PUBLISHER’S HACK AND HEDGESMITH
BORROW’S “literary” life in London—where he lodged at 16, Millman Street,
Bedford Row, with his friend Kerrison—was a period of the deadliest and
most miserable drudgery. No author is a man of genius to his publisher,
as Heine tells us. Borrow was certainly not a man of genius to Sir
Richard Phillips, and their association for about ten months was a time
of strain and irritation to both. Consequently, in Borrow’s opinion,
Barabbas was Sir Richard Phillips. He lives only as “the publisher” in
“Lavengro,” in which he is pictured as a subject fit merely for the odium
and execration of the human race. Discount from this estimate of Sir
Richard is highly necessary. He appears to have been a moderately
inoffensive person, whose chief weakness was metaphysics, and a
worse-assorted pair than he and Borrow it would be hard to imagine.
What was the literary ammunition with which Borrow expected to bring the
publisher of _The Monthly Magazine_ to his feet? It consisted wholly of
translations and versifications. Their intrinsic merit was very slight,
and there was no market for them. Some might be useful to fill up an odd
corner, but they were certainly no staple commodity for a person
intending to get a living by literature. Under the combined disadvantage
of unmarketable wares and an uncongenial temperament, Borrow might well
have considered himself lucky to be taken on by Phillips as a factotum to
do the scavenging of his business. But while they were together the
youth tasted the bitterest cup and fed on the hardest crust that Grub
Street had to offer to the worshippers of the Muses. It had been more
humane if Phillips had repeated to Borrow the advice which Mr. Wilcox,
the bookseller, offered to Dr. Johnson when he proposed to live as an
author: “You had better buy a porter’s knot.” Hard physical exertion
would have served him better than the labour he endured, this child of
The Wild, cooped up in London compiling criminal records or translating
philosophical treatises into the German language.
Phillips had just retired from the business of pure publishing, which was
a gloomy fact in the prospect of Borrow’s cargo of ballads. He retained
_The Monthly Magazine_, it was true, and had started a pretentious
periodical under the resounding title of _The Universal Review or
Chronicle of the Literature of all Nations_, apparently in the hope—which
proved vain—that it would provide a career for his son. This was the
_Oxford Review_ which figures in the pages of “Lavengro.” The actual
editor was the redoubtable William Gifford, and the work of which
superfluous copies lay about on the floor in such prodigal profusion was
his translation of Juvenal. The incongruity of such an atmosphere for
the kind of genius that possessed young Borrow! With a pathetic belief
in the potency of Danish ballads to move the stoniest heart and draw
guineas from the tightest purse, he introduced the subject. Phillips
would have none of it, and when his visitor began to declaim of
“Buckshank bold and Elphinstone,
And more than I can mention here,”
he stopped him, saying that “it was very pretty indeed, and beat Scott
hollow, and Percy too”—but nobody then cared for Percy, nor for Scott
either, save as a novelist. If Borrow could produce something which
should rival the merits of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” by Legh Richmond,
there might be a chance of doing business. The young aspirant for
literary fame searched London for a copy of the book which he was
recommended to imitate, and, when he found it, discovered that he could
by no possibility do anything like it, for it was a religious book,
“written from the heart,” and Borrow had to confess to the publisher that
he did not know much about religion in an intimate way. The only thing
to do was to accept that which the publisher was prepared to offer him,
the task of reviewing books for the new periodical, and of collating
records of “Celebrated Trials.”
