A WANDERING YOUTH
THE Borrows of Tredinnick, in the parish of St. Cleer, were proud Cornish
yeomen. For centuries they had occupied the same house and farmed the
same land. Now they have been scattered over the world, in true Cornish
fashion, and there is not a Borrow left in the district.
Tredinnick is a little old house in a hollow, about a mile north-west of
St. Cleer Church, near Liskeard, among the hills of Eastern Cornwall. It
is a long, low, stone-fronted building of two storeys, backed by a row of
tall elms standing at the roadside, with an apple orchard behind, and the
ground at the side sloping away into a deep valley of orchards and
meadows. The place is quite unpretentious; the farm is little more than
fifty acres in extent, and the house has lost in the lapse of time the
neatness that would have shown in the abode of Borrow’s _gentillâtre_.
Still, for a farmhouse, it is commodious. It has walls two feet thick,
and in the long, raftered, slate-floored kitchen are deep window-seats,
and an open hearth and chimney-corner, the crock-hook depending in the
midst. Lavengro would have rejoiced in such a place. The dining-room
and sitting-room are on the other side of the entrance, and
communicate—respectable but undistinguished rooms.
In this home was born, in December, 1758, Thomas, father of George
Borrow. He was a posthumous child. We have a very fair picture of him
in the opening chapters of “Lavengro.” We see him in youth, the
favourite of his mother, whose special care of him was the cause of
jealousy in his six brothers. We learn that shortly after he was
eighteen his mother died, and he adopted “the profession of arms, which
he followed during the remainder of his life.” But Lavengro, candidly
stating that he knows little about the early life of his father, does not
tell us the circumstances in which he left the homestead at Tredinnick,
after bringing to a disastrous end his apprenticeship to one Edward
Hambly, a maltster. He is described as “cool and collected, slow to
anger, though perfectly fearless, patient of control, of great strength,
and, to crown all, a proper man with his hands.” This may in some
measure account for the adulation of prize-fighting which in “Lavengro,”
as Mr. Birrell has pointed out, scandalised “the religious world” that
had welcomed with such effusive joy “The Bible in Spain.” George Borrow
inherited a love of adventure and a fondness for “the noble art,” and
probably also the aversion from “gentility” apparent in the lines with
which his autobiography opens. Yet it is strange that he was really
proud of his gentle descent, proud of his Cornish father and his
little-landed ancestry, and proud of the French extraction of his mother
and the small and delicate hands he got from her.
The manner of departure of Lavengro’s father out of Cornwall had an
intimate connection with that properness of his with his hands. He was
at Menheniot Fair with a party of youths from Liskeard, three or four
miles distant, when a row arose between young Menheniot and young
Liskeard; probably some breeze of incident blew upon the embers of a
village feud. Slow as he was to anger and patient of control, Borrow
nevertheless entered with zest into the fray, for he headed the Liskeard
party and brought the struggle to a climax by knocking down the
constable. Thereafter, fearing the consequences of his adventure, he
departed from the ancestral roof-tree, and began the wandering life which
he was leading when he met the mother of Lavengro. And small wonder at
his flight, for the constable he knocked down was none other than his own
master, the head-borough, Edward Hambly. The date of the scrimmage was
July 28th, 1783. He disappeared for five months. In December he turned
up at Bodmin and enlisted in the Coldstream Guards, who had a recruiting
party there under Captain William Morshead, later the celebrated general.
The captain, knowing his antecedents, did all he could to prevent the
enlistment, but without success.
Thomas Borrow may well have recalled the constable of Menheniot in later
years when he did battle in Hyde Park with “big Ben Brain” (read Bryan),
giving that celebrity a little useful practice for the contest in which
he became “champion of England, having conquered the heroic Johnson,” and
paving the way for the friendship to which all such encounters should
lead. Bryan, wrote George in after years, “expired in the arms of my
father, who read the Bible to him in his later moments.” What marvel
that “Lavengro” is a medley of religion and beer-drinking, prize-fighting
and philosophy?
Thomas vanished for several years into the privacy of a private of the
Coldstreams. Such a man, however, was not likely to remain permanently
in the obscurity of the ranks. He climbed steadily. After eight or nine
years, spent mostly with the regiment in London, he emerged into view
again as a sergeant, and in 1792 was transferred to the West Norfolk
Militia, whose headquarters were at East Dereham. This was the origin of
all we hear later about the pretty little town of “D—.”
