BORROW’S BOOKS
STRONG was the appeal made to a very wide public by “The Bible in Spain.”
What was the nature of the appeal? It was unique; but it was not
inherently surprising. “I woke one morning and found myself famous,”
said Byron of the reception of “Childe Harold.” Borrow’s gigantic leap
from the shades of chilly neglect into the sunshine of popularity was
equally sudden and less obviously explicable. He had none of the social
advantages that helped to spread the notoriety of Byron’s achievement.
Comparatively few people knew anything about the obscure son of the
adjutant of the Norfolk Militia; and we have already seen that his
special type of genius made no special impression on that generation.
Yet “The Bible in Spain” went forth from Albemarle Street into “the
reading world” to make a triumphal progress amidst storms of applause.
This furore was created not entirely by the real merits of the book, but
largely by adventitious circumstances. It has great merits. But there
is more work, there is better work, in “Lavengro”; the latter is a far
more representative Borrow book than its forerunner. It has more of
Borrow’s humour, more of his subtility; it is far more fascinating as a
human document. Yet “Lavengro” was still-born. It was received with no
applause. The critics disapproved of it, and the public did not buy it.
Whereas thirty-five thousand copies of “The Bible in Spain” were sold in
a year, it took the same time to get rid of a thousand copies of
“Lavengro.” Thus, the real reasons of the success of 1843 did not reside
primarily in the qualities for which we admire the book to-day. The
attributes that make it something more than a mere record of a
colporteur’s labours, its picaresque liveliness, its saturnine humour,
its vivid sketches of romantic rascality, keep it alive. The narrator
moves, like some new Gil Blas, through a series of scenes which give the
reader a savour of the atmosphere of Spain hardly excelled in English
literature. It is evident from the experience of “Lavengro” that these
were not the attributes that caused the book to sell in its thousands
when it was published. The cause of its huge circulation was that it
appealed to a public which would buy in large quantities a record of
missionary enterprise and religious adventure, and would not have bought
any book that Borrow could write if the religious interest had been
absent. No doubt, when they had bought and read, the quality of the work
as literature produced in them unaccustomed and pleasing sensations not
to be obtained from most books purchased for similar reasons. Borrow’s
evangelism attracted them and his art retained them.
The bulk of “The Bible in Spain” consists of transcripts of letters
written to the Bible Society reporting upon his proceedings in the
Peninsula. Suppose the letters had never been written. Suppose Borrow
had merely described his travels and adventures in Spain in a
secular-fashion, is it possible to question that the book would have
shared the same fate, as “Lavengro”? Partly by design, partly by
accident, the contents were skilfully mixed and flavoured to a nicety.
True, it contained more than a _soupçon_ of gypsyism and scoundrelism.
True, its finest passages are devoted to gypsies and vagabonds and their
haunts and habits. Yet, the dominant elements are religious. It is not
proposed to suggest that any hypocrisy is involved. Borrow was, in his
peculiar fashion, a deeply religious man. His passionate Protestantism
was thoroughly sincere. When he declaimed against Romish superstitions,
and laid his vigorous flail upon Batuscha, “the paralytic,” he meant
every word he said. When, describing the ravishing scenery at Monte
Moro, he declares, “I sat down on a broken wall and remained gazing, and
listening, and shedding tears of rapture; for of all the pleasures which
a bountiful God permitteth His children to enjoy, none are so dear to
some hearts as the music of forests and streams . . . ” he is not canting
for the benefit of Earl Street, though in other circumstances the
sentiment might have been differently expressed. And the majority of his
readers perused this with the Bible Society in their minds. One
remembers having “The Bible in Spain” placed in one’s youthful hands,
with stress laid on the fact that this was the work of a man who had
encountered infinite perils and suffered amazing hardships in a pious
cause, and with injunctions to observe not the remarkable beauties of the
book but the benighted condition of the priest-ridden children of Spain,
to compare it with the blessings of unlimited Bible-reading which oneself
enjoyed.
There is no need to labour this point. The perspective has cleared with
the passage of years. There is no less admiration for the fine work
which the Bible Society did and is doing, and a great deal more
perspicuous admiration of Borrow’s book. Literature owes much to the
Bible Society in many ways, and one of its debts lies here—that it found
Borrow employment at a time when he was in sore straits, and provided him
with the means of introducing to the public the fruits of his literary
labour.
It has already been suggested that, in point of art, “The Bible in Spain”
does not bear comparison with “Lavengro.” For what it is worth, that is
a deliberate judgment. But it should be said that no such comparison
ought to be instituted. The two books are widely different in
inspiration, in purpose, in execution. The record of the Spanish
journeys has an interest of its own, and may stand on its own merits. As
a descriptive and narrative writer Borrow had few superiors in his time.
His style smacks of Defoe, smacks of the Bible, smacks of the archaic
poets and romancers he loved so well. But it is his own style—at once a
noble and spacious style and no style at all. There is no preciosity and
there is little elegance in it; but there is naturalism, virility,
grandeur. Only when he becomes didactic does his power decline. Then,
in spite of his tremendous vigour of invective, he rarely rises above the
level of the leader-writer, with his eye on the thing nearest to his fond
prejudices, searching for the most offensive word that happens to be
handy.
There is probably less sermonising in “The Bible in Spain” than in
“Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.” Borrow is in love with Spain as Spain.
He abounds in admiration of the country and its climate, the nobility of
its people and their “stern, heroic virtue.” He does not gloss over the
savagery and crime to be found among them, but he observes that there is
very little of low, vulgar vice in the great body of the Spanish nation.
His fulminations are reserved for the politicians and the warring
factions that distressed the land, and for the “atrocious projects of
malignant Rome.” He is generous in his approval of the valour and the
probity of the people as a whole. He moves among them with a freedom
that can only be attained by the man who knows the language—and not by
all men who know it. For Spaniards are sensitive about their noble
tongue, and do not like to hear it mutilated by those who are not to the
manner born. Borrow had no nervousness about his linguistic powers. He
gives some entertaining instructions to Englishmen who want to make
themselves understood in a foreign language: they should speak with much
noise and vociferation, opening their mouths wide. “Is it surprising,”
he asks, “that the English are in general the worst linguists in the
world, seeing that they pursue a system diametrically opposite? For
example, when they attempt to speak Spanish, the most sonorous tongue in
existence, they scarcely open their lips, and, putting their hands in
their pockets, fumble lazily instead of applying them to the
indispensable office of gesticulation.” He, at any, rate, succeeded in
vociferating and gesticulating his way through Spain to good purpose, and
his picture of the country is enriched by a wealth of intimacy that would
have been beyond the power of almost any other Englishman.
