that it is not surprising to
learn that in twenty-four hours his body had turned black and life had
left him. Cronan did not attribute his death to this remarkable
prescription, but rather to the vengeance of the supernatural powers.
“And,” says he, “a very fitting end it was for a person who was a tyrant
and interfered with the fairies.”
These things seem to have occupied Borrow on the journey to the exclusion
of all else. Before he left the district, however, he made some extracts
from the register of Paul Church, recording the death of a Keigwin killed
by the Spaniards in 1595, and the death of Dolly Pentreath (entered in
her married name of Dorothy Jeffery) in 1777. He had hunted up an old
man of eighty at Mousehole, who in his boyhood had seen and heard Dolly
Pentreath, and he had made a long list of Cornish words taken down from
the lips of aged persons in that village. No doubt the Cornish book was
intended to include a vocabulary of the old tongue.
I do not know of any evidence that Borrow had made a study of the Cornish
language in previous years, but his command of Welsh, and in a less
degree his knowledge of the three variants of Gaelic, made almost the
whole of the Cornish words surviving, in names of places and people, and
in peculiarities of local dialect, easily understood of him. There is a
general resemblance between Cornish and Welsh about which, I am told, all
writers agree, though they differ as to its exact extent. But the truth
is probably not far from the statement of Sir John Dodridge, who in 1630
said of the Cornish: “They have a particular language called Cornish
(although now much worn out of use), differing but little from the Welsh
and the language of the Britaines of France.” Mr. Henry Jenner, F.S.A.,
in his admirable “Handbook of the Cornish Language,” states that Welsh,
Cornish, and Breton “may be said to be as near together as three separate
languages can well be, but to have drifted too far apart to be accounted
three dialects of the same language.”
The principal differences between Cornish and Welsh can be stated very
briefly. The following points show the main divergences between the
Cornish of the later literary remains and the Welsh of the books and
newspapers of the present day:—
(_a_) Certain grammatical differences, such as the occasional use of an
indefinite article, never employed in Welsh.
(_b_) A number of variations in vocabulary, in which Cornish will often
be found to have used a word current in contemporary Breton in place of
one current in contemporary Welsh. This is not surprising, even if it be
not assumed that the language was taken into Brittany from England, for
the relations between the shipping ports of Cornwall and Brittany were
exceedingly close, especially those relations of contraband traffic so
dear to the hearts of the writers of romance.
(_c_) Phonetic changes resembling corruptions, such as the substitution
of “j” or English “ch” for “d” or “t” in the bodies or the beginnings of
words, and of “s” or “z” for the same letters at the ends of words. {187}
It will be seen that Borrow could have found such differences as these no
stumbling-block to his philological excursions. He would readily
recognise _Tywardreath_ as the equivalent of the Welsh, Tywardraeth, the
house on the sands, and would be assisted thereto by the sight of the
wide stretches of white sand fringing St. Austell Bay in the angle where
Tywardreath stands on its hill side. He would identify _Hendra_ as
Hendre, the old stead; _Chyandour_ as Tyrdwr, the house of the water;
_Egloskerry_ as Eglwyscerrig, the stone church; and such forms as _nance_
for nant, a ravine, _pons_ for pont, a bridge, _plou_ for plwyf, a
parish, would offer no difficulty to one familiar with parallel changes
in other groups of languages.
CHAPTER X
THE BOOK THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN
BY January 26th, 1854, Borrow was back among his friends at Penquite,
bursting in upon them lyrically with:
“Behold the man who’s been at Kinmel Dray,
Who passed by Kinmel Cres upon his way,
And who at Kinmel Worthey made a stay.”
He and Mr. Taylor undertook a long moorland tramp by tor and bog that day
to Kilmar, a jagged and precipitous hill behind the Cheesewring, where is
the huge rock structure popularly known as “King Arthur’s Bed.” The
Arthurian mood, to be developed presently, was already coming upon him.
When, next day, he walked to Liskeard, to visit the ex-Mayor once more,
and met the worthy Town Clerk, the talk turned from “Jew houses” to King
Arthur’s court, and his imaginative vision darted off to the North and
the golden traditions of glorious Camelot. On these he brooded while he
walked, and while he sat by the roaring fire of hazel faggots in the
kitchen of Penquite. Not that he allowed these ethereal matters to
engross him entirely, for he was curious about the cost of hazel-wood as
fuel—remembering that he had burnt it at the shrine of Isopel, the “Queen
of the Dingle,” thirty years gone. So he notes: “Hazel faggots, 10s. a
hundred, at 30 lbs.”
Going about among the natives, he disdained no unconsidered trifle of
lore and knowledge. Cornish phrases struck his fancy, such as “bread
baked in the clome”—in earthenware “kettles” on the open hearth, covered
with burning peat, bread of such a rare flavour and quality, indeed, as
twentieth-century man cannot conceive, even in St. Cleer, where the
“machine-baked” variety is now hawked by half a dozen enterprising bakers
from the neighbouring towns. There is another Cornish delicacy which
does persist; it is known as “thunder and lightning”—a _soupçon_ of sugar
syrup over the clotted cream of the country. “Poor old Philp,” he
records one of his relatives as narrating among the characteristics of a
local notoriety—“Poor old Philp used to like ‘triggle’ over cream.”
One story given to him by Mr. Taylor was of an old man who built himself
a hovel of turf on Kilmar Tor. In the winter of 1814 there was a great
snow-storm, and the old man’s hut was buried in the drifts for two nights
and two days. When they dug him out they found that he had been in bed
all the time, and declared that it was “the longest night I ever knawed;
I thought t’d never end.”
There was another dinner party at the old house of his forefathers. He
ploughed to Tredinnick through the drizzle of a “soft” Cornish day.
“Ben’t got wet, ha’ thee?” was the salutation of William Borrow, aged
seventy, welcoming him to the homestead. One of his few stumbling-blocks
was the Cornish dialect. “My relations are most excellent people,” he
wrote to his wife, “but I could not understand more than half of what
they said.” The simplicity of their mode of life was a surprise to him,
and probably a pleasant one; he found no affectation of gentility among
them. Wealth to the extent of £70,000 was reported to be in the united
hands of the family, but the head of it, Henry Borrow, “lives in a house
in which there is not a single grate—nothing but open chimneys.”
Discussions about the character and attributes of the pixies were
constant. Henry could hardly tell him whether he believed in the pixies
or not; but he did believe in the Durdy Dogs, having himself heard them
giving tongue. If Henry had confessed to a faith in pixies, he need not
have been ashamed of his intellectual company. The belief was shared by
no smaller a person than the redoubtable Hawker of Morwenstow, who saw
and chased a pixy two years later as he rode through a gorge on the way
home from Wellcombe. He relates how he felt himself “flush and then grow
pale” when he saw a “brown, rough shape” start up among the furze bushes,
and how, “remembering St. Thomas’s word that every spirit must crouch to
the Sign,” he made the sign in the air before urging his horse towards
the creature—which, of course, escaped!
Pixies, legends, and philology, however, all took a place in his keen
inquiries secondary to authentic recollections of his father’s youth. He
makes full notes of two anecdotes related to him. Henry Borrow’s account
of the Menheniot Fair affray, as the traveller pencilled it down, is full
of delicious filial exultation, which is repeated in another story,
narrated to him by Thomas Borrow, of Lamellion, and thus set forth:
“My father.—At one time, at Bodmin Bridge, was a big, bony man six
foot high, the terror of everybody at Plymouth and Devonport. My
father fought him at Liskeard, just by a butcher’s shop. My father
struck him a blow which sent him staggering across the street into a
cooper’s shop. He got up and came on again, saying, ‘Where is
Borrow?’ ‘Here I am,’ said my father, and struck him another blow
which knocked him down, after staggering six yards. He was
dreadfully sick, and did not ask for Borrow again.”
There is a pathetic as well as a humorous interest in these explorations
of Cornish memory for traces of the father who had died in so much doubt
as to the future of this son, and so much well-justified scepticism about
the prospect of his maintaining himself on his “Armenian or other
acquirements.”
Borrow became increasingly anxious to see the wild country on the
rock-bound north coast before he left the Duchy for London. Letters from
Mrs. Pollard mention his desire to inspect “King Arthur’s Castle at
Tintagell.” On February 1st he left Penquite for Tredinnick, to spend a
last day and night with the Borrow family there, and to brood again over
the memories of his father which the little old house awoke. It was the
only night he had slept at Tredinnick; he had been previously “much
affected on being taken upstairs, at the remembrance of his father, and
shed tears.” After breakfast the next day he set off for a rough
cross-country ride, mounted on a horse named Triumph, and accompanied by
his cousin, Nicholas Borrow. By way of the road he had twice traversed
with Miss Taylor, past Doniert’s grave, by Redgate, and along the valley
of the lonely Dreynes river, they cantered to Bolventor and the Jamaica
Inn. The derelict village of Bolventor consists at the present time
mainly of a large building set in a square of grass-grown cobbles—the
erstwhile famous Jamaica Inn. Now deprived of a licence, and selling
mineral waters to casual and disconsolate wayfarers or thirsty cyclists,
this hostelry, at the time of Borrow’s visit, was a place of some
importance—a coaching house upon the main road between London and
Falmouth. Not many years before it had been busy day and night with
scenes such as those described in the account of the inn in “The Romany
Rye,” where Lavengro acted as hostler and clerk of the stables. The
coaches clattered over the cobble-stones, and the square echoed with the
cries of jarveys and postilions, and the rattle of harness, and the
champing of bits. It was already beginning to decline in 1854; for the
railway was building far to the south, and a new line of traffic was
being opened up.
The two horsemen; now within sight of the greatest hills of Cornwall,
Brown Willy and Rough Tor, left the road and struck across the heath in
the direction of the mountainous northern horizon. “We then proceeded,”
wrote Borrow, “over moor and moss, till we came to a stream, which we
forded. It was rocky and dangerous.” If this was, as I suppose, Hanter
Gantick, the great ravine in which the Lanke river roars down between
banks composed of huge aggregations of granite boulders, the description
was not too bold. Even in his wildest adventure, he could hardly have
attempted to get a horse across a worse place. “We then ascended another
hill, on the top of which we saw at a distance an inhabited country.”
The eminence was probably Rough Tor moor, and the cultivated land the
undulating country to the north of the central wild. Whichever of the
cluster of hills it was, it could not have failed of interest for Borrow.
They provided him with hut circles, with a great Logan stone encrusted
with Druidical superstitions, the court or “hall” of King Arthur which he
had been discussing at Liskeard with Mr. Jago, and the remains of a
chapel to St. Michael, whose gate arch was removed some twenty years
before to make a doorway for the Britannia Inn, near Altarnun! Having
seen his cousin through the wilderness, and pointed out to him the Pisgah
sight of “an inhabited country,” Nicholas Borrow bade him an affectionate
farewell, and returned with the horses to Tredinnick, while George set
out on foot alone to reach Camelford. “I passed by a place called Carn
Long, and, striding forward, found myself at Camelford before I expected.
A wilder journey over moss and moor I never made.” The “moss,” by which
he betokens the bogs in the neighbourhood of Brown Willy, is a notorious
great hindrance to travellers who would otherwise ascend these hills in
much larger numbers.
The extraordinary scenery and the romantic associations of the country
upon which he was now entering amply repaid him for the toils and pains
of his day’s scramble across the backbone of Cornwall. He was in King
Arthur’s land. At Camelford he trod a battlefield ten centuries old, for
here it was that Egbert the Saxon met the Britons of the West in 823.
Borrow did not linger in the quaint old town, but pushed on towards
Tintagel by way of Slaughter Bridge already mentioned, which inherited
its grisly name from that “last weird battle in the West,” where Mordred
fell and Arthur received his mortal hurt. Enthusiastic local
authorities, more confident than the general, are able to give the date
of the conflict as A.D. 543. “At last I reached Tintagel, about 6.30
p.m., and went to an inn (the Wharncliffe Arms), kept by Symmonds,” to
whom he had been recommended from Penquite. After such a day he was glad
of its shelter and of the creature comforts it offered to a tired man on
a cold February night.
The fascinations of Tintagel are many and oddly mingled. The very air
seems full of wraiths; the solid and substantial characters of mediæval
history have their ghosts hovering about these rugged hills, no less than
the more ethereal spectres of the heroes of Arthurian myth. Tintagel
Castle, on the heights to the west, to which Borrow turned next day, is
an ancient ruin standing on a wonderful site. It has been familiar to
most people for a long time as one of the wildest and most picturesque
scenes in England, and the impression may remain the same to-day in the
minds of those who are imaginative enough to be able to blot out of the
picture the incongruous achievements of the modern hotel-builder. But it
was not so well known to any but Cornishmen when Borrow visited it, for
that was long before the iron road had reached within thirty miles of it.
The fable of Arthur’s birth in the impregnable fortress, Dundagil, whose
remains now stand gaunt and silent on their rocky eminence, may be
dismissed by a date. The architecture of the original castle was Norman;
the rebuilding took place in the thirteenth century. There is now a
great gulch 200 feet wide between the cliff where the two principal
courts stood and the “island”; it was formerly much narrower, and is
reputed to have been spanned by a drawbridge. Yet it is pleasant to
dream, as Borrow did and as Tennyson did when he lived at Boscastle a
year or two later meditating his Idylls, that this was the veritable
scene where the blameless King held court, and the Knights of the Round
Table served him. Tennyson has shackled the Arthurian legend to Tintagel
with links that can never be broken. And it is also pleasant to recall
the more authentic and more historical connections of the place—that
twelfth century when the Castle was a great stronghold, when the little
chapel of St. Julitta was founded upon the height to the west of the
island; those days in the thirteenth century when Tintagel was in such
height of glory, when David Prince of Wales, seeking refuge in his
struggle with Henry the Third, received the hospitality of its Cornish
lord. It is not a far cry across the Bristol Channel, past Lundy, to the
coast of Wales, and as he looked northward over the grey sea, Borrow
could hardly have resisted the customary emotions that the thought of
Wales created in him, with his memories of the procession of the bards
from Ab Gwylim by Elis Wyn to Gronwy Owen.
But this was rich ground for him, and he was fully employed in absorbing
impressions of men and events, past and present, which he briefly
recorded in the two notebooks that were afterwards meant to be expanded
into his work on Cornwall. There was the quaint harbour of Boscastle
near by; there was Forrabury minster, the “silent tower of Bottreux,”
with its bell-legend—the story of the peal of bells which an Earl of
Bottreux presented to Forrabury in order that its music might rival that
of Tintagel, the wreck of the ship which conveyed them from London just
off the shore while Tintagel was sounding the curfew, the warning rung
for mariners on that grim lee shore by the buried bells when a storm is
approaching from the Atlantic. There was the lovely waterfall of St.
Knighton’s Kieve. Borrow had a taste in waterfalls, and was eloquent in
describing them, though unscientific, as Dr. Russel Wallace has pointed
out. The venerable evolutionist, remarking on the progress of his
doctrine, illustrated it by the fact that so great a writer as George
Borrow could speak of a waterfall as being in all details as it was
“‘since the day of creation, and will probably remain to the day of
judgment.’” There were other associations—political in kind—which would
not have rejoiced him so exceedingly; he had no great love for
politicians, especially of the Whig sort who had controlled most of the
forty odd pocket boroughs of Cornwall. Bossiney was one of them, the
hamlet close to Tintagel, whose chief claim to utility after it ceased to
return two members to Parliament was that it contained a smithy.
On the wild coast to the west, at that time almost inaccessible and
unknown—where now the tripper in his thousands hears the music of the
Atlantic on Trebarwith Strand—he spent three days, walking long distances
and reaching as far west as Pentire Point, which guards the Bay of
Padstow. On the return journey he took the inland road, through St.
Minver and Egloshayle (“the church by the stream”), where, to avoid the
evils of continual tidal bores, a pious fifteenth-century parson got up a
subscription to build the noble bridge of seventeen arches that spans the
River Camel. At Pengelly, close to the celebrated slate quarries of
Delabole, he made the last entry in his Cornish journal. He is sitting
in the little parlour of the old Delabole Arms, and sees two prints on
the wall with inscriptions in French: “Le Revd. Dr. Amour,” and “A
l’Amour il faut se rendre.” “In the latter print,” says he, “quite an
angelic _petit maître_. The March of Gentility has reached Pengelley!”
Having packed up his things at Penquite and said good-bye to his Cornish
relations, he turned his face eastwards, and was in London on February
10th.
To lovers of Borrow, even to mere admirers of his genius, it must always
be a cause of regret—vain enough, but none the less sorrowful—that among
his numerous failures was the failure to write the book on Cornwall
advertised when “The Romany Rye” was published. Perhaps a reason or two
may not be far to seek. It has already been seen that “Lavengro,” on
which he had expended the labour of years, was received with icy
indifference by the public and with torrid hostility by the critics. The
fate of his darling book did much to embitter several years of his life.
The visit to Cornwall broke into this grey period like a burst of
sunshine into a wintry day; it was warm and friendly there, redolent of
beautiful memories of the father he adored; the simple and hospitable
people he met were full of homely kindness, with just a piquant suspicion
of hero-worship; the country itself was full of charm. The whole
experience interested, even inspired him, and no one can doubt that while
he was in Cornwall, and for some time after he left it, he fully intended
that the promised book should be written. He had talked over the project
with the Taylors at Penquite; later he arranged the matter with John
Murray.
Then came distractions. When he returned from the land of saints and
pixies to London and the east, it was to resume work upon that Appendix
in which he was pouring out the overflowing vials of his wrath upon his
critics, upon the army of his mortal enemies, upon the mythical myriads
of those whom he supposed to be placing obstacles in the path towards
official employment which he desired to tread. He filled his letters and
bored his friends with the mournful burden of his complaint against
Governments and authorities, lords and notabilities, who to his distorted
imagination seemed to be in league against the interests and prosperity
of George Henry Borrow. Amid these glooms the ray of sunshine faded. In
London he had none of the liveliness that possessed him in the West;
morose and melancholy moods alternated with savage outbursts against his
foes—even though he spent a considerable part of his time in so cheerful
a haunt as the library of the British Museum, looking for material with
which to confute and confound them. At last “The Romany Rye” came out.
It was as great a failure as “Lavengro.” Its reception disheartened him
for literary work, and the Cornish book receded farther into the
distance. Finally, his adventures in Wales intervened, and he chose
rather to write of them than of the smaller subject of which he might
have made a better book, fine as “Wild Wales” unquestionably is.
There was so much good material in his Cornish tour, and in the lore and
gossip which he drank in so avidly, that the disjointed notes of his
impressions do only create a thirst for more. In his printed works there
are but few references to the Duchy in the West. There is the passage in
“Lavengro” where he speaks of his father’s Cornish descent, and quotes
the proverb, “In Cornwall are the best gentlemen.” And in “Wild Wales”
there is another adage which he had picked up in the West—the “proverb in
the Gerniweg . . . which was the language of my forefathers, saying,
‘Ne’er leave the old way for the new’”—the theme, by the way, of a
Cornish ballad given in Llhuyd’s _Archæologia Britannica_ and translated
by Borrow. That is all. The book he would have written on this land of
miracles and fairies, of Celtic legend, of the last struggles of the
British race in England against their Germanic conquerors, the land where
the language of the ancient people was spoken within the memory of
gossips with whom he conversed, where the very names of people and places
were fragrant of the old order, where
“By Tre, Pol, and Pen,
You may know the Cornishmen,”—
such a book would have been worth having. A Celt in mind and blood and
bone, he would have written it with sympathy, and he would have found it
a subject not nearly so keenly exploited as the Wales of which he
afterwards wrote, or the Manxland where he compiled similar journals in a
later year.
Within the comparatively brief time he allowed himself, Borrow saw a
great deal that was characteristic of Cornwall. It is a county of many
characters, with industries and employments various if small. Its
patriotic toast is: “Fish, Copper, and Tin.” To this triple sentiment
agriculture might be appropriately added. Borrow saw them all. He saw
farming in the hills in his own family and among their friends. He
watched tin and copper mining in the Caradons, and saw how the
West-countrymen
“. . . . From the bleak Cornubian shore
Dispense the mineral treasure which of old
Sidonian pilots sought,”
as the imaginative Akenside has it. Mount’s Bay was encircled by legends
of the Phœnicians and their voyages to the “Cassiterides” for tin. At
Newlyn—long before it became the most bepainted village in three
kingdoms—and at Mousehole with his friend Burney, he saw the fishing
industry in full operation. We should have had from him many a burst of
the dialogue of which he was a consummate master—as with Henry Goodman,
the nonagenarian of Tremar, and with the old men he met in Dolly
Pentreath’s parish of Paul—and the Cornish language, once spoken
throughout the South of England, would have been discussed, if not in
sufficiently learned style to satisfy the expert, at any rate in a way
that would have made for the entertainment of mankind at large.
We have read of his Cornish father’s prowess in “the art of
fisticuffery,” and might certainly have looked for a spirited account of
the affair at Bodmin Bridge when the terror of all Plymouth and Devonport
was vanquished, and another of the fracas at Menheniot Fair. But we
should probably also have had an essay upon an art which has always been
far more popular in Cornwall than boxing—that is, the art of wrestling.
We may be sure he would have expressed his patriotic preference for the
Cornish over the Devonshire style. He might have agreed with Touchstone
that “breaking ribs” was not sport for ladies, but he would have
regretted its decline because it was a vigorous and manly game, and he
would have fastened upon the career of the great wrestler Polkinghorne,
whose contest with the Devonshire hero Cann, on Tamar Green at Devonport
in 1826, was a Homeric battle worthy the pen of him who discoursed of
that great fight in which Thurtell was “lord of the concourse.” He would
have given us the true inwardness of “the Cornish hug” and the “Flying
Mare,” and might even have cited the ballad of Will Treffry and Little
Jan, whose untimely end left sorrowing the lady who was to have been his
bride that very day:
“Then, with a desperate toss,
Will showed the Flying Hoss,
And Little Jan fell on the tan,
And never more he spake.
Oh, Little Jan, alack!
The ladies say, Oh, woe’s the day!
Oh, Little Jan, alack!”
But most of all do I miss such a treatise as should have grown out of his
exploration of the Tintagel country, speculating in what degree he would
have adopted the Cornish theory of Arthur, what he would have made of the
mass of tradition and romance that has collected about that stretch of
coast. One may imagine how his mind would have followed the legend of
Arthur from its birthplace in the Far North down through his beloved
Wales to the spot on which he stood before the crumbling walls of
Dundagil, out of whose silent ruins Tennyson’s imagination was about to
construct his marvellous picture of the stately halls of Camelot.
Borrow’s would have been a vastly different story from Tennyson’s
idealisation of the mystery of Arthur’s life, and still more startling
would have been its contrast with the version of the master-mystic of
these parts, the immortal Vicar of Morwenstow. {205} This in spite of
the fact that, as Hawker said, he worked into his poem “The Record and
Rationale of Keltic Cornwall, the rock, barrow, moor, mountain all there,
with the spirit of our fathers rehearsing their intent”—for Hawker’s
Catholic theology would have been anathema to the Papist-hater, Borrow,
and the man who wrote supporting the Bull of Pius IX., promulgated that
very year, would inevitably have been placed on the Borrovian index.
Borrow would rather have harked back to Walter Mapes, and beyond him to
Malory, and beyond him to Geoffrey of Monmouth. His Arthur’s mother
would have been the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and Uther would
have been his father. His Arthur would have wed the daughter of
Leodegraunce, King of Camelyard; the Table Round—the most valuable
accretion which Cornwall has given to the legend—would have been Arthur’s
wedding present from Leodegraunce, who would have received it from Uter
Pendragon, for whom it would have been made by Merlin, Prince of
Enchanters. Camelot would have been Camelford, and not Winchester, nor
Queen Camel in Somerset; and we might have had a discussion of the
question what Shakespeare meant when he made Kent in _King Lear_ say to
the Duke of Cornwall:
“Goose, if I had you upon Sarum Plain,
I’d drive ye cackling home to Camelot.”
The argument in favour of Queen Camel is that on the moors in that
neighbourhood it is customary to breed geese; but then, geese are among
the common objects of the Cornish moors.
We should not have lacked, either, some examination of the scanty
literature of Old Cornwall, of the _Pascon Agan Arluth_, the Passion of
Our Lord, of the trilogy of poems on The Beginning of the World, the
Passion, and the Resurrection. We should have heard of the Miracle
Plays, which continued to be performed in the amphitheatres or “rounds”
of Cornwall well into the seventeenth century—the ancient drama of
_Meriasek_, Duke of Brittany, and the corrupt sixteenth-century masque of
“The Creation of the World, with Noah’s Flood”; and we should have been
told with approval of these plays that, like those of Brittany, they were
far more reverent and more decent than the corresponding performances in
the English and French languages.
Such a book, in Borrow’s inimitable prose, with the interludes and
dialogues whose supreme merit Ford was quick to perceive, would have been
invaluable. The subject is so luxuriant in interest and so novel that it
might well have had a far greater success than anything he had written
since “The Bible in Spain.” But its only place is on the long list of
the Unwritten Books of the world, a literary ellipsis deplored but never
to be filled.
CHAPTER XI
THE LAND OF ELIS WYN
IN these years of the fulness of his manhood, the wandering spirit
possessed and compelled Borrow. It dragged him all over the United
Kingdom in search of such adventure and distraction as he could find. He
allowed his work on “The Romany Rye” to be held up by the scheme of a
tour in Wales. With his wife and Miss Clarke he spent the summer and
autumn of 1854 in the land of the Cymry. This expedition was on
different lines from any he had ever undertaken before. He was far more
tractable than of old, far more “civilised” than when, in his youth, he
had roamed the highways and lived in the hedges and the inns. He was far
more comfortable, but also sadly less dramatic than while rummaging the
peninsula for gypsy lore. He went about these travels with a much less
romantic spirit than he had manifested in his Cornish journeys.
Wales—its literature, its history, its language, and its bards—had been a
passion of his life. When he set about making its personal acquaintance,
the heat of the amour had cooled off, and he became a tourist rather than
a picaro. Some years later he published a full record of his travels and
experiences. At that time the world was far less interested in George
Borrow than it had been, and few people took the trouble to compare “Wild
Wales” with his other books. But a later generation, which has found a
new interest in him, has made many comparisons. One of the commonest
observations is that the new book differs from its predecessors in that
it is a mild and pleasant record of travel; idiosyncrasies and
angularities are there, it is true, but the book is not all fads and
angles. Many reasons have been given for this. One of the most
ingenious is that Borrow was accompanied by two ladies who knew exactly
what he was doing, and that he dared neither seek the vulgar adventures
that give colour to his other works, nor invent them in order to add
purple patches where they seemed necessary for artistic effect. One
declines to adopt this theory. Borrow may have been somewhat restrained
by the presence of his wife and her daughter while he lived with them at
Llangollen. But he was often away for considerable periods on walking
excursions, and, in the latter part of his tour, when he tramped through
Wales from north to south, he was entirely alone. There could have been
no restraint upon him then. He was at liberty to seek out the most
disreputable company he pleased, to consort with gypsies, or tinkers, or
the scum of the earth—if it can be admitted without treason that Wales
contains any scum. That Borrow was induced by the influence of his
womenkind to moderate the tone of his writing is a thing one cannot
believe: he returned at the end of the year to their company at Yarmouth,
to add some of the most vitriolic passages to “The Romany Rye.”
Two sets of circumstances may more fitly account for the character of
“Wild Wales.” One is that Borrow had idealised Wales in his mind, and
that he went about it determined to see only what was good and noble in
the country and its people. His early enthusiasm for its language had
given birth to an extraordinary passion for its literature, and a
hero-worshipping devotion to its great ones. To him there were no
mountains like the Welsh mountains of which he had dreamed in his boyhood
among the fenlands of Norfolk. To him there were no princes to be
compared with the Welsh chieftains who resisted the tide of Saxon
aggression. He might pretend as stoutly as he pleased that the
Anglo-Saxon race was the flower of the earth, that there were no finer
fellows in the records of chivalry than the English prize-fighters, and
that there was no nectar to be mentioned with English ale. But when, as
in Cornwall and Wales, he was among the Celts from whom he sprang, all
this superficial structure of association tumbled down, and his true and
native soul breathed its proper atmosphere. Wales was all good to him.
