Transcribed from the 1908 Cassell and Company edition by David Price.
_By the Same Author_
A
Sea Dog of Devon
A Life of Sir
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With Introduction by Lord Brassey
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[Picture: George Borrow by Henry Philips pinxt; Emery Walker photo]
GEORGE BORROW
THE MAN AND HIS WORK
* * * * *
BY
R. A. J. WALLING
_Author of_ “_A Sea Dog of Devon_”
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[Picture: Decorative graphic]
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PREFACE
ONE writing of Borrow since the publication of Dr. W. I. Knapp’s “Life,
Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow” (Murray, 1899) must of
need acknowledge the invaluable services conferred upon the student by
that monumental work. Its store of documents is the harvest of a
lifetime of devoted labour, and it bridges many a yawning gulf which
aforetime left the Borrovian explorer disconsolate. In this monograph,
where Dr. Knapp is directly quoted, the fact is generally mentioned
either in the text or by way of footnote; but it seemed fitting that
there should be some more definite expression of my indebtedness to his
affectionate diligence in those long and fruitful researches, which alone
have made possible a consecutive story of Borrow’s life.
An inquiry into the Cornish origin of the Borrow family, into the
circumstances of Borrow’s visit to the home of his forbears, and of his
tour in Cornwall, was responsible for the inception of the present book.
The astonishing contrast between the Borrow of the common conception and
Borrow as he really was in the flesh and in the spirit gradually forced
itself upon me. Borrow has been popularly regarded in two lights. Many
people have had a vague idea that if he was not a gypsy he was “half a
gypsy, or something of the sort.” More instructed opinion has accepted
his affection for East Anglia, the country of his birth, and his
glorification of Anglo-Saxonism, as sufficient evidence that he was
himself an Anglo-Saxon. Both views are wrong. He was of Celtic origin;
his genius was Celtic, though its attributes were modified by many
influences. Here is the explanation of many things in Borrow’s life and
work which can be explained in no other way. If the part of the book
referring to his Cornish associations appears to be out of proportion to
the rest, my excuse lies here also.
Further, the Cornish episodes are those least known in Borrow’s life. My
object has been, so far as the narrative is concerned, to strengthen the
connecting links between those portions of his career which he set forth
in his autobiographies, rather than to re-traverse ground where he
himself trailed the pen.
Gratitude must be expressed for much assistance given to me in the
elucidation of obscure points and in the tracing of documents. First, I
am indebted to Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, not only for liberty to draw
upon his rich store of recollections of his friend, but for much advice,
assistance, and suggestion, the value of which it is difficult to
overestimate. No little of the revival of interest in Borrow and the
subjects with which he dealt is due to the vogue given to “gypsyism” in
literature by the extraordinary success of that wonderful novel,
“Aylwin,” and the fascinations of its heroine, Sinfi Lovel, of whom Mr.
Watts-Dunton and Borrow conversed during those walks commemorated in Dr.
Gordon Hake’s sonnet:
While he, Lavengro, towering by your side,
With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,
Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride
To tell the legends of the fading race—
As at the summons of his piercing glance,
Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,
While you called up that pendant of romance
To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
Your Amazonian Sinfi’s noble story!
Mr. Francis Edwards, of Marylebone, has generously given permission for
the reproduction of exceedingly interesting passages from unique copies
of Borrow’s books in his possession. To the kindness of Mrs. Ford, of
Pencarrow, is due some of the additional information about the relations
of Borrow with her husband, Richard Ford. For East Anglian memories I
have consulted, among others, Mr. William Dutt, of Lowestoft, and Mr.
William Mackay, of Oulton. Family documents and reminiscences have been
contributed by Mr. W. H. Borrow, of South Hampstead; Mr. E. Pollard, of
Penquite; Mr. William Pollard, of Woolston, and, above all, by Dr.
Reginald Taylor, of Gray’s’ Inn Road (son of the “gallant girl” of the
’fifties in Cornwall), to whom my thanks are due especially for the
material of the detailed account of Borrow’s Cornish tour.
In the biographical sense, the most important new matter is the
correspondence between Borrow and Sir John Bowring, supplied by the
courtesy of Sir John’s sons, Mr. Lewin B. Bowring, of Torquay, and Mr. F.
