EIGHT YEARS OF VAGABONDAGE
There has been much nonsense written concerning what has been called the
'veiled period' of George Borrow's life. This has arisen from a letter
which Richard Ford of the _Handbook for Travellers in Spain_ wrote to
Borrow after a visit to him at Oulton in 1844. Borrow was full of his
projected _Lavengro_, the idea of which he outlined to his friends. He
was a genial man in those days, on the wave of a popular success.
Was not _The Bible in Spain_ passing merrily from edition to
edition! Borrow, it is clear, told Ford that he was writing his
'Autobiography'--he had no misgiving then as to what he should call
it--and he evidently proposed to end it in 1825 and not in 1833, when
the Bible Society gave him his real chance in life. Ford begged him, in
letters that came into Dr. Knapp's possession, and from which he quotes
all too meagrely, not to 'drop a curtain' over the eight years
succeeding 1825. 'No doubt,' says Ford, 'it will excite a mysterious
interest,' but then he adds in effect it will lead to a wrong
construction being put upon the omission. Well, there can be but one
interpretation, and that not an unnatural one. Borrow had a very rough
time during these eight years. His vanity was hurt, and no wonder. It
seems a small matter to us now that Charles Dickens should have been
ashamed of the blacking-bottle episode of his boyhood. Genius has a
right to a penurious, and even to a sordid, boyhood. But genius has no
right to a sordid manhood, and here was George 'Olaus' Borrow, who was
able to claim the friendship of William Taylor, the German scholar; who
was able to boast of his association with sound scholastic foundations,
with the High School at Edinburgh and the Grammar School at Norwich; who
was a great linguist and had made rare translations from the poetry of
many nations, starving in the byways of England and of France. What a
fate for such a man that he should have been so unhappy for eight years;
should have led the most penurious of roving lives, and almost certainly
have been in prison as a common tramp.[80] It was all very well to
romance about a poverty-stricken youth. But when youth had fled there
ceased to be romance, and only sordidness was forthcoming. From his
twenty-third to his thirty-first year George Borrow was engaged in a
hopeless quest for the means of making a living. There is, however, very
little mystery. Many incidents of each of these years are revealed at
one or other point. His home, to which he returned from time to time,
was with his mother at the cottage in Willow Lane, Norwich. Whether he
made sufficient profit out of a horse, as in _The Romany Rye_, to enable
him to travel upon the proceeds, as Dr. Knapp thinks, we cannot say. Dr.
Knapp is doubtless right in assuming that during this period he led 'a
life of roving adventure,' his own authorised version of his career at
the time, as we have quoted from the biography in his handwriting from
_Men of the Time_. But how far this roving was confined to England, how
far it extended to other lands, we do not know. We are, however,
satisfied that he starved through it all, that he rarely had a penny in
his pocket. At a later date he gave it to be understood at times that he
had visited the East, and that India had revealed her glories to him. We
do not believe it. Defoe was Borrow's master in literature, and he
shared Defoe's right to lie magnificently on occasion. Dr. Knapp has
collected the various occasions upon which Borrow referred to his
supposed earlier travels abroad prior to his visit to St. Petersburg in
1833. The only quotation that carries conviction is an extract from a
letter to his mother from St. Petersburg, where he writes of 'London,
Paris, Madrid, and other capitals which I have visited.' I am not,
however, disinclined to accept Dr. Knapp's theory that in 1826-7 Borrow
did travel to Paris and through certain parts of Southern Europe. It is
strange, all the same, that adventures which, had they taken place,
would have provoked a thousand observations, provoked but two or three
passing references. Yet there is no getting over that letter to his
mother, nor that reference in _The Gypsies of Spain_, where he
says--'Once in the south of France, when I was weary, hungry, and
penniless....' Borrow certainly did some travel in these years, but it
was sordid, lacking in all dignity--never afterwards to be recalled. For
the most part, however, he was in England. We know that Borrow was in
Norwich in 1826, for we have seen him superintending the publication of
the _Romantic Ballads_ by subscription in that year. In that year also
he wrote the letter to Haydon, the painter, to say that he was ready to
sit for him, but that he was 'going to the south of France in a little
better than a fortnight.'[81] We know also that he was in Norwich in
1827, because it was then, and not in 1818 as described in _Lavengro_,
that he 'doffed his hat' to the famous trotting stallion Marshland
Shales, when that famous old horse was exhibited at Tombland Fair on the
Castle Hill. We meet him next as the friend of Dr. Bowring. The letters
to Bowring we must leave to another chapter, but they commence in 1829
and continue through 1830 and 1831. Through them all Borrow shows
himself alive to the necessity of obtaining an appointment of some kind,
and meanwhile he is hard at work upon his translations from various
languages, which, in conjunction with Dr. Bowring, he is to issue as
_Songs of Scandinavia_. Dr. Knapp thinks that in 1829 he made the
translation of the _Memoirs of Vidocq_, which appeared in that year with
a short preface by the translator.[82] But these little volumes bear no
internal evidence of Borrow's style, and there is no external evidence
to support the assumption that he had a hand in their publication. His
occasional references to Vidocq are probably due to the fact that he had
read this little book.
I have before me one very lengthy manuscript of Borrow's of this period.
It is dated December 1829, and is addressed, 'To the Committee of the
Honourable and Praiseworthy Association, known by the name of the
Highland Society.'[83] It is a proposal that they should publish in two
thick octavo volumes a series of translations of the best and most
approved poetry of the ancient and modern Scots-Gaelic bards. Borrow was
willing to give two years to the project, for which he pleads 'with no
sordid motive.' It is a dignified letter, which will be found in one of
Dr. Knapp's appendices--so presumably Borrow made two copies of it. The
offer was in any case declined, and so Borrow passed from disappointment
to disappointment during these eight years, which no wonder he desired,
in the coming years of fame and prosperity, to veil as much as possible.
The lean years in the lives of any of us are not those upon which we
delight to dwell, or upon which we most cheerfully look back.[84]
FOOTNOTES:
[80] Only thus can we explain Borrow's later declaration that he had
_four_ times been in prison.
[81] I quote this letter in another chapter. Mr. Herbert Jenkins thinks
(_Life_, ch. v. p. 88) that Borrow was in Paris during the revolution of
1830, because of a picturesque reference to the war correspondents there
in _The Bible in Spain_. But Borrow never hesitated to weave little
touches of romance from extraneous writers into his narratives, and may
have done so here. I have visited most of the principal capitals of the
world, he says in _The Bible in Spain_. This we would call a palpable
lie were not so much of _The Bible in Spain_ sheer invention.
[82] _Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police until
1827, and now proprietor of the paper manufactory at St. Mandé_. Written
by himself. Translated from the French. In Four Volumes. London:
Whittaker, Treacher and Arnot, Ave Maria Lane, 1829.
[83] This with other documents I am about to present to the Borrow
Museum, Norwich.
[84] In 1830 Borrow had another disappointment. He translated _The
Sleeping Bard_ from the Welsh. This also failed to find a publisher. It
was issued in 1860, under which date we discuss it.