His delight and admiration were unfeigned. They appear in the book, and
they appear equally in the notes unused in the book, which Dr. Knapp has
preserved.
The second set of circumstances relates to the date at which the book was
published. It did not appear till 1862. By that time (he would have
been the last man to admit it) some home-truths had been forced upon
Borrow. He had discovered that the game he played with the public in
“Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” was not worth the candle. He wanted to
write a popular book, and to regain some of the ground he had lost. The
public did not like his anti-Popery screeds; he deliberately excised
anything that could offend them in that respect, as will be seen. The
public did not care twopence about his gypsies and would rather be
without them. He deliberately avoided any reference to the gypsies of
Wales, though they were perhaps the most interesting and the most
intelligent of the Romany tribes inhabiting the British Isles.
During his Welsh wanderings Borrow was more than ever the philologist let
loose. His joy was unbounded in the discovery of persons who said to him
“Dim Saesneg,” signifying that they did not understand English, in the
exercise of his Welsh upon them, in their astonishment that there should
be one tall Englishman striding through Wales who could speak to them in
their own vernacular. His Welsh has been criticised with a certain
degree of justice. It was book-learnt. But it was a sufficiently good
working medium to enable him to get into closer touch with the people
than he could have done with English alone. When he was reciting Welsh
verses on the top of Snowdon, a native asked him whether he came from
Brittany. The variation which the Celtic language underwent in its
journey through Cornwall into Armorica is surprisingly slight. The
present writer was sailing once in a boat off the coast of Finistère with
two Breton fishermen, exploring certain grottoes inhabited by the
korrigans, which take the place of pixies in Brittany, and found some
difficulty in reconciling their French with any standard known to him.
But, they said, if against his next visit he would learn to speak
“Ouelsh,” some interesting and profitable discourse would be easy. And
they might have been, for all their appearance, two dark-eyed denizens of
Mevagissey or the Cardigan coast.
If Borrow had only a literary acquaintance with the language, he had a
spiritual affinity with the land and the people. Welshmen admit that
“Wild Wales” is one of the finest books on their country ever produced,
either by Welsh or English writers. Indeed, it could hardly fall short
of that, being the work of a man fascinated by his subject, who
maintained a high pitch of enthusiasm for every phase of it, whether he
was escorting his ladies to see fine prospects in the neighbourhood of
Llangollen or making excursions with John Jones, the Methodist weaver, or
visiting simple cottages to drink milk and talk with their inhabitants of
the works of the Bards and Mystics over which he had pored long years ago
in the corporation library at Norwich, or entertaining rough miners with
ghost stories in mountain hostelries.
While the best episodes of the tour are given in the book, the incidents
recorded in his diary and omitted from the published work possess one or
two features of interest. For instance, as Dr. Knapp points out, the
interview with the Irishman on the road between Cerrig y Drudion and
Cernioge Mawr would have been much improved in point of realism if Borrow
had included in it the words of the song, “Croppies, lie down!” and the
objurgations of the patriotic fiddler on each verse of this pæan of the
detested Orangemen. The scene appeared in this form in his original
draft. But there were reasons, already set out, why he did not want just
at this time to declaim to the public:
“Whoop! Protestants, whoop!
And drink full of hope,
Bad luck to the Devil, Pretender, and Pope!
And down, down, Croppies, lie down!”
That truculent song, which had been “the delight of the young gentlemen
of the Protestant Academy of that beautiful old town” of Clonmel, would
not have been the delight of the British people at large when “Wild
Wales” was issued from the press, and Borrow had learnt enough to know
that. The other principal omission from the book is the Ghost Story of
Lope de Vega. We may accept without regret the fact that he did not
print the account of the duel on Wimbledon Common between Colonel Lennox
and the Duke of York, which has nothing to do with anything in
particular. But the Ghost Story was originally set in a most suitable
framework, and would have read well. He always maintained that it was
_facile princeps_ among ghost stories, and, with due homage to the
Society for Psychical Research, one may admit that his judgment was not
far wrong. He got the tale from an English translation of the Romance,
_El Peregrino en su Patria_, published in London in 1738. He told it to
a company of miners assembled in the inn of Guter Vawr, with whom he had
some difficulty at first in getting upon terms of amity. Borrow may have
lacked colloquial knowledge of the Welsh language, but he had something
which was better: he appreciated with the keenest relish its musical
charm, and he admired it without stint. He understood the people and
their ways of thought, and could accommodate himself to their habits. He
idolised their heroes and poets. Thus he got outside himself more in
“Wild Wales” than he succeeded in doing in any other book, and the
observation has been very justly made upon it that it is an itinerary
rather than an autobiography. Nevertheless, it throws an interesting
light on some facets of his character, and is a book which his friends
must love because it displays him in happier moods and under warmer skies
than most of his writings.
The clouds lowered again after the exaltation of the Welsh tour. He
returned from the mountains and the bards, from the rarefied atmosphere
of Snowdonia and the warmth of his welcome by a Celtic society, to sordid
disputes and wordy warfares about his new book, “The Romany Rye.” It was
exactly four years before that Murray had begun imploring him to “give
the new volumes the finishing touches.” He had been “touching” them with
a vengeance, and the finish was not at all to Murray’s taste. He
completed the task soon after his arrival in Yarmouth, and packed off the
manuscript to Albemarle Street. That respectable thoroughfare was next
door to being scandalised by the contents of the parcel. True, Murray
put his criticisms in a friendly way, but they were strong criticisms,
and they were backed by literary opinions of some weight. But Borrow had
experienced a surfeit of critics, and his anger was supreme. He told
Murray he had given him the manuscript on condition that it should not
pass out of his hands, and complained that it had been shown round among
several people. He declared that he was not anxious to publish it, a
statement from which the usual discount must be subtracted. He proceeded
to describe it as “one of the most learned works ever written” (this with
Mrs. Borrow as his mouthpiece, for decency’s sake), and his manifesto
then diffused itself in renewed attacks on the foes of “Lavengro,”
refusal to have anything to do with Murray’s suggestion for a book on
Russia, and a denunciation of England as an ingrate country. “It owed
much to him, and he owed nothing to it.”
Borrow’s books not only took a long time to write, but had a bad habit of
hanging about after they had been written. Many things happened before
“The Romany Rye” appeared to a bewildered public, holding the critics “up
by their tails.” In the meantime, the Romany Rye himself had been
wandering again. He was, as De Quincey said of Descartes, “as restless
as a hyena.” In 1855 he took his wife and Miss Clarke to another
out-of-the-way corner of Celtic Britain—the Isle of Man. Making Douglas
his headquarters, he explored the country thoroughly, generally alone and
on foot. He was on the look-out for the material for another book,
which, as in the case of the Cornish volume, remained a project. He did
get as far as the title, “Bayr Jairgey and Glion Doo: The Red Path and
the Black Valley,” and prepared an introduction for it.
The Isle of Man was at that time, in the literary sense, an unoccupied
country, and Borrow would have worked over a fertile field of virgin soil
if he had carried out his purpose. There was no Manx Society; there was
no Manx _Miscellany_. The Runes were there for him to decipher and
describe; the poetry and the history of the island were at his disposal
to exploit. “In lone farmhouses and cottages situated in gills and
glens” were the “smoke-stained volumes” of “carvals” in manuscript, poems
of the people, which he diligently searched out while penetrating the
recesses of the island. The carvals—_Anglice_, carols—are mostly on
Biblical subjects and of no great antiquity. Borrow got possession of
two volumes and examined the contents of many. He had only a slight
acquaintance with the Manx language, but his general knowledge of Gaelic
stood him in good stead as he puzzled his way through the carval of
“Joseph,” or of “David and Goliath,” or of “The Evil Women,” of which
last he remarks that it is written in dispraise of the sex and recalls
the poem of Simonides on the same subject. It is the work of an
eighteenth-century smuggler named Moore, whose misogyny was displayed in
an original fashion—by picking out all the bad characters of the feminine
persuasion in the Holy Scriptures and relating their most wicked deeds.
Borrow says it “is a curious piece, and must certainly have found its way
abroad without clerical sanction.” He was not more interested in these
effusions than in the scanty printed literature of the island—such as the
ballads of “Brown William” and “Myle Charaine.” The former (“Ilian Dhu”
in the vernacular) commemorates one John William Christian, a Receiver of
the Isle of Man, who at the time of the Restoration was executed on
Hangoe Hill because he had surrendered to Cromwell. {218} Borrow
translated this poem, and also the ballad of “Myle Charaine,” the miser,
which he entitles “Mollie Charane.” His version was published in _Once a
Week_. He was fond enough of it to go hunting for the miser’s
descendants on a lonely curragh, much to the amazement of the good
people, who could not understand that the possession of an ancestor who
happened to have been mentioned in a poem was any good reason for the
invasion of their privacy. His keenest taste, however, took him much
farther back into the mists of the past than the balladists of the
eighteenth century. Was not the early history of the island a record of
the lives and deeds of his beloved Danes and Norsemen? Were not their
sepulchral monuments to be seen in the Runic stones? And, more distant
still, were there not the legends and the fragments of half-lost songs of
Finn, the Celtic hero whose exploits are celebrated in so many lands? He
had encountered Finn in Ireland. He had found him in Cornwall under the
wing of the Irish guide, Cronan. Here he met him again. Walking with
Borrow on Snaefell, a miner of Laxey, James Skillicorn (who was the donor
of one of his two volumes of carvals) recited a Manx tradition of Finn—“a
mighty man of valour and a swift runner.”
There were two giants (so the tale ran) rejoicing in the name of Finn; of
these, Finn McCoul, a huge giant, was Scottish, and Finn McCoyle, a
lesser giant, was Manx. The Scots Finn, hearing rumours of the fame of
the Manx Finn, and feeling some jealousy, decided to visit him in order
that they might try their strength. So he waded across from the
southernmost point of Scotland to the northernmost point of the island.
Finn’s wife answered the door to him, and was at once stricken with
amazement and fear at his gigantic proportions. She saw that her
husband, who was inside lying on the bed, would be no match for him, and
therefore told him that McCoyle was not at home.
“Who is the great fellow lying on the bed?” asked McCoul.
“Only a little son of ours,” said the astute Mrs. McCoyle.
The visiting giant then asked for something to eat, and she said she
would give him a cake such as they were in the habit of eating, and
presented him with an iron platter.
McCoul crunched it to powder between his teeth, and swallowed it with the
utmost relish.
Then McCoyle, assuming the part his wife had invented for him, and
pretending to be the son of a mighty father, offered to take McCoul out
to his father’s playing-ground and show him the ball with which he
played. Having reached the place, McCoyle directed the visitor’s
attention to a round crag of rock, weighing something more than a ton,
which he said was his father’s skittle-ball. “Can you do anything with
that?” he asked.
McCoul seized it, threw it a mile high, and caught it again.
“Well done!” cried the crafty McCoyle. “Let’s see you do it again.”
And as he threw the rock up into the sky again, McCoyle went behind him
and gave him a push which sent him over the cliff, where he was dashed in
a thousand pieces.
“Such an end,” says the tale, “may all those have who come over the water
expressly, as the Scottish giant did, to bully the decent people of Man.”
In Cornwall Borrow found the ancient language dead; in the Isle of Man he
found it rapidly dying out of common use, and not much cultivated for
literary purposes. The Church services in Manx were being discontinued.
Deploring all this greatly, he still went on studying it. He was no
lover of Methodists—placing them in one of his comprehensive categories
with “Whigs, Muggletonians, and Latter-day Saints.” But his political
and religious prejudices did not interfere with his love of the Celtic
tongues or his devotion to poetry in any form, and when he had nothing
else to do he sat in his lodgings and read Killey’s translation into Manx
of the Methodist Hymn Book. Killey’s other chief work was the
translation of Parnell’s “Hermit.” Why anybody should want to translate
that highly overrated piece of Queen Annery into any language at all, it
is hard to say. His choice of subjects, however, did not deter Borrow
from paying homage to him and going to see his daughter, with whom he had
a discussion on the effects of Methodism in the island. It was summed up
in the best Borrovian oracular manner: “The Methodists have done much
good in Man,” he said to her, “but their doctrines and teaching have
contributed much to destroy the poetical traditions of the people.” This
dictum was very like that which R. S. Hawker proclaimed of the Methodists
in Cornwall. But Hawker did not allow that they had done any good at
all. Wesley, he said, caused the Cornish people to “_change_ their Sins
and called it conversion. . . . With my last Breath I protest that the
Man Wesley corrupted and depraved instead of improving the West of
England. . . . The Vices of the Body are not after all, bad as they are,
so hateful as the Sins of the Mind.” Borrow was nearer the truth than
Hawker. But it may be doubted whether the spread of Methodism had much,
if anything, to do with the evanishment of old poetic traditions; the
march of industrialism and the increasing fluidity of population were the
real culprits.
Borrow trod the red path and explored the black glen—whose magnificence
he did not praise too highly—and inspected carvals, climbed walls to look
at carved stones, sketched with Henrietta, and generally enjoyed himself
for several weeks. It was the autumn of the fall of Sebastopol. The
news reached the island on September 10th, and provoked some of Borrow’s
most fiery denunciations of politicians and soldiers—the offence being
that the French had taken the Malakoff and the British had been repulsed
from the Redan. “The war might have been gloriously settled nearly a
year ago by the English, and they have got all the credit of the affair,
but for the inactivity and indecision of that miserable creature Raglan,
the aristocratical leader of the English and the secret friend of the
Russians. . . . Much shouting in Douglas and firing of guns in the
harbour, though for what reason it would be difficult to say.”
Borrow’s patriotism was of a peculiar kind. He had the type of mind
which was generally “agin the Government,” and few of the operations of
British statesmanship, either at home or abroad, gave him any
satisfaction. Yet there never was a man who took more pride in the fact
that he was an Englishman. The sight of The Rock moved him to paroxysms
of patriotism. When he begins a paragraph, “O, England!” the experienced
reader knows what to expect, and all Radicals and other subversive
persons may “stand clear,” as they say at sea. But even they will
forgive him because the quality of his martial music is so high.
“O England! long, long may it be before ere the sun of thy glory sink
beneath the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous clouds
are now gathering rapidly round thee, still, still may it please the
Almighty to disperse them, and to grant thee a futurity longer in
duration and still brighter in renown than thy past! Or, if thy doom
be at hand, may that doom be a noble one and worthy of her who has
been styled the Old Queen of the Waters. May thou sink, if thou dost
sink, amid blood and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more than
one nation to participate in thy downfall! Of all fates, may it
please the Lord to preserve thee from a disgraceful and a slow decay;
becoming, ere extinct, a scorn and a mockery for those selfsame foes
who now, though they envy and abhor thee, still fear thee, nay, even
against their will, honour and respect thee.”
Nor will the reader be shocked or surprised to learn that these somewhat
unpacific and heathen sentiments formed “part of a broken prayer for my
native land, which, after my usual thanksgiving, I breathed to the
Almighty ere retiring to rest that Sunday night at Gibraltar.” Like many
other Englishmen, he seemed to find more to admire in the institutions
and the character of his country when he was at a distance than when he
was at home.
The principal authority for the Manx incidents is Dr. Knapp, who gives
fully the journals of the tour from which some extracts have been made.
CHAPTER XII
LONDON AGAIN
ON the return to Yarmouth, the trials of a crotchety temper were resumed.
Murray’s reception of “The Romany Rye” so inflamed Borrow’s anger that in
April, 1856, he recalled the precious manuscript in the curtest of curt
notes. Murray, nothing loth to rid himself of this wild book, with its
tigerish animadversions upon the literary world at large, packed it up
and sent it to Yarmouth, where it remained for another year. Its author,
in high dudgeon, kept his mind as far as possible off his grievances by
tramping about East Anglia and endeavouring to reawaken the sensations of
his youth upon the English roads. He rejoices in the sight of a coach,
which even then seemed a strange anachronism, so thoroughly had the
railway revolutionised the conditions of travel. He is carried back
thirty years to the days of Thurtell by a meeting with an old man who
remembered the mill between Painter and Oliver, and could call up visions
of the concourse of pilfering rascals assembled on that occasion, so that
the adjoining field was found next day to be strewn with empty
pocket-books! He sees a horse fall down and refuse to rise in a street
of King’s Lynn, and at once becomes the horse-doctor, advising the
administration of reviving ale according to one story, and according to
another administering it himself.
Among the visits he paid during these excursions was one to Miss Anna
Gurney at North Repps; he took a speedy departure when she began to
propound to him questions in Arabic grammar, and consoled himself with a
dinner at “Tucker’s.” But this was the kind of life and experience
which, sending his memory back to his early exploits by grassy lane and
windy heath, was bound to turn his thoughts again to the manuscript
stowed away at Yarmouth in which so many of those adventures were
depicted. In the following February he withdrew it from its
hiding-place, read it over afresh with great relish, and decided that it
must be published. Such good stuff should be withheld from the public no
longer, Murray or no Murray.
Thus an ultimatum was despatched to Albemarle Street. The eminent
publisher was informed that, if he did not bring out “The Romany Rye,”
some less eminent publisher would be applied to. The firm, always
excellent friends to Borrow, resolved to humour him, but in the letter in
which the bargain was clinched Mr. Murray could not resist a sly dig; he
said the work would be published “to oblige him.” Whereat Borrow told
him that he believed his intentions were good, but that “people with the
best of intentions occasionally do a great deal of harm.” “The Romany
Rye” appeared in May.
If the reception of “Lavengro” disappointed its author, no less can be
said of the reception of its sequel. The majority of the critics did not
like it any better than Borrow liked them. Even his friend Whitwell
Elwin, who reviewed it for the _Quarterly_, reproved him vigorously for
the violence and vulgarity of the Appendix, and threw Bentley at him in
this wise: “No author was ever written down except by himself.” But
Elwin was fair, and more prescient than most of his contemporaries. He
admitted that “Lavengro” had not had its due, and said that it contained
“passages which, in their way, are not surpassed by anything in English
literature.” He spoke with warmth of the truth and vividness of the
descriptions of both scenes and persons, the purity, force, and
simplicity of the language, which “should confer immortality upon many of
its pages.” Elwin did not write without knowledge when he said that
“various parts of the history are known to be a faithful narrative of Mr.
Borrow’s career, while we ourselves can testify as to many other parts of
his volumes, that nothing can excel the fidelity with which he has
described both men and things. Far from his showing any tendency to
exaggeration, such of his characters as we chance to have known—and they
are not a few—are rather within the truth than beyond it. . . . There
can be no doubt that the larger part, and possibly the whole, of the work
is a narrative of actual occurrences.”
The review which most correctly anticipated the verdict of a later
generation, a generation that knew not Borrow but was emancipated from
some of the prejudices of the ’fifties, was that of the _Saturday
Review_. The writer saw the charm of these books—their raciness, their
naturalistic humour, their spirit of romance. He penetrated the secret
of Borrow’s style when he spoke of his “almost affectedly simple
language.” He realised the permanent power of a writer who could make
such wonderfully strong impressions without actual categorical
description of scenery or persons. Otherwise, the treatment of the book
was cool and neglectful, or hostile—in either case highly unsatisfactory
to Borrow. Perhaps we, who can read “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye”
together, and view them in a different atmosphere, are hardly able to
make sufficient allowance for the conduct of critics who had this sequel
to a half-forgotten book pitched on their tables after an interval of six
years, and found that its most vigorous passages consisted of terrific
denunciations of their harmless selves.
The disappointed author went off alone in August to seek solace in a
second tour through the country which still held the warmest place in his
affections. He walked through the greater part of South Wales to the
very tip of the Pembrokeshire promontory, and then cut across to Hereford
and Shropshire. At Uppington and Donnington he sought out the tracks of
Gronwy Owen, and returned to London and Yarmouth once more full of his
Celtic bards and prophets. Occasionally antiquarian researches were
interrupted to give time for original vaticinations on public affairs.
He was a fierce opinionist, who contrived as a rule to find his opinions
on the side which was against the constituted authority, whatever it
might be. The conduct of Indian policy during the Mutiny pleased him no
better than the conduct of the Russian war. In a letter to Murray, after
defending the tone of “The Romany Rye” on the ground that it denounced
boldly the evils which were hurrying the country to destruction and had
kindled God’s anger against it, “namely, the pride, insolence, cruelty,
covetousness, and hypocrisy of its people, and, above all, that rage for
gentility which must be indulged in at the expense of every good and
honourable feeling,” he goes on to discuss affairs in the East. Some of
his choicest anathemas are reserved for “the miserable newspapers,” which
proclaimed a firm determination to put down the rebels in India, “but
forget to tell us how India is to be held without the sepoys.” The
international situation seemed to his hypochondriac mind to be full of
irremediable gloom, and he turned again, sighing, from these melancholy
reflections to his Welsh poets. His passionate desire was reawakened to
reveal the wonders of Cymric literature to a stiff-necked generation of
Englishmen. He had turned out once more his translation of the “Visions”
of Elis Wyn, which had been too strong for the stomach of the little
bookseller of Smithfield nearly thirty years before. He delivered it to
Murray on his way back from Wales. Borrow suggested that it would be
likely to sell if it could be adorned with three engravings by
Cruikshank—“the dance of the fairies in the first part; another the old
poet in Hades flinging a skull at the head of Elis Wyn in the second; and
the last, the personification of Sin in the third part at the very
conclusion.” But Murray was no more impressed with the saleable quality
of the Sleeping Bard than the bookseller of Smithfield had been;
Cruikshank continued to throw stones at the Bottle Imp instead of
flinging skulls at Elis Wyn, and the manuscript went back to Yarmouth.
All literary enterprises were suddenly set aside in August, 1858, by a
family tragedy. No less a phrase can describe Borrow’s loss when his
mother died, for the bonds between them were exceedingly close. Her love
had a poignant quality which was sharpened by the anxiety, well-concealed
from him, with which his weaknesses filled her. His love for her was
more than filial. It had kept him in East Anglia for many years; it had
an important influence, which has been previously suggested, upon his
attitude towards the Catholic Church; he could never forget that it was
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes that drove his mother’s family out
of France.
The death occurred rather suddenly. The severance had so extreme an
effect upon him that he was inconsolable during many weeks. At last, to
obtain distraction, he set off on a walking tour in the Highlands. He
devoted much of his time to roaming all over the island of Mull, which he
described as perhaps the wildest country in Europe. He noted that the
place-names of Mull strongly resembled those of the Isle of Man, and
wrote scraps of discourse on the Gaelic dialects. Leaving Mull, he
penetrated, principally on foot, into the farthest north, crossing to
Orkney and Shetland at the end of November. A quiet seven months at
Yarmouth followed, and in June, 1859, he paid a visit to Ireland. Mrs.
Borrow and Miss Clarke remained in Dublin while he plodded through the
country. He walked to the wilds of Connemara, pursuing his customary
line of inquiry into language and legend, and thence extended his tramp
to the Giants’ Causeway. In Dublin he studied with zest the records of
the associations which were exploring the ancient literature of the
country, and gloated over the stories of Finn and Ossian. He became a
member of the Ossianic Society soon after his arrival in the Irish
capital. Unfortunately, Borrow left no record of the tour or of his
studies in Dublin.
Ireland was, indeed, soon forgotten after his return home in November.
At Yarmouth he came almost immediately under the magic spell of Wales
again. The unpublished manuscript of “The Sleeping Bard” could not be
allowed to slumber any longer, and he determined to issue the book at his
own expense. Murray made a graceful compromise; though he would not
undertake the publication, he allowed Borrow to use his valuable imprint,
so that 250 copies were turned out by Denew the printer of Yarmouth, with
the notification on the title-page that the book was published by John
Murray. Apparently Borrow came to the conclusion that if Elis Wyn was to
be reviewed adequately, he must do it himself. In the _Quarterly Review_
for January, 1861, appeared an anonymous article on “The Welsh and their
Literature.” All the sprites which inhabited Borrow’s portfolios knew
that the main part of this article had been there for many years. It
appeared in the _Quarterly_, polished up, and interleaved with references
to the translation of the “Bardd Cwsg.” It was admired by those who were
interested in the subject, and they were at any rate sufficiently
numerous to buy up the whole edition of Elis Wyn in a month. The book
was held in very favourable opinion by Welshmen. This was the last
literary work of any sort he did in East Anglia, to which he was shortly
to bid farewell for fourteen years.
Borrow and his wife departed from Yarmouth at the end of June, 1860, and
took lodgings at No. 21, Montagu Street, Portman Square. The special
reason for their residence in the East of England had vanished with the
death of his mother, and they had been discussing for some time the
project of taking a house in London. There he counted upon closer touch
with the literary world. In a sense, he obtained it, for he was in
constant companionship with a few choice friends; but for the purposes of
a biographer the removal to town was disastrous. After the first year or
two he made no conspicuous figure in literature, his correspondence
almost ceased, and the records of his movements first become scanty and
then vanish altogether. They are to be found in casual references among
the reminiscences of the limited circle of his associates—Frances Power
Cobbe, Charles Godfrey Leland, and Theodore Watts-Dunton. And, with the
last name excepted, it is no very prepossessing picture that we get of
him. Miss Clarke had been left at Oulton during the period of
house-hunting. She joined them after they had taken No. 22, Hereford
Square, Brompton, where they had Miss Cobbe for a near neighbour.
Having installed his household gods there, Borrow began to occupy himself
with the most congenial employments he could discover. There was “Wild
Wales.” The beloved book was on the stocks; it was being worked up with
the affection he bestowed on no other subject. But he did not permit it
to absorb him. There were many things to be done in London by a lover of
common adventures and a student of social byways. There were rambles in
the streets and in the environs of London, where odd characters were far
more numerous than in East Anglia, or Wales, or Cornwall. There were
gypsies—degenerate gypsies who lived in houses, still more degenerate
gypsies who plied petty commerce in caravans, and the remnants of the
real blood who camped in the outskirts of the metropolis, and were not
unwilling to converse with “the London caloro” when he found his way
among them. There was an occasional race; there was an occasional fight.
A foot race at Brompton between “Deerfoot,” the Seneca Indian, and
Jackson, “the American deer,” in October, 1861, was the subject of a
lively description in his notebook.
Borrow tried some of his friends a good deal, even now that he was
mellowing. But he had not lost the art of being jovial, and there are
records of festivities at which he very successfully entertained those
whom he might call his “pals.” Richmond was a favourite resort. One
dinner party at the Star and Garter, when Borrow was host, comprised John
Murray, his partner Cooke, and his brother-in-law, Dr. David Smith, of
Edinburgh. It was a gargantuan feast for that day; it cost Borrow £6
3s., of which £4 1s. 6d. was for wine. His studies in the poetry of many
lands went on concurrently with his entertainments and his work on Wales.
The habit of translation was ingrained, and could not be conquered. He
continued turning poems and legends into English from the Celtic tongues,
from Danish, Turkish, and Russian. But no book came of all this
industry. The public were still callously indifferent to Borrow’s
poetical versions, as they had been in other years. They had put up with
some of Bowring’s anthologies, but had now tired even of his Magyars and
Serbs. The prevailing sentiment about this kind of literary ware was
represented by a ludicrous parody which appeared in _Fraser’s Magazine_:
TE PIKKE MEGGE. THE PIOUS MAIDEN.
Hogy, wogy, Pogy! Holy little Polly!
Xupumai trtzaaa bnikttm Love sought me, but I tricked
Pogy, wogy, hogy! him.
Bsduro plgvbz cttnsttm Polly little holy!
Wogy, hogy, Pogy! You thought of me, “I’ve
Mlèsrz vbquògp fvikttm. nicked him.”
Little holy Polly!
I’m not to be your victim.
The utmost Borrow could do was to induce the editor of _Once a
Week_—which had just entertained a very different kind of angel unawares
in the person of George Meredith—to publish a series of ballads and
stories from the Manx, Russian, Danish, and old Norse.
