THE PASSING OF THE ROMANY RYE
WHEN “The Romano Lavo-Lil” came out at the beginning of 1874, the public
were already in possession of Leland’s great book, which finally “queered
the pitch” for Borrow. The two would not bear comparison as a study of
the Romany language, for Borrow had worked so hurriedly that his
vocabulary was much less complete than he might have made it. There are
a large number of gypsy words in various parts of “Lavengro” and “The
Romany Rye” which he failed to incorporate in the new book; and others
acquired at Yetholm were also omitted. But it was not only in comparison
with Leland’s that Borrow’s last words on the gypsies seemed feeble.
Many much more learned persons had been publishing monumental works on
the subject—Pott, Miklosich, Paspati, to mention only three. The new
philological spirit had been operating on the Romany; the gypsy tongue
had been treated with as much care and skill as though it were one of the
great literary languages; whereas, when “The Zincali” was offered to the
public, as Mr. Hindes Groome pointed out in _The Academy_, “there were
not two educated men in England who possessed the slightest knowledge of
Romany.”
Mr. Groome was fair, even generous, in some of his acknowledgments. On
the other hand, _The Athenæum_ had no bowels of compassion for the
veteran; it did not temper justice with mercy. Though it had to confess
that not a few of those who had studied the gypsies and their language
“owed their first taste for the subject to the perusal of Mr. Borrow’s
books,” it could not “allow merely sentimental reasons to prevent us from
telling the honest truth,” but forthwith told it in terms of perfect
candour.
Amidst this demonstration of the fact that he had outlived his age,
Borrow decided to leave London once and for all, and to return to his
home on the shores of Oulton Broad, where he was finally lost to the
sight of a world not patient of him. As he told Mr. Watts-Dunton, he was
going down into East Anglia to die. For many years before the
publication of his last book, he had been very little in the limelight.
The public which had hailed “The Bible in Spain” with almost delirious
delight had grown older. In the absence of regular literary appeals to
its attention by Borrow, it had imagined him already dead. Some American
celebrities at one of Mrs. Procter’s Sunday afternoons were discussing
Borrow and Latham with Mr. Watts-Dunton, who told them “an anecdote of a
whimsical meeting” between these two. Was it the computation of his
capacity for “bottles at a sitting” which Latham endeavoured to get out
of Borrow at Dr. Gordon Hake’s? “My anecdote,” adds Watts-Dunton, “was
fully appreciated and enjoyed by my auditors till I chanced to let fall
the fact that both heroes of the quaint adventure were still alive, that
they occasionally met at Putney, and that I had quite lately been seeking
for sundews on Wimbledon Common with the one and strolling through
Richmond Park with the other. Then the look that passed from face to
face showed how dangerous it is to indulge on all occasions in the
coxcombry of mere truth. And afterwards my brilliant hostess did not
fail to let me know how grievously my character for veracity had suffered
for having talked about two men as being alive who were well known to
have been dead years ago—‘talked of them as though I had just left them
at luncheon.’ And yet at this very time Latham and Borrow were, in the
eyes of a few of England’s most illustrious men, the important names they
had always been.” {253}
Borrow’s leave-taking of London had its apotheosis from the same pen in a
brilliant and much-quoted passage:
“The last time I ever saw George Borrow was shortly before he left
London to live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo
Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and
striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were
reeling and boiling over the West End. Borrow came up and stood
leaning over the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might
be. Like most people born in flat districts, he had a passion for
sunsets. Turner could not have painted that one, I think, and
certainly my pen could not describe it; for the London smoke was
flushed by the sinking sun and had lost its dunness, and, reddening
every moment as it rose above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it
went curling round the sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving,
however, just a segment of a golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly
as in the thinnest and clearest air—a peculiar effect which struck
Borrow deeply. I never saw such a sunset before or since, not even
on Waterloo Bridge; and, from its association with ‘the last of
Borrow,’ I shall never forget it.”
And Mr. Watts-Dunton paid tribute to Borrow of a sonnet melodising their
talk of the “Children of the Open Air,” and making contrast of the lot of
lovers of the sun and wind with the habitants of London:
“. . . . Where men wither and choke,
Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
And love of woods and wild-wind prophecies—
Yea, every voice that to their father spoke;
And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
Leave never a meadow, outside Paradise.”