At Dumpling Green, near by, resided Miss Ann Perfrement, sweet and twenty
when Sergeant Borrow marched into her perspective. She was the daughter
of a farmer who had descended from a Huguenot family, immigrants to
Norfolk among many others—including the Martineaus—after the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes. Miss Perfrement was occasionally engaged to act
minor parts in plays performed at Dereham by companies sent to the
country towns from the Theatre Royal in Norwich. Her stage presence
fascinated the Sergeant, who had reached the age of thirty-eight proof
against all feminine blandishments. He pursued his courtship of the
amateur actress with ardour and success. She accepted him, and a most
happy union began with their wedding on February 11th, 1793.
The movements of a regiment, even of militia, in those stirring days were
apt to be incalculable. The West Norfolks threaded the United Kingdom
from end to end, combining the swiftness of a bishop with the unexpected
evolutions of a knight upon the chessboard. Sergeant Borrow got his
commission as captain and adjutant in 1798; in 1800, either at Chelmsford
or Colchester, was born his elder son, John, who became first a military
officer and then an artist, and was one of Haydon’s pupils. In 1803 he
was back in Norfolk, recruiting. At East Dereham, on July 5th in that
year, George Borrow opened his eyes upon a world of which he was to see
so much more than falls to the lot of most sons, even of soldiers.
This bundle of potentialities was named George in honour of the King his
father served, and Henry after a Cornish uncle. The first few years of
his life were spent, like those of the young Sternes, at the tail of the
regiment, marching and countermarching in Essex, Kent, and Sussex,
wandering from barracks to barracks as the exigencies of the army
dictated in that day of Napoleonic scares. At the age of six he returned
to “pretty D—,” and there received some of the vivid impressions he has
reproduced in indelible colours upon the earlier pages of “Lavengro”—the
dignified rector and Philo, the clerk, reading “their respective portions
of the venerable liturgy,” and rolling “many a portentous word
descriptive of the wondrous works of the Most High”; and the “Lady
Bountiful, leaning on her gold-headed cane.” There he revelled in the
boy’s first flush of delight over “Robinson Crusoe,” and imbibed the
germs of that worship of Defoe which shines in all his work.
The next peregrination of the family was to Norman Cross, where George
met the snake-catcher and received from him the present of the fangless
viper with which he contrived so effectually to subdue the wrath of old
Gypsy Smith and his evil-looking mort, who “wore no cap, and her long
hair fell on either side of her head like horse-tails half way down her
waist; her skin was dark and swarthy, like that of a toad.” We know how
he was named “Sapengro,” and how brotherhood was sworn between him and
the gypsies’ son Ambrose, who figures immortally as Jasper Petulengro.
The sojourn at Norman Cross lasted fifteen months. Then, in July, 1811,
the regiment returned to East Dereham, where George took his introduction
to the science of languages. The embryo “polyglot gentleman” laid a
sound foundation upon Lilly’s Latin Grammar. However, their wanderings
were by no means at an end. For years there was to be little rest and
small possibility of regular schooling. In 1812 the West Norfolks were
moving again—marching through the Midlands and the North by slow stages
towards Edinburgh, stopping a month or two here and there. For example,
at Huddersfield they billeted long enough for George to be sent to the
local school. The conditions of such a life were hardly favourable to
the development of scholarship upon conventional lines. How valuable
they were to the cultivation of the kind of genius that lay behind the
forehead of George Borrow it is difficult to overestimate. He
assimilated rich and varied experience through every pore. He acquired
the love of a roving life, the passionate devotion to the road, that
never left him till the end of his days. His father was a wanderer
before he was born; he was a wanderer himself throughout his boyhood. It
was fit training for the man who was afterwards to be dubbed “the
Wandering Jew of Literature.”
In April of 1813 the West Norfolks descended upon Edinburgh, Captain
Thomas on horseback leading the van, and Mrs. Borrow and her boys
bringing up the rear in a “po’-shay.” There were many gay days of
military merry-making at Edinburgh Castle before, in the autumn, John and
George were entered at the High School. Probably they spent only one
session at the academy of classical learning which had, a generation
earlier, turned out so great a genius as Sir Walter Scott.
