Transcribed from the 1908 Cassell and Company edition by David Price.

GEORGE BORROW
THE MAN AND HIS WORK

BY
R. A. J. WALLING
Author of “A Sea Dog of Devon”

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

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE

One writing of Borrow since the publication of Dr. W. I. Knapp’s “Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow” (Murray, 1899) must of need acknowledge the invaluable services conferred upon the student by that monumental work. Its store of documents is the harvest of a lifetime of devoted labour, and it bridges many a yawning gulf which aforetime left the Borrovian explorer disconsolate. In this monograph, where Dr. Knapp is directly quoted, the fact is generally mentioned either in the text or by way of footnote; but it seemed fitting that there should be some more definite expression of my indebtedness to his affectionate diligence in those long and fruitful researches, which alone have made possible a consecutive story of Borrow’s life.

An inquiry into the Cornish origin of the Borrow family, into the circumstances of Borrow’s visit to the home of his forbears, and of his tour in Cornwall, was responsible for the inception of the present book. The astonishing contrast between the Borrow of the common conception and Borrow as he really was in the flesh and in the spirit gradually forced itself upon me. Borrow has been popularly regarded in two lights. Many people have had a vague idea that if he was not a gypsy he was “half a gypsy, or something of the sort.” More instructed opinion has accepted his affection for East Anglia, the country of his birth, and his glorification of Anglo-Saxonism, as sufficient evidence that he was himself an Anglo-Saxon. Both views are wrong. He was of Celtic origin; his genius was Celtic, though its attributes were modified by many influences. Here is the explanation of many things in Borrow’s life and work which can be explained in no other way. If the part of the book referring to his Cornish associations appears to be out of proportion to the rest, my excuse lies here also.

Further, the Cornish episodes are those least known in Borrow’s life. My object has been, so far as the narrative is concerned, to strengthen the connecting links between those portions of his career which he set forth in his autobiographies, rather than to re-traverse ground where he himself trailed the pen.

Gratitude must be expressed for much assistance given to me in the elucidation of obscure points and in the tracing of documents. First, I am indebted to Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, not only for liberty to draw upon his rich store of recollections of his friend, but for much advice, assistance, and suggestion, the value of which it is difficult to overestimate. No little of the revival of interest in Borrow and the subjects with which he dealt is due to the vogue given to “gypsyism” in literature by the extraordinary success of that wonderful novel, “Aylwin,” and the fascinations of its heroine, Sinfi Lovel, of whom Mr. Watts-Dunton and Borrow conversed during those walks commemorated in Dr. Gordon Hake’s sonnet:

While he, Lavengro, towering by your side,
With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,
Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride
To tell the legends of the fading race—
As at the summons of his piercing glance,
Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,
While you called up that pendant of romance
To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
Your Amazonian Sinfi’s noble story!

Mr. Francis Edwards, of Marylebone, has generously given permission for the reproduction of exceedingly interesting passages from unique copies of Borrow’s books in his possession. To the kindness of Mrs. Ford, of Pencarrow, is due some of the additional information about the relations of Borrow with her husband, Richard Ford. For East Anglian memories I have consulted, among others, Mr. William Dutt, of Lowestoft, and Mr. William Mackay, of Oulton. Family documents and reminiscences have been contributed by Mr. W. H. Borrow, of South Hampstead; Mr. E. Pollard, of Penquite; Mr. William Pollard, of Woolston, and, above all, by Dr. Reginald Taylor, of Gray’s’ Inn Road (son of the “gallant girl” of the ’fifties in Cornwall), to whom my thanks are due especially for the material of the detailed account of Borrow’s Cornish tour.

In the biographical sense, the most important new matter is the correspondence between Borrow and Sir John Bowring, supplied by the courtesy of Sir John’s sons, Mr. Lewin B. Bowring, of Torquay, and Mr. F. H. Bowring, of West Hampstead. This throws a little light on the mysterious “Veiled Period.” The quarrel between Borrow and Bowring will possibly never be explained quite fully; the correspondence now summarised or printed for the first time shows that for more than twenty years Bowring was a good friend of Borrow—“my only friend,” as he said in 1842. Judgment on the merits of the dispute, so far as the evidence can be taken at present, must go against Borrow.

I have entered with some diffidence upon the discussion of Borrow’s “gypsyism”; any degree of confidence which may appear is the offspring of the enthusiastic aid afforded to me by Mr. R. A. Scott-Macfie, the secretary of the Gypsy Lore Society.

R. A. J. W.

Plymouth,
October, 1908.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
THE WIND ON THE HEATH

“What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?” . . . “There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”

The speakers were two young men, met casually on breezy Household Heath outside the city of Norwich; the time towards sunset on a fine evening; the year at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The tall young Englishman who questioned and the lithe swart gypsy who answered were friends of some years’ standing, but of infrequent intercourse. The one, with an absorbing curiosity in all things rare and strange, especially in rare and strange dialects and languages, the other, with a gypsy’s agile, half-developed intellect and pagan philosophy, had a common bond in their love of The Wild and their passion for pugilism and horse-dealing.

The quality of this friendship was peculiar, but not more remarkable than the manner of its origin. Norman Cross, on the North Road, is a lonely place, remote from the trafficking of the world, peopled mainly now by ghosts. In the year 1810 it was the home of several thousands of sorrowful men. There was enacted the sequel of many an incident in the world-tragedy of the Great Conflict, for on that solitary cross-road the Government had built sixteen prisons to hold six thousand Frenchmen, human spoil of war, and fenced them round with a palisade. Outside were barracks for the militia who guarded the prisoners and captives, and wooden houses for the officers who commanded the militia. It was a fantastic environment for an episode which determined the career and directed the effort of such genius as was latent in a boy of seven.

In one of the wooden huts on the roadside dwelt Captain Thomas Borrow, a Cornishman, adjutant of the West Norfolk Militia. With him were his wife, formerly Ann Perfrement, the descendant of Huguenot refugees, and their two sons, John, aged ten, and George, aged seven. The younger boy, even at that age, was fond of self-communion, of solitary wandering; shy of normal relations with his fellows and prone to scrape acquaintance with the oddest people he could find. He absorbed impressions readily; he never forgot what he saw or heard. He observed how the unhappy prisoners earned some scanty comforts by straw-plaiting; his dark face was often lit up by the light of the bonfires on which callous authority threw the dainty work of French fingers, prohibited and condemned because it interfered with the prosperity of the Bedfordshire straw industry. He was one of the astonished listeners to the adventure of the French officer who hid himself in a refuse bin and was shot out of prison and collected by the scavengers. He picked up the friendship of a snake-collector, who told him the tale of the King of the Vipers, and made him a present of a toothless snake, which thereafter he carried about in his bosom as a pet.

This companion of his lonely excursions was with him on the day when he strolled into a green lane where the gypsies had encamped. With it he turned the tables on the pair of vagabonds who threatened to assault him and drown him in the toad pond for prying into their tents; and, for his supposititious occult power over a poisonous reptile, he was endowed by them with the title of “sapengro,” or snake-master. Who had been, one moment before, a “young highwayman” and a “Bengui’s bantling” [3] became a “precious little gentleman” and a “gorgeous angel” when the snake “stared upon his enemy with its glittering eyes”; and presently was introduced with ceremony to their son, a lad of thirteen, ruddy and roguish of face, with whom he swore eternal brotherhood.

The gypsies camped in the green lane at Norman Cross were of the mighty tribe of Smith, and the roguish lad was Ambrose. It was Ambrose Smith who figured thereafter in the writings of the little sapengro as Jasper Petulengro. It was he who uttered the pæan of the sun, moon and stars, and the wind on the heath, when George Borrow met him eight or nine years afterwards near the encampment outside the city of Norwich.

George was then a youth pretending to learn law in the respectable office of Simpson and Rackham, in Tuck’s Court, but was far more ardently engaged in studying the by-products of human society and threading the byways of literature. He had been wandering on the heath until he “came to a place where, beside a thick furze, sat a man, his eyes fixed intently on the red ball of the setting sun.” The conversation, which may be found in the twenty-fifth chapter of “Lavengro,” is one of the most remarkable and most poetical dialogues in the English tongue. It strikes with perfect accuracy the keynote of George Borrow’s life. The whole chapter is a microcosm of Borrow, his philosophy, his morals, and his tastes. Its exordium is a passionate statement of his efforts in search of the heart of things, his pursuit of the elusive answer to the eternal Question. Its middle includes some reflections on philological research, mingled in Borrow’s incomparable manner with the pathos of failure and the humour of success. It has its fling at the metaphysicians. It reports in vivid words the earnest sermon of a field preacher; it describes with great wealth of comparison and eloquence the singing of a hymn on that Norfolk moor by a crowd of commonplace people elevated to a pitch of intense feeling by religious enthusiasm: a hymn which echoed in the ears of the listener many times in after years when in the great cathedrals of the world he was disappointed with religion decked out in all the panoply of pomp and circumstance; its peroration is Mr. Petulengro’s immortal pronouncement on the problem of mortality—and its epilogue is the gypsy’s invitation to his brother to “put on the gloves, and I will try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive.”

This is the very essence of Borrow—languages, religion, hedge-philosophy, and pugilism. The only element missing from the mixture is one of his characteristic outbursts in praise of the brown ale of old England. “There’s likewise a wind on the heath” lets us some way into the heart of Borrow’s secret.

The little sapengro of Norman Cross, the inquisitive youth who discussed Death with Jasper Petulengro, and was boxed out of the mood of morbid introspection, in which he declared, “I would wish to die,” into a healthy appreciation of the sweetness of Life, played many parts in his long career. He became scoffing sceptic, Bible missionary and Papist-hater, traveller, and recluse, philologist and poet. But his principal service to his day and generation and to their posterity had nothing to do with philosophy or religion, with belabouring “Romanisers” or with evangelical propagandism, with topography or with languages, or with poetry in the academic sense. It had everything to do with his wanderings in green lanes, his “love of Nature unconfined,” his acquaintance with the gypsies, his passion for The Wild, and his devotion to the ruder athletics. Many an artist imagines that he would make a reputation as a man of business; many a wizard of accounts has secret dreams of literary fame. Borrow had an impotent desire for scholarship and the celebrity of learning; but he laboured better than he knew. His invaluable bequest is to be disinterred from the numerous pages of five books, dug out from a mass of irrelevance and banality; and its inspiration will be found in the words of Mr. Petulengro: “There’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?” [6]

The man who, preaching from this text, imposed worship on the English-speaking world, was intensely alive, intensely egoistic. Often “engrossed with the sufferings of himself and of his soul,” as one has written of his hero Byron, he yet had a keen outlook upon that part of society in which he could move freely, and, as he saw intensely, was able to produce intense impressions of his visions upon his readers. He was a strange, romantic, wayward, irresponsible man—irresponsible, that is, to any but his own code of honour, manliness and virtue.

He was a very Don Quixote of letters. He went about the world tilting at every windmill he encountered; not infrequently he would construct windmills on which to break his lance. If he was often unhorsed and maimed, that did not matter; it merely made his next onslaught more severe. In one of his contests with persons who had offended him he speaks of them as malignant pseudo-critics, by whom he would not allow himself to be poisoned. “No, no! he will rather hold them up by their tails, and show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from their broken jaws.” Possibly only a man who had been worsted in his battle could have been guilty of this. But—furor arma ministrat; this was Borrow on the war-path against his critics. The true Borrovian likes to think of Borrow at another period and in different circumstances. It was a crabbed literary person who mangled and was mangled in this fashion. The lover of his genius pictures him otherwise—the young and handsome and vigorous Lavengro, stalking over the high roads and the byways of England, disputing with scholar or with gypsy, camping in lonely dingles, conjugating Armenian verbs with Isopel Berners. He has six feet three inches of height. His hair is white, but he has the complexion of healthy youth, and eyes dark and deep as mountain tarns. He revels in the friendship of gypsies and all the vagrants of earth, and cares for few other friends. He would rather sing ballads in the tent of a Romany chal than be entertained in the palace of a prince; he prefers the society of a prize-fighter to the converse of any duke. Recall his picture of himself:

“A lad who twenty tongues can talk,
And sixty miles a day can walk;
Drink at a draught a pint of rum,
And then be neither sick nor dumb;
Can tune a song and make a verse,
And deeds of northern kings rehearse;
Who never will forsake a friend
While he his bony fist can bend;
And, though averse to brawl and strife,
Will fight a Dutchman with a knife;
Oh, that is just the lad for me,
And such is honest six-foot-three.”

Or, again, in his riper age, as he is described by Mr. Egmont Hake (Dr. Gordon Hake’s fourth son)—a huge figure of a fine old man, eccentric of humour, rich beyond measure in the experience from which he drew anecdote, full of quaint whimsy and natural conceit. He was, says Mr. Hake (Athenæum, August 13th, 1881), “a choice companion on a walk, whether across country or in the slums of Houndsditch. His enthusiasm for nature was peculiar; he could draw more poetry from a widespreading marsh with its straggling rushes than from the most beautiful scenery, and would stand and look at it with rapture.” He rejoiced in a hedge-alehouse, or a coaching inn; he was moved to passionate delight by local reminiscences of highway robbers, vagrom scoundrels, pugilists, and vagabonds of all degrees; good beer was a poem to him. Under all these impressions he expanded nobly; contact with conventional respectability shrivelled him up; his bête noire was “gentility.” His strength and vigour remained unimpaired almost to the end of his life; at seventy he would break the ice on a pond and plunge in to bathe.

No man less fit than this for literary controversy was ever born into the world. It was an evil fate that launched him upon those sordid disputations disfiguring the Appendices to “The Romany Rye,” from which the “blood and foam” passage I have quoted is drawn.

Few men bringing to the literary mart so slight a cargo as Borrow brought have obtained so great a price for it. Some of his work, judged by any conventional standard, is remarkably poor. The best of it, judged by the only proper standard (which is entirely unconventional) is so good that immortality might be predicted for it by a person inclined to take the risk of being confuted in some remotely future incarnation. A great number of the enterprises in which Borrow dissipated many years of his life may be dismissed as of no literary importance and of no possible value to any other son of man. His philology, quâ philology, is grossly unscientific; its uses are, in fact, not scientific but artistic. They reside in the quaint hues it helped him to mix on his palette, the whimsical, half-serious, half-humorous disquisitions into which an unusual word would lead him, the ease with which it enabled him to glorify his picture with the tints of foreign skies and the forms of strange men. If we are to assess his linguistic achievements by their practical and immediate results, the years Borrow spent upon them were squandered. The seeds of his philological learning,

“Like Hebrew roots, were found
To flourish most in barren ground.”

They produced a meagre crop of translations, of no consequence either as exercises or as poetry. But that would be a perverse view to take of Borrow’s studies. Their virtue was not in their verbal fruits, but in the quality they added to his later work. For example, those “deeds of northern kings rehearsed” were rehearsed a great deal better by other people, and the works of Elis Wyn had been more efficiently dealt with by a Welshman. But would the shining history of Isopel Berners have been as glorious if Lavengro had not been the sort of man to compare her with Ingeborg, the northern queen who engaged and defeated in single combat each of her long string of redoubtable brothers? Or would not the fascinating converse of Lavengro with the Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, have lost half its charm if the young man had not been able to talk familiarly with him of Master Elis Wyn and the Bardd Cwsg? It is the reflected colour of all this word-learning that gives it a high place in Borrow’s development.

He began to study languages almost before he was out of frocks. He did not find his métier till he was thirty-eight: “The Zincali; or, The Gypsies of Spain” was published in 1841. This was late for a man who had been so deeply devoted to the pen. His processes were slow, too. His other books of any significance numbered only four, and they occupied twenty-one years in gestation. “The Bible in Spain” was dated 1842, “Lavengro” appeared in 1850, “The Romany Rye” in 1857, and “Wild Wales” in 1862. Much was concentrated in these few works, laboriously elaborated as they were, and produced with horrible pangs of travail. They crystallised—if such a term may be used of Borrow—the experiences of a long life of wandering through the world, and they recorded the opinions collected or developed by a self-centred man of violent prejudices. They provide an almost unparalleled conglomeration of good and bad, of false and sound. They commit inexcusable crimes against every canon of taste—and they have in them the true stuff of poetry and romance. The glamour of these last is over them all. The poetry of Borrow, one of the most natural poets who have written in English, takes its spring in the keen observation and appreciation of the elemental joys found in Nature’s least-trodden ways, and the elemental humours of her least sophisticated children. It recalls Sidney’s epigram of the excellent poets that never versified and the versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets. For Borrow’s verse, on the whole, is villainous, and much of his prose is truest poetry. He restored to us, at any rate for a time, the picaresque element in romantic literature, and revived our indulgent fondness for the good-humoured villains of low life.

With the jovial virtues of Le Sage, however, Borrow combined in a remarkable way some of the quaintest characteristics of Sterne. The mark of “Shandyism” is strong upon portions of his work—but let it be said at once that the philo-pugilist Borrow is absolutely free from any taint of the pornographic double entendre of the Rev. Laurence Sterne, M.A. Captain Tom Borrow often rivals My Uncle Toby, and the battle with Ben Bryan in Hyde Park may be compared as a staple reminiscence with the Siege of Namur; but there is no Widow Wadman in “Lavengro.” Ab Gwilym becomes in some points as delightful as Slawkenbergius, and there are episodes in “The Bible in Spain” and “Lavengro” which may compare with the stories of the Dead Ass and of Lefevre, the Monk and Maria; but it can be said of Borrow’s books with more truth than a sententious critic once said it of Sterne’s, that they may be submitted to the taste, feeling, good sense, and candour of the public “without the least apprehension that the perusal of any part of them will be followed by consequences unfavourable to the interests of society.” It may be a negative virtue that a book fails “to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of innocence”; but, for what it is worth, any book of Borrow’s has that merit.

Interesting as these comparisons may be to his admirers, Borrow must not be judged by any purely literary standards. One discerning critic, Mr. Thomas Seccombe, has observed that he “wrote with infinite difficulty.” That is evident in almost every page. He had no fatal facility in composition. He developed no graces of style. The man who loves Stevenson is probably a man who will also love Borrow, but for reasons quite apart from style. Borrow’s awkward forms and ugly lapses were calculated to make Stevenson’s delicately tuned literary organism shudder in its marrow. Their likeness lies in their love of Out-of-Doors, their capacity for discovering and enjoying the unusual adventure in the commonplace environment.

I doubt whether Borrow definitely and consciously copied his style from anybody, or modelled it on any man’s writings; but if we are to go anywhere for his master we must go to Defoe, whose “wondrous volume” was his “only study and principal source of amusement” in his very small boyhood at East Dereham. How he apostrophises the wizard! “Hail to thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee? England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could spare them easier far than Defoe, ‘unabashed Defoe,’ as the hunchbacked rhymer styled him.” England may not owe to Defoe all that Borrow declares she does of her “astonishing discoveries both by sea and land,” and her “naval glory,” but she certainly owes to him some of the gift that Borrow bestowed upon her. George had many other points of resemblance to the “illiterate fellow” of Swift’s satire besides this—that they were both at divers times accused of being illiterate fellows, and both answered back with compound interest of invective. Both were not only writing men, but also men of action. Both prided themselves something unduly upon their philological attainments. Both did late in life the literary work that won them lasting fame. Above all, they shared what Defoe wittily described as his “natural infirmity of homely, plain writing.” That is, they had command of a tense, nervous, vigorous English without ornate excrescences or fanciful refinements of any kind—the style which is greatest because it is no style at all, the style which bites into the mind and irritates the imagination. Both were able to give verisimilitude to the most fantastical narratives; both were masters of the form of autobiographical fiction. The parallel may finish with the remark that neither of them was a bookish man.

Borrow was not even a great reader. He spent many hours among books—but such books! They were mainly collections of ballads picked from a variety of languages fit “to add a storey to the Tower of Babel,” the detritus of the libraries he visited. He was fond of an uncommon book, whatever its intrinsic merit, but he was fonder of an uncommon human being. Men were his books. A ghostly procession of the authors with whom Borrow had hobnobbed—leaving out of account his investigations in shady paths on behalf of the Newgate Calendar—would afford a motley spectacle of tatterdemalions, the rag, tag, and bobtail of literature. He had inflated ambitions of scholarship, but, in fact, he had received only an ill-regulated education, and his taste refused all conventional rules as inventions of the Devil.

The Bible, Shakespeare in a lesser degree, and Defoe most of all—these were his classics. No bad assortment, either; but the restriction of one’s reading to these three would hardly testify to a catholic taste. His favourite poet was Byron. The two are as unlike in most particulars of their dispositions and careers as two heirs of mortality can be; but it is not difficult to realise that Byron’s life and poetry would touch deep springs in the nature of Borrow. Like Byron, he worked all his affections, all his passions, all his prejudices into the very texture of his books, and in them ran through all the gamut of his most violent emotions. Like Byron, he had a fond weakness for melancholy—what Goethe called “the hypochondriac humour.” As in the case of Byron, his melancholy alternated with spasms of furious elemental rage, expressed in the unbridled vituperation of his fellow men. So that, though no two characters more widely different figure in literary history, there were points of contact and bases of agreement between them. It was, indeed, a soul attuned to Borrow who wrote:

“’Tis sweet to win, no matter how, one’s laurels,
By blood or ink; ’tis sweet to put an end
To strife: ’tis sometimes sweet to have our quarrels
Particularly with a tiresome friend:
Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels;
Dear is the helpless creature we defend
Against the world: and dear the schoolboy spot
We ne’er forget, though there we are forgot.”

The lines may be said to depict Borrow in some of his best-known aspects—winning laurels by blood and ink, quarrelling with tiresome friends, rejoicing in the good things of life, defending his dependents, and treasuring the memories of his childhood.

He threw himself into his works in such a fashion that it is impossible to elucidate them without reference to his personal career, or to understand his proceedings without reference to his books. They are all more or less in the autobiographical form, and they are all more or less real autobiographies: how much more and how much less it is often difficult to say. The secret of the books, the reason for the fascination they exert upon mankind, must be found in the man; his own secret must be sought in two directions. One has already been indicated—his love of The Wild. From his gypsies and wanderers, his hedge-tinkers and vagroms, all the denizens of the heath and the green lanes—the society which began to vanish with the enclosure of the English fields, and is fast disappearing from the land,—material unpromising and uncongenial enough to the general, Borrow contrived to extract fine poetry and mildly thrilling romance.

And how was it that a man whose pet weakness was his idolatry of the Anglo-Saxons, who joyed in thinking himself representative of what was best and manliest in a race whose aversion from the Romany is so pronounced, was the man of all others in England who seemed to get into closest touch with the gypsies, to understand them and to be understood of them? Perhaps a little because of his philological craze and the avidity with which he set himself to pick up their language. But the real explanation is that, in fact, Borrow was no Anglo-Saxon at all. His vainglorious boasts of Anglo-Saxon breeding were based on nothing more substantial than the fact that his father and mother happened to be living in Norfolk at the time when he came into the world. He was a Celt of Celts. His genius was truly Celtic. His father was a Cornishman whose family had resided in the West-country peninsula—Lord Courtney’s “emerald, set in a sapphire sea”—for many generations, and was a Cornish and therefore a Celtic family to the very tips of its numerous fingers. His mother was of French descent. Here was a pretty parentage for a bluff and hearty champion of optimistic and progressive Anglo-Saxondom!