H. Bowring, of West Hampstead. This throws a little light on the
mysterious “Veiled Period.” The quarrel between Borrow and Bowring will
possibly never be explained quite fully; the correspondence now
summarised or printed for the first time shows that for more than twenty
years Bowring was a good friend of Borrow—“my only friend,” as he said in
1842. Judgment on the merits of the dispute, so far as the evidence can
be taken at present, must go against Borrow.
I have entered with some diffidence upon the discussion of Borrow’s
“gypsyism”; any degree of confidence which may appear is the offspring of
the enthusiastic aid afforded to me by Mr. R. A. Scott-Macfie, the
secretary of the Gypsy Lore Society.
R. A. J. W.
Plymouth,
_October_, 1908.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1. THE WIND ON THE HEATH 1
2. A WANDERING YOUTH 21
3. PUBLISHER’S HACK AND HEDGESMITH 46
4. BORROW AND BOWRING 67
5. IN FOREIGN PARTS 85
6. THE SUMMER HOUSE AT OULTON 106
7. “LAVENGRO” AND HIS CRITICS 128
8. “SUCCESS TO OLD CORNWALL!” 146
9. A GALLANT GIRL AND HER FAMILY 168
10. THE BOOK THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN 189
11. THE LAND OF ELIS WYN 208
12. LONDON AGAIN 224
13. DEATH OF MRS. BORROW 238
14. THE PASSING OF THE ROMANY RYE 251
15. BORROW’S GYPSYISM 264
16. BORROW’S BOOKS 293
17. CHARACTERISTICS 337
INDEX 349
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
GEORGE BORROW _Frontispiece_
_After the Portrait by Henry Phillips_, _by
permission of Mr. John Murray_, _the owner of the
Painting_.
PAGE OF BORROW’S DRAFT OF “THE ZINCALI” _page_ 276
_By permission of Mr. Watts-Dunton_.
PORTION OF PAGE OF BORROW’S COPY OF THE “ROMANTIC _page_ 331
BALLADS” WITH HIS MS. REVISION
_By permission of Mr. Francis Edwards_
CHAPTER I
THE WIND ON THE HEATH
“WHAT is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?” . . . “There’s night
and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother,
all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very
sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”
THE speakers were two young men, met casually on breezy Household Heath
outside the city of Norwich; the time towards sunset on a fine evening;
the year at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The tall young
Englishman who questioned and the lithe swart gypsy who answered were
friends of some years’ standing, but of infrequent intercourse. The one,
with an absorbing curiosity in all things rare and strange, especially in
rare and strange dialects and languages, the other, with a gypsy’s agile,
half-developed intellect and pagan philosophy, had a common bond in their
love of The Wild and their passion for pugilism and horse-dealing.
The quality of this friendship was peculiar, but not more remarkable than
the manner of its origin. Norman Cross, on the North Road, is a lonely
place, remote from the trafficking of the world, peopled mainly now by
ghosts. In the year 1810 it was the home of several thousands of
sorrowful men. There was enacted the sequel of many an incident in the
world-tragedy of the Great Conflict, for on that solitary cross-road the
Government had built sixteen prisons to hold six thousand Frenchmen,
human spoil of war, and fenced them round with a palisade. Outside were
barracks for the militia who guarded the prisoners and captives, and
wooden houses for the officers who commanded the militia. It was a
fantastic environment for an episode which determined the career and
directed the effort of such genius as was latent in a boy of seven.
In one of the wooden huts on the roadside dwelt Captain Thomas Borrow, a
Cornishman, adjutant of the West Norfolk Militia. With him were his
wife, formerly Ann Perfrement, the descendant of Huguenot refugees, and
their two sons, John, aged ten, and George, aged seven. The younger boy,
even at that age, was fond of self-communion, of solitary wandering; shy
of normal relations with his fellows and prone to scrape acquaintance
with the oddest people he could find. He absorbed impressions readily;
he never forgot what he saw or heard. He observed how the unhappy
prisoners earned some scanty comforts by straw-plaiting; his dark face
was often lit up by the light of the bonfires on which callous authority
threw the dainty work of French fingers, prohibited and condemned because
it interfered with the prosperity of the Bedfordshire straw industry. He
was one of the astonished listeners to the adventure of the French
officer who hid himself in a refuse bin and was shot out of prison and
collected by the scavengers. He picked up the friendship of a
snake-collector, who told him the tale of the King of the Vipers, and
made him a present of a toothless snake, which thereafter he carried
about in his bosom as a pet.