Another enterprise was undertaken by Borrow, which in itself was
sufficient to prove his undoing even if the life had been congenial to
him. Phillips was the author of a work of philosophy entitled “The
Proximate Causes of the Material Phenomena of the Universe.” In an ill
moment the new recruit engaged to translate this portentous tome into
German for publication. Shades of Olaus Wormius and Ab Gwilym! Borrow’s
German was the first stumbling-block. It was good enough to enable him
to read German works and to turn German into English, but to work with it
as a colloquial tongue was quite a different matter. In this respect he
had contracted to do the impossible. But even if his German had been
perfect he would have been a fish out of water, for he knew nothing of
metaphysics. This is not the place to discuss the value of Sir Richard
Phillips’s book, which has doubtless taken up some dusty nook on a
library shelf for its permanent and undisturbed place of residence. But
it was enough for Borrow to be told that nobody could understand his
German version: in his opinion the cause of that did not reside so much
in his imperfect acquaintance with the language as in the folly of the
author. Borrow did not understand him and his terminology; consequently,
the theories and the language of Sir Richard Phillips were equally
absurd. The contumely poured upon the publisher in “Lavengro” was
probably not fully deserved. A German edition of the Philosophy,
translated by Theobald and Lebret, appeared at Stuttgart in 1826, and,
for what it was worth, the Germans succeeded in understanding this. But,
for the rest, if Borrow was treated no worse than other publishers’ hacks
were treated, his lot was no more pleasant. Phillips was exigent about
the work for which he paid so meanly, and none too kindly in his manner.
Even about the “Celebrated Trials,” which was the enterprise George liked
best of them all, Borrow was worried in an unconscionable fashion.
Of course, there was another life than this: his own private life, his
intercourse with such friends as he had already in London and with the
new acquaintances he made during his unconventional wanderings about the
city. His brother John, the artist, reached London on April 29th,
commissioned to induce Benjamin Haydon to paint the portrait of a Mr.
Robert Hawkes, who was Mayor of Norwich in 1822. John had been asked to
do the portrait himself, but distrusted his powers and preferred that the
commission should go to Haydon. George went with his brother to
interview “the painter of the Heroic,” who was not by way of painting
provincial mayors as a matter of preference, but was in the chronic state
of impecuniosity which made the fee of a hundred pounds an irresistible
bait. The mission was successful. Haydon went down to Norwich, and
executed a portrait of the worthy Mr. Hawkes “striding under a Norman
arch out of the cathedral.” The Norman arch seems to have been suggested
locally, and it appealed strongly to Haydon’s sense of the grandiose,
though many people may be inclined to agree with George that the mayors
of the day, as a rule, would have been better painted issuing from The
Chequers or The Brewers Three.
Whatever distractions he could discover or invent, Borrow’s life was
miserable, and brought on severe attacks of melancholia, which he first
described as “the Horrors” and afterwards as “the Fear.” “What a life!
What a dog’s life!” he tells us he would exclaim after “escaping” from
the presence of the publisher. His woes, real and imaginary—and a great
many of them were the effect of his morbid imaginings—drove him to
desperate thoughts. After his brother’s visit, Knapp tells us, he wrote
to Kerrison: “Dear Roger,—Come to me immediately. I believe I am dying.”
He was probably very far from dying, but Kerrison had an idea that George
was liable to suicidal impulses, did not like assuming the responsibility
for such an irresponsible person, and shifted his lodgings. The mood
passed, and Borrow went on hawking his ballads among the publishers of
London with no more success than before. He relates how he called on
“glorious John” twenty times without success. We are not to place too
much reliance upon the exactitude of this statement. Meanwhile, the
“Celebrated Trials” was going on. It was a tremendous compilation, with
little of Borrow’s own work in it. Its 3,600 pages represented nearly a
year’s adventures among the bookstalls and the files of old newspapers
and fly-sheets. One piece of characteristic literary work with which he
endowed the world was his translation of Klinger’s “Faustus,” which
shortly appeared. This had been done at Norwich in the Simpson & Rackham
days. Finally, the book of “Trials” was completed, and the _Universal
Review_ died of inanition. “I did not like reviewing at all . . . I
never could understand why reviews were instituted,” says Lavengro. And
he continued to detest reviewers and reviewing to the end of his days.
In 1853, when Whitwell Elwin was deputising for Lockhart as editor of the
_Quarterly_, he met Borrow. Their interview, Elwin’s son tells us, was
characteristic of both: “Borrow was just then very sore with his slashing
critics, and, on someone mentioning that Elwin was a _quartering_
reviewer, he said, ‘Sir, I wish you a better employment!’”