Borrow was fond of Norfolk: the rest was affectation. He had all the Celtic characteristics—the quick and lively imagination, the poetic temperament, the intensely emotional nature, the tendency to melancholy. The only writer who, within my knowledge, has laid effective stress on this is Mr. Watts-Dunton. Borrow loved the wide level landscapes, the marshes and broads of East Anglia, just as FitzGerald did, a descendant of Irishmen who was born in the East. Various reasons conspired to produce this affection. Norfolk was the scene of his boyish exploits. In Norfolk lived the mother he worshipped. There he met the wife who was his truest friend and finest comrade. But the spirit of East Anglia, the Teutonic tradition, did not preside over Borrow’s destiny and direct his moral and intellectual fortunes. It was the spirit of Old Cornwall, its remote hills peeping out of vales of mystery towards an empyrean where every cloud breathed legend, the land of weird imaginings, of saintly lore, and chivalric romance. The bluff and blunt and downright John-Bullery that Borrow affected was but a pose; the heat of the fires of the Underworld creeps up into his work, and the pale light of the Overworld shines down upon it. He is constantly on the brink of moral tragedy and ever listening to the rumble of the spiritual upheaval. What stirs him most to eloquence and deep feeling is Celtic Ireland or Celtic Wales, the wild music of the speech of Murtagh the Papist gossoon, the “noble mountains, green fields, and majestic woods” of the Cymric land.

Many peculiarities of Borrow, on a superficial examination, seem to offer flat contradiction to this view. His “Poperyphobia” appears to be difficult to reconcile with his unquestionable sympathy with the Celtic spirit of Ireland. He affects the Orange hue; whenever he sees a Catholic head he hits it. We need not seek far for the explanation. His mother was of a Huguenot family which had been driven out of France by the persecutions of the Catholic Church: Borrow idolised his mother. Further, it never mattered to him whether an injury was two days or two centuries old; he hated the offender just the same. His father had quarrelled, long before George was born, with a gentleman named Hambly. To the end of his life Borrow swore that a person named Hambly could never be good. His adulation of violent sports and his pathetic belief in the immaculate supremacy of the English in all athletics are other facts which on the surface may seem to upset the theory of an obsessing Celtic mysticism. But even here his ancestry counts for much. The Cornish were ever devoted to athletic contests; their cousins the Welsh are in one of the realms of sport unparalleled and unapproachable. Borrow’s good-ale-of-old-England fetish surprised the decent and sober people of Wales, and his “wishy-washy tea” is the national beverage of Cornwall. But his devotion to malt liquor was a part of his protest against “gentility-nonsense” and “temperance-canting,” about which he raved with even more than usual violence and incoherence. In the mid-Victorian age in which he wrote, the glorification of beer-swilling was as un-“genteel” as even Borrow could have desired.

All these idiosyncrasies, however, count for little beside the deeper characteristics of Borrow’s life and work, over which the Celtic genius reigned. Racial traits were strongly marked in him, and he is a standing refutation of Mr. George Moore’s dictum that “the land makes the Celt,” and that it is not a question of race. In this heredity we must look for the beginnings of any proper view of Borrow.

CHAPTER II
A WANDERING YOUTH

The Borrows of Tredinnick, in the parish of St. Cleer, were proud Cornish yeomen. For centuries they had occupied the same house and farmed the same land. Now they have been scattered over the world, in true Cornish fashion, and there is not a Borrow left in the district.

Tredinnick is a little old house in a hollow, about a mile north-west of St. Cleer Church, near Liskeard, among the hills of Eastern Cornwall. It is a long, low, stone-fronted building of two storeys, backed by a row of tall elms standing at the roadside, with an apple orchard behind, and the ground at the side sloping away into a deep valley of orchards and meadows. The place is quite unpretentious; the farm is little more than fifty acres in extent, and the house has lost in the lapse of time the neatness that would have shown in the abode of Borrow’s gentillâtre. Still, for a farmhouse, it is commodious. It has walls two feet thick, and in the long, raftered, slate-floored kitchen are deep window-seats, and an open hearth and chimney-corner, the crock-hook depending in the midst. Lavengro would have rejoiced in such a place. The dining-room and sitting-room are on the other side of the entrance, and communicate—respectable but undistinguished rooms.

In this home was born, in December, 1758, Thomas, father of George Borrow. He was a posthumous child. We have a very fair picture of him in the opening chapters of “Lavengro.” We see him in youth, the favourite of his mother, whose special care of him was the cause of jealousy in his six brothers. We learn that shortly after he was eighteen his mother died, and he adopted “the profession of arms, which he followed during the remainder of his life.” But Lavengro, candidly stating that he knows little about the early life of his father, does not tell us the circumstances in which he left the homestead at Tredinnick, after bringing to a disastrous end his apprenticeship to one Edward Hambly, a maltster. He is described as “cool and collected, slow to anger, though perfectly fearless, patient of control, of great strength, and, to crown all, a proper man with his hands.” This may in some measure account for the adulation of prize-fighting which in “Lavengro,” as Mr. Birrell has pointed out, scandalised “the religious world” that had welcomed with such effusive joy “The Bible in Spain.” George Borrow inherited a love of adventure and a fondness for “the noble art,” and probably also the aversion from “gentility” apparent in the lines with which his autobiography opens. Yet it is strange that he was really proud of his gentle descent, proud of his Cornish father and his little-landed ancestry, and proud of the French extraction of his mother and the small and delicate hands he got from her.

The manner of departure of Lavengro’s father out of Cornwall had an intimate connection with that properness of his with his hands. He was at Menheniot Fair with a party of youths from Liskeard, three or four miles distant, when a row arose between young Menheniot and young Liskeard; probably some breeze of incident blew upon the embers of a village feud. Slow as he was to anger and patient of control, Borrow nevertheless entered with zest into the fray, for he headed the Liskeard party and brought the struggle to a climax by knocking down the constable. Thereafter, fearing the consequences of his adventure, he departed from the ancestral roof-tree, and began the wandering life which he was leading when he met the mother of Lavengro. And small wonder at his flight, for the constable he knocked down was none other than his own master, the head-borough, Edward Hambly. The date of the scrimmage was July 28th, 1783. He disappeared for five months. In December he turned up at Bodmin and enlisted in the Coldstream Guards, who had a recruiting party there under Captain William Morshead, later the celebrated general. The captain, knowing his antecedents, did all he could to prevent the enlistment, but without success.

Thomas Borrow may well have recalled the constable of Menheniot in later years when he did battle in Hyde Park with “big Ben Brain” (read Bryan), giving that celebrity a little useful practice for the contest in which he became “champion of England, having conquered the heroic Johnson,” and paving the way for the friendship to which all such encounters should lead. Bryan, wrote George in after years, “expired in the arms of my father, who read the Bible to him in his later moments.” What marvel that “Lavengro” is a medley of religion and beer-drinking, prize-fighting and philosophy?

Thomas vanished for several years into the privacy of a private of the Coldstreams. Such a man, however, was not likely to remain permanently in the obscurity of the ranks. He climbed steadily. After eight or nine years, spent mostly with the regiment in London, he emerged into view again as a sergeant, and in 1792 was transferred to the West Norfolk Militia, whose headquarters were at East Dereham. This was the origin of all we hear later about the pretty little town of “D—.”

At Dumpling Green, near by, resided Miss Ann Perfrement, sweet and twenty when Sergeant Borrow marched into her perspective. She was the daughter of a farmer who had descended from a Huguenot family, immigrants to Norfolk among many others—including the Martineaus—after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Miss Perfrement was occasionally engaged to act minor parts in plays performed at Dereham by companies sent to the country towns from the Theatre Royal in Norwich. Her stage presence fascinated the Sergeant, who had reached the age of thirty-eight proof against all feminine blandishments. He pursued his courtship of the amateur actress with ardour and success. She accepted him, and a most happy union began with their wedding on February 11th, 1793.

The movements of a regiment, even of militia, in those stirring days were apt to be incalculable. The West Norfolks threaded the United Kingdom from end to end, combining the swiftness of a bishop with the unexpected evolutions of a knight upon the chessboard. Sergeant Borrow got his commission as captain and adjutant in 1798; in 1800, either at Chelmsford or Colchester, was born his elder son, John, who became first a military officer and then an artist, and was one of Haydon’s pupils. In 1803 he was back in Norfolk, recruiting. At East Dereham, on July 5th in that year, George Borrow opened his eyes upon a world of which he was to see so much more than falls to the lot of most sons, even of soldiers.

This bundle of potentialities was named George in honour of the King his father served, and Henry after a Cornish uncle. The first few years of his life were spent, like those of the young Sternes, at the tail of the regiment, marching and countermarching in Essex, Kent, and Sussex, wandering from barracks to barracks as the exigencies of the army dictated in that day of Napoleonic scares. At the age of six he returned to “pretty D—,” and there received some of the vivid impressions he has reproduced in indelible colours upon the earlier pages of “Lavengro”—the dignified rector and Philo, the clerk, reading “their respective portions of the venerable liturgy,” and rolling “many a portentous word descriptive of the wondrous works of the Most High”; and the “Lady Bountiful, leaning on her gold-headed cane.” There he revelled in the boy’s first flush of delight over “Robinson Crusoe,” and imbibed the germs of that worship of Defoe which shines in all his work.

The next peregrination of the family was to Norman Cross, where George met the snake-catcher and received from him the present of the fangless viper with which he contrived so effectually to subdue the wrath of old Gypsy Smith and his evil-looking mort, who “wore no cap, and her long hair fell on either side of her head like horse-tails half way down her waist; her skin was dark and swarthy, like that of a toad.” We know how he was named “Sapengro,” and how brotherhood was sworn between him and the gypsies’ son Ambrose, who figures immortally as Jasper Petulengro.

The sojourn at Norman Cross lasted fifteen months. Then, in July, 1811, the regiment returned to East Dereham, where George took his introduction to the science of languages. The embryo “polyglot gentleman” laid a sound foundation upon Lilly’s Latin Grammar. However, their wanderings were by no means at an end. For years there was to be little rest and small possibility of regular schooling. In 1812 the West Norfolks were moving again—marching through the Midlands and the North by slow stages towards Edinburgh, stopping a month or two here and there. For example, at Huddersfield they billeted long enough for George to be sent to the local school. The conditions of such a life were hardly favourable to the development of scholarship upon conventional lines. How valuable they were to the cultivation of the kind of genius that lay behind the forehead of George Borrow it is difficult to overestimate. He assimilated rich and varied experience through every pore. He acquired the love of a roving life, the passionate devotion to the road, that never left him till the end of his days. His father was a wanderer before he was born; he was a wanderer himself throughout his boyhood. It was fit training for the man who was afterwards to be dubbed “the Wandering Jew of Literature.”

In April of 1813 the West Norfolks descended upon Edinburgh, Captain Thomas on horseback leading the van, and Mrs. Borrow and her boys bringing up the rear in a “po’-shay.” There were many gay days of military merry-making at Edinburgh Castle before, in the autumn, John and George were entered at the High School. Probably they spent only one session at the academy of classical learning which had, a generation earlier, turned out so great a genius as Sir Walter Scott.

There is not much in Borrow’s record of the time to illustrate that session, or to show what point in his youthful struggle with the dead languages the incipient philologist reached. Here, as ever, his interests were in the by-paths of life and learning. David Haggart was more to him than the ministrations of his painstaking master, Mr. Carson. Borrow had a catholic and withal a discriminating taste in vagabonds. It manifested itself even at this early age. Just as in later years he was fascinated by the personality of John Thurtell, so was he charmed at Edinburgh by that weird brigand Haggart, who enlisted in the West Norfolks as a drummer-boy, having been unearthed at Leith Races by one of Captain Borrow’s recruiting sergeants. The drummer-boy whom George made his companion subsequently became burglar, highway robber, murderer, and prison-breaker, and only suspended his nefarious activities at the end of the hangman’s rope in the year 1821.

The regiment left Edinburgh for home in 1814, on the cessation of the war. The mustering-out took place at Norwich, where feastings and congratulations were the order of many days. George’s parents lodged at the Crown and Angel Inn, while he was sent to the Grammar School. This time there was some hope that he might be able to continue his studies undisturbed. Napoleon prevented its realisation by escaping from Elba and getting the Norfolk militiamen sent to Ireland, where sympathetic disturbances were occurring. They did not embark at Harwich, however, until after the battle of Waterloo. From Cork they went to Clonmel, and George had his first taste of the fascinating country whose very name always seemed to exercise a spell upon him. At Clonmel he was sent to school, and began to learn Greek. What was of greater consequence, he met a wild Irish boy, the Murtagh who figures so finely in “Lavengro.” Murtagh taught him Erse in return for a pack of cards. But even more important still, it was here that he learned to ride on horseback and picked up the love of horse-flesh which was one of the grand passions of his life. Oh, that cob!—on which he rode round the Devil’s Mountain—“may the sod lie lightly over the bones of the strongest, speediest, and most gallant of its kind.”

The wanderings of the elder Borrows finally ceased in 1816. After the Irish campaign, they returned to Norwich to settle down, and took a house in Willow Lane. George, now thirteen, was sent again to the Grammar School to receive his first regular course of “education.” Fortunately, the process was quite unable to interfere with his natural development. It was hardly possible that a boy who had been beating about the roads and townships of the three kingdoms ever since he could toddle, had learnt snake-charming and the Irish language, explored the mysteries of gypsyism and horse-dealing, and picked up such a collection of odds and ends of lore as reposed in his retentive brain, should comfortably abandon his vagrom modes of thought and life for the mechanical lessons and the conventional ways of a Grammar School ruled by a martinet. His wander-years had quite unfitted him for methodical study, and he found even less interest in the common pursuits of the school than does the average healthy rascal of thirteen. Consequently, he had no soft corner in the heart of the “head,” Edward Valpy, a pedagogue of the ancient style who had no toleration for intransigence, and never risked the spoiling of the child by any economy of the rod.

George had some Latin and a little Greek, picked up at Huddersfield and Edinburgh and Clonmel, but he had probably found Murtagh a more congenial authority than the excellent Lilly, and his Erse was more than his Greek. Now that his body was moored to the desk at Norwich, his mind wandered wantonly from the languages he had to study to those for which, in the Valpeian régime, there was no provision. With his never-failing capacity for picking up the quaintest and most out-of-the-way people to be found about him, he made the acquaintance of Father D’Éterville, the “elderly personage . . . rather tall and something of a robust make,” who wore “a snuff-coloured coat and drab pantaloons . . . an immense frill, seldom of the purest white, but invariably of the finest French cambric,” and told the young student that if he wished to be a poet he should emulate Monsieur Boileau rather than the vagabond Dante! The Rev. Thomas D’Éterville was a French émigré who had come over in 1792, and had qualifications from the University of Caen. With him George studied French and Italian, and made a beginning of Spanish.

Among his contemporaries drilled and thrashed by Valpy were several men who obtained varying degrees of fame in the world of thought and action. The Grammar School boys of the time included James Martineau, Sir Archdale Wilson, and Rajah Brooke of Sarawak. Their achievements were considerable, but it is, in one mind at all events, an open question whether Borrow’s did not excel them all. Certainly no man of them made so many idolatrous friends, and probably no man so many bitter enemies.

George was no ordinary schoolboy. His devotion to learning was intense, but peculiar to himself. In his boyish pranks and recreations he was just as unconventional. On one occasion, the wander-fever having seized him, he communicated it to three friends of his own age. They decided to run away from school, with some wild idea of emulating the feats of his favourite Robinson Crusoe. The plan, worked out by Borrow, was that they should escape to the Norfolk coast and take any ship that would convey them out of England. Till they could find some convenient means of emigration, they proposed to conceal themselves in a lair upon the shore, and to subsist by forays upon the portable and comestible property of the people of the district. The adventure began early in the morning and terminated within a few hours. They were discovered some dozen miles away by a gentleman who recognised one of them, and ignominiously restored to the affection of their parents—and the insatiable wrath of Valpy. The “head” took Borrow, as the ringleader, and flogged him severely. It was said that for this purpose the culprit was “horsed” on the back of Martineau, and that the punishment was so bad that Borrow had to keep his bed for a fortnight. George could with difficulty forget a slight or forgive an injury, real or imaginary, and Dr. Knapp declares that he hated Martineau ever afterwards, and up to the time of his death would never visit any house where he knew he must meet the theologian. It is true that he did not care to meet Martineau, but the reason assigned for his aversion must be given up as a fable. Martineau ridiculed the story, and asserted with every show of truth that he never “horsed” Borrow.

Dr. Jessopp was another of his schoolfellows. He has an anecdote of Borrow appearing at school one day, his face stained brown with walnut juice, and of Valpy, inquiring sententiously, “Borrow, are you suffering from jaundice, or is it only dirt?”

Such hours of leisure as were not occupied by D’Éterville and his French and Italian, or by the explorations into Spanish and the Romany, were given up to his worship of Nature and his devotion to sport. He fished in the Yare at Earlham, and went fowling over the surrounding fields and marshes with “a condemned musket bearing somewhere on its lock in rather antique characters, ‘Tower, 1746.’” But, above all, he haunted Harford Bridge. For at Harford Bridge did not the amazing John Thurtell reside? This son of a respectable alderman of Norwich had been in warlike adventures abroad, but now that the wars were over had returned to his native parts to get such entertainment out of life as a man might to whom every form of sport came gaily welcome, and the more violent it was the more gaily. So distinguished a patron of the prize-ring and so ungenteel a gentleman was certain to make a strong appeal to young Borrow, who made his acquaintance and acquired from him the art of boxing. As we have seen, his father, the captain, had been a bruiser when occasion demanded, and had fought Ben Bryan. His fondness for the sport was hereditary. He developed it during his visits to Thurtell, and it never left him. One of the kinds of “canting nonsense” denounced in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye” is the “unmanly cant”—a phrase in which he summed up all objections to the practice of fisticuffs. His mentor in the noble art is lightly sketched in “The Zincali” in connection with the description of a prize-fight. The “terrible Thurtell, lord of the concourse,” made a sad ending. He committed the murder which inspired the familiar ballad of “William Weare”:

“He cut his throat from ear to ear,
His brains he battered in;
His name was Mr. William Weare,
He lived in Lyon’s Inn.”

Thurtell induced Weare, who had relieved him of £400 at a gaming-table, to drive to Elstree in Hertfordshire, where he disposed of him in the artistic fashion just related. One of his companions turned King’s evidence, and he was hanged at Hertford in 1823. [34]

So, learning his grammar at school, visiting D’Éterville at Strangers’ Hall for French and Italian, trespassing on the grounds of the admirable Mr. Gurney in search of fish, being initiated into the art and mystery of pugilism, strolling to Thorpe, and Eaton, and Cringleford, George passed two years. He was fourteen when he saw the fight depicted in “The Zincali.” The next year he was one of the spectators at the great annual Tombland Fair, when he encountered once more the gypsy Ambrose Smith, and went with him to the encampment on Mousehold Heath, discoursing by the way of the quality of beauty, as exemplified in the person of Tawno Chikno and the earl’s daughter who fell in love with him, and making the acquaintance of the weird old hag “whose name was Herne and she came of the hairy ones.” While the gypsies remained in camp on Mousehold Heath, the lad visited them frequently, and was introduced by Jasper—terribly angering his mother-in-law, Mrs. Herne—into the mysteries of the Romany language. His extraordinary facility in acquiring and retaining words obtained for him the nickname of Lavengro, or “word-fellow.”

George left school in 1819, and was articled to the firm of Simpson & Rackham, solicitors, of Tuck’s Court, Norwich, apparently on the advice of his friend Roger Kerrison, son of a substantial citizen. Though it is clear that he never entertained any enthusiasm for the profession, he diligently pursued his studies at the irksome desk. They were not, however, those of the law, but of languages and poetry. By devoting himself to his parchments and his law books, and seeking to fill the station of life to which he had been dedicated, he might have made an indifferently bad country solicitor. Thank heaven, nothing was further from his thoughts. He was taken specially under the wing of the head of the firm, William Simpson, then Town Clerk, and an excellent good fellow. George lodged in his house in the Upper Close. Tuck’s Court, where he sat at the desk, was nearly opposite the old Norfolk Hotel.

It was not long before he added another to his strange gallery of cronies—a Welsh groom employed by a gentleman living at the end of the court, a queer, mis-shapen man, the butt of George’s fellow-clerks, who hailed his every appearance with the ballad of:

“Taffy was a Welshman,
Taffy was a thief.”

To Borrow, however, he was not a freak of nature, sent by a kindly Providence to lighten the laborious hours of Simpson & Rackham’s office, but a man who knew the Welsh language, and might assist him in learning it. In return for his help, George induced the other boys to cease their persecution, and declared that this had the effect of releasing the Welshman from the horns of a dilemma—for he was cogitating whether “to hang himself from the balk of the hayloft or to give his master warning.” So he won his way into the epic of “Dafydd ab Gwilym” and the songs of the Welsh bards.

Borrow’s adventures were now of a character different from those of his schoolboy days. He began to enter upon profound intellectual waters. His mania for languages grew upon him. We have already seen him acquiring Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and Erse. He now set about Welsh, Danish, and other tongues, and in pursuit of German he fell in with William Taylor. The meeting had an important influence upon his development. Taylor was a scholar of fine parts, a man deeply versed in German literature at a time when, as Professor Dowden has said, “German characters were as undecipherable to most Englishmen as Assyrian arrow-heads.” He was the friend of Southey, whom he entertained in Norwich at the house, No. 21, King Street, which was the resort of all the wit and learning that centred in the city. Taylor found young Borrow a man after his own heart, took to him readily, and offered to teach him German. It is hardly necessary to say that George accepted such an invitation, nor that he learnt a good deal more than German at the feet of Taylor, whose views on most questions were advanced and unrestricted. The scholar was an agnostic in matters of religion, and an iconoclast in many sorts. His great failing was drunkenness: he ultimately became a sot.

Miss Martineau wrote that:

“In Taylor’s old age . . . his habits of intemperance kept him out of sight of the ladies, and he got around him a set of ignorant and conceited young men, who thought they could set the world right by their destructive propensities. One of his chief favourites was George Borrow, as George Borrow himself has given us to understand. When this polyglot gentleman appeared before the public as a devout agent of the Bible Society in foreign parts, there was one burst of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days.”

Professor Dowden has pleasantly reminded us of the delight Harriet Martineau took in “pricking a literary windbag”; sometimes she pricked more substantial things, and her rapier broke. At any rate, she is hardly a good witness on the subject of Borrow, for no love was lost between the families.

And Taylor, at the time when he took up George, was a man of some consequence in the literary world, apart from “the little Academe” of Norwich. He knew his Kotzebue, his Goethe, his Schiller, his Klopstock; he was in himself a reference library of what was then outlandish knowledge. He raised a bright light above the intellectual circle of the city, in spite of the sarcasm of Harriet Martineau, who rallies his eccentricity, his “defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had rescued him from it, information, given as certain, that ‘God Save the King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon”—and so forth. But his solid claim to consideration is good; he lives as “the Anglo-Germanist” of Borrow’s books rather than as “godless Billy Taylor.”

I have taken leave to doubt that Borrow’s melancholy was the fruit of the theological opinions he acquired from Taylor. Effort has been made to trace all his sufferings to this association, and to the moral disintegration that is supposed to have set in as the result of his intercourse with an atheist. It seems to me an unfair and regrettable imputation. Borrow was destined to go through his Werterian period, and, child of the Celtic spirit that he was, it was bound to be a period of acute strain and stress. He felt all things intensely. If he had not encountered the mocking philosophy of “Billy Taylor” through personal contact, he would have met it elsewhere. It could no more be missed by the youth of 1820 than by the youth of a later century.

What we know with certainty of Taylor is that he was the earliest scholar and critic to divine what there was in George Borrow and to encourage his literary bent. We have to be grateful to him for that. He wrote to Southey:

“A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s ‘Wilhelm Tell,’ with a view of translating it for the Press. His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity; indeed, he has the gift of tongues and, though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.”

The catalogue of Borrow’s languages is thus largely and rapidly extended. We need not stay to inquire how he obtained them all, nor need we assume that his acquaintance with them was in any sense complete or scientific. It was probably little more than a dictionary acquaintance; he had an extraordinary facility for getting the rudiments of a language in a few weeks with little more assistance than the dictionary could supply. His Welsh and Danish studies are the most important to notice here; they had a considerable influence upon the course of his life during the few years now approaching. “Ab Gwilym” and the ballads of the Norsemen obsessed him.