At the age of seventy-one there was not much left for the solitary spirit
to achieve. It was not easy to make new friendships, and even the old
ones were difficult to nurture at Oulton. He made one effort to get
Edward FitzGerald over from Woodbridge to see him. FitzGerald, twenty
years before, had been an ardent admirer of Borrow’s work. Sending him a
copy of his translation of Calderon’s plays, he remarked that he was a
man “who both did fine things in his own language and was deep read in
those of others.” Their correspondence was not extensive, but
FitzGerald’s letters are of considerable interest. For example, they
show that Borrow was in the secret of old Omar. FitzGerald wrote that
“Cowell, to whom I sent a copy, was naturally alarmed at it, he being a
very religious man; nor have I given any other copy but to George Borrow
. . . and to old Donne . . .” {255} This was a copy of the edition
printed in 1859 by Quaritch. But two years before the premature birth of
the great poem, FitzGerald had lent Borrow his manuscript of the
quatrains, and in asking for the return of it, he wrote: “I only want a
look at him. . . . You shall have _Omar_ back directly, or whenever you
want him, and I should really like to make you a copy (taking my time) of
the best quatrains. I am now looking over the Calcutta manuscript, which
has 500!—very many quite as good as those in the manuscript you have; but
very many in _both_ manuscripts are well omitted. . . .” FitzGerald had
been at Oulton about 1850. In 1856 he had visited Borrow again at
Yarmouth, and of that meeting he says expressively, “I enjoyed my
evening.” He did not fail, of course, to rub against some of Borrow’s
angles. According to Mr. Benson (“Edward FitzGerald,” in the “English
Men of Letters” series), he “found this strange pilgrim’s masterful
manners and irritable temper uncongenial,” but Mr. Benson admits that
FitzGerald said, long afterwards, “he was almost the only friend Borrow
had never quarrelled with.” The irritation could have been but slight,
if it could be called irritation at all: in one of his wayward moods
Borrow banged home the covers of the book just as his guest was about to
ask him to read some of the Northern Ballads. This incident is mentioned
without rancour by FitzGerald, in a letter in which he makes Borrow a
present of Redhouse’s “New Turkish Dictionary,” declares what a pleasant
evening he had spent at Yarmouth, and lets his friend into the secret of
his amazing marriage.
“I must tell you. I am come up here” (he writes from London) “on my
way to Chichester to be—married! to Miss Barton (of Quaker memory),
and our united ages amount to 96!—a dangerous experiment on both
sides. She at least brings a fine head and heart to the
bargain—worthy of a better market. But it is to be, and I dare say
you will honestly wish we may do well.”
The “dangerous experiment” turned out as we know. FitzGerald’s letter is
hardly that of a man who found Borrow “uncongenial.” He liked the Borrow
_ménage_, they had much in common in their literary tastes, and some few
common friends—Donne for one, and for another Kerrich, of Geldeston Hall,
FitzGerald’s brother-in-law. He liked Borrow’s books, too. They were
among the few modern works he read, though his fastidious palate was
offended by some of Borrow’s lapses in style. In addition to the
meetings at Oulton and Yarmouth, there were foregatherings at Donne’s
house in London, at FitzGerald’s own house in Great Portland Street, and
at Gorleston.
But this was all twenty years old now; the FitzGerald who received
Borrow’s letter at Woodbridge was sixty-six and a close recluse, unable
to understand why any man who had reached his age or gone beyond it
should want any company but his own. His response is a curious
illustration of the hermit way of thought into which he had fallen. He
told Borrow that for the last fifteen years he had not visited any of his
oldest friends, except the daughters of George Crabbe—“my old parson
Crabbe,” vicar of Bredfield, whose “brave old white head” had “sunk into
the village churchsward” in 1857—and Donne, to whom he had given a
half-day. To have told why he had thus fallen from his company would
have been a tedious thing, he said, and all about himself, too—“whom,
Montaigne says, one never talks about without detriment to the person
talked about.”
“One’s friends, however kind and ‘loyal’ (as the phrase goes), do
manage to exist and enjoy themselves pretty reasonably without one.
“So with me. And is it not much the same with you also? Are you not
glad now to be mainly alone, and find company a heavier burden than
the grasshopper? . . . I like to think over my old friends. They
are there, lingering as ineffaceable portraits—done in the prime of
life—in my memory. Perhaps we should not like one another so well
after a fifteen years’ separation, when all of us change and most of
us for the worse. . . .
“So shall things rest? I could not go to you, after refusing all
this while to go to older—if not better—friends. . . .”
This letter, dated January 10th, 1875, is almost the final literary relic
of Borrow. It sings in a minor key, but with a fitting sombre melody,
the requiem of his career in the world of letters. Borrow himself,
however, did not renounce and abhor society in FitzGerald’s fashion.
Desolate Oulton, the haunt of so many wraiths of past joys and sorrows,
saddened the lonely old man, and in the late ’seventies he lived a good
deal in Norwich, where he had apartments in Lady Lane, seeking the
company of those who knew and liked him. His favourite resort was the
old Norfolk Hotel. There he had his special chair, whence he issued his
pronouncements _ex cathedra_ on ale and men and things. But to Oulton he
turned at the last, dismal as it was. The estate had been pitifully
neglected during his residence in London. The Nemesis that dogged his
steps as a landed proprietor had always been the litigious tenant. There
was one in possession of the Hall Farm in 1878, when Dr. and Mrs.
MacOubrey had left London to live at Oulton, in order to bear Borrow
company in his declining days. This tenant, calling at the Cottage to
deliver an ultimatum about the need for repairs, became rude to Borrow,
who fired up quite in his best style, and declared, “Sir, you came in by
that door; you can go out by it!”
Borrow’s predilection for the alehouse is beyond question, whether it was
in Norwich, or in London, or in Wales. But it was probably not so
overpowering as sometimes has been represented. The misrepresentation is
doubtless his own fault in great measure, because of the literary
emphasis he laid upon the virtue of inns and their staple commodity. We
have observed how this affected one of the reviewers of “Wild Wales.”