At the death of the _Universal Review_, his relations with Phillips came
to an end. He had little money and no resources. Once more he resumed
the weary round, tramping in search of purchasers for his translations,
and gradually approaching a condition of penury, but maintaining his
attitude of aggression and independence. It is into this brief period
that he has worked some of the most effective scenes of “Lavengro,” the
friendship with the old apple-woman who had a stall on London Bridge, and
with the Armenian merchant to whom he suggested that his wealth should be
devoted to the liberation and aggrandisement of Armenia. Languages and
poetry still obsessed his dreams. But audacious poverty at last bit a
deeper wound than could be salved by poetry, and he resolved, only just
too late, to accept an engagement the Armenian had offered him. It was
sharp upon his disappointment at finding that the Armenian had taken him
at his word, and gone away bent upon the conquest of Persia, that,
returning from an excursion to Greenwich, Blackheath, and Shooter’s Hill,
in the course of which he came upon the “Petulengros” in camp, he saw a
notice in a bookseller’s window, “Wanted, a Novel or Tale.” “Lavengro”
relates how he shut himself up from the 13th to the 18th of May, and
wrote “The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell,” which he sold to the
bookseller for twenty pounds.
How much of all this is truth and how much is fiction it is difficult to
determine. There is probably a basis of fact for it. Borrow, with all
his imagination and all his romance, was not an inventive writer, and
though the idea of “Joseph Sell” may have been suggested by the history
of “Rasselas,” it is more probable that by some stroke of luck of this
kind he did obtain the money with which to set out on his tour of the
English roads. The circumstance that no “Life of Joseph Sell” has ever
been discovered is nothing to set against this probability, and against
the feeling with which Lavengro narrates its inception and
accomplishment. Borrow’s love of mystification entirely accounts for it.
There was a choice between saying exactly what he did, what his tale or
history was entitled, and obscuring the whole matter by a fictitious
name; and it would not have been Borrow if he had not chosen the latter
course. By whatever work, he did obtain money enough to allow him to
shake the dust of London off his shoes and begin those wanderings through
English rural districts which provided the adventures described in the
second and better half of “Lavengro.”
Borrow was big and strong and a magnificent walker; never before, as Mr.
Watts-Dunton has said, had there appeared on English roads so
majestic-looking a tramp, with bundle and stick. He went south-west to
Salisbury Plain, and there is a powerful account in “Lavengro” of sunrise
at Stonehenge. The only thing to compare with it is Thomas Hardy’s
prose-poem of the same magical place by moonlight. One cannot read
without a thrill the passage where, “taking off my hat I advanced slowly,
and cast myself with my face upon the dewy earth in the middle of the
portal of giants. The spirit of Stonehenge was strong upon me.”
There is little, of importance to Borrow’s own life, to decipher in the
story of his wayfaring which is not incorporated in the book itself.
Perhaps one of the most weird of his adventures was the encounter with
the scholar and gentleman afflicted by the “touching” mania; one of the
most sensational the attempt made by Mrs. Herne, the gypsy crone, to
poison him with a doctored cake; one of the most impressive his meeting
with the Welsh Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife,
Winifred—Peter Williams who suffered tortures untold because he imagined
that in his boyhood he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. He
met Romanist missionaries, who at that time were very active on the
highways and byways of England; dog-fighters and prize-fighters;
everywhere out-of-the-way adventures occurred to him. He bought the
stock-in-trade of Jack Slingsby, a hedgesmith and tinker, who was afraid
to remain on the roads because of the enmity of the terrible bully,
Blazing Bosvile, alias the Flaming Tinman; and in the course of his
wanderings in search of business, he pulled up in Mumper’s Dingle, where
was enacted the romance of Isopel Berners. The scene is said to have
been identified as Mumber Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire.
In all the writings of Borrow there is but one episode of love. This
romantic wanderer, so far as he informs us or we can ascertain, had been
only once in love in nearly forty years, and that for a few weeks; nor
was he then so deeply immersed that he took any particular pains to bring
the lady to his own way of thinking. But this one episode has endowed
English literature with a figure which takes a proud place in the gallery
of fair women, the figure of Isopel Berners. Like everything else in
Lavengro’s life, his sweetheart must be remarkable, his courtship must be
unconventional, the adventure must have a vague and misty ending.
Watch Isopel as she descends, with her donkey and cart, behind the
Flaming Tinman and Moll, his mort, into Mumper’s Dingle, where Lavengro
has camped.