There is not much in Borrow’s record of the time to illustrate that
session, or to show what point in his youthful struggle with the dead
languages the incipient philologist reached. Here, as ever, his
interests were in the by-paths of life and learning. David Haggart was
more to him than the ministrations of his painstaking master, Mr. Carson.
Borrow had a catholic and withal a discriminating taste in vagabonds. It
manifested itself even at this early age. Just as in later years he was
fascinated by the personality of John Thurtell, so was he charmed at
Edinburgh by that weird brigand Haggart, who enlisted in the West
Norfolks as a drummer-boy, having been unearthed at Leith Races by one of
Captain Borrow’s recruiting sergeants. The drummer-boy whom George made
his companion subsequently became burglar, highway robber, murderer, and
prison-breaker, and only suspended his nefarious activities at the end of
the hangman’s rope in the year 1821.
The regiment left Edinburgh for home in 1814, on the cessation of the
war. The mustering-out took place at Norwich, where feastings and
congratulations were the order of many days. George’s parents lodged at
the Crown and Angel Inn, while he was sent to the Grammar School. This
time there was some hope that he might be able to continue his studies
undisturbed. Napoleon prevented its realisation by escaping from Elba
and getting the Norfolk militiamen sent to Ireland, where sympathetic
disturbances were occurring. They did not embark at Harwich, however,
until after the battle of Waterloo. From Cork they went to Clonmel, and
George had his first taste of the fascinating country whose very name
always seemed to exercise a spell upon him. At Clonmel he was sent to
school, and began to learn Greek. What was of greater consequence, he
met a wild Irish boy, the Murtagh who figures so finely in “Lavengro.”
Murtagh taught him Erse in return for a pack of cards. But even more
important still, it was here that he learned to ride on horseback and
picked up the love of horse-flesh which was one of the grand passions of
his life. Oh, that cob!—on which he rode round the Devil’s Mountain—“may
the sod lie lightly over the bones of the strongest, speediest, and most
gallant of its kind.”
The wanderings of the elder Borrows finally ceased in 1816. After the
Irish campaign, they returned to Norwich to settle down, and took a house
in Willow Lane. George, now thirteen, was sent again to the Grammar
School to receive his first regular course of “education.” Fortunately,
the process was quite unable to interfere with his natural development.
It was hardly possible that a boy who had been beating about the roads
and townships of the three kingdoms ever since he could toddle, had
learnt snake-charming and the Irish language, explored the mysteries of
gypsyism and horse-dealing, and picked up such a collection of odds and
ends of lore as reposed in his retentive brain, should comfortably
abandon his vagrom modes of thought and life for the mechanical lessons
and the conventional ways of a Grammar School ruled by a martinet. His
wander-years had quite unfitted him for methodical study, and he found
even less interest in the common pursuits of the school than does the
average healthy rascal of thirteen. Consequently, he had no soft corner
in the heart of the “head,” Edward Valpy, a pedagogue of the ancient
style who had no toleration for intransigence, and never risked the
spoiling of the child by any economy of the rod.
George had some Latin and a little Greek, picked up at Huddersfield and
Edinburgh and Clonmel, but he had probably found Murtagh a more congenial
authority than the excellent Lilly, and his Erse was more than his Greek.
Now that his body was moored to the desk at Norwich, his mind wandered
wantonly from the languages he had to study to those for which, in the
Valpeian _régime_, there was no provision. With his never-failing
capacity for picking up the quaintest and most out-of-the-way people to
be found about him, he made the acquaintance of Father D’Éterville, the
“elderly personage . . . rather tall and something of a robust make,” who
wore “a snuff-coloured coat and drab pantaloons . . . an immense frill,
seldom of the purest white, but invariably of the finest French cambric,”
and told the young student that if he wished to be a poet he should
emulate Monsieur Boileau rather than the vagabond Dante! The Rev. Thomas
D’Éterville was a French _émigré_ who had come over in 1792, and had
qualifications from the University of Caen. With him George studied
French and Italian, and made a beginning of Spanish.
Among his contemporaries drilled and thrashed by Valpy were several men
who obtained varying degrees of fame in the world of thought and action.