It is astonishing that a man with so many insular prejudices as Borrow, a
person so dogmatic, and so utterly scornful of the religion that pervades
the very soil of Spain, should have been able to ingratiate himself with
its people as he did, while on an errand which most of them must have
considered damnably heretical. The secret is to be sought in his love of
the romantic and the quality of _simpatia_, which, in spite of all his
idiosyncrasies, he possessed in very high degree.
“The Bible in Spain” is a piece of Borrow. That provides its principal
charm. It is not peppered with “dots and asterisks” in the same way as
“Lavengro,” and does not depend for any great part of its effect on
ellipsis. But it is still delightfully irresponsible and
inconsequential, full of quaint snatches of character, of rough sketches
of picturesque figures, of bits of adventure which lead nowhere, yet
carry the reader on from incident to incident with a fascination as
irresistible as the elusive attractions of Tristram Shandy. There are
solid values as well. There are the rugged, unpremeditated eloquence of
its descriptions, the vivid colouring of its persons in the piece, and,
the never-flagging gallop of its action. One would be hard pressed to
name a book of its kind in which stir and progression are more constant.
On every page peep realistic portraits at which the reader has just time
to glance before he is hurried on. Who can ever forget the goatherd on
the mountain between Monte Moro and Elvas, who recalled to Borrow’s mind
Brute Carle in the ballad of Swayne Vonved?
“A wild swine on his shoulders he kept,
And upon his bosom a black bear slept;
And about his fingers, with hair o’erhung,
The squirrel sported and weasel clung,—”
that weird figure of a man, with the otter slung around his neck, who
could not read, but, when he was asked whether he knew aught of God or
Christ, “turned his countenance towards the sun, which was beginning to
sink in the west, nodded to it, and then again looked fixedly upon me. I
believe that I understood the mute reply, which probably was that it was
God who made that glorious light which illumes and gladdens all creation;
and gratified with that belief I left him. . . .” Who does not treasure
the cameo of the drunken driver of Evora, who, having wrecked his
carriage and killed his mule, exclaimed, “Paciencia! . . . It was God’s
will that she should die. What more can be said?” Or the portrait of
the Manchegan prophetess that aroused the wrath of Mr. Brandram; or of
the pig-merchant who sang the “Marseillaise” and brandished his
snick-and-snee in the inn at Badajoz? Or, in a different medium, the
picture of Mendizabal, the Jewish Prime Minister, who told Borrow it was
not Bibles they wanted in Spain, but guns and gunpowder with which to put
down the rebels? Or, on a different scale, the visions of the Jews of
Lisbon and the “children of Egypt” who tried to tempt him to a horse deal
at Duenas?
Borrow was in Spain during some of the most exciting years of its modern
history. He tells us that he had no politics except those of the
gypsies—promising success to both sides, and ultimately joining the one
which won. That was perhaps a very proper attitude for a foreigner and a
person who had to rely on official favour in order to get his work of
Bible distribution done. Notwithstanding this, he does not conceal his
contempt for the Carlist cause. His posadero at Cordova was “an
egregious Carlist,” and though he expressly told his friend, the
correspondent of the _Morning Chronicle_ in Madrid, that he was not a
Liberal, his sympathies certainly lay away from the ultramontism of the
insurgents. Borrow’s Spanish politics, of course, are of little
importance; his sketches of political events, on the other hand, are not
only interesting but valuable. His record of the circumstances which led
up to the death of General Quesada is the account of an eye-witness, and
is adopted by Major Martin Hume in his “Story of Spain,” though doubt is
thrown upon the sensational tale of the Revolution of La Granja, where
the Queen is made to succumb to the desires of the Constitutionalists by
the threat of shooting her paramour, Muñoz, before her eyes. One of the
most characteristic bits of Borrow’s work is his portrait of Baltasar,
the “National,” and one of his unsurpassable touches of description is
given to the celebration, in the Café of the Calle d’Alcala, of Quesada’s
assassination, the huge bowl of coffee mixed for the blood-drunken
soldiery, and _el panuelo_, the blue kerchief whose ghastly contents were
used to stir the mixture. Those contents were the severed hand and
fingers of Quesada, the mutilated bones celebrated in the refrain which
resounded through the hall:
“Que es lo que abaja
Por aquel cerro?
Ta ra ra ra ra!
Son los huesos de Quesada,
Que los trae un perro. . . .”
Baltasar’s invitation to “Don Jorge” to drink of the cup on this
“pleasant day for Spain” relieves with a touch of humour a scene which
would otherwise be as revolting as the archaic ceremony of the vulpinised
wine after a fox-hunt. The variety and rapid movement of the scene are
remarkable, but not more so than those of fifty other scenes in the book;
and the waggish little assassin Baltasar is no quainter than fifty other
characters, from Borrow’s own Greek servant, Antonio, to Judah Lib, the
Jew of Galatia, or Benedict Moll, the Swiss.
It is the essence of Spain that Borrow gives us in his inimitable,
erratic way, its hot love and burning hate, its high chivalry and its
profound roguery, the ineffable beauty of its women and the ugly rags of
its mendicants, the solemn dignity of its people and their saline wit,
contrasted with his own sententiousness and his peculiar, mordant humour.
The vitality of the book, the continuing effect of its best scenes, and
the never-failing interest of its adventures, are wonderful.
Yet there is hardly a Borrovian who does not prefer “Lavengro” and “The
Romany Rye,” regarding them as one book, to anything else that Borrow
ever did. It is incomparably the finest and most fragrant efflorescence
of his genius. The fascination exercised by “Lavengro” over a
considerable part of the human race is difficult to explain: its secret
is as elusive as a great deal else in Borrow. But its existence cannot
be questioned. It has hypnotised men of vastly different temperaments,
causing this one to devote his life to the delightful, if unprofitable,
pursuit of the mysteries concealed behind Borrow’s “dots and asterisks”
and the filling up of his ellipses, and that one to become a student of
Romany and a “gypsiologist” who would otherwise have remained indifferent
to the history and character of the chals and chis.
Many discussions have been held upon the nature of this secret. It still
avoids capture; it cannot be precipitated into words. Some explanation
of its effects may be offered, but even that can be but tentative. The
book appeals to primal instincts. It quivers with life. It stirs the
deepest emotions of those who have the sub-conscious love of Nature—the
instinct for Nature which manifests itself not in petty eulogies of the
fine things of the world, but in silent, ecstatic content with Earth.
Gypsies have it strongly developed; indeed, it explains gypsyism. The
book abounds in the unconventional strong man, in his joy of conflict, in
his curiosity about human villainy, and his admiration of all heroic
qualities. It is in the succession of Defoe, and in a less degree of
Fielding, and again in a less degree of Smollett, and it awakes nearly
all the sensations produced by them in turn, with the saving grace we
have noted—that it is never in the least salacious or even obscene.
Another favourite theme of debate has been the autobiographical problem.
