I
Why is it that almost as soon as we can toddle we eagerly demand a story
of our elders? Why is it that the most excitable little girl, the most
incorrigible little boy can be quieted by a teaspoonful of the jam of
fiction? Why is it that "once upon a time" can achieve what moral
strictures are powerless to effect?
It is because to most of us the world of imagination is the world that
matters. We live in the "might be's" and "peradventures." Fate may have
cast our lot in prosaic places; have predetermined our lives on humdrum
lines; but it cannot touch our dreams. There we are princes,
princesses--possessed of illimitable wealth, wielding immeasurable power.
Our bodies may traverse the same dismal streets day after day; but our
minds rove luxuriantly through all the kingdoms of the earth.
Those wonderful eastern stories of the "Flying Horse" and the "Magic
Carpet," symbolize for us the matter-of-fact world and the
matter-of-dream world. Nay, is there any sound distinction between facts
and dreams? After all--
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
But there are dreams and dreams--dreams by moonlight and dreams by
sunlight. Literature can boast of many fascinating moonlight
dreams--Ancient Mariners and Christabels, Wonder Books and Tanglewood
Tales. And the fairies and goblins, the witches and wizards, were they
not born by moonlight and nurtured under the glimmer of the stars?
But there are dreams by sunlight and visions at noonday also. Such
dreams thrill us in another but no less unmistakable way, especially when
the dreamer is a Scott, a William Morris, a Borrow.
And dreamers like Borrow are not content to see visions and dream dreams,
their bodies must participate no less than their minds. They must needs
set forth in quest of the unknown. Hardships and privations deter them
not. Change, variety, the unexpected, these things are to them the very
salt of life.
This untiring restlessness keeps a Richard Burton rambling over Eastern
lands, turns a Borrow into the high-road and dingle. This bright-eyed
Norfolk giant took more kindly to the roughnesses of life than did
Hazlitt and De Quincey. Quite as neurotic in his way, his splendid
physique makes us think of him as the embodiment of fine health. Illness
and Borrow do not agree. We think of him swinging along the road like
one of Dumas' lusty adventurers, exhibiting his powers of horsemanship,
holding his own with well-seasoned drinkers--especially if the drink be
Norfolk ale--conversing with any picturesque rag-tag and bob-tail he
might happen upon. There is plenty of fresh air in his pages. No
thinker like Hazlitt, no dreamer like De Quincey; but a shrewd observer
with the most amazing knack of ingratiating himself with strangers.
No need for this romancer to seek distant lands for inspiration. Not
even the villages of Spain and Portugal supplied him with such fine stuff
for romance as Mumper's Dingle. He would get as strange a story out of a
London counting-house or an old apple-woman on London Bridge as did many
a teller of tales out of lonely heaths and stormy seas.
_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ are fine specimens of romantic
autobiography. His life was varied enough, abounding in colour; but the
Vagabond is never satisfied with things that merely happen. He is
equally concerned with the things that might happen, with the things that
ought to happen. And so Borrow added to his own personal record from the
storehouse of dreams. Some have blamed him for not adhering to the
actual facts. But does any autobiographer adhere to actual facts? Can
any man, even with the most sensitive feeling for accuracy, confine
himself to a record of what happened?
Of course not. The moment a man begins to write about himself, to delve
in the past, to ransack the storehouse of his memory; then--if he has
anything of the literary artist about him, and otherwise his book will
not be worth the paper it is written on--he will take in a partner to
assist him. That partner's name is Romance.
As a revelation of temperament, the _Confessions_ of Rousseau and the
_Memoires_ of Casanova are, one feels, delightfully trustworthy. But no
sane reader ever imagines that he is reading an accurate transcript from
the life of these adventurous gentlemen. The difference between the
editions of De Quincey's _Opium Eater_ is sufficient to show how the
dreams have expanded under popular approbation.
Borrow himself suggests this romantic method when he says, "What is an
autobiography? Is it a mere record of a man's life, or is it a picture
of the man himself?" Certainly, no one carried the romantic colouring
further than he did. When he started to write his own life in _Lavengro_
he had no notion of diverging from the strict line of fact. But the
adventurer Vagabond moved uneasily in the guise of the chronicler. He
wanted more elbow-room. He remembered all that he hoped to encounter,
and from hopes it was no far cry to actualities.