The Grammar School boys of the time included James Martineau, Sir
Archdale Wilson, and Rajah Brooke of Sarawak. Their achievements were
considerable, but it is, in one mind at all events, an open question
whether Borrow’s did not excel them all. Certainly no man of them made
so many idolatrous friends, and probably no man so many bitter enemies.
George was no ordinary schoolboy. His devotion to learning was intense,
but peculiar to himself. In his boyish pranks and recreations he was
just as unconventional. On one occasion, the wander-fever having seized
him, he communicated it to three friends of his own age. They decided to
run away from school, with some wild idea of emulating the feats of his
favourite Robinson Crusoe. The plan, worked out by Borrow, was that they
should escape to the Norfolk coast and take any ship that would convey
them out of England. Till they could find some convenient means of
emigration, they proposed to conceal themselves in a lair upon the shore,
and to subsist by forays upon the portable and comestible property of the
people of the district. The adventure began early in the morning and
terminated within a few hours. They were discovered some dozen miles
away by a gentleman who recognised one of them, and ignominiously
restored to the affection of their parents—and the insatiable wrath of
Valpy. The “head” took Borrow, as the ringleader, and flogged him
severely. It was said that for this purpose the culprit was “horsed” on
the back of Martineau, and that the punishment was so bad that Borrow had
to keep his bed for a fortnight. George could with difficulty forget a
slight or forgive an injury, real or imaginary, and Dr. Knapp declares
that he hated Martineau ever afterwards, and up to the time of his death
would never visit any house where he knew he must meet the theologian.
It is true that he did not care to meet Martineau, but the reason
assigned for his aversion must be given up as a fable. Martineau
ridiculed the story, and asserted with every show of truth that he never
“horsed” Borrow.
Dr. Jessopp was another of his schoolfellows. He has an anecdote of
Borrow appearing at school one day, his face stained brown with walnut
juice, and of Valpy, inquiring sententiously, “Borrow, are you suffering
from jaundice, or is it only dirt?”
Such hours of leisure as were not occupied by D’Éterville and his French
and Italian, or by the explorations into Spanish and the Romany, were
given up to his worship of Nature and his devotion to sport. He fished
in the Yare at Earlham, and went fowling over the surrounding fields and
marshes with “a condemned musket bearing somewhere on its lock in rather
antique characters, ‘Tower, 1746.’” But, above all, he haunted Harford
Bridge. For at Harford Bridge did not the amazing John Thurtell reside?
This son of a respectable alderman of Norwich had been in warlike
adventures abroad, but now that the wars were over had returned to his
native parts to get such entertainment out of life as a man might to whom
every form of sport came gaily welcome, and the more violent it was the
more gaily. So distinguished a patron of the prize-ring and so ungenteel
a gentleman was certain to make a strong appeal to young Borrow, who made
his acquaintance and acquired from him the art of boxing. As we have
seen, his father, the captain, had been a bruiser when occasion demanded,
and had fought Ben Bryan. His fondness for the sport was hereditary. He
developed it during his visits to Thurtell, and it never left him. One
of the kinds of “canting nonsense” denounced in the Appendix to “The
Romany Rye” is the “unmanly cant”—a phrase in which he summed up all
objections to the practice of fisticuffs. His mentor in the noble art is
lightly sketched in “The Zincali” in connection with the description of a
prize-fight. The “terrible Thurtell, lord of the concourse,” made a sad
ending. He committed the murder which inspired the familiar ballad of
“William Weare”:
“He cut his throat from ear to ear,
His brains he battered in;
His name was Mr. William Weare,
He lived in Lyon’s Inn.”
Thurtell induced Weare, who had relieved him of £400 at a gaming-table,
to drive to Elstree in Hertfordshire, where he disposed of him in the
artistic fashion just related. One of his companions turned King’s
evidence, and he was hanged at Hertford in 1823. {34}
So, learning his grammar at school, visiting D’Éterville at Strangers’
Hall for French and Italian, trespassing on the grounds of the admirable
Mr. Gurney in search of fish, being initiated into the art and mystery of
pugilism, strolling to Thorpe, and Eaton, and Cringleford, George passed
two years. He was fourteen when he saw the fight depicted in “The
Zincali.” The next year he was one of the spectators at the great annual
Tombland Fair, when he encountered once more the gypsy Ambrose Smith, and
went with him to the encampment on Mousehold Heath, discoursing by the
way of the quality of beauty, as exemplified in the person of Tawno
Chikno and the earl’s daughter who fell in love with him, and making the
acquaintance of the weird old hag “whose name was Herne and she came of
the hairy ones.” While the gypsies remained in camp on Mousehold Heath,
the lad visited them frequently, and was introduced by Jasper—terribly
angering his mother-in-law, Mrs. Herne—into the mysteries of the Romany
language. His extraordinary facility in acquiring and retaining words
obtained for him the nickname of Lavengro, or “word-fellow.”