We have traced the history of the composition of “Lavengro,” and seen
that the book is truly an autobiography, though not a chronology. Borrow
invented little and recorded much. Most of the things that happen in
“Lavengro” happened in its author’s life, as Elwin said. He
unquestionably grouped figures and events for the sake of effect. Such a
concatenation as Borrow himself, Isopel Berners, the Petulengros, Tawno
Chikno, the Man in Black, and the Innkeeper in the immediate
neighbourhood of one Staffordshire dingle at the same time was, of
course, never known to history. Such dramatis personæ are far too
striking to have been collected by coincidence. The meeting of the
queenly Isopel, princess of roadside heroines, and Lavengro, crallis
(chief) of hedge philologists, and their method of intellectual commerce,
tax the credulity of the reader sufficiently. But the residuum of fact
is considerable; there is more essential truth than concrete fiction in
“Lavengro,” and it complies with the terms of Borrow’s own conception of
an autobiography.
It has been shown that the world was unready for such a book. It was
busy about diverse affairs. It had passed out of the Byronic phase in
which Borrow attempted to detain it. The men of 1850 were unable to
appreciate his manner, and cared nothing about his matter. Now that he
made no definite appeal to the Bible Society public, and had removed
himself out of the atmosphere of Old Spain, shimmering with romance, he
found that there was no public left for him. What use had the world in
the climacterical year of the great, progressive nineteenth century for
the petty philosophy and the infinitesimal adventures of a tinker who was
not “inspired” in any sense of which it was cognisant? It was just about
to appoint Matthew Arnold as Inspector of Schools: that was more to the
purpose. It had crowned Alfred Tennyson as Poet Laureate; it was weeping
and roaring over “David Copperfield”; it was preparing to admit Thackeray
among the Immortals, for he was on the point of publishing “The History
of Henry Esmond, Esq.” If it wanted fierce controversy, was not Carlyle
thundering out his “Latter-day Pamphlets”? If it wanted picturesque
history, was not Macaulay sufficient—were not working men’s clubs in
Lancashire passing him votes of thanks for having made history
intelligible to the masses? If it wanted politics or economics, did it
not possess its John Bright and its Richard Cobden, and was there not
Mill’s “Principles of Political Economy,” fresh from the press, to be
read? It wanted Free Libraries, not free manners. Ruskin could satisfy
all its taste for archaism. It had rid itself of Chartism, and was
coquetting with Christian Socialism; “Alton Locke” was far more likely to
appeal to its sympathies than the innkeeper at Willenhall.
One perceives how inevitable was the dismal fate of “Lavengro,” launched
at the head of a society fermenting, effervescing, seething with
progressive optimism, feverish in its eager industrial advance, filled
with sentiment, vibrating with hopeful emotions, its literary affections
fastened partly upon Macaulay, partly upon Carlyle, partly upon Tennyson.
The apparition of a book like “Lavengro” was ludicrous in its eyes,
dressed in the style of a dead century, and concerned with subjects as
dead as its habiliments. What had all this farrago of gypsies,
horse-witches, apple-women, green lanes, breezy heaths, and road-girls
(however magnificent) to do with any soul in 1850, with Manchesterism or
with Kingsleyism, with the buzz of commercial prosperity, or the growth
of social idealism or the development of political liberties, or with
current culture, or with the sentiment of the age? Nothing at all. The
frantically busy world went on building schools and inspecting them,
planning railways and running trains on them, raising mills and factories
and grinding and making, discussing problems and settling them; and it
passed Borrow by. It did not want a Romany Defoe, a modern Smollett, a
new and more truculent Bunyan, and it barely nodded to him as he
attempted to arrest its steps. It cared not a brass farthing about his
opinions, which did not matter at all; unfortunately, it cared as little
about his naturalism, which mattered a great deal.
The only point of approach between Borrow and the public was the point of
anti-Popery. Borrow anticipated the storm of 1850, for the bulk of his
work had been written before that storm broke. His Man in Black was
modelled upon what he knew of the Catholic propagandists in England, but
the model was highly coloured; it was impossible for Borrow to view a
priest or a Catholic of any degree except through the medium of his own
ultra-Protestant spectacles. Further, the portrait is probably more
malicious than it would have been but for the state of public opinion on
the “Papal aggression” which was then being foreshadowed. The Man in
Black is a very complete picture of the Jesuitical sneak who probably
existed only in the imagination of ardent Evangelicals. But even this
accidentally topical character did not save from disaster a work which
was utterly out of tune with the times. Imagine Macaulay, or Kingsley,
or Ruskin falling on their readers in the manner of Borrow’s preface:
“Pray, be not displeased, gentle reader, if perchance thou hast
imagined that I was about to conduct thee to distant lands, and hadst
promised thyself much instruction and entertainment from what I might
tell thee of them. I do assure thee that thou hast no reason to be
displeased, inasmuch as there are no countries in the world less
known by the British than these selfsame British islands, or where
more strange things are everyday occurring, whether in road or
street, house or dingle.”
It was all very true, but the “gentle reader” did not want to hear about
those strange things, and his ear found Borrow’s “thees” and “thous” and
“hadsts” uncouth. “Charity and free and genial manners” in the Borrovian
sense were foreign to his desires.
Borrow’s own favourite characters in “Lavengro,” he tells us, were the
brave old soldier and his wife (his parents), the ancient gentlewoman who
sold apples on London Bridge and conned the history of blessed Mary
Flanders, and the wandering Methodist and his wife Winifred. Filial
affection accounts for his first choice. The others are certainly
delightful vignettes; but it is strange that Borrow did not bring Jasper
Petulengro into his category of favourites, or Isopel Berners. Those two
are immortal, and it is to them that the mind flies when “Lavengro” is
mentioned.
The book—still regarding “The Romany Rye” as part of it—divides itself
into two sections. The first and shorter section covers a period of some
twenty years; the other, his idyll of the roads, extending from the
fifty-eighth chapter of “Lavengro” to the end, deals with about a year of
his life. The subject of his rural wanderings grew upon him as he wrote,
and the episode of Belle Berners naturally required a spacious canvas;
the reasons why he introduced the postilion’s tale have already been
related. This amazing book defies analysis or classification. It is “a
thing of shreds and patches,” a hotch-potch of odds and ends of learning
and speculation, an uneven jumble of incidents; doubtless it is all the
critics of 1851 said it was. Yet it is a great book, a treasured book, a
book to read five times as Leland read it, to dip into and be tempted on
and on, chapter by chapter. It has all the faults that the purists allot
to it—much tiresome iteration, many split infinitives, gross errors of
taste, much fuliginous and turgid writing. Yet it is a great work of
literature, compelling, overpowering in many ways. It often rises in
eloquence to remarkable heights and glows with all the hues of poetry:
mark the dialogue on death, the midnight vigil in the Dingle. The force
of sheer description in the poison scene and in the fight with the
Flaming Tinman can hardly be surpassed. There are racy humour and
genuine humanity in the incident of the inn where he met Jack Slingsby
and his family depressed from the encounter with the Flaming Tinman, and
proved to them the “genial, gladdening power” of good ale, “the true and
proper drink of Englishmen.” All Borrow’s affectation of learning, all
his word-chasing, all his preaching, are forgiven in the intense joy of
such scenes as these. When Jack Slingsby said to him, “It’s a fine thing
to be a scholar,” he retorted, “Not half so fine as to be a tinker.” It
is the hedgesmith in Lavengro that gives his book its ineffable charm.
