'THE CHILDREN OF THE OPEN AIR'
Behold George Borrow, then, in a comfortable home on the banks of Oulton
Broad--a family man. His mother--sensible woman--declines her son's
invitation to live with the newly-married pair. She remains in the
cottage at Norwich where her husband died. The Borrows were married in
April 1840, by May they had settled at Oulton. It was a pleasantly
secluded estate, and Borrow's wife had £450 a year. He had, a month
before his marriage, written to Mr. Brandram to say that he had a work
nearly ready for publication, and 'two others in a state of
forwardness.' The title of the first of these books he enclosed in his
letter. It was _The Zincali: Or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain_. Mr.
Samuel Smiles, in his history of the House of Murray--_A Publisher and
his Friends_--thus relates the circumstances of its publication:--
In November 1840 a tall, athletic gentleman in black called
upon Mr. Murray offering a MS. for perusal and publication....
Mr. Murray could not fail to be taken at first sight with this
extraordinary man. He had a splendid physique, standing six
feet two in his stockings, and he had brains as well as
muscles, as his works sufficiently show. The book now submitted
was of a very uncommon character, and neither the author nor
the publisher were very sanguine about its success. Mr. Murray
agreed, after perusal, to print and publish 750 copies of _The
Gypsies of Spain_, and divide the profits with the author.
It was at the suggestion of Richard Ford, then the greatest living
English authority on Spain, that Mr. Murray published the book. It did
not really commence to sell until _The Bible in Spain_ came a year or so
later to bring the author reputation.[144] From November 1840 to June
1841 only three hundred copies had been sold in spite of friendly
reviews in some half dozen journals, including _The Athenæum_ and _The
Literary Gazette_. The first edition, it may be mentioned, contained on
its title-page a description of the author as 'late agent of the British
and Foreign Bible Society in Spain.'[145] There is very marked
compression in the edition now in circulation, and a perusal of the
first edition reveals many interesting features that deserve to be
restored for the benefit of the curious. But nothing can make _The
Zincali_ a great piece of literature. It was summarised by the
_Edinburgh Review_ at the time as 'a hotch-potch of the jockey, tramper,
philologist, and missionary.' That description, which was not intended
to be as flattering as it sounds to-day, appears more to apply to _The
Bible in Spain_. But _The Zincali_ is too confused, too ill-arranged a
book to rank with Borrow's four great works. There are passages in it,
indeed, so eloquent, so romantic, that no lover of Borrow's writings can
afford to neglect them. But this was not the book that gypsy-loving
Borrow, with the temperament of a Romany, should have written, or could
have written had he not been obsessed by the 'science' of his subject.
His real work in gypsydom was to appear later in _Lavengro_ and _The
Romany Rye_. For Borrow was not a man of science--a philologist, a
folk-lorist of the first order.
No one, indeed, who had read only _The Zincali_ among Borrow's works
could see in it any suspicion of the writer who was for all time to
throw a glamour over the gypsy, to make the 'children of the open air' a
veritable cult, to earn for him the title of 'the walking lord of gypsy
lore,' and to lay the foundations of an admirable succession of books
both in fact and fiction--but not one as great as his own. The city of
Seville, it is clear, with sarcastic letters from Bible Society
secretaries on one side, and some manner of love romance on the other,
was not so good a place for an author to produce a real book as Oulton
was to become. Richard Ford hit the nail on the head when he said with
quite wonderful prescience:
How I wish you had given us more about yourself, instead of the
extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew
nothing about gypsies! I shall give you the _rap_, on that, and
a hint to publish your whole adventures for the last twenty
years.[146]
Henceforth Borrow was to write about himself and to become a great
author in consequence. For in writing about himself as in _Lavengro_ and
_The Romany Rye_ he was to write exactly as he felt about the gypsies,
and to throw over them the glamour of his own point of view, the view of
a man who loved the broad highway and those who sojourned upon it. In
_The Gypsies of Spain_ we have a conventional estimate of the gypsies.