George left school in 1819, and was articled to the firm of Simpson &
Rackham, solicitors, of Tuck’s Court, Norwich, apparently on the advice
of his friend Roger Kerrison, son of a substantial citizen. Though it is
clear that he never entertained any enthusiasm for the profession, he
diligently pursued his studies at the irksome desk. They were not,
however, those of the law, but of languages and poetry. By devoting
himself to his parchments and his law books, and seeking to fill the
station of life to which he had been dedicated, he might have made an
indifferently bad country solicitor. Thank heaven, nothing was further
from his thoughts. He was taken specially under the wing of the head of
the firm, William Simpson, then Town Clerk, and an excellent good fellow.
George lodged in his house in the Upper Close. Tuck’s Court, where he
sat at the desk, was nearly opposite the old Norfolk Hotel.
It was not long before he added another to his strange gallery of
cronies—a Welsh groom employed by a gentleman living at the end of the
court, a queer, mis-shapen man, the butt of George’s fellow-clerks, who
hailed his every appearance with the ballad of:
“Taffy was a Welshman,
Taffy was a thief.”
To Borrow, however, he was not a freak of nature, sent by a kindly
Providence to lighten the laborious hours of Simpson & Rackham’s office,
but a man who knew the Welsh language, and might assist him in learning
it. In return for his help, George induced the other boys to cease their
persecution, and declared that this had the effect of releasing the
Welshman from the horns of a dilemma—for he was cogitating whether “to
hang himself from the balk of the hayloft or to give his master warning.”
So he won his way into the epic of “Dafydd ab Gwilym” and the songs of
the Welsh bards.
Borrow’s adventures were now of a character different from those of his
schoolboy days. He began to enter upon profound intellectual waters.
His mania for languages grew upon him. We have already seen him
acquiring Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and Erse. He now set
about Welsh, Danish, and other tongues, and in pursuit of German he fell
in with William Taylor. The meeting had an important influence upon his
development. Taylor was a scholar of fine parts, a man deeply versed in
German literature at a time when, as Professor Dowden has said, “German
characters were as undecipherable to most Englishmen as Assyrian
arrow-heads.” He was the friend of Southey, whom he entertained in
Norwich at the house, No. 21, King Street, which was the resort of all
the wit and learning that centred in the city. Taylor found young Borrow
a man after his own heart, took to him readily, and offered to teach him
German. It is hardly necessary to say that George accepted such an
invitation, nor that he learnt a good deal more than German at the feet
of Taylor, whose views on most questions were advanced and unrestricted.
The scholar was an agnostic in matters of religion, and an iconoclast in
many sorts. His great failing was drunkenness: he ultimately became a
sot.
Miss Martineau wrote that:
“In Taylor’s old age . . . his habits of intemperance kept him out of
sight of the ladies, and he got around him a set of ignorant and
conceited young men, who thought they could set the world right by
their destructive propensities. One of his chief favourites was
George Borrow, as George Borrow himself has given us to understand.
When this polyglot gentleman appeared before the public as a devout
agent of the Bible Society in foreign parts, there was one burst of
laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days.”
Professor Dowden has pleasantly reminded us of the delight Harriet
Martineau took in “pricking a literary windbag”; sometimes she pricked
more substantial things, and her rapier broke. At any rate, she is
hardly a good witness on the subject of Borrow, for no love was lost
between the families.