“There is something highly poetical about a forge,” and Borrow has caught
and transmitted its poetry to us.
The fashion in which Borrow pounced upon his critics, detractors,
enemies, as he pictured them, clawed them and mangled them in the
notorious Appendix has been indicated in snatches. Printed sermons and
speeches can hardly be more deadly dull than a quarrel of this sort after
the lapse of half a century: that is, as a rule. In this case there is a
distinct survival of literary interest, for the Appendix is luminous
(albeit with a lurid incandescence), and in it glow some of the gems of
Borrow’s style. His critics inspired him to this _tour de force_, the
“quartering reviewers,” those arbitrary persons who, in the sententious
phrase of Hazlitt, “would be thought to have purchased a monopoly of wit,
learning, and wisdom—
‘Assume the rod, affect the god,
And seem to shake the spheres.’”
As we have seen, they cauterised Borrow because he had not written the
book they expected him to write, just as their predecessors had “pulled
Pope to pieces” for not being Shakespeare or Milton. Borrow was odd and
singular, and had transgressed every canon of the taste of the time. But
he was fully conscious that he had written a fine book. Their abuse,
their satire, their indifference sent him into a fine frenzy, in which he
pretended to despise the whole tribe. “By God! ’tis good, and if you
lik’t you may.” But the affectation was ill-sustained by the
performance; he set about to bludgeon them in very good earnest, and
seized the opportunity of time, space, and inclination to wield his
weapon across the heads of a great many other offenders besides the
critics.
The bludgeon is the only possible figure to use. In this amazing display
of whirling invective Borrow is like no other protagonist in literature.
For many reasons it were possible to wish that he had never written it;
for others it is precious. It neither pricks the enemy like Pope, nor
incises him like Swift, nor burns him like Gifford, nor lashes him like
Byron. It simply pounds him as the Flaming Tinman was pounded by
Borrow’s long right. It begins, innocently enough, with an exposition of
the principles on which “Lavengro” was written, the principles it upheld,
the morals it inculcated, and the author’s reasons for supposing that it
deserved well of the world. In this last particular the chapter is
curious. According to Borrow, the book is worthy because it demonstrates
how the hand of Providence constantly guides the destinies of the hero,
preventing him in all his doings from falling a prey either to vice or to
poverty. He admitted that Lavengro was not a remarkably religious person
up to the point where the book took leave of him, but it was very likely
that he would eventually become religious, though not precise or
straight-laced. He would retain with his scholarship “something of his
gypsyism, his predilection for the hammer and tongs, and perhaps some
inclination to put on certain gloves—not white kid—with any friend who
might be inclined for a little old-English diversion.” The absence of
any straight-lacedness from his character was also to be predicated in
the matter of ale. He did not believe that either fondness for
invigorating exercise or willingness to partake of any of the good things
provided by the Almighty (meaning especially ale with plenty of malt, not
too much hops, and at least two years old) would be any bar to his
entrance into heaven.
One would not for worlds suggest that Borrow laid this stress upon the
moralities and the theology of his book what time his tongue was in his
cheek. But he could hardly have failed to see that it was his gypsyism
rather than his theology that would lend the work its permanent
importance. The second chapter of the Appendix is an anti-Popery tirade
which it would be tiresome to follow. He boasts of how in Spain he
“hewed right and left, making the priests fly before him and run away
squeaking that the Devil was after them.” Which is hardly an accurate
account of the matter, and is only introduced apparently in order that he
may belabour Bowring. The process is this: The Bible Society sent Borrow
to Spain to perform these deeds of derringdo; the Bible Society was not
supported by the Government, but rather frowned upon, so that any man
wearing its colours was excluded from the chance of serving his country,
while “a fellow who unites in himself the bankrupt trader, the broken
author, or rather book-maker, and the laughed-down single-speech spouter
of the House of Commons, may look forward, always supposing that he has
been a foaming Radical, to the Government of an important colony.” It
seems almost necessary to apologise, even at this distance of time, to
the descendants of Sir John Bowring, so virulent and unjust is Borrow in
his strictures.
Borrow is accused of bigotry in his anti-Papist campaign. Bigotry!
There is no excuse for even a whisper of the word in anything that he has
done. Bigots yourselves, messieurs! A person may speak and write
against Rome without bigotry, but “it is impossible for anyone but a
bigot or a bad man to write or speak in her praise.” Which clears the
ground for an understanding of the outlook of our very paragon of all
tolerance.
In the third chapter, “On Foreign Nonsense,” there speaks John Bull, the
patriotic Briton, the Germanophobe in a time when Teutophilism was the
fashion, who, in the heyday of the prophet Carlyle’s authority, declared
that “of German literature”—but words failed him to characterise German
literature, and he had to express himself by a note of exclamation and a
dash, and grudgingly admitted that there was _one_ fine poem in the
German language—“Oberon,” to wit. This from the disciple of William
Taylor was a little strong; but Borrow on the rampage trampled even on
Taylor, with a reservation of praise for his scholarship. The essay on
“gentility-nonsense” is decidedly the best of them all. These two
chapters are the most effective, the richest in the diction of wrath, and
they touch the highest point he reaches in criticism. Here, if anywhere,
is to be found the merit of the Appendix.
It is this revolt against the finnicking conventions, this hard-hitting
at every self-sufficient snob’s head in a self-satisfied age, that gives
the work its air of modernity, and places it _en rapport_ with the
twentieth century. Once again there is no delicate satire, no fine
irony, no touch of the “Snob Papers,” in the “gentility-nonsense”
chapter. It is simply energetic quarter-staff play, with resounding
thwacks upon the head of any unlucky wight who happens to have charged
“vulgarity” upon Borrow because he had endeavoured to bring his
tatterdemalion crew of gypsies, mumpers, and tinkers into the decent and
respectable parlours of the English middle-classes. That was all very
well on the operatic stage. The gypsy villains in _The Bohemian Girl_
were entertaining enough when they entered the marble halls and spoilt
the furniture and pilfered the wine behind the footlights, as they had
been doing any night for the last ten years; but this was serious
literature and a very different matter. Borrow laid about him with a
will, and defended smithery against jobbery, and tinkering against
philandering, and the dingle against the drawing-room with almost lyrical
eloquence. Was it not better for Lavengro to make the forge glow by the
roadside, and manufacture donkey-shoes for Isopel, than to borrow another
man’s money and go to Brighton, with the sister of Annette le Noir,
though that would have been an exceedingly genteel thing to do? Was not
the successor of Jack Slingsby more worthy of respect than Mr. Flamson,
the railway contractor? Had not the jockey at Horncastle, who offered
him a fair price for his horse, a better title to honour “than the
scoundrelly lord who attempts to cheat him of one-fourth of its value?”