But in 1862 occurred a literary event whose importance was very slowly
realised. “Wild Wales” appeared. Its reception by the critics was
exceedingly curious. Most of the newspapers ignored it altogether;
others were unjust to the point of savagery. For concentrated malice,
the _Cornhill_ notice would be difficult to surpass. “Really,” wrote the
reviewer (obviously as closely in touch with Borrow and his subject as a
cat with the differential calculus), “it is too much to demand that we
should read the record of every glass of ale which Mr. Borrow
drank—usually with his criticism of its quality—or be patient under the
fatiguing triviality of, ‘I paid my bill and departed,’ which occurs
incessantly.” But, lest it should be imagined that Borrow was either
drinking beer or paying hotel bills all the time he was in Wales, the
reviewer went on grudgingly to admit that “snatches of commonplace
conversation and intensely prosaic translations of Welsh-poems swell out
this book and render it rather tiresome reading.” At least one notice
was both fair and complimentary, and foreshadowed the very high opinion
in which the book is held at the present day by Welshmen. That was the
article in the _Spectator_, which described it as “the first really
clever book we remember to have seen in which an honest attempt is made
to do justice to the Welsh literature. . . . In the course of his
wanderings Mr. Borrow caught very happily the salient points in the Welsh
character, and he has depicted them with those light, free touches which
none but George Borrow can hit off to such perfection.” True, the
_Spectator_ discovered “the fine Roman hand” of Mr. Borrow in some of the
speeches of his friends, but felt sure that the conversations were in
substance faithfully recorded.
Borrow was in his sixtieth year when “Wild Wales” was published. In
spite of the extraordinary extent and variety of his activities, he was
by no means an old man. He retained his physical vigour; his mental
force was unimpaired. He was to have twenty years more of life in which
to accumulate new experiences and contract a rare friendship or two. Yet
he had certainly outgrown his vogue. The older public that had hailed
some of his writing with demonstrative joy had gone; he had not found—nor
was to find while he lived—the newer public that could enter into the
spirit in which he did his work. It is a little disconcerting, but not
really a matter for surprise, that after the publication of “Wild Wales”
Borrow gradually sank out of view. He buried himself still deeper in his
philological studies. At intervals he vanished from London to make tours
in various parts of the British Islands. Rough notes of these may be
consulted in Knapp; they were never polished into anything like literary
form. In 1865 came another severance: Miss Clarke, his step-daughter,
married Dr. William MacOubrey, and went to live at Belfast. The “old
Hen” of Borrow’s letters, the “Henrietta” of “Wild Wales,” had been a
member of his household ever since the golden days of sunny Seville, and
he had a very deep and sincere affection for her. He did not, of course,
feel the separation so acutely as did his wife, who had never parted from
her for more than a few weeks at a time during the forty-seven years
since she was born; and it was Mrs. Borrow who planned a visit to the
Orange capital in the following year. She was escorted to Belfast by her
husband, who left her there with Mrs. MacOubrey, while he went off to
Scotland. Crossing to Stranraer, he set out upon a lonely tramp in the
Lowlands and the Border Country. He visited Abbotsford, but, his rage
against Sir Walter Scott having subsided, his notes are as mild as a
guidebook. Pushing on to Edinburgh, he returned to Glasgow by rail, and
took the steamer to Belfast, spending the remaining weeks of the holiday
in Ulster, with pedestrian trips to Lisburn and Antrim.
The journey through the Border was not without some literary fruit, as
will be seen. For some years Borrow had been absorbed in Welsh and
Danish poetry; but just now his attention was returning to the gypsy
friends of his youth. At Kirk Yetholm, a few miles south-east of Kelso,
dwelt Esther Blyth, the descendant of a famous gypsy king, herself
endowed with a royal title, “the Queen of the Nokkums.” Her majesty was
sought out and “interviewed,” and the notes of this encounter were worked
into a chapter of the last book Borrow ever wrote.
CHAPTER XIII
DEATH OF MRS. BORROW
DURING the visit to Belfast Mrs. Borrow had been unwell, and her
ill-health was her husband’s principal cause of anxiety for the following
three years. In 1867 they visited Bognor, where she was revivified by
the sea breezes, while he made tours through Hampshire and the New
Forest. The next year complications arose in the administration of the
Oulton estate, and they had to go into Norfolk to extricate the business.
On their return, Mrs. Borrow failed rapidly. Weakened by heart disease
and dropsy, and worried by the prospect of litigation with a neighbour,
her illness took a serious form, and threw Borrow into a state of
melancholy in which “the Horrors” attacked him, as we find by a reference
in Miss Cobbe’s autobiography. She speaks of having one night “cheered
him and sent him off quite brisk” after a bout of this kind, her method
being to engage him in theological argument “in a serious way”! He
“abounded in my sense of the nonexistence of Hell.” If the processes by
which they sought to remove Borrow’s megrims were original, the sympathy
and solicitude of Miss Cobbe and Miss Lloyd were unfailing. But none of
the cares of friendship, no effort on Borrow’s part, could avail to stave
off the disaster that approached. His wife grew worse, and on January
30th, 1869, succumbed to an aggregation of maladies, just in time to
obviate the necessity (foreshadowed by Dr. Playfair, who was called in at
the end) of sequestration because of mental affliction.
Thus sadly closed the long partnership of thirty years so romantically
begun at Seville in “a dream of sunshine and shade, of falling water and
flowers.” Mrs. Borrow had reached the age of seventy-three, and was
seven years older than her husband. His grief was terrible. He had lost
her who had been in literal fact his better half, who had inspired his
courage and fought his “Horrors” for him, had organised his business, and
had been wife and friend, counsellor and physician, amanuensis and
private secretary rolled into one. “Poor old Borrow is in a sad state,”
wrote Miss Cobbe. In his distraught condition friendliness suffered. He
hesitated to “trouble anyone with his sorrows” and, when over-persuaded
to dine out, was melancholy, “so cross so _rude_,” as said Miss Cobbe on
one occasion. Her narrative of the attempts she made to drag him out of
himself is luminous with humour—conscious and unconscious. There was
much innocent malice in the fashion in which she set her superior
knowledge of Norse lore against his, parrying his Firbolgs with her
Keatinge, and his Tuatha-de-Danaan with her Hakon of Norway. But she did
not perceive that the most humorous thing of all was the fact that she
should attempt to raise a bereaved man out of his despair by touching him
in his most tender intellectual spots.
For a year after the death of his wife Borrow buried himself in
books—out-of-the-way books, archaic books, as usual. Drake’s “Historia
Anglo-Scotica” figures in the list. He declared to Miss Cobbe that he
had read no modern writer since Scott. This was not literally accurate.
He had read and admired Dickens, for, in a letter to Luis de Usóz, he
spoke of him as “a second Fielding . . . who, in certain novels founded
on life in London and the provinces, as displayed in every grade of
society from the lowest to the highest, has evinced such talent, such
humour, variety and profound knowledge of character, that he charms his
readers—at least, those that have the capacity to comprehend him. . . .
Read, as soon as you can, all the writings of ‘Boz,’ and I am sure you
will thank me all your life for having disclosed to you a mine of such
delectable reading.” {241} His opinion of Scott had undergone
considerable modification since the days of the Appendix and
“Charlie-o’er-the-Waterism,” for he said that “Scott _was greater than
Homer_!” (The italics and the note of astonishment are Miss Cobbe’s.)
Another sweeping dictum of his on the same occasion was that the Norse
stories were “far grander than the Greek.” But Borrow was addicted to
impulsive generalisations, and we need pay no more special attention to
these judgments promulgated in Hereford Square than to the declarations
made at various times that Gronwy Owen’s account of the toppling down of
the crag of Snowdon on the Judgment Day was better than anything in
Homer, that Horace and Martial were not superior to Ab Gwilym, and that
Huw Morris was the finest lyrical poet of the seventeenth century.
Not long after these passages at arms with Miss Cobbe, he was suddenly
plunged again into the old romantic interest of gypsyism. Towards the
end of 1870 he received a letter from C. G. Leland, who had then been
about eighteen months in England, and was pursuing his studies of the
English gypsies on more scientific and more thorough lines than Borrow
had ever adopted. No two men were farther apart in literary
characteristics than Borrow and Leland. The author of the “Hans
Breitmann” ballads is far better known to the larger world as a writer of
comic verse than as a student of languages and folklore. “Hans
Breitmann’s Barty” and “Ping-Wing, the Pieman’s Son” are in everybody’s
mouth; “The English Gypsies and their Language” and his “Gypsy Sorcery”
are familiar mainly to the elect. The humour of Borrow and that of
Leland are of widely different character. Leland’s gay spirit lights a
lamp of jocund fancy; Borrow’s humour is elemental, and, when his art
adds quality to it, the quality is sardonic. Yet these two were attuned
in a remarkable way, and on the subject of gypsyism and philology their
tastes were in common. Borrow—leaving out of account a little natural
jealousy—could hardly fail to be attracted to the man who was to write so
vividly later of his intimacy with all “the lords and earls of Little
Egypt” in the south of England, and of those sojourns in the tents which
involved “a great deal of strangely picturesque rural life, night-scenes
by firelight, in forests and by river banks, and marvellously odd
reminiscences of other days.” And there were other interests held by
both—for Leland was a Celtic scholar; did he not “discover” Shelta, and
know all about the olden men, who
“. . . sat with ghosts on a stormy shore
And spoke in a tongue men speak no more”?
Leland told Borrow in his first letter that he was a lover of his books,
and had read them all five times, with the exception of “The Bible in
Spain” and “Wild Wales,” which he had only read once. He had been
seeking in vain for some mutual friend to introduce them, and now put
himself forward modestly as the author of “a collection of ballads
satirising Germany and the Germans, under the title of ‘Hans Breitmann.’”
Borrow wrote giving an invitation. Leland acknowledged it in a charming
letter, announcing that he had asked his publishers to send Borrow copies
of “Breitmann” and “The Music Lesson of Confucius.” The former was
offered as an oblation to the gypsy gods; it contained a ballad “written
by myself in the German Romany jib . . . which I would gladly learn from
yourself whether it be worth anything or not.” The second was a delicate
compliment to Borrow, for in it was a poem “suggested by a passage in
‘The Romany Rye,’ referring to the melancholy Sven Vonved, the Northern
Sphynx, who went about giving out riddles and gold rings.” Leland ran on
about gypsies and the Romany tongue, tinkers and rat-catchers, horses and
hunting, in his inimitable way, declaring, “My dear Mr. Borrow, for all
this you are entirely responsible. More than twenty years ago your books
had an incredible influence on me, and now you see the results.”
At the meeting which followed, Leland told Borrow that he was preparing a
work on the English gypsies, and it is fairly clear that this fact
induced Borrow to write his own last book, “The Romano Lavo-Lil,” or
Word-Book of the Gypsies. There have been found even Borrovians to
regret that this book was ever published. Most of the criticism lavished
upon it is no doubt justified. It is quite as unscientific, quite as
useless as a lexicon, as its assailants said. Its miscellaneous contents
are not to be compared for vigour and interest with his earlier work.
But the true lover of Borrow would not have it absent from the little
shelf which holds his books, even if it were only for the tale of Ryley
Bosvil, and the interview with Esther Blyth—a reminiscence of his visit
to Kirk Yetholm to see the “Queen of the Nokkums” during the Border tour.
“The Romano Lavo-Lil” did not appear, however, till 1874. In the
meantime, he edited a third edition of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,”
in one volume each, for Murray (1872), and recast his translation of the
Gospel of Luke in the Calo.
An acquaintance he formed during the late years of his London life was
that of Mr. William Mackay, who subsequently went to live at Oulton
Broad. Mr. Mackay has related one or two anecdotes spiced with a very
piquant frankness, for he is apparently no worshipper of Borrow, and has
taken pains to dispute the claims advanced by those who are. He speaks
of one occasion when they went together to a tavern on the edge of a
great common, where Borrow called for “swipes.” This was the beerhouse
title of the poorest kind of ale. Mr. Mackay says that Borrow affected
it because it was the drink of his Romany friends. When he “had taken a
pull at the pewter, he pointed out to me a yokel at the end of the
apartment. The foolish bumpkin was slumbering. Borrow, in a stage
whisper, gravely assured me that the man was a murderer, and confided to
me, with all the emphasis of honest conviction, the scene and details of
his crime. Subsequently I ascertained that the elaborate incidents and
fine touches of local colour were but the coruscations of a too vivid
imagination, and that the villain of the ale-house on the common was as
innocent as the author of ‘The Romany Rye.’” It may not unreasonably
seem to dispassionate persons that Borrow took a pull not only at the
pewter, but at his friend’s leg as well.
But Mr. Mackay is able to throw an interesting light on one or two facets
of his character—notably on his love of pugilism for its own sake.
Outside Borrow’s own books, I do not know any sketch that gives a more
living idea of his joy in combat than this. “It was a fine thing,” says
Mr. Mackay, “to see the great man tackle a tramp. Then he scented the
battle from afar, bearing down on the enemy with quivering nostril. If
the nomad happened to be a gypsy, he was courteously addressed; but if he
were a mere native tatterdemalion, inclined to be truculent, Borrow’s
coat was off in a moment, and the challenge to decide there and then who
was the better man flung forth. I have never seen such challenges
accepted, for Borrow was robust and towering. But those who have seen
him ‘put his dukes up’ affirm that he gave an excellent account of
himself.”
There is also a glimpse in these notes {245} of Borrow’s attitude towards
the great, though the story is not attested in any way and may be merely
_ben trovato_. When a member of the Russian Embassy called on him in
Hereford Square to request for his Imperial master a copy of “Targum,”
Borrow “rudely told the official to let his master fetch it himself!”
The most pregnant friendship of the later days remains to be mentioned.
Two souls of close affinity discovered each other in 1872. In that year
Borrow encountered Mr. Theodore Watts. The fortunate fates threw these
two men together: Mr. Watts-Dunton, as we know him, has done more for the
true interpretation of Borrow than any other man. He brought to the
study of the Borrow books and the elucidation of the Borrow character an
intimate knowledge of the quaint things that Borrow loved. He brought an
extensive and peculiar acquaintance with the tortuous paths in which
Borrow roamed, whether they were literary, or philological, or merely
geographical. Nobody has so deeply penetrated the Borrovian psychology;
the pity of it is that his criticism and appreciation are scattered
through the inaccessible files of journals and reviews, or appear as
“introductions” to various editions of Borrow’s works, and have never
been collected.
The story of their meeting on the common ground of friendship with Dr.
Gordon Hake is, of course, familiar to all Borrovians. It had results so
wide, however, that some account of it is due. For many years before the
date mentioned, Mr. Watts-Dunton, with his amour of _Natura benigna_, his
gypsyism, his cult of the open air, had naturally been strongly drawn
towards such a personality as Borrow’s, and had learnt to love his
strange books. He had seen the white-haired giant swimming in the sea
off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him till the day at Gordon Hake’s
house at Roehampton, when Borrow’s approach, “striding across the
common,” was announced. They got into touch with difficulty. Kindred
spirits as they were, Borrow’s whimsies, his strangely mingled egoism and
shyness, placed obstacles in the way of sympathy.
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s account of the meeting is lit by a mischievously
flashing humour. It may be aptly compared with Boswell’s description of
his introduction to Johnson in the back parlour of Davies’s shop, but it
is far fuller of humorous intent. He knew something of Borrow’s
idiosyncrasies—his impatience of any learning that was not in his own
“line,” his touchiness about his own books, his objection to inquiries
into his relations with the gypsies. A way of approach was gradually
discovered in the pamphlet literature of the eighteenth century, in which
both were highly cultured. Bampfylde Moore Carew did not yield much, for
Borrow “evidently considered that every properly educated man ought to be
familiar with the story of Bampfylde Moore Carew in its every detail.”
Beer, bruising, gentility, languages were no more successful. “I tried
other subjects in the same direction, but with small success, till in a
lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very
scarce eighteenth-century pamphlet narrating the story of Ambrose
Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering
a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seaside
inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as
a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man
he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett’s supposed
victim, having been seized on the night in question with a violent
bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes’
walk in the sea breeze, when the pressgang captured him and carried him
off to sea, where he had been in service ever since. I introduced the
subject of Ambrose Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold’s play upon it, and at
once the ice between us thawed, and we became friends.”
We have to thank Ambrose Gwinett and the gypsies on Wimbledon Common for
many charming additions to the literature of Borrow. Hard upon this
conversation came the first of those walks in Richmond Park which Mr.
Watts-Dunton has described with so much felicity. It included that call
at the Bald-faced Stag in Kingston Vale, {248} in order that Borrow might
show his companion Jerry Abershaw’s sword. It was the occasion of the
rainbow whose “triumphal arch” filled the sky, when Borrow explained the
gypsy mystery of the trus’hul, how, by making a cross of two sticks, the
expert in occultism could wipe the rainbow out of the heavens. {249} Mr.
Watts-Dunton quaintly discusses the question whether Borrow was “a true
child of the open air,” and comes to the conclusion that the man who
stood looking at the deer and the herons in Richmond Park, what time he
carried under his arm a huge, bulging, green gamp, was not one of those
who, “owing to some exceptional power or some exceptional infirmity,” can
get closer to Nature than to brother, sister, wife, or friend. The
inquisitiveness of the man of science prevents this familiarity; so does
“sensivity to human contact,” as in the case of Emily Brontë; so does
subjection to the love passion. It was neither science nor passion that
prevented Borrow from matriculating in the University of the Open Air in
the sense that Thoreau did. It was Ambition.
“His books show that he could never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the
perilous stuff of ambition. To become renowned, judging from many a
peroration in his books, was as great an incentive . . . to learn
languages as to Alexander Smith’s poet-hero it was an incentive to
write poetry. . . . But I soon found that if he was not a perfect
Child of the Open Air—he was something better: a man of that deep
sympathy with human kind which the Child of the Open Air must needs
lack.”
There was much talk during that ramble of the herons of Whittlesea
Mere—which Mr. Watts-Dunton identified as the scene of some of the
adventures in the early part of “Lavengro”—of viper-taming, of the East
Anglian gypsies, of horses (and especially of the descendants of
“Shales”), of the quality of the sea-water off the east coast, and of
like matters dear to the heart of Borrow. The East Anglian in his new
companion completely conquered Borrow. They sang a duet in praise of the
glassy Ouse, which was the only river in England adequate to reflect the
rainbow, and of the wet sands of the Norfolk coast. The last passage of
the dialogue that Mr. Watts-Dunton has set down is an amusing example of
the complacency with which they agreed on the superiority of East Anglia
to any other spot under heaven:
“It is on sand alone that the sea strikes its true music—Norfolk
sand; a rattle is not music.”
“The best of the sea’s lutes,” I said, “is made by the sands of
Cromer.”
Thus was the entente ratified. It endured till Borrow finally left
London to end his days not far from the sound of the sea’s best lute.
CHAPTER XIV
THE PASSING OF THE ROMANY RYE
WHEN “The Romano Lavo-Lil” came out at the beginning of 1874, the public
were already in possession of Leland’s great book, which finally “queered
the pitch” for Borrow. The two would not bear comparison as a study of
the Romany language, for Borrow had worked so hurriedly that his
vocabulary was much less complete than he might have made it. There are
a large number of gypsy words in various parts of “Lavengro” and “The
Romany Rye” which he failed to incorporate in the new book; and others
acquired at Yetholm were also omitted. But it was not only in comparison
with Leland’s that Borrow’s last words on the gypsies seemed feeble.
Many much more learned persons had been publishing monumental works on
the subject—Pott, Miklosich, Paspati, to mention only three. The new
philological spirit had been operating on the Romany; the gypsy tongue
had been treated with as much care and skill as though it were one of the
great literary languages; whereas, when “The Zincali” was offered to the
public, as Mr. Hindes Groome pointed out in _The Academy_, “there were
not two educated men in England who possessed the slightest knowledge of
Romany.”
Mr. Groome was fair, even generous, in some of his acknowledgments. On
the other hand, _The Athenæum_ had no bowels of compassion for the
veteran; it did not temper justice with mercy. Though it had to confess
that not a few of those who had studied the gypsies and their language
“owed their first taste for the subject to the perusal of Mr. Borrow’s
books,” it could not “allow merely sentimental reasons to prevent us from
telling the honest truth,” but forthwith told it in terms of perfect
candour.
Amidst this demonstration of the fact that he had outlived his age,
Borrow decided to leave London once and for all, and to return to his
home on the shores of Oulton Broad, where he was finally lost to the
sight of a world not patient of him. As he told Mr. Watts-Dunton, he was
going down into East Anglia to die. For many years before the
publication of his last book, he had been very little in the limelight.
The public which had hailed “The Bible in Spain” with almost delirious
delight had grown older. In the absence of regular literary appeals to
its attention by Borrow, it had imagined him already dead. Some American
celebrities at one of Mrs. Procter’s Sunday afternoons were discussing
Borrow and Latham with Mr. Watts-Dunton, who told them “an anecdote of a
whimsical meeting” between these two. Was it the computation of his
capacity for “bottles at a sitting” which Latham endeavoured to get out
of Borrow at Dr. Gordon Hake’s? “My anecdote,” adds Watts-Dunton, “was
fully appreciated and enjoyed by my auditors till I chanced to let fall
the fact that both heroes of the quaint adventure were still alive, that
they occasionally met at Putney, and that I had quite lately been seeking
for sundews on Wimbledon Common with the one and strolling through
Richmond Park with the other. Then the look that passed from face to
face showed how dangerous it is to indulge on all occasions in the
coxcombry of mere truth. And afterwards my brilliant hostess did not
fail to let me know how grievously my character for veracity had suffered
for having talked about two men as being alive who were well known to
have been dead years ago—‘talked of them as though I had just left them
at luncheon.’ And yet at this very time Latham and Borrow were, in the
eyes of a few of England’s most illustrious men, the important names they
had always been.” {253}
Borrow’s leave-taking of London had its apotheosis from the same pen in a
brilliant and much-quoted passage:
“The last time I ever saw George Borrow was shortly before he left
London to live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo
Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and
striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were
reeling and boiling over the West End. Borrow came up and stood
leaning over the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might
be. Like most people born in flat districts, he had a passion for
sunsets. Turner could not have painted that one, I think, and
certainly my pen could not describe it; for the London smoke was
flushed by the sinking sun and had lost its dunness, and, reddening
every moment as it rose above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it
went curling round the sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving,
however, just a segment of a golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly
as in the thinnest and clearest air—a peculiar effect which struck
Borrow deeply. I never saw such a sunset before or since, not even
on Waterloo Bridge; and, from its association with ‘the last of
Borrow,’ I shall never forget it.”
And Mr. Watts-Dunton paid tribute to Borrow of a sonnet melodising their
talk of the “Children of the Open Air,” and making contrast of the lot of
lovers of the sun and wind with the habitants of London:
“. . . . Where men wither and choke,
Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
And love of woods and wild-wind prophecies—
Yea, every voice that to their father spoke;
And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
Leave never a meadow, outside Paradise.”
At the age of seventy-one there was not much left for the solitary spirit
to achieve. It was not easy to make new friendships, and even the old
ones were difficult to nurture at Oulton. He made one effort to get
Edward FitzGerald over from Woodbridge to see him. FitzGerald, twenty
years before, had been an ardent admirer of Borrow’s work. Sending him a
copy of his translation of Calderon’s plays, he remarked that he was a
man “who both did fine things in his own language and was deep read in
those of others.” Their correspondence was not extensive, but
FitzGerald’s letters are of considerable interest. For example, they
show that Borrow was in the secret of old Omar. FitzGerald wrote that
“Cowell, to whom I sent a copy, was naturally alarmed at it, he being a
very religious man; nor have I given any other copy but to George Borrow
. . . and to old Donne . . .” {255} This was a copy of the edition
printed in 1859 by Quaritch. But two years before the premature birth of
the great poem, FitzGerald had lent Borrow his manuscript of the
quatrains, and in asking for the return of it, he wrote: “I only want a
look at him. . . . You shall have _Omar_ back directly, or whenever you
want him, and I should really like to make you a copy (taking my time) of
the best quatrains. I am now looking over the Calcutta manuscript, which
has 500!—very many quite as good as those in the manuscript you have; but
very many in _both_ manuscripts are well omitted. . . .” FitzGerald had
been at Oulton about 1850. In 1856 he had visited Borrow again at
Yarmouth, and of that meeting he says expressively, “I enjoyed my
evening.” He did not fail, of course, to rub against some of Borrow’s
angles. According to Mr. Benson (“Edward FitzGerald,” in the “English
Men of Letters” series), he “found this strange pilgrim’s masterful
manners and irritable temper uncongenial,” but Mr. Benson admits that
FitzGerald said, long afterwards, “he was almost the only friend Borrow
had never quarrelled with.” The irritation could have been but slight,
if it could be called irritation at all: in one of his wayward moods
Borrow banged home the covers of the book just as his guest was about to
ask him to read some of the Northern Ballads. This incident is mentioned
without rancour by FitzGerald, in a letter in which he makes Borrow a
present of Redhouse’s “New Turkish Dictionary,” declares what a pleasant
evening he had spent at Yarmouth, and lets his friend into the secret of
his amazing marriage.
“I must tell you. I am come up here” (he writes from London) “on my
way to Chichester to be—married! to Miss Barton (of Quaker memory),
and our united ages amount to 96!—a dangerous experiment on both
sides. She at least brings a fine head and heart to the
bargain—worthy of a better market. But it is to be, and I dare say
you will honestly wish we may do well.”
The “dangerous experiment” turned out as we know. FitzGerald’s letter is
hardly that of a man who found Borrow “uncongenial.” He liked the Borrow
_ménage_, they had much in common in their literary tastes, and some few
common friends—Donne for one, and for another Kerrich, of Geldeston Hall,
FitzGerald’s brother-in-law. He liked Borrow’s books, too. They were
among the few modern works he read, though his fastidious palate was
offended by some of Borrow’s lapses in style. In addition to the
meetings at Oulton and Yarmouth, there were foregatherings at Donne’s
house in London, at FitzGerald’s own house in Great Portland Street, and
at Gorleston.
But this was all twenty years old now; the FitzGerald who received
Borrow’s letter at Woodbridge was sixty-six and a close recluse, unable
to understand why any man who had reached his age or gone beyond it
should want any company but his own. His response is a curious
illustration of the hermit way of thought into which he had fallen. He
told Borrow that for the last fifteen years he had not visited any of his
oldest friends, except the daughters of George Crabbe—“my old parson
Crabbe,” vicar of Bredfield, whose “brave old white head” had “sunk into
the village churchsward” in 1857—and Donne, to whom he had given a
half-day. To have told why he had thus fallen from his company would
have been a tedious thing, he said, and all about himself, too—“whom,
Montaigne says, one never talks about without detriment to the person
talked about.”
“One’s friends, however kind and ‘loyal’ (as the phrase goes), do
manage to exist and enjoy themselves pretty reasonably without one.
“So with me. And is it not much the same with you also? Are you not
glad now to be mainly alone, and find company a heavier burden than
the grasshopper? . . . I like to think over my old friends. They
are there, lingering as ineffaceable portraits—done in the prime of
life—in my memory. Perhaps we should not like one another so well
after a fifteen years’ separation, when all of us change and most of
us for the worse. . . .
“So shall things rest? I could not go to you, after refusing all
this while to go to older—if not better—friends. . . .”
This letter, dated January 10th, 1875, is almost the final literary relic
of Borrow. It sings in a minor key, but with a fitting sombre melody,
the requiem of his career in the world of letters. Borrow himself,
however, did not renounce and abhor society in FitzGerald’s fashion.
Desolate Oulton, the haunt of so many wraiths of past joys and sorrows,
saddened the lonely old man, and in the late ’seventies he lived a good
deal in Norwich, where he had apartments in Lady Lane, seeking the
company of those who knew and liked him. His favourite resort was the
old Norfolk Hotel. There he had his special chair, whence he issued his
pronouncements _ex cathedra_ on ale and men and things. But to Oulton he
turned at the last, dismal as it was. The estate had been pitifully
neglected during his residence in London. The Nemesis that dogged his
steps as a landed proprietor had always been the litigious tenant. There
was one in possession of the Hall Farm in 1878, when Dr. and Mrs.
MacOubrey had left London to live at Oulton, in order to bear Borrow
company in his declining days. This tenant, calling at the Cottage to
deliver an ultimatum about the need for repairs, became rude to Borrow,
who fired up quite in his best style, and declared, “Sir, you came in by
that door; you can go out by it!”