A personage visited Taylor at Norwich in the year 1821 to whom this sort of young man could not fail to be interesting. It was John Bowring, on a business mission to the city. Borrow was a guest at a dinner party given by Taylor in July of that year, when Bowring was present with Lewis Evans, a Welsh doctor who had physicked the army in Spain during the Peninsular War. The philological mood was strong on Borrow—and Bowring was certainly a considerable philologist. He had recently made one of his long journeys on the Continent, combining business pains with literary joys in his accustomed manner, and had compiled an anthology which he described as a “Specimen of Russian Poets.” This collection it was which inspired the present of a diamond ring, conferred on him by Alexander I. A man of such stamp must naturally have appeared something of a hero in the eyes of this youth. Why is it that he makes anything but a heroic figure in Borrow’s works?

Rightly or wrongly—wrongly, as I think—in after years the “Norwich young man” considered himself to have received much injury at the hands of Bowring. Consequently, Bowring became the most vicious and most worthless scoundrel that ever wore shoe-leather. This was Borrow’s way: he was a prince of haters. The poet and linguist, the diplomatist, the political disciple of the illustrious Jeremy Bentham, was melted down into the Old Radical of the Appendix to “The Romany Rye,” and caricatured in the postboy’s story at the end of “Lavengro.” No accurate view of Bowring can be acquired from these acerbitous descriptions; line must be altered and colour modified with great liberality. Bowring may have made pretensions that could not be sustained, but his proper pretensions were certainly far greater than Borrow, in the berserking spirit that possessed him twenty years afterwards, was ready to admit. The polite tag with which he headed the eleventh chapter of the Appendix was:

“This very dirty man with his very dirty face
Would do any dirty act which would get him a place.”

Borrow’s lively account of the dinner party, written with Archilochian bitterness, cannot be read without many reservations. He makes out Bowring a literary pirate and a morally reprehensible cheat, a fraudulent ignoramus, trading for cheap glory on other people’s lack of knowledge, claiming an acquaintance with languages and poetry which he does not possess—evading conversation that will test his assertions, and dodging all the keen questions of the young Solon who tells the tale. Borrow poses him with his Red Rhys of Eryry, with his Ghengis Khan, and with his Koran. Finding that Borrow knows nothing of the Slavonic languages, Bowring immediately becomes garrulous on the subject of Slavonic lore and literatures; when in later years they meet again and Borrow has the Slavonic languages at the tip of his tongue, Bowring hurriedly changes the subject! That deductions have to be made from such an account of the matter is obvious; they may well be generous.

It is clear that, at the time, the young man entertained none of these opinions about Bowring, for he sought his help in a troublesome period of his own life, and was ready to engage in a literary collaboration with him. What actually happened was that, as a result of this meeting at the hospitable board of William Taylor, Borrow was induced to pursue even with greater ardour than before his translations from the Celtic and the Norse languages. It may have been largely a waste of time. Possibly George would have done better either by sticking to his law books or by cultivating his bent for original composition; but that was no fault of Bowring, from whom he received inspiration and encouragement in a course of study that was exceedingly congenial to him.

He went on delving in the musty old folios of the Corporation Library. Their yellow pages were more precious to him than aught in the world; the songs he puzzled out of the “Danica Literatura” were sweeter than the

“Celestial syrens’ harmony
That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres.”

True delight to him was the acquisition of Anglo-Saxon, the improvement of his Welsh and Scandinavian; the sum and crown of bliss was to pore over Llhuyd’s “Archæologia Britannica” and to translate Olaus Wormius—of whom he became so desperately fond that in a fit of youthful freakishness he adopted the signature “George Olaus Borrow.” His pencilled notes are still to be seen on the margins of the ancient tomes so generously handed over to his tender mercies by the city authorities.

Meanwhile, piles of notebooks and manuscripts were growing in the house in the Upper Close; the rhymed translation of “Ab Gwilym” and English versions of the old Norse ballads were proceeding laboriously but steadily. To the industry of the bookworm was added the passion of the author. “Ab Gwilym,” Olaus Wormius, and William Taylor in the aggregate were far too strong an influence for worthy Mr. Simpson of Tuck’s Court to counteract. Wigs and parchment could not stand against philology and poetry. Whatever notions Borrow ever entertained about pursuing the law as a profession gradually paled before the furor scribendi. Thomas Campbell was editing Colburn’s New Monthly, and Taylor wrote to him on behalf of Borrow. The result was the appearance in the magazine of a rhymed English version of Schiller’s ballad, “Der Taucher,” which was signed “G. O. B.”—the “O” standing for the Olaus of his adoption. This represented all that Campbell did for him. Borrow was more successful with Sir Richard Phillips, the editor and proprietor of The Monthly Magazine, to whom his name was also introduced by Taylor. In the late months of 1823 several poetical translations appeared in the Monthly. It must be confessed that they hardly reached even to the merit of mediocrity. During the same period Borrow was hard at work translating Klinger’s “Faustus” and other matters. It was not a sanitary life for a youth of twenty. The inevitable consequences were ill-health, morbid melancholy, and a particularly turbid period of Werterism, during which threats of suicide were frequent. All this has been laid at the door of William Taylor. It would be far more appropriate to charge it upon Klinger, Olaus Wormius, and Ab Gwilym. Borrow contrived very effectually “to suck melancholy out of a song.”

This, of course, was very unsatisfactory preparation for the career of a respectable solicitor in a cathedral city. His father protested in vain. Before the noble old captain died, leaving the brothers dependent on their own resources (since he had been able to make provision only just sufficient for his widow), George had decided that his association with the law should be determined at the same time as his apprenticeship. Roger Kerrison had already departed to London, and Borrow wrote to him there:

“If ever my health mends, and possibly it may by the time my clerkship expires, I intend to live in London, write plays, poetry, etc., abuse religion, and get myself prosecuted; for I would not for an ocean of gold remain any longer than I am forced in this dull and gloomy town.” [45]

Borrow’s father died on February 28th, 1824. A month later, within a day or two of the expiry of his articles, George was on the coach bound for London, accompanied by a little green box full of manuscripts, and in his pocket a letter of introduction from William Taylor to Sir Richard Phillips, the publisher. He had burnt his legal boats and destroyed his youthful bridges; he was fairly started upon the literary life.

CHAPTER III
PUBLISHER’S HACK AND HEDGESMITH

Borrow’s “literary” life in London—where he lodged at 16, Millman Street, Bedford Row, with his friend Kerrison—was a period of the deadliest and most miserable drudgery. No author is a man of genius to his publisher, as Heine tells us. Borrow was certainly not a man of genius to Sir Richard Phillips, and their association for about ten months was a time of strain and irritation to both. Consequently, in Borrow’s opinion, Barabbas was Sir Richard Phillips. He lives only as “the publisher” in “Lavengro,” in which he is pictured as a subject fit merely for the odium and execration of the human race. Discount from this estimate of Sir Richard is highly necessary. He appears to have been a moderately inoffensive person, whose chief weakness was metaphysics, and a worse-assorted pair than he and Borrow it would be hard to imagine.

What was the literary ammunition with which Borrow expected to bring the publisher of The Monthly Magazine to his feet? It consisted wholly of translations and versifications. Their intrinsic merit was very slight, and there was no market for them. Some might be useful to fill up an odd corner, but they were certainly no staple commodity for a person intending to get a living by literature. Under the combined disadvantage of unmarketable wares and an uncongenial temperament, Borrow might well have considered himself lucky to be taken on by Phillips as a factotum to do the scavenging of his business. But while they were together the youth tasted the bitterest cup and fed on the hardest crust that Grub Street had to offer to the worshippers of the Muses. It had been more humane if Phillips had repeated to Borrow the advice which Mr. Wilcox, the bookseller, offered to Dr. Johnson when he proposed to live as an author: “You had better buy a porter’s knot.” Hard physical exertion would have served him better than the labour he endured, this child of The Wild, cooped up in London compiling criminal records or translating philosophical treatises into the German language.

Phillips had just retired from the business of pure publishing, which was a gloomy fact in the prospect of Borrow’s cargo of ballads. He retained The Monthly Magazine, it was true, and had started a pretentious periodical under the resounding title of The Universal Review or Chronicle of the Literature of all Nations, apparently in the hope—which proved vain—that it would provide a career for his son. This was the Oxford Review which figures in the pages of “Lavengro.” The actual editor was the redoubtable William Gifford, and the work of which superfluous copies lay about on the floor in such prodigal profusion was his translation of Juvenal. The incongruity of such an atmosphere for the kind of genius that possessed young Borrow! With a pathetic belief in the potency of Danish ballads to move the stoniest heart and draw guineas from the tightest purse, he introduced the subject. Phillips would have none of it, and when his visitor began to declaim of

“Buckshank bold and Elphinstone,
And more than I can mention here,”

he stopped him, saying that “it was very pretty indeed, and beat Scott hollow, and Percy too”—but nobody then cared for Percy, nor for Scott either, save as a novelist. If Borrow could produce something which should rival the merits of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” by Legh Richmond, there might be a chance of doing business. The young aspirant for literary fame searched London for a copy of the book which he was recommended to imitate, and, when he found it, discovered that he could by no possibility do anything like it, for it was a religious book, “written from the heart,” and Borrow had to confess to the publisher that he did not know much about religion in an intimate way. The only thing to do was to accept that which the publisher was prepared to offer him, the task of reviewing books for the new periodical, and of collating records of “Celebrated Trials.”

Another enterprise was undertaken by Borrow, which in itself was sufficient to prove his undoing even if the life had been congenial to him. Phillips was the author of a work of philosophy entitled “The Proximate Causes of the Material Phenomena of the Universe.” In an ill moment the new recruit engaged to translate this portentous tome into German for publication. Shades of Olaus Wormius and Ab Gwilym! Borrow’s German was the first stumbling-block. It was good enough to enable him to read German works and to turn German into English, but to work with it as a colloquial tongue was quite a different matter. In this respect he had contracted to do the impossible. But even if his German had been perfect he would have been a fish out of water, for he knew nothing of metaphysics. This is not the place to discuss the value of Sir Richard Phillips’s book, which has doubtless taken up some dusty nook on a library shelf for its permanent and undisturbed place of residence. But it was enough for Borrow to be told that nobody could understand his German version: in his opinion the cause of that did not reside so much in his imperfect acquaintance with the language as in the folly of the author. Borrow did not understand him and his terminology; consequently, the theories and the language of Sir Richard Phillips were equally absurd. The contumely poured upon the publisher in “Lavengro” was probably not fully deserved. A German edition of the Philosophy, translated by Theobald and Lebret, appeared at Stuttgart in 1826, and, for what it was worth, the Germans succeeded in understanding this. But, for the rest, if Borrow was treated no worse than other publishers’ hacks were treated, his lot was no more pleasant. Phillips was exigent about the work for which he paid so meanly, and none too kindly in his manner. Even about the “Celebrated Trials,” which was the enterprise George liked best of them all, Borrow was worried in an unconscionable fashion.

Of course, there was another life than this: his own private life, his intercourse with such friends as he had already in London and with the new acquaintances he made during his unconventional wanderings about the city. His brother John, the artist, reached London on April 29th, commissioned to induce Benjamin Haydon to paint the portrait of a Mr. Robert Hawkes, who was Mayor of Norwich in 1822. John had been asked to do the portrait himself, but distrusted his powers and preferred that the commission should go to Haydon. George went with his brother to interview “the painter of the Heroic,” who was not by way of painting provincial mayors as a matter of preference, but was in the chronic state of impecuniosity which made the fee of a hundred pounds an irresistible bait. The mission was successful. Haydon went down to Norwich, and executed a portrait of the worthy Mr. Hawkes “striding under a Norman arch out of the cathedral.” The Norman arch seems to have been suggested locally, and it appealed strongly to Haydon’s sense of the grandiose, though many people may be inclined to agree with George that the mayors of the day, as a rule, would have been better painted issuing from The Chequers or The Brewers Three.

Whatever distractions he could discover or invent, Borrow’s life was miserable, and brought on severe attacks of melancholia, which he first described as “the Horrors” and afterwards as “the Fear.” “What a life! What a dog’s life!” he tells us he would exclaim after “escaping” from the presence of the publisher. His woes, real and imaginary—and a great many of them were the effect of his morbid imaginings—drove him to desperate thoughts. After his brother’s visit, Knapp tells us, he wrote to Kerrison: “Dear Roger,—Come to me immediately. I believe I am dying.” He was probably very far from dying, but Kerrison had an idea that George was liable to suicidal impulses, did not like assuming the responsibility for such an irresponsible person, and shifted his lodgings. The mood passed, and Borrow went on hawking his ballads among the publishers of London with no more success than before. He relates how he called on “glorious John” twenty times without success. We are not to place too much reliance upon the exactitude of this statement. Meanwhile, the “Celebrated Trials” was going on. It was a tremendous compilation, with little of Borrow’s own work in it. Its 3,600 pages represented nearly a year’s adventures among the bookstalls and the files of old newspapers and fly-sheets. One piece of characteristic literary work with which he endowed the world was his translation of Klinger’s “Faustus,” which shortly appeared. This had been done at Norwich in the Simpson & Rackham days. Finally, the book of “Trials” was completed, and the Universal Review died of inanition. “I did not like reviewing at all . . . I never could understand why reviews were instituted,” says Lavengro. And he continued to detest reviewers and reviewing to the end of his days. In 1853, when Whitwell Elwin was deputising for Lockhart as editor of the Quarterly, he met Borrow. Their interview, Elwin’s son tells us, was characteristic of both: “Borrow was just then very sore with his slashing critics, and, on someone mentioning that Elwin was a quartering reviewer, he said, ‘Sir, I wish you a better employment!’”

At the death of the Universal Review, his relations with Phillips came to an end. He had little money and no resources. Once more he resumed the weary round, tramping in search of purchasers for his translations, and gradually approaching a condition of penury, but maintaining his attitude of aggression and independence. It is into this brief period that he has worked some of the most effective scenes of “Lavengro,” the friendship with the old apple-woman who had a stall on London Bridge, and with the Armenian merchant to whom he suggested that his wealth should be devoted to the liberation and aggrandisement of Armenia. Languages and poetry still obsessed his dreams. But audacious poverty at last bit a deeper wound than could be salved by poetry, and he resolved, only just too late, to accept an engagement the Armenian had offered him. It was sharp upon his disappointment at finding that the Armenian had taken him at his word, and gone away bent upon the conquest of Persia, that, returning from an excursion to Greenwich, Blackheath, and Shooter’s Hill, in the course of which he came upon the “Petulengros” in camp, he saw a notice in a bookseller’s window, “Wanted, a Novel or Tale.” “Lavengro” relates how he shut himself up from the 13th to the 18th of May, and wrote “The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell,” which he sold to the bookseller for twenty pounds.

How much of all this is truth and how much is fiction it is difficult to determine. There is probably a basis of fact for it. Borrow, with all his imagination and all his romance, was not an inventive writer, and though the idea of “Joseph Sell” may have been suggested by the history of “Rasselas,” it is more probable that by some stroke of luck of this kind he did obtain the money with which to set out on his tour of the English roads. The circumstance that no “Life of Joseph Sell” has ever been discovered is nothing to set against this probability, and against the feeling with which Lavengro narrates its inception and accomplishment. Borrow’s love of mystification entirely accounts for it. There was a choice between saying exactly what he did, what his tale or history was entitled, and obscuring the whole matter by a fictitious name; and it would not have been Borrow if he had not chosen the latter course. By whatever work, he did obtain money enough to allow him to shake the dust of London off his shoes and begin those wanderings through English rural districts which provided the adventures described in the second and better half of “Lavengro.”

Borrow was big and strong and a magnificent walker; never before, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, had there appeared on English roads so majestic-looking a tramp, with bundle and stick. He went south-west to Salisbury Plain, and there is a powerful account in “Lavengro” of sunrise at Stonehenge. The only thing to compare with it is Thomas Hardy’s prose-poem of the same magical place by moonlight. One cannot read without a thrill the passage where, “taking off my hat I advanced slowly, and cast myself with my face upon the dewy earth in the middle of the portal of giants. The spirit of Stonehenge was strong upon me.”

There is little, of importance to Borrow’s own life, to decipher in the story of his wayfaring which is not incorporated in the book itself. Perhaps one of the most weird of his adventures was the encounter with the scholar and gentleman afflicted by the “touching” mania; one of the most sensational the attempt made by Mrs. Herne, the gypsy crone, to poison him with a doctored cake; one of the most impressive his meeting with the Welsh Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife, Winifred—Peter Williams who suffered tortures untold because he imagined that in his boyhood he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. He met Romanist missionaries, who at that time were very active on the highways and byways of England; dog-fighters and prize-fighters; everywhere out-of-the-way adventures occurred to him. He bought the stock-in-trade of Jack Slingsby, a hedgesmith and tinker, who was afraid to remain on the roads because of the enmity of the terrible bully, Blazing Bosvile, alias the Flaming Tinman; and in the course of his wanderings in search of business, he pulled up in Mumper’s Dingle, where was enacted the romance of Isopel Berners. The scene is said to have been identified as Mumber Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire.

In all the writings of Borrow there is but one episode of love. This romantic wanderer, so far as he informs us or we can ascertain, had been only once in love in nearly forty years, and that for a few weeks; nor was he then so deeply immersed that he took any particular pains to bring the lady to his own way of thinking. But this one episode has endowed English literature with a figure which takes a proud place in the gallery of fair women, the figure of Isopel Berners. Like everything else in Lavengro’s life, his sweetheart must be remarkable, his courtship must be unconventional, the adventure must have a vague and misty ending.

Watch Isopel as she descends, with her donkey and cart, behind the Flaming Tinman and Moll, his mort, into Mumper’s Dingle, where Lavengro has camped.

“Dashing past the other horse and cart, which by this time had reached the bottom of the pass, appeared an exceedingly tall woman—or rather girl, for she could scarcely have been above eighteen. She was dressed in a tight bodice and a blue stuff gown; hat, bonnet, or cap she had none, and her hair, which was flaxen, hung down on her shoulders unconfined; her complexion was fair, and her features handsome, with a determined but open expression.”

In conversation with the Flaming Tinman, who is working himself up to the proper pitch of a quarrel with the amateur tinker, the tall girl remarks that she would engage to thrash that weedy-looking youth with one hand. Forth bursts Lavengro, with his eternal Norse lore: “‘You might beat me with no hands at all,’ said I, ‘fair damsel, only by looking at me—I never saw such a face and figure—both regal—why, you look like Ingeborg, Queen of Norway; she had twelve brothers, and could lick them all, though they were heroes:

“‘On Dovrefeld, in Norway,
Were once together seen
The twelve heroic brothers
Of Ingeborg, the queen!’”

A pretty invocation, indeed, to a hawker travelling with a donkey-cart!

“None of your chaffing, young fellow,” said the tall girl, “or I will give you what shall make you wipe your face; be civil, or you will rue it.”

Lavengro admitted that he was “perhaps a peg too high,” and offered her “something a bit lower.” It was a Romany couplet. The rage of the tall girl, whilom Queen Ingeborg, may be imagined when she found herself associated with the gypsies; there is no despite of gypsies quite so deep as that of the English of the “lower orders,” as they might say at Marlborough. And, after a little more of Lavengro’s solemn chaff: “Before I could put myself on guard, she struck me a blow on the face which had nearly brought me to the ground.”

Fit exordium to the love-story of travelling hawker and hedge-tinker, to be promoted later by lessons in Armenian given by the Knight of the Solder-iron to the Damsel of the Donkey-cart. And the scene that follows—Lavengro’s fight with the Flaming Tinman, who transferred his mortal enmity for Jack Slingsby to the temporary owner of Jack Slingsby’s stock-in-trade—is a fit sequel. The heroic combat was the real beginning of the courtship. “The tall girl” saw foul play on the part of the Tinman, and immediately became “the young man’s” champion and assumed the office of his second. It was by her advice, after he had been knocked off his legs several times by the Tinman’s flashing fist, that, instead of fighting with his left, he got in the blow with his “long right” that settled the hash of Blazing Bosvile. The Tinman and his mort took themselves off after this discomfiture, leaving Lavengro and Isopel Berners in undisputed possession of the Dingle.

We learn little about Isopel in details of fact, except that she was born in “Long Melford workhouse,” and put “out to service,” where she experienced all the joys that were usually stored up in service for workhouse girls in the early part of the nineteenth century. When her mistress attempted to knock her down with a besom, Belle knocked down the mistress with her fist. So she went back to the Great House, was put in a dark cell, and fed for a fortnight on bread and water. At her next essay to serve she was no more fortunate; this time she knocked down her master for being rude to her, and had to fly the house. A travelling hawkeress, going the roads with silk and linen, took a fancy to her, and carried her on many journeys. Belle protected her from insult and violence; in return the old woman, at her death, left the girl her stock. She was thus in business on her own account, and casually travelling with the Bosviles, when she fell in with Lavengro.

In his erratic way, Borrow paints a charming idyll of the few succeeding weeks during which they lived in the Dingle: an idyll of natural beauty, and a picture of such womanly modesty and strength of character as to make Isopel Berners one of the heroines the heart cherishes. The uneducated Amazon, the feminine pugilist, who can take her own part in any quarrel, is by nature a modest girl, a woman with the finest perceptions and the most delicate instincts; she has a vein of poetry in her composition which gives her a certain affinity with the wandering philologist, who has in turn a vein of chivalry in his. While she dwells in her tent and he in his, while she goes up and down the neighbourhood on her business, and Lavengro stays in the Dingle to make new shoes for her donkey, Isopel is all the time dreaming what might have been. For all his chivalry, the young man is strange and plain-spoken, rarely paying a compliment, never making an advance, boring her with philological disquisitions, talking of things indifferent to her, pestering her with Armenian declensions, or sitting dull and silent while he sips the tea she has made for him. Here is a characteristic passage:

“I took another cup; we were again silent. ‘It is rather uncomfortable,’ said I at last, ‘for people to sit together without having anything to say.’

“‘Were you thinking of your company?’ said Belle.

“‘What company?’ said I.

“‘The present company.’

“‘The present company? Oh, ah!—I remember that I said one only feels uncomfortable in being silent with a companion when one happens to be thinking of the companion. Well, I had been thinking of you the last two or three minutes, and had just come to the conclusion that, to prevent us both feeling occasionally uncomfortable towards each other, having nothing to say, it would be as well to have a standing subject on which to employ our tongues. Belle, I have determined to give you lessons in Armenian.’”

Which he proceeds forthwith to do. What was a girl to make of a man like that? When that Lavengro’s heart was sore thereafter for the lack of Belle Berners, he had to thank his moroseness and his Armenian nouns for it.

So proceeded, without passion, without even a symptom of philandering on either side, the Romance of Mumper’s Dell—dreadfully misunderstood by the postilion who sheltered there in the thunderstorm, and by Mrs. Chikno when the gypsies encamped near by—but never advancing, so far as the two chief actors were concerned. It is continued from the last volume of “Lavengro” into the first volume of the “Romany Rye.” In the latter, for a hundred pages we are waiting upon some development of it; but it is as elusive as a pixy. We continually tremble upon the brink of a declaration. Take this scene, powerful but inconclusive. Upon the departure of Mr. and Mrs. Petulengro, after their visit of ceremony:

“Then you are going?” said I, when Belle and I were left alone.

“Yes,” said Belle; “I am going on a journey; my affairs compel me.”

“But you will return again?” said I.

“Yes,” said Belle; “I shall return once more.”

“Once more,” said I. “What do you mean by once more? The Petulengros will soon be gone; and will you abandon me in this place?”

“You were alone here,” said Belle, “before I came, and I suppose you found it agreeable, or you would not have stayed in it.”

“Yes,” said I. “That was before I knew you; but having lived with you here, I should be very loth to live here without you.”