There is great temptation to quote largely from these hectic chapters,
but one sample must suffice. “Millions,” he says, seem to think
otherwise on these questions,
“by their servile adoration of people whom, without rank, wealth, and
fine clothes, they would consider infamous, but whom, possessed of
rank, wealth, and glittering habiliments, they seem to admire all the
more for their profligacy and crimes. Does not a blood-spot or a
lust-spot on the clothes of a blooming emperor give a kind of zest to
the genteel young god? Do not the pride, superciliousness, and
selfishness of a certain aristocracy make it all the more regarded by
its worshippers? and do not the clownish and gutter-blood admirers of
Mr. Flamson like him all the more because they are conscious that he
is a knave? If such is the case—and, alas! is it not the case?—they
cannot be too frequently told that fine clothes, wealth, and titles
adorn a person in proportion as he adorns them; that if worn by the
magnanimous and good they are ornaments indeed, but if by the vile
and profligate they are merely _san benitos_, and only serve to make
their infamy doubly apparent; and that a person in seedy raiment and
tattered hat, possessed of courage, kindness, and virtue, is entitled
to more respect from those to whom his virtues are manifested than
any cruel profligate emperor, selfish aristocrat, or knavish
millionaire in the world.”
The appropriate sequel to this flaming fury against the worship of
material wealth and the idolatry of worldly success is his protest
against Sir Walter Scott’s Jacobitism, which he called “Scotch
gentility-nonsense” and “Charlie-o’er-the-Waterism.” With a full brush
and rapid strokes he paints a Hogarthian picture of the Stewarts, more
remarkable for the piquancy of its epithets than the accuracy of its
history. A disgraceful procession of abandoned reprobates hurries across
his pages: the “dirty, cowardly miscreant,” James I.; the “cruel,
revengeful tyrant,” Charles I.; the “lazy and sensual” Charles II.; the
“poor creature,” James II.; and the miserable Pretenders, especially
Charles Edward of that ilk, a “worthless, ignorant youth” and a
“profligate, illiterate old man.” All these lamentable persons, these
blotches on the face of history, according to Borrow, were dead and
happily buried out of the sight of decent people until Scott gave them
resurrection by his power of fine writing. It was Scott who summoned
Jacobitism and Laudism out of their graves; the wave of Popery now
passing so destructively over England came from Oxford, it was true; but
Scott sent it to Oxford. And Scott, accordingly, is scarified. His
secret is ruthlessly wrenched from him. Why did he revive Jacobitism?
It was because he worshipped gentility and adored the born-great. Scott
denounced Murat and heaped contumely upon him as the son of a pastrycook;
but was not the pedigree of the pastrycook better than that of the
Edinburgh pettifogger who was Scott’s progenitor?
Working himself up to a foaming frenzy, Borrow attributes all Scott’s
mortal sufferings to the vengeance of an angry Deity for taking the part
of the wicked Jacobites against the righteous Williamites, “for lauding
up to the skies the miscreants and robbers, and calumniating the noble
spirts of Britain, the salt of England, and his own country!” Scott
became paralysed in body and mind, pitiable to others, and loathsome to
himself. “Ah!” exclaims Borrow, “God knows perfectly well how to
strike!” A modern audience gapes in amazement at the rodomontade, and
wonders whether the man who pumps it out page after page can be quite
sane, especially when he declares that he has been influenced “not by any
feeling of malice or ill-will, but simply by a regard for the truth.”
But Borrow saw red whenever he was out raiding the pastures of “Popery”
or seeking a joust with gentility, and the verdict against him may be
softened a little when the reader lights upon one or more of his fine
tributes to the genius of Scott, who “did for the sceptre of the wretched
Pretender what all the kings of Europe could not do for his body—placed
it on the throne of these realms; and for Popery what Popes and Cardinals
strove in vain to do for three centuries—brought back its mummeries and
nonsense into the temples of the British Isles.”
The eighth chapter of the Appendix, “On Canting Nonsense,” need not
detain us; his outbreak against the teetotalers and anti-pugilists has
received sufficient notice. As for the “Pseudo-Critics,” every Borrow
lover wishes it had never been written, picturesque as is the apologue of
the eminent reviewers of the London Press in the character of vipers with
their fangs drawn, held up by their tails. Still more is it to be
regretted that Borrow’s temper in the dispute with Bowring led him to
perpetrate the last two chapters, full of rancour and spleen as they are,
their charges of perfidy against Sir John unsupported by any evidence,
and contradicted by the probabilities of the case.
Borrow was clearly no competent critic of his own work. He concludes the
Appendix with a pronouncement on the merits and the purpose of
“Lavengro,” which, he says, was “written for the express purpose of
inculcating virtue, love of country, learning, manly pursuits, and
genuine religion—for example, that of the Church of England.” Not the
morals of “Lavengro,” not its “patriotism” (which is of a peculiar
brand), not its philology, not its theology, give the strange book life.
Its value lies in its poetry, its portraits, its atmosphere, its
self-revelation, its literary power, and, above all, in that ruling sense
of the joy of living which, in spite of all its errant morbidity, is the
inspiration of the book. “There’s a wind on the heath, brother. . . Who
would wish to die?”
It is a difficult thing for one who is not a Welshman to approach such a
book as “Wild Wales” in any useful temper save humility. To attack the
subject in the spirit which animated Borrow when he invaded the country
would be to court disaster, and the disgrace inevitably attending such an
enterprise would be well merited. It is not given to many to carry a
charmed life as Borrow did—going into Wales and compelling the admiration
of those whom his prickly prejudices and his violent intolerance most
offended.
The spell Wales casts over men’s minds, and the hold it has upon men’s
hearts, are elusive things. Having no tangible substance, they are yet
as real as a battleship. Many people feel them acutely, but are not
content to endure and enjoy them. There is a desire, in these definitive
days, to analyse, to dissect, to explain them, to label and classify
them; but at the slightest touch of the scalpel, at the vision of the
quill, they vanish. As with Cornwall, so with Wales—indeed, in many
respects they are one,—the charm they wield is a charm of atmosphere, of
vague overhanging mysteries and underdwelling romances. Those who feel
it are under the magic influence of the Celtic spirit, and it has been
well said that “to boast of the Celtic spirit is to confess you have it
not.” {320}
I have endeavoured to show that Borrow, in spite of his pose of
Anglo-Saxonism, was a true Celt, a very wisp of the Celtic spirit itself.