Things might have happened so! Ye gods, they _did_ happen so! And after
all it matters little to us the exact proportion of fact and fiction.
What does matter is that the superstructure he has raised upon the
foundation of fact is as strange and unique as the palace of Aladdin.
However much he suggested the typical Anglo-Saxon in real life, there was
the true Celt whenever he took pen in hand.
A stranger blend of the Celt and the Saxon indeed it would be hard to
find. The Celtic side is not uppermost in his temperament--this strong,
assertive, prize-fighting, beer-loving man (a good drinker, but never a
drunkard) seems far more Saxon than anything else. De Quincey had no
small measure of the John Bull in [Picture: George Borrow] his
temperament, and Borrow had a great deal more. The John Bull side was
very obvious. Yet a Celt he was by parentage, and the Celtic part was
unmistakable, though below the surface. If the East Anglian in him had a
weakness for athleticism, boiled mutton and caper sauce, the Celt in him
responded quickly to the romantic associates of Wales.
Readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton's charming romance _Aylwin_ will recall the
emphasis laid on the passionate love of the Welsh for a tiny strip of
Welsh soil. Borrow understood all this; he had a rare sympathy with the
Cymric Celt. You can trace the Celt in his scenic descriptions, in his
feeling for the spell of antiquity, his restlessness of spirit. And yet
in his appearance there was little to suggest the Celt. Small wonder
that many of his friends spoke of this white-haired giant of six foot
three as if he was first and foremost an excellent athlete.
Certainly he had in full measure an Englishman's delight and proficiency
in athletics--few better at running, jumping, wrestling, sparring, and
swimming.
In many respects indeed Borrow will not have realized the fancy picture
of the Englishman as limned by Hawthorne's fancy--the big, hearty,
self-opiniated, beef-eating, ale-drinking John Bull. Save to a few
intimates like Mr. Watts-Dunton and Dr. Hake he seems to have concealed
very effectually the Celtic sympathies in his nature. But no reader of
his books can be blind to this side of his character; and then again, as
in all the literary Vagabonds, it is the complexity of the man's
temperament that attracts and fascinates.
The man who can delight in the garrulous talk of a country inn,
understand the magic of big solitudes; who can keenly appraise the points
of a horse and feel the impalpable glamour of an old ruin; who will
present an impenetrable reserve to the ordinary stranger and take the
fierce, moody gypsy to his heart; who will break almost every convention
of civilization, yet in the most unexpected way show a sturdy element of
conventionality; a man, in short, of so many bewildering contradictions
and strangely assorted qualities as Borrow cannot but compel interest.
Many of the contradictory traits were not, as they seemed, the
inconsequential moods of an irresponsible nature, but may be traced to
the fierce egotism of the man. The Vagabond is always an egotist; the
egotism may be often amusing, and is rarely uninteresting. But the
personal point of view, the personal impression, has for him the most
tremendous importance. It makes its possessor abnormally sensitive to
any circumstances, any environment, that may restrict his independence or
prevent the full expression of his personal tastes and whims. Among our
Vagabonds the two most pronounced egotists are Borrow and Whitman. The
secret of their influence, their merits, and their deficiencies lies in
this intense concentration of self. An appreciation of this quality
leads us to comprehend a good deal of Borrow's attitude towards men and
women. Reading _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ the reader is no less
struck by the remarkable interest that Borrow takes in the
people--especially the rough, uncultured people--whom he comes across, as
in the cheerful indifference with which he loses sight of them and passes
on to fresh characters. There is very little objective feeling in his
friendships; as flesh and blood personages with individualities of their
own--loves, hopes, faiths of their own--he seems to regard them scarcely
at all. They exist chiefly as material for his curiosity and
inquisitiveness. Hence there is a curious selfishness about him--not the
selfishness of a passionate, capricious nature, but the selfishness of a
self-absorbed and self-contained nature. Perhaps there was hidden away
somewhere in his nature a strain of tenderness, of altruistic affection,
which was reserved for a few chosen souls. But the warm human touch is
markedly absent from his writings, despite their undeniable charm.
Take the Isopel Berners episode. Whether Isopel Berners was a fiction of
the imagination or a character in real life matters not for my purpose.