“Indeed,” said Belle. “I did not know that I was of so much consequence to you. Well—the day is wearing away—I must go and harness Traveller to the cart.”

He does some little service for her, as harnessing the donkey and putting the bundles into the cart. The narrative proceeds, and the chapter ends thus:

“I put the bundles into the cart, and then led Traveller and the cart up the winding path to the mouth of the dingle. Belle followed. At the top I delivered the reins into her hands, we looked at each other steadfastly for some time. Belle then departed, and I returned to the dingle, where, seating myself on my stone, I remained for upwards of an hour in thought.”

Great is ellipsis—but romance cannot live by ellipsis alone. The next chapter begins, “On the following morning,” and is a spirited account of a feast of roast sucking-pig in the gypsy encampment!

There is never room for a doubt that Lavengro was by this time fairly in love with Belle. But there is also no room for doubt that Belle had realised that he was not for her, nor was she for him. Their ways lay apart. Belle’s way was the broad road of the Atlantic to America, where she hoped to conduct her life free from the disadvantages that attended the career in England of a workhouse girl with a name which, as Lavengro had told her, belonged to the nomenclatures of the ancient aristocracy. His way was through many strange lands, through a life of adventure and turmoil, to an old age of mingled glory, hypochondria, and megrims. So that Belle had resolved to nip the romance in the bud, and her last journey from the Dingle was made with the purpose of selling her donkey and cart and her silks and linens, and going to Liverpool to take ship for the New World. She returned once more, as she had promised. It was late at night; Lavengro was asleep in his tent; but he had banked up the fire, and placed the kettle over it. The little noise of her arrival woke him, and he dressed so as to go out and unharness her donkey. Now that it was all impossible, and Belle had made her irrevocable decision, Lavengro, of course, came to the point. On their last day together, he set her conjugating the Armenian verb siriel, and when he had worried her through it, told her that the English equivalent of siriel was “to love.” And, in his whimsical, moonshiny, teasing way, having driven Isopel to tears, he suddenly proposed to her that they should be off together to America, settle down in some forest, and conjugate the verb siriel conjugally!

And, as there was never a doubt that Lavengro had managed to get himself in love with Belle, so there was never a doubt that Belle was strongly tempted to acknowledge that she loved this strange fellow of six feet three with the black eyes and the white hair and the long right arm, who could beat Blazing Bosvile and make donkey shoes, and mend kettles and talk all the languages that were heard in the Tower of Babel. But well for Belle’s peace of mind that she resisted the temptation; for Lavengro, the constitutional wanderer, would have led her a pretty life when they had buried themselves in the depths of an American forest to conjugate Armenian verbs!

The next morning he set off with his friend Jasper for a horse fair, leaving Belle behind. “On arriving at the extremity of the plain, I looked towards the dingle. Isopel Berners stood at the mouth; the beams of the early morning sun shone full on her noble face and figure. I waved my hand towards her. She slowly lifted up her right arm. I turned away, and never saw Isopel Berners again.”

For while Lavengro was away Belle departed from the Dingle, and left never a trace behind her. Now that he had lost the treasure upon which he had set so small a price, Lavengro was very sore at heart, and would have given much to recall her and to consummate his day-dreams. But all that he ever heard of her again was in a letter addressed by her to “the young man in Mumper’s Dingle.” Herein she explained why she had refused his offer, which, if he had made it in the early part of their acquaintance, she would have accepted. She proffered him some very good advice about his manners, told him she thought he was a bit mad at bottom, gave him a lock of her glorious hair, and left this maxim with him: “Fear God, and take your own part.” Which was so much to Lavengro’s liking that he made it the motto of the second portion of his life-story, “The Romany Rye”; and there it is to this day under his name, and over the imprint of Mr. Murray.

Was Isopel Berners a reality, and did Borrow meet her in Mumper’s Dingle? Or is the whole of this history an invention? Dr. Knapp’s elaborate researches do not help us much, because there is no documentary evidence about the episode. He can merely tell us that Borrow did make such a journey, did buy a tinker’s stock-in-trade, and did live in Mumper’s Dingle. So that we must look for internal evidence.

I have no doubt that Isopel Berners was a reality, and a very substantial one; I have no doubt that she was extraordinarily tall, strong, and beautiful; and that her hair was wonderfully fine. I do not insist that she was either as tall, as strong, or as beautiful as she is painted in “Lavengro”; for Shorsha had a habit of exaggerating—it was one of the many constitutional defects of his character; he could not help it.

The reason is very simple for this faith about Isopel Berners, the prototype of Queen Ingeborg, who, as Mr. Birrell has said, need fear comparison with no damsel that ever lent sweetness to the stage, relish to rhyme, or life to novels. Borrow never created a character. He has left many portraits; but to imagine an Isopel Berners, to invent the incident, was as impossible for him as flying. The romance of Isopel Berners would never have been written if George Borrow, when he was travelling England on foot upon the money he earned by writing “Joseph Sell” and by mending kettles, had not met Isopel’s prototype in Mumper’s Dingle.

The adventures of the rest of this year of 1825 may be told very briefly. Borrow left the Dingle when it appeared certain that he would see no more of Isopel, and, with money borrowed from Jasper Petulengro—or rather forced by his gypsy friend upon an unwilling recipient—bought a fine horse and set off wandering again. His roadside encounters, with the bee-keeper and brewer of mead, with the gentleman who had learnt Chinese by the aid of the hieroglyphics on teapots, and all the rest of them, being more or less impersonal and extraneous to his own history, may be left for consideration in connection with “The Romany Rye.” He took a situation for a time as assistant in a stable-yard at a coaching inn—having abandoned the tinker’s craft and given the pony and stock-in-trade to his gypsy friends,—ultimately sold his horse at Horncastle Fair, and tramped back to Norwich, where his mother was living.

CHAPTER IV
BORROW AND BOWRING

We now have Borrow a youth of twenty-two. His life has been full of weird adventure, but to all appearances quite unprofitable in any worldly sense. His future is nebulous. Dreams are dreamed; visions are vanished. He seems to be farther from fame and fortune than when he set off in the coach for London, with the green box in the boot carrying his Danish ballads and his “Ab Gwilym.” His castles in the clouds have come crashing to earth in irremediable ruin.

Borrow was indignant with a scurvy world which had treated him harshly. The plain truth was that the world had no feeling about him at all, one way or the other. He had nothing to sell that anybody wanted to buy, and no means of making a living. He had a long road to travel before he found himself. In 1825 he went home to Norwich a failure, with the sense of defeat very strong upon him. The mother who was at once his best adviser and sincerest worshipper was not likely to chide his folly as the father had done. She was ready to receive him with demonstrations of love, and to share her little with him. This was part of the ignominy which he hated—that he was obliged to impose himself upon the household in Willow Lane. In a world out of joint, the cursed spite was that he could do nothing to set it right.

Long time he struggled hard to lift himself out of this rut. He continued to fail. When at last he did succeed, these years became to him a horrible nightmare. He would not speak of them; he tried not to think of them. He resolutely refused to permit the public a glimpse into the sordid secrets they contained. From 1825 to 1832 he lived a life of which he wished nobody to know anything. Out of some correspondence between him and Richard Ford arose the phrase, “the Veiled Period.” Ford implored him to lift the veil a little and allow his admirers to know what he was doing. There were many reasons why he declined to do so. He endeavoured to puzzle the public about it, and perhaps succeeded partly in mystifying himself. He suggested a kind of vague romance of wanderings in remote parts of Europe. Some of the suggestions were founded on a slight basis of fact; that is all that can be said for them.

As to the facts: there is no doubt that he did buy a horse with money lent to him by Ambrose Smith, and sell it at a profit. As in the case of Isopel, it may not be unwise to allow some discount off the published accounts of the transaction. Very possibly the horse was not such a fine horse as that noble animal with whose assistance Lavengro electrified the jockeys at Horncastle Fair; perhaps the profit on the sale was not so great as it was made to appear in “The Romany Rye.” But there was such a transaction. Ambrose Smith reminded him of it, long years afterwards, when he visited the great author at Oulton.

Soon after his return to Norwich, he was busy again about his literary schemes. He tried to sell copies of his translation of Klinger, which he took from the publisher in lieu of payment for the work. While with Phillips in London, he had projected a volume of poetical translations of Danish ballads. The plan then came to naught. Now he printed the book in Norwich by subscription, after a correspondence with Allan Cunningham about it. Cunningham was full of admiration for the old songs drawn from the “Kjaempe Viser.” “Swayne Vonved” was his favourite, and it remained Borrow’s own pet throughout life. Five hundred copies of the “Romantic Ballads” were printed, of which 200 were subscribed for. These, at ten and sixpence a copy, paid all the expenses of the issue. There was an arrangement under which the London publisher, John Taylor, took the rest and placed his imprint on the title-page. Cunningham gave the young poet a great deal of good advice about promoting the interests of the book. He neglected it, with characteristic self-sufficiency. He had published ballads, and if the great public did not share Mopsa’s affection for ballads in print, the nineteenth-century Autolycus could not help it, and would be content with what he could get out of the local subscribers in Norwich.

In 1826 he was in London, and in correspondence with Benjamin Haydon about sitting for a figure in one of his pictures—possibly the “Mock Election.” In the course of the correspondence Borrow speaks of proceeding presently to the South of France. This is the first hint of those brief travels on the Continent which became magnified by the pervading haze into world-wide wanderings. “Were you ever at Kiachta?” Bowring asked him in a letter some years later. He was never within some thousands of miles of Kiachta. In 1826 he probably did go tramping through part of Europe, but he did not reach the East, as some confused references in the books suggest. The tale of Murtagh in “The Romany Rye” may incorporate some of his adventures. At any rate, that alluring narrative was certainly not given to Borrow in the year 1825 at Horncastle Fair. There is clear evidence of that in the fact that a portion of it was picked up nearly thirty years later in very different circumstances.

The real itinerary of the tour of 1826 is probably by way of Paris on foot to Bayonne; across the Pyrenees into Spain; Pamplona, the Riviera, Italy, Genoa, and thence home by ship. Slight traces can be found of such a journey. There is the lightly-touched meeting with Vidocq in Paris. That delectable rascal’s career always had a strong fascination for Borrow, whose appetite for picturesque blackguards was greedy. Vidocq at this time was fifty years of age. A quarter of a century of adventure as a showman, a soldier, a galley-slave, and a highwayman had terminated in 1812 with his appointment to the head of a detective office in Paris, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. By the year 1825 the authorities were persuaded that the principle was unworkable, and dismissal ended Vidocq’s career of corruption and swindling. If Borrow met him in Paris the next year, therefore, he found his hero a free lance. The Mémoires of M. Vidocq, which appeared in 1828, and are probably at least as trustworthy as Baron Munchausen, were among Borrow’s favourite reading; his relish for literature, embloomed with the flowers of crime and perfumed by the breath of criminals, had been cultivated by the compilation of the “Celebrated Trials,” and it never left him. Vidocq and Peyrecourt loom large in passages of his works; whether they made so great a figure in his actual experiences in France is another question. He appears to have met Baron Taylor at Bayonne, and naturally found in the “picturesque and romantic” voyager a congenial companion. From these lofty associations the descent on the other side of the Pyrenees to Quesada [72] and his “Army of Faith,” the gang of frontiersmen who were helping themselves freely in the name of the Church, was sudden and severe. But Borrow seems to have fallen even further, for there is a dim suggestion of his imprisonment at Pamplona, of his emergence from gaol in a state of beggary, and his succour at the hands of a party of gypsies whose patteran he followed in the mountains. He tramped eastwards, ultimately brought up at Genoa, penniless, and was assisted by some person or persons unknown to get ship for England.

This is as far as Dr. Knapp has been able to trace the elusory course of the Wandering Jew of Literature. The theory that he acted as the travelling commissioner of a London newspaper finds no support. By 1827 he was back in Norwich, keeping his mother’s small household accounts, visiting the Tombland Fair to inspect “Marshland Shales,” the glorious chieftain of all the equine race, grubbing for booksellers, writing articles for newspapers. It was a mean and anxious way of life, abominable to Borrow, who hated poverty and was ashamed of it. Therein may be sought the real reason why he “veiled” these years of his life. His next appearance in the literary arena is in the distinguished company of Dr. John Bowring.

The Bowring episode in Borrow’s life is one of its most remarkable and least explicable features. Bowring seems to have been a good friend to Borrow for many years, to have engaged with him in literary collaboration, and to have exerted himself in various directions on his behalf. His reward, so far as Borrow’s works go, is a scurrilous sketch of himself in “Lavengro,” a long denunciation in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye,” and the bitter hatred of a man who knew how to hate as fiercely as he could love intensely. The whole story of their severance is obscure, but there can be little doubt that Borrow was entirely in the wrong, that the charges he made against Bowring of treachery and falsehood were baseless, and that of many people pilloried in Borrow’s books Bowring was among the least deserving such scurvy treatment. We have observed already the circumstances of the first meeting between Borrow and Bowring at Taylor’s house in Norwich. We shall see that Bowring came to his rescue when he was in the sorest straits, and was, in fact, doing much to help him during part of the “veiled period.”

It has been the writer’s fortune to secure [73] a series of letters from Borrow to Bowring, which throw much light upon his schemes and modes of life in the last three of those mysterious years between his return from the Continent and his engagement by the Bible Society. He did not remain long in Norwich. In 1829 he was in London, residing at No. 17, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and deeply employed about certain translations of Scandinavian poetry which were to form the basis of a new book on more elaborate lines than those of the “Romantic Ballads.” Bowring and Borrow had a plan for issuing in collaboration a collection of English versions, with interpretations, of those Northern poets whom a purblind public, not yet obsessed by the Scandinavian spirit in poetry and music, resolutely disregarded and despised. This was the “literary project” of which the world heard so much in the Appendix. The arrangements went so far that a prospectus of the work was put out. The title proposed was “The Songs of Scandinavia,” and the collection was to be published in two volumes octavo. The project remained a project, and the niche left by expectant librarians for the two octavo volumes was never filled. But in connection with the negotiations and arrangements between Borrow and Bowring a correspondence occurred which is full of interest and contains one or two characteristic bits of Borrovian humour. Incidentally, the letters, if taken in sequence, and read together with another one of the year 1842, show that, up to a time not far ante-dating the publication of “The Romany Rye,” with its gross attack on Bowring, the two men were on the best possible terms. Indeed, in 1842 Borrow speaks of his old collaborator as “my oldest, I may say my only, friend.” [75]

It were greatly to be wished that the sordid dispute with Bowring might be numbered among the delenda of Borrow’s history, but some mention of it will be necessary. Unhappily, no satisfactory explanation can be given which is at all flattering to Borrow. For these letters prove conclusively that he introduced into “Lavengro” and its sequel opinions about Bowring which he certainly did not hold at the time of which he was writing.

In 1829 their Scandinavian scheme was in the tideway. They had written and they had met for the discussion of their plans; Borrow had done a great deal of translation. He was exceedingly anxious that at any rate the first volume should appear at once; for, as he said in a letter written on the last day of the year, he was “terribly afraid of being forestalled in the Kiampe Viser by some of those Scotch blackguards, who affect to translate from all languages, of which they are fully as ignorant as Lockhart is of Spanish.” The italicised passage is underlined in Borrow’s letter; it is a curious foretaste of some of the choicer invective which he afterwards bestowed on Scott and the Scots, and of his disagreement with Lockhart. The preparations were hurried on with a view to the appearance of the first part of the book in February. The drafting of the prospectus was left to Borrow, and on January 8th (1830) he sent a copy to Bowring for his inspection, inviting “the correction of your master-hand.” He had, he said, “endeavoured to frame a Danish style,” but was not sure whether he had succeeded. “Alter, I pray you,” he exclaimed, “whatever false logic has crept into it, find a remedy for its incoherencies, and render it fit for its intended purpose.” There follows a delightful touch of egotism. He has, he explains, had a rising headache for two days, which has “almost” prevented him from doing anything. But, he adds with fine nonchalance, “I sat down this morning and translated a hundred lines of the ‘May Day’”—as though a hundred lines of English verse were a trifle which he threw off without effort, malgré his “rising headache.”

Bowring examined the prospectus, made what revisions he thought necessary, and sent it back.

“I approve of the prospectus in every respect,” wrote Borrow (January 14th). “It is businesslike, and there is nothing flashy in it. I do not wish to suggest one alteration.” He goes on to describe the energy with which he is working, and speaks of having rendered four hundred lines in one day! The last paragraph of this letter displays Borrow in a different attitude towards reviews and reviewing from that which he adopted in after years. “When you see the foreign editor,” he tells Bowring,

“I should feel much obliged if you would speak to him about my reviewing Tegnér, and inquire whether a good article on Welsh poetry would be received. I have the advantage of not being a Welshman. I would speak the truth, and would give translations from some of the best Welsh poetry; and I really believe that my translations would not be the worst that have been made from the Welsh tongue.”

But this condition of things, in which the romantic ferment caused by Steffens and Oehlenschläger in Denmark was to be reproduced in England by Borrow’s translations, did not last long. Difficulties arose in connection with the publication of the proposed book, and the enthusiasm paled as the year progressed. The two volumes receded from view; the twin mountain in labour finally brought forth a review article of some forty pages. This was despatched in the summer to the Foreign Quarterly Review, was held back for twelve months, and appeared at last in the number for June, 1831. In this Bowring wrote in lively style on Danish and Norwegian literature, and Borrow supplied sixteen specimens of verse.

In the meantime, Bowring was doing what he could to assist his protégé to some profitable employment. He sent him an ancient manuscript which Grundtvig, the Danish poet, wanted to have transcribed. Borrow said (June 7th) the task would not be overpaid at £49, but as he was “doing nothing particular” at the time, and might learn something from it, he would do it for £20. Bowring also exerted his influence to get him work in the magazines. During the summer of 1830, Borrow flitted from Great Russell Street to No. 7, Museum Street, and in the autumn, went to Norwich for a holiday. In the letter (September 14th) in which he tells Bowring of his proposal to leave London for Norwich, we get the first hint of a project which now and then flashed through his mind for a year or two—that of entering the military service: “I have thought of attempting to get into the French service, as I should like prodigiously to serve under Clausel in the next Bedouin campaign.” This remained a thought, though, as we shall see, other plans of the same character went a little further. In the same letter he complained that he was very unwell, but traced his malady to ennui and unsettled prospects, and hoped that cold bathing in October and November would prove of some service to him. There is no reference in this correspondence to one task which he himself asserts he achieved in 1830. That was the translation of Elis Wyn. At the instance of “a little bookseller of my acquaintance” in Smithfield, he rendered from the Welsh Wyn’s, “Visions of the Sleeping Bard.” This was the nearest approach he made to the promise of literary success; but even here his malign fate dogged him. When the little bookseller saw the translation, he begged off the bargain on the plea that “the terrible descriptions of vice and torment would frighten the genteel part of the English public out of their wits. . . . Myn Diawl! I had no idea till I read him in English that Elis Wyn had been such a terrible fellow!” The sly dig at the “genteel” public may be reasonably attributed to the bookmaker rather than to the bookseller.

Before he departed from London, Borrow, returning some books to Bowring, utters (September 17th) one of those ejaculations on public affairs which he subsequently inserted as tags to many of his letters: “More Revolutions, I see. The King of Saxony has run away, and the Kent peasantry are burning stacks and houses. Where will all this end?”

A dozen plans for carving a way to undying fame and modest fortune, all equally futile, were built up and fell down about this time. Apparently Borrow could not rid himself of the delusion that a hungry world was waiting to devour the beauties of the Gaelic Bards, if only they were served up in a suitable form for general consumption. He launched at the devoted heads of the Highland Society of London a scheme under which the Society was to employ (and pay) him for two years in translating the Gaelic Bards into English verse. The scheme left the Highland Society as cold as the Bards would have left the reading world. He turned his artillery upon the British Museum. The Codex Exoniensis was to be copied; he applied for the work, but without success. It was done in 1831 by one of the regular officials of the Museum. Discouraged but not dismayed, he sought other employment in Bloomsbury, and asked Bowring to put in a word for him. The Doctor pointed out that in his position it was necessary to go about such a matter with discretion. It would not do for him to originate an application, but if the authorities of the Museum could be induced to seek his opinion, he would give Borrow such a character as would “take you to the top of Hecla itself. You have claims, strong ones, and I should rejoice to see you niched in the British Museum.” But this design failed like the rest. In a letter to Bowring he described himself, with melancholy eloquence, as “drifting upon the sea of the world, and likely to be so.” To Borrow there was “no fiercer hell than failure”; but the inferno was of his own creation. His greatest failure was the failure to realise that there was no sort of demand for the work he insisted on doing, and that its intrinsic value was far below the standard at which he placed it.

Compelled thus to abandon his literary ambitions for the present, he turned his efforts in another direction. He began the pursuit of a shimmering phantom over which, in the course of his life, he contrived to waste a great deal of valuable time. Upon what he based the idea does not appear, but Borrow seems to have imagined that he had some claim to official employment abroad. It did not much matter whether the work was made for him by the British Government or by a foreign State, so long as he should be given the opportunity of displaying his philological prowess in foreign parts. After the appearance of the joint article in the Foreign Quarterly, as Bowring seemed to be able to do nothing for him at the British Museum, Borrow asked him to see what he could do towards getting him a post under the Belgian Government. Bowring made the application, but without success; the Belgians were not at the moment in need of any English assistance, however talented. Borrow keenly recognised his friend’s diligence in the matter, and turned his heaviest artillery on the Ministry at Brussels, who were so obstinately blind to the advantages of having Mr. George Borrow in their service. They did not seem, he said in a letter to Bowring written from Willow Lane, Norwich, and dated September 11th, 1831, either to know or to care for the opinion of the great Cyrus, whose advice to his captains he quoted from Xenophon: “Take no heed from what countries ye fill up your ranks, but seek recruits as ye do horses, not those particularly who are of your own country, but those of merit.” Belgium, having failed to appreciate the worth of George Borrow, at once became the most contemptible nation on earth:

“The Belgians will only have such recruits as are born in Belgium, and when we consider the heroic manner in which the native Belgian army defended the person of their new sovereign in the last conflict with the Dutch, can we blame them for their determination? It is rather singular, however, that, resolved as they are to be served only by themselves, they should have sent for 50,000 Frenchmen to clear their country of a handful of Hollanders, who have generally been considered the most unwarlike people in Europe, and who, if they had had fair play given them, would long ere this time have replanted the Orange flag on the towers of Brussels and made the Belgians what they deserved to be—hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

This sardonic outburst is one of the earliest samples of the polemical style which Borrow was to develop so strongly in later years.

As he could neither go to fight Bedouins under Clausel nor enter the Belgian service in Europe, it appears to have occurred to his friend Bowring that he might care to follow in his father’s footsteps, and that the British service might suit him at a pinch. If Borrow would like to purchase a commission, Bowring offered to introduce his name to the War Secretary. Borrow replied that his name had been down for several years for the purchase of a commission, but he had never had sufficient interest to procure an appointment. He would not now mind serving in the militia if they were to be embodied for service in Ireland (“that unhappy country”), but he wished to leave the question open for a few months in order to see whether something more promising turned up. If he had not secured employment within two or three months, he would then ask Bowring to redeem his promise in the matter of the War Secretary, and to recommend him to a corps in one of the Eastern colonies on the plea that he was “well grounded in Arabic” and had some talent for languages:

“I flatter myself that I could do a great deal in the East, provided I could once get there, either in a civil or military capacity. There is much talk at present about translating European books in the two great languages, the Arabic and Persian. Now, I believe that with my enthusiasm for these tongues I could, if resident in the East, become in a year or two better acquainted with them than any European has been yet, and more capable of executing such a task. . . .”

This letter concluded with a postscript in which he requested that his best remembrances might be presented to Mrs. Bowring and to Edgar, their son; and, he added, “tell them they will both be starved.