Borrow’s predilection for the alehouse is beyond question, whether it was
in Norwich, or in London, or in Wales. But it was probably not so
overpowering as sometimes has been represented. The misrepresentation is
doubtless his own fault in great measure, because of the literary
emphasis he laid upon the virtue of inns and their staple commodity. We
have observed how this affected one of the reviewers of “Wild Wales.”
Legends grew up around a certain inn at Oulton Broad, the Wherry Hotel.
They were inevitable. Because it was an inn and was near Borrow’s house,
gossip assumed that he was a frequent visitor and a bibulous. A sort of
myth arose that it was the scene of drinking bouts, where Borrow not only
gratified his own passion for quarrelling and fighting, but egged on
others to quarrel and fight. It has already been shown on good evidence
that he was personally temperate, if not abstemious, and the known facts
dispose of the idea that there was any excessive drinking. {259} But the
stories gave occasion for a correspondence in one of the London papers a
few years ago, when Mr. William Mackay was able to dismiss them by
proving that the Wherry Hotel was kept by one Mason during this period,
and that Mr. Mason averred that Borrow did not visit the house more than
twice, and that he had no recollection of the incidents so vividly
described.
Mr. William A. Dutt has given us a graphic little picture {260} of Borrow
in the last years of his life in the country of the Broads, and of the
impression he made on his neighbours:
“His tall, erect, somewhat mysterious figure was often seen in the
early hours of summer mornings or late at night on the lonely
pathways that wind in and out from the banks of Oulton Broad. He
loved to be mysterious, and the village children used to hush their
voices and draw aside at his approach. They looked upon him with
fear and awe—for had they not seen him stop and talk with the
gypsies, who ran away with little children? But in his heart Borrow
was fond of the little ones, though it amused him to watch the
impression his strange personality made upon them. Older people he
seldom spoke to when out on his solitary rambles; but sometimes he
would flash out such a glance from beneath his broad-brimmed hat and
shaggy eyebrows as would make timid country-folk hasten on their way
filled with vague thoughts and fears of the evil eye. . . .
“Still, Borrow was not unpopular with the villagers, many of whom,
long after his death, remembered little acts of kindness on his part
by which they had benefited. To the sick and infirm he was always a
good friend, though his almost invariable remedy for all the ills
that flesh is heir to were wine and ale. He was exceedingly fond of
animals, and nothing aroused his wrath more than to see them badly
treated. . . . A favourite old cat that was ill crawled out of his
house to die in the garden hedge. Borrow no sooner missed the poor
creature than he went in search of it, and brought it indoors in his
arms. He then laid it down in a comfortable spot, and sat and
watched it till it was dead.”
Most old people incline to exaggerate their age after they have passed
the common span of life, and are offended if the achievement of longevity
is not accounted a meritorious performance in them. Borrow was
unconventional in this as in all things. He resented references to his
age. The vicar of Lowestoft visited him at Oulton, and had a smooth and
delightful experience till he transgressed by asking the veteran how old
he was. “Sir,” said Borrow thunderously, “I tell my age to no man!” One
of his last bits of writing, in a tremulous hand, was a little
dissertation “On People’s Age,” beginning: “Never talk to people about
their age. . . . Compliment a man of eighty-five on the venerableness of
his appearance, and he will shriek out, ‘No more venerable than
yourself,’ and will perhaps hit you with his crutch.” {262}
The forcible sentiment was that of a man whose mind was stronger than his
physical frame. Within a few months the passing came. His death, by
some strange fate, was as secret as much of his life had been: he passed
to the hidden bourne unseen by any human eye; his last agony was even
more closely veiled than those years of his youth around which he had
diffused a mist as thick as the enchanted vapours raised by his favourite
magicians, the Firbolgs.
On July 26th, 1881, Dr. and Mrs. MacOubrey drove to Lowestoft on
business. Borrow was left alone in the house. When they returned he lay
dead. Censure passed upon his step-daughter and her husband in
connection with this incident is ungenerous. They had cared for him so
tenderly that it is impossible to accuse them of any lack of affection.
And who, viewing George Borrow’s life and character as a rounded whole,
would regard the circumstances of his death with disapproval? So,
seventy-eight years after the summer evening when, at the “beautiful
little town in a certain district of East Anglia, I first saw the light,”
he entered into the Life Everlasting, not many miles away, alone in his
lonely house, with the fir trees whispering as his spirit departed, and
the quiet water shimmering by the little summer-house where that spirit
had communed with its choicest companions and accomplished its finest
work. The body lay silent there for several days:
“That port which so majestic was and strong,
Loose, and deprived of vigour, stretched along:
All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan . . .”
On August 4th it was conveyed to London, and laid with the body of his
wife in West Brompton Cemetery.
Borrow dead was Borrow forgotten until the afflation of a new time
breathed upon him, and his resurrection came. The “strange pilgrim’s
masterful manner and irritable temper” took their proper place in the
background of the picture; the real value of his pilgrimage was seen. A
finnicking age which emphasised his “vulgarity” had ended, and another
age had opened which was competent to approve his realism and to appraise
his art. Borrow took his rightful niche among the immortals who have
illuminated the human comedy and sung the joys of earth. The inspiration
of Jasper Petulengro is the inspiration of the New Day: “There’s a wind
on the heath, brother. . . . Who would wish to die?”
CHAPTER XV
BORROW’S GYPSYISM
BORROW’S gypsyism was the most important part of his literary
stock-in-trade. What it was worth, apart from its literary value, is a
moot point.
Any writer who is not a deep gypsiologist must approach such a question
with diffidence. The consensus of opinion is all that can be suggested.
It is that Borrow was unscientific both as a Romany linguist and as a
student of Romany history. His knowledge of this strange race, for whose
origin we go to the Hindu Kush and beyond, was empirical; so was his
acquaintance with the language they took with them all over the world and
preserved for so many years almost as inviolably secret as the Etruscan
mystery. He was an enthusiast, but not a learned enthusiast, and his
method did not lend itself to thoroughness—like that of Mr. Sampson, for
example, of whom a gypsy warned his friends that he would “cut the heart
out of your breast if he thought he’d find a new word in it.” Borrow’s
gypsy stories were not arranged on the elaborate plan of Mr. Sampson’s
excursions into the gypsy lore of Wales. Though he knew the “tinkler”
tribes intimately, it was left for Leland, long years afterwards, to
discover that they had a language of their own, which was not Romany, but
Shelta, subsequently identified with the secret medium of the ancient
bards of Ireland. Leland’s discovery and the investigations of Professor
Kuno Meyer and Mr. Sampson, which traced Shelta back to the Gaelic of ten
centuries ago, surely form one of the great romances of philology.
Leland himself was surprised that Borrow had not penetrated this mystery,
because he had “specially cultivated tinkers.”
In a chapter on this subject intended to form part of a book on Shelta,
never completed, Leland wrote:
“The first or second time I conversed with Borrow was in the British
Museum, where he was examining an old Irish manuscript, and made the
remark to me that he did not believe there was a man now living who
could really read such works. But this Nestor of the Romany ryes,
who was indeed a man of marvellous attainments and real genius, was
somewhat touched with the common weakness of the old school, that he
had mastered many subjects. Thus he positively declared in his
‘Lavo-Lil’ that there are only twelve hundred Anglo-Romany words,
when in fact my own manuscript collection actually contains between
three and four thousand, all approved as authentic by the late
Professor E. H. Palmer. What Borrow would have said had he been told
that there were thousands of tinkers now living who spoke the secret
language of the bards—which was probably that of the Druids—passes
conjecture.” {265}
We should certainly have had a tinker portrait as fine as that of
Murtagh, from whom Borrow learned the Irish Gaelic of ordinary commerce.
But it is idle to pursue the subject of Borrow’s empiricism. That is a
matter which concerns the experts of philology and not the wider world.
The important thing is the use which Borrow made of his gypsy knowledge
and the fascination he himself exercised over the Romany chalu gypsy men.
While he often affected to approach the subject from the scientist’s
point of view, and to lay the Romany language on the dissecting table,
what in actual fact attracted him was the picturesque aspect of gypsy
life. That is what attracts his readers to-day. His books are fitting
companions of the pictures of David Cox and De Wint. Who, looking upon
that wonderful drawing by Cox of “Gypsies Crossing a Moor”—a drawing so
phenomenally realistic of the effect of wind that the spectator is almost
induced to turn up his coat collar—does not recall the description in
“The Zincali” of “the hurried march; the women and children, mounted on
lean but spirited asses, would scour along the plains fleeter than the
wind; ragged and savage-looking men, wielding the scourge and goad, would
scamper by their side or close behind . . .”? And there are a score of
scenes in “Lavengro” to match the sketches made by De Wint in his visits
to the Romany tans (tents)—his glowing yellows, his swarthy faces, and
his romantic rags.
The point specially to be observed is that Borrow’s vision of the gypsy
race in the early part of the nineteenth century is practically the only
one in existence. It has the value of a record, in addition to the value
of a picture. Though there are great numbers of gypsies in the British
islands, the old order of society known to Borrow has largely broken up.
When he knew it, the organisation and status of that society had been
unaltered for centuries. Borrow’s gypsies were as esoteric as they had
been in 1550, when Andrew Borde, writing his “Fyrst Boke of the
Introduction of Knowledge,” “introduced” as a great discovery a few
sentences of Romany, which he described as “Egipt speche,” and drew an
uncomplimentary character sketch of the ’Gyptians, to whom he ascribed
origin in the land of Rameses: “The people of the country be swarte, and
doth go disgised in theyr apparel contrary to other nacions, they be
lyght fingerd and use pyking [picking pockets], they have litle manner,
and evyl looking, and yet be pleasant dansers.” {267} Even while
Borrow’s books were appearing, however, the old gypsy society was
disappearing. The enclosure of the English commons had made it hard for
them to survive in their original state; the arrival of the railway so
altered the whole atmosphere and outlook of the countryside that it
became intolerable to them, and vast numbers of the wealthier class, the
gryengroes or horse-dealers, with whom Borrow consorted, left for a newer
and more simply-organised country on the other side of the Atlantic.
Those who remained deteriorated. Gypsy traditions survive. So does the
language. But the racial purity has been to a great extent lost by
intermarriage among the gypsies, the “tinklers,” and the mumpers; and
many of the caravanners on the English roads to-day have very little
gypsy blood in their veins. How long any gypsyism at all will combat the
onslaughts of the law on the one hand and the motor on the other is a
doubtful point. There is a tendency in the one case to impose conditions
which make the nomadic life almost impracticable; {268} in the other
case, the caravan (in the gypsy sense) is seriously incommoded by the
speeding up of road traffic.
Borrow wrote in his autobiography about gypsies as they were in the days
before education and petrol had combined against them, when their camps
were to be found in lonely lanes and obscure dells, and they rested in
the heat of noon by the green roadside. The substantial accuracy of his
picture has been amply confirmed. He recorded facts about their habits
and their habitat. For some reason he was able to read more deeply into
their character than many observers who are not open to the same charge
of being unscientific. What he tells us of gypsy pride, love of race,
exclusiveness, mutual honour, hostility to the gentiles, faithfulness to
their own standards amidst what seems to be degradation and squalor, is
perfectly true. It remains as true to-day, indeed, as it was when Borrow
wrote, wherever unadulterated gypsy blood is found. He extenuated
nothing. Complaint has been made that, on the contrary, he failed to do
justice to the better side of the gypsy woman’s character. Mr.
Watts-Dunton has pointed this out; and it cannot be denied that the
figures of Mrs. Herne and Leonora are horrible enough, grotesquely
villainous, and compelling mainly by reason of the baneful magnetism of
their unequivocal wickedness. The companion portrait of Ursula should
not, however, be overlooked, nor that section of “The Zincali” which he
devotes to the vindication of the gitanas’ chastity.
The charm exercised by the gypsies upon Borrow was so strong that he said
he did not remember the time when the mere mention of the name failed to
awaken within him feelings hard to be described. He knew all the tribes
of the East of England from his boyhood—the Smiths, the Pinfolds, Grays,
Bosviles,—visited their camps, met them on Mousehold Heath, admired their
horse-craft, worshipped the pugilists among them, followed them to fairs
and studied their tricks and wiles, learnt their language, and found his
way into their confidence. It could only be done because he worked
spells upon them much as they worked their enchantment upon him. The
tall youth with the white hair and the piercing eyes, who seemed to be
more absorbed in their saying and their doing than in any other
employment of his life, became one of them whenever he pleased. They,
indeed, refused to believe that one so learned in their business was not
one of them. Remarking on the fact that in all his intercourse with the
tribes in various parts of the world he had never received the least
injury from men whose hatred and contempt of the “gorgios” (“gentiles,”
or non-gypsies) was inveterate, he said he was “not deceived as to the
motive of their forbearance: they thought him a Rom (_c.f._ page 277),
and on this supposition they hurt him not, their love of ‘the blood’
being their most distinguishing characteristic.” This was the set of
circumstances which enabled Borrow to give us sketches of life and
character as fine as are to be found within any book-covers: the
masterly-limned portrait of Jasper Petulengro, quaintest and most
alluring of pagans, and the towering figure of Tawno Chikno, type of
gypsy beauty and chivalry. This vision of gypsydom in England is one of
Borrow’s finest bequests to his countrymen, if, indeed, its value is not
greater than that of anything else he accomplished.
In Spain he pursued the same road. He would turn aside anywhere to talk
with a gitano (gypsy), and the gypsy episodes help to flush and enliven
the pages of “The Bible in Spain” in a very striking manner. The method
he adopted in compiling “The Zincali” has been remarked in an earlier
chapter. The reader who cares not at all for Sancho de Moncada will yet
find much in the book of curious incident and lively observation. He who
is bored to death with Quinones may yet be interested in such a dramatic
story as that of the Bookseller of Logrono, and in such a graphic
description as that of the forge in the woods, with its gypsy metaphor of
the sparks: “More than a hundred lovely daughters I see produced at one
time, fiery as roses; in one moment they expire, gracefully
circumvolving.” As he tells us in “Lavengro,” Borrow always saw poetry
in a forge. But just as he preferred Gronwy Owen to Homer, so he set the
vision of the gypsy smithy, under the trees of an English dingle or in a
Spanish forest, high above the more grandiose forges of the classic
shades in which
“. . . the mighty family
Of one-eyed brothers hasten to the shore,
And gather round the bellowing Polypheme.”
Indeed, he sometimes expressed downright contempt for Vulcan and his
minions, though he did not disdain the Cyclopean legend as a literary
element in the composition of the scene just mentioned. The traditional
trade of the smith is dying out among the gypsies, and the sale of cheap
tinpots is a much commoner occupation of their lives than the forging of
the petul (horseshoe). Certain aspects of gypsydom described in “The
Zincali,” however, are constant, and here it is proposed to notice more
particularly Borrow’s remarks bearing on the general and permanent
features of Romany character and customs, arts and manners.
The attitude of the race towards questions of religion interested him
greatly. If their progenitors brought any religion with them from beyond
the frontier hills of India, they had lost all trace of it before Western
inquirers began to investigate their history and explore their minds.
“Do you fear God, O Tuérta?” Borrow asked the one-eyed daughter of Pépa
the sybil in Madrid.
“Brother, I fear nothing!” was Tuérta’s reply.
He translated the Gospel of St. Luke into the gypsy language of Spain,
and remarks that the gitános purchased it freely; many of the men
understood it, and prized it highly, but they were induced “more by the
language than the doctrine.” The women, though generally unable to read,
“each wished to have one in her pocket, especially when engaged in
thieving expeditions; for they all looked upon it in the light of a charm
which would preserve them from all danger and mischance.” Having
forgotten whatever gods they ever worshipped before they left their
country of origin, they were perfectly indifferent to the Christianity of
the Western world. There is a curiously interesting passage on this
subject in the introductory chapters of “The Zincali” dealing with the
English gypsies:
“With respect to religion, they call themselves members of the
Established Church, and are generally anxious to have their children
baptised and to obtain a copy of the register. Some of their
baptismal papers, which they carry about with them, are highly
curious, going back for a period of upwards of two hundred years.
With respect to the essential points of religion, they are quite
careless and ignorant; if they believe in a future state, they dread
it not, and if they manifest when dying any anxiety, it is not for
the soul but for the body; a handsome coffin and a grave in a quiet
country churchyard are invariably the objects of their last thoughts,
and it is probable that, in their observance of the rite of baptism,
they are principally influenced by a desire to enjoy the privilege of
burial in consecrated ground.”
This might hold as an accurate account of the gypsies of to-day. In
Eastern Europe, I believe, they are Christians or Mussulmans with the
greatest impartiality, and change from one religion to the other as
circumstances may require. In Great Britain they like the distinction
and the respectability which they suppose to be attached to marriages and
baptisms in the Established Church. The ceremony of baptism is a
favourite one. They do not mind how many times or in how many places
they submit their children to that rite: the sponsors usually give
presents. The German gypsies who were in Great Britain in 1906 had their
children baptised in Glasgow. The Catholic faith is professed by some
Welsh members of the race. But, in general, religion of any type has no
relation whatever to their lives; as a keen observer of the gypsies
remarked to the writer, “they know as much about it as a navvy does of
bimetallism.” They go to tea-meetings which may be organised for their
benefit, and behave themselves as to the manner born; but efforts to
evangelise them have been of little permanent effect. They have no
“religious sense” in our acceptation of the term. Respect for the dead,
however, is still an essential article of the gypsy code.
When that rare old scoundrel Ryley Bosvil lay a-dying, as Borrow relates
in the “Lavo-Lil,” a Methodist visited him and asked him what was his
hope. “My hope is,” said he, “that when I am dead I shall be put into
the ground and my wife and children will weep over me.” They did. And
on the return from the grave they carried out the gypsy custom, brought
from India, of the funeral pyre. Instead of quarrelling over the
division of the property, like Christians, as Borrow sourly says, they
killed his pony and buried it, smashed his caravan and cart into
matchwood, and built a fire, on which they cast his clothes, blankets,
carpets, and curtains; they broke his mirrors and his crockery, and
battered up his hardware, and threw it all on the flames. That practice
is still occasionally carried out in England: the property of the dead
shall not be defiled by the living. And of the dead themselves they
speak only with bated breath. The relatives of a deceased gypsy will
sometimes give up his favourite food. “An old friend of mine . . . gave
up fish when her husband died, because it was the last thing they had
eaten together,” writes to me one who has an intimate knowledge of the
race. The old love for graves in quiet little churchyards survives in
Wales, but in England—at any rate in Lancashire—the gypsies now own
graves in the big cemeteries. This is also the case in France. In
Norway, it is said, nobody knows how they dispose of their dead.
[Picture: Page of Borrow’s Draft of “The Zincali.” By permission of Mr.
Watts-Dunton]
In “The Zincali” Borrow has a short disquisition on gypsy law, which he
analyses under three heads: (1) Separate not from the husbands; (2) Be
faithful to the husbands; (3) Pay your debts to the husbands—the husband
being the “Rom,” as distinct from the “gorgio,” or gentile. He contends
that, whatever may be the moral and legal relations between gypsydom and
the world at large, there is perfect honour amongst the members of the
race itself. He enlarges on the chastity of gypsy women, which is never
overcome, in whatever licentious scenes they may be involved. Experts in
the Romany language take exception to the use of the expression
“husbands” in Borrow’s sense. “Rom” is an obscure word, and “husband” is
only a secondary meaning. Its Indian origin is uncertain; there are in
Western Asia thousands of people who call themselves “Rom” and are not
gypsies. But Borrow’s rendering of the principles of gypsy law is
accurate. Clan attachment is all-powerful still. Mr. Scott-Macfie
informs me of the case of two brothers, friends of his, who quarrelled
and have not spoken for thirty years. Yet they always live in the same
camp, “and when there is a battle Kenza always comes and fights by Noah’s
side, returning to his tent after the struggle without having said a
word.” Their common cause is the concern of all: when a gypsy is in
trouble, money is always forthcoming for his defence and to pay his fine.
The chastity of the gypsy women is the fact to which is owing the
preservation of their race purity against tremendous odds.
The occupations and customs of gypsies have not varied much all the world
over. The men have been jockeys and horse-dealers and the women
fortune-tellers. Borrow has given more than one account of _hokano
baro_, “the great trick,” practised on credulous women, who hide money or
valuables in the earth or elsewhere, deluded by the Romany chi’s (gypsy
woman’s) promise that it shall magically increase—and, of course, never
find it again. The three weeks generally prescribed as the term of its
gestation are quite long enough to put a sufficient number of miles
between the gypsy and her victim. The practice of _hokano baro_ is
becoming rarer, probably not because of any reluctance on the part of the
gypsies to perform it, but because of the gradual decline of the kind of
superstition which made it possible. There are relics of it in the West
of England and elsewhere. The village “witch” occasionally makes an
appearance in the police court, and not many years ago in Cornwall a chi
received imprisonment for a false pretence not less ingenious than the
_hokano baro_, and almost as elaborate as some recent conspiracies in
which no gypsies have been involved. The bait in this case was money “in
Chancery,” and three Cornish housewives were effectually swindled by a
cleverly constructed story in which witchcraft, the planets, phantom
lawyers, and hidden property all played their parts.
To hoax the gentile is a meritorious thing in a gypsy, and there is
evidence that the Romany people themselves are not as a race
superstitious. Their success depended in Borrow’s time upon cold
calculation and rapid judgment of the characters of the people with whom
they had to deal. Pepita’s interview with Cristina in the palace, and
the trick of Aurora upon the wealthy widow lady {279} are evidence of
that. Their modern attitude is precisely the same, though I have been
told of one Welsh gypsy who believed she could work spells, had faith in
her own fortune-telling, and was believed in by other gypsies. A
well-known gryengro in the eastern counties, it is said, never concludes
any important horse-dealing transaction till his mother has “read the
stars” for him. Some gypsies credit the seventh daughter with the power
of true divination. But in the main their art of dukkering, bewitching,
or fortune-telling, is merely the art of gauging the personalities with
which they are dealing, and, as Borrow says, adapting their promises “to
the age and condition of the parties who seek for information”; the gypsy
holds the hand of her client, but her eyes are fixed upon the client’s
face. Readers of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” a much more numerous
company than those who have studied “The Zincali,” will recall references
in those books to _draving balos_. This was the pleasant custom of
administering to pigs and other comestible animals of the countryside a
certain poison, which infallibly deprived them of life but did not render
their flesh unfit for food. Having done this in secret, the gypsy would
go up to the farmer openly and offer some small price for the carcass,
and his offer would be accepted, since a porker supposed to have died of
disease was marketable in no other quarter. The custom does not linger
in England, but a recent traveller in Spain saw at Martos, in the
province of Jaen, a whole gypsy tribe feeding on the roasted body of a
poisoned pig.
Among the Romany habits quaintly discussed in “The Zincali” {280} which
still survive in gypsydom is that of the _patteran_, or trail—the bunches
of twigs or handfuls of grass scattered at a cross-road to indicate to
stragglers the way which their companions have taken. It has been
remarked that the ranks of the gryengroes, or horse-dealers, of the class
described in Borrow’s books have been greatly depleted, particularly by
emigration to the Western continent; but there are representatives of
these, the gypsy aristocracy, still to be seen at the English horse-sales
and fairs, and very formidable judges of a horse they are, though I know
of none quite so expert as Jasper Petulengro. One of them not long ago
bought a piece of land near Lowestoft, in order that he and his friends
might camp undisturbed by the law and unvexed by the police.
No account of Borrow’s gypsyism can neglect the wonderful scene or series
of scenes which, omitted from “The Zincali,” were included in “The Bible
in Spain,” picturing his journey from Badajoz towards Madrid in company
with Antonio Lopez. These passages, in the ninth and tenth chapters of
the book, convey an extraordinary impression of the gypsy character and
of gypsy habits. They contain sketches of persons and incidents vivid as
lightning flashes; they are full of Borrow’s best matter and in his most
characteristic manner. See the fierce gitano in his zamarra, or cloak of
sheepskin, and his high-peaked Andalusian hat, coming to interview the
London Caloro (gypsy) who has so strange a knowledge of their language
that the gypsies for whom he has written a gospel call him “brother.”
Antonio, bound on a journey on “the affairs of Egypt,” has bethought him
that the strange Caloro is going to Madrid. The country is very
disturbed; the gypsies are taking advantage of the uproar to plunder the
gentiles; and the Caloro may fall a victim to them. Antonio proposes,
therefore, to accompany him as far as the frontiers of Castile, so that
he may not run the risk of a mistake; while, as for perils from any other
quarter than the bands of gypsy brigands—does not Antonio carry in his
bosom the magic _bar lachi_, the lodestone, a talisman which renders him
immune from knife or bullet, and for him makes “the dark night the same
as the fair day, and the wild carrascal [forest] as the market-place?”
The _bar lachi_ occupies a prominent place in “The Zincali,” where a
strange story is told of the fascination exercised upon the gitanós by
the large piece of lodestone in the museum at Madrid, and the recipe is
given for a magic potion consisting of a little powder from the stone
dropped in a glass of the potent spirit aguardiente. Antonio had
fortified himself with such a draught before he came to make his proposal
that they should ride forth together, Borrow on the fleet horse which had
cost fifty dollars, and the gypsy on a mule.
From the moment when Borrow’s love of adventure and desire to get insight
into Spanish gypsydom led him to accept this strange proposal instead of
going to Madrid in prosaic British fashion by the stage-coach, his pages
are lit by variegated lights—the blaze of straw fires roasting pig, the
eye of the sun in dusty village streets, or its rays percolating through
the maze of forest trees, or the brasero’s glow in the vast ruined house
in Merida, where the gypsy crone tells him her story of torrid adventure
in Morocco among the Corahai, her fortune-telling and her hokkawaring
(deceiving) among the desert tribes. They are overhung by the mystery of
the object of Antonio’s journey, which remains unsolved. They echo with
the weird converse of Antonio himself, with his guitar-strings vibrating
in the shadows of the great room lit by an earthen lamp on the floor,
with the patter of the gypsy girls’ feet as they dance. Nobody has ever
mixed ingredients like these into such a dish as Borrow served up—the
ancient gitana who knew “more crabbed things and crabbed words than all
the Erraté [gypsy folk] betwixt here and Catalonia,” the venal alguazils,
or excise officers, looking for contraband who were bribed by the present
of a cigar and frightened out of the house by the maledictions of the old
woman and her girls, the bivouac among the trees, the dialogues on solemn
questions with Pepindorio the pagan.
The most interesting gypsy-hunt in which Borrow indulged in the later
part of his life was the search in the Cheviot Hills for relics of old
Will Faa, the gypsy “king,” smuggler, and innkeeper of Kirk Yetholm.
Faa, the bearer of a celebrated name in Scottish gypsydom, flourished in
the eighteenth century during those years when the nomads had recovered
from the effects of the early persecutions, and had not yet been assailed
by an organised rural police. This monarch in the Augustan age of the
Romanies had been a person of great consequence in Borderland, and it was
at the house he occupied in Kirk Yetholm—an inn which in ’64 had much of
the appearance of a ruined Spanish posada—that Borrow was gazing when a
woman accosted him on gypsy subjects, and told him that a granddaughter
of Will Faa was residing in the town. The incident, with his visit to
this celebrity, Esther Blyth, “the Queen of the Nokkums,” {284} provides
the material for the last and the best chapter of “The Romano Lavo-Lil.”
He describes his “deep discourse” with her “about matters Nokkum, about
the words they used and the famous ones among them in the older time.”
There is a curious forecast here of Leland’s discovery of Shelta, and its
identification with the language of the ancient Gaelic bards, though
Borrow remained quite innocent of its significance. The Queen of the
Nokkums had not much Romany, but used a “poggado jib” (a broken jargon)
consisting partly of gypsy words, partly of Lowland Scots, and partly of
cant, “the allegorical jargon of thieves.” He remarks: “Then she called
a donkey _asal_, and a stone _cloch_, which words are neither cant nor
gypsy, but Irish or Gaelic. I incurred her vehement indignation by
saying they were Gaelic. She contradicted me flatly, and said that
whatever I might know” (and he had been astonishing her with his Romany
jib, as usual), “I was quite wrong there, for that neither she nor any
one of her people would condescend to speak anything so low as Gaelic,
or, indeed, if they possibly could avoid it, have anything to do with the
poverty-stricken creatures who used it.” Borrow goes on to moralise in
his own way on the effect built up in the minds of the public at large on
the subject of the Highlanders and their Gaelic by “the magic writings of
Walter Scott,” and to contrast it with the contempt in which both people
and language were held in Scott’s own land.