“Dashing past the other horse and cart, which by this time had
reached the bottom of the pass, appeared an exceedingly tall woman—or
rather girl, for she could scarcely have been above eighteen. She
was dressed in a tight bodice and a blue stuff gown; hat, bonnet, or
cap she had none, and her hair, which was flaxen, hung down on her
shoulders unconfined; her complexion was fair, and her features
handsome, with a determined but open expression.”
In conversation with the Flaming Tinman, who is working himself up to the
proper pitch of a quarrel with the amateur tinker, the tall girl remarks
that she would engage to thrash that weedy-looking youth with one hand.
Forth bursts Lavengro, with his eternal Norse lore: “‘You might beat me
with no hands at all,’ said I, ‘fair damsel, only by looking at me—I
never saw such a face and figure—both regal—why, you look like Ingeborg,
Queen of Norway; she had twelve brothers, and could lick them all, though
they were heroes:
“‘On Dovrefeld, in Norway,
Were once together seen
The twelve heroic brothers
Of Ingeborg, the queen!’”
A pretty invocation, indeed, to a hawker travelling with a donkey-cart!
“None of your chaffing, young fellow,” said the tall girl, “or I will
give you what shall make you wipe your face; be civil, or you will
rue it.”
Lavengro admitted that he was “perhaps a peg too high,” and offered her
“something a bit lower.” It was a Romany couplet. The rage of the tall
girl, whilom Queen Ingeborg, may be imagined when she found herself
associated with the gypsies; there is no despite of gypsies quite so deep
as that of the English of the “lower orders,” as they might say at
Marlborough. And, after a little more of Lavengro’s solemn chaff:
“Before I could put myself on guard, she struck me a blow on the face
which had nearly brought me to the ground.”
Fit exordium to the love-story of travelling hawker and hedge-tinker, to
be promoted later by lessons in Armenian given by the Knight of the
Solder-iron to the Damsel of the Donkey-cart. And the scene that
follows—Lavengro’s fight with the Flaming Tinman, who transferred his
mortal enmity for Jack Slingsby to the temporary owner of Jack Slingsby’s
stock-in-trade—is a fit sequel. The heroic combat was the real beginning
of the courtship. “The tall girl” saw foul play on the part of the
Tinman, and immediately became “the young man’s” champion and assumed the
office of his second. It was by her advice, after he had been knocked
off his legs several times by the Tinman’s flashing fist, that, instead
of fighting with his left, he got in the blow with his “long right” that
settled the hash of Blazing Bosvile. The Tinman and his mort took
themselves off after this discomfiture, leaving Lavengro and Isopel
Berners in undisputed possession of the Dingle.
We learn little about Isopel in details of fact, except that she was born
in “Long Melford workhouse,” and put “out to service,” where she
experienced all the joys that were usually stored up in service for
workhouse girls in the early part of the nineteenth century. When her
mistress attempted to knock her down with a besom, Belle knocked down the
mistress with her fist. So she went back to the Great House, was put in
a dark cell, and fed for a fortnight on bread and water. At her next
essay to serve she was no more fortunate; this time she knocked down her
master for being rude to her, and had to fly the house. A travelling
hawkeress, going the roads with silk and linen, took a fancy to her, and
carried her on many journeys. Belle protected her from insult and
violence; in return the old woman, at her death, left the girl her stock.
She was thus in business on her own account, and casually travelling with
the Bosviles, when she fell in with Lavengro.
In his erratic way, Borrow paints a charming idyll of the few succeeding
weeks during which they lived in the Dingle: an idyll of natural beauty,
and a picture of such womanly modesty and strength of character as to
make Isopel Berners one of the heroines the heart cherishes. The
uneducated Amazon, the feminine pugilist, who can take her own part in
any quarrel, is by nature a modest girl, a woman with the finest
perceptions and the most delicate instincts; she has a vein of poetry in
her composition which gives her a certain affinity with the wandering
philologist, who has in turn a vein of chivalry in his. While she dwells
in her tent and he in his, while she goes up and down the neighbourhood
on her business, and Lavengro stays in the Dingle to make new shoes for
her donkey, Isopel is all the time dreaming what might have been. For
all his chivalry, the young man is strange and plain-spoken, rarely
paying a compliment, never making an advance, boring her with
philological disquisitions, talking of things indifferent to her,
pestering her with Armenian declensions, or sitting dull and silent while
he sips the tea she has made for him. Here is a characteristic passage:
“I took another cup; we were again silent. ‘It is rather
uncomfortable,’ said I at last, ‘for people to sit together without
having anything to say.’