And Taylor, at the time when he took up George, was a man of some
consequence in the literary world, apart from “the little Academe” of
Norwich. He knew his Kotzebue, his Goethe, his Schiller, his Klopstock;
he was in himself a reference library of what was then outlandish
knowledge. He raised a bright light above the intellectual circle of the
city, in spite of the sarcasm of Harriet Martineau, who rallies his
eccentricity, his “defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had
rescued him from it, information, given as certain, that ‘God Save the
King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon”—and so forth. But
his solid claim to consideration is good; he lives as “the
Anglo-Germanist” of Borrow’s books rather than as “godless Billy Taylor.”
I have taken leave to doubt that Borrow’s melancholy was the fruit of the
theological opinions he acquired from Taylor. Effort has been made to
trace all his sufferings to this association, and to the moral
disintegration that is supposed to have set in as the result of his
intercourse with an atheist. It seems to me an unfair and regrettable
imputation. Borrow was destined to go through his Werterian period, and,
child of the Celtic spirit that he was, it was bound to be a period of
acute strain and stress. He felt all things intensely. If he had not
encountered the mocking philosophy of “Billy Taylor” through personal
contact, he would have met it elsewhere. It could no more be missed by
the youth of 1820 than by the youth of a later century.
What we know with certainty of Taylor is that he was the earliest scholar
and critic to divine what there was in George Borrow and to encourage his
literary bent. We have to be grateful to him for that. He wrote to
Southey:
“A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s ‘Wilhelm Tell,’
with a view of translating it for the Press. His name is George
Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity;
indeed, he has the gift of tongues and, though not yet eighteen,
understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.”
The catalogue of Borrow’s languages is thus largely and rapidly extended.
We need not stay to inquire how he obtained them all, nor need we assume
that his acquaintance with them was in any sense complete or scientific.
It was probably little more than a dictionary acquaintance; he had an
extraordinary facility for getting the rudiments of a language in a few
weeks with little more assistance than the dictionary could supply. His
Welsh and Danish studies are the most important to notice here; they had
a considerable influence upon the course of his life during the few years
now approaching. “Ab Gwilym” and the ballads of the Norsemen obsessed
him.
A personage visited Taylor at Norwich in the year 1821 to whom this sort
of young man could not fail to be interesting. It was John Bowring, on a
business mission to the city. Borrow was a guest at a dinner party given
by Taylor in July of that year, when Bowring was present with Lewis
Evans, a Welsh doctor who had physicked the army in Spain during the
Peninsular War. The philological mood was strong on Borrow—and Bowring
was certainly a considerable philologist. He had recently made one of
his long journeys on the Continent, combining business pains with
literary joys in his accustomed manner, and had compiled an anthology
which he described as a “Specimen of Russian Poets.” This collection it
was which inspired the present of a diamond ring, conferred on him by
Alexander I. A man of such stamp must naturally have appeared something
of a hero in the eyes of this youth. Why is it that he makes anything
but a heroic figure in Borrow’s works?
Rightly or wrongly—wrongly, as I think—in after years the “Norwich young
man” considered himself to have received much injury at the hands of
Bowring. Consequently, Bowring became the most vicious and most
worthless scoundrel that ever wore shoe-leather. This was Borrow’s way:
he was a prince of haters. The poet and linguist, the diplomatist, the
political disciple of the illustrious Jeremy Bentham, was melted down
into the Old Radical of the Appendix to “The Romany Rye,” and caricatured
in the postboy’s story at the end of “Lavengro.” No accurate view of
Bowring can be acquired from these acerbitous descriptions; line must be
altered and colour modified with great liberality. Bowring may have made
pretensions that could not be sustained, but his proper pretensions were
certainly far greater than Borrow, in the berserking spirit that
possessed him twenty years afterwards, was ready to admit. The polite
tag with which he headed the eleventh chapter of the Appendix was:
“This very dirty man with his very dirty face
Would do any dirty act which would get him a place.”
Borrow’s lively account of the dinner party, written with Archilochian
bitterness, cannot be read without many reservations. He makes out
Bowring a literary pirate and a morally reprehensible cheat, a fraudulent
ignoramus, trading for cheap glory on other people’s lack of knowledge,
claiming an acquaintance with languages and poetry which he does not
possess—evading conversation that will test his assertions, and dodging
all the keen questions of the young Solon who tells the tale. Borrow
poses him with his Red Rhys of Eryry, with his Ghengis Khan, and with his
Koran. Finding that Borrow knows nothing of the Slavonic languages,
Bowring immediately becomes garrulous on the subject of Slavonic lore and
literatures; when in later years they meet again and Borrow has the
Slavonic languages at the tip of his tongue, Bowring hurriedly changes
the subject! That deductions have to be made from such an account of the
matter is obvious; they may well be generous.