The faltering hand of age is all too plainly seen in this Kirk Yetholm
sketch. It has a certain interest, but it lacks the wondrous witchery of
his earlier dialogues with gypsies in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.”
Perhaps there was every bit as much of the picturesque and romantic in
his later intercourse with the swarthy people; but he was not the same
Borrow. He had not the old spirit, the vim, the elasticity, and he could
not invest his gypsy friends and their surroundings with the charm that
pervaded his former writing on the subject. He had lost zest. He knew
and mentioned that the Romany chals and chis whom he saw in dingy
metropolitan suburbs or slums were out for a great part of the year in
the green lanes and pleasant ways of Kent; but he gives us no pictures of
the patch of grass, so vividly described by Dickens about the same time,
“between the road-dust and the trees,” the place whose sweet temptations
“all the tramps with carts or caravans, the gypsy-tramp, the show-tramp,
the cheap-jack, find it impossible to resist,” where “all turn the horse
loose when they come to it, and boil the pot. Bless the place! I love
the ashes of the vagabond fires that have scorched its grass!” Yet that
was just the picture that would have appealed to the younger Borrow.
During his residence in London he paid many visits to the gypsy haunts in
the neighbourhood, such as the no-man’s-land at Wandsworth, where was to
be found a very Babel of gypsies, mumpers, and Irish vagrants, as unlike
a true gypsy encampment as anything on earth—a medley of caravans and
carts, horses and donkeys, basket-makers and clothes-peg carvers,
broken-down pugilists and the scum of the nether world. There were
sketches to be made of such characters as Mrs. Cooper, the deserted wife
of Jack Cooper, a famous gypsy prize-fighter. With her he would sit “in
her little tent after she had taken her cup of tea . . . and hear her
talk of old times and things: how Jack courted her ’neath the trees of
Loughton Forest, and how, when tired of courting, they would get up and
box.” There were suggestions to be offered of such personalities as the
“dark, mysterious, beautiful, terrible creature,” with a lovely gypsy
face, but an expression “evil—evil to a degree,” who was a puzzle to all
the inhabitants of the gypsery, now dukkering for servant girls or
bandying slang with butcher-boys, and anon “in a beautiful half
riding-dress, her hair fantastically plaited and adorned with pearls,
standing beside the carriage of a countess telling the fortune of her
ladyship with the voice and look of a pythoness.” There were stories to
be told of the encampment at Latimer’s Green in the north of London, and
of the rookery at “The Mount,” in the East End, and there was a biography
to be related of that tremendous fellow, Ryley Bosvil, the tinker who
wore gold pieces for coat-buttons, who had two wives, gave himself grand
airs, and composed Romany verses, of which the following ode to one of
his better halves is a spirited specimen—the translation is Borrow’s:
“Beneath the bright sun there is none, there is none,
I love like my Yocky Shuri;
With the greatest delight in blood I would fight
To the knees for my Yocky Shuri!”
But in all these literary excursions into gypsydom, the effervescence had
gone. It was left for other pens to transmute the gorgio’s impressions
of the Romany into real poetry. And even Borrow’s own adventures in
these later times are better described by another than by himself.
Mr. Watts-Dunton relates one of the best gypsy stories ever told about
Borrow. It arose out of a discussion between them as to the probable
nature of the appeal, if any, which Matthew Arnold’s poem of “The Scholar
Gypsy” would make to a real Romany chi. Borrow had ventured the opinion
that whatever might be the poetical merits of Arnold’s work, it was clear
that he had no conception of the Romany temper, and that gypsies would be
unable either to understand its motive or to sympathise with it. Mr.
Watts-Dunton thought, on the contrary, that, however blind a gypsy might
be to the beauties of Arnold’s style, “the motive was so clearly
developed that the most illiterate person could understand it.” They
went off together to a gypsy camp to test the question, agreeing to read
the poem to the first intelligent gypsy woman they should find—for gypsy
men, said Borrow, were “too prosaic to furnish a fair test.” The
encounter with the Romanies came about through the discovery of a magpie
crouching in a hawthorn bush. The bird did not attempt to fly away as
they approached. Mr. Watts-Dunton exclaimed, “It is wounded, or else
dying—or is it a tame bird escaped from a cage?”
“Hawk!” said Borrow laconically, and turned up his face and gazed
into the sky. “The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his
quarry and made his meal. I fancy he has himself been ‘chivvied’ by
the hawk, as the gypsies would say.”
And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that specked
the dazzling blue, a hawk—one of the kind which takes its prey in the
open rather than in the thick woodlands—was wheeling up and up, and
trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to stoop at
and devour it. . . .
As Borrow and his friend were gazing at the bird, a woman’s voice at
their elbows said:
“It’s lucky to chivvy the hawk that chivvies a magpie. I shall stop
here till the hawk’s flew away.”
They turned round, and there stood a magnificent gypsy woman,
carrying, gypsy fashion, a weakly child that, in spite of its sallow
and wasted cheek, proclaimed itself to be hers. By her side stood a
young gipsy girl of about seventeen years of age. She was
beautiful—quite remarkably so—but her beauty was not of the typical
Romany kind. It was, perhaps, more like the beauty of a Capri girl.
She was bareheaded—there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her
head—her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a
gypsy girl’s hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the
back of her neck and upon her shoulders. In the tumbled tresses
glittered certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels.
They were small dead dragon-flies of the crimson kind called
“sylphs.”
The woman was a well-known gypsy, Perpinia Boswell, with whom both
students were acquainted. Borrow expressed surprise at the condition of
the infant, and remarked that the “chavo” (baby) ought not to look like
that with such a mother. Perpinia agreed. It was a misery to her,
especially as her husband, Mike, was “such a daddy, too,” stronger for a
man than she was for a woman. A great black cutty protruded between the
woman’s teeth.
“How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?” asked Mr.
Watts-Dunton. She could not say, but the girl ventured the calculation
that it was as many as she could afford to buy. Her husband did not like
her to smoke, and said it made her look “like an old Londra woman in
Common Garding Market.”
“You must not smoke another pipe,” said Borrow’s friend to the
mother—“not another pipe till the child leaves the breast.”
“What?” said Perpinia defiantly. “As if I could live without my
pipe!”
“Fancy Pep a-livin’ without her baccy,” laughed the girl of the
dragon-flies.
“Your child can’t live with it,” said Borrow’s friend to Perpinia.
“That pipe of yours is full of a poison called nicotine.”
“Nick what?” said the girl, laughing. “That’s a new kind o’ Nick.
Why, you smoke yourself!”
“Nicotine,” said Borrow’s friend; “and the first part of Pep’s body
that the poison gets into is her breast, and—”
“Gets into my burk?” said Perpinia; “get along wi’ ye.”
“Yes.”
“Do it poison Pep’s milk?” said the girl.
“Yes.”
“That ain’t true,” said Perpinia; “can’t be true.”
“It _is_ true,” said Borrow’s friend. “If you don’t give up that
pipe for a time the child will die, or else be a rickety thing all
his life. If you _do_ give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a
Romany chal as Mike himself.”
“Chavo agin pipe, Pep,” said the girl.
“Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,” said Borrow, in that
hail-fellow-well-met tone of his which he reserved for the Romanies—a
tone which no Romany could ever resist. And he took it gently from
the woman’s lips. “Don’t smoke any more till I come to the camp and
see the chavo again.”
The woman looked very angry at first.
“He be’s a good-friend to the Romanies,” said the girl in an
appeasing tone.
“That’s true,” said the woman, “but he’s no business to take my pipe
out o’ my mouth for all that.”
She made no further protest, but remained to keep guard over the magpie
which was to bring luck to her chavo, while Borrow walked away with the
pipe in his pocket, accompanied by his friend and the young girl. The
three sat down on a fallen tree to put Arnold’s poem through the crucible
of the gypsy mind. The girl was a beauty of the most entrancing type to
be found among her race, and her loveliness made a strong appeal even to
Borrow, whose taste—the subject of frequent remark—was not so much for
tawny women, however seductive, as for tall and stately fair girls, such
as Isopel Berners and the queens of the North. The gypsy’s complexion,
says Mr. Watts-Dunton,
“though darker than an English girl’s, was rather lighter than any
ordinary gypsy’s. Her eyes were of an indescribable hue, but an
artist who has since then painted her portrait for Borrow’s friend
described it as a mingling of pansy-purple and dark tawny. The
pupils were so large that, being set in the somewhat almond-shaped
and long-eyelashed lids of her race, they were partly curtained both
above and below, and this had the effect of making the eyes seem
always a little contracted and just about to smile. The great size
and deep richness of the eyes made the straight little nose seem
smaller than it really was, they also lessened the apparent size of
the mouth, which, red as a rosebud, looked quite small until she
laughed, when the white teeth made quite a wide glitter.”
The poem was interrupted, before three lines had been read, by a swarm of
dragon-flies which swam in the sunshine around the girl’s head, causing
her to exclaim that the “Devil’s needles” were come to sew up her eyes
for killing their brothers. “I dussn’t set here,” said she. “Us
Romanies call this ‘Dragon-fly brook.’ And that’s the king of the
dragon-flies; he lives here.” The insects presently disappeared, and she
sat down again to hear the lil (book). She was interested in the prose
story of Glanville, on which Arnold’s poem was founded, but the poem
itself bewildered her, except that “her eyes flashed now and then at the
lovely bits of description.” It was read a second time. “Can’t make out
what the lil’s all about—seems all about nothink! Seems to me that the
pretty sights what makes a Romany fit to jump out o’ her skin for joy
makes this ’ere gorgio want to cry. What a rum lot gorgios is sure_ly_!”
And then she sprang up and ran off towards the camp with the agility
of a greyhound, turning round every few moments, pirouetting and
laughing aloud.
“The beauty of that girl,” Borrow again murmured, “is quite—quite—”
Again he did not finish his sentence, but after a while said:
“That was all true about the nicotine?”
“Partly, I think,” said his friend, “but not being a medical man I
must not be too emphatic. If it _is_ true it ought to be a criminal
offence for any woman to smoke in excess while she is suckling a
child.”
“Say it ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,”
growled Borrow. “Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale
tobacco—pheugh!”
Borrow did not forget the incident. Perpinia abstained from tobacco, and
in a fortnight, after several visits to the camp, he had the satisfaction
of knowing that the child was recovering from its illness.
“Is not Perpinia very grateful to you and to me?” said the friend.
“Yes,” said Borrow, with a twinkle in his eye. “She manages to feel
grateful to you and me for making her give up the pipe, and also to
believe at the same time that her child was saved by the good luck
that came to her because she guarded the magpie.”
CHAPTER XVI
BORROW’S BOOKS
STRONG was the appeal made to a very wide public by “The Bible in Spain.”
What was the nature of the appeal? It was unique; but it was not
inherently surprising. “I woke one morning and found myself famous,”
said Byron of the reception of “Childe Harold.” Borrow’s gigantic leap
from the shades of chilly neglect into the sunshine of popularity was
equally sudden and less obviously explicable. He had none of the social
advantages that helped to spread the notoriety of Byron’s achievement.
Comparatively few people knew anything about the obscure son of the
adjutant of the Norfolk Militia; and we have already seen that his
special type of genius made no special impression on that generation.
Yet “The Bible in Spain” went forth from Albemarle Street into “the
reading world” to make a triumphal progress amidst storms of applause.
This furore was created not entirely by the real merits of the book, but
largely by adventitious circumstances. It has great merits. But there
is more work, there is better work, in “Lavengro”; the latter is a far
more representative Borrow book than its forerunner. It has more of
Borrow’s humour, more of his subtility; it is far more fascinating as a
human document. Yet “Lavengro” was still-born. It was received with no
applause. The critics disapproved of it, and the public did not buy it.
Whereas thirty-five thousand copies of “The Bible in Spain” were sold in
a year, it took the same time to get rid of a thousand copies of
“Lavengro.” Thus, the real reasons of the success of 1843 did not reside
primarily in the qualities for which we admire the book to-day. The
attributes that make it something more than a mere record of a
colporteur’s labours, its picaresque liveliness, its saturnine humour,
its vivid sketches of romantic rascality, keep it alive. The narrator
moves, like some new Gil Blas, through a series of scenes which give the
reader a savour of the atmosphere of Spain hardly excelled in English
literature. It is evident from the experience of “Lavengro” that these
were not the attributes that caused the book to sell in its thousands
when it was published. The cause of its huge circulation was that it
appealed to a public which would buy in large quantities a record of
missionary enterprise and religious adventure, and would not have bought
any book that Borrow could write if the religious interest had been
absent. No doubt, when they had bought and read, the quality of the work
as literature produced in them unaccustomed and pleasing sensations not
to be obtained from most books purchased for similar reasons. Borrow’s
evangelism attracted them and his art retained them.
The bulk of “The Bible in Spain” consists of transcripts of letters
written to the Bible Society reporting upon his proceedings in the
Peninsula. Suppose the letters had never been written. Suppose Borrow
had merely described his travels and adventures in Spain in a
secular-fashion, is it possible to question that the book would have
shared the same fate, as “Lavengro”? Partly by design, partly by
accident, the contents were skilfully mixed and flavoured to a nicety.
True, it contained more than a _soupçon_ of gypsyism and scoundrelism.
True, its finest passages are devoted to gypsies and vagabonds and their
haunts and habits. Yet, the dominant elements are religious. It is not
proposed to suggest that any hypocrisy is involved. Borrow was, in his
peculiar fashion, a deeply religious man. His passionate Protestantism
was thoroughly sincere. When he declaimed against Romish superstitions,
and laid his vigorous flail upon Batuscha, “the paralytic,” he meant
every word he said. When, describing the ravishing scenery at Monte
Moro, he declares, “I sat down on a broken wall and remained gazing, and
listening, and shedding tears of rapture; for of all the pleasures which
a bountiful God permitteth His children to enjoy, none are so dear to
some hearts as the music of forests and streams . . . ” he is not canting
for the benefit of Earl Street, though in other circumstances the
sentiment might have been differently expressed. And the majority of his
readers perused this with the Bible Society in their minds. One
remembers having “The Bible in Spain” placed in one’s youthful hands,
with stress laid on the fact that this was the work of a man who had
encountered infinite perils and suffered amazing hardships in a pious
cause, and with injunctions to observe not the remarkable beauties of the
book but the benighted condition of the priest-ridden children of Spain,
to compare it with the blessings of unlimited Bible-reading which oneself
enjoyed.
There is no need to labour this point. The perspective has cleared with
the passage of years. There is no less admiration for the fine work
which the Bible Society did and is doing, and a great deal more
perspicuous admiration of Borrow’s book. Literature owes much to the
Bible Society in many ways, and one of its debts lies here—that it found
Borrow employment at a time when he was in sore straits, and provided him
with the means of introducing to the public the fruits of his literary
labour.
It has already been suggested that, in point of art, “The Bible in Spain”
does not bear comparison with “Lavengro.” For what it is worth, that is
a deliberate judgment. But it should be said that no such comparison
ought to be instituted. The two books are widely different in
inspiration, in purpose, in execution. The record of the Spanish
journeys has an interest of its own, and may stand on its own merits. As
a descriptive and narrative writer Borrow had few superiors in his time.
His style smacks of Defoe, smacks of the Bible, smacks of the archaic
poets and romancers he loved so well. But it is his own style—at once a
noble and spacious style and no style at all. There is no preciosity and
there is little elegance in it; but there is naturalism, virility,
grandeur. Only when he becomes didactic does his power decline. Then,
in spite of his tremendous vigour of invective, he rarely rises above the
level of the leader-writer, with his eye on the thing nearest to his fond
prejudices, searching for the most offensive word that happens to be
handy.
There is probably less sermonising in “The Bible in Spain” than in
“Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.” Borrow is in love with Spain as Spain.
He abounds in admiration of the country and its climate, the nobility of
its people and their “stern, heroic virtue.” He does not gloss over the
savagery and crime to be found among them, but he observes that there is
very little of low, vulgar vice in the great body of the Spanish nation.
His fulminations are reserved for the politicians and the warring
factions that distressed the land, and for the “atrocious projects of
malignant Rome.” He is generous in his approval of the valour and the
probity of the people as a whole. He moves among them with a freedom
that can only be attained by the man who knows the language—and not by
all men who know it. For Spaniards are sensitive about their noble
tongue, and do not like to hear it mutilated by those who are not to the
manner born. Borrow had no nervousness about his linguistic powers. He
gives some entertaining instructions to Englishmen who want to make
themselves understood in a foreign language: they should speak with much
noise and vociferation, opening their mouths wide. “Is it surprising,”
he asks, “that the English are in general the worst linguists in the
world, seeing that they pursue a system diametrically opposite? For
example, when they attempt to speak Spanish, the most sonorous tongue in
existence, they scarcely open their lips, and, putting their hands in
their pockets, fumble lazily instead of applying them to the
indispensable office of gesticulation.” He, at any, rate, succeeded in
vociferating and gesticulating his way through Spain to good purpose, and
his picture of the country is enriched by a wealth of intimacy that would
have been beyond the power of almost any other Englishman.
It is astonishing that a man with so many insular prejudices as Borrow, a
person so dogmatic, and so utterly scornful of the religion that pervades
the very soil of Spain, should have been able to ingratiate himself with
its people as he did, while on an errand which most of them must have
considered damnably heretical. The secret is to be sought in his love of
the romantic and the quality of _simpatia_, which, in spite of all his
idiosyncrasies, he possessed in very high degree.
“The Bible in Spain” is a piece of Borrow. That provides its principal
charm. It is not peppered with “dots and asterisks” in the same way as
“Lavengro,” and does not depend for any great part of its effect on
ellipsis. But it is still delightfully irresponsible and
inconsequential, full of quaint snatches of character, of rough sketches
of picturesque figures, of bits of adventure which lead nowhere, yet
carry the reader on from incident to incident with a fascination as
irresistible as the elusive attractions of Tristram Shandy. There are
solid values as well. There are the rugged, unpremeditated eloquence of
its descriptions, the vivid colouring of its persons in the piece, and,
the never-flagging gallop of its action. One would be hard pressed to
name a book of its kind in which stir and progression are more constant.
On every page peep realistic portraits at which the reader has just time
to glance before he is hurried on. Who can ever forget the goatherd on
the mountain between Monte Moro and Elvas, who recalled to Borrow’s mind
Brute Carle in the ballad of Swayne Vonved?
“A wild swine on his shoulders he kept,
And upon his bosom a black bear slept;
And about his fingers, with hair o’erhung,
The squirrel sported and weasel clung,—”
that weird figure of a man, with the otter slung around his neck, who
could not read, but, when he was asked whether he knew aught of God or
Christ, “turned his countenance towards the sun, which was beginning to
sink in the west, nodded to it, and then again looked fixedly upon me. I
believe that I understood the mute reply, which probably was that it was
God who made that glorious light which illumes and gladdens all creation;
and gratified with that belief I left him. . . .” Who does not treasure
the cameo of the drunken driver of Evora, who, having wrecked his
carriage and killed his mule, exclaimed, “Paciencia! . . . It was God’s
will that she should die. What more can be said?” Or the portrait of
the Manchegan prophetess that aroused the wrath of Mr. Brandram; or of
the pig-merchant who sang the “Marseillaise” and brandished his
snick-and-snee in the inn at Badajoz? Or, in a different medium, the
picture of Mendizabal, the Jewish Prime Minister, who told Borrow it was
not Bibles they wanted in Spain, but guns and gunpowder with which to put
down the rebels? Or, on a different scale, the visions of the Jews of
Lisbon and the “children of Egypt” who tried to tempt him to a horse deal
at Duenas?
Borrow was in Spain during some of the most exciting years of its modern
history. He tells us that he had no politics except those of the
gypsies—promising success to both sides, and ultimately joining the one
which won. That was perhaps a very proper attitude for a foreigner and a
person who had to rely on official favour in order to get his work of
Bible distribution done. Notwithstanding this, he does not conceal his
contempt for the Carlist cause. His posadero at Cordova was “an
egregious Carlist,” and though he expressly told his friend, the
correspondent of the _Morning Chronicle_ in Madrid, that he was not a
Liberal, his sympathies certainly lay away from the ultramontism of the
insurgents. Borrow’s Spanish politics, of course, are of little
importance; his sketches of political events, on the other hand, are not
only interesting but valuable. His record of the circumstances which led
up to the death of General Quesada is the account of an eye-witness, and
is adopted by Major Martin Hume in his “Story of Spain,” though doubt is
thrown upon the sensational tale of the Revolution of La Granja, where
the Queen is made to succumb to the desires of the Constitutionalists by
the threat of shooting her paramour, Muñoz, before her eyes. One of the
most characteristic bits of Borrow’s work is his portrait of Baltasar,
the “National,” and one of his unsurpassable touches of description is
given to the celebration, in the Café of the Calle d’Alcala, of Quesada’s
assassination, the huge bowl of coffee mixed for the blood-drunken
soldiery, and _el panuelo_, the blue kerchief whose ghastly contents were
used to stir the mixture. Those contents were the severed hand and
fingers of Quesada, the mutilated bones celebrated in the refrain which
resounded through the hall:
“Que es lo que abaja
Por aquel cerro?
Ta ra ra ra ra!
Son los huesos de Quesada,
Que los trae un perro. . . .”
Baltasar’s invitation to “Don Jorge” to drink of the cup on this
“pleasant day for Spain” relieves with a touch of humour a scene which
would otherwise be as revolting as the archaic ceremony of the vulpinised
wine after a fox-hunt. The variety and rapid movement of the scene are
remarkable, but not more so than those of fifty other scenes in the book;
and the waggish little assassin Baltasar is no quainter than fifty other
characters, from Borrow’s own Greek servant, Antonio, to Judah Lib, the
Jew of Galatia, or Benedict Moll, the Swiss.
It is the essence of Spain that Borrow gives us in his inimitable,
erratic way, its hot love and burning hate, its high chivalry and its
profound roguery, the ineffable beauty of its women and the ugly rags of
its mendicants, the solemn dignity of its people and their saline wit,
contrasted with his own sententiousness and his peculiar, mordant humour.
The vitality of the book, the continuing effect of its best scenes, and
the never-failing interest of its adventures, are wonderful.
Yet there is hardly a Borrovian who does not prefer “Lavengro” and “The
Romany Rye,” regarding them as one book, to anything else that Borrow
ever did. It is incomparably the finest and most fragrant efflorescence
of his genius. The fascination exercised by “Lavengro” over a
considerable part of the human race is difficult to explain: its secret
is as elusive as a great deal else in Borrow. But its existence cannot
be questioned. It has hypnotised men of vastly different temperaments,
causing this one to devote his life to the delightful, if unprofitable,
pursuit of the mysteries concealed behind Borrow’s “dots and asterisks”
and the filling up of his ellipses, and that one to become a student of
Romany and a “gypsiologist” who would otherwise have remained indifferent
to the history and character of the chals and chis.
Many discussions have been held upon the nature of this secret. It still
avoids capture; it cannot be precipitated into words. Some explanation
of its effects may be offered, but even that can be but tentative. The
book appeals to primal instincts. It quivers with life. It stirs the
deepest emotions of those who have the sub-conscious love of Nature—the
instinct for Nature which manifests itself not in petty eulogies of the
fine things of the world, but in silent, ecstatic content with Earth.
Gypsies have it strongly developed; indeed, it explains gypsyism. The
book abounds in the unconventional strong man, in his joy of conflict, in
his curiosity about human villainy, and his admiration of all heroic
qualities. It is in the succession of Defoe, and in a less degree of
Fielding, and again in a less degree of Smollett, and it awakes nearly
all the sensations produced by them in turn, with the saving grace we
have noted—that it is never in the least salacious or even obscene.
Another favourite theme of debate has been the autobiographical problem.
We have traced the history of the composition of “Lavengro,” and seen
that the book is truly an autobiography, though not a chronology. Borrow
invented little and recorded much. Most of the things that happen in
“Lavengro” happened in its author’s life, as Elwin said. He
unquestionably grouped figures and events for the sake of effect. Such a
concatenation as Borrow himself, Isopel Berners, the Petulengros, Tawno
Chikno, the Man in Black, and the Innkeeper in the immediate
neighbourhood of one Staffordshire dingle at the same time was, of
course, never known to history. Such dramatis personæ are far too
striking to have been collected by coincidence. The meeting of the
queenly Isopel, princess of roadside heroines, and Lavengro, crallis
(chief) of hedge philologists, and their method of intellectual commerce,
tax the credulity of the reader sufficiently. But the residuum of fact
is considerable; there is more essential truth than concrete fiction in
“Lavengro,” and it complies with the terms of Borrow’s own conception of
an autobiography.
It has been shown that the world was unready for such a book. It was
busy about diverse affairs. It had passed out of the Byronic phase in
which Borrow attempted to detain it. The men of 1850 were unable to
appreciate his manner, and cared nothing about his matter. Now that he
made no definite appeal to the Bible Society public, and had removed
himself out of the atmosphere of Old Spain, shimmering with romance, he
found that there was no public left for him. What use had the world in
the climacterical year of the great, progressive nineteenth century for
the petty philosophy and the infinitesimal adventures of a tinker who was
not “inspired” in any sense of which it was cognisant? It was just about
to appoint Matthew Arnold as Inspector of Schools: that was more to the
purpose. It had crowned Alfred Tennyson as Poet Laureate; it was weeping
and roaring over “David Copperfield”; it was preparing to admit Thackeray
among the Immortals, for he was on the point of publishing “The History
of Henry Esmond, Esq.” If it wanted fierce controversy, was not Carlyle
thundering out his “Latter-day Pamphlets”? If it wanted picturesque
history, was not Macaulay sufficient—were not working men’s clubs in
Lancashire passing him votes of thanks for having made history
intelligible to the masses? If it wanted politics or economics, did it
not possess its John Bright and its Richard Cobden, and was there not
Mill’s “Principles of Political Economy,” fresh from the press, to be
read? It wanted Free Libraries, not free manners. Ruskin could satisfy
all its taste for archaism. It had rid itself of Chartism, and was
coquetting with Christian Socialism; “Alton Locke” was far more likely to
appeal to its sympathies than the innkeeper at Willenhall.
One perceives how inevitable was the dismal fate of “Lavengro,” launched
at the head of a society fermenting, effervescing, seething with
progressive optimism, feverish in its eager industrial advance, filled
with sentiment, vibrating with hopeful emotions, its literary affections
fastened partly upon Macaulay, partly upon Carlyle, partly upon Tennyson.
The apparition of a book like “Lavengro” was ludicrous in its eyes,
dressed in the style of a dead century, and concerned with subjects as
dead as its habiliments. What had all this farrago of gypsies,
horse-witches, apple-women, green lanes, breezy heaths, and road-girls
(however magnificent) to do with any soul in 1850, with Manchesterism or
with Kingsleyism, with the buzz of commercial prosperity, or the growth
of social idealism or the development of political liberties, or with
current culture, or with the sentiment of the age? Nothing at all. The
frantically busy world went on building schools and inspecting them,
planning railways and running trains on them, raising mills and factories
and grinding and making, discussing problems and settling them; and it
passed Borrow by. It did not want a Romany Defoe, a modern Smollett, a
new and more truculent Bunyan, and it barely nodded to him as he
attempted to arrest its steps. It cared not a brass farthing about his
opinions, which did not matter at all; unfortunately, it cared as little
about his naturalism, which mattered a great deal.
