Transcribed from the 1896 David Nutt edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
NOTE
_A few passages in this monograph are taken from a short article on_
"_George Borrow_" _which appeared in_ "_Good Words_."
_W. A. D._
GEORGE BORROW IN
EAST ANGLIA
BY
WILLIAM A. DUTT
"The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we,
through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original
relation to the universe? . . . The sun shines to-day also. There is
more wool and flax in the fields. Let us demand our own works, and
laws, and worship."--EMERSON.
LONDON
DAVID NUTT, 270-271, STRAND
1896
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. EAST ANGLIA 7
II. EARLY DAYS 12
III. THE LAWYER'S CLERK 19
IV. DAYS IN NORWICH 29
V. LIFE AT OULTON 39
VI. BORROW AND PUGILISM 60
VII. BORROW AND THE EAST ANGLIAN GIPSIES 68
"_Apart from Borrow's undoubted genius as a writer_, _the
subject-matter of his writings has an interest that will not wane_,
_but will go on growing_. _The more the features of our_ '_Beautiful
England_,' _to use his own phrase_, _are changed by the multitudinous
effects of the railway system_, _the more attraction will readers
find in books which depict her before her beauty was marred_--_books
which picture her in those antediluvian days when there was such a
thing as space in the island_--_when in England there was a sense of
distance_, _that sense without which there can be no romance_--_when
the stage-coach was in its glory_, _when the only magician that could
convey man and his belongings at any rate of speed beyond man's own
walking rate was the horse_--_the beloved horse whose praises Borrow
loved to sing_, _and whose ideal was reached in the mighty_
'_Shales_'--_when the great high roads were alive_, _not merely with
the bustle of business_, _but with real adventure for the
traveller_--_days and scenes which Borrow_, _better than any one
else_, _could paint_."
THEODORE WATTS.
CHAPTER I: EAST ANGLIA
It is a trite saying, the truth of which is so universally admitted that
it is hardly worth repeating, that a man's memory, above all things,
retains most vividly recollections of the scenes amidst which he passed
his early days. Amidst the loneliness of the African veldt or American
prairie solitudes, the West-countryman dreams of Devon's grassy tors and
honeysuckle lanes, and Cornish headlands, fretted by the foaming waves of
the grey Atlantic; in teaming cities, where the pulse of life beats loud
and strong, the Scotsman ever cherishes sweet, sad thoughts of the braes
and burns about his Highland home; between the close-packed roofs of a
London alley, the Italian immigrant sees the sunny skies and deep blue
seas of his native land, the German pictures to himself the loveliness of
the legend-haunted Rhineland, and the Scandinavian, closing his eyes and
ears to the squalor and misery, wonders whether the sea-birds still
circle above the stone-built cottage in the Nordland cleft, and cry
weirdly from the darkness as they sweep landward in the night. Many a
wanderer, whatever else he may let go, holds in his heart the hope that
one day he may go back to the place where his boyhood's days were spent,
even though it be but to dwell alone amidst the phantoms of long dead
dreams and long lost loves.
East Anglia may well be compared to a sad-faced mother, who sees her
children, whom she would fain keep with her, one by one go out into the
wide world to seek those things that cannot be found in her humble home.
For years the youths of Eastern England have had to leave the hamlet
hall, the village rectory, the marshland farmstead, and the cottage home,
and wander far and wide to gain their daily bread. Toil as they might,
farm and field could give them little for their labour, the
mother-country's breast was dry. And yet they loved her--loved her
dearly. Deeply and firmly rooted in his heart is the love of the East
Anglian for East Anglia. The outside world has but recently discovered
the charm of the Broadland: by the dweller there it has been felt since
the day when he first gazed with seeing eyes across its dreamy, silent
solitudes. The secrets of the marshland wastes have been whispered in
his ears by the wind in the willows, and have been sung to him by the
sighing sedge. He knows the bird voices of reed rond and hover, and has
read the lesson of the day's venture in the brightening sunrise and
sunset glow. Amidst scenes that have little changed since the Iceni hid
in the marshland-bordering woods, and crept out in their coracles on the
rush-fringed meres, he is at home with Nature, and becomes her friend,
her lover. She holds back no secret from him if he wills that he should
learn it; she charms him with her many moods. Her laughter is the
sunlight, and ere it has died away she has hidden coyly in a veil of
mist; now she is tearful with the raindrops falling on her changeful
face, but the light comes back with the silvery gleaming of her winding
rivers. When her lover leaves her, and wanders off to wooings far away,
she reproaches him by her silence; and when he has time to think, he
remembers with regret and longing the restful loveliness that was once
about him like a mantle of peace.
Flowering meads, wide-reaching marshland solitudes, lonely heaths and
sandhills sloping downward to the sea; wildfowl-haunted shores and flats,
rivers and lagoons through which the wherries glide, the calling of the
herdman and the sighing of the sea-wind through bracken, gorse, and fir
ridge--these are East Anglia, and, like voices heard in childhood, they
are with her children wherever they may wander, until all earthly voices
are for ever lost in silence.
No one felt the charm of peaceful Eastern England more fully and deeply
than did George Borrow. An East Anglian born, he was nurtured within the
borders of Norfolk during many of the most impressionable years of his
life, and when world-worn and weary, he sought rest from his wanderings,
he came back to East Anglia to die. During his latter days, he became
rather inaccessible; but an East Englishman always had a better chance of
successfully approaching him than any one not so fortunate as to have
been born within the compass of East Anglia. Mr. Theodore Watts
discovered this when Borrow and he were the guests of Dr. Hake at
Roehampton.
"When I went on to tell him," writes Mr. Watts, "that I once used to
drive a genuine Shales mare, a descendant of that same famous Norfolk
trotter who could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he, with the
Norfolk farmers, raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair;
and when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare
with myself behind her in a dogcart--an East Anglian dogcart; when I
praised the stinging saltness of the sea-water of Yarmouth, Lowestoft,
and Cromer, the quality of which makes it the best, the most delightful
of all sea-water to swim in; when I told him that the only English river
in which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was 'the glassy
Ouse' of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see
it reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a
good many things showing that I was in very truth not only an Englishman
but an East Englishman, my conquest of the 'walking lord of gipsy lore'
was complete, and from that moment we became friends."
"It is on sand alone," said Borrow, "that the sea strikes its true
music--Norfolk sand."
"The best of the sea's lutes," chimed in the artful Watts, "is made by
the sands of Cromer."