“There is now a report in the street that twelve corn-stacks are blazing within twenty miles of this place. I have lately been wandering about Norfolk, and I am sorry to say that the minds of the peasantry are in a horrible state of excitement. I have repeatedly heard men and women in the harvest-field swear that not a grain of the corn they were cutting should be eaten, and that they would as lieve be hanged as live. I am afraid all this will end in a famine and a rustic war.”

Reform staved off the “rustic war,” and other things intervened to prevent Borrow from carrying out his half-formed intention of becoming a military man.

CHAPTER V
IN FOREIGN PARTS

“Romance brought up” the year 1832. It was a year full of events with an important bearing on the course of Borrow’s life. In the first place, he became acquainted with the Skeppers, of Oulton Hall, near Lowestoft. The introduction to this family issued in a friendship with Mr. Skepper’s sister, the widow of a young naval officer named Clarke. In Mrs. Clarke, a woman somewhat older than himself—she was thirty-six and he was twenty-nine—he met the woman who was to bring into his life its fairest influence and its rarest happiness. But the story of this romance must be postponed for a few pages in order to the relation of a sequence of affairs without which it cannot be understood. They resulted from sundry conversations about Borrow—between the Skeppers and the Rev. Francis Cunningham, Rector of Pakefield, and in turn between Cunningham and Joseph Gurney, his brother-in-law, from whose meadows at Earlham George had fished in boyhood.

Both Cunningham and Gurney were interested in the work of the Bible Society, and between them the idea was hatched of employing Borrow’s philological learning in its behalf. The Society happened at the moment to be looking for a man to superintend the printing of the New Testament in Manchu. There were many negotiations, and ultimately the engagement was consummated which made Borrow’s modest fortune.

To go to St. Petersburg on this business of the Bible Society’s was an adventure after Borrow’s own heart. He had passed through some exceedingly stormy waters, and in this employment he found a secure and congenial harbour. He could well afford to regard lightly the critical attitude of certain people in Norwich, who did not forget to recall the episode of “godless Billy Taylor.” Their temper was reflected in the letter of Harriet Martineau referring to Borrow as a “polyglot gentleman,” and remarking that his appearance as “a devout agent of the Bible Society” evoked “one shout of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days.” Borrow did not like their laughter, and he did not forgive their contempt. But for the time he was too busy with the actualities of his new situation to trouble about them, and too elated with his suddenly brightened prospects to be cast down by the jeers of the scornful.

He was going a journey into a far country, and he was going on a more or less philological errand. His task was to undertake the production in the Russian capital of the Manchu version of the Sacred Books made by Lipotsof. Invited to London to see the officials of the Society, he set off in high spirits—and on foot. The long road stretched for a hundred and twelve miles between Norwich and London—that road which some ten years before he had travelled by coach with the little green box of poetical translations. He now tramped it in 27½ hours, and his expenses en route amounted to fivepence halfpenny! This feat was one of his favourite boasts. It was, in its way, a remarkable achievement. Few big, healthy young men would care to undertake such long-sustained exertion on a pint of ale, half a pint of milk, a roll of bread, and two apples. But such is Borrow’s tale of his commissariat arrangements on this expedition.

The Society desired him to learn the Manchu language before he set out for Russia. They gave him six months for the purpose. Even for a meteoric philologist like Borrow, who swallowed a language by memorising its dictionary, six months meant short commons. He could not possibly acquire more than a nodding acquaintance with that most difficult of the tongues of Babel. However, he set about his task with zeal.

There is one amusing passage in the correspondence between him and the Secretary of the Bible Society. Observe the true Borrovian spirit asserting itself in the letter where he expresses pleasure at the prospect of “becoming useful to the Deity, to man, and to myself.” Observe the solemn admonition of the good secretary, when he perceived that a sense of human frailty was not one of Borrow’s most striking characteristics: “Doubtless you mean the prospect of glorifying God.” Thereafter, the Borrovian spirit was subdued (in correspondence) to the proper standard of orthodoxy.

At the end of June, 1833, he set sail for St. Petersburg, by way of Hamburg, and was highly delighted with the Russian capital. He made his way into the acquaintanceship of a number of literary people, in whose society he found congenial entertainment. Among them he speedily established for himself quite a reputation. It was here that he began his long friendship with Hasfeldt, which produced a prolific correspondence. Hasfeldt was a Dane attached to the Russian Government, and a linguist of attainments, who added to his income by the teaching of European languages. He conceived a remarkable fondness for “tall George,” as he called him; the affection was returned as fully as Borrow could return a friendship, and that was in much higher measure than many estimates of him suggest. He met Russian scholars, and found many opportunities for extending his philological studies in the direction of the Oriental languages.

His work on the Chinese version was hard and long. He had to use German printers, who did not always feel for the task the enthusiasm which Borrow expected everybody to throw into anything in which he himself was concerned. They had to be bribed with vodka, and other things, in order that progress might be secured. The Bible Society presumably swallowed the vodka in their delight at the energy Borrow displayed, and they passed a resolution to pay him any expenses to which he might be put in the execution of the commission. He had to furbish up an old fount of type in the Chinese character, that had been lying rusting in a cellar for many years, and to get everything in order himself, because, of course, it was impossible to obtain compositors who knew anything of the Manchu. He even turned printer. So keen was the zest with which he entered into the work that he submitted a proposal to the Society to undertake the distribution of the books when they were printed, going overland to China, and looking in upon the Tartars on the way! Without doubt he would have done it but for the fact that the Russian Government refused to grant him a passport for the purpose. It is characteristic of Borrow that years afterwards he said, and doubtless thought, that he had been overland to China.

The work of printing done, he paid a hurried visit to Moscow, gathering impressions for the description of the Kremlin to be found in “The Bible in Spain,” and on September 9th, 1835, he left St. Petersburg for England, having spent the previous night in a solemn leave-taking of Hasfeldt. While in St. Petersburg hard at work, and feeling run down, he had “the Horrors” several times, but affected to have found a cure for it in the shape of strong port wine. It was during his stay in Russia that the news arrived of the death of his brother John in Mexico. He had discovered other activities to occupy him besides the translation of the Testament into Chinese. He turned homilies of the Church of England into Russian and Manchu, and did translations of some of the sacred Buddhist books from Manchu into English. He conceived at the moment no high opinion of the Buddhist philosophy. “You will be surprised,” he writes to the Rev. F. Cunningham, “that Satan by such inconsistent trash should have been able to ensnare the souls of millions!” If that had been read in the Martineau household there might have been another “burst of laughter.” It was while he was in St. Petersburg, too, that he published his “Targum,” a collection of poetic translations from thirty different languages and dialects. When Pushkin, the poet, after Borrow’s departure, received a presentation copy of this book, he expressed his great regret that he had not met the author.

Borrow reached London on the 18th September, and went down to Norfolk, feeling anxious again about his future, and hoping that the Bible Society would be able to find some further employment for him. He was not disappointed. The Society had not yet given up hope that they might find a way to send him to China, but in the meantime they resolved to commission him to Portugal. On November 2nd they passed a resolution that he should be asked to go to Lisbon and Oporto to inquire about “means and channels for promoting the circulation of the Holy Scriptures in Portugal.” [91] Here is the origin of two of his books, of which one was “The Bible in Spain.” On November 6th he sailed from London, touching at Falmouth on the 8th, and was at Lisbon on the 13th. He was to confer with one Wilby about the work; but, Wilby being away, Borrow consoled himself with the company of Captain Heyland, of the 35th Foot, whose acquaintance he had made on the voyage. With him he made several trips, upon one of which he met the bohémienne landlady of Cintra. During this first expedition to the Peninsula, he set up relations with the gypsies of Spain, which provided the germ of the first of his books that attracted anything like general attention. At Badajoz he encountered a gypsy tribe, by whom he was detained ten days. In that time he had translated the Gospel of Saint Luke into the Câlo, or Spanish gypsy language, and the version was subsequently printed by the Bible Society. One of the Romany chals, Antonio Lopez, accompanied him most of the way to Madrid, delaying three days at Merida in a gypsy house. Antonio finally went off with a gitana. Borrow bought a donkey from the girl, and rode on the animal’s back as far as Talavera, where he sold it to a Toledo Jew whom he met on the road. The rest of the journey to Madrid he did by the diligence, like a common Christian.

By the time of his arrival there, he had formed a definite project of printing the New Testament in Spanish and in Spain, without comment or note of any sort. The law would prohibit the circulation of such a book if it were printed outside and brought into the country. It was decided to use the current Catholic version, in order not to excite any more prejudices than could be helped, and to sell cheaply, and thus to spread the book among people who had never seen it before. This was a time in Spain of constant political excitement, chronic Ministerial change, and periodical revolution; and Borrow had much trouble in getting official recognition for the enterprise, without which he might as well have left it alone. But the way was smoothed for him by Sir George Villiers, the British Minister, and at the end of twelve months he returned to England with an active campaign mapped out in his mind, for which he soon obtained the approval of the Society. In a letter to his mother about this, he remarked that his “ordination” would be put off till his return. This is the first and the last that we hear of any proposal to enter the Church.

On his way out to Spain the second time, he happened across Santa Coloma, the Carlist, who is frequently met with hereafter in his Spanish adventures. “The Bible in Spain” relates very closely the events of the next two years—his wanderings and escapes, his enterprise in Madrid, where he set up a bookselling shop, his imprisonment for insulting the Government and the Catholic Church—an offence of which he was quite innocent, for such was not his method at the time. The trouble was brought on him by an evangelical firebrand, named Lieutenant Graydon, who led Borrow into one of his scrapes with the Peninsular powers by claiming to be associated with him in the work of the Bible Society. Borrow’s imprisonment resulted in a declaration by him in the Spanish Press, directed against Graydon. He said that neither himself nor the Bible Society was actuated by any enmity against either the Government or the Catholic clergy of Spain, and concluded by avowing himself the sole agent of the Society in the Peninsula. Out of this grew an estrangement between Borrow and the Society. It happened that Graydon was one of the pets of Mr. Brandram, joint secretary of the Society, and was actually regarded as one of their agents, though he received no pay, being the holder of a Government pension. He was an enthusiastic evangelist, who seems to have lacked nothing save discretion, but manifested this defect by fierce attacks upon the Catholic faith in its stronghold, instead of contenting himself with prosecuting the primary work of the Society, which was the distribution of the unadulterated Scriptures. In the event, Graydon was withdrawn from Spain, but it was expressly stated that this step was taken only in the interests of his own safety, and that the Society would pass no judgment on the merits of the dispute between him and Borrow until Graydon had returned to England and had an opportunity of vindicating himself. Borrow at the same time was ordered to cease issuing his advertisement. It is difficult to judge a man like Graydon. His good faith in all he did can hardly be doubted, but there is no question that the result of his ill-timed action was to put an end to the work of the Society and the circulation of the Bible in Spain for many years.

The relations between Earl Street and Borrow grew more strained, and very soon he had practically a command to come to London. He packed up and returned, but such was the force of his character that he fascinated Earl Street into sending him to Spain a third time. He was only home a month or two, and got back to the Peninsula on the last day of 1838. But the mission was not of much further use, for there had been another change of Ministry in the meanwhile, and Borrow and the Society were again out of official favour.

He proceeded to Seville, settling there for a purpose, as we shall presently see. In the sunlit southern city he was encountered by an English traveller, who has left a most entertaining account of him. This was Lieutenant-Colonel Elers Napier, in whose “Excursions along the Shores of the Mediterranean” appears the remarkable figure of a Man of Mystery, who is easily identified as Don Jorge—though apparently Napier never learned who he was. Borrow, six feet three, with piercing black eyes, snowy head, and swarthy, hairless face, made a profound impression on his new friend—and we may be sure that he omitted nothing that would deepen it. He showed off all his best points and maintained a rigid silence upon the question of his identity, so that in Napier’s recollections he assumes almost supernatural proportions, and is described throughout as “The Unknown.” He revealed all his miscellaneous acquaintance with languages, Occidental and Oriental. He conversed with the Colonel in Spanish, in Latin, in French (“the purest Parisian accent”), in Italian. He spoke English perfectly, but did not appear to be an Englishman. He was even as conversant with Hindu as the Anglo-Indian himself; he seemed, Napier says, to know everything and everybody, but was apparently known to nobody himself. His almost magic power over the gypsies, his familiarity with their patois and their customs, the way in which they almost worshipped him when he took Napier by night for a visit to one of their weird encampments, added to the marvel.

But the real significance of the visit to Seville is not to be sought in the archives of the Bible Society or in the jottings of Colonel Napier. Borrow’s friendship with Mrs. Clarke, of Oulton, arose in the fashion already mentioned. His long absences from England did not impair it, and in 1838 it developed in peculiar circumstances, which were the subject from time to time of scandal utterly unfounded, and of gossip more or less impertinent and irrelevant. Whether Borrow, during the years from 1832 to 1838 nurtured dreams of any relation closer than friendship it is hardly possible to determine. He was not “a marrying man,” and probably the sober little romance that ended in their wedding was a thing of sudden growth. That theory is encouraged by a passage in his correspondence as late as 1838, when he told his friend Usóz that it was better to suffer the halter than the yoke, and expressed his conviction that bachelordom was the better kingdom for him. But at the end of the same year, during his stay in England, he visited his friends at Oulton, and found a state of affairs that doubtless altered his judgment.

The business of Mrs. Clarke, who was the principal heiress of the Oulton Hall estate, was in a highly complicated condition. She had none but professional advisers, save Borrow, and leant with obvious relief upon his friendship to guide her through a puzzling maze of family disputes. It would be wearisome to attempt to follow the controversies about the disposition of the property. They finally involved Chancery proceedings, and Dr. Knapp asserts that Mrs. Clarke’s solicitors advised her that it would be well for her to disappear for a time. The reason for this counsel is obscure, but the fact that it was followed is important. Mrs. Clarke consulted Borrow about it, with the result that her evanishment took the form of a journey to Spain, accompanied by her daughter Henrietta. The fact created an amazing quantity of idle speculation and not too generous suggestion. The plan was arranged in March, 1839. Borrow was then in Madrid, and immediately posted off to Seville to prepare a house for the reception of the two ladies, having given them some useful hints, drawn from his long experience of Spain, as to the household gods they ought to bring with them. They arrived in June, and were installed at No. 7, Plazuela de la Pila Seca, which Borrow had modestly furnished and was himself occupying.

The little wind of scandal that played about this arrangement will not disturb the equanimity of those who know their Borrow. The ménage was unquestionably a little difficult to explain to the Spaniards to whom explanation was necessary, and to this difficulty Dr. Knapp attributes Borrow’s expedition to Tangier at the end of August. This was the trip with which “The Bible in Spain” suddenly closed down in the approved Borrovian style. The scandal was of short duration and small effect. But in after years other suggestions were made, including the highly improbable and offensive one that Mrs. Clarke was at this time pursuing Borrow with the object of matrimony, and “travelled over half Europe in search of him.” Another friendly theory advanced was that Borrow’s proceedings were governed by mercenary motives, and that he married Mrs. Clarke because she had an income of three or four hundred a year.

Meanwhile, the quarrel with the Bible Society was dragging its slow length along. The correspondence is confused and in general uninteresting, except that it shows how Borrow’s attitude towards Earl Street had altered since the time when he climbed down before the protests of the good secretary in the first days of their association. He was on his feet now.

He felt surer of his ground than when he was at his wits’ end for employment and subsistence. Consequently his native impatience of restraint came out. The Bible Society never gauged their man. In one despatch to Earl Street, Borrow had said of a certain enterprise that “his usual good fortune accompanied them.” “This,” replied Mr. Brandram, “is a mode of speaking to which we are not well accustomed; it savours, some of our friends would say, a little of the profane. . . . Pious expressions may be thrust into letters ad nauseam, and it is not for that I plead; but is there not a via media?” The breach grew wider and severance was ordained; it was consummated very shortly after Borrow’s return to England at the beginning of the next year.

The visit to Tangier occupied some five or six weeks. Borrow returned to Seville at the end of September, and set to work compiling notes and making transcripts for his book on the Gypsies of Spain. The enterprise was assisted by diligent friends, such as Bailly, [99a] Usóz, [99b] and Gayangos. [99c] The fruits of their curious researches among dusty and neglected bookshelves may be seen in the long translations from archaic Spanish authors in “The Zincali.” It was a Spaniard who invented the epigram on the virtues of old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old books to read. But we may be excused for excluding from the category of books which have the bouquet of old crusted port the discourses of Dr. Sancho de Moncada and others to which Borrow has treated us so liberally.

He spared time from these labours and from the task of settling up with the Bible Society to pay considerable attention to Mrs. Clarke and “Hen”—the affectionate diminutive given to her daughter Henrietta. The widow had found Seville, as Borrow promised her it should be, “a most agreeable retreat,” where “the growls of her enemies could scarcely reach her.” The ladies enjoyed to the full the startling change from the life of the English fens to that of the sunny and many-hued Spanish city. They realised his prophecy that it would be a delicious existence where, “during the summer and autumn, the people reside in their courtyards, over which an awning is hung. A very delicious existence it is—a species of dream of sunshine and shade, of falling water and flowers.” And, incidentally, of course, a very fit setting for such love-making as came to be done: the weather is always fine when people are courting, as a modern sage has remarked. Not much more than a month after his return from Morocco, Borrow had proposed marriage to Mrs. Clarke, and had been accepted. The arrangement was to a certain extent a “convenient” one for both parties. With little prospect of further employment by the Bible Society, and only a precarious hold on any profitable literary work, Borrow had no glowing future before him. Mrs. Clarke felt the need of a man to manage affairs for her at Oulton. Still, there is ample evidence that this was a fortuitous concourse of circumstances, and that it had little to do with the marriage. The warm English friendship had become more intimate as the years passed, and there was nothing more natural than this sequel when they were thrown together in the “delightful existence” in which she hid from her “enemies” at Seville.

Having decided to cross the Rubicon, Borrow determined that the sooner it was done the better. There was to be no “sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.” He began at once to make preparations for the return to England in order that they might be married in their own country. One of the first steps to be taken to this end was to procure his passport from the Alcalde. Why this official disapproved of Borrow cannot be affirmed. As a son of the True Church he may have conceived a prejudice against the Protestant colporteur; he may have been infected by the “spy” mania; he may have been merely anxious to display his own importance. At any rate, he resolved to give the Ingles rubio as much trouble as possible to remove himself and his party out of Spain. He raised questions about the validity of Borrow’s papers, refused the passport, and would not be pacified by the offer of fees, “lawful or unlawful,” to quote Borrow, who sent to him apparently under the impression that authority, though a stubborn bear, might be led by the nose with gold, as the clown said to Autolycus. When Don Jorge himself went to the office to inquire into the matter, he was told to go away. Instead he continued to investigate the motives of the Alcalde, who thereupon threatened to carry him to prison. Borrow dared him to do so—and he did it. This was his third acquaintance with the inside of a Spanish gaol. He sent a reassuring note to Mrs. Clarke, and had a message taken to the British Consul. Colonel Napier had noticed earlier in the year that the police kept sharp eyes on Borrow, and attributed it to the suspicion that he was (of all things in the world!) a Russian spy. There was clearly something in the suggestion that he was under espionage, for while he was in prison his house was searched for papers. Nothing “compromising” being found, he was released the next night.

His indignation at this outrage reached white heat, and did not die down for months. His insistence upon redress detained Borrow in the country much longer than he had proposed to stop. Once having got his knife into Spanish officialdom, he twisted it round till he had gouged out his pound of flesh. And even then, after he had returned to England, and the knife was no longer available, Spanish officialdom received very severe treatment from that even more terrible weapon, his pen. From Seville he set working all the diplomatic machinery that an injured Briton could influence; he went to Madrid on the business; he wrote incessantly and exhaustively about it. His return to England and his marriage had to wait until he had settled accounts with the impertinent Alcalde de Barrio, who had laid sacrilegious hands upon a subject of her Britannic Majesty—and that subject George Borrow. While ambassadors and consuls and State secretaries were busily employed in official correspondence on his behalf, he proceeded with the work on the “Gypsies,” and did not get away from Spain till April, 1840.

The embarkation of the colporteur and his party upon the Royal Adelaide steamer at Cadiz was an impressive ceremony. Borrow was taking a long farewell of Spain, and he was not going home without souvenirs of his residence there. In the previous year he had purchased the Arab horse celebrated in his books as “Sidi Habismilk” (being interpreted, “My Lord Mustard”). The retinue at Cadiz included not only Mrs. Clarke and Henrietta, but also Sidi Habismilk and Hayim ben Attar, “the Jew of Fez,” Borrow’s servant. [103] They touched at Lisbon, where General Cordova came on board—not on business of State, but in search of a consignment of cigars that had been sent to him in the care of the captain. Borrow wrote an amusing sketch of the General and two Secretaries of Legation stowing Havana cigars in their pockets “with all the eagerness of contrabandista.” [104] The vessel arrived in the port of London on April 16th, and the party put up at the Spread Eagle, in Gracechurch Street. As soon as the licence could be obtained, the marriage of “George Henry Borrow, bachelor,” with “Mary Clarke, widow,” was celebrated at St. Peter’s Church, Cornhill, and witnessed by John Pilgrim, of Norwich (the bride’s solicitor) and by her daughter Henrietta. The wedding day was April 23rd.

There remained a very little business to do in London. He had an interview with the General Purposes Committee of the Bible Society, received a letter from Mr. Brandram, saying that there was no sphere open “to which your services in connection with our Society can be transferred,” and quickly terminated his relations with Earl Street. In spite of the little differences that had arisen, there was a generous reference to Borrow in the Report of the Society for 1840. He was said to have succeeded “by almost incredible pains, and at no small cost and hazard,” in his last mission to Spain, and to have assisted in circulating during five years nearly fourteen thousand copies of the Scriptures. Thus the Bible Society and Don Jorge said good-bye.

At the beginning of May, Mr. and Mrs. Borrow and Miss Clarke went down to Oulton. The Hall having been let to a farmer, they took up their residence in a little house on the margin of the Broad, known as Oulton Cottage.

CHAPTER VI
THE SUMMER HOUSE AT OULTON

When Borrow went to Oulton he was thirty-seven. The comforts of the domesticity to which he settled down were sweet, but its joys were of a very different quality from those golden matrimonial projects of which he had dreamed in Mumper’s Dingle. He was older, sadder, if not much wiser. He had modified the scale of his ambitions. He was bent upon the acquisition of such fame as he could attract through the avenue of literature, and not disdainful of what local celebrity might come his way. But though he was not of the temperament to apostrophise with Cowper—

“Domestic happiness! Thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the Fall!”

there is everything in favour of the supposition that, in marrying Mrs. Clarke, Borrow wrought better for himself than a man of his temperament usually has an actuarial expectation of doing in matrimony. Moreover, he did infinitely better than a great number of literary persons who have taken the plunge in similar circumstances. There was no such tragedy about his marriage as befell his friend and neighbour Edward FitzGerald; indeed, there was no tragedy at all. Its absence is due to Mrs. Borrow’s remarkable personality, her wifely qualities, unfailing devotion to him in all his fads and moods and whimsies. She was a perfect “helpmeet”; she provided him with a buffer to absorb some of the shocks of outrageous fortune; she was a patient amanuensis and an indefatigable secretary.

The picture one constructs of his wife from the materials—slight enough—that Borrow himself gives, and from the correspondence extant, is that of the “flower of wifely patience”—a woman in whom tact has been developed to such a degree as to become a kind of extra sense. She was married to one of the queerest specimens of mankind that Nature ever evolved; yet she secured in their union happiness for both. Her affection for him was true and deep; it was strong enough even to prevail over idiosyncrasies that might easily have been fatal to any chance of domestic peace, to say nothing of marital bliss. She was one of the women to whom “patience hath such mild composure given” that even Borrow failed to destroy her equanimity and self-possession. Behind her hero-worship appears now and then an illuminating gleam of feminine commonsense—just a shooting ray upon some foible; but whenever it seems likely to show Borrow in a specifically unfavourable light it is immediately switched off.