The only point of approach between Borrow and the public was the point of
anti-Popery. Borrow anticipated the storm of 1850, for the bulk of his
work had been written before that storm broke. His Man in Black was
modelled upon what he knew of the Catholic propagandists in England, but
the model was highly coloured; it was impossible for Borrow to view a
priest or a Catholic of any degree except through the medium of his own
ultra-Protestant spectacles. Further, the portrait is probably more
malicious than it would have been but for the state of public opinion on
the “Papal aggression” which was then being foreshadowed. The Man in
Black is a very complete picture of the Jesuitical sneak who probably
existed only in the imagination of ardent Evangelicals. But even this
accidentally topical character did not save from disaster a work which
was utterly out of tune with the times. Imagine Macaulay, or Kingsley,
or Ruskin falling on their readers in the manner of Borrow’s preface:
“Pray, be not displeased, gentle reader, if perchance thou hast
imagined that I was about to conduct thee to distant lands, and hadst
promised thyself much instruction and entertainment from what I might
tell thee of them. I do assure thee that thou hast no reason to be
displeased, inasmuch as there are no countries in the world less
known by the British than these selfsame British islands, or where
more strange things are everyday occurring, whether in road or
street, house or dingle.”
It was all very true, but the “gentle reader” did not want to hear about
those strange things, and his ear found Borrow’s “thees” and “thous” and
“hadsts” uncouth. “Charity and free and genial manners” in the Borrovian
sense were foreign to his desires.
Borrow’s own favourite characters in “Lavengro,” he tells us, were the
brave old soldier and his wife (his parents), the ancient gentlewoman who
sold apples on London Bridge and conned the history of blessed Mary
Flanders, and the wandering Methodist and his wife Winifred. Filial
affection accounts for his first choice. The others are certainly
delightful vignettes; but it is strange that Borrow did not bring Jasper
Petulengro into his category of favourites, or Isopel Berners. Those two
are immortal, and it is to them that the mind flies when “Lavengro” is
mentioned.
The book—still regarding “The Romany Rye” as part of it—divides itself
into two sections. The first and shorter section covers a period of some
twenty years; the other, his idyll of the roads, extending from the
fifty-eighth chapter of “Lavengro” to the end, deals with about a year of
his life. The subject of his rural wanderings grew upon him as he wrote,
and the episode of Belle Berners naturally required a spacious canvas;
the reasons why he introduced the postilion’s tale have already been
related. This amazing book defies analysis or classification. It is “a
thing of shreds and patches,” a hotch-potch of odds and ends of learning
and speculation, an uneven jumble of incidents; doubtless it is all the
critics of 1851 said it was. Yet it is a great book, a treasured book, a
book to read five times as Leland read it, to dip into and be tempted on
and on, chapter by chapter. It has all the faults that the purists allot
to it—much tiresome iteration, many split infinitives, gross errors of
taste, much fuliginous and turgid writing. Yet it is a great work of
literature, compelling, overpowering in many ways. It often rises in
eloquence to remarkable heights and glows with all the hues of poetry:
mark the dialogue on death, the midnight vigil in the Dingle. The force
of sheer description in the poison scene and in the fight with the
Flaming Tinman can hardly be surpassed. There are racy humour and
genuine humanity in the incident of the inn where he met Jack Slingsby
and his family depressed from the encounter with the Flaming Tinman, and
proved to them the “genial, gladdening power” of good ale, “the true and
proper drink of Englishmen.” All Borrow’s affectation of learning, all
his word-chasing, all his preaching, are forgiven in the intense joy of
such scenes as these. When Jack Slingsby said to him, “It’s a fine thing
to be a scholar,” he retorted, “Not half so fine as to be a tinker.” It
is the hedgesmith in Lavengro that gives his book its ineffable charm.
“There is something highly poetical about a forge,” and Borrow has caught
and transmitted its poetry to us.
The fashion in which Borrow pounced upon his critics, detractors,
enemies, as he pictured them, clawed them and mangled them in the
notorious Appendix has been indicated in snatches. Printed sermons and
speeches can hardly be more deadly dull than a quarrel of this sort after
the lapse of half a century: that is, as a rule. In this case there is a
distinct survival of literary interest, for the Appendix is luminous
(albeit with a lurid incandescence), and in it glow some of the gems of
Borrow’s style. His critics inspired him to this _tour de force_, the
“quartering reviewers,” those arbitrary persons who, in the sententious
phrase of Hazlitt, “would be thought to have purchased a monopoly of wit,
learning, and wisdom—
‘Assume the rod, affect the god,
And seem to shake the spheres.’”
As we have seen, they cauterised Borrow because he had not written the
book they expected him to write, just as their predecessors had “pulled
Pope to pieces” for not being Shakespeare or Milton. Borrow was odd and
singular, and had transgressed every canon of the taste of the time. But
he was fully conscious that he had written a fine book. Their abuse,
their satire, their indifference sent him into a fine frenzy, in which he
pretended to despise the whole tribe. “By God! ’tis good, and if you
lik’t you may.” But the affectation was ill-sustained by the
performance; he set about to bludgeon them in very good earnest, and
seized the opportunity of time, space, and inclination to wield his
weapon across the heads of a great many other offenders besides the
critics.
The bludgeon is the only possible figure to use. In this amazing display
of whirling invective Borrow is like no other protagonist in literature.
For many reasons it were possible to wish that he had never written it;
for others it is precious. It neither pricks the enemy like Pope, nor
incises him like Swift, nor burns him like Gifford, nor lashes him like
Byron. It simply pounds him as the Flaming Tinman was pounded by
Borrow’s long right. It begins, innocently enough, with an exposition of
the principles on which “Lavengro” was written, the principles it upheld,
the morals it inculcated, and the author’s reasons for supposing that it
deserved well of the world. In this last particular the chapter is
curious. According to Borrow, the book is worthy because it demonstrates
how the hand of Providence constantly guides the destinies of the hero,
preventing him in all his doings from falling a prey either to vice or to
poverty. He admitted that Lavengro was not a remarkably religious person
up to the point where the book took leave of him, but it was very likely
that he would eventually become religious, though not precise or
straight-laced. He would retain with his scholarship “something of his
gypsyism, his predilection for the hammer and tongs, and perhaps some
inclination to put on certain gloves—not white kid—with any friend who
might be inclined for a little old-English diversion.” The absence of
any straight-lacedness from his character was also to be predicated in
the matter of ale. He did not believe that either fondness for
invigorating exercise or willingness to partake of any of the good things
provided by the Almighty (meaning especially ale with plenty of malt, not
too much hops, and at least two years old) would be any bar to his
entrance into heaven.
One would not for worlds suggest that Borrow laid this stress upon the
moralities and the theology of his book what time his tongue was in his
cheek. But he could hardly have failed to see that it was his gypsyism
rather than his theology that would lend the work its permanent
importance. The second chapter of the Appendix is an anti-Popery tirade
which it would be tiresome to follow. He boasts of how in Spain he
“hewed right and left, making the priests fly before him and run away
squeaking that the Devil was after them.” Which is hardly an accurate
account of the matter, and is only introduced apparently in order that he
may belabour Bowring. The process is this: The Bible Society sent Borrow
to Spain to perform these deeds of derringdo; the Bible Society was not
supported by the Government, but rather frowned upon, so that any man
wearing its colours was excluded from the chance of serving his country,
while “a fellow who unites in himself the bankrupt trader, the broken
author, or rather book-maker, and the laughed-down single-speech spouter
of the House of Commons, may look forward, always supposing that he has
been a foaming Radical, to the Government of an important colony.” It
seems almost necessary to apologise, even at this distance of time, to
the descendants of Sir John Bowring, so virulent and unjust is Borrow in
his strictures.
Borrow is accused of bigotry in his anti-Papist campaign. Bigotry!
There is no excuse for even a whisper of the word in anything that he has
done. Bigots yourselves, messieurs! A person may speak and write
against Rome without bigotry, but “it is impossible for anyone but a
bigot or a bad man to write or speak in her praise.” Which clears the
ground for an understanding of the outlook of our very paragon of all
tolerance.
In the third chapter, “On Foreign Nonsense,” there speaks John Bull, the
patriotic Briton, the Germanophobe in a time when Teutophilism was the
fashion, who, in the heyday of the prophet Carlyle’s authority, declared
that “of German literature”—but words failed him to characterise German
literature, and he had to express himself by a note of exclamation and a
dash, and grudgingly admitted that there was _one_ fine poem in the
German language—“Oberon,” to wit. This from the disciple of William
Taylor was a little strong; but Borrow on the rampage trampled even on
Taylor, with a reservation of praise for his scholarship. The essay on
“gentility-nonsense” is decidedly the best of them all. These two
chapters are the most effective, the richest in the diction of wrath, and
they touch the highest point he reaches in criticism. Here, if anywhere,
is to be found the merit of the Appendix.
It is this revolt against the finnicking conventions, this hard-hitting
at every self-sufficient snob’s head in a self-satisfied age, that gives
the work its air of modernity, and places it _en rapport_ with the
twentieth century. Once again there is no delicate satire, no fine
irony, no touch of the “Snob Papers,” in the “gentility-nonsense”
chapter. It is simply energetic quarter-staff play, with resounding
thwacks upon the head of any unlucky wight who happens to have charged
“vulgarity” upon Borrow because he had endeavoured to bring his
tatterdemalion crew of gypsies, mumpers, and tinkers into the decent and
respectable parlours of the English middle-classes. That was all very
well on the operatic stage. The gypsy villains in _The Bohemian Girl_
were entertaining enough when they entered the marble halls and spoilt
the furniture and pilfered the wine behind the footlights, as they had
been doing any night for the last ten years; but this was serious
literature and a very different matter. Borrow laid about him with a
will, and defended smithery against jobbery, and tinkering against
philandering, and the dingle against the drawing-room with almost lyrical
eloquence. Was it not better for Lavengro to make the forge glow by the
roadside, and manufacture donkey-shoes for Isopel, than to borrow another
man’s money and go to Brighton, with the sister of Annette le Noir,
though that would have been an exceedingly genteel thing to do? Was not
the successor of Jack Slingsby more worthy of respect than Mr. Flamson,
the railway contractor? Had not the jockey at Horncastle, who offered
him a fair price for his horse, a better title to honour “than the
scoundrelly lord who attempts to cheat him of one-fourth of its value?”
There is great temptation to quote largely from these hectic chapters,
but one sample must suffice. “Millions,” he says, seem to think
otherwise on these questions,
“by their servile adoration of people whom, without rank, wealth, and
fine clothes, they would consider infamous, but whom, possessed of
rank, wealth, and glittering habiliments, they seem to admire all the
more for their profligacy and crimes. Does not a blood-spot or a
lust-spot on the clothes of a blooming emperor give a kind of zest to
the genteel young god? Do not the pride, superciliousness, and
selfishness of a certain aristocracy make it all the more regarded by
its worshippers? and do not the clownish and gutter-blood admirers of
Mr. Flamson like him all the more because they are conscious that he
is a knave? If such is the case—and, alas! is it not the case?—they
cannot be too frequently told that fine clothes, wealth, and titles
adorn a person in proportion as he adorns them; that if worn by the
magnanimous and good they are ornaments indeed, but if by the vile
and profligate they are merely _san benitos_, and only serve to make
their infamy doubly apparent; and that a person in seedy raiment and
tattered hat, possessed of courage, kindness, and virtue, is entitled
to more respect from those to whom his virtues are manifested than
any cruel profligate emperor, selfish aristocrat, or knavish
millionaire in the world.”
The appropriate sequel to this flaming fury against the worship of
material wealth and the idolatry of worldly success is his protest
against Sir Walter Scott’s Jacobitism, which he called “Scotch
gentility-nonsense” and “Charlie-o’er-the-Waterism.” With a full brush
and rapid strokes he paints a Hogarthian picture of the Stewarts, more
remarkable for the piquancy of its epithets than the accuracy of its
history. A disgraceful procession of abandoned reprobates hurries across
his pages: the “dirty, cowardly miscreant,” James I.; the “cruel,
revengeful tyrant,” Charles I.; the “lazy and sensual” Charles II.; the
“poor creature,” James II.; and the miserable Pretenders, especially
Charles Edward of that ilk, a “worthless, ignorant youth” and a
“profligate, illiterate old man.” All these lamentable persons, these
blotches on the face of history, according to Borrow, were dead and
happily buried out of the sight of decent people until Scott gave them
resurrection by his power of fine writing. It was Scott who summoned
Jacobitism and Laudism out of their graves; the wave of Popery now
passing so destructively over England came from Oxford, it was true; but
Scott sent it to Oxford. And Scott, accordingly, is scarified. His
secret is ruthlessly wrenched from him. Why did he revive Jacobitism?
It was because he worshipped gentility and adored the born-great. Scott
denounced Murat and heaped contumely upon him as the son of a pastrycook;
but was not the pedigree of the pastrycook better than that of the
Edinburgh pettifogger who was Scott’s progenitor?
Working himself up to a foaming frenzy, Borrow attributes all Scott’s
mortal sufferings to the vengeance of an angry Deity for taking the part
of the wicked Jacobites against the righteous Williamites, “for lauding
up to the skies the miscreants and robbers, and calumniating the noble
spirts of Britain, the salt of England, and his own country!” Scott
became paralysed in body and mind, pitiable to others, and loathsome to
himself. “Ah!” exclaims Borrow, “God knows perfectly well how to
strike!” A modern audience gapes in amazement at the rodomontade, and
wonders whether the man who pumps it out page after page can be quite
sane, especially when he declares that he has been influenced “not by any
feeling of malice or ill-will, but simply by a regard for the truth.”
But Borrow saw red whenever he was out raiding the pastures of “Popery”
or seeking a joust with gentility, and the verdict against him may be
softened a little when the reader lights upon one or more of his fine
tributes to the genius of Scott, who “did for the sceptre of the wretched
Pretender what all the kings of Europe could not do for his body—placed
it on the throne of these realms; and for Popery what Popes and Cardinals
strove in vain to do for three centuries—brought back its mummeries and
nonsense into the temples of the British Isles.”
The eighth chapter of the Appendix, “On Canting Nonsense,” need not
detain us; his outbreak against the teetotalers and anti-pugilists has
received sufficient notice. As for the “Pseudo-Critics,” every Borrow
lover wishes it had never been written, picturesque as is the apologue of
the eminent reviewers of the London Press in the character of vipers with
their fangs drawn, held up by their tails. Still more is it to be
regretted that Borrow’s temper in the dispute with Bowring led him to
perpetrate the last two chapters, full of rancour and spleen as they are,
their charges of perfidy against Sir John unsupported by any evidence,
and contradicted by the probabilities of the case.
Borrow was clearly no competent critic of his own work. He concludes the
Appendix with a pronouncement on the merits and the purpose of
“Lavengro,” which, he says, was “written for the express purpose of
inculcating virtue, love of country, learning, manly pursuits, and
genuine religion—for example, that of the Church of England.” Not the
morals of “Lavengro,” not its “patriotism” (which is of a peculiar
brand), not its philology, not its theology, give the strange book life.
Its value lies in its poetry, its portraits, its atmosphere, its
self-revelation, its literary power, and, above all, in that ruling sense
of the joy of living which, in spite of all its errant morbidity, is the
inspiration of the book. “There’s a wind on the heath, brother. . . Who
would wish to die?”
It is a difficult thing for one who is not a Welshman to approach such a
book as “Wild Wales” in any useful temper save humility. To attack the
subject in the spirit which animated Borrow when he invaded the country
would be to court disaster, and the disgrace inevitably attending such an
enterprise would be well merited. It is not given to many to carry a
charmed life as Borrow did—going into Wales and compelling the admiration
of those whom his prickly prejudices and his violent intolerance most
offended.
The spell Wales casts over men’s minds, and the hold it has upon men’s
hearts, are elusive things. Having no tangible substance, they are yet
as real as a battleship. Many people feel them acutely, but are not
content to endure and enjoy them. There is a desire, in these definitive
days, to analyse, to dissect, to explain them, to label and classify
them; but at the slightest touch of the scalpel, at the vision of the
quill, they vanish. As with Cornwall, so with Wales—indeed, in many
respects they are one,—the charm they wield is a charm of atmosphere, of
vague overhanging mysteries and underdwelling romances. Those who feel
it are under the magic influence of the Celtic spirit, and it has been
well said that “to boast of the Celtic spirit is to confess you have it
not.” {320}
I have endeavoured to show that Borrow, in spite of his pose of
Anglo-Saxonism, was a true Celt, a very wisp of the Celtic spirit itself.
The fact explains everything about his tour in Wales, his intercourse
with Welshmen, and his success in achieving a book which they are quite
willing to confess is one of the best books ever written about their
country. The spell was upon him, and he was content to let it work
without attempting to divide it, chemically or mechanically, into its
component elements. It worked through the scenery which he described
with his peculiar skill, whether of massive mountain and lonely lake, or
of sweet vale and tinkling cascade. It worked through the language,
which he admired for its wonderful soft music concealed under apparently
fortuitous concourses of crabbed consonants. It worked through the
character of the people for whom he had so strong an affinity hidden
behind all his affectation of downrightishness, John-Bullish egotism and
pride. He was completely successful in his tribute to Wales—one of the
finest in English literature.
Perhaps this is the most amazing thing in all his amazing career. For
Borrow trampled—or appeared to trample—remorselessly on some of the most
delicate feelings of Welshmen. His hatred of Rome was hardly greater
than his hatred of nonconformity with the Church of England. This peeps
out of many a page of “Wild Wales.” Thousands of Welsh people must be
aroused to a point just short of fury by his satirical or abusive
allusions to Dissenters. But most of them are tempted past the
danger-spot by Borrow’s love of Wales and his power to enchant the reader
as he himself was enchanted.
A militant Welshman once said to me that Borrow “allowed his hatred of
Nonconformity to colour all his descriptions of the people. His pictures
of Welsh Nonconformists are terribly exaggerated, and he damaged his book
by his want of sympathy with the then budding aspirations of Wales, which
have bloomed into the present political and ecclesiastical conditions
well known to you.” That may very likely be a true view of the work
through Cymric spectacles; yet the same person confessed that he knew no
book of the kind which he liked better than “Wild Wales.” The reason was
that, in spite of his contempt for the budding aspirations of the
Nationalists, Borrow contrived to do the Welsh nation a high literary
service by demonstrating its individuality, its distinction, its
difference from England, in every line he wrote about it. His
border-line is sharp and clear; passing into Wales, he passes into a more
ethereal air; passing through Wales he is in a land of enchantment—not
vague and misty, consisting of reminders of a distant past, but actual
and present, where, _pace_ Mr. Edward Thomas, “they talk of hero and poet
as if they had met them on the hills; and, as the poet has said, ‘Folly
would it be to say that Arthur has a grave.’”
Borrow’s Welsh, so far as it can be judged from the book, is exceedingly
good, considering the circumstances in which it was acquired. His
knowledge of “the spoken word” was comparatively slight. His intercourse
had been far more intimate with Welsh books than with Welshmen. Indeed,
we do not hear of many colloquies between this Welsh scholar and Welsh
people until he arrives at the age of fifty. There are only two of any
importance mentioned in his works. First in point of date was the
episode of the Welsh groom whose acquaintance he gained when serving his
articles in Took’s Court. Next was that of the Welsh Methodist preacher,
Peter Williams, and his wife, described in “Lavengro.” For the rest, Ab
Gwilym and the bards were his Welsh mentors. In these conditions, His
knowledge of the language became quite remarkable. It was a working
medium for him in those parts of the Principality where the phrase “Dim
Saesneg” was most often heard. Welshmen tell me that a curious feature
of “Wild Wales” is that the Welsh in the first part of the book is more
correct than that in the second. As one remarks, it was “the romance of
the language which captivated him. He was more familiar with its rugged
mountains than with its tender parts. This it was that inspired his
passionate regard for Ab Gwilym and Elis Wyn above other Welsh writers.”
Welsh estimates of the Welsh writers whom Borrow most affected are not
quite the same as his own. It is said that in a general way his
appreciations are just, but that he gives too high a place to Ab Gwilym,
who was by no means the chief of the Welsh poets read about 1850. Ab
Gwilym’s language is cumbrous, and his manner laborious. He had mastered
his art with difficulty, and his work therefore betrays an almost
complete lack of spontaneity. Yet his services to Welsh poetry were
considerable, for he began a new revival of the bardic art when it had
for a long time been under a cloud. He revelled, if with something of
grandiosity, in the majestic in Nature, and his Ode to the Thunder is
certainly impressive—the language producing a cumulative effect of
elemental noise which is exceedingly remarkable. It is hardly surprising
that Borrow was attracted to Ab Gwilym, whose satire and invective in the
treatment of his rival, Bwa Bach, are echoed in much of Borrow’s own
writing. Elis Wyn was a horse of a very different colour, and has a
reputation in Welsh literature which even Borrow does not exaggerate.
His mystic imaginings are daring in the extreme, and his style is vivid;
others than Borrow adjudge the _Bardd Cwsg_ to be equal in many parts to
Dante at his highest.
“The Sleeping Bard; or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell; by Elis
Wyn, translated from the Cambrian British by George Borrow, author of,”
etc., etc., is a rare book now. The copy before me, in its flimsy
salmon-coloured paper cover, with its uncut edges and all its evidences
of country, job-printing (in spite of John Murray’s imprint), is priced
at two guineas. Somehow, its dress seems fitting, Borrovian. One would
rather this informality for the weird imaginings and the sulphuric
vaticinations of the Denbighshire mystic than any finer guise of print
and binding. The gusto with which Borrow attacked a task of this kind is
obvious from preface to epilogue. He traces the influence, of Quevedo’s
“Visions or Discourses” upon the matter, and the style of Elis Wyn,
especially with reference to the character of Rhywun, that symbolical
“Somebody,” who complains in the Vision of Death that so much of the
villainy and scandal in the world is attributed to him: Rhywun’s
forerunner is the Juan de la Encina of Quevedo’s work. He considers,
however, that the Welshman’s work is superior to that of the Spaniard.
There can be little doubt that Elis Wyn was acquainted with Quevedo’s
“Visions,” either in the original or in the English translation published
in London about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The resemblance
between the Welsh “Vision of the World” and the Spanish “Interior of the
World Disclosed” is too close for any other verdict, the similarity of
Elis Wyn’s “Vision of Hell” to Quevedo’s “Sties of Pluto” too remarkable.
But Borrow seems to have overlooked or rejected—at any rate, he does not
mention—the much greater probability that the composition of this
allegory in Welsh was suggested by “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” which was
hardly half a century old when “The Sleeping Bard” appeared. A deeply
religious minister like Elis Wyn may reasonably be conceived to have been
fired with the desire to do for the Welsh people in the Welsh vernacular
what the inspired tinker had done in English for the common people of his
country.
Judged by Borrow’s translation, the literary merits of “The Sleeping
Bard” come out very high. Whether they are as splendid as the plentiful
comparisons with classical writers would suggest can only be estimated by
those who are deeply versed in the Welsh literary medium. What more
immediately concerns us is the quality of Borrow’s rendering. His style
lent itself admirably to the interpretation of the ideas in the book, and
whatever the excellences or defects of his work as a translator, the
effect he produces, especially in the most lurid parts of the “Visions,”
is often superb. There is magnificent prose in the last section, the
“Vision of Hell”—notably in the dialogues between Lucifer and his hosts.
Lucifer’s address to the “potentates of Hell! princes of the black abodes
of Despair!” is a gigantic conception of the eternal warfare of Good and
Evil, couched in language of extraordinary power. Take the speech, in
which he urges his confederates to greater exertions against the
Omnipotent:
“. . . although the Almighty Enemy sent his own son to die for the
beings of that world; yet I, by my baubles, obtain ten souls for
every one which he obtains by his crucified son. And although I have
not been able to reach him who sits in the high places and discharges
the invincible thunder-bolts, yet revenge of some kind is sweet. Let
us complete the destruction of the remnant of human beings still in
the favour of our destroyer. I remember the time when you caused
them to be burnt by multitudes and cities, and even the whole race of
the earth, by means of the flood, to be swept down to us in the fire.
But at present, though your strength and your natural cruelty are not
a whit diminished, yet you are become in some degree inactive; if
that had not been the case we might long since have destroyed the few
who are godly, and have caused the earth to be united with this our
vast empire. But know, ye black ministers of my displeasure, that
unless ye be more resolute and more diligent, and make the most of
the short-time that remains to you for doing evil, ye shall
experience the weight of my anger, in torments new and strange to the
whole of you. This I swear, by the deepest Hell, and the vast
eternal pit of darkness.”
Moloch arises to protest against the censure, to declare, how he has
joyed in the sufferings of men, “the shrieks of infants perishing in the
fire as of old, when thousands of sucklings were sacrificed to me outside
of Jerusalem.” Lucifer laughs in the face of his “heartless legions,”
and announces his intention to go to the Earth in his own kingly person:
“Not one man, henceforth, shall be found on the earth to adore the
Almighty.”
“Thereupon he gave a furious bound, attempting to set off in a
firmament of living fire; but, behold! the fist above his head shook
the terrific bolt till he trembled in the midst of his frenzy, and
before he could move far an invisible hand lugged the old fox back by
his chain in spite of his teeth. Whereupon he became seven times
more frantic; his eyes were more terrible than lightnings, black,
thick smoke burst from his nostrils, and dark green flames from his
mouth and entrails; he gnawed his chain in agony, and hissed forth
direful blasphemy and the most frightful curses.”
“Myn Diawl!” as the little bookseller of Smithfield ejaculated. No
wonder he regarded Elis Wyn as a terrible fellow. While Borrow was
engaged in transferring these scenes into English, contrasting the
peaceful figure of the Bard asleep on the summit of Cader Idris with the
appalling spectacles of his dreams, delighting in the process of heaping
horror upon horror and crashing them against the “squeamish nonsense” of
his age, he did not fail to be effective. It was when he took to verse
that he failed: the metrical translations at the end of each section are
the weakest things in the book. Elis Wyn had a salty humour, and used it
well upon “the oddities and follies which men commit.” Several of
Borrow’s own pet aversions are held up to ridicule—gentility, coquetry,
tobacco, and so on. With what zest he relates the mockery in Hell of
“two honourable gentlemen, newly arrived, who were insisting on being
shown respect suitable to their gentility” may be imagined. The
condemnation of tobacco is worthy of slobbering James himself: “For what
is tobacco but one of my meanest instruments to carry bewilderment into
the brain?” asks Beelzebub.
Borrow made good use of Elis Wyn, not only in this translation, but in
“Wild Wales.” The intensely humorous conversation with Bos the drover at
Pentraeth Coch will be remembered:
“Pray excuse me,” said I, “but is not droving rather a low-lifed
occupation?”
“Not half so much as pig-jobbing,” said Bos, “and that that’s your
trade, I’m certain, or you would never have gone to Llanfair.”
“I am no pig-jobber,” said I, “and when I asked you that question
about droving, I merely did so because one Elis Wyn, in a book he
wrote, gives the drovers a very bad character, and puts them in Hell
for their malpractices.”
“Oh, he does,” said Mr. Bos, “well, the next time I meet him at
Corwen I’ll crack his head for saying so. Malpractices—he had better
look at his own, for he is a pig-jobber, too. Written a book, has
he? Then I suppose he has been left a legacy, and gone to school
after middle-age, for when I last saw him, which is four years ago,
he could neither read nor write.”
I was about to tell Mr. Bos that the Elis Wyn I meant was no more a
pig-jobber than myself, but a respectable clergyman who had been dead
considerably upwards of a hundred years, and that also,
notwithstanding my respect for Mr. Bos’s knowledge of history, I did
not believe that Owen Tudor was buried at Penmynnydd, when I was
prevented . . .
And he made equally good use of the other bards and heroes of Wales, both
in his colloquies with comic persons like Mr. Bos or with the bard of
Anglesey, “the greatest Prydydd in the whole world,” who kept an inn at
L—, and believed “the awen or inspiration was quite as much at home in
the bar as in the barn, perhaps more”; and in his outbursts of
apostrophic eloquence—as when he stood on Holyhead: “‘Some king, giant,
or man of old renown lies buried beneath this cairn,’ said I. ‘Whoever
he may be I trust he will excuse me for mounting it, seeing that I do so
with no disrespectful spirit.’” A glowing vision follows of the scenes
which had passed beneath that grey promontory, from the times of the
Druids, “long-bearded men with white vestments, toiling up the rocks,
followed by fierce warriors with glittering helms and short, broad,
two-edged swords,” as the army of Suetonius pursued them; “I thought I
heard groans, cries of rage, and the dull, awful sound of bodies
precipitated down the rocks . . .” Borrow may not have sympathised with
the modern aspirations of Nationalist Wales, but he certainly succeeded
in demonstrating its nationality, in understanding its poetry, and in
visualising its romance.