The fact explains everything about his tour in Wales, his intercourse
with Welshmen, and his success in achieving a book which they are quite
willing to confess is one of the best books ever written about their
country. The spell was upon him, and he was content to let it work
without attempting to divide it, chemically or mechanically, into its
component elements. It worked through the scenery which he described
with his peculiar skill, whether of massive mountain and lonely lake, or
of sweet vale and tinkling cascade. It worked through the language,
which he admired for its wonderful soft music concealed under apparently
fortuitous concourses of crabbed consonants. It worked through the
character of the people for whom he had so strong an affinity hidden
behind all his affectation of downrightishness, John-Bullish egotism and
pride. He was completely successful in his tribute to Wales—one of the
finest in English literature.
Perhaps this is the most amazing thing in all his amazing career. For
Borrow trampled—or appeared to trample—remorselessly on some of the most
delicate feelings of Welshmen. His hatred of Rome was hardly greater
than his hatred of nonconformity with the Church of England. This peeps
out of many a page of “Wild Wales.” Thousands of Welsh people must be
aroused to a point just short of fury by his satirical or abusive
allusions to Dissenters. But most of them are tempted past the
danger-spot by Borrow’s love of Wales and his power to enchant the reader
as he himself was enchanted.
A militant Welshman once said to me that Borrow “allowed his hatred of
Nonconformity to colour all his descriptions of the people. His pictures
of Welsh Nonconformists are terribly exaggerated, and he damaged his book
by his want of sympathy with the then budding aspirations of Wales, which
have bloomed into the present political and ecclesiastical conditions
well known to you.” That may very likely be a true view of the work
through Cymric spectacles; yet the same person confessed that he knew no
book of the kind which he liked better than “Wild Wales.” The reason was
that, in spite of his contempt for the budding aspirations of the
Nationalists, Borrow contrived to do the Welsh nation a high literary
service by demonstrating its individuality, its distinction, its
difference from England, in every line he wrote about it. His
border-line is sharp and clear; passing into Wales, he passes into a more
ethereal air; passing through Wales he is in a land of enchantment—not
vague and misty, consisting of reminders of a distant past, but actual
and present, where, _pace_ Mr. Edward Thomas, “they talk of hero and poet
as if they had met them on the hills; and, as the poet has said, ‘Folly
would it be to say that Arthur has a grave.’”
Borrow’s Welsh, so far as it can be judged from the book, is exceedingly
good, considering the circumstances in which it was acquired. His
knowledge of “the spoken word” was comparatively slight. His intercourse
had been far more intimate with Welsh books than with Welshmen. Indeed,
we do not hear of many colloquies between this Welsh scholar and Welsh
people until he arrives at the age of fifty. There are only two of any
importance mentioned in his works. First in point of date was the
episode of the Welsh groom whose acquaintance he gained when serving his
articles in Took’s Court. Next was that of the Welsh Methodist preacher,
Peter Williams, and his wife, described in “Lavengro.” For the rest, Ab
Gwilym and the bards were his Welsh mentors. In these conditions, His
knowledge of the language became quite remarkable. It was a working
medium for him in those parts of the Principality where the phrase “Dim
Saesneg” was most often heard. Welshmen tell me that a curious feature
of “Wild Wales” is that the Welsh in the first part of the book is more
correct than that in the second. As one remarks, it was “the romance of
the language which captivated him. He was more familiar with its rugged
mountains than with its tender parts. This it was that inspired his
passionate regard for Ab Gwilym and Elis Wyn above other Welsh writers.”
Welsh estimates of the Welsh writers whom Borrow most affected are not
quite the same as his own. It is said that in a general way his
appreciations are just, but that he gives too high a place to Ab Gwilym,
who was by no means the chief of the Welsh poets read about 1850. Ab
Gwilym’s language is cumbrous, and his manner laborious. He had mastered
his art with difficulty, and his work therefore betrays an almost
complete lack of spontaneity. Yet his services to Welsh poetry were
considerable, for he began a new revival of the bardic art when it had
for a long time been under a cloud. He revelled, if with something of
grandiosity, in the majestic in Nature, and his Ode to the Thunder is
certainly impressive—the language producing a cumulative effect of
elemental noise which is exceedingly remarkable. It is hardly surprising
that Borrow was attracted to Ab Gwilym, whose satire and invective in the
treatment of his rival, Bwa Bach, are echoed in much of Borrow’s own
writing. Elis Wyn was a horse of a very different colour, and has a
reputation in Welsh literature which even Borrow does not exaggerate.
His mystic imaginings are daring in the extreme, and his style is vivid;
others than Borrow adjudge the _Bardd Cwsg_ to be equal in many parts to
Dante at his highest.
“The Sleeping Bard; or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell; by Elis
Wyn, translated from the Cambrian British by George Borrow, author of,”
etc., etc., is a rare book now. The copy before me, in its flimsy
salmon-coloured paper cover, with its uncut edges and all its evidences
of country, job-printing (in spite of John Murray’s imprint), is priced
at two guineas. Somehow, its dress seems fitting, Borrovian. One would
rather this informality for the weird imaginings and the sulphuric
vaticinations of the Denbighshire mystic than any finer guise of print
and binding. The gusto with which Borrow attacked a task of this kind is
obvious from preface to epilogue. He traces the influence, of Quevedo’s
“Visions or Discourses” upon the matter, and the style of Elis Wyn,
especially with reference to the character of Rhywun, that symbolical
“Somebody,” who complains in the Vision of Death that so much of the
villainy and scandal in the world is attributed to him: Rhywun’s
forerunner is the Juan de la Encina of Quevedo’s work. He considers,
however, that the Welshman’s work is superior to that of the Spaniard.
There can be little doubt that Elis Wyn was acquainted with Quevedo’s
“Visions,” either in the original or in the English translation published
in London about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The resemblance
between the Welsh “Vision of the World” and the Spanish “Interior of the
World Disclosed” is too close for any other verdict, the similarity of
Elis Wyn’s “Vision of Hell” to Quevedo’s “Sties of Pluto” too remarkable.
But Borrow seems to have overlooked or rejected—at any rate, he does not
mention—the much greater probability that the composition of this
allegory in Welsh was suggested by “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” which was
hardly half a century old when “The Sleeping Bard” appeared. A deeply
religious minister like Elis Wyn may reasonably be conceived to have been
fired with the desire to do for the Welsh people in the Welsh vernacular
what the inspired tinker had done in English for the common people of his
country.