This companion of his lonely excursions was with him on the day when he
strolled into a green lane where the gypsies had encamped. With it he
turned the tables on the pair of vagabonds who threatened to assault him
and drown him in the toad pond for prying into their tents; and, for his
supposititious occult power over a poisonous reptile, he was endowed by
them with the title of “sapengro,” or snake-master. Who had been, one
moment before, a “young highwayman” and a “Bengui’s bantling” {3} became
a “precious little gentleman” and a “gorgeous angel” when the snake
“stared upon his enemy with its glittering eyes”; and presently was
introduced with ceremony to their son, a lad of thirteen, ruddy and
roguish of face, with whom he swore eternal brotherhood.
The gypsies camped in the green lane at Norman Cross were of the mighty
tribe of Smith, and the roguish lad was Ambrose. It was Ambrose Smith
who figured thereafter in the writings of the little sapengro as Jasper
Petulengro. It was he who uttered the pæan of the sun, moon and stars,
and the wind on the heath, when George Borrow met him eight or nine years
afterwards near the encampment outside the city of Norwich.
George was then a youth pretending to learn law in the respectable office
of Simpson and Rackham, in Tuck’s Court, but was far more ardently
engaged in studying the by-products of human society and threading the
byways of literature. He had been wandering on the heath until he “came
to a place where, beside a thick furze, sat a man, his eyes fixed
intently on the red ball of the setting sun.” The conversation, which
may be found in the twenty-fifth chapter of “Lavengro,” is one of the
most remarkable and most poetical dialogues in the English tongue. It
strikes with perfect accuracy the keynote of George Borrow’s life. The
whole chapter is a microcosm of Borrow, his philosophy, his morals, and
his tastes. Its exordium is a passionate statement of his efforts in
search of the heart of things, his pursuit of the elusive answer to the
eternal Question. Its middle includes some reflections on philological
research, mingled in Borrow’s incomparable manner with the pathos of
failure and the humour of success. It has its fling at the
metaphysicians. It reports in vivid words the earnest sermon of a field
preacher; it describes with great wealth of comparison and eloquence the
singing of a hymn on that Norfolk moor by a crowd of commonplace people
elevated to a pitch of intense feeling by religious enthusiasm: a hymn
which echoed in the ears of the listener many times in after years when
in the great cathedrals of the world he was disappointed with religion
decked out in all the panoply of pomp and circumstance; its peroration is
Mr. Petulengro’s immortal pronouncement on the problem of mortality—and
its epilogue is the gypsy’s invitation to his brother to “put on the
gloves, and I will try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be
alive.”
This is the very essence of Borrow—languages, religion, hedge-philosophy,
and pugilism. The only element missing from the mixture is one of his
characteristic outbursts in praise of the brown ale of old England.
“There’s likewise a wind on the heath” lets us some way into the heart of
Borrow’s secret.
The little sapengro of Norman Cross, the inquisitive youth who discussed
Death with Jasper Petulengro, and was boxed out of the mood of morbid
introspection, in which he declared, “I would wish to die,” into a
healthy appreciation of the sweetness of Life, played many parts in his
long career. He became scoffing sceptic, Bible missionary and
Papist-hater, traveller, and recluse, philologist and poet. But his
principal service to his day and generation and to their posterity had
nothing to do with philosophy or religion, with belabouring “Romanisers”
or with evangelical propagandism, with topography or with languages, or
with poetry in the academic sense. It had everything to do with his
wanderings in green lanes, his “love of Nature unconfined,” his
acquaintance with the gypsies, his passion for The Wild, and his devotion
to the ruder athletics. Many an artist imagines that he would make a
reputation as a man of business; many a wizard of accounts has secret
dreams of literary fame. Borrow had an impotent desire for scholarship
and the celebrity of learning; but he laboured better than he knew. His
invaluable bequest is to be disinterred from the numerous pages of five
books, dug out from a mass of irrelevance and banality; and its
inspiration will be found in the words of Mr. Petulengro: “There’s
likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would
wish to die?” {6}
The man who, preaching from this text, imposed worship on the
English-speaking world, was intensely alive, intensely egoistic. Often
“engrossed with the sufferings of himself and of his soul,” as one has
written of his hero Byron, he yet had a keen outlook upon that part of
society in which he could move freely, and, as he saw intensely, was able
to produce intense impressions of his visions upon his readers. He was a
strange, romantic, wayward, irresponsible man—irresponsible, that is, to
any but his own code of honour, manliness and virtue.