Near the easternmost point of land in England, on the margin of Oulton Broad, in a spot where the roar of the North Sea could be heard, was the cottage in which the best of his remaining years were to be passed. Here he was to prosecute amid the solemn marshland the eternal search for truth and happiness, and to find that the pursuit was even more difficult for him than for the majority of mankind. The house contained few rooms, but sufficient for the requirements of the little family, and its quietude and isolation were special recommendations to Borrow in the particular mood in which he then found himself. The scenery was of a character for which he had strong affection, and the place itself was linked with one or two of the powerful emotions of his youth. The Broad stretched away from the end of his garden, and he overlooked it from the summer-house he built as a study. Behind the house: and almost surrounding it, were plantations of pine trees. For the rest, only an occasional tower or windmill broke the level horizon. The scene is different, more varied, and much fuller of life at the present day, when the virtues of the Broads as pleasure waters and of the country round as a residential district have been discovered and exploited. But in certain hours and seasons it is easy to imagine Oulton as George Borrow knew it.

Miss Elizabeth Harvey has left us a picture of Borrow as the friends of this period recalled him. [109] In his wooden pavilion “on the very margin of the water,” she tells us, “he had many strange old books in various languages. I remember he once put one before me, telling me to read it. ‘Oh, I can’t,’ I replied. He said, ‘You ought: it’s your own language.’ It was an old Saxon book. He used to spend a great deal of his time in this room, writing, translating, and at times singing strange words in a stentorian voice, while passers-by on the lake would stop to listen with astonishment and curiosity to the singular sounds.” A note on his personal appearance, by the same hand, may help to keep his figure in mind: “He was six feet three, a splendid man, with handsome hands and feet. He wore neither whiskers, beard, nor moustache. His features were very handsome, but his eyes were peculiar, being round and rather small, but very piercing, and now and then fierce. He would sometimes sing one of his Romany songs, shake his fist at me, and look quite wild. Then he would ask, ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ ‘No, not at all,’ I would say. Then he would look just as gentle and kind, and say, ‘God bless you, I would not hurt a hair of your head.’” Here was he, then, when he set up author in real earnest, and induced “glorious John” to publish the first book that resulted from his adventures in foreign parts. This was “The Zincali; or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain, with an Original Collection of their Songs and Poetry, and a Copious Dictionary of their Language.” Most of the compilation—for such it is, and a desultory compilation at that—had been made during his five years in Spain. It was written at odd times, “chiefly in ventas and posadas, whilst wandering through the country in the arduous and unthankful task of distributing the Gospel among its children.”

In its published form “The Zincali” was an amalgam of several schemes that had occurred to the author from time to time during his Spanish wanderings. He had projected a collection of the rhymes and proverbial sayings of the gypsies of Spain, inspired thereto by the material he had gathered at Badajoz and Merida, to which additions were made some years later at Seville with the assistance of Juan Antonio Bailly, a French courier with a considerable acquaintance among the Câlé. He had also proposed a glossary of Câlo and English, which afterwards resolved itself into a limited vocabulary of words occurring in the songs and sayings that he and Bailly had collected. Both these schemes were imperfectly executed. Borrow’s knowledge of the Spanish-gypsy language was quite empirical, and Bailly’s collections were either written by illiterate persons, or taken down from the lips of people who spoke a corrupted jargon. Borrow and Bailly made a large number of translations from obscure Spanish authors—and this was the material from which “The Zincali” was constructed. He eked it out with a quantity of out-of-the-way information and anecdote acquired during his association with gypsies in England and Russia, and in the course of much miscellaneous browsing among books. A more unscientific process of writing “An Account of the Gypsies of Spain, etc.,” it would be hard to devise. There were half a hundred works of more or less utility which he might have consulted, and there is no evidence that he had seen more than a tithe of that number. But, pari passu, there is certainly no evidence that if he had seen them all he would have produced a better book. In fact, here, as in every other case, his work does not depend for its charm and its value upon any scientific basis whatever, but upon the idiosyncrasies of Borrow himself, the mordant style, the quaint observation, the atmosphere with which he contrives to invest his subject. “The Zincali” was read at first, as it is read now, not so much for the accuracy of its history or its philology as for its intrinsic interest as literature.

Having put together at Oulton these notes, memoranda, rhymes, translations, descriptions, and scraps of a gypsy vocabulary, Borrow took the compost to John Murray, who agreed to publish an edition of 750 copies. The book attracted certain minds attuned to the Borrovian spirit, and it was admitted to display the supreme virtue of originality. The voice of Murray, above all, was encouraging, and to Borrow that was the voice of the “Mæcenas of British literature.” In spite of occasional difficulties, he held Mr. Murray in unfailing honour, and was proud to have his work sealed with the cachet of Albemarle Street. The close association of the Murrays with Richard Ford, whose “Handbook” was long the classic English work on Spain, had important results for Borrow. Ford was living in retirement at Heavitree, near Exeter—the haven where, half a century later, George Gissing found rest in his last days—and to him the manuscript of “The Zincali” was sent for critical observation. Ford’s knowledge of Spain was extensive and peculiar, and he immediately perceived in Borrow a man after his own heart, who preferred byways to highways, was full of curious learning, and invariably took the unconventional outlook. [112] His criticism of the book was what might have been expected. It took the form of a regret that Borrow had not given his readers more of himself “instead of the extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing about gypsies.” But, on the whole, both Murray and Ford were pleased. So were the reviewers. As to the public, they bought the work very slowly. It appeared in April, 1841, and by June only three hundred copies had been sold. Murray explained this genially by declaring that the state of politics had shed a blight over literature; no book was selling, and Borrow’s only shared the fate of the rest.

But before this a new enterprise had been designed. It was to be an account of Borrow’s personal adventures while engaged in the circulation of the Scriptures in the Peninsula. The scheme appealed strongly to Ford, and Murray thought well of it. Ford was “delighted” to know that Borrow meditated such a work. “The more odd personal adventures the better, and still more so if dramatic; that is, giving the exact conversations.” “I have given him much advice,” said Ford in a letter to Addington, “to avoid Spanish historians and poetry like prussic acid; to stick to himself, his biography, and queer adventures.” And Borrow wrote to Ford: “I shall attend to all your advice. The book will consist entirely of my personal adventures, travels, etc., in that country during five years. I met with a number of strange characters, all of whom I have introduced; the most surprising of them is my Greek servant, who accompanied me in my ride of 1,500 miles.” And again: “‘The Bible in Spain’ is a rum, very rum, mixture of gypsyism, Judaism, and missionary adventure, and I have no doubt will be greedily read.” Here was the impulse from which arose “The Bible in Spain.”

The book which gave Borrow his first and greatest vogue was a compilation based mainly on the letters he had sent home in the form of reports to the Bible Society. They were unquestionably the most remarkable reports from a literary point of view, and the most unconventional from a religious point of view, that had ever been received by the grave and reverend seniors of Earl Street. The Society had been staggered once or twice. Borrow’s confession that he was a little “superstitious,” his reference to the “prophetess” of Manzanares, his “luck”—all these were foreign phrases, and distasteful to the pundits of the Bible Society. They chid Borrow; but they put up with him until the final disruption, and now, when he applied for permission to use his letters in connection with the new book, they treated him very well. There were some episodes—the squabble with Graydon among them—for which they were not anxious to secure more publicity, a very natural feeling; but, Borrow giving assurances, they “cheerfully forwarded the letters to him.”

The relations between the Bible Society and this astounding missionary of theirs provide a quaint chapter in literary history. Throughout a great part of their intercourse with him they seem to have remained in a state of bland and childlike innocence with regard to the real character and the actual personality of their agent. They were aware of his eccentricity, but apparently blind to the causes from which the eccentricity sprang. This was the quality which gave his letters from Spain their value for the purposes of the book he now began to edit.

The year 1841 was gloomy, with bad weather and much disease. It was the year when the murrain first appeared in Great Britain and spread havoc throughout the agricultural districts. Of all men Borrow was most delicately affected by the moods of Nature round him, most sympathetically attuned—wild and fierce where Nature was fierce and wild, gentle and sunny amid fair meads in fine weather. And during this miserable year he found it hard to make progress with his writing. Next spring the change came with a rush, cold and dry, with bright days merging into a glorious summer. The country called Borrow out. He tells us that he spent most of his time riding his Arab horse “over heaths and through the green lanes of my native land,” or staying at home and fishing for big pike in the ponds near Oulton Broad, or basking in the sun. He worshipped Sidi Habismilk, and the horse worshipped his master so manifestly as almost to encourage the belief that Borrow was really a “horse-wizard.” The Arab followed him about like a dog. But this magnetism of his was not confined to horses; it was exercised equally over dogs and cats. Miss Harvey mentions that when Borrow set out from Oulton for a walk, he was often accompanied by two dogs and a cat. Grimalkin would, of course, be satisfied with much less pedestrianism than her master and the dogs, and would turn back home after a quarter of a mile or so. These diversions occupied him well into the summer. It was only when the heat and his own laziness began to remind him of sun-baked Andalusia that the big book came to his mind as a duty to be done. In actual fact, it would seem that the bulk of the manuscript was in the hands of Murray by the middle of the year in the form of a fair copy made by Mrs. Borrow from the letters and from the new connecting links which the author scribbled, as he says, “higgledypiggledy” on the blank leaves of account-books and the backs of envelopes.

The book was published in December, 1842, and dated 1843. Ford, whose interest in it was continuous, had given Borrow much advice; he prophesied success. “Avoid words; stick to deeds,” was his counsel. There should be no “fine writing,” but plenty of wild adventure, “journals . . . sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, rambles, and the interior of Spanish prisons.” Borrow was to “avoid rant and cant. Dialogues always tell; they are dramatic, and give an air of reality.” With how much fidelity Borrow followed this advice needs no emphasis. How accurate was Ford’s diagnosis of the public taste the sequel demonstrates.

There was a loud chorus of praise from the literary papers. Those who had approved “The Zincali” called their readers to witness how they had unerringly detected the trail of true genius. The Athenæum and the Examiner led the way. Ford wrote a pæan in the Edinburgh; the Quarterly was sorry it had overlooked the “Gypsies,” but made up for the omission by its reception of “The Bible.” The author became the lion of the hour; visiting London, he was fêted with ambassadors and “princes and members of Parliament,” as he wrote to his wife. “On Saturday night I went to a grand soirée, and the people came in throngs to be introduced to me. To-night I am going to the Bishop of Norwich, to-morrow to another place, and so on.” He was overwhelmed with congratulations from private friends, among whose letters those of Hasfeldt from St. Petersburg gave him most pleasure. Six editions of the book were sold in England before the end of the year; it was pirated in America by three houses; it was translated into French, German, and Russian. Borrow was the most scintillating star in the literary firmament of 1843.

The book deserved its success. It has all the Borrovian merits and few of the Borrovian defects. There is the charm of the wonderful style, which is no style at all, the crisp sentence, the unexpected epithet, the penetrating phrase, jumpy and abrupt, but compelling the reader to take the jump and make the sudden halt because it is the only thing to do. There is the astonishing variety of adventure, of character, of colour, of scene, the wealth of incident, the compelling force of narrative. Ford said that Borrow “sometimes put him in mind of Gil Blas; [118] but he had not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor did he gild the bad.” There was, he added, a touch of Bunyan in the way in which, like that enthusiastic tinker, he hammered away at the Devil, or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. It was, in fine, such a book as had never been placed in the hands of the public which now read it with tremendous avidity—the public interested in foreign missions, in the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts—in a word, “the religious world.” “The Bible in Spain” coloured with all the hues of romance the great work of disseminating the Scriptures; it introduced them to new people and to new scenes; it candied the villainies of gypsies with the frosted sugar of evangelical effort, and if it recited strange things of superstitious papists and dubious prophetesses, was not the guide who introduced these matters to them “a devout agent of the Bible Society,” whose end justified all the means he sought? The “polyglot gentleman” was the most piquant sensation that had ever made its way into thousands of English drawing-rooms.

It was obvious that so great a success must be followed up, and “The Bible in Spain” was hardly in the press before Borrow was pondering a scheme for a book to follow it. For many reasons, the matter was long in maturing. The chief of them, probably, was Borrow’s health. As he grew older, his innate melancholy deepened into hypochondria, from which he emerged occasionally with fits of high-strung merriment. At forty years of age he had lived three ordinary lives. He was irritable and eccentric, the irresponsible victim of megrims. Success did not sweeten life for him. While he was the literary lion of London, he growled at those who fêted and flattered him as though he would devour them. He was certainly an admirer of George Borrow himself, and he was not displeased with the flattery; but it left him unsatisfied. Hasfeldt, with whom he still corresponded, noted his unrest, rallied him, tried to cheer him, adjuring him to philosophy. But the lack of peace was the effect of a deeper cause than Hasfeldt’s friendly soul could divine; deeper than Borrow himself could plumb.

“I did very wrong not to bring you when I came” (so he wrote to his wife from London, when at the zenith of his social success and at the nadir of mental and spiritual tribulation), “for without you I cannot get on at all. Left to myself, a gloom comes upon me which I cannot describe. . . . My place seems to be in our own dear cottage, where, with your help, I hope to prepare for a better world. . . . The poor bird when in trouble has no one to fly to but his mate.”

His condition displayed itself in ridiculous quarrels with his neighbours, particularly about the conflicts in which their dogs were involved. It was characteristic of Borrow that he would never admit his own dog to be in the wrong. One dispute is set out by Dr. Knapp in a formal correspondence with the vicar of Oulton. The parson described the Borrow dog as “a beast of a very quarrelsome and savage disposition.” Borrow retorted that the animal was “a harmless house-dog.” The last passage of Borrow’s last letter on the subject was:

“Circumstances over which Mr. Borrow at present has no control will occasionally bring him and his family under the same roof with Mr. Denniss; that roof, however, is the roof of the House of God, and the prayers of the Church of England are wholesome from whatever mouth they may proceed.”

He became absolutely furious when a railway was taken through his estate and past his house by one of the schemes of Sir Morton Peto.

It was in this temper that he began the book which was to stir generations into controversy, to arouse bitter criticism and tremendous recrimination, to destroy for his lifetime the literary reputation that Borrow had earned—the book destined, in the irony of fate, to be that upon which such share of immortality as Borrow possesses will probably rest.

“Lavengro” passed through many mutations while it was planning and writing. The idea of an autobiography had been suggested by Ford, who wanted him to publish his “whole adventures for the last twenty years,” describing the countries he had visited, discussing the languages he knew, and treating of the people he had lived with. The “reader” who had pronounced judgment for Murray upon the manuscript of “The Bible in Spain” had thought it would be well to prefix to that narrative some pages of autobiographical matter. These hints fructified early, for “The Bible” had hardly issued from the press before he was suggesting to Murray another book: “Capital subject: early life, studies and adventures; some account of my father, William Taylor, Whiter, Big Ben, etc. etc.”

His first plan was more coherent and more comprehensive than the book in its published form; it was to be an actual autobiography in three volumes, the first to take him to the time of his father’s death, the second to describe his literary life in London and his adventures on the road, and to proceed to his travels abroad; the third to give his adventures in Russia and carry him through a journey in Barbary and Turkey, which yet remained to be undertaken. The first part of the scheme was faithfully carried out, though Borrow wrote very slowly. Throughout the early correspondence on the subject with Murray, he referred to the book as “My Life: A Drama.” It was not till October, 1843, that he mentioned the title “Lavengro: A Biography.” Next month he told Murray that he had reached his Irish experiences. “I am now in a blacksmith’s shop in the south of Ireland, taking lessons from the Vulcan in horse-charming and horse-shoe making.” In January, 1844, he described it in a letter to Dawson Turner, of Yarmouth, the collector of manuscripts, as “a kind of biography in the Robinson Crusoe style.” There was much more difficulty in stringing together the “Lavengro” episodes than in editing the letters from Spain. He was writing from memory of matters twenty or thirty years old, not visualising recent travels with the assistance of documents made on the spot. Further, he laboured under a sense of the necessity for doing something specially fine in order that his new book might not endanger the reputation he had obtained with his last. “People will expect so much,” he wrote to Murray. “I go on . . . scribbling away, though with a palpitating heart.” Ford, who visited him at Oulton (January, 1844), was enthusiastic about the book, but disapproved of Borrow’s scheme for dropping several years (“the veiled period”—1826 to 1833): “I shall be most anxious,” he wrote, “to hear you tell your own story and recent adventures; but first let us lift up a corner of the curtain over those seven years.” Borrow was enthusiastic, too, in the intervals of sunshine that lit up his melancholy life. “‘Lavengro’ progresses steadily, but I am in no hurry. It is my third book. Hitherto the public has said: ‘Good! Better!’ I want it to say to No. 3, ‘Best!’”

It was remarkable that he had been content to remain four years at Oulton, even though the monotony was varied by occasional visits to London and tours through East Anglia on his Arab horse. The wandering spirit which possessed him from the cradle to the grave had been suppressed with difficulty, and by the aid of circumstances which were inimical to schemes of travel and adventure. It was not for lack of effort on Borrow’s part that he did not spend those years in going up and down the world and to and fro in it. He had hardly begun “The Bible in Spain” before he was recommencing the kind of campaign which marked the early ’thirties—worrying Lord Clarendon to get him made a consul or to engage him in some work abroad for the Government. Lord Clarendon politely told him that it was “quite hopeless” to ask Palmerston for a consulship; and apparently Borrow was unable to make any definite suggestion for the useful employment of his philological learning in any travelling commission on behalf of the nation. These schemes dropped; he had dreams of settling in Berlin, and others, provoked by Hasfeldt, of studying the sagas in Copenhagen; they were succeeded by visions of travel in North Africa, in search of the wandering sect of the Dar-Bushi-Fal and the witch-hamlet, Char Seharra, to which there are mysterious references in the sixth chapter of “The Zincali.” But none of these enterprises came to a head, and he performed the uncongenial role of a stay-at-home till, having worked just over a year upon the manuscript of “Lavengro,” he suddenly determined to take a prolonged tour abroad. Starting on April 23rd, 1843, he proceeded by way of Paris to Strasburg and Vienna, travelled through Hungary, Transylvania, and Rumania to Bucharest, across the Danube, and from Rustchuk to Constantinople, where he was in September. Thence he went to Salonika, through Thessaly and Albania to Prevesa, afterwards visiting Corfu and Venice, returning by Rome, Marseilles, Paris, and Havre to London, which he reached in the middle of November. Dr. Knapp gives the itinerary. This is one of the few expeditions of which Borrow left no records save those worked into late editions of “The Zincali” and into the Hungarian’s narrative in “The Romany Rye.”

Having satiated his roving demon for a time, Borrow returned to Oulton and resumed work upon “Lavengro.” By this time he had completed the first volume, covering the period to his father’s death, which is the most authentically autobiographical part of the book. Henceforward his plans underwent a gradual change, and ultimately the original scheme went completely adrift. Borrow was tossed about in the eddies of his passions and prejudices as a cork in a whirlpool. “Lavengro” took charge of him. Progress seemed to be slower than ever; the work dragged more desperately as the departure from the first plan grew more marked.

He took some consolation in the visit of Ford, already mentioned. “I am here,” wrote Ford from Oulton Hall, “on a visit to El Gitano: two rum coves in a queer country.” And he gives, in a letter to Addington (January 26th, 1844), a delicious picture of the place and their pursuits:

“This is a regular Patmos, an ultima Thule, placed in an angle of the most unvisited, out-of-the-way portion of England. His house hangs over a lonely lake covered with wild fowl, and is girt with dark firs, through which the wind sighs sadly. However, we defy the elements, and chat over las cosas de Espana, and he tells me portions of his life, more strange even than his book. We scamper by day over the country in a sort of gig, which reminds me of Mr. Weare on his trip with Mr. Thurtell (Borrow’s old preceptor). ‘Sidi Habismilk’ is in the stable and a zamarra now before me, writing as I am in a sort of summer-house, called La Mezquita, in which El Gitano concocts his lucubrations, and paints his pictures, for his object is to colour up and poetise his adventures.”

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

“An Batuscha,—I have got your letter, which I should have answered sooner had I not been to Yarmouth—not, however, to the house of the Armenian. Thank you for the pheasants and the caviare which you were kind enough to send. Almost as soon as I got back from Norwich the weather became disagreeable—a strange jumble of frost, fog, and wet. I am glad that during your stay there it has been a little more favourable. My wife is better, and left her room, but poor Henrietta is in bed with the same complaint. I still keep up, but not exactly the thing. You can’t think how I miss you in our chats by the fireside. The wine, now I am alone, has lost its flavour, and the cigar makes me ill. I am very frequently by the Valley of the Shadow, and, had I not summers and jaunts to look forward to, I am afraid it would be all up with your friend, su Batuscha.

“I still go on with my life, but slowly, lazily. What I write is, however, good. I feel it is good: strange and wild as it is. I expect to be in London by the beginning of March, and hope there to write your review [126b] and receive a cheque from Murray to the tune of some hundreds. The colt is, however, not bought yet. My wife has set her face against it, and at present I do not like to press the matter. She is in delicate health, and believes she has dreamt it would either kill her or me. At present I may truly call myself el necio de la casa, pero veremos vir. She much regrets not having seen you.

“When I go to London upon whom would you advise me to call? Who is worth knowing? Now that the old man is dead, I am afraid that a certain street will not be quite so agreeable as it was. Did the gypsies tell you where they lived? If I knew I would go and visit them. I suppose somewhere about Tottenham Court.

“As I returned from Norwich I stopped at Thurton and tasted the wine. It was really good. When you are next past that way you must taste it yourself, and give me your opinion. I hope . . . having found your way to these parts you will frequently favour us with your company. God bless you. Ever yours,

“George Borrow.

“Muchismas espresiones de la parti de mi esposa y de la Henriqueta.”

Note.—The correspondence with Mr. Murray, to which reference is made in this chapter, and some of Ford’s letters should be consulted in Dr. Knapp. Ford’s letters to Addington are reproduced in Mr. Rowland Prothero’s collection (Murray, 1905).

CHAPTER VII
“LAVENGRO” AND HIS CRITICS

At this period Borrow suffered frequently from attacks of melancholia; little vexations upset him terribly. He was more than once assaulted by roughs while on his way home to Oulton from Lowestoft, and the remedy that occurred to him was that he should be made a magistrate so that he might take short measures with the ruffians who infested the woods. He applied in various quarters for this appointment. But the Whigs were in and Borrow was a Tory. Neither the influence of Lockhart nor the admiration which Gladstone entertained for “The Bible in Spain” sufficed to prevail against the eternal principle of “the spoils to the victors.”

In connection with this episode, as may be imagined, several persons were placed upon Borrow’s index. Lockhart himself soon got there. When Ford’s “Handbook for Spain” appeared, the author was exceedingly anxious that Borrow should write the article on it for the Quarterly Review. No man could have done it with ampler knowledge or invested it with more absorbing interest than “El Gitano,” as Lockhart dubbed him in the correspondence on the subject. But the essay Borrow produced, written in ill-health, and betraying all the evidences of a jaundiced and embittered mind, was in no sense a review of Ford’s book. It was a long screed against those persons and tendencies in Spanish politics that aroused his ire. The extract given by Dr. Knapp is in the very best invective style of the Appendix. Lockhart behaved exceedingly well in the matter. He would publish the article in the Quarterly if Borrow would permit him to insert extracts from Ford’s book in suitable places, so that the reader might be able to obtain some glimmering of the author’s style and subject. Borrow petulantly replied that he would not have the paper tampered with. Lockhart then very properly exercised his editorial authority, and refused to publish it. He softened the decision by suggesting that Borrow’s work would make an admirable magazine article, mentioning periodicals that would be glad to have it. The suggestion was not adopted, the article remained in proof-sheet in the hands of Murray, and Lockhart was numbered among the increasing army of Borrow’s mortal enemies. It was an unhappy sequel to this incident that the friendship between Ford and Borrow cooled off, and their intercourse ceased altogether a few years later—by no desire of Ford’s, as the correspondence shows.