Judged by Borrow’s translation, the literary merits of “The Sleeping
Bard” come out very high. Whether they are as splendid as the plentiful
comparisons with classical writers would suggest can only be estimated by
those who are deeply versed in the Welsh literary medium. What more
immediately concerns us is the quality of Borrow’s rendering. His style
lent itself admirably to the interpretation of the ideas in the book, and
whatever the excellences or defects of his work as a translator, the
effect he produces, especially in the most lurid parts of the “Visions,”
is often superb. There is magnificent prose in the last section, the
“Vision of Hell”—notably in the dialogues between Lucifer and his hosts.
Lucifer’s address to the “potentates of Hell! princes of the black abodes
of Despair!” is a gigantic conception of the eternal warfare of Good and
Evil, couched in language of extraordinary power. Take the speech, in
which he urges his confederates to greater exertions against the
Omnipotent:
“. . . although the Almighty Enemy sent his own son to die for the
beings of that world; yet I, by my baubles, obtain ten souls for
every one which he obtains by his crucified son. And although I have
not been able to reach him who sits in the high places and discharges
the invincible thunder-bolts, yet revenge of some kind is sweet. Let
us complete the destruction of the remnant of human beings still in
the favour of our destroyer. I remember the time when you caused
them to be burnt by multitudes and cities, and even the whole race of
the earth, by means of the flood, to be swept down to us in the fire.
But at present, though your strength and your natural cruelty are not
a whit diminished, yet you are become in some degree inactive; if
that had not been the case we might long since have destroyed the few
who are godly, and have caused the earth to be united with this our
vast empire. But know, ye black ministers of my displeasure, that
unless ye be more resolute and more diligent, and make the most of
the short-time that remains to you for doing evil, ye shall
experience the weight of my anger, in torments new and strange to the
whole of you. This I swear, by the deepest Hell, and the vast
eternal pit of darkness.”
Moloch arises to protest against the censure, to declare, how he has
joyed in the sufferings of men, “the shrieks of infants perishing in the
fire as of old, when thousands of sucklings were sacrificed to me outside
of Jerusalem.” Lucifer laughs in the face of his “heartless legions,”
and announces his intention to go to the Earth in his own kingly person:
“Not one man, henceforth, shall be found on the earth to adore the
Almighty.”
“Thereupon he gave a furious bound, attempting to set off in a
firmament of living fire; but, behold! the fist above his head shook
the terrific bolt till he trembled in the midst of his frenzy, and
before he could move far an invisible hand lugged the old fox back by
his chain in spite of his teeth. Whereupon he became seven times
more frantic; his eyes were more terrible than lightnings, black,
thick smoke burst from his nostrils, and dark green flames from his
mouth and entrails; he gnawed his chain in agony, and hissed forth
direful blasphemy and the most frightful curses.”
“Myn Diawl!” as the little bookseller of Smithfield ejaculated. No
wonder he regarded Elis Wyn as a terrible fellow. While Borrow was
engaged in transferring these scenes into English, contrasting the
peaceful figure of the Bard asleep on the summit of Cader Idris with the
appalling spectacles of his dreams, delighting in the process of heaping
horror upon horror and crashing them against the “squeamish nonsense” of
his age, he did not fail to be effective. It was when he took to verse
that he failed: the metrical translations at the end of each section are
the weakest things in the book. Elis Wyn had a salty humour, and used it
well upon “the oddities and follies which men commit.” Several of
Borrow’s own pet aversions are held up to ridicule—gentility, coquetry,
tobacco, and so on. With what zest he relates the mockery in Hell of
“two honourable gentlemen, newly arrived, who were insisting on being
shown respect suitable to their gentility” may be imagined. The
condemnation of tobacco is worthy of slobbering James himself: “For what
is tobacco but one of my meanest instruments to carry bewilderment into
the brain?” asks Beelzebub.
Borrow made good use of Elis Wyn, not only in this translation, but in
“Wild Wales.” The intensely humorous conversation with Bos the drover at
Pentraeth Coch will be remembered:
“Pray excuse me,” said I, “but is not droving rather a low-lifed
occupation?”
“Not half so much as pig-jobbing,” said Bos, “and that that’s your
trade, I’m certain, or you would never have gone to Llanfair.”
“I am no pig-jobber,” said I, “and when I asked you that question
about droving, I merely did so because one Elis Wyn, in a book he
wrote, gives the drovers a very bad character, and puts them in Hell
for their malpractices.”
“Oh, he does,” said Mr. Bos, “well, the next time I meet him at
Corwen I’ll crack his head for saying so. Malpractices—he had better
look at his own, for he is a pig-jobber, too. Written a book, has
he? Then I suppose he has been left a legacy, and gone to school
after middle-age, for when I last saw him, which is four years ago,
he could neither read nor write.”
I was about to tell Mr. Bos that the Elis Wyn I meant was no more a
pig-jobber than myself, but a respectable clergyman who had been dead
considerably upwards of a hundred years, and that also,
notwithstanding my respect for Mr. Bos’s knowledge of history, I did
not believe that Owen Tudor was buried at Penmynnydd, when I was
prevented . . .
And he made equally good use of the other bards and heroes of Wales, both
in his colloquies with comic persons like Mr. Bos or with the bard of
Anglesey, “the greatest Prydydd in the whole world,” who kept an inn at
L—, and believed “the awen or inspiration was quite as much at home in
the bar as in the barn, perhaps more”; and in his outbursts of
apostrophic eloquence—as when he stood on Holyhead: “‘Some king, giant,
or man of old renown lies buried beneath this cairn,’ said I. ‘Whoever
he may be I trust he will excuse me for mounting it, seeing that I do so
with no disrespectful spirit.’” A glowing vision follows of the scenes
which had passed beneath that grey promontory, from the times of the
Druids, “long-bearded men with white vestments, toiling up the rocks,
followed by fierce warriors with glittering helms and short, broad,
two-edged swords,” as the army of Suetonius pursued them; “I thought I
heard groans, cries of rage, and the dull, awful sound of bodies
precipitated down the rocks . . .” Borrow may not have sympathised with
the modern aspirations of Nationalist Wales, but he certainly succeeded
in demonstrating its nationality, in understanding its poetry, and in
visualising its romance.