He was a very Don Quixote of letters. He went about the world tilting at
every windmill he encountered; not infrequently he would construct
windmills on which to break his lance. If he was often unhorsed and
maimed, that did not matter; it merely made his next onslaught more
severe. In one of his contests with persons who had offended him he
speaks of them as malignant pseudo-critics, by whom he would not allow
himself to be poisoned. “No, no! he will rather hold them up by their
tails, and show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from
their broken jaws.” Possibly only a man who had been worsted in his
battle could have been guilty of this. But—_furor arma ministrat_; this
was Borrow on the war-path against his critics. The true Borrovian likes
to think of Borrow at another period and in different circumstances. It
was a crabbed literary person who mangled and was mangled in this
fashion. The lover of his genius pictures him otherwise—the young and
handsome and vigorous Lavengro, stalking over the high roads and the
byways of England, disputing with scholar or with gypsy, camping in
lonely dingles, conjugating Armenian verbs with Isopel Berners. He has
six feet three inches of height. His hair is white, but he has the
complexion of healthy youth, and eyes dark and deep as mountain tarns.
He revels in the friendship of gypsies and all the vagrants of earth, and
cares for few other friends. He would rather sing ballads in the tent of
a Romany chal than be entertained in the palace of a prince; he prefers
the society of a prize-fighter to the converse of any duke. Recall his
picture of himself:
“A lad who twenty tongues can talk,
And sixty miles a day can walk;
Drink at a draught a pint of rum,
And then be neither sick nor dumb;
Can tune a song and make a verse,
And deeds of northern kings rehearse;
Who never will forsake a friend
While he his bony fist can bend;
And, though averse to brawl and strife,
Will fight a Dutchman with a knife;
Oh, that is just the lad for me,
And such is honest six-foot-three.”
Or, again, in his riper age, as he is described by Mr. Egmont Hake (Dr.
Gordon Hake’s fourth son)—a huge figure of a fine old man, eccentric of
humour, rich beyond measure in the experience from which he drew
anecdote, full of quaint whimsy and natural conceit. He was, says Mr.
Hake (_Athenæum_, August 13th, 1881), “a choice companion on a walk,
whether across country or in the slums of Houndsditch. His enthusiasm
for nature was peculiar; he could draw more poetry from a widespreading
marsh with its straggling rushes than from the most beautiful scenery,
and would stand and look at it with rapture.” He rejoiced in a
hedge-alehouse, or a coaching inn; he was moved to passionate delight by
local reminiscences of highway robbers, vagrom scoundrels, pugilists, and
vagabonds of all degrees; good beer was a poem to him. Under all these
impressions he expanded nobly; contact with conventional respectability
shrivelled him up; his _bête noire_ was “gentility.” His strength and
vigour remained unimpaired almost to the end of his life; at seventy he
would break the ice on a pond and plunge in to bathe.
No man less fit than this for literary controversy was ever born into the
world. It was an evil fate that launched him upon those sordid
disputations disfiguring the Appendices to “The Romany Rye,” from which
the “blood and foam” passage I have quoted is drawn.
Few men bringing to the literary mart so slight a cargo as Borrow brought
have obtained so great a price for it. Some of his work, judged by any
conventional standard, is remarkably poor. The best of it, judged by the
only proper standard (which is entirely unconventional) is so good that
immortality might be predicted for it by a person inclined to take the
risk of being confuted in some remotely future incarnation. A great
number of the enterprises in which Borrow dissipated many years of his
life may be dismissed as of no literary importance and of no possible
value to any other son of man. His philology, _quâ_ philology, is
grossly unscientific; its uses are, in fact, not scientific but artistic.
They reside in the quaint hues it helped him to mix on his palette, the
whimsical, half-serious, half-humorous disquisitions into which an
unusual word would lead him, the ease with which it enabled him to
glorify his picture with the tints of foreign skies and the forms of
strange men. If we are to assess his linguistic achievements by their
practical and immediate results, the years Borrow spent upon them were
squandered. The seeds of his philological learning,
“Like Hebrew roots, were found
To flourish most in barren ground.”