More trouble arose from the obscure dispute with Bowring, in which Borrow accused him of palming off upon the House of Commons as his own the Manchu-Tartar version of the Scriptures that Borrow had printed at St. Petersburg, in order to get for himself the consulship at Canton, while at the same time affecting to promote the candidature of Borrow for the post. To any impartial mind the evidence in favour of this theory is scanty, and the theory itself improbable. That Borrow believed it there can be no doubt; it tinged his life with added gall and wormwood, and helped to divert the course and purpose of his book. A further grievance was the failure of the British Museum trustees to get the funds for a mission to the Convent of St. Catharine on Sinai in search of the manuscript of the fourth-century Greek Testament, afterwards acquired by Tischendorf for Alexander II. of Russia. But it would be tiresome to follow all the convolutions of Borrow’s tempers and jealousies throughout these troubled years. They are amply reflected in many portions of the literary work he was doing.

Time drifted, and it was 1848 before Murray could make a definite announcement about “Lavengro.” In that year appeared in his “list of new works in preparation” the following:—“‘Lavengro’: An Autobiography. By George Borrow, author of ‘The Bible in Spain,’ etc. 3 vols., post 8vo.” In October the first volume went to press, and then there was more vacillation about the title of the book. It was advertised in the Quarterly Review and the Athenæum in November, and December as “Life: A Drama.” That form was immediately dropped. Borrow was taken ill and work ceased. In July, 1849, the old advertisement describing it as an autobiography was restored, though we well know now that by this time it had ceased to be autobiographical in the conventional sense. Finally the pangs of labour ended with the year 1850, and “Lavengro—The Scholar—The Gypsy—The Priest” was delivered to the reading world and to the tender mercies of the critics in February, 1851.

It will be seen that the autobiographical claim was abandoned at the last. In the preface, which he accomplished just in time to get it to press, Borrow modified his description of the book: “In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe a Dream.” Later he denied that he ever said it was an autobiography, or that he ever authorised anybody else to say it was; this in spite of the advertisements quoted above, and of the general impression he had allowed to be created that he was writing an account of his life.

Yet, in fact, “Lavengro” is little else. It followed faithfully the original plan throughout the first volume. Then came Borrow’s journey in the East and his return to accumulate hatreds, nurse revenges, and conduct wordy war with the battalions of his imaginary foes. And, in order to vent his spleen upon them, he deliberately altered the tenour of his book. The episodes of travel on the English roads were already protracting themselves beyond manageable length when events occurred that determined him to reject the whole scheme of the two remaining volumes first designed, and to extend these episodes still further so as to drag in some of his pet aversions and exhibit them in a disgraceful or ridiculous light. Particularly did he pour forth the vials of his wrath upon Bowring, the Old Radical, inserting the incident of the postilion and his story specially for the purpose.

But while Borrow was down in the summer-house at Oulton writing marvellous pages on odd scraps of paper, probing profound depths of speculation, and rising to the dizziest heights of natural eloquence, while he allowed himself to be possessed and fascinated by the gypsies and the jockeys, the tramps and the wastrels, the thimble-engroes and the pugilists, and all the weird company that defile through the haunting pages of his book, while the development of Catholic missions in England diverted his ultra-Protestant mind to the machinations of mythical Jesuits and gave him the figure of the Man in Black; while he piled rage and scorn upon the devoted head of John Bowring, who added to his other sins against the Borrovian covenant a characteristically Unitarian indifference to the “No Popery” cry [132]—all this time “Lavengro” was not making much progress with his life, the publisher was appealing to him to hurry, and the hungry printer was sending up pitiable cries for “copy.” Borrow, having gone off on a branch line, utterly declined to return. He had occupied nearly two volumes in describing the events of a few months—from his descent upon London and Sir Richard Phillips to his sojourn in Mumper’s Dell. He was in the middle of the postilion’s story, wherein the Old Radical was receiving his shrewdest knocks, when Murray issued his ultimatum, and Mrs. Borrow was despatched to London with the last of the manuscript (November, 1850). He had been obliged to break off abruptly, for Murray threatened, if the book were not finished there and then, to “throw it up.” Promising himself to complete the narrative in a sequel, Borrow left “Lavengro” as we have it now. The reviewers and the reading world, instead of the autobiography in common form which they had been led to expect, received a picaresque hotch-potch about which the best they could find to say was that it was “remarkable.”

The almost unanimous verdict of the critics was highly unfavourable. The Athenæum (whose review was written by Dilke) spoke of the warm expectations that had been raised and the great disappointment that was felt; Fraser, in which William Stirling (Sir William Stirling-Maxwell) discussed it, was vigorously satirical about Borrow’s trivial mystifications, his dashes, dots, and asterisks; Blackwood was “sick of the Petulengros and their jargon,” and its reviewer acutely perceived the internal evidence of the changes in plan and disposition which had been made while the work was in progress. The two persons who found anything good to say about the book were friends of Borrow—Dr. Gordon Hake and Mr. W. B. Donne. It is curious that these were the only reviewers who displayed much prescience in their criticism. Hake took the bold course of prophecy: “Lavengro’s” roots, he said, would strike deep into the soil of English letters. Donne perceived that, as he said, the public had been looking for a second Marco Polo, and were presented instead with a nineteenth-century Defoe.

In spite, however, of all that could be said in its favour, the public would have none of “Lavengro.” Three thousand copies of the first edition were printed. Notwithstanding Murray’s confident prophecy that it would find a ready sale, it fell almost lifeless, and twenty-one years passed before another edition was called for. It is a little difficult to understand the attitude of the public and the Press towards a work which, in spite of its obvious faults, is one of the most virile and most entrancing works of English literature. The true explanation is to be found in the theory suggested by Mr. Watts-Dunton. “Lavengro” was a complete failure, he said, and its reception by the Press, the accusations of “lowness and vulgarity,” embittered Borrow. Why was it that the public of that day considered such books as “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” to be low and vulgar? The fact was that “Lavengro,” issuing forth in the year of the great Exhibition, made its bow before the most genteel and most philistine age of Victorian literature. A writer hardly dared to admit that a man was a man or a woman a woman. We have arrived at the other extreme in the process of emancipating ourselves from philistinism, and there is no excuse in Art or Nature for many of the books written and published at the present time. But the reception of “Lavengro” was largely due to the mawkish sentiment against which Borrow hysterically declaimed as “gentility-nonsense,” and we have fortunately outgrown it. In time readers came to see the extraordinary merits of Borrow’s books; they bought them as they were re-issued, read them, liked them, and will go on reading and liking them. Gypsyism has, in fact, become popular in the genteelest circles.

Many years ago Mr. Watts-Dunton succeeded in throwing a gleam of light upon Borrow’s own view of the work. He tells us how, when they were discussing the question of the real nature of autobiography, Borrow exclaimed, “What is an autobiography? Is it a mere record of the incidents of a man’s life, or is it a picture of the man himself—his character, his soul?” And Mr. Watts-Dunton adds observations applying the inference to Borrow’s book. He points out what we have already seen—that he sat down to write his own life in “Lavengro,” and that in the first volume he did almost confine himself to matters of fact. “But, as he went on, he clearly found that the ordinary tapestry into which destiny had woven the incidents of his life was not tinged with sufficient depth of colour to satisfy his sense of wonder. When he wishes to dive very boldly into the ‘abysmal deeps of personality,’ he speaks and moves partly behind the mask of some fictitious character.” “Let it be remembered,” says Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that it was this instinct of wonder, not the instinct of the mere poseur, that impelled him to make certain exaggerated statements about the characters themselves that are introduced into his books.”

This view of the eccentricities and purple patches of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” is interesting, and certainly just to a point. It does not account for the whole of the leaps that Borrow took in one direction and another; it does not explain Mr. Platitude, or the Man in Black, or the Old Radical. The reason for their creation has been already stated. The “instinct of wonder,” the Celtic imagination, now brooding, now soaring, does, however, explain much in the books that cannot be explained by reference to actual facts of the author’s career, and does justify in a sense his theory of autobiography—that the truest self-revelation may be found not so much in the mere recital of bare facts as in the impression of the form of his thought, and in the reflection of the colours that glow in his soul.

If the year of the great Exhibition was an unfortunate year for the commercial fortunes of “Lavengro,” the Exhibition itself had certain irresistible attractions for “Lavengro’s” author. It had drawn to London a large congregation of the peoples of the earth, and the thought that in Hyde Park twenty languages were chiming a rare cacophony was too much for him. He went off to town to see the show, taking his step-daughter with him. The tall man with the white hair, striding about under the glass roof, soon began to create a minor sensation, which was by no means to the liking of Miss Clarke. To see a group of foreigners in converse was enough for him. He went up to them and addressed them in their own tongue, and repeated the process so often that it began to be whispered about that he was “uncanny,” and he excited so much remark that his daughter thought it better to drag him away.

While Borrow was at Oulton struggling with the composition of “Lavengro,” quarrelling with the vicar, denouncing Sir Morton Peto, procrastinating with his publisher, and passing some of the most miserable, if the most fruitful years of his life, he made an acquaintance which ripened into an important and valuable friendship. The Misses Harvey introduced the Borrows to Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, then resident as a physician at Bury St. Edmund’s—the friendly critic of “Lavengro” already mentioned. Visits were paid and repaid by the two families at Bury and at Oulton, and a close association and familiarity grew up. Dr. Hake thus becomes one of the most trustworthy and most interesting authorities on this portion of Borrow’s life, and relates many exceedingly suggestive stories illustrating the varied and strangely contradictory phases of Borrow’s character. His sketch of the personality of his friend, inscribed in his “Memoirs,” has often been quoted. Its principal value is that it brings out with the authority of a medical man the cause of much that frequently seems inexplicable in Borrow—his native hypochondria, and the reason for his violent antipathy towards society, and especially “genteel” society: “Society he loved and hated alike; he loved it that he might be pointed out and talked of; he hated it because he was not the prince he felt himself in its midst.” I refer again in this connection to the view proffered to me by Mr. Watts-Dunton, gleaned from intercourse with Borrow at a later period of his life, that his denunciation of respectability and “gentility-nonsense” was simply by way of revenge upon the Philistines; that he loved real respectability and good repute, worshipped fame and success, and equally hated insignificance and failure.

Dr. Hake’s anecdotes illustrate his impatience of much of the kind of fame and notice he attracted, the outbursts of violence with which he greeted people who did not appeal to him, and the intensity of his egoism. Poor Agnes Strickland was anxious to be introduced to him, and, after expressing her great admiration of his books, she begged to be allowed to send him a copy of her “Queens of England.” Borrow cried, “For God’s sake don’t, madam; I should not know what to do with them.” And, getting up, he said to Mr. Donne, of the London Library, who had introduced the ill-assorted pair, “What a d— fool that woman is!” There was Mrs. Bevan, the wife of the Suffolk banker, with whom he went to dine, Dr. Hake being of the company. Borrow knew that the bank had dealt, as he thought, rigorously with a friend who was in financial straits. Mrs. Bevan, who, of course, had no responsibility in this matter, sat next to Borrow at dinner. Dr. Hake describes her as “a simple, unpretending woman, desirous of pleasing him,” which she sought to do by describing the pleasure with which she had read his books. “Pray, what books do you mean, madam?” said Borrow. “Do you mean my account-books?” And he rose from the table, walking up and down the room during dinner, and wandered about the house till the carriage was ordered. There was Thackeray, whom he met at Hardwicke House, in Suffolk. Thackeray ventured to ask him whether he had read the “Snob Papers” in Punch. “In Punch?” said Borrow. “It is a periodical I never look at!”

Instances of his boorishness could be multiplied, but it is sufficiently proved. Let us see what there is on the other side of the account.

There is a tale told by Mr. Ewing Ritchie [140] which illustrates the fact that Borrow thoroughly detested the practice of snubbing—when he witnessed it as a third person. A clergyman at the supper table at Oulton Hall (then let to a tenant who was a Nonconformist) made an onslaught upon a young Independent minister for holding Calvinistic opinions. The occasion of this Christian dispute was the more appropriate as they had all just returned from an undenominational meeting of the Bible Society, at which Borrow had made a speech. The minister stood up to the cleric, and told him that the Thirty-nine Articles to which he had sworn assent were Calvinistic. The reply to this was that there was a mode of explaining away the Articles: we were not bound to take the words “in their natural sense.” The young Nonconformist confessed that he did not understand that way out of the difficulty, and subsided. Then Borrow stepped into the fray, “opening fire on the clergyman,” says Mr. Ritchie, “in a very unexpected manner, and giving him such a setting-down as the hearers, at any rate, never forgot. All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms was held up by Borrow to ridicule, and the clergyman was beaten at every point.” The comment of the young minister to Mr. Ritchie was, “Never did I hear one man give another such a dressing as on that occasion.” It was very like to be tremendous when Borrow had his Protestant bonnet on and at the same time thought he saw a member of the Church he loved making himself ridiculous.

The interview between Borrow and the Rev. Whitwell Elwin has been previously mentioned (p. [52]). “What party are you in the Church?” he suddenly exclaimed to the Rector of Booton. “Tractarian, Moderate, or Evangelical? I am happy to say I am the old High.” “I am happy to say I am not,” replied Elwin. A conversation thus begun with unpromising differences of opinion about the ethics of review-writing, and continued in an atmosphere of theological disputation, would ordinarily have ended in a violent quarrel. Borrow must have been in an especially benignant mood that day, for he allowed Elwin to throw aspersions upon his pronunciation of the Norfolk dialect, and yet did not bring the séance to a conclusion with lightning in his eyes, thunder on his brows, and storms of invective flowing from his eloquent tongue. “Borrow boasted,” says Elwin, “of his proficiency in the Norfolk dialect, which he endeavoured to speak as broadly as possible. I told him that he had not cultivated it with his usual success.” But the clouds cleared, the protagonists became warm friends, and promised to visit each other. It does not appear that Elwin ever went to Oulton, but Borrow did go to Booton, exerted himself to please his hosts by calling upon his stores of anecdote and adventure, and entranced the children of the rectory by singing gypsy songs to them. It will be remembered that Elwin was then editing the Quarterly Review as deputy for Lockhart. He begged Borrow to “try his hand at an article for the Review.” But Borrow was far too sore with reviews and reviewers to entertain such a proposal; the incident of Ford’s “Handbook,” too, was recent. “Never!” he cried. “I have made a resolution never to have anything to do with such a blackguard trade!”

The Booton episode is related mainly because it offers an opportunity of referring to a trait of Borrow which has been the subject of strange misrepresentation. Dr. Jessopp wrote for the Daily Chronicle [142] a review of a new edition of “The Romany Rye,” in which the following remarkable passage occurred:

“Of anything like animal passion there is not a trace in all his many volumes. Not a hint that he ever kissed a woman or ever took a little child upon his knee. He was beardless; his voice was not the voice of a man. His outbursts of wrath never translated themselves into uncontrollable acts of violence; they showed themselves in all the rancorous hatred that could be put into words—the fire smouldered in that sad heart of his. Those big bones and huge muscles and the strong brain were never to be reproduced in an offspring to be proud of. How if he were the Narses of literature—one who could be only what he was, though we are always inclined to lament that he was not something more?”

One does not care to discuss the principal suggestion here involved, save to say that there is not a tittle of evidence to support it, that it cannot be believed by any student of some of the most robust and most virile works in the English language, and that the alleged facts upon which it is based have been categorically contradicted by Mr. Thomas Hake (the eldest son of Dr. Gordon Hake) in an interesting letter to Mr. Watts-Dunton. [143] This gentleman, the author of several novels, who knew more of Borrow than anyone else, must not be confounded with his younger brother, Mr. Egmont Hake (mentioned on page [8]), the well-known author of “The Story of Chinese Gordon.” It will be a great pity if Mr. Thomas Hake does not give us his reminiscences of the author of “Lavengro.” One point, however, of Dr. Jessopp’s impeachment of Borrow may be taken up without offence. There is not a hint, says Dr. Jessopp, that Borrow “ever kissed a woman or ever took a little child upon his knee.” It is a new demand upon biographers that they shall record, even by way of hint, the osculatory adventures of their heroes, and possibly the best reply is that there is certainly no hint that he never kissed a woman, and there is plenty of testimony to the fact that he was no misogynist. But if a hint will suffice it may be found in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s account of the conversation between them and the gypsy woman Perpinia, whom he warned against smoking tobacco while she was suckling an infant: “It ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,” growled Borrow. “Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale tobacco—pheugh!” The inference is so obvious that one need not pursue the argument by inversion of the story. When one comes to Dr. Jessopp’s picture of Borrow in his relation to children, however, there is a large quantity of direct evidence gathered from many quarters which proves it to be erroneous. Mr. Thomas Hake, in the letter just cited, says:

“When our family lived at Bury St. Edmund’s in the ’fifties, my father, as you know, was one of Borrow’s most intimate friends, and he was frequently at our house, and Borrow and my father were a good deal in correspondence (as Dr. Knapp’s book shows), and my impression of Borrow is exactly the contrary of that which it would be if he in the least resembled Dr. Jessopp’s description of him. At that time George was in the nursery and I was a child. He took a wonderfully kind interest in us all . . . but the one he took most notice of was George, chiefly because he was a very massive child. It was then that he playfully christened him ‘Hales,’ because he said that the child would develop into a second ‘Norfolk giant.’ You will remember that he always addressed George by that name.”

The truth is that Borrow was exceedingly fond of children. He appealed strongly to them. No such impression as he made upon the Elwin children at Booton, upon the boys of Dr. Gordon Hake’s family at Bury, upon the Cornish children he encountered in 1854 (p. [170]), was ever made by a man who did not understand children and sympathise with them.

The chronicle to the end of 1853 may be very briefly recounted. Borrow’s mother had been persuaded in 1849 to leave the house in Willow Lane, Norwich, where she had lived alone ever since his departure for St. Petersburg, and take up her quarters with the family at Oulton. In the midst of the writing of “The Romany Rye” in 1853, Dr. Hake ordered Borrow’s wife not to remain at Oulton during the coming winter. Borrow himself welcomed the prospect of a change, and in August he and the three women of his household removed to Yarmouth, where they lived in lodgings for seven years, except when they were engaged in the excursions which he presently organised in various parts of the United Kingdom.

CHAPTER VIII
“SUCCESS TO OLD CORNWALL!”

Borrow’s only journey to the land of mystery and legend from which his family sprang was made in 1853. It came about curiously. An incident occurred, soon after he had taken up his residence in lodgings at Yarmouth, which demonstrated both his personal courage and the easy terms on which he always was with the water. [146] In the midst of a terrible storm he dashed into the sea, himself saved one life from an overturned boat, and assisted to rescue the rest of the people in danger. He became the local hero of the hour, and an account of his gallantry was printed in the Bury Post.

The Borrows of Cornwall had been mainly a home-keeping race. The connection of George’s branch with the parent stem had been completely severed half a century before, and the inhabitants of the Caradon Hills had altogether lost sight of old Tom Borrow and his life. Now, however, the Plymouth Mail reprinted from the Bury paper a paragraph about the Yarmouth affair, and in process of time it was read at St. Cleer. The appearance of a person by the name of Borrow in this heroic shape was discussed with curiosity. Putting two and two together, the Cornishmen came to the conclusion that this celebrated author and saviour of drowning men could be none other than the son of that Tom Borrow whose claim to fame among them was that he had knocked down the headborough at Menheniot Fair.

Many of the name were in the district. Henry Borrow, of Looe Down, was a son of another Henry, George’s uncle, and therefore a cousin of the Romany Rye. Henry had a daughter, Ann, married to Mr. Robert Taylor, of Penquite, a person of some consideration in the locality. The upshot of the discussion was that Mr. Taylor was requisitioned by the rest of the family to invite the celebrity to Cornwall. In a letter of acceptance, Borrow expressed the pleasure it gave him to receive such an invitation, and the delight he felt in knowing that there were still some who remembered his honoured father, who, he said, had as true a Cornish heart as ever beat.

Thus he spent the Christmas of 1853 in the county of which he was in the truest sense native; and of this atmosphere, most genial to him, he breathed eagerly. Borrow never accomplished the book he proposed to write about Cornwall. An advertisement of it was published at the end of “The Romany Rye,” when he was fresh home from his visit and full of the romance he had absorbed in the westernmost peninsula of England. But, like many of his plans, it failed to come to anything. If it had been written, it would probably have been as full of good things as his Welsh book, and a better whole, since it was a smaller and more manageable subject. It will be possible presently to attempt to indicate the kind of work this might have been.

He left Yarmouth on December 23rd, and, this time not disdaining the services of the detested railway, was able to reach Plymouth at midnight. In that day Plymouth was the western terminus of the railway system. Brunel’s great bridge, which carries the iron road at a dizzy altitude across the Tamar from Devonshire into Cornwall, was not raised till six years later, and people who adventured into the land of giants and saints, pilchards and pasties, must complete their journey by coach. Having slept a night at the Royal Hotel in Plymouth, Borrow found that the Christmas traffic had crowded the coach, and he arrived at the Borrovian determination to walk to Liskeard, on the main road eighteen miles away, the nearest town to his objective among the hills. Leaving his luggage to be carried on by the mail, he “threw his cloak on his arm (a very old friend which had seen some thirty years’ service, the constant companion of his travels”), and trudged off to Devonport, across the Tamar by the ferry, and along the enchanting sylvan highway to the town whose representative in Parliament was just then laying about the “Puseyites” in a fashion most agreeable to Borrow.

There was a little stir in the bookish circles of the old Cornish borough among whom Mr. Taylor had spread the news that Borrow was coming, and a small party assembled to meet him and lionise him. These were drawn up under the porch of Webb’s Hotel as the huge figure strode into view. There was the ex-Mayor, Mr. Bernard Anstis. There was the Town Clerk, Mr. James Jago, a connection of the Borrows by marriage. There were his own relations. Happily, under these new auspices, he dropped his affectation of objection to be lionised, and took wine with his worshippers at the hotel in quite a conventional manner. Then, after tea with the Jago family, he and Taylor mounted horseback and rode off to Penquite, four miles away, to spend an old-style rural Christmas. “A hospitable reception, with a log on the fire” was Borrow’s own word for it—a brief but hearty tribute to the effect it had upon him. On Christmas Day he walked from Penquite to St. Cleer Church, about which his notebooks mention that it lacked an organ (as it does to this day), but that there was a fiddler in the gallery. Returning over the noble expanse of St. Cleer Down, he was introduced to a family of relations by marriage—the Pollards—and in the afternoon walked to their residence at Woolston to have lively talk of travel with two sons who had been in Australia, and to discuss the prehistoric memorials of the district, which he describes as “Druid stones.” All the Borrows have left St. Cleer, but the Pollards are in possession of Penquite.

It may seem that one lingers over the details of a visit which was but a small incident in Borrow’s life. The excuse must be offered that, if one could but penetrate the mystery of what may be called the Spirit of Old Cornwall, one would be in possession of the key to much that is mysterious in Borrow. He had inherited it fully, and it shaped many of his most pronounced characteristics. Here, if anywhere and at any time, he was at home—far more at home than his father had ever been; what freak of atavism may not account for that? Where eyes look out upon a world of wonder and of miracle, where even yet magic and supernatural intervention have their sway in that world’s affairs, and there is an underworld of faery, where strange Celtic words are of common use and wont, the philological, legend-loving wanderer was in a fitting atmosphere.

Not many people remain in Cornwall now who can remember Borrow, but a few years ago I found memories of the man and his eccentricities still lively among old inhabitants. Borrow amazed them not only by his personal peculiarities, but by his intellectual superiority to “they Borrowses.” There were many Borrows round about, small farmers, excellent and worthy undistinguished people, the friends and equals of their neighbours; the staggering fact was that such a wonder, such a celebrity, such a walking encyclopædia of information on matters of which they had never heard, should have sprung from the Borrow stock. His “curious ways” were subject of remark, but his popularity rose superior to his manners: in a few short weeks he obtained a reputation for liveliness hardly second to that of his father.

