I have been reading those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which
appeared in _The Athenæum_. {25} I have been reading them, I may add,
under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-same
heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quaint
talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life.
So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his
paper I seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian accent of the
well-remembered voice—I seemed to see the mighty figure, strengthened by
the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin
bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the
wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he
crushed them, now stopping to watch the water-wagtail by the ponds as he
descanted upon the powers of that enchanted bird—powers, like many human
endowments, more glorious than pleasant, if it is sober truth, as Borrow
would gravely tell, that the gipsy lad who knocks a water-wagtail on the
head with a stone gains for a bride a “ladye from a far countrie,” and
dazzles with his good luck all the other black-eyed young urchins of the
dingle.
Though my own intimacy with Borrow did not begin till he was considerably
advanced in years, and ended on his finally quitting London for Oulton,
there were circumstances in our intercourse—circumstances, I mean,
connected partly with temperament and partly with mutual experience—which
make me doubt whether any one understood him better than I did, or broke
more thoroughly through that exclusiveness of temper which isolated him
from all but a few. However, be this as it may, no one at least realized
more fully than I how lovable was his nature, with all his
angularities—how simple and courageous, how manly and noble. His
shyness, his apparent coldness, his crotchety obstinacy, repelled people,
and consequently those who at any time during his life really understood
him must have been very few. How was it, then, that such a man wandered
about over Europe and fraternized so completely with a race so suspicious
and intractable as the gipsies? A natural enough question, which I have
often been asked, and this is my reply:—
Those who know the gipsies will understand me when I say that this
suspicious and wary race of wanderers—suspicious and wary from an
instinct transmitted through ages of dire persecutions from the Children
of the Roof—will readily fraternize with a blunt, single-minded, and shy
eccentric like Borrow, while perhaps the skilful man of the world may
find all his tact and _savoir faire_ useless and, indeed, in the way.
And the reason of this is not far to seek, perhaps. What a gipsy most
dislikes is the feeling that his “gorgio” interlocutor is thinking about
him; for, alas! to be the object of “gorgio” thoughts—has it not been a
most dangerous and mischievous honour to every gipsy since first his
mysterious race was driven to accept the grudging hospitality of the
Western world? A gipsy hates to be watched, and knows at once when he is
being watched; for in tremulous delicacy of apprehension his organization
is far beyond that of an Englishman, or, indeed, of any member of any of
the thick-fingered races of Europe. One of the results of this excessive
delicacy is that a gipsy can always tell to a surety whether a “gorgio”
companion is thinking about him, or whether the “gorgio’s” thoughts are
really and genuinely occupied with the fishing rod, the net, the gin, the
gun, or whatsoever may be the common source of interest that has drawn
them together.
Now, George Borrow, after the first one or two awkward interviews were
well over, would lapse into a kind of unconscious ruminating bluntness, a
pronounced and angular self-dependence, which might well disarm the
suspiciousness of the most wary gipsy, from the simple fact that it was
genuine. Hence, as I say, among the few who understood Borrow his gipsy
friends very likely stood first—outside, of course, his family circle.
And surely this is an honour to Borrow; for the gipsies, notwithstanding
certain undeniable obliquities in matters of morals and cusine, are the
only people left in the island who are still free from British vulgarity
(perhaps because they are not British). It is no less an honour to them,
for while he lived the island did not contain a nobler English gentleman
than him they called the “Romany Rye.”
Borrow’s descriptions of gipsy life are, no doubt, too deeply charged
with the rich lights shed from his own personality entirely to satisfy a
more matter-of-fact observer, and I am not going to say that he is
anything like so photographic as F. H. Groome, for instance, or so
trustworthy. But then it should never be forgotten that Borrow was,
before everything else, a poet. If this statement should be challenged
by “the present time,” let me tell the present time that by poet I do not
mean merely a man who is skilled in writing lyrics and sonnets and that
kind of thing, but primarily a man who has the poetic gift of seeing
through “the shows of things” and knowing where he is—the gift of
drinking deeply of the waters of life and of feeling grateful to Nature
for so sweet a draught; a man who, while acutely feeling the ineffable
pathos of human life, can also feel how sweet a thing it is to live,
having so great and rich a queen as Nature for his mother, and for
companions any number of such amusing creatures as men and women. In
this sense I cannot but set Borrow, with his love of nature and his love
of adventure, very high among poets—as high, perhaps, as I place another
dweller in tents, Sylvester Boswell himself, “the well-known and
popalated gipsy of Codling Gap,” who, like Borrow, is famous for “his
great knowledge in grammaring one of the ancientist langeges on record,”
and whose touching preference of a gipsy tent to a roof, “on the accent
of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of
Nature’s life,” is expressed with a poetical feeling such as Chaucer
might have known had he not, as a court poet, been too genteel.
“Enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life!” That is what Borrow did; and
how few there are that understand it.
The self-consciousness which in the presence of man produces that kind of
shyness which was Borrow’s characteristic left him at once when he was
with Nature alone or in the company of an intimate friend. At her, no
man’s gaze was more frank and childlike than his. Hence the charm of his
books. No man’s writing can take you into the country as Borrow’s can:
it makes you feel the sunshine, see the meadows, smell the flowers, hear
the skylark sing and the grasshopper chirrup. Who else can do it? I
know of none. And as to personal intercourse with him, if I were asked
what was the chief delight of this, I should say that it was the delight
of bracingness. A walking tour with a self-conscious lover of the
picturesque—an “interviewer” of Nature with a note-book—worrying you to
admire _him_ for admiring Nature so much, is one of those occasional
calamities of life which a gentleman and a Christian must sometimes
heroically bear, but the very thought of which will paralyze with fear
the sturdiest Nature-worshipper, whom no crevasse or avalanche or
treacherous mist can appal. But a walk and talk with Borrow as he strode
through the bracken on an autumn morning had the exhilarating effect upon
his companion of a draught of the brightest mountain air. And this was
the result not, assuredly, of any exuberance of animal spirits (Borrow,
indeed, was subject to fits of serious depression), but rather of a
feeling he induced that between himself and all nature, from the clouds
floating lazily over head to the scented heather, crisp and purple, under
foot, there was an entire fitness and harmony—a sort of mutual
understanding, indeed. There was, I say, something bracing in the very
look of this silvery-haired giant as he strode along with a kind of easy
sloping movement, like that of a St. Bernard dog (the most deceptive of
all movements as regards pace), his beardless face (quite matchless for
symmetrical beauty) beaded with the healthy perspiration drops of strong
exercise, and glowing and rosy in the sun.
As a vigorous old man Borrow never had an equal, I think. There has been
much talk of the vigour of Shelley’s friend, E. J. Trelawny. I knew that
splendid old corsair, and admired his agility of limb and brain; but at
seventy Borrow could have walked off with Trelawny under his arm. At
seventy years of age, after breakfasting at eight o’clock in Hereford
Square, he would walk to Putney, meet one or more of us at Roehampton,
roam about Wimbledon and Richmond Park with us, bathe in the Fen Ponds
with a north-east wind cutting across the icy water like a razor, run
about the grass afterwards like a boy to shake off some of the
water-drops, stride about the park for hours, and then, after fasting for
twelve hours, eat a dinner at Roehampton that would have done Sir Walter
Scott’s eyes good to see. Finally, he would walk back to Hereford
Square, getting home late at night.
And if the physique of the man was bracing, his conversation, unless he
happened to be suffering from one of his occasional fits of depression,
was still more so. Its freshness, raciness, and eccentric whim no pen
could describe. There is a kind of humour the delight of which is that
while you smile at the pictures it draws, you smile quite as much or more
to think that there is a mind so whimsical, crotchety, and odd as to draw
them. This was the humour of Borrow. His command of facial
expression—though he seemed to exercise it almost involuntarily and
unconsciously—had, no doubt, much to do with this charm. Once, when he
was talking to me about the men of Charles Lamb’s day—_The London
Magazine_ set—I asked him what kind of a man was the notorious and
infamous Griffiths Wainewright. {32} In a moment Borrow’s face changed:
his mouth broke into a Carker-like smile, his eyes became elongated to an
expression that was at once fawning and sinister, as he said,
“Wainewright! He used to sit in an armchair close to the fire and
_smile_ all the evening like _this_.” He made me see Wainewright and
hear his voice as plainly as though I had seen him and heard him in the
publishers’ parlour.
