George Borrow, by R. A. J. Walling

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
London, Paris, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
MCMVIII

p. vPREFACE

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 p. vihe 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, p. vii“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:

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 p. viiinew 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.

p. ixCONTENTS

p. xiLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

p. 1CHAPTER I
THE WIND ON THE HEATH

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. p. 2Norman 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 p. 3callous 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 p. 4Cross 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 p. 5words 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 p. 6and 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 p. 7produce 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. p. 8His 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:

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 p. 9scenery, 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 p. 10possible 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,

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 p. 11converse 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 p. 12most 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 p. 13critic 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 p. 14of 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. p. 15The 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 p. 16them 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:

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 p. 17more 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 p. 18had 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 p. 19Underworld 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 p. 20here 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.

p. 21CHAPTER 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 p. 22rejoiced 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 p. 23lines 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, p. 24knowing 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—p. 25including 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 p. 26life 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.

p. 27The 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 p. 28bringing 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 p. 29place 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 p. 30regular 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 p. 31up 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 p. 32friends 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.

p. 33Dr. 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 p. 34it 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”:

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]

p. 35So, 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 p. 36his 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:

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 p. 37whether “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 p. 38great failing was drunkenness: he ultimately became a sot.

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 p. 39Solomon”—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:

p. 40The 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 p. 41diamond 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:

Borrow’s lively account of the dinner party, written with Archilochian bitterness, cannot be read without p. 42many 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; p. 43but 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

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. p. 44Wigs 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 p. 45for 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:

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.

p. 46CHAPTER 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 p. 47them. 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 p. 48redoubtable 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

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 p. 49new 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 p. 50poured 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. p. 51Haydon 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 p. 52reliance 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 p. 53he 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 p. 54tour 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, p. 55to 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 p. 56few 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.

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; p. 57she had twelve brothers, and could lick them all, though they were heroes:

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 p. 58to 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 p. 59her 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:

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 p. 61but inconclusive. Upon the departure of Mr. and Mrs. Petulengro, after their visit of ceremony:

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:

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!

p. 62There 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, p. 63moonshiny, 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 p. 64so 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 p. 65insist 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 p. 66own 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.

p. 67CHAPTER 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 p. 68him. 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 p. 69was 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. p. 70He 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, p. 71Genoa, 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 p. 72descent 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 p. 73in 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 p. 74of 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, p. 75up 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]

p. 76It 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 p. 77to 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,

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, p. 79and 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 p. 80fellow!” 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 p. 81pointed 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 p. 82appearance 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:

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:

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.

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.

p. 85CHAPTER 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 p. 86learning 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 p. 87Books 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, p. 88and 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 p. 89expected 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. p. 90Petersburg 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 p. 91send 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, p. 92upon 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 p. 93change, 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 p. 94actuated 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 p. 95grew 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 p. 96conversed 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 p. 97halter 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. p. 98They 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.

p. 99He 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 p. 100Zincali.” 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 p. 101had 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 p. 102raised 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 p. 103knife 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 p. 104had 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.

p. 105At 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.

p. 106CHAPTER 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—

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 p. 107about 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.

p. 108Near 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 p. 109him. [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 p. 110earnest, 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 p. 111down 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 p. 112minds 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 p. 113his 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 p. 114acid; 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 p. 115well. 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 p. 116of 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 p. 117success. “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 p. 118year; 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 p. 119of 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 p. 120cheer 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.

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:

p. 121He 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 p. 122was 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 p. 123so 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. p. 124Lord 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 p. 125into 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:

After Ford had left, Borrow wrote to him a letter [126a] which provides an interesting glimpse at the process of composition of “Lavengro”:

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).

p. 128CHAPTER 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 p. 129the 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 p. 130Manchu-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.” p. 131That 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 p. 132were 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 p. 133the 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 p. 134acutely 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 p. 135“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—p. 136that 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 p. 137of 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—p. 138the 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 p. 139who 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!”

p. 140Instances 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 p. 141young 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 p. 142Oulton, 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:

p. 143One 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 p. 144between 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:

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 p. 145in 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.

p. 146CHAPTER 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 p. 147Tom 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 p. 148of 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 p. 149Devonport, 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 p. 150residence 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 p. 151many 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

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.” p. 152It 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—p. 153not 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 p. 154of 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” p. 155more 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.”

p. 156“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 p. 157a 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!”