I have been told that he roamed the Caradons in all weathers without a hat, in search of sport and specimens, antiquities and dialects. He often carried a gun. If a bird that fell to him dropped in a moorland pool, he would plunge in after it and come out dripping water and beaming triumph. Little parties he attended at Penquite, at the vicarage, at the houses of friends in Liskeard, were

“. . . As merry
As, first, good company, good wine, good welcome
Can make good people.”

He himself kept the fireside circle roaring with his constant flow of gypsy songs and stories. But it was an essential point that the parties should not be genteel. “Lavengro” had not long been written, and he was then engaged upon its sequel. Shortly he was to be writing—if it were not already written—that chapter of the Appendix on “gentility-nonsense.” It was, in fact, just the zenith of the anti-gentility campaign. Once he went from Penquite into Liskeard to dine with Mr. Bernard Anstis. The despiteful demon seized him at the ex-Mayor’s hospitable board. Gentility showed its cloven hoof in some form or other; in the midst of dinner Borrow protested silently against the apparition by keeping his handkerchief in his pocket and dragging out for ostentatious use the old, greasy, rust-stained, powder-grimed rag he kept about him for cleaning his gun during expeditions on the moors. He seemed, said one, now departed (John Abraham, of Liskeard), who related to me this story, to be “perpetually repeating to himself old Burton’s maxim that ‘of all vanities and fopperies, to brag of gentility is the greatest.’ Yet he was proud of the fact that his father derived from what he called the Cornish ‘gentillâtre.’” Mr. Taylor was a member of a card club in Liskeard, to which belonged the doctors and lawyers and other professional gentlemen of the town. Borrow was taken in to play cards with them. But it was far too tame for him. While they settled down to their rubber, he stole out to explore the back slums of the town, “picking up all the disreputable characters he could find, working off his knowledge of ‘cant’ on them, and getting out of them what he could.”

Borrow met at St. Cleer a kindred spirit in the vicar, Berkeley. This was an Irishman of the North—not to put too fine a point on it, an Orangeman,—a man of some pretensions to learning and a great “original,” as they might say in Cornwall. Berkeley’s militant Protestantism was quite as fierce as Borrow’s. But for a certain Irish cob, as he tells us, Borrow might have become a mere philologist. It was in Ireland that he first developed the taste for petty adventure which he now indulged to the full in the wilds of Cornwall. Here was common ground. Berkeley piled coals on the fire of his anti-Papist enthusiasm. The good vicar was, withal, convivial in disposition, exiled among a people cloaking their essential kindness under a serious demeanour, and exceedingly abstemious. He was open-hearted and open-handed when he had money, which was not always. He suffered once at the hands of ruthless bailiffs. As a burning Protestant, he was on amicable terms with the Dissenters, who formed the majority of his parishioners in Methodist Cornwall; he was a bitter enemy of Ritualism, and “Popery” was his bête noire. This piquant personality presided over the destinies of the parish of St. Cleer at a time when the fortunes of the Church of England reached their lowest ebb in Cornwall, and the Methodist societies flourished like the green bay-tree. It is related that for a considerable time the only regular attendant at church, in addition to the parson, was a schoolmaster of episcopal sympathies, who walked a mile and a half of a Sunday morning to hear Berkeley’s denunciation of the Papists echoing through an empty building.

Berkeley was one of those Irish Protestants to whom Borrow had paid tribute as a “most remarkable body of men who during two centuries have fought a good fight in Ireland in the cause of civilisation and religious truth . . . where . . . though surrounded with difficulties of every kind, they have maintained their ground; amidst darkness they have held up a lamp, and it would be well for Ireland were all her children like these, her adopted ones.” This is highly controversial ground, upon which there is no need to enter, save for the purpose of remarking that the man who had recently written that was like to be a friendly soul to Berkeley. And during his stay in Cornwall he was frequently at the vicarage. He would, as Berkeley related to Dr. Knapp in the character-sketch he reproduces, “suddenly spring from his seat and walk to and fro the room in silence; anon he would clap his hands and sing a gypsy song, or perchance would chant forth a translation of some Viking poem; after which he would sit down again and chat about his father, whose memory he revered, as he did his mother’s.” [154] He had the “Horrors” more than once. He told Berkeley that these attacks of depression were the result of the attempt made by a gypsy crone to poison him, as related in “Lavengro.” The vicar and his wife visited Penquite one evening, and found Borrow sitting, sunk in despair, by the side of a huge fire, taking no notice of person or thing. He remained wrapped in his mood of melancholy for hours, and was only roused from it when Mrs. Berkeley sat down at the piano and softly played some old Scots and Irish airs. Then, after a while, he jumped up and danced about the room, and began to shout a joyous melody. The “Horrors” had been conjured away, and he was another man. He made up for his previous obsession by giving the company liberally of his best, pouring out good stories and side-splitting anecdotes as fast as he could recite them. And, as Mrs. Berkeley was leaving the room, he said to her, “Your music was as David’s harp to my soul.”

One of the sources of Borrow’s pride in his father was his long and loyal service as a soldier; he had no respect for people who beat the sword into a ploughshare. Berkeley records his retort upon a young man who was telling how he had retired from the army because “the army was—aw—no place for a gentleman now.”

“I should judge,” said Borrow, “that it was rather the other way.”

“Aw—what do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Why, this: that the army is no place for a man who is not a gentleman, and that such a person was right in leaving it.”

Borrow was fortunate, apparently, in the occasions of some of these Johnsonian fulminations. It is not everybody who would endure the treatment so mildly as did the ex-army officer, or that latitudinarian don who is reported once to have met Borrow at Dr. Hake’s house. The pundit preached at Borrow for some time, so runs the tale, and, when he had finished, Borrow thumped the table with his fist, crying, “Sir, you’re a fool!” As Punch very justly remarked about this prodigious narrative, because the article in which it appeared was in praise of Borrow, Borrow’s rudeness was made to appear to be “the end of the don for ever . . . there was no appeal.” Yet the don probably had a case, and if the article had been in praise of him, Borrow would certainly have been made to appear the fool. He has suffered not a little from the ill-regulated enthusiasm of admirers who insist on counting his petulance and his outbursts of boorishness as his minor virtues instead of his major vices.

A quaint commentary on anecdotes of this sort is Berkeley’s assertion that Borrow often repeated to him the answer he received from an old prize-fighter in reply to the question, “What is the best way to get through life quietly?”—“Learn to box, and keep a civil tongue in your head.” Surely the most illuminating example of pure precept without example that can be unearthed in all literature. Berkeley shared the common fate of Borrow’s associates who supposed that a successful writer would care to discuss other writers. The genial vicar found how good a hater his visitor was; he displayed his spleen against the Martineaus; he foamed over the inoffensive Mrs. Stowe. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was then the fashion, and Berkeley sang its praises. Borrow showed great excitement, and presently exploded invective against “a lot of Uncle Toms and Tomfools!” When he cooled down he had the grace to apologise for his vehemence.

But in all this intercourse with the lively Orangeman, of course, Borrow is to be seen only on one side, and that not the best, of his many-sided character. It was his controversial side. Berkeley, not native, had little intimate knowledge of Cornwall. Just one fact appears in his reminiscences which may fitly bridge the gulf between these episodes and Borrow’s real adventures. He liked to pore over the register of St. Cleer Church, where the names of so many Borrows were inscribed, and one day was sent into transports of delight by the discovery of a marriage record in which the woman’s name was Jenefer—a name commoner in Cornwall aforetime than at present. “Can you not see?” he cried. “It is Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife!”

Borrow, who wrote that fine passage about Stonehenge, which has been already quoted (p. [54]), who waited for sunrise over that silent plain under the portal of giants, could not fail to be fascinated by the archæological riches of his father’s native place. Particularly was he entranced by the Trevethy Stone—alternatively “Trethevy.” Few parishes in the kingdom can boast a prehistoric structure of so elaborate a kind as this huge cromlech, few parish roads so great a store of relics of bygone art and ancient piety as the mile or so of parish road that Borrow traversed in order to reach it. It is at once the finest and the least-known cromlech in the West of England, and in a splendid state of preservation. The walls are four huge slabs of granite, only one of which has departed from the perpendicular; the roof is a fifth huge slab, in one corner of which is a round hole that has formed the theme of many a heated archæological discussion. If, as is supposed, the ancients (who without the assistance of machinery dealt with such enormous weights as these) first constructed great earthworks, and then pulled the rocks into position by rolling them up the slopes upon the trunks of fir-trees, the hole may have been used for the attachment of the ropes upon which the army of workmen hauled. Or the hole may be the work of weather, which has wrought such pixy-pranks in granite, as may be observed in the Devil’s Cheesewring not far off. The Trethevy cromlech must have been the memorial, and probably the burial-place, of some great chieftain. Whatever the grave or the cairn contained, it was, like all the other monuments of the kind, rifled ages ago, and nothing but the silent stones is left.

Borrow says of his sensations when he saw it, “A thrill came over me as I surveyed this gigantic erection.” He does not tell us what his speculations were as to the origin of the hole; but after he had climbed to the top and carefully measured every stone, he put his arm through the hole, and shouted, “Success to Old Cornwall!” He spares us the obvious comparison between the Eleusinian Mysteries and the rites of the Mên-an-tol, or holed stone, administered to Druidic neophytes.

From Penquite it was not a far cry, for a man who walked five miles in an hour with ease, to the great brown-backed hill of Caradon, seamed all along its foot with the wounds inflicted by centuries of miners. Caradon is twelve hundred feet high, and gives a wonderful prospect over two counties. From its summit, on a clear day, the Atlantic to the North and the Channel to the South are the limits of vision. Across the narrow gorge intervening strode the hat-less pedestrian of six-feet-three, looking like some nineteenth-century giant Caradon swallowing up the miles of bracken and heath, to the round hill where the Devil’s Cheesewring was piled, examining with curiosity, just below the peak, the hut of one Daniel Gumb. Gumb was no gnome, no pixy, no mythical person, as his name might almost betoken, but a veritable person in the flesh, stonemason and mathematician, who had carved in the block of granite that formed the roof of his dwelling-place a problem of Euclid. There are the squares and triangles remaining to this day to attest both his scholarship and his craft. On a heath near by, Borrow was shown three stone circles which carried his mind back three thousand years at least (Sir Norman Lockyer may be able to say how much more), “the Hurlers”—according to quaint tradition the petrified bodies of groups of profane persons who played the ancient Cornish game of hurling on a Sunday. There is one stone pillar a little distance to the south of the circles, which is said to have been the messenger who was going to St. Cleer for ale when the sudden petrifaction took place. This looks, however, like an excrescence of modern humour, probably conceived by a foreigner, since natives would joke with reluctance on such a subject. Sunday is a golfless day in Cornwall even now. Another and a less ribald version of the story was given to Borrow at Woolston. It related that while the hurlers were gathered where the three circles now are, on Cradock Moor there was a giant, who held in his hand a golden ball, which he was to throw over the tower of St. Cleer Church, and the first of the hurlers to find it was to possess it. The giant shared the fate of the other Sabbath-breakers, and is to be seen to this day on the moor in the form of “The Longstone”—an old round-headed cross.

A few miles in upon the moor to the north, Borrow twice visited the very heart and centre of Cornish romance—the lonely mountain pool of Dozmary. Set high among the wild, uncultivated hills, the pool breathes mystery. It is hundreds of feet above the river that winds down the combes: whence comes the water? The love of magical solutions for natural conundrums is deep-rooted. Colloquial opinion has held the pool in awe, reported it fathomless; and at the present day, to explain a lake at the top of a hill, with no visible intake of water, by saying it is fed from the inexhaustible reservoir of the peat in the surrounding country, is not held by some people to be facing the question adequately. But the spiritual and legendary mysteries of Dozmary were far more attractive to Borrow. It is reputed to be the original setting of two of the great legends of the world—the Passing of Arthur, and the Penance of Tregeagle.

Standing on the silver strand that belts the lake, on a moonlit night of such winter weather as Borrow found in the hills, it is easy to reconstruct the ritual of the Mort d’Arthur, either on the lines of Malory or those of Tennyson, to erect stately scenes and silent processionals, to enact the temptation of Bedivere, to select the clump of flags in which he hid the brand Excalibur, to see his three journeys to the shore, and finally to watch the whirling and flashing of the blade as it left his hand and curved over the water, where rose that arm

“Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.”

It is easy to imagine the last scene of all—Arthur coming

“Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked,
Larger than human on the frozen hills,”

the funeral barge appearing on the waters, bearing the three queens, the commencement of the voyage into the unknown, to the island valley of Avalon. By the cold moonlight the spectacle fits the frame, for all distances are magnified and the awkward corners of daylight fact are obscured by the mysterious glamour. It is not the setting Tennyson has given to the Idyll, but it mates the story as told by Malory in his re-rendering from the French. It is not far over the hills to Slaughter Bridge, where Arthur is said to have received his mortal wound in combat with Sir Mordred; it is a dozen miles or so to King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagel.

Fascinating as the great allegory is in any setting, it may be assumed, quite safely, that Borrow was even more keenly interested in the other, wilder, fiercer legend of Dozmary—the legend of Tregeagle. For, though he exclaimed his pleasure at detecting a resemblance between the names Jenefer and Guinevere in the parish records of St. Cleer, and afterwards made a journey to the Arthurian country to the north—when he passed by Caerleon on his tour through Wales, he did not turn aside to dream of the Round Table, but contented himself with mentioning Caerleon as “at one time one of the most considerable towns in Britain,” and went on to explain that whisky really was a corruption of the Erse word for water, and that meticulous accuracy would describe the fiery spirit as usquebaugh!

The Penance of Tregeagle was a very different matter. It is a variant of the universal Satanic legend. Tregeagle is a prototype of the immemorial man who makes compact with the Father of Evil, the bargain in this case being a hundred years of earthly pleasure in return for his soul immortal. The parable is an answer to the tragic question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Tregeagle was a shepherd, who, dissatisfied with his share of the good things of earth, expressed a petulant wish to possess all he could see. The Devil appeared to him in guise of Knight, arrayed in black armour, carrying a black lance, riding a black horse, accompanied by two black hounds of hell. The stranger challenged Tregeagle’s desire; for the forfeit of his soul at the end of a hundred years, he should have during those hundred years a castle and broad lands and endless riches. The shepherd accepted the terms; the Black Knight sounded his terrible horn and rode away, with the black hounds (which dominate the story in all its versions) snarling at his horse’s heels. In some form or other the dog is nearly always associated with the Satanic legend. In the Faust stories the Spirit of Evil is introduced as a dog. In “Tam o’ Shanter,”

“There sat Auld Nick in shape o’ beast,
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large.”

Upon the Devil’s departure, Tregeagle fell into a trance, and, when he awoke, the moors were changed into waving forests and verdant meadows, and on the hill where Dozmary had been stood a splendid castle. Tregeagle himself was arrayed in knightly costume, and saluted as their lord by a stately retinue.

In the course of his hundred years of prosperity all his fine stock of original sin had black and bloody development. Rapine, murder, and pillage went unchecked; he consummated his crimes by abducting the lovely virgin Goonhylda, daughter of the Earl of Cornwall, and shutting her up in the castle. Her father led an expedition to rescue her, and its arrival at Tregeagle’s gates precisely coincided with the expiration of his hundred years. And as the Earl’s messenger thundered there, the sound of the terrible horn and the sinister baying of hounds was heard; the Black Horseman came riding across the hills, calling upon Tregeagle to surrender himself, for that his bond was due.

Tregeagle, in a palsy of fear, stepped out, and was immediately stricken dead by a bolt from the black clouds that had suddenly o’erspread the scene. A storm raged, a spectre arose from the corpse of Tregeagle and fled into the murk, pursued by the grim huntsman and his hounds. When the storm had passed, the enchantment was over. Castle, forests and meadows had vanished; once more stretched the wide brown moors, glittered the surface of the pool. But Tregeagle was condemned for ever to the service of the Devil, who delights to set him Sisyphean tasks, of which the chief is to drain dry the pool of Dozmary by baling it with a limpet shell which has a hole in the bottom. Let him desist for a moment, and his torture begins; he flies shrieking before the Huntsman and his ghastly hounds. The spectre horseman and his pack are known as “The Devil and his Durdy Dogs.” The punishment of Tregeagle is only a small part of their business. They travel far and wide, not only over the moors but along the sea coasts, and their attentions are most fatal to those who happen to be abroad at night bent on deeds of evil. There is a tale of a herdsman who was on the moor of a winter’s night, and was chased by the Durdy Dogs, which came rushing down from a neighbouring tor. He could not run fast enough to escape, and just as they were close upon him he fell on his knees in prayer. Immediately the dogs stood at bay, howling ferociously. The terrible Huntsman shouted, “Bo Shrove!” (“the boy prays”), and at the word both he and his hounds vanished. [166] Similar legends of the yeth-hounds of Dartmoor are heard in Devonshire. As the black dogs hunt Tregeagle across the Cornish hills, their baying and his cries of agony are heard in lonely cottages at night. One draws closer to the chimney-corner as the wind pelts moaning athwart the waste, when this tradition is related to him by firelight in one of the crofts near by. Crying children are told that they are “roarin’ an’ howlin’ like Tregeagle.”

Borrow was deeply interested, not only in these larger legends of world-celebrity, but in the purely local folklore, the pixy stories of the peasantry. The Cornish pixies—or “piskies,” to use the vernacular—are diminutive fairies, generally dressed in green, very fond of mirth and mischief, some bad, but most good. They mislead men at night, for fun; then the only way to break the spell is for the victim to turn his coat inside out. They play practical jokes; they resemble, now Will o’ the Wisp, now the Scottish brownie, and again Robin Goodfellow; when properly propitiated they sometimes make gifts to their human neighbours of fairy food and fairy goblets. Borrow heard how the pixies mount horses’ heads at nights, and ride them about the fields, making stirrups of their manes; how they work in the mines, and are heard knocking in the levels underground, like the Duegars of northern latitudes; how some of them are under penance, like Tregeagle, to bale dry the pool of Dozmary.

Elizabeth Borrow, his cousin, related this characteristic story to him. A child belonging to poor parents was observed to have developed peculiarities. Among these was the fact that it could never get enough to eat. This is not, one might suppose, a peculiarity of children altogether confined to St. Cleer or even to Cornwall; but this child’s appetite was so abnormal that its relations decided to consult a wise woman about it. The witch told them that she had no doubt it was a pisky. She recommended them to put a large quantity of old shoes on a spit and make the child turn it, even if they had to beat it to compel it to the task. This procedure was adopted, and after a sound thrashing and much complaining the child was heard to say:

“I am four score years and more,
But never saw such a roast before.”

Then, as they were too young to have a child over eighty, the parents had proof positive that it was a pisky. The murder being out, after some time it disappeared, and their own child was magically restored to them.

CHAPTER IX
A GALLANT GIRL AND HER FAMILY

“The Pollards,” praised as a “very fine family” in Borrow’s notebooks, lived at Woolston, in the neighbouring parish of St. Ive. He told them they reminded him of Spaniards. “The gallant girl” of eighteen, who rode with him over the countryside, Mr. Taylor’s daughter, afterwards married Mr. Edward Pollard, and came into possession of Penquite. Miss Taylor was a notorious horsewoman. She owned at one time a very spirited horse, on which she used to ride every Sunday to church at St. Cleer. There was no mounting that horse in the ordinary way, and she invariably got into the saddle with one leap. Outside the church gate there would always be a crowd of people assembled to

“See the young lady
Get up on her horse”

when she started home for Penquite. Of that family circle round William Pollard, who was head of the house at Woolston during Borrow’s visit, alternately amazed, bewildered, and enchanted by the visitor, two sons and two daughters still survive. [168] A charming lady of great age, the daughter, has clear recollections of the events of half a century ago. Her impression of “the walking lord of gypsy-lore,” as Dr. Hake called him, is of “a very tall, silvery-headed man of middle age, with wonderful brown eyes, remarkably handsome and well-knit. He seemed to know something about everything. The fact we marvelled at was that, being acquainted with so many languages, he did not confound one with another. He appeared to be a wild, romantic person, a being of whom we had never seen the like before; his energy was unbounded—he almost lived in the open air, though it was in the depth of a bitter winter.”

It has already been indicated that the winter of 1853–4 was unusually severe—at any rate for Cornwall, where the climate is generally as soft as that of Ireland. The hills and tors ascending to the north of the country in which Borrow was staying were mantled in white during the greater part of his visit. The clear air at these altitudes seemed to inspirit him; he was a very different person from the Borrow who had nursed his grievances and been tormented by his melancholy demons on the marshes of Oulton. “One morning,” said Mrs. Edey, “after an exceptionally heavy fall of snow during the night, he was up with the earliest light, ploughing his way through the drifts to Woolston, where he commandeered one of my brothers to be his companion for a whole-day ramble over the snow-bound moors. And, said my brother, he sang as he walked the songs of half-a-dozen nations from the time they left almost without interruption, till they returned.”

There are two interesting passages in her story throwing a sidelight upon his relations with children. On his frequent walks from Penquite to Woolston he was wont to pass a certain desolate, abandoned mine. On the side of its premises was a little rough stone building, occupied as a cottage by a poor woman with a large family. The children’s poverty-stricken condition attracted his notice, and he regularly took with him in his pocket some bit of food to present to them as they stood looking out for the arrival of the tall stranger with the white hair. One of the children was customarily posted on the roadside to watch for him, and this one was dubbed by Borrow “the little sentinel.” Again, at dinner with some legal light of the district, he was suddenly missed during dessert, and a search revealed him in a remote room surrounded by the children of the house, whom he was amusing by his stories and catechising in the subjects of their studies and pursuits. He excused his absence by saying that he had been fascinated by the intelligence of the children, and had forgotten all about the dinner. More than once he expressed a high opinion of the mental average of Cornish children.

Penquite, the “substantial stone house on a hillside,” where Borrow stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taylor in 1854, is a characteristic Cornish farmhouse of the older and better sort—the native home of yeomen. The parish road ascends a steep hillock in the direct and uncompromising manner which is the distinctive mark of an old way, beaten out before the era of enclosure and before the development of wheeled traffic. At the top a thicket of pine and beech trees stands sentinel beside the “court-gate,” beyond which the road, curling to the south, brings one to a view of orchard land speckled with snowdrops, white gates, cedars of rich green, a slated house, French windows gleaming in the sun, and a garden sloping towards the stream at the bottom of the valley.

This was the destination to which Shorsha, the horse-wizard, and Robert Taylor, the Cornish farmer, cantered up on Christmas Eve of 1853. The Taylors left it in 1877, handing the farm on to Edward Pollard, who had married their only daughter. At Mrs. Pollard’s death (1904), the property passed into the hands of her eldest son, Edward. It was this eldest son who answered my pull at the bell-knob under the ancient granite porch, and gave me a real welcome. He has added a section to the house at the back, but the southern front remains as it has been for many generations. Here was the old low-ceiled parlour where Borrow and Berkeley, the Irish vicar, discussed the comparative beauty and virtue of Cornish women and Irish women; beyond, the stone-flagged kitchen where he got his “hospitable reception, with a log on the fire.” But the march of science has partly spoilt the venerable kitchen. It has left the settle from which Shorsha’s long legs stretched to the blaze, but it has filled up the open hearth and put a modern kitchen range in its place. Mr. William Pollard is the son of one of that “fine family” at Woolston with whom Borrow discoursed of Australia, whence two of the young Pollards had just returned that Christmas. In the early ’fifties Australia was a name to conjure with; Ballarat was a magic incantation. Two of the five Pollard sons adventured there, and it was one of the two that I visited Woolston to see.