“‘Were you thinking of your company?’ said Belle.
“‘What company?’ said I.
“‘The present company.’
“‘The present company? Oh, ah!—I remember that I said one only feels
uncomfortable in being silent with a companion when one happens to be
thinking of the companion. Well, I had been thinking of you the last
two or three minutes, and had just come to the conclusion that, to
prevent us both feeling occasionally uncomfortable towards each
other, having nothing to say, it would be as well to have a standing
subject on which to employ our tongues. Belle, I have determined to
give you lessons in Armenian.’”
Which he proceeds forthwith to do. What was a girl to make of a man like
that? When that Lavengro’s heart was sore thereafter for the lack of
Belle Berners, he had to thank his moroseness and his Armenian nouns for
it.
So proceeded, without passion, without even a symptom of philandering on
either side, the Romance of Mumper’s Dell—dreadfully misunderstood by the
postilion who sheltered there in the thunderstorm, and by Mrs. Chikno
when the gypsies encamped near by—but never advancing, so far as the two
chief actors were concerned. It is continued from the last volume of
“Lavengro” into the first volume of the “Romany Rye.” In the latter, for
a hundred pages we are waiting upon some development of it; but it is as
elusive as a pixy. We continually tremble upon the brink of a
declaration. Take this scene, powerful but inconclusive. Upon the
departure of Mr. and Mrs. Petulengro, after their visit of ceremony:
“Then you are going?” said I, when Belle and I were left alone.
“Yes,” said Belle; “I am going on a journey; my affairs compel me.”
“But you will return again?” said I.
“Yes,” said Belle; “I shall return once more.”
“Once more,” said I. “What do you mean by once more? The
Petulengros will soon be gone; and will you abandon me in this
place?”
“You were alone here,” said Belle, “before I came, and I suppose you
found it agreeable, or you would not have stayed in it.”
“Yes,” said I. “That was before I knew you; but having lived with
you here, I should be very loth to live here without you.”
“Indeed,” said Belle. “I did not know that I was of so much
consequence to you. Well—the day is wearing away—I must go and
harness Traveller to the cart.”
He does some little service for her, as harnessing the donkey and putting
the bundles into the cart. The narrative proceeds, and the chapter ends
thus:
“I put the bundles into the cart, and then led Traveller and the cart
up the winding path to the mouth of the dingle. Belle followed. At
the top I delivered the reins into her hands, we looked at each other
steadfastly for some time. Belle then departed, and I returned to
the dingle, where, seating myself on my stone, I remained for upwards
of an hour in thought.”
Great is ellipsis—but romance cannot live by ellipsis alone. The next
chapter begins, “On the following morning,” and is a spirited account of
a feast of roast sucking-pig in the gypsy encampment!
There is never room for a doubt that Lavengro was by this time fairly in
love with Belle. But there is also no room for doubt that Belle had
realised that he was not for her, nor was she for him. Their ways lay
apart. Belle’s way was the broad road of the Atlantic to America, where
she hoped to conduct her life free from the disadvantages that attended
the career in England of a workhouse girl with a name which, as Lavengro
had told her, belonged to the nomenclatures of the ancient aristocracy.
His way was through many strange lands, through a life of adventure and
turmoil, to an old age of mingled glory, hypochondria, and megrims. So
that Belle had resolved to nip the romance in the bud, and her last
journey from the Dingle was made with the purpose of selling her donkey
and cart and her silks and linens, and going to Liverpool to take ship
for the New World. She returned once more, as she had promised. It was
late at night; Lavengro was asleep in his tent; but he had banked up the
fire, and placed the kettle over it. The little noise of her arrival
woke him, and he dressed so as to go out and unharness her donkey. Now
that it was all impossible, and Belle had made her irrevocable decision,
Lavengro, of course, came to the point. On their last day together, he
set her conjugating the Armenian verb _siriel_, and when he had worried
her through it, told her that the English equivalent of _siriel_ was “to
love.” And, in his whimsical, moonshiny, teasing way, having driven
Isopel to tears, he suddenly proposed to her that they should be off
together to America, settle down in some forest, and conjugate the verb
_siriel_ conjugally!