Borrow’s purely poetical works remain to be considered. The ballad
literature of many lands had overpowering fascination for him. This was
a perfectly natural affinity. In the ballads, if anywhere, is to be
found the “homely, plain writing” which Borrow admired. In them, too,
were enshrined the histories of the characters he loved or the heroes he
adored. If the public had afforded him more encouragement, we should
have had a series of transcripts and translations spreading over many
years. Fortunately, sheer force of circumstances pushed Borrow into
another literary channel and gave us his prose books. Borrow’s lyrical
genius is hardly a matter for discussion; it simply does not exist, in
spite of Allan Cunningham’s eulogies. Most of his verse is artificial,
stilted, and in the most violent contrast with the vigorous naturalism of
his prose. He seemed to have a lyrical sense, but no capacity for
recording its impressions. The result is a mass of doggerel, here and
there lightened and vivified by a stanza or two of real beauty, happening
simply where a concourse of chances gave him subject, imaginative idea,
and words which harmonised. These flashes of inspiration, however, are
rare.
[Picture: Portion of page of Borrow’s MS. copy of the “Romantic Ballads”
with his MS. revision]
The “Romantic Ballads” which he translated in his youth from the old
Danish and from Œhlenschlaeger are exceedingly interesting because of
their matter: the legends include some of the great ones of the Northern
world. But Borrow’s verse would provide a deep disappointment for any
reader who, having made acquaintance with his prose through “Lavengro,”
for example, had conceived high expectations of his poetry. The copy
which lies before me is an exceedingly interesting one. I am indebted
for its use to Mr. Francis Edwards, the bookseller in Marylebone; whose
property it is. The volume is in the original coloured boards as it was
issued from the press of S. Wilkin at Norwich in 1826. It was Borrow’s
own copy. In it he had erased many lines and stanzas, and written,
either in ink or pencil, others to take their place. There is no record
of the date at which this revision was undertaken—doubtless with a view
to a second edition which was never called for,—but the evidence of the
handwriting shows that it was done in his youth, during the “veiled
period,” and probably before 1830. The finnicking calligraphy—plain to
read, and full of character, but exceedingly fine and minute—is his early
style, the style of the letters to Bowring, and not that of the later
period when he rushed through his manuscripts in odd notebooks and on the
backs of old accounts or envelopes.
The book illustrates the fact that at this time the Bowring influence was
strong on him, and that he and Bowring were on cordial terms. The
title-page is adorned by a quatrain of Bowring’s:
“Through gloomy paths unknown,
Paths which untrodden be,
From rock to rock I roam
Along the dashing sea.”
The opening pages are occupied by a poetical address to Borrow from Allan
Cunningham, whose encouragement and praise had prompted him to issue the
work. Cunningham apostrophises him in numbers like these:
“Sing, sing, my friend! Breathe life again
Through Norway’s song and Denmark’s strain.”
A few examples from among the many manuscript amendments made by
Borrow—which Mr. Edwards has courteously permitted me to give—will let
some light into the mental workshop of the versifier. In the ballad of
“The Death Raven” Dame Sigrid is lying on the deck of the ship watching
the setting of the sun:
ORIGINAL.
“Then all at once the smiling sky drew dark,
The breaker’s raved, and sinking seemed the bark;
The wild Death Raven, perched upon the mast,
Screamed ’mid the tumult and awoke the blast.”
“The foam-clad billows to repose he brought,
And tamed the tempest with the speed of thought.”
“Above her head its leaf the aspen shook,
Moist as her cheek and pallid as her look.”
REVISION.
“Deformed with breakers then the ocean grew,
The water spirted in the ship’s sides through;
Perched on the mast the wild Death Raven yells,
Whilst deep the vessel downward he impels.”
“The billows clad with foam he tames with ease,
And at his glance the savage tempests cease.”
“Above her head its boughs the aspen spread,
Like her it quaked, like her cold sweat it shed.”
This ballad is a translation from Œhlenschlaeger, and produces an eerie
effect of magic forces acting in the natural world—the Death Raven as the
spirit of Evil bargaining with its victim and wreaking hideous woe and
bloody tragedy till it is finally overcome by the vengeance of a pure
maiden who calls to her aid the supernal powers against the infernal.
But Borrow is in literal difficulties all the time, and the story hitches
and tears on the irregularities and ugly angles of his verse. In the
ballad of “Aager and Eliza” (from the old Danish collection of Heroic
Romances edited by Vegel in 1591), it is hard to choose between the
banalities of his two versions:
ORIGINAL.
“Have ye heard of the bold Sir Aager,
How he rode to yonder isle?
There he saw the sweet Eliza
Who upon him deigned to smile.”
REVISION.
“’Twas the valiant knight, Sir Aager,
How he to the island hied.
There he wedded . . . {334} Else,
She of maidens was the pride.”
The best thing in the book is the ballad of “Swayne [or Svend] Vonved,”
of which we have heard a good deal from Borrow, Leland, and others. This
is also from Vegel’s collection. Borrow quotes as a preface to it
Grimm’s account of the legend. Svend Vonved was a terrible fellow,
minstrel and warrior, sent out to avenge the death of his father, and the
poem relates his desperate deeds of valour and blood, his victories over
“knights of pride,” his short way with the female magicians, and his last
characteristic action—the destruction of the harp on which he had twanged
accompaniment to his songs, so that “no sweet sound shall in future
soothe his wild humour.” One manuscript alteration only in this ballad
is of interest; it occurs in the episode of the fight with the Brute
Carle:
ORIGINAL.
“They fought for a day, they fought for two,
And so on the third they were fain to do;
But, ere the fourth day reached the night,
The Brute Carle fell, and was slain outright—
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”
REVISION.
“They fought for a day, they fought for two,
And so on the third they were fain to do;
But, ere the fourth day the night had reached,
The Brute dead on the earth he stretched—
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”
In a lighter vein there is the ballad of “The Deceived Merman,” which had
appeared with some of the other poems in the _Monthly Magazine_ while
Borrow was engaged with Phillips. In the _Magazine_ it began:
“Fair Agnes left her mother’s door.”
The first revision occurred prior to the collection of the ballads in
book-form, when it began:
“Fair Agnes lone on the sea-shore stood,
Then rose a Merman from out the flood:
“‘Now, Agnes, hear what I say to thee—
Wilt thou my leman consent to be?’
“‘O, freely that will I become
If thou but take me beneath the foam.’”
The third couplet is altered in the manuscript revision to read thus:
“‘Oh, yes, forsooth that will I be
If thou’lt take me to the bottom of the sea.’”
The merman did, and there was a family. But Agnes, having obtained
permission to go back and visit her mother, came under religious
influences, stayed overlong, and was finally deaf to all the requests of
her amphibious spouse that she should return to her deserted family,
proving unmaternal enough even to disregard an appeal _ad misericordiam_
on behalf of the youngest of the merbabies. {336}
The “Ballads” have some interest, but, with the exception of “Svend
Vonved,” they have small merit, and it is not surprising that the public
took so little notice of them that the second edition was never required.
Borrow made much better play with his Danish legends and his heroes of
the North in his later prose books, where they take their proper place as
the material of soufflés or as flavouring in a tasty mélange.
CHAPTER XVII
CHARACTERISTICS
THERE is but one authentic portrait of Borrow, it is the painting in the
possession of Mr. John Murray, by whose kind permission it has been
reproduced for this work. An engraving from it was used as the
frontispiece to the first edition of “Lavengro,” and it has always been
known as “the ‘Lavengro’ portrait.” If there is anything in the theory
that a man reaches a certain climacteric when Nature, having done all she
can for him, designs that he shall sit for his portrait, Borrow seems to
have sat at the identical moment. It would be impossible to wish for a
better view of Don Jorge than this.
The white hair, the swart complexion, the brilliant eyes, the almost
affectedly unconventional dress, give an impression of the man which
irresistibly recalls the romance of his youthful exploits and the weird
poetry of the most poetical part of his career. It was this striking
appearance of his, and his commanding height, combined with his
unorthodox outlook, which gave him his unquestionable influence with the
gypsies. It helped to make him, during the one blazing season of his
social celebrity, the lion of the London drawing-rooms. If he failed to
maintain his popularity, it was in spite of his appearance, which had
wonderful distinction.
No Borrovian regrets that Borrow failed, that he did not remain the pet
of society, and that he was only for a brief space encouraged to Byronic
affectations and ambitions. In following his wayward sprites into all
the _bêtises_ he committed, in alienating himself from the fashionable
world and getting himself infinitely disliked by people who were ready to
idolise him if he would have subscribed to all their conventions, Borrow
wrought better than he knew. He would not have been Borrow, in fact, if,
after the publication of “The Bible in Spain,” he had submitted to the
influences of the great world and become a manufacturer of popular books.
He would have written a great deal more and a great deal worse; he would
have lost his piquancy to acquire gentility; he would have become suave,
smooth, complacent, and pious, instead of being rugged, rebellious,
boorish—and Borrow.
Such speculations are needless. It was impossible for Borrow to be other
than Borrow was. The rudeness of his manner was no pose: this was an
elemental spirit that could not avoid being itself, whatever veneer it
eroded, whatever polish it dulled. The angularity, the abruptness, the
most fascinating and most irritating qualities of his work—these also
were no affectation. They arose naturally out of the qualities of the
man himself. There is no writer who has put more of his ego into his
work than Borrow. One looks at his portrait, contemplates his ancestry
and his training, and admits that if this man were to become a writer
there was no other kind of writer he could have become than the author of
“Lavengro.” It is possible to lay too much stress on Borrow’s
boorishness, and this is the very last place in which it should be done.
His strain of melancholia often verged upon madness: any measured
judgment of his life must take account of that fact, and it will explain
much that is otherwise difficult to understand. I have been informed
that he suffered in his youth from the “touching” mania, and that even if
on his travels described in “Lavengro” he did meet a gentleman who was
thus afflicted, the extraordinary vigour and vividness of the scenes in
which the malady is depicted are due to his own painful acquaintance with
it. Again, I have been told that the incident in “The Romany Rye,” where
the old man studies the Chinese language through the medium of the
legends inscribed on teapots, is drawn from his own experience, and that
he turned to pursuits of this kind in order to stave off the horrors of
melancholy which afflicted him in his moods of self-concentration. A man
of this extraordinary sensibility, passing his youth at the eye-piece of
a kaleidoscope, so to speak, afflated with poetry in boyhood, in narrow
circumstances, buffeted by ill-fortune for many years, chasing many a
Will-o’-the-wisp, could not help being “a queer chap,” as Ford said. He
was soured by circumstance in his early days. In middle life, when the
sunshine of success burst upon him for a time, he became more genial.
The picture of him one gets in his Cornish and Welsh tours is very
pleasant. But he became cold again in later years, and was a bitter man
after the death of his wife had broken the strongest link between him and
his fellows.
His personal and his literary characteristics were, of course, deeply
intermingled. The impatience of pusillanimity which appears in many a
passage of his life was reflected in his works. He had an overpowering
admiration of courage and strength, either mental or physical. There is
a sentence or two in “The Bible in Spain,” describing the last day of
Quesada, which gives light upon Borrow’s idols:
“No action of any conqueror or hero on record is to be compared with
this closing scene in the life of Quesada, for who, by his single
desperate courage and impetuosity, ever stopped a revolution in full
course? Quesada did; he stopped the revolution at Madrid for one
entire day, and brought back the uproarious and hostile mob of a huge
city to perfect order and quiet. His burst into the Puerta del Sol
was the most tremendous and successful piece of daring ever
witnessed. I admired so much the spirit of the brute bull that I
frequently during his wild onset shouted ‘Vive Quesada!’”
And the same note of admiration is struck with reference to many a
pugilist and criminal in whose career it is difficult to find anything to
approve.
Herein is to be found the secret of much of the power of what I have
called Borrow’s naturalism. The characters he depicts are all intensely
alive, and act without reference to any theory of action. When he was
compiling the “Celebrated Trials” he had an education in naturalism which
merely developed his own tendencies. When he introduced into “Lavengro”
David Haggart, the friend of his youth at Edinburgh, it was as a real
person, and not as a biographical lay-figure upon which to hang moral
speculations. Not one writer in a hundred would have treated the Haggart
incident as Borrow did, for, courageous as he was, David was an ingrained
rascal, whose villainies would probably have continued for another
half-century if the hangman had not got hold of him. Borrow did not
speculate on criminology, as the fashion is, and discuss the extent to
which environment was responsible for the career of his blackguards. He
just accepted them in their environment, and, with glowing admiration for
their bravery—Haggart was brave enough to run mortal risks for the crimes
of his associates—transferred them to his pages in their habit as they
lived. Professor Chandler, an American critic, has accomplished a
luminous comparison when he says that Borrow’s realism is of a different
quality from Thackeray’s—the former sympathetic and the latter satiric.
A hundred instances of the truth of this observation will occur to those
who review the regiments of rascals which march through the pages of the
two authors.
It was the same influence which made Borrow’s gypsies so real that, in
spite of all the errors into which imperfect knowledge of the subject led
him, his pictures of the Romany race remain unapproached for truth of
line and naturalness of colour. Ainsworth drew gypsies; they were stage
figures; they are forgotten. Borrow’s gypsies are immortal. Other
authors of his own time visualised rascality in many forms; Dickens
especially created a marvellous gallery of rogues. But Dickens set up
his villains either in order to punish them in the interests of altruism
or to reform them in the interests of propaganda. Borrow regarded them
from a widely different point of view. They were studies in real life,
and not material for the administration of poetic justice. It is
interesting to contrast his view of a very popular book with that of a
contemporary writer. Charles Reade was an unequivocal admirer of “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,” which he said was “great by theme and great by skill.” We
have seen what Borrow said about a lot of “Uncle Toms and Uncle
Tom-fools.” It is idle, perhaps, but not without charm, to guess what he
would have made of a character like Legree if he had been able to
persuade Isopel Berners to take him with her to America and had met with
a slave-driver in that continent. Parallel with this worship of strength
and courage may be placed his taste in literature. He had little sense
of the verbal niceties of style; his affection was reserved for the
robust and vigorous writing of authors like Defoe, and for the hefty,
rousing force of the narratives which he discovered among the biographies
and autobiographies of criminals in many an aged pamphlet and forgotten
broadsheet. It would, however, be easy to exaggerate this side of
Borrow’s character. He was not merely a non-moral literary berserker.
There was a softer, a more imaginative side to his nature—not
irreconcilable with the other, because it arose out of the same quality
of sympathy and the same acuteness of vision. This was manifested most
strongly, perhaps, in his later and more settled years, and perhaps more
plainly in his relations with children than in any others.
Apart from those episodes of his life which form the staple of his books,
the most pleasant picture of the man is to be found in his days of
comparative leisure in East Anglia, when he divided his time between
study, literary work, visits to friends, the entertainment of friends,
and rambles about rural Norfolk and Suffolk. It was a red-letter day
when a gypsy tribe arrived in the neighbourhood of Oulton. His Romany
friends would be invited to camp in his grounds, to receive him and his
people by their camp-fires, to rokker (talk) Romany with him, and to
listen to his gypsy songs. When there were no gypsies, he would make
explorations into the character and the dialect of the Norfolk or Suffolk
natives, picking up any chance companion of the road. He generally
succeeded in eliciting a life history and in pursuing, as far as the
duration of the companionship would allow, a psychological study. Some
of his philological adventures on the country roads have been amusingly
related by Miss Harvey:
“When they used some word peculiar to Norfolk (or Suffolk)
countrymen, he would say, ‘Why, that’s a Danish word.’ By and by the
man would use another peculiar expression: ‘Why, that’s Saxon!’ A
little later, another: ‘Why, that’s French! . . . What a wonderful
man you are to speak so many languages!’ One man got very angry, but
Mr. Borrow was quite unconscious that he had given any offence.”
His taste revolted against the use of foreign words or phrases in common
conversation, though he resorted to the practice very largely in his
books and correspondence. He would chaff his wife or Miss Clarke if
either of them introduced a French word into talk around the table,
crying, “What’s that? Trying to come over me with strange languages!”
The picture of his life at this time, apart from the petty distractions
of his disputes with neighbours and the controversies with his publisher,
is that of a quiet and pleasant domesticity, occasionally disturbed by
fits of “the Horrors.” When, nervously depressed into the depths of
gloom, he was unable to sleep, he would get up in the night and set off
on long walks, often stretching them over the twenty-five miles of road
to Norwich. He would return the next night invigorated by the exercise,
and freed from his enemy. While in good health his existence at the
Cottage was that of a quiet, studious man, spending his evenings with his
wife and her daughter, reading voraciously, entertaining his
acquaintances, and behaving in a tamely rational manner till his passion
was roused or his prejudices were assailed. His personal habits were
quite temperate. He ate little breakfast, a hearty dinner, and
subsequently took only a glass of cold water before going to bed.
He did not drink nearly so much ale as his panegyrics of malt liquor
might lead the unwary to suppose. Miss Harvey spoke to him of a lady who
had a fondness for a certain gentleman. “Well,” said Borrow, “did he
make her an offer?” “No,” answered Miss Harvey. “Ah!” he exclaimed, “if
she had given him some good ale he would.”
He appears never to have concerned himself about the character of the
food he ate so long as he had substantial fare. He amazed the landlady
of a Cromer hotel by replying to her inquiry what he would have for
dinner, “Give me a piece of flesh!” The landlady mentioned the strange
request to a lady staying in the hotel, and described the person who made
it. “Oh!” she laughed, “that’s Mr. Borrow. What he wants is a good rump
steak.” And a rump steak, being served, quite satisfied him, for it was
his favourite dish. He was exceedingly susceptible to music—we have seen
his comparison of Mrs. Berkeley’s piano to David’s harp—but he does not
appear to have possessed a highly cultured ear, for Miss Harvey tells us
that “one piece he seemed never to tire of hearing. It was a polka, ‘The
Redowa,’ I think, and when I had finished he used to say, ‘Play that
again, H—.’”
Richard Ford summarises Borrow’s character in three sentences: “Borrow is
a queer chap. . . . I believe Borrow to be honest, albeit a gitano. His
biography will be passing strange if he tells the _whole_ truth.” {347}
There is one strange error in this. Borrow was not a gypsy, of course,
though the vagrant spirit was lively in him. But he was honest, even
when most mistaken. The most deplorable thing in his career was his
unfounded and grotesque libels upon Bowring, about which it can only be
suggested that he was beside himself with rage and disappointment when he
wrote them, having failed to obtain the mission from the Government which
was the _ignis fatuus_ of his life. There can be as little question that
Borrow believed himself to have been ill-treated by Bowring as there is
that Bowring was innocent of his charges. The subtle hint in Ford’s
phrase, “if he tells the _whole_ truth,” will be appreciated. Borrow did
not reveal everything in his books. It is unreasonable to expect any man
to do so; but in Borrow’s case, ellipsis was often used where statement
would have been preferable and more straight-forward. Yet the criticism
must fall when we cease to regard his works as purely personal documents
and consider them as works of art. In this respect, addition would not
improve them. Elimination might be tolerated in the interests of some of
the victims of his wrath; but the destruction of the Appendix, for
example, would deprive us of some of the most powerful vituperative
writing in English literature. The debt that literature owes to Borrow
is great, for he sustained into the nineteenth century the traditions of
the great narrative writers, and his successor is still to seek.
* * * * *
THE END
INDEX
A
“Aager and Eliza,” 331, 334
Abraham, John, of Liskeard, 152
_Academy_, _The_, 251
Addington, Lord, Ford’s letters to, 113, 125, 346 (_note_)
Ainsworth, Harrison, 342
Ale, Borrow’s fondness for, 20, 235, 244, 259, 309, 345
Altarnun, Cornwall, 194
Anglo-Saxonism, Borrow’s, 17, 18, 313
Anstis, Bernard, 149, 152
Arabic, Borrow’s knowledge of, 83
“Army of Faith,” 72
Arnold, Matthew, 287 _et seq._, 305, 336 (_note_)
Arthurian Legend, The, 161, 162, 189, 195 _et seq._, 204 _et seq._
_Athenæum_, _The_, 8, 117, 130, 133, 252, 253 (_note_)
Avery (or Every), John, 175
B
Bailly, Juan Antonio, 99 (_note_), 110, 111
Belfast, Borrow at, 237
Belgians, Borrow on, 82, 83
Benson, A. C, 255, 256
Berkeley, Rev., Vicar of St. Cleer, 152 _et seq._
Berners, Isopel, 7, 10, 55 _et seq._, 291, 304, 308, 342
Bevan, Mrs., 139
“Bible in Spain, The,” 11, 12, 22, 75 (_note_), 114 _et seq._, 207, 271,
293 _et seq._, 338
Bible Society, The, 85 _et seq._, 98, 99, 104, 114, 115, 296
Birrell, A., 22, 65
_Blackwood_, 133
Blyth, Esther (“Queen of the Nokkums”), 237, 244, 284 _et seq._
Boconnoc Pillar, The, 179 (_note_)
Bolventor, Cornwall, 193
Borde, Andrew, 267
Borlase, William, 180
Borrow, George, his birth, 25; at Huddersfield school, 27; at Edinburgh
High School, 28; at Norwich Grammar School, 29, 30; at Clonmel School,
29; articled to solicitors, 35; and Sir John Bowring, 40, 73, 132; starts
for London, 45; his literary-life in London, 46–54; his wanderings in
England, 54–69; in Paris in 1826, 70; his imprisonments, 72, 93; applies
for work at British Museum, 80; seeks post under Belgian Government, 82;
employed by Bible Society, 86; at St. Petersburg, 88; returns to London,
90; visits Portugal and Spain, 91–103; his marriage, 104; separates from
Bible Society, 104; at Oulton, 105–124, 125, 132, 137, 252, 258–262;
takes prolonged tour abroad, 124; in the East, 131; his view of
“Lavengro,” 135; and Dr. Hake, 138; at Yarmouth, 145, 224; his prowess as
a swimmer, 146; visits Cornwall, 147–199; returns to London, 199; tours
in Wales, 208–215, 227; visits Isle of Man, 216; tours in the Highlands,
230; visits Ireland, 230, 237; takes up residence in London, 232; tramps
in Lowlands and Border Country, 237; death of his wife, 238; and Mr.
Watts-Dunton, 246, 253; and Edward FitzGerald, 254; his last days in
Norwich, 258; his death, 262
Borrow, Captain Thomas, 2, 22 _et seq._, 121, 147, 176, 192; marriage of,
25; death of, 45
—, John, 2, 25, 50; death of, 90
—, Mrs. Geo., 104, 106 _et seq._ 116, 120, 133, 145, 177, 208, 215;
illness and death of, 238 _et seq._ (_see also_ CLARKE, MRS.)
—, Mrs. Thomas, 2, 24, 25, 66, 67, 145; death of, 229
Borrows, The Cornish, 147 _et seq._, 190 _et seq._
Bosvil (Bosvile), Gypsy tribe, 55
—, Ryley, 244, 275, 287
Bowring, Sir John, 40, 41, 70, 73 _et seq._, 91, 129, 132, 133, 136, 234,
313, 332, 346
—, L. B. and F. H., 73 (_note_)
—, Edgar, 84
Brandram, J., Secretary of Bible Society, 94, 99, 104, 300
British Museum (_see_ MUSEUM)
Brontë, Emily, 249
Brook, Sir James, 31
Brown Willy, Cornwall, 194
Bryan, B. (“Ben Brain”), 24, 33, 121
Buddhist Doctrines, Borrow on, 90
Burney, of Mousehole, 177 _et seq._
_Bury Post_, _The_, 146
Byron, 6, 15, 16, 293
C
Camelford, Cornwall, 195
Campbell, Thomas, 44
“Canting Nonsense,” 34, 318
Caradon Hills, The, Cornwall, 146, 151 _et seq._, 202
Carew, Bampfylde Moore, 247
Carlism, Borrow on, 301
Carlyle, Thomas, 305, 313
Carn Brea, Cornwall, 180
“Celebrated Trials,” 49, 50, 52, 341
Celtic strain in Borrow, 17, 19, 20, 150, 202, 210, 320
Chandler, F. W., 341
Children’s Bill, The, 268 (_note_)
Christian, John William (“Shan Dhu”), 217, 218
Clarendon, Lord, 123, 124
Clarke, Miss Henrietta, 97, 137; in Wales, 208 _et seq._, marriage of,
236 (_see also_ MACOUBREY, MRS.)