They produced a meagre crop of translations, of no consequence either as
exercises or as poetry. But that would be a perverse view to take of
Borrow’s studies. Their virtue was not in their verbal fruits, but in
the quality they added to his later work. For example, those “deeds of
northern kings rehearsed” were rehearsed a great deal better by other
people, and the works of Elis Wyn had been more efficiently dealt with by
a Welshman. But would the shining history of Isopel Berners have been as
glorious if Lavengro had not been the sort of man to compare her with
Ingeborg, the northern queen who engaged and defeated in single combat
each of her long string of redoubtable brothers? Or would not the
fascinating converse of Lavengro with the Methodist preacher, Peter
Williams, have lost half its charm if the young man had not been able to
talk familiarly with him of Master Elis Wyn and the Bardd Cwsg? It is
the reflected colour of all this word-learning that gives it a high place
in Borrow’s development.
He began to study languages almost before he was out of frocks. He did
not find his _métier_ till he was thirty-eight: “The Zincali; or, The
Gypsies of Spain” was published in 1841. This was late for a man who had
been so deeply devoted to the pen. His processes were slow, too. His
other books of any significance numbered only four, and they occupied
twenty-one years in gestation. “The Bible in Spain” was dated 1842,
“Lavengro” appeared in 1850, “The Romany Rye” in 1857, and “Wild Wales”
in 1862. Much was concentrated in these few works, laboriously
elaborated as they were, and produced with horrible pangs of travail.
They crystallised—if such a term may be used of Borrow—the experiences of
a long life of wandering through the world, and they recorded the
opinions collected or developed by a self-centred man of violent
prejudices. They provide an almost unparalleled conglomeration of good
and bad, of false and sound. They commit inexcusable crimes against
every canon of taste—and they have in them the true stuff of poetry and
romance. The glamour of these last is over them all. The poetry of
Borrow, one of the most natural poets who have written in English, takes
its spring in the keen observation and appreciation of the elemental joys
found in Nature’s least-trodden ways, and the elemental humours of her
least sophisticated children. It recalls Sidney’s epigram of the
excellent poets that never versified and the versifiers that need never
answer to the name of poets. For Borrow’s verse, on the whole, is
villainous, and much of his prose is truest poetry. He restored to us,
at any rate for a time, the picaresque element in romantic literature,
and revived our indulgent fondness for the good-humoured villains of low
life.
With the jovial virtues of Le Sage, however, Borrow combined in a
remarkable way some of the quaintest characteristics of Sterne. The mark
of “Shandyism” is strong upon portions of his work—but let it be said at
once that the philo-pugilist Borrow is absolutely free from any taint of
the pornographic _double entendre_ of the Rev. Laurence Sterne, M.A.
Captain Tom Borrow often rivals My Uncle Toby, and the battle with Ben
Bryan in Hyde Park may be compared as a staple reminiscence with the
Siege of Namur; but there is no Widow Wadman in “Lavengro.” Ab Gwilym
becomes in some points as delightful as Slawkenbergius, and there are
episodes in “The Bible in Spain” and “Lavengro” which may compare with
the stories of the Dead Ass and of Lefevre, the Monk and Maria; but it
can be said of Borrow’s books with more truth than a sententious critic
once said it of Sterne’s, that they may be submitted to the taste,
feeling, good sense, and candour of the public “without the least
apprehension that the perusal of any part of them will be followed by
consequences unfavourable to the interests of society.” It may be a
negative virtue that a book fails “to bring the blush of shame to the
cheek of innocence”; but, for what it is worth, any book of Borrow’s has
that merit.
Interesting as these comparisons may be to his admirers, Borrow must not
be judged by any purely literary standards. One discerning critic, Mr.
Thomas Seccombe, has observed that he “wrote with infinite difficulty.”
That is evident in almost every page. He had no fatal facility in
composition. He developed no graces of style. The man who loves
Stevenson is probably a man who will also love Borrow, but for reasons
quite apart from style. Borrow’s awkward forms and ugly lapses were
calculated to make Stevenson’s delicately tuned literary organism shudder
in its marrow. Their likeness lies in their love of Out-of-Doors, their
capacity for discovering and enjoying the unusual adventure in the
commonplace environment.