And, as there was never a doubt that Lavengro had managed to get himself
in love with Belle, so there was never a doubt that Belle was strongly
tempted to acknowledge that she loved this strange fellow of six feet
three with the black eyes and the white hair and the long right arm, who
could beat Blazing Bosvile and make donkey shoes, and mend kettles and
talk all the languages that were heard in the Tower of Babel. But well
for Belle’s peace of mind that she resisted the temptation; for Lavengro,
the constitutional wanderer, would have led her a pretty life when they
had buried themselves in the depths of an American forest to conjugate
Armenian verbs!
The next morning he set off with his friend Jasper for a horse fair,
leaving Belle behind. “On arriving at the extremity of the plain, I
looked towards the dingle. Isopel Berners stood at the mouth; the beams
of the early morning sun shone full on her noble face and figure. I
waved my hand towards her. She slowly lifted up her right arm. I turned
away, and never saw Isopel Berners again.”
For while Lavengro was away Belle departed from the Dingle, and left
never a trace behind her. Now that he had lost the treasure upon which
he had set so small a price, Lavengro was very sore at heart, and would
have given much to recall her and to consummate his day-dreams. But all
that he ever heard of her again was in a letter addressed by her to “the
young man in Mumper’s Dingle.” Herein she explained why she had refused
his offer, which, if he had made it in the early part of their
acquaintance, she would have accepted. She proffered him some very good
advice about his manners, told him she thought he was a bit mad at
bottom, gave him a lock of her glorious hair, and left this maxim with
him: “Fear God, and take your own part.” Which was so much to Lavengro’s
liking that he made it the motto of the second portion of his life-story,
“The Romany Rye”; and there it is to this day under his name, and over
the imprint of Mr. Murray.
Was Isopel Berners a reality, and did Borrow meet her in Mumper’s Dingle?
Or is the whole of this history an invention? Dr. Knapp’s elaborate
researches do not help us much, because there is no documentary evidence
about the episode. He can merely tell us that Borrow did make such a
journey, did buy a tinker’s stock-in-trade, and did live in Mumper’s
Dingle. So that we must look for internal evidence.
I have no doubt that Isopel Berners was a reality, and a very substantial
one; I have no doubt that she was extraordinarily tall, strong, and
beautiful; and that her hair was wonderfully fine. I do not insist that
she was either as tall, as strong, or as beautiful as she is painted in
“Lavengro”; for Shorsha had a habit of exaggerating—it was one of the
many constitutional defects of his character; he could not help it.
The reason is very simple for this faith about Isopel Berners, the
prototype of Queen Ingeborg, who, as Mr. Birrell has said, need fear
comparison with no damsel that ever lent sweetness to the stage, relish
to rhyme, or life to novels. Borrow never created a character. He has
left many portraits; but to imagine an Isopel Berners, to invent the
incident, was as impossible for him as flying. The romance of Isopel
Berners would never have been written if George Borrow, when he was
travelling England on foot upon the money he earned by writing “Joseph
Sell” and by mending kettles, had not met Isopel’s prototype in Mumper’s
Dingle.
The adventures of the rest of this year of 1825 may be told very briefly.
Borrow left the Dingle when it appeared certain that he would see no more
of Isopel, and, with money borrowed from Jasper Petulengro—or rather
forced by his gypsy friend upon an unwilling recipient—bought a fine
horse and set off wandering again. His roadside encounters, with the
bee-keeper and brewer of mead, with the gentleman who had learnt Chinese
by the aid of the hieroglyphics on teapots, and all the rest of them,
being more or less impersonal and extraneous to his own history, may be
left for consideration in connection with “The Romany Rye.” He took a
situation for a time as assistant in a stable-yard at a coaching
inn—having abandoned the tinker’s craft and given the pony and
stock-in-trade to his gypsy friends,—ultimately sold his horse at
Horncastle Fair, and tramped back to Norwich, where his mother was
living.