'There can be no doubt that they are human beings and have immortal
souls,' he says, even as if he were writing a letter to the Bible
Society. All his anecdotes about the gypsies are unfavourable to them,
suggestive only of them as knaves and cheats. From these pictures it is
a far cry to the creation of Jasper Petulengro and Isopel Berners. The
most noteworthy figure in _The Zincali_ is the gypsy soldier of
Valdepeñas, an unholy rascal. 'To lie, to steal, to shed human
blood'--these are the most marked characteristics with which Borrow
endows the gypsies of Spain. 'Abject and vile as they have ever been,
the gitános have nevertheless found admirers in Spain,' says the author
who came to be popularly recognised as the most enthusiastic admirer of
the gypsies in Spain and elsewhere. Read to-day by the lover of Borrow's
other books _The Zincali_ will be pronounced a readable collection of
anecdotes, interspersed with much dull matter, with here and there a
piece of admirable writing. But the book would scarcely have lived had
it not been followed by four works of so fine an individuality. Well
might Ford ask Borrow for more about himself and less of the extracts
from 'blunder-headed old Spaniards.' When Borrow came to write about
himself he revealed his real kindness for the gypsy folk. He gave us
Jasper Petulengro and the incomparable description of 'the wind on the
heath.' He kindled the imagination of men, proclaimed the joys of
vagabondage in a manner that thrilled many hearts. He had some
predecessors and many successors, but 'none could then, or can ever
again,' says the biographer of a later Rye, 'see or hear of Romanies
without thinking of Borrow.'[147] In her biography of one of these
successors in gypsy lore, Charles Godfrey Leland, Mrs. Pennell discusses
the probability that Borrow and Leland met in the British Museum. That
is admitted in a letter from Leland to Borrow in my possession. To this
letter Borrow made no reply. It was wrong of him. But he was then--in
1873--a prematurely old man, worn out and saddened by neglect and a
sense of literary failure. For this and for the other vagaries of those
latter years Borrow will not be judged harshly by those who read his
story here. Nothing could be more courteous than Borrow's one letter to
Leland, written in the failing handwriting--once so excellent--of the
last sad decade of his life:
[Illustration: AN APPLICATION FOR A BOOK IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, WITH
BORROWS SIGNATURE]
22 HEREFORD SQUARE, BROMPTON, _Nov. 2, 1871._
SIR,--I have received your letter and am gratified by the
desire you express to make my acquaintance. Whenever you please
to come I shall be happy to see you.--Yours truly,
GEORGE BORROW.[148]
The meeting did not, through Leland's absence from London, then take
place. Two years later it was another story. The failing powers were
more noteworthy. Borrow was by this time dead to the world, as the
documents before me abundantly testify. It is not, therefore, necessary
to assume, as Leland's friends have all done, that Borrow never replied
because he was on the eve of publishing a book of his own about the
gypsies. There seems no reason to assume, as Dr. Knapp does and as
Leland does, that this was the reason for the unanswered letter:
To George Borrow, Esq.
LANGHAM HOTEL, PORTLAND PLACE, _March 31st, 1873._
DEAR SIR,--I sincerely trust that the limited extent of our
acquaintanceship will not cause this note to seem to you too
presuming. _Breviter_, I have thrown the results of my
observations among English gypsies into a very unpretending
little volume consisting almost entirely of facts gathered from
the Romany, without any theory. As I owe all my interest in the
subject to your writings, and as I am sincerely grateful to you
for the impulse which they gave me, I should like very much to
dedicate my book to you. Of course if your kindness permits I
shall submit the proofs to you, that you may judge whether the
work deserves the honour. I should have sent you the MS., but
not long after our meeting at the British Museum I left for
Egypt, whence I have very recently returned, to find my
publisher clamorous for the promised copy.
It is _not_--God knows--a mean and selfish desire to help my
book by giving it the authority of your name, which induces
this request. But I am earnestly desirous for my conscience'
sake to publish nothing in the Romany which shall not be true
and sensible, even as all that you have written is true and
sensible. Therefore, _should_ you take the pains to glance over
my proof, I should be grateful if you would signify to me any
differences of opinion should there be ground for any. Dr. A.
F. Pott in his _Zigeuner_ (vol. ii. p. 224), intimates very
decidedly that you took the word _shastr_ (Exhastra de Moyses)
from Sanskrit and put it into Romany; declaring that it would
be very important if _shaster_ were Romany. I mention in my
book that English gypsies call the New Testament (also any MS.)
a _shaster_, and that a betting-book on a racecourse is called
a _shaster_ 'because it is written.' I do not pretend in my
book to such deep Romany as you have achieved--all that I claim
is to have collected certain words, facts, phrases, etc., out
of the Romany of the roads--corrupt as it is--as I have found
it to-day. I deal only with the gypsy of the _Decadence_. With
renewed apology for intrusion should it seem such, I remain,
yours very respectfully,
CHARLES G. LELAND.