At any rate the episode, his friendship with this Anglo-Saxon girl of the
road, is one of the distinctive features of both _Lavengro_ and _The
Romany Rye_. The attitude of Borrow towards her may safely be regarded
as a clear indication of the man's character.
A girl of fine physical presence and many engaging qualities such as were
bound to attract a man of Borrow's type, who had forsaken her friends to
throw in her lot with this fellow-wanderer on the road. Here were the
ready elements of a romance--of a friendship that should burn up with the
consuming power of love the baser elements of self in the man's
disposition, and transform his nature.
And what does he do?
He accepts her companionship, just as he might have accepted the
companionship of one of his landlords or ostlers; spends the time he
lived with her in the Dingle in teaching her Armenian, and when at last,
driven to desperation by his calculating coldness, she comes to take
farewell of him, he makes her a perfunctory offer of marriage, which she,
being a girl of fine mettle as well as of strong affection, naturally
declines. She leaves him, and after a few passages of philosophic
regret, he passes on to the next adventure.
Now Borrow, as we know, was not physically drawn towards the ordinary
gypsy type--the dark, beautiful Celtic women; and it was in girls of the
fair Saxon order such as Isopel Berners that he sought a natural mate.
Certainly, if any woman was calculated by physique and by disposition to
attract Borrow, Isopel Berners was that woman. And when we find that the
utmost extent of his passion is to make tea for her and instruct her in
Armenian, it is impossible not to be disagreeably impressed by the
unnatural chilliness of such a disposition. Not even Isopel could break
down the barrier of intense egoism that fenced him off from any profound
intimacy with his fellow-creatures.
Perhaps Dr. Jessop's attack upon him errs in severity, and is to an
extent, as Mr. Watts-Dunton says, "unjust"; but there is surely an
element of truth in his remarks when he says: "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 even took a little child upon his knee." Nor do I
think that the anecdote which Mr. Watts-Dunton relates about the
beautiful gypsy, to whom Borrow read Arnold's poem, goes far to dissipate
the impression of Borrow's insensibility to a woman's charm.
A passing tribute to the looks of an extraordinarily beautiful girl is
quite compatible with a comparative insensibility to feminine beauty and
feminine graces. That Borrow was devoid of animal passion I do not
believe--nor indeed do his books convey that impression; that he had no
feeling for beauty either would be scarcely compatible with the Celtic
element in his nature. I think it less a case--as Dr. Jessop seems to
think--of want of passion as of a tyrannous egotism that excluded any
element likely to prove troublesome. He would not admit a disturbing
factor--such as the presence of the self-reliant Isopel--into his life.
No doubt he liked Isopel well enough in his fashion. Otherwise certainly
he would not have made up his mind to marry her. But his own feelings,
his own tastes, his own fancies, came first. He would marry her--oh
yes!--there was plenty of time later on. For the present he could study
her character, amuse himself with her idiosyncrasies, and as a return for
her devotion and faithful affection teach her Armenian. Extremely
touching!
But the episode of Isopel Berners is only one illustration, albeit a very
significant one, of Borrow's calculating selfishness. No man could prove
a more interesting companion than he; but one cannot help feeling that he
was a sorry kind of friend.
It may seem strange at first sight, finding this wanderer of the road in
the pay of the Bible Society, and a zealous servant in the cause of
militant Protestantism. But the violent "anti-Popery" side of Borrow is
only another instance of his love of independence. The brooding egotism
that chafed at the least control was not likely to show any sympathy with
sacerdotalism.
There was no trace of philosophy in Borrow's frankly expressed views on
religious subjects. They were honest and straightforward enough, with
all the vigorous unreflective narrowness of ultra-Protestantism.
It says much for the amazing charm of Borrow's writing that _The Bible in
Spain_ is very much better than a glorified tract. It must have come as
a surprise to many a grave, pious reader of the Bible Society's
publications.
And the Bible Society made the Vagabond from the literary point of view.
Borrow's book--_The Zincali_--or an account of the gypsies of Spain,
published in 1841, had brought his name before the public. But _The
Bible in Spain_ (1843) made him famous--doubtless to the relief of
"glorious John Murray," the publisher, who was doubtful about the book's
reception.
It is a fascinating book, and if lacking the unique flavour of the
romantic autobiographies, _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_, has none the
less many of the characteristics that give all his writings their
distinctive attraction.