It is clear that, at the time, the young man entertained none of these
opinions about Bowring, for he sought his help in a troublesome period of
his own life, and was ready to engage in a literary collaboration with
him. What actually happened was that, as a result of this meeting at the
hospitable board of William Taylor, Borrow was induced to pursue even
with greater ardour than before his translations from the Celtic and the
Norse languages. It may have been largely a waste of time. Possibly
George would have done better either by sticking to his law books or by
cultivating his bent for original composition; but that was no fault of
Bowring, from whom he received inspiration and encouragement in a course
of study that was exceedingly congenial to him.
He went on delving in the musty old folios of the Corporation Library.
Their yellow pages were more precious to him than aught in the world; the
songs he puzzled out of the “Danica Literatura” were sweeter than the
“Celestial syrens’ harmony
That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres.”
True delight to him was the acquisition of Anglo-Saxon, the improvement
of his Welsh and Scandinavian; the sum and crown of bliss was to pore
over Llhuyd’s “Archæologia Britannica” and to translate Olaus Wormius—of
whom he became so desperately fond that in a fit of youthful freakishness
he adopted the signature “George Olaus Borrow.” His pencilled notes are
still to be seen on the margins of the ancient tomes so generously handed
over to his tender mercies by the city authorities.
Meanwhile, piles of notebooks and manuscripts were growing in the house
in the Upper Close; the rhymed translation of “Ab Gwilym” and English
versions of the old Norse ballads were proceeding laboriously but
steadily. To the industry of the bookworm was added the passion of the
author. “Ab Gwilym,” Olaus Wormius, and William Taylor in the aggregate
were far too strong an influence for worthy Mr. Simpson of Tuck’s Court
to counteract. Wigs and parchment could not stand against philology and
poetry. Whatever notions Borrow ever entertained about pursuing the law
as a profession gradually paled before the _furor scribendi_. Thomas
Campbell was editing Colburn’s _New Monthly_, and Taylor wrote to him on
behalf of Borrow. The result was the appearance in the magazine of a
rhymed English version of Schiller’s ballad, “Der Taucher,” which was
signed “G. O. B.”—the “O” standing for the Olaus of his adoption. This
represented all that Campbell did for him. Borrow was more successful
with Sir Richard Phillips, the editor and proprietor of _The Monthly
Magazine_, to whom his name was also introduced by Taylor. In the late
months of 1823 several poetical translations appeared in the _Monthly_.
It must be confessed that they hardly reached even to the merit of
mediocrity. During the same period Borrow was hard at work translating
Klinger’s “Faustus” and other matters. It was not a sanitary life for a
youth of twenty. The inevitable consequences were ill-health, morbid
melancholy, and a particularly turbid period of Werterism, during which
threats of suicide were frequent. All this has been laid at the door of
William Taylor. It would be far more appropriate to charge it upon
Klinger, Olaus Wormius, and Ab Gwilym. Borrow contrived very effectually
“to suck melancholy out of a song.”
This, of course, was very unsatisfactory preparation for the career of a
respectable solicitor in a cathedral city. His father protested in vain.
Before the noble old captain died, leaving the brothers dependent on
their own resources (since he had been able to make provision only just
sufficient for his widow), George had decided that his association with
the law should be determined at the same time as his apprenticeship.
Roger Kerrison had already departed to London, and Borrow wrote to him
there:
“If ever my health mends, and possibly it may by the time my
clerkship expires, I intend to live in London, write plays, poetry,
etc., abuse religion, and get myself prosecuted; for I would not for
an ocean of gold remain any longer than I am forced in this dull and
gloomy town.” {45}
Borrow’s father died on February 28th, 1824. A month later, within a day
or two of the expiry of his articles, George was on the coach bound for
London, accompanied by a little green box full of manuscripts, and in his
pocket a letter of introduction from William Taylor to Sir Richard
Phillips, the publisher. He had burnt his legal boats and destroyed his
youthful bridges; he was fairly started upon the literary life.