Francis Hindes Groome remarked when reviewing Borrow's _Word Book_ in
1874,[149] that when _The Gypsies of Spain_ was published in 1841 'there
were not two educated men in England who possessed the slightest
knowledge of Romany.' In the intervening thirty-three years all this was
changed. There was an army of gypsy scholars or scholar gypsies of whom
Leland was one, Hindes Groome another, and Professor E. H. Palmer a
third, to say nothing of many scholars and students of Romany in other
lands. Not one of them seemed when Borrow published his _Word Book of
the Romany_ to see that he was the only man of genius among them. They
only saw that he was an inferior philologist to them all. And so Borrow,
who prided himself on things that he could do indifferently quite as
much as upon things that he could do well, suffered once again, as he
was so often doomed to suffer, from the lack of appreciation which was
all in all to him, and his career went out in a veritable blizzard. He
published nothing after his _Romano Lavo-Lil_ appeared in 1874.[150] He
was then indeed a broken and a bitter man, with no further interest in
life. Dedications of books to him interested him not at all. In any
other mood, or a few years earlier, Leland's book, _The English
Gypsies_,[151] would have gladdened his heart. In his preface Leland
expresses 'the highest respect for the labours of Mr. George Borrow in
this field,' he quotes Borrow continually and with sympathy, and renders
him honour as a philologist, that has usually been withheld. 'To Mr.
Borrow is due the discovery that the word _Jockey_ is of gypsy origin
and derived from _chuckiri_, which means a whip,' and he credits Borrow
with the discovery of the origin of 'tanner' for sixpence; he vindicates
him as against Dr. A. F. Pott,--a prince among students of gypsydom--of
being the first to discover that the English gypsies call the Bible the
_Shaster_. But there is a wealth of scientific detail in Leland's books
that is not to be found in Borrow's, as also there is in Francis Hindes
Groome's works. What had Borrow to do with science? He could not even
give the word 'Rúmani' its accent, and called it 'Romany.' He 'quietly
appropriated,' says Groome, 'Bright's Spanish gypsy words for his own
work, mistakes and all, without one word of recognition. I think one
has the ancient impostor there.'[152] 'His knowledge of the strange
history of the gypsies was very elementary, of their manners almost more
so, and of their folk-lore practically _nil_,' says Groome
elsewhere.[153] Yet Mr. Hindes Groome readily acknowledges that Borrow
is above all writers on the gypsies. 'He communicates a subtle insight
into gypsydom'--that is the very essence of the matter.[154] Controversy
will continue in the future as in the present as to whether the gypsies
are all that Borrow thought them. Perhaps 'corruption has crept in among
them' as it did with the prize-fighters. They have intermarried with the
gorgios, thrown over their ancient customs, lost all their picturesque
qualities, it may be. But Borrow has preserved in literature for all
time, as not one of the philologists and folk-lore students has done, a
remarkable type of people. But this is not to be found in his first
original work, _The Zincali_, nor in his last, _The Romano Lavo-Lil_.
This glamour is to be found in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_, to which
books we shall come in due course. Here we need only refer to the fact
that Borrow had loved the gypsies all his life--from his boyish meeting
with Petulengro until in advancing years the prototype of that wonderful
creation of his imagination--for this the Petulengro of _Lavengro_
undoubtedly was--came to visit him at Oulton. Well might Leland call him
'the Nestor of Gypsydom.'
We find the following letter to Dr. Bowring accompanying a copy of _The
Zincali_:
To Dr. John Bowring.
58 JERMYN STREET, ST. JAMES, _April 14, 1841._
MY DEAR SIR,--I have sent you a copy of my work by the mail. If
you could contrive to notice it some way or other I should feel
much obliged. Murray has already sent copies to all the
journals. It is needless to tell you that despatch in these
matters is very important, the first blow is everything. Lord
Clarendon is out of town. So I must send him his presentation
copy through Murray, and then write to him. I am very unwell,
and must go home. My address is George Borrow, Oulton Hall,
Oulton, Lowestoft, Suffolk. Your obedient servant,
GEORGE BORROW.
Two years later we find Borrow writing to an unknown correspondent upon
a phase of folk-lore:
OULTON, LOWESTOFT, SUFFOLK, _August 11, 1843._
MY DEAR SIR,--Many thanks for your interesting and kind letter
in which you do me the honour to ask my opinion respecting the
pedigree of your island goblin, le feu follet Belenger; that
opinion I cheerfully give with a premise that it is only an
opinion; in hunting for the etymons of these fairy names we can
scarcely expect to arrive at anything like certainty.