Borrow’s purely poetical works remain to be considered. The ballad
literature of many lands had overpowering fascination for him. This was
a perfectly natural affinity. In the ballads, if anywhere, is to be
found the “homely, plain writing” which Borrow admired. In them, too,
were enshrined the histories of the characters he loved or the heroes he
adored. If the public had afforded him more encouragement, we should
have had a series of transcripts and translations spreading over many
years. Fortunately, sheer force of circumstances pushed Borrow into
another literary channel and gave us his prose books. Borrow’s lyrical
genius is hardly a matter for discussion; it simply does not exist, in
spite of Allan Cunningham’s eulogies. Most of his verse is artificial,
stilted, and in the most violent contrast with the vigorous naturalism of
his prose. He seemed to have a lyrical sense, but no capacity for
recording its impressions. The result is a mass of doggerel, here and
there lightened and vivified by a stanza or two of real beauty, happening
simply where a concourse of chances gave him subject, imaginative idea,
and words which harmonised. These flashes of inspiration, however, are
rare.
[Picture: Portion of page of Borrow’s MS. copy of the “Romantic Ballads”
with his MS. revision]
The “Romantic Ballads” which he translated in his youth from the old
Danish and from Œhlenschlaeger are exceedingly interesting because of
their matter: the legends include some of the great ones of the Northern
world. But Borrow’s verse would provide a deep disappointment for any
reader who, having made acquaintance with his prose through “Lavengro,”
for example, had conceived high expectations of his poetry. The copy
which lies before me is an exceedingly interesting one. I am indebted
for its use to Mr. Francis Edwards, the bookseller in Marylebone; whose
property it is. The volume is in the original coloured boards as it was
issued from the press of S. Wilkin at Norwich in 1826. It was Borrow’s
own copy. In it he had erased many lines and stanzas, and written,
either in ink or pencil, others to take their place. There is no record
of the date at which this revision was undertaken—doubtless with a view
to a second edition which was never called for,—but the evidence of the
handwriting shows that it was done in his youth, during the “veiled
period,” and probably before 1830. The finnicking calligraphy—plain to
read, and full of character, but exceedingly fine and minute—is his early
style, the style of the letters to Bowring, and not that of the later
period when he rushed through his manuscripts in odd notebooks and on the
backs of old accounts or envelopes.
The book illustrates the fact that at this time the Bowring influence was
strong on him, and that he and Bowring were on cordial terms. The
title-page is adorned by a quatrain of Bowring’s:
“Through gloomy paths unknown,
Paths which untrodden be,
From rock to rock I roam
Along the dashing sea.”
The opening pages are occupied by a poetical address to Borrow from Allan
Cunningham, whose encouragement and praise had prompted him to issue the
work. Cunningham apostrophises him in numbers like these:
“Sing, sing, my friend! Breathe life again
Through Norway’s song and Denmark’s strain.”
A few examples from among the many manuscript amendments made by
Borrow—which Mr. Edwards has courteously permitted me to give—will let
some light into the mental workshop of the versifier. In the ballad of
“The Death Raven” Dame Sigrid is lying on the deck of the ship watching
the setting of the sun:
ORIGINAL.
“Then all at once the smiling sky drew dark,
The breaker’s raved, and sinking seemed the bark;
The wild Death Raven, perched upon the mast,
Screamed ’mid the tumult and awoke the blast.”
“The foam-clad billows to repose he brought,
And tamed the tempest with the speed of thought.”
“Above her head its leaf the aspen shook,
Moist as her cheek and pallid as her look.”
REVISION.
“Deformed with breakers then the ocean grew,
The water spirted in the ship’s sides through;
Perched on the mast the wild Death Raven yells,
Whilst deep the vessel downward he impels.”
“The billows clad with foam he tames with ease,
And at his glance the savage tempests cease.”
“Above her head its boughs the aspen spread,
Like her it quaked, like her cold sweat it shed.”
This ballad is a translation from Œhlenschlaeger, and produces an eerie
effect of magic forces acting in the natural world—the Death Raven as the
spirit of Evil bargaining with its victim and wreaking hideous woe and
bloody tragedy till it is finally overcome by the vengeance of a pure
maiden who calls to her aid the supernal powers against the infernal.
But Borrow is in literal difficulties all the time, and the story hitches
and tears on the irregularities and ugly angles of his verse. In the
ballad of “Aager and Eliza” (from the old Danish collection of Heroic
Romances edited by Vegel in 1591), it is hard to choose between the
banalities of his two versions:
ORIGINAL.
“Have ye heard of the bold Sir Aager,
How he rode to yonder isle?
There he saw the sweet Eliza
Who upon him deigned to smile.”
REVISION.
“’Twas the valiant knight, Sir Aager,
How he to the island hied.
There he wedded . . . {334} Else,
She of maidens was the pride.”
The best thing in the book is the ballad of “Swayne [or Svend] Vonved,”
of which we have heard a good deal from Borrow, Leland, and others. This
is also from Vegel’s collection. Borrow quotes as a preface to it
Grimm’s account of the legend. Svend Vonved was a terrible fellow,
minstrel and warrior, sent out to avenge the death of his father, and the
poem relates his desperate deeds of valour and blood, his victories over
“knights of pride,” his short way with the female magicians, and his last
characteristic action—the destruction of the harp on which he had twanged
accompaniment to his songs, so that “no sweet sound shall in future
soothe his wild humour.” One manuscript alteration only in this ballad
is of interest; it occurs in the episode of the fight with the Brute
Carle:
ORIGINAL.
“They fought for a day, they fought for two,
And so on the third they were fain to do;
But, ere the fourth day reached the night,
The Brute Carle fell, and was slain outright—
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”
REVISION.
“They fought for a day, they fought for two,
And so on the third they were fain to do;
But, ere the fourth day the night had reached,
The Brute dead on the earth he stretched—
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”
In a lighter vein there is the ballad of “The Deceived Merman,” which had
appeared with some of the other poems in the _Monthly Magazine_ while
Borrow was engaged with Phillips. In the _Magazine_ it began:
“Fair Agnes left her mother’s door.”
The first revision occurred prior to the collection of the ballads in
book-form, when it began:
“Fair Agnes lone on the sea-shore stood,
Then rose a Merman from out the flood:
“‘Now, Agnes, hear what I say to thee—
Wilt thou my leman consent to be?’
“‘O, freely that will I become
If thou but take me beneath the foam.’”
The third couplet is altered in the manuscript revision to read thus:
“‘Oh, yes, forsooth that will I be
If thou’lt take me to the bottom of the sea.’”
The merman did, and there was a family. But Agnes, having obtained
permission to go back and visit her mother, came under religious
influences, stayed overlong, and was finally deaf to all the requests of
her amphibious spouse that she should return to her deserted family,
proving unmaternal enough even to disregard an appeal _ad misericordiam_
on behalf of the youngest of the merbabies. {336}
The “Ballads” have some interest, but, with the exception of “Svend
Vonved,” they have small merit, and it is not surprising that the public
took so little notice of them that the second edition was never required.
Borrow made much better play with his Danish legends and his heroes of
the North in his later prose books, where they take their proper place as
the material of soufflés or as flavouring in a tasty mélange.