I doubt whether Borrow definitely and consciously copied his style from
anybody, or modelled it on any man’s writings; but if we are to go
anywhere for his master we must go to Defoe, whose “wondrous volume” was
his “only study and principal source of amusement” in his very small
boyhood at East Dereham. How he apostrophises the wizard! “Hail to
thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee?
England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could spare
them easier far than Defoe, ‘unabashed Defoe,’ as the hunchbacked rhymer
styled him.” England may not owe to Defoe all that Borrow declares she
does of her “astonishing discoveries both by sea and land,” and her
“naval glory,” but she certainly owes to him some of the gift that Borrow
bestowed upon her. George had many other points of resemblance to the
“illiterate fellow” of Swift’s satire besides this—that they were both at
divers times accused of being illiterate fellows, and both answered back
with compound interest of invective. Both were not only writing men, but
also men of action. Both prided themselves something unduly upon their
philological attainments. Both did late in life the literary work that
won them lasting fame. Above all, they shared what Defoe wittily
described as his “natural infirmity of homely, plain writing.” That is,
they had command of a tense, nervous, vigorous English without ornate
excrescences or fanciful refinements of any kind—the style which is
greatest because it is no style at all, the style which bites into the
mind and irritates the imagination. Both were able to give
verisimilitude to the most fantastical narratives; both were masters of
the form of autobiographical fiction. The parallel may finish with the
remark that neither of them was a bookish man.
Borrow was not even a great reader. He spent many hours among books—but
such books! They were mainly collections of ballads picked from a
variety of languages fit “to add a storey to the Tower of Babel,” the
detritus of the libraries he visited. He was fond of an uncommon book,
whatever its intrinsic merit, but he was fonder of an uncommon human
being. Men were his books. A ghostly procession of the authors with
whom Borrow had hobnobbed—leaving out of account his investigations in
shady paths on behalf of the Newgate Calendar—would afford a motley
spectacle of tatterdemalions, the rag, tag, and bobtail of literature.
He had inflated ambitions of scholarship, but, in fact, he had received
only an ill-regulated education, and his taste refused all conventional
rules as inventions of the Devil.
The Bible, Shakespeare in a lesser degree, and Defoe most of all—these
were his classics. No bad assortment, either; but the restriction of
one’s reading to these three would hardly testify to a catholic taste.
His favourite poet was Byron. The two are as unlike in most particulars
of their dispositions and careers as two heirs of mortality can be; but
it is not difficult to realise that Byron’s life and poetry would touch
deep springs in the nature of Borrow. Like Byron, he worked all his
affections, all his passions, all his prejudices into the very texture of
his books, and in them ran through all the gamut of his most violent
emotions. Like Byron, he had a fond weakness for melancholy—what Goethe
called “the hypochondriac humour.” As in the case of Byron, his
melancholy alternated with spasms of furious elemental rage, expressed in
the unbridled vituperation of his fellow men. So that, though no two
characters more widely different figure in literary history, there were
points of contact and bases of agreement between them. It was, indeed, a
soul attuned to Borrow who wrote:
“’Tis sweet to win, no matter how, one’s laurels,
By blood or ink; ’tis sweet to put an end
To strife: ’tis sometimes sweet to have our quarrels
Particularly with a tiresome friend:
Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels;
Dear is the helpless creature we defend
Against the world: and dear the schoolboy spot
We ne’er forget, though there we are forgot.”
The lines may be said to depict Borrow in some of his best-known
aspects—winning laurels by blood and ink, quarrelling with tiresome
friends, rejoicing in the good things of life, defending his dependents,
and treasuring the memories of his childhood.
He threw himself into his works in such a fashion that it is impossible
to elucidate them without reference to his personal career, or to
understand his proceedings without reference to his books. They are all
more or less in the autobiographical form, and they are all more or less
real autobiographies: how much more and how much less it is often
difficult to say. The secret of the books, the reason for the
fascination they exert upon mankind, must be found in the man; his own
secret must be sought in two directions. One has already been
indicated—his love of The Wild. From his gypsies and wanderers, his
hedge-tinkers and vagroms, all the denizens of the heath and the green
lanes—the society which began to vanish with the enclosure of the English
fields, and is fast disappearing from the land,—material unpromising and
uncongenial enough to the general, Borrow contrived to extract fine
poetry and mildly thrilling romance.