I suppose you are aware that the name of Bilenger or Billinger
is of occasional though by no means of frequent occurrence both
in England and France. I have seen it; you have heard of
Billings-gate and of Billingham, the unfortunate assassin of
poor Percival,--all modifications of the same root; Belingart,
Bilings home or Billing ston. But what is Billin-ger? Clearly
that which is connected in some way or other with Billing. You
will find _ger_, or something like it, in most
European-tongues--Boulan_ger_, horolo_ger_, tal_ker_, walk_er_,
ba_ker_, bre_wer_, beg_gar_. In Welsh it is of frequent
occurrence in the shape of _ur_ or _gwr_--hen_ur_ (an eld_er_),
her_wr_ (a prow_ler_); in Russian the ger, gwr, ur, er, appears
in the shape of _ik_ or _k_--sapojgn_ik_, a shoema_ker_,
Chinobu_ik_, a man possessed of rank. The root of all these, as
well as of _or_ in senator, victor, etc., is the Sanscrit _ker_
or _kir_, which means lord, master, maker, doer, possessor of
something or connected with something.
We want now to come at the meaning of Beling or Billing, which
probably means some action, or some moral or personal
attribute; Bolvile in Anglo-Saxon means honest, Danish Bollig;
Wallen, in German, to wanken or move restlessly about; Baylan,
in Spanish, to dance (Ball? Ballet?), connected with which are
to whirl, to fling, and possibly Belinger therefore may mean a
Billiger or honest fellow, or it may mean a Walter_ger_, a
whirl_enger_, a flinger, or something connected with restless
motion.
Allow me to draw your attention to the word 'Will' in the
English word will-o-the-wisp; it must not be supposed that this
Will is the abbreviation of William; it is pure Danish,
'Vild'--pronounced will,--and signifies wild; Vilden Visk, the
wild or moving wisp. I can adduce another instance of the
corruption of the Danish vild into will: the rustics of this
part of England are in the habit of saying 'they are led will'
(vild or wild) when from intoxication or some other cause they
are bewildered at night and cannot find their way home. This
expression is clearly from the old Norse or Danish. I am not at
all certain that 'Bil' in Bilinger may not be this same will or
vild, and that the word may not be a corruption of vilden, old
or elder, wild or flying fire. It has likewise occurred to me
that Bilinger may be derived from 'Volundr,' the worship of the
blacksmith or Northern Vulcan. Your obedient servant,
GEORGE BORROW.
FOOTNOTES:
[144] There were 750 copies of the first edition of _The Zincali_ in two
vols. in 1841. 750 of the second edition in 1843, and a third issue of
750 in the same year. A fourth edition of 7,500 copies appeared in the
cheap Home and Colonial Library in 1846, and there was a fifth edition
of 1000 copies in 1870. These were all the editions published in England
during Borrow's lifetime. Dr. Knapp traced three American editions
during the same period.
[145] _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. By George Borrow, Late Agent of the British and
Foreign Bible Society in Spain. '_For that which is unclean by nature,
thou canst entertain no hope; no washing will turn the gypsy
white_.'--Ferdousi. In two volumes. London: John Murray, Albemarle
Street, 1841.
[146] Knapp's _Life_, vol. i. p. 378.
[147] Mrs. Pennell. See _Charles Godfrey Leland: a Biography_, by
Elizabeth Robins Pennell. 2 vols. 1906.
[148] Given in Mrs. Pennell's _Leland: a Biography_, vol. ii. pp. 142-3.
The letter to which it is a reply is given in Knapp's _Borrow_, vol. ii.
pp. 228-9.
[149] _The Academy_, June 13, 1874.
[150] _Romano Lavo-Lil: Word Book of the Romany; or, English Gypsy
Language_. By George Borrow. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street,
1874.
[151] Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) better known as 'Hans
Breitmann' of the popular ballads, was born in Philadelphia and died in
Florence. He was always known among his friends as 'The Rye,' in
consequence of his enthusiasm for the gypsies concerning whom he wrote
four books, the best known being: _The English Gypsies and their
Language_, by Charles G. Leland: Trübner. _The Gypsies_, by Charles G.
Leland: Trübner.
[152] See Groome's _In Gipsy Tents_ (W. P. Nimmo, 1880), and _Gipsy
Folk-Tales_ (Hurst & Blackett, 1899). Francis Hindes Groome (1851-1902),
whom it was my privilege to know, was the son of Archdeacon Groome, the
friend of Edward FitzGerald. He was the greatest English authority of
his time on gypsy language and folk-lore. He celebrated his father's
friendship with the paraphraser of Omar Khayyám in _Two Suffolk
Friends_, 1895, and wrote a good novel of gypsydom in _Kriegspiel_,
1896. He also edited an edition of _Lavengro_ (Methuen), 1901.
[153] Groome to Leland in _Charles Godfrey Leland: a Biography_, by E.
R. Pennell, vol. ii. p. 141.
[154] Introduction to _Lavengro_ (Methuen), 1901.