Clarke, Mrs. (Mrs. George Borrow), 85, 96, 97 _et seq._; marriage with
Borrow, 104 (_see also_ BORROW, MRS. GEORGE)
Clausel, and Bedouin campaign, 79, 83
Clonmel, Borrow at school in, 29
Cobbe, Frances Power, 232, 238, 239, 240
Coldstream Guards, Thomas Borrow enlists in, 23, 24
Coloma, Santa, the Carlist, 93
Cooper, Mrs. (gypsy celebrity), 286
Cordova, General, 103
Cork, Borrow at, 29
_Cornhill Magazine_, _The_, 235
Cornish language, 174, 186 _et seq._, 203
Cornwall, Borrow, family in, 17, 18, 21; Borrow’s visit to, 146 _et
seq._; Borrow leaves, 199; suggested book on, 199 _et seq._; gypsies in,
278
Crofton, H. T., 267 (_note_)
Cronan, the guide, 185
“Croppies, lie down!” 213
Cruikshank, and Elis Wyn, 229
Cunningham, Allan, 69, 332
—, Rev. F., 85, 90
D
“Death Raven, The” 333
Defoe, Borrow’s exemplar, 13, 14, 26, 134, 297, 303, 343
Delabole, Cornwall, 199
Denew, of Yarmouth, 231
“Denmark, Songs of,” 75
Denniss, Vicar of Oulton, 120 (_note_)
Dereham, East, 14, 24; Borrow born at, 25
D’Éterville, Abbé, 31, 33, 35
Dickens, Charles, Borrow and, 240, 285, 305, 342
Dilke, Sir Charles, reviews “Lavengro,” 133
Doniert, King of Cornwall, 178, 193
Donne, W. B., 134, 139, 255, 256
Dowden, Professor, 37, 38
Dozmary Pool, 161 _et seq._
Druids, Borrow and the, 179
Dublin, Borrow in, 230
Dutt, W. A., of Lowestoft, 260
E
East Anglia, Borrow and, 18, 222, 250, 343
_Eastern Daily Press_, _The_, 146 (_note_)
Edey, Mrs., of Liskeard, 168, 169
Edinburgh, Borrow in, 27
_Edinburgh Review_, _The_, 117
Edwards, Francis, 330
“Egipt speche,” Borde’s, 267
Elwin, Rev. Whitwell, 52, 141, 142, 226, 304
Every (or Avery), John, 175
Every, Miss, 175, 176 (_note_)
_Examiner_, _The_, 75 (_note_), 117
F
Faa, Will (Gypsy “King”), 283
“Faustus,” Klinger’s, Borrow translates, 44, 52, 69
Finn, Legends of, 185, 218 _et seq._
FitzGerald, Edward, 107, 254 _et seq._; his letter to Borrow, 257
Ford, Richard, 68, 72 (_note_), 112 _et seq._, 116, 117, 118, 123, 125,
126, 129, 340, 346
Ford, Mrs., 113 (_note_), 126 (_note_)
_Foreign Quarterly_, _The_, 78, 82
_Fraser’s Magazine_, 133, 234
G
Gaelic language (_see_ SHELTA)
Gayangos, Librarian of the “Nacional,” 99
“Gentility Nonsense,” 20, 151, 152, 314 _et seq._
German, Borrow’s knowledge of, 49; literature, 313
Ghost story, Lope de Vega’s, 214
Gifford, William, 48
“Gil Blas,” 118, 294
Gladstone, W. E., and “The Bible in Spain,” 128
_Globe_, _The_, 245
Grampound, Borrow at, 179
Graydon, Lieutenant, 93, 94, 115
Groome, Hindes, 251
Grundtvig, Danish poet, 78
“Guinevere,” Borrow’s suggestion, 157
Gumb, Daniel, 159
Gurney, Joseph, 35, 85
—, Anna, 225
Guter Vawr, 214
Gwinett, Ambrose, 248
Gypsies, Borrow and, 1–4, 17, 295, 303, 314, 342, 343; Spanish, 92, 99,
110; in London, 127, 233; songs and stories of, 151; in Cornwall, 181; in
Wales, 211; and C. G. Leland, 241 _et seq._; and Watts-Dunton, 248 _et
seq._; their language, 251, 264–292, 342, 343
“Gypsies of Spain, The” (_see_ “ZINCALI”)
Gypsy Lore Society, 265 (_note_), 267 (_note_)
H
Haggart, David, 28, 341
Hake, Dr. Gordon, 8, 109 (_note_), 134, 137, 138 _et seq._, 145, 156,
169, 246, 249 (_note_), 253
—, Mr. Egmont, 8
—, Mr. Thomas, 143
Hambly, Edmund, 19, 22
“Handbook for Spain,” Ford’s, 126 (_note_), 128, 129
Harford Bridge, 33
Harvey, Miss Elizabeth, 108, 109, 116, 137, 146 (_note_), 344 _et seq._
Hasfeldt, 88, 89, 117, 119, 124
Hawker of Morwenstow, 191, 205; on Methodists, 221
Haydon, Benjamin, 50, 51, 70
Hayim Ben Attar, 103
Hayle, Borrow at, 182
Hazlitt, William, 310
“Herne, Mrs.” 35, 270
Highland Society of London, The, 80
Homer, and Gronwy Owen, 240, 241, 272
Horncastle Fair, 66, 69, 70
“Horrors, The,” 51, 90, 155, 238, 239, 344
Huddersfield, Borrow at school in, 27, 28
Huguenots, Mrs. Thomas Borrow’s descent from, 19, 24
Hume, Martin, 301
Hurlers, The, 160
I
Imprisonments, Borrow’s, 72, 93
“Ingeborg, Queen,” 10, 57
Ireland, Borrow’s love for, 19; first visit to, 29; suggested service in,
83, 153; tour in, 230
J
Jago, James, of Liskeard, 149, 194
Jenner, Henry, 187
Jessopp, Dr., 33; on Borrow and children, 142
“Jew of Fez, The,” 103
John, S. R., 187 (_note_)
Johnson, the Pugilist, 24
“Jones, John,” of Llangollen, 212
“Joseph Sell,” 53, 54
K
Kerrison, Roger, 35, 45, 51
Killey (Manx poet), 221
Kingsley, Charles, 305
King’s Lynn, 225
Kirk Yetholm, 237, 244, 248 (_note_), 251, 283 _et seq._
“Kjaempe Viser,” The, 69, 76
Klinger (_see_ “FAUSTUS”)
Knapp, Professor W. I., LL.D., 32, 45, 51, 72, 97, 127 (_note_), 129,
154, 185, 211, 213, 240 (_note_), 262 (_note_)
L
Languages, Borrow’s capacity for, 1, 30, 31
Latham, Dr., 252, 253
“Lavengro,” 4, 12, 22, 24, 26, 29, 46, 47, 53, 54 _et seq._, 73, 76, 121
_et seq._, 125, 130, 151, 199, 244, 266, 293 _et seq._, 302 _et seq._,
339; publication of, 131; reviews of, 133, 226; Borrow’s view of, 135;
fascination exercised by, 303
“— Portrait,” The, 337
Leland, C. G., 232, 241 _et seq._, 265, 284, 309
Le Sage, Borrow compared with, 12, 118, 294
Lipotsof, translator, 87
Liskeard, Cornwall, 21, 23; Borrow at, 147 _et seq._
Lockhart, J. G., 52, 76, 128, 129, 142
Lockyer, Sir Norman, 160
Logan Rock, The, 184
London, Borrow family in, 231
Longstone, The, 161
Lopez, Antonio, 92, 281 _et seq._
Lostwithiel, Borrow at, 178
M
Macaulay, Lord, 305
Mackay, William, of Oulton, 244 _et seq._, 249 (_note_), 260
MacOubrey, Dr., 236, 237, 258, 262
—, Mrs., 236, 237, 258, 262 (_see also_ CLARKE, MISS H.)
MacRitchie, D., 280 (_note_)
Malory’s Arthurian Legend, 162
Man, Isle of, Borrow’s visit to, 216 _et seq._
Manchu, The Scriptures in, 86 _et seq._
Manx language, Borrow and the, 217
Martineau family, The, 25, 90, 157
—, Harriett, 38, 86
—, James, 31, 32
Mendizabal, Prime Minister of Spain, 300
Menheniot Pair, 23, 24, 147, 203
Meredith, George, 234
“Merman, The Deceived,” 335
Metaphysics, Phillips’s, 49
Methodists, in Cornwall, 153; in Isle of Man, 220; and gypsies, 275
Militia, West Norfolk, 24, 27, 28; Captain Thomas Borrow’s commission in,
25
Miracle Plays, Cornish, 206
_Monthly Magazine_, _The_, 44, 46 _et seq._, 335
Moore (Manx poet), 217
_Morning Chronicle_, _The_, 301
Morshead, Captain W., 23
Moscow, Borrow’s visit to, 89
Mousehold Heath, Norwich, 1
Mumber Lane (“Mumper’s Dingle”), 55, 309
Murray, John, 51, 64, 75 (_note_), 110 _et seq._, 116, 121, 123, 129,
130, 133, 134, 200, 201, 215, 231, 233, 337; and “Romany Rye,” 224 _et
seq._
“Murtagh,” Wild Irish boy, 29, 70, 184, 265
Museum, British, and Borrow, 80, 130
Mutiny, The Indian, 228
N
Napier, Colonel Elers, 95, 96, 102
Naturalism, Borrow’s, 341
_New Monthly_, _The_, 44
“Nokkums, Queen of the” (_see_ BLYTH, ESTHER)
Nonconformity, Borrow on, 321
Norman Cross, 2, 26, 27
Norwich, 1, 4; West Norfolks’ return to, 29; Borrow’s home-coming, 66,
67, 72, 79; Borrow’s old age in, 258
— Grammar School, 29, 30
O
Oehlenschläger, 78, 330 _et seq._
Omar Khayyam, 255
_Once a Week_, 218, 234
Oulton, 69, 97; Borrow settles at, 105, 106, 116, 132; Borrow returns to,
252, 258; picture of Borrow’s last years at, 260; Richard Ford at, 125
Owen, Gronwy, 197, 228
_Oxford Review_, 47
P
Padstow, Cornwall, 199
Palmerston, Lord, 124
Parnell’s “Hermit,” 221
Patriotism, Borrow’s, 222
Pengelly, Cornwall, 199
Penquite, Cornwall, 147, 151 _et seq._; Borrow leaves, 199
Pentire Point, Cornwall, 199
Pentreath, Dolly, 183, 186
Penzance, Borrow at, 182 _et seq._
Perfrement, Ann (_see_ BORROW, MRS. THOMAS)
“Perpinia,” Story of, 289 _et seq._
Peto, Sir Morton, 121, 137
“Petulengro, Jasper” (Ambrose Smith), 1, 4, 5, 6, 35, 53, 65, 263, 308
Peyrecourt, 71
Phillips, Sir Richard, publisher, 44, 45, 46 _et seq._, 69, 335
Pixies, The Cornish, 166 _et seq._
Playfair, Dr., 239
Plymouth, 148
_Plymouth Mail_, 147
Poetry, Borrow’s, 234
Pollards, The, of Woolston, 168 _et seq._
Portugal, Borrow’s first visit to, 91 _et seq._
Procter, Mrs., 252
Protestantism, Borrow’s, 19, 211, 295, 307, 313; Berkeley’s, of St.
Cleer, 153
Pugilism, Borrow’s admiration of, 1, 5, 8, 9, 12, 22, 24, 33, 34, 156,
203, 245, 259
_Punch_ (quoted), 156
Pushkin, on Borrow’s “Targum,” 90
Q
_Quarterly Review_, 52, 117, 128, 129, 130, 142, 226, 231
Quesada, Spanish leader, 72; assassination of, 301, 340
Quevedo, and Elis Wyn, 324
Quiller-Couch, Thomas, 166 (quoted), 174 (_note_)
Quincey, De, 34 (quoted)
R
“Rasselas” and “Joseph Sell,” 53
Reade, Charles, 342
Redruth, Borrow at, 180
Religion, Gypsies and, 272 _et seq._
Restormel Castle, 178
Richmond, Borrow gives dinner at, 233
Ritchie, Ewing, 140
“Romano Lavo-Lil,” 243, 248 (_note_), 275, 284 _et seq._; its
publication, 251
“Romantic Ballads,” The, 69, 74, 329 _et seq._
Romany language, 264 _et seq._
“Romany Rye,” The, 9, 11, 34, 60 _et seq._, 70, 125, 193, 199, 215, 302,
339; attack on Bowring in, 73, 75; Dr. Jessopp on, 142; its publication,
201, 224 _et seq._, 244
Rough Tor, Cornwall, 194
S
St. Cleer, Cornwall, 21, 147 _et seq._
St. Michael’s Mount, 183
Salisbury Plain, 54
Sampson, John, 264
_Saturday Review_, 227
“Scandinavia, Songs of, 74
“Scholar Gypsy, The,” 287
Scotland, Borrow’s tramp through, 230; tour of 1866, 237
Scott, Sir W., 218 (_note_), 237, 240, 285, 316 _et seq._
Scott-Macfie, R.A., 277
Sebastopol, Pall of, 222
Seccombe, Thomas (quoted), 13
“Sell, Joseph,” 53, 54
Seville, Borrow settles in, 95, 97
“Shales, Marshland,” 72, 250
Shaw, Thomas (Lord Advocate), 268 (_note_)
Shelta, the Tinkers’ Language, 242, 265 _et seq._
“Sidi Habismilk,” 103, 116, 123, 125
Simpson and Rackham, of Norwich, 4, 35
Simpson, William, 35, 36, 43
Skeppers, The, of Oulton, 85
“Slingsby, Jack” (“Lavengro”), 55, 309
Smith, Ambrose, 4, 68, 69 (see _also_ “PETULENGRO”)
—, the elder, 3, 4, 26
“Snob Papers,” The, 139
Southey, Taylor’s letter to, 39
Spain, Borrow’s visits to, 92 _et seq._; his view of, 297 _et seq._
_Spectator_, _The_, 235
Sterne, Borrow compared with, 12, 13
Stevenson, R. L., 13
Stirling-Maxwell, Sir W., reviews “Lavengro,” 133
Stonehenge, 54, 158
Stowe, Mrs. Beecher, 157
Strickland, Agnes, 139
“Swayne Vonved,” 173, 180, 243, 299, 334 _et seq._
T
Tangier, Borrow’s visit to, 98 _et seq._
“Targum,” Borrow’s, 90, 246
Taylor, Baron, 71
—, John, publisher, 69
—, Miss Jane, of Penquite, 169 _et seq._
—, Robert, of Penquite, 147 _et seq._
—, William, of Norwich, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 73, 86, 121, 314
Tennyson, Lord, 305; the Arthurian Legend, 162, 197
Thackeray, W. M., 139, 305, 341
Thomas, Edward, 320 (_note_)
Thurtell, John, 28, 33, 34, 125, 224
Tinkers’ language (_see_ SHELTA)
Tintagel, Cornwall, 195 _et seq._
Tol-pedn-Penwith, 184
Tombland Fair, 72
Tredinnick, Borrows of, 21
Tregeagle, The legend of, 161 _et seq._
Trethevy Stone, The, 158, 159
“Tristram Shandy” and “Lavengro,” 12
Truro, Borrow at, 180
Turner, Dawson, of Yarmouth, 122
U
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 157, 342
_Universal Review_, 47, 52
Usóz, Don Luis, 96, 99, 24
V
Valpy, Edward, 30, 32; flogs Borrow, 33
“Veiled Period, The,” 68 _et seq._
Vidocq, 71
Villiers, Sir G., Minister at Madrid, 93
“Vipers, King of the,” 3
“Visions of Sleeping Bard,” Publication of, 231
W
Wales, Borrow’s love of, 19, 320; first visit to, 208 _et seq._; second
visit to, 227; gypsies in, 275, 279
Wallace, A. R., 198
Wandsworth, Gypsies at, 286
War Office, Borrow and the, 83
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 54, 134 _et seq._, 138, 143, 232, 246 _et seq._,
252, 253, 270, 287 _et seq._
Weare, William, Murder of, 34, 125
Welsh language, Borrow learns, 36; criticism of Borrow’s knowledge of,
211 _et seq._, 322
Wherry Hotel, The, 259
Wilby, agent of the Bible Society, 91
“Wild Wales,” 11, 208 _et seq._, 232, 236, 319 _et seq._; publication of,
234; reviews of, 235
Williams, Peter and Winifred, 11, 55, 308
Willow Lane, Norwich, 29, 68
Wilson, Sir Archdale, 31
Woodbridge, FitzGerald at, 257
Woolston, Cornwall, 150 _et seq._
Wrestling, 203, 204
Wyn, Elis, 10, 79, 197, 208, 229 231, 323 _et seq._
Y
Yarmouth, Borrow lives at, 145, 146, 224
Z
“Zincali, The,” 11, 34, 35, 100, 103, 110 _et seq._, 124, 176, 251, 266,
271 _et seq._
* * * * *
* * * * *
PRINTED BY CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD., LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C.
FOOTNOTES.
{3} _Bengui_, Romany word for “devil.”
{6} Borrow loved the wind. There is no reason for discrediting Mr.
Petulengro’s affection for it, but it should be pointed out that gypsies
in general, like all tent-dwellers, regard it as their principal enemy
among the elemental forces.
{34} Thurtell, of course, figures in De Quincey’s essay “On Murder as
One of the Fine Arts,” in which he guided the studies of his readers
“from Cain to Mr. Thurtell.” De Quincey whimsically declared that
Thurtell’s was an inferior performance; its style was “as harsh as Albert
Dürer and as coarse as Fuseli.” The case created as great a sensation as
any murder trial of the nineteenth century. The circumstances were
peculiarly gruesome, for it was affirmed that Thurtell and his
accomplices, after throwing the body into a pond, went away and sat down
to a supper of roast pork; but afterwards, fearing that the body might be
discovered where they had placed it, took it up and dropped it in another
pond. Thurtell’s arrest was a great surprise; his neighbours accounted
him a gentleman. This led to the celebrated definition, given at the
trial by one of the witnesses, who was asked, “What do you mean by a
gentleman?” and answered, “Well, a person who drives a gig.”
{45} The letter may be consulted in Dr. Knapp.
{72} Opinions have differed acutely about Quesada. Richard Ford’s
letters show that he held the general of the Army of the Faith in
considerable respect. Borrow himself devoted one of the most fascinating
chapters of “The Bible in Spain” to a sketch of Quesada.
{73} Through the kind exertions of Sir John Bowring’s sons, Mr. Lewin
Bowring, of Torquay, and Mr. F. H. Bowring, of Hampstead.
{75} It will be useful to print this letter in full:—
“OULTON, LOWESTOFT, SUFFOLK.
June 14, 1842.
“MY DEAR SIR,—Pray excuse my troubling you with a line. I wish you
would send me as many of the papers and manuscripts, which I left at
yours some twelve years ago, as you can find. Amongst others, there
is an essay on Welsh Poetry, a translation of the Death of Balder,
etc. If I am spared to the beginning of next year I intend to bring
out a volume called ‘Songs of Denmark,’ consisting of some selections
from the K. Viser, and specimens from Evald, Gruntvig,
Oehlenschläger, etc. I suppose that I must give a few notices of
those people. Have you any history of Danish literature from which I
could glean a few hints? I think you have a book in two volumes
containing specimens of Danish poetry. It would be useful to me, as
I want to translate Ingemann’s ‘Dannebrog,’ and one or two other
pieces. I shall preface all with an essay on the Danish language.
It is possible that a book of this description may take, as Denmark
is quite an untrodden field.
“Could you lend me for a short time a Polish and French or Polish and
German dictionary? I am going carefully through Mukiewitz, about
whom I intend to write an _article_.
“‘The Bible in Spain’ is in the Press, and, with God’s permission,
will appear about November, in three volumes. I shall tell Murray to
send a copy to my oldest, I may say my _only_, friend. Pray let me
know how you are getting on. I every now and then see your name in
the _Examiner_, the only paper I read. Should you send the papers
and the books, it must be by the Yarmouth coach, which starts from
Tottenham. Address—George Borrow, Crown Inn, Lowestoft, Suffolk.
With kindest remembrances to Mrs. B., Miss B., and family,
“I remain, dear Sir,
“Ever yours,
“GEORGE BORROW.
“Doctor Bowring.”
{91} Borrow contemplated carrying out a plan of his own for the teaching
of the Gospel. On December 27th, 1835, he wrote from Evora in the
Alemtejo to Dr. Bowring as follows:—
“For the last six weeks I have been wandering amongst the wilds of
the Alemtejo, and have introduced myself to its rustics, banditti,
etc., and become very popular amongst them; but as it is much more
easy to introduce oneself to the cottage than the hall (though I am
not utterly unknown in the latter) I want you to give or procure me
letters to the most liberal and influential minds of Portugal. I
likewise want a letter from the Foreign Office to Lord de Walden. In
a word, I want to make what interest I can towards obtaining the
admission of the Gospel of Jesus into the public schools of Portugal
which are about to be established. I beg leave to state that this is
_my plan_ and no other person’s, as I was merely sent over to
Portugal to observe the disposition of the people, therefore I do not
wish to be named as an Agent of the B. S., but as a person who has
plans for the mental improvement of the Portuguese; should I receive
_these letters_ within the space of six weeks it will be time enough,
for before setting up my machine in Portugal I wish to lay the
foundation of something similar in Spain.”
{99a} Juan Antonio Bailly. _See_ chap, vi., p. 110.
{99b} Don Luis de Usóz y Rio was one of Borrow’s staunchest friends in
Spain, and looked after his affairs in Madrid while he was on his
provincial journeys. Usóz was largely responsible for the great
collection in twenty volumes of the works of Spanish Reformers of the
Sixteenth Century.
{99c} Librarian of the “National.”
{103} “The Bible in Spain,” chap. lv.
{104} Dr. Knapp, vol. i., p. 341.
{109} _Eastern Daily Press_, October 1st, 1892. Miss Harvey and her
sister Susan were two of the closest friends of the Borrows. Their
father had been articled to the law at the same time as Borrow, and had
similar tastes in sport, and their association was long and genial. The
intercourse between these two families led to an important
acquaintanceship for Borrow, that of Gordon Hake. _See_ p. 137.
{112} Richard Ford was almost as interesting a person as Borrow himself,
though a much more amenable. The discoverer of Velazquez was, at the
time of their acquaintance, living in Heavitree mainly because his
brother James had a prebendal stall in Exeter Cathedral. There he had
built himself a house, in which he had expressed his own taste in
architecture and decoration. His long series of articles in the
_Quarterly Review_ began with an architectural subject, the “cob-walls”
of Devonshire—a mixture of “mud” and straw, said to be the warmest, and
among the most durable of all walls. Many examples of this form of
building remain in the neighbourhood of Exeter. Ford traced a connection
between the mud walls of Devon and the concrete used by the Moors and
Phœnicians. Ford visited Borrow, at Oulton, in 1844. He was thrice
married, the last time in 1851, to Mary, only daughter of Sir A.
Molesworth, the head of the distinguished Cornish family of that name.
Mrs. Ford still survives, and the author has the privilege of
acknowledging her kindly interest and valuable assistance in his
inquiries into the relations between Borrow and her husband.
{118} This was no case of like to like. Borrow had no great admiration
for Le Sage, and supported the absurd theory that “Gil Blas” was “a
piratical compilation from the works of old Spanish novelists.”
{126a} I am indebted to the courtesy of Mrs. Ford for permission to
reproduce this letter.
{126b} Referring to the review of the _Handbook for Spain_.
{132} Lady Bowring’s “Memoir,” prefixed to “Matins and Vespers.”
{140} In his “East Anglian Reminiscences.”
{142} _Daily Chronicle_, April 30th, 1900.
{143} Quoted by Mr. Watts-Dunton in his introduction to “The Romany
Rye”—“In Defence of Borrow” (Minerva Library).
{146} Miss Harvey related (in the _Eastern Daily Press_) a story of
Borrow’s prowess as a swimmer and diver. He was bathing with a friend,
and after he had plunged under water, nothing was seen of him for so long
a time that his companion began to be alarmed. Presently, Borrow’s voice
was heard from afar off, crying: “There! If that had been written in one
of my books, they would have said it was a lie, wouldn’t they?”
{154} Borrow’s admiration of Irish women was comprehensive. He notes
that on one of his visits to the vicarage, Berkeley’s aunt was present:
“Fine old Irish lady; received me in most kind and hospitable manner.”
Later, when Berkeley spent an evening at Penquite, they discussed and
compared Irish and Cornish women with many illustrations of points of
resemblance in vivacity and difference in character.
{166} Related by Mr. Thomas Quiller-Couch to W. C. Hazlitt.
{168} Mr. William Pollard, of Woolston, Mr. Robert Pollard, and Mrs.
Edey, of Liskeard, and Mrs. Toll, of Pensilva (1908).
{174a} This is the characteristic Cornish version of the rhyme, as cited
by Mr. Couch in “Folklore in a Cornish Village.” The natural rhyme (and
the common version) substitutes “birth” for “death.”
{174b} He records a visit at Tremar to Henry Goodman, ninety years old,
who in his boyhood had heard the Cornish language spoken. If this was
true, the old tongue must have lingered in these hills after the death of
Dolly Pentreath, who in the Far West was said to be the last person who
spoke it. And, with regard to the dialect then current, he remarks that
he “hardly understood” old Goodman. “Miss Taylor and his daughter, Ann
Honeychurch, interpreted.”
{176} Miss Every’s companion on this visit was a Miss Hambly—name of ill
omen! Mr. William Pollard gave me an amusing addition to Borrow’s
observations. “At the beginning of last century,” said he, “things were
very different from what they are now. We had no police or anything of
the kind, except parish constables. Miss Hambly was a descendant of
Edmund Hambly, the parish constable of Menheniot, whom George Borrow’s
father fought at Menheniot Fair. He detested the name, and was as near
being rude to Miss Hambly as he could be. He neglected her all the
evening, while Miss Every was in great feather with him. This is her
book.” It was an old edition of “The Gypsies of Spain,” in Murray’s Home
and Colonial Library, with the signature “M. Every” in a fine-pointed
handwriting and faded ink; the book had been kept with care; here and
there it was interleaved with neat little cuttings of sentimental verses,
slit from casual newspapers. It should have lain beside a Victorian jar
of rose-leaves.
{179} This was the locally celebrated Pillar at Boconnoc, on “Druid’s
Hill.” It is an unquestionably ancient round-headed cross, raised to its
present position by modern piety.
{185} See Dr. Knapp’s transcript.
{187} I am much indebted for the marshalling of these points of
comparison to Mr. S. R. John, the editor of _Celtia_.
{205} R. S. Hawker: “The Quest of the Sangraal.”
{218} See Sir Walter Scott: Introduction to “Peveril of the Peak.”
Resentment against the alleged injustice of this execution lingered long
in some Celtic districts, even those which were most Royalist in
tendency. This was the case, at any rate, wherever there were
descendants of Christian. So far from the island as Penzance and so far
from the date of the event as the ’eighties reference was made to it in
tones of indignation at the gathering of a learned society. There was a
lineal descendant of Brown William, residing in the town.
{241} This letter was written in Spanish, and is translated by Dr.
Knapp.
{245} _The Globe_, July 21st, 1896.
{248} This was one of Borrow’s favourite hostelries. Another was the
Bald-faced Hind, on the hill above Fairlop the “trysting-place” of the
gypsies: “There they musters from all parts of England, and there they
whoops, dances, and plays; keeping some order nevertheless because the
Rye of all the Romans is in the house, seated behind the door” (“Romano
Lavo-Lil,” “Kirk Yetholm”).
{249} It would have been about the same period that, Borrow being at Dr.
Gordon Hake’s house at Coombe End, an encampment of gypsies was formed
near by on Wimbledon Common. According to Mr. Mackay, Borrow got Hake to
give the gypsies permission to take water from his well. “They came and
helped themselves to the water, and to everything else to which they
became attracted. Hake represented the circumstances to Borrow. Borrow
eloquently resented the aspersions cast on his friends, and left Coombe
End in high dudgeon—to return, however, at a subsequent date.”
{253} _The Athenæum_, March 17th, 1888.
{255} Letter to W. H. Thompson.
{259} They certainly do not confirm the impression of one who informed
me that a friend of Borrow in his last days in East Anglia told him that
the old man was frequently “well-oiled” (!), and that when in a condition
of perfect lubrication he was “a terrible fellow indeed.”
{260} “George Borrow in East Anglia” (1896).
{262} This was written in 1880. A facsimile of a portion of the first
draft is given by Dr. Knapp.
{265} _Journal_ of the Gypsy Lore Society, July, 1907, p. 81.
{267} _See_ Mr. H. T. Crofton’s article in the Gypsy Lore Society’s
_Journal_, October, 1907, p. 157. Borrow, by the way, knew his Andrew
Borde, but had apparently failed to identify the “Egipt speche” as
Romany.
{268} There was a curious reference in the debate on the Second Reading
of the Children’s Bill (House of Commons, March 24th, 1908) to Borrow and
his gypsies. Mr. Thomas Shaw, the Lord Advocate, was describing the
measures proposed by the Bill for dealing with tramp or wandering
children, and “reminded the House that the most beautiful parts of the
United Kingdom were often infested by such children, going about under
the charge, not of any regular type of gypsy, but of mere wandering
vagabonds. These children went from parish to parish, and no local
authority got hold of them. What the Bill did was to say that, if they
had no settled home, or if they were with a guardian who was unfit to
take care of them, they should be subject to seizure. Not begging alone,
but the mere fact of living in a wandering state and not receiving the
education which they would otherwise receive, would bring them within the
range of the provisions of the Bill. They could be taken before the
magistrates and committed to an industrial school. George Borrow never
did a worse service to his country than by writing ‘Lavengro,’ in which
he praised this tramping and wandering life till even the most
well-disposed citizens came to think that there might be something
beautiful in it. The life of children brought up in this way was a life
of squalor, and sometimes of very little else but immorality, and it was
high time the State saw that they were rescued from it” (_The Times_,
March 25th). One does not propose to criticise the provisions of the
Children’s Bill, but it is strange that a Minister should quote
“Lavengro” in this way. Borrow was always insisting upon the very facts
that Mr. Shaw cites about the squalor and misery of the mumpers,
“pikers,” “Abrahamites,” and the other vagrom denizens of the roads, and
his praise was reserved (in so far as it was praise at all) for the life
of the “regular type of gypsy.”
{279} “The Zincali,” part 11, chap. vi. No rule lacks exceptions. We
have noted the gypsy belief in the New Testament as a talisman, and their
faith in the occult powers of the loadstone will fall for consideration
presently.
{280} It is to be observed that “The Zincali” is still referred to as an
authority on Spanish gypsydom. Pott used it in his great work. Mr.
MacRitchie adopts its accounts of the Spanish gypsy nobles (Gypsy Lore
Society’s _Journal_, New Series, No. 2, pp. 98–99).
{284} “Nokkum?” said I; “the root of _nokkum_ must be _nok_, which
signifieth a nose . . . and I have no doubt that your people call
themselves _Nokkum_ because they are in the habit of _nosing_ the
gorgios.”—_Romano Lavo-Lil_, “Kirk Yetholm.”
{320} Mr. Edward Thomas: “Beautiful Wales.”
{334} Words undecipherable.
{336} This is perhaps the most striking illustration of Borrow’s lack of
the genius of verse. Compare Matthew Arnold’s poem, “The Forsaken
Merman,” based on the same legend.
{347} Letter to Addington, February 27th, 1843.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "George Borrow - the Man and his Work" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.