And how was it that a man whose pet weakness was his idolatry of the
Anglo-Saxons, who joyed in thinking himself representative of what was
best and manliest in a race whose aversion from the Romany is so
pronounced, was the man of all others in England who seemed to get into
closest touch with the gypsies, to understand them and to be understood
of them? Perhaps a little because of his philological craze and the
avidity with which he set himself to pick up their language. But the
real explanation is that, in fact, Borrow was no Anglo-Saxon at all. His
vainglorious boasts of Anglo-Saxon breeding were based on nothing more
substantial than the fact that his father and mother happened to be
living in Norfolk at the time when he came into the world. He was a Celt
of Celts. His genius was truly Celtic. His father was a Cornishman
whose family had resided in the West-country peninsula—Lord Courtney’s
“emerald, set in a sapphire sea”—for many generations, and was a Cornish
and therefore a Celtic family to the very tips of its numerous fingers.
His mother was of French descent. Here was a pretty parentage for a
bluff and hearty champion of optimistic and progressive Anglo-Saxondom!
Borrow was fond of Norfolk: the rest was affectation. He had all the
Celtic characteristics—the quick and lively imagination, the poetic
temperament, the intensely emotional nature, the tendency to melancholy.
The only writer who, within my knowledge, has laid effective stress on
this is Mr. Watts-Dunton. Borrow loved the wide level landscapes, the
marshes and broads of East Anglia, just as FitzGerald did, a descendant
of Irishmen who was born in the East. Various reasons conspired to
produce this affection. Norfolk was the scene of his boyish exploits.
In Norfolk lived the mother he worshipped. There he met the wife who was
his truest friend and finest comrade. But the spirit of East Anglia, the
Teutonic tradition, did not preside over Borrow’s destiny and direct his
moral and intellectual fortunes. It was the spirit of Old Cornwall, its
remote hills peeping out of vales of mystery towards an empyrean where
every cloud breathed legend, the land of weird imaginings, of saintly
lore, and chivalric romance. The bluff and blunt and downright
John-Bullery that Borrow affected was but a pose; the heat of the fires
of the Underworld creeps up into his work, and the pale light of the
Overworld shines down upon it. He is constantly on the brink of moral
tragedy and ever listening to the rumble of the spiritual upheaval. What
stirs him most to eloquence and deep feeling is Celtic Ireland or Celtic
Wales, the wild music of the speech of Murtagh the Papist gossoon, the
“noble mountains, green fields, and majestic woods” of the Cymric land.
Many peculiarities of Borrow, on a superficial examination, seem to offer
flat contradiction to this view. His “Poperyphobia” appears to be
difficult to reconcile with his unquestionable sympathy with the Celtic
spirit of Ireland. He affects the Orange hue; whenever he sees a
Catholic head he hits it. We need not seek far for the explanation. His
mother was of a Huguenot family which had been driven out of France by
the persecutions of the Catholic Church: Borrow idolised his mother.
Further, it never mattered to him whether an injury was two days or two
centuries old; he hated the offender just the same. His father had
quarrelled, long before George was born, with a gentleman named Hambly.
To the end of his life Borrow swore that a person named Hambly could
never be good. His adulation of violent sports and his pathetic belief
in the immaculate supremacy of the English in all athletics are other
facts which on the surface may seem to upset the theory of an obsessing
Celtic mysticism. But even here his ancestry counts for much. The
Cornish were ever devoted to athletic contests; their cousins the Welsh
are in one of the realms of sport unparalleled and unapproachable.
Borrow’s good-ale-of-old-England fetish surprised the decent and sober
people of Wales, and his “wishy-washy tea” is the national beverage of
Cornwall. But his devotion to malt liquor was a part of his protest
against “gentility-nonsense” and “temperance-canting,” about which he
raved with even more than usual violence and incoherence. In the
mid-Victorian age in which he wrote, the glorification of beer-swilling
was as un-“genteel” as even Borrow could have desired.
All these idiosyncrasies, however, count for little beside the deeper
characteristics of Borrow’s life and work, over which the Celtic genius
reigned. Racial traits were strongly marked in him, and he is a standing
refutation of Mr. George Moore’s dictum that “the land makes the Celt,”
and that it is not a question of race. In this heredity we must look for
the beginnings of any proper view of Borrow.