His vocabulary, rich in picturesque words of the high road and dingle,
his quaint countrified phrases, might also have added to the effect of
this kind of eccentric humour. “A duncie book—of course it’s duncie—it’s
only duncie books that sell nowadays,” he would shout when some new
“immortal poem” or “greatest work of the age” was mentioned. Tennyson, I
fear, was the representative duncie poet of the time; but that was
because nothing could ever make Borrow realize the fact that Tennyson was
not the latest juvenile representative of a “duncie” age; for although,
according to Leland, {33} the author of ‘Sordello’ is (as is natural,
perhaps) the only bard known in the gipsy tent, it is doubtful whether
even his name was more than a name to Borrow; indeed, I think that people
who had no knowledge of Romany, Welsh, and Armenian were all more or less
“duncie.” As a trap to catch the “foaming vipers,” his critics, he in
‘Lavengro’ purposely misspelt certain Armenian and Welsh words, just to
have the triumph of saying in another volume that they who had attacked
him on so many points had failed to discover that he had wrongly given
“zhats” as the nominative of the Armenian noun for bread, while everybody
in England, especially every critic, ought to know that “zhats” is the
accusative form.
I will try, however, to give the reader an idea of the whim of Borrow’s
conversation, by giving it in something like a dramatic form. Let the
reader suppose himself on a summer’s evening at that delightful old
roadside inn the Bald-Faced Stag, in the Roehampton Valley, near Richmond
Park, where are sitting, over a “cup” (to use Borrow’s word) of foaming
ale, Lavengro himself, one of his oldest friends, and a new acquaintance,
a certain student of things in general lately introduced to Borrow and
nearly, but not quite, admitted behind the hedge of Borrow’s shyness, as
may be seen by the initiated from a certain rather constrained,
half-resentful expression on his face. Jerry Abershaw’s {34} sword (the
chief trophy of mine host) has been introduced, and Borrow’s old friend
has been craftily endeavouring to turn the conversation upon that ever
fresh and fruitful topic, but in vain. Suddenly the song of a
nightingale, perched on a tree not far off, rings pleasantly through the
open window and fills the room with a new atmosphere of poetry and
romance. “That nightingale has as fine a voice,” says Borrow, “as though
he were born and bred in the Eastern Counties.” Borrow is proud of being
an East-Anglian, of which the student has already been made aware and
which he now turns to good account in the important business he has set
himself, of melting Lavengro’s frost and being admitted a member of the
Open-Air Club. “Ah!” says the wily-student, “I know the Eastern
Counties; no nightingales like those, especially Norfolk nightingales.”
Borrow’s face begins to brighten slightly, but still he does not direct
his attention to the stranger, who proceeds to remark that although the
southern counties are so much warmer than Norfolk, some of them, such as
Cornwall and Devon, are without nightingales. Borrow’s face begins to
get brighter still, and he looks out of the window with a smile, as
though he were being suddenly carried back to the green lanes of his
beloved Norfolk.
“From which well-known fact of ornithology,” continues the student, “I am
driven to infer that in their choice of habitat nightingales are guided
not so much by considerations of latitude as of good taste.” Borrow’s
anger is evidently melting away. The talk runs still upon nightingales,
and the student mentions the attempt to settle them in Scotland once made
by Sir John Sinclair, who introduced nightingales’ eggs from England into
robins’ nests in Scotland, in the hope that the young nightingales, after
enjoying a Scotch summer, would return to the place of their birth, after
the custom of English nightingales. “And did they return?” says Borrow,
with as much interest as if the honour of his country were involved in
the question. “Return to Scotland?” says the student quietly; “the
entire animal kingdom are agreed, you know, in never returning to
Scotland. Besides, the nightingales’ eggs in question were laid in
Norfolk.” Conquered at last, Borrow extends the hand of brotherhood to
the impudent student (whose own private opinion, no doubt, is that
Norfolk is more successful in producing Nelsons than nightingales), and
proceeds without more ado to tell how “poor Jerry Abershaw,” on being
captured by the Bow Street runners, had left his good sword behind him as
a memento of highway glories soon to be ended on the gallows tree.
(By-the-bye, I wonder where that sword is now; it was bought by Mr.
Adolphus Levy, of Alton Lodge, at the closing of the Bald-Faced Stag.)
From Jerry Abershaw Borrow gets upon other equally interesting topics,
such as the decadence of beer and pugilism, and the nobility of the now
neglected British bruiser, as exampled especially in the case of the
noble Pearce, who lost his life through rushing up a staircase and
rescuing a woman from a burning house after having on a previous occasion
rescued another woman by blacking the eyes of six gamekeepers, who had
been set upon her by some noble lord or another. Then, while the ale
sparkles with a richer colour as the evening lights grow deeper, the talk
gets naturally upon “lords” in general, gentility nonsense, and
“hoity-toityism” as the canker at the heart of modern civilization.