Legends grew up around a certain inn at Oulton Broad, the Wherry Hotel.
They were inevitable. Because it was an inn and was near Borrow’s house,
gossip assumed that he was a frequent visitor and a bibulous. A sort of
myth arose that it was the scene of drinking bouts, where Borrow not only
gratified his own passion for quarrelling and fighting, but egged on
others to quarrel and fight. It has already been shown on good evidence
that he was personally temperate, if not abstemious, and the known facts
dispose of the idea that there was any excessive drinking. {259} But the
stories gave occasion for a correspondence in one of the London papers a
few years ago, when Mr. William Mackay was able to dismiss them by
proving that the Wherry Hotel was kept by one Mason during this period,
and that Mr. Mason averred that Borrow did not visit the house more than
twice, and that he had no recollection of the incidents so vividly
described.
Mr. William A. Dutt has given us a graphic little picture {260} of Borrow
in the last years of his life in the country of the Broads, and of the
impression he made on his neighbours:
“His tall, erect, somewhat mysterious figure was often seen in the
early hours of summer mornings or late at night on the lonely
pathways that wind in and out from the banks of Oulton Broad. He
loved to be mysterious, and the village children used to hush their
voices and draw aside at his approach. They looked upon him with
fear and awe—for had they not seen him stop and talk with the
gypsies, who ran away with little children? But in his heart Borrow
was fond of the little ones, though it amused him to watch the
impression his strange personality made upon them. Older people he
seldom spoke to when out on his solitary rambles; but sometimes he
would flash out such a glance from beneath his broad-brimmed hat and
shaggy eyebrows as would make timid country-folk hasten on their way
filled with vague thoughts and fears of the evil eye. . . .
“Still, Borrow was not unpopular with the villagers, many of whom,
long after his death, remembered little acts of kindness on his part
by which they had benefited. To the sick and infirm he was always a
good friend, though his almost invariable remedy for all the ills
that flesh is heir to were wine and ale. He was exceedingly fond of
animals, and nothing aroused his wrath more than to see them badly
treated. . . . A favourite old cat that was ill crawled out of his
house to die in the garden hedge. Borrow no sooner missed the poor
creature than he went in search of it, and brought it indoors in his
arms. He then laid it down in a comfortable spot, and sat and
watched it till it was dead.”
Most old people incline to exaggerate their age after they have passed
the common span of life, and are offended if the achievement of longevity
is not accounted a meritorious performance in them. Borrow was
unconventional in this as in all things. He resented references to his
age. The vicar of Lowestoft visited him at Oulton, and had a smooth and
delightful experience till he transgressed by asking the veteran how old
he was. “Sir,” said Borrow thunderously, “I tell my age to no man!” One
of his last bits of writing, in a tremulous hand, was a little
dissertation “On People’s Age,” beginning: “Never talk to people about
their age. . . . Compliment a man of eighty-five on the venerableness of
his appearance, and he will shriek out, ‘No more venerable than
yourself,’ and will perhaps hit you with his crutch.” {262}
The forcible sentiment was that of a man whose mind was stronger than his
physical frame. Within a few months the passing came. His death, by
some strange fate, was as secret as much of his life had been: he passed
to the hidden bourne unseen by any human eye; his last agony was even
more closely veiled than those years of his youth around which he had
diffused a mist as thick as the enchanted vapours raised by his favourite
magicians, the Firbolgs.
On July 26th, 1881, Dr. and Mrs. MacOubrey drove to Lowestoft on
business. Borrow was left alone in the house. When they returned he lay
dead. Censure passed upon his step-daughter and her husband in
connection with this incident is ungenerous. They had cared for him so
tenderly that it is impossible to accuse them of any lack of affection.
And who, viewing George Borrow’s life and character as a rounded whole,
would regard the circumstances of his death with disapproval? So,
seventy-eight years after the summer evening when, at the “beautiful
little town in a certain district of East Anglia, I first saw the light,”
he entered into the Life Everlasting, not many miles away, alone in his
lonely house, with the fir trees whispering as his spirit departed, and
the quiet water shimmering by the little summer-house where that spirit
had communed with its choicest companions and accomplished its finest
work. The body lay silent there for several days:
“That port which so majestic was and strong,
Loose, and deprived of vigour, stretched along:
All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan . . .”
On August 4th it was conveyed to London, and laid with the body of his
wife in West Brompton Cemetery.
Borrow dead was Borrow forgotten until the afflation of a new time
breathed upon him, and his resurrection came. The “strange pilgrim’s
masterful manner and irritable temper” took their proper place in the
background of the picture; the real value of his pilgrimage was seen. A
finnicking age which emphasised his “vulgarity” had ended, and another
age had opened which was competent to approve his realism and to appraise
his art. Borrow took his rightful niche among the immortals who have
illuminated the human comedy and sung the joys of earth. The inspiration
of Jasper Petulengro is the inspiration of the New Day: “There’s a wind
on the heath, brother. . . . Who would wish to die?”