p. 158Borrow, 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 p. 159probably 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 p. 160person, 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 p. 161on 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 p. 162finally to watch the whirling and flashing of the blade as it left his hand and curved over the water, where rose that arm

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 p. 163in 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 p. 164Knight 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,”

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.

p. 165Tregeagle, 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 p. 166shouted, “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 p. 167Duegars 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:

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.

p. 168CHAPTER 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

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 p. 169lady 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, p. 170said 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 p. 171of 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 p. 172the 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 p. 173and 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:

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 p. 174much 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—

—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 p. 175in 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 p. 176choicest 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 p. 177around 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 p. 178folk 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.”

p. 179They 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

p. 180He 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 p. 181without 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 p. 182associations, 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 p. 183naval 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 p. 184Mousehole, 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:

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.

p. 185But 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,” p. 186says 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 p. 187little 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 p. 188Tywardreath 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.

p. 189CHAPTER 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:

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, p. 190the “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 p. 191through 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 p. 192the 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:

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 p. 193for 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 p. 194to 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 p. 195wilderness, 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 p. 196recommended 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 p. 197dream, 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,” p. 198with 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 p. 199long 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 p. 200with 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 p. 201London 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 p. 202have 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

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

p. 203as 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 p. 204it 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:

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 p. 205to 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, p. 206nor 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:

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 p. 207novel 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.

p. 208CHAPTER 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 p. 209a 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 p. 210by 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 p. 211notes 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 p. 212working 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 p. 213weaver, 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:

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 p. 214Borrow 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 p. 215of 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, p. 216for 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 p. 217there 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 p. 218Man, 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 p. 219again. 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.

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.

p. 220Then 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.

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 p. 221prejudices 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 p. 222evanishment 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, p. 223“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.

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.

p. 224CHAPTER 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 p. 225King’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 p. 226the 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 p. 227beyond 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 p. 228to 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 p. 229was 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 p. 230revocation 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 p. 231home 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, p. 232Montagu 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 p. 233London 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 p. 234of 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:

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 p. 235curious. 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 p. 236Spectator 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 p. 237of 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.

p. 238CHAPTER 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 p. 239Lloyd 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 p. 240her 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.)

p. 241Another 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 p. 242widely 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

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 p. 243invitation. 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 p. 244work. 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 p. 245of 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. p. 246When 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, p. 247his 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 p. 248lucky 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 p. 249Borrow 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.

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:

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.

p. 251CHAPTER 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 p. 252in 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. p. 253Was 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:

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:

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 p. 255that 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 p. 256masterful 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.

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 p. 257lapses 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.”

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 p. 259repairs, 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. p. 260William 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:

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 p. 262venerable 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 p. 263spirit 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:

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?”

p. 264CHAPTER 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 p. 265for 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:

We should certainly have had a tinker portrait as fine as that of Murtagh, from whom Borrow learned p. 266the 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 p. 267vision 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, p. 268and 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 p. 269as 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 p. 270the 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 p. 271world 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, p. 272with 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

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 p. 273before 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.

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:

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.

p. 275When 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.

p. 277In “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 p. 278the 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, p. 279phantom 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 p. 280“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 p. 281aristocracy, 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, p. 282to 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 p. 283in 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 p. 284Borderland, 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 p. 285jib, 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 p. 286temptations “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 p. 287riding-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:

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 p. 288whatever 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?”

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.”

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 p. 291gypsy 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,

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 p. 292the 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 surely!”

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.

p. 293CHAPTER 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 p. 294than 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 p. 295similar 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 p. 296other 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 p. 297has 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 p. 298language—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 p. 299spite 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?

that weird figure of a man, with the otter slung around his neck, who could not read, but, when he p. 300was 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 p. 301to 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:

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 p. 303most 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 p. 304it 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 p. 305Borrow 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 p. 306itself 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 p. 307its 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:

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 p. 309the 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 p. 310his 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—

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. p. 311“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 p. 312scholarship “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 p. 313its 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 p. 314William 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 p. 315smithery 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,

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, p. 317is 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 p. 318could 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 p. 319portraits, 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 p. 320Celtic 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 p. 321hardly 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, p. 322where, 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 p. 323tender 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.

p. 324“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 p. 325World 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! p. 326princes 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:

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: p. 327“Not one man, henceforth, shall be found on the earth to adore the Almighty.”

“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” p. 328may 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:

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 p. 329an 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 p. 330and 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.

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 p. 332Borrow’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:

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:

p. 333A 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:

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 p. 334the 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:

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 p. 335sweet 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:

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:

The first revision occurred prior to the collection of the ballads in book-form, when it began:

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.

p. 337CHAPTER 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 p. 338the 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 p. 339qualities 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 p. 340for 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:

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.

p. 341Herein 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 p. 342regiments 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 p. 343literature. 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 p. 344up 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:

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 p. 345invigorated 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. p. 346Berkeley’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. p. 347Yet 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.

p. 349INDEX

“Bible in Spain, The,” 11, 12, 22, 75 (note), 114 et seq., 207, 271, 293 et seq., 338

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, p. 350138; 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

—, Mrs. Geo., 104, 106 et seq. 116, 120, 133, 145, 177, 208, 215; illness and death of, 238 et seq. (see also Clarke, Mrs.)

Bowring, Sir John, 40, 41, 70, 73 et seq., 91, 129, 132, 133, 136, 234, 313, 332, 346

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)

p. 351Cornwall, 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

Ford, Richard, 68, 72 (note), 112 et seq., 116, 117, 118, 123, 125, 126, 129, 340, 346

p. 352Gypsies, 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

Hake, Dr. Gordon, 8, 109 (note), 134, 137, 138 et seq., 145, 156, 169, 246, 249 (note), 253

Ireland, Borrow’s love for, 19; first visit to, 29; suggested service in, 83, 153; tour in, 230

Knapp, Professor W. I., LL.D., 32, 45, 51, 72, 97, 127 (note), 129, 154, 185, 211, 213, 240 (note), 262 (note)

p. 353“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

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.

Norwich, 1, 4; West Norfolks’ return to, 29; Borrow’s home-coming, 66, 67, 72, 79; Borrow’s old age in, 258

p. 354O

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

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

“Romano Lavo-Lil,” 243, 248 (note), 275, 284 et seq.; its publication, 251

“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

Wales, Borrow’s love of, 19, 320; first visit to, 208 et seq.; second visit to, 227; gypsies in, 275, 279

Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 54, 134 et seq., 138, 143, 232, 246 et seq., 252, 253, 270, 287 et seq.

Welsh language, Borrow learns, 36; criticism of Borrow’s knowledge of, 211 et seq., 322

“Wild Wales,” 11, 208 et seq., 232, 236, 319 et seq.; publication of, 234; reviews of, 235

“Zincali, The,” 11, 34, 35, 100, 103, 110 et seq., 124, 176, 251, 266, 271 et seq.

FOOTNOTES.

[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.”

[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.

[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:—

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[187] I am much indebted for the marshalling of these points of comparison to Mr. S. R. John, the editor of Celtia.

[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.

[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.”

[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.”

[262] This was written in 1880. A facsimile of a portion of the first draft is given by Dr. Knapp.

[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.”

[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.

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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

The Project Gutenberg eBook of George Borrow, the Man and His Work

p. iiiGEORGE BORROW THE MAN AND HIS WORK

p. vPREFACE

p. ixCONTENTS

p. xiLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

p. 1CHAPTER I THE WIND ON THE HEATH

p. 21CHAPTER II A WANDERING YOUTH

p. 46CHAPTER III PUBLISHER’S HACK AND HEDGESMITH

p. 67CHAPTER IV BORROW AND BOWRING

p. 85CHAPTER V IN FOREIGN PARTS

p. 106CHAPTER VI THE SUMMER HOUSE AT OULTON

p. 128CHAPTER VII “LAVENGRO” AND HIS CRITICS

p. 146CHAPTER VIII “SUCCESS TO OLD CORNWALL!”

p. 168CHAPTER IX A GALLANT GIRL AND HER FAMILY

p. 189CHAPTER X THE BOOK THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN

p. 208CHAPTER XI THE LAND OF ELIS WYN

p. 224CHAPTER XII LONDON AGAIN

p. 238CHAPTER XIII DEATH OF MRS. BORROW

p. 251CHAPTER XIV THE PASSING OF THE ROMANY RYE

p. 264CHAPTER XV BORROW’S GYPSYISM

p. 293CHAPTER XVI BORROW’S BOOKS

p. 337CHAPTER XVII CHARACTERISTICS