“FAUSTUS” AND “ROMANTIC BALLADS”
IN the early pages of _Lavengro_ Borrow tells us nearly all we are ever
likely to know of his sojourn in London in the years 1824 and 1825,
during which time he had those interviews with Sir Richard Phillips which
are recorded in our last chapter. Dr. Knapp, indeed, prints a little
note from him to his friend Kerrison, in which he begs his friend to come
to him as he believes he is dying. Roger Kerrison, it would seem, had
been so frightened by Borrow’s depression and threats of suicide that he
had left the lodgings at 16 Milman Street, Bedford Row, and removed
himself elsewhere, and so Borrow was left friendless to fight what he
called his “horrors” alone. The depression was not unnatural. From his
own vivid narrative we learn of Borrow’s bitter failure as an author. No
one wanted his translations from the Welsh and the Danish, and Phillips
clearly had no further use for him after he had compiled his _Newgate
Lives and Trials_ (Borrow’s name in _Lavengro_ for _Celebrated Trials_),
and was doubtless inclined to look upon him as an impostor for
professing, with William Taylor’s sanction, a mastery of the German
language which had been demonstrated to be false with regard to his own
book. No “spirited publisher” had come forward to give reality to his
dream thus set down:
I had still an idea that, provided I could persuade any spirited
publisher to give these translations to the world, I should acquire
both considerable fame and profit; not, perhaps, a world-embracing
fame such as Byron’s; but a fame not to be sneered at, which would
last me a considerable time, and would keep my heart from
breaking;—profit, not equal to that which Scott had made by his
wondrous novels, but which would prevent me from starving, and enable
me to achieve some other literary enterprise. I read and re-read my
ballads, and the more I read them the more I was convinced that the
public, in the event of their being published, would freely purchase,
and hail them with the merited applause.
He has a tale to tell us in _Lavengro_ of a certain _Life and Adventures
of Joseph Sell_, _the Great Traveller_, the purchase of which from him by
a publisher at the last moment saved him from starvation and enabled him
to take to the road, there to meet the many adventures that have become
immortal in the pages of _Lavengro_. Dr. Knapp has encouraged the idea
that _Joseph Sell_ was a real book, ignoring the fact that the very title
suggests doubts, and was probably meant to suggest them. In Norfolk, as
elsewhere, a “sell” is a word in current slang used for an imposture or a
cheat, and doubtless Borrow meant to make merry with the credulous.
There was, we may be perfectly sure, no _Joseph Sell_, and it is more
reasonable to suppose that it was the sale of his translation of
Klinger’s _Faustus_ that gave him the much needed money at this crisis.
Dr. Knapp pictures Borrow as carrying the manuscript of his translation
of _Faustus_ with him to London. There is not the slightest evidence of
this. It may be reasonably assumed that Borrow made the translation from
Klinger’s novel during his sojourn in London. It is true the preface is
dated “Norwich, April 1825,” but Borrow did not leave London until the
end of May, 1825, that is to say, until after he had negotiated with “W.
Simpkin and R. Marshall,” now the well-known firm of Simpkin and
Marshall, for the publication of the little volume. That firm,
unfortunately, has no record of the transaction. My impression is that
Borrow in his wandering after old volumes on crime for his great
compilation, _Celebrated Trials_, came across the French translation of
Klinger’s novel published at Amsterdam. From that translation he
acknowledges that he borrowed the plate which serves as frontispiece—a
plate entitled “The Corporation Feast.” It represents the corporation of
Frankfort at a banquet turned by the devil into various animals. It has
been erroneously assumed that Borrow had had something to do with the
designing of this plate, and that he had introduced the corporation of
Norwich in vivid portraiture into the picture. Borrow does, indeed,
interpolate a reference to Norwich into his translation of a not too
complimentary character, for at that time he had no very amiable feelings
towards his native city. Of the inhabitants of Frankfort he says:
They found the people of the place modelled after so unsightly a
pattern, with such ugly figures and flat features, that the devil
owned he had never seen them equalled, except by the inhabitants of
an English town called Norwich, when dressed in their Sunday’s best.
{62}
In the original German version of 1791 we have the town of Nuremberg thus
satirised. But Borrow was not the first translator to seize the
opportunity of adapting the reference for personal ends. In the French
translation of 1798, published at Amsterdam, and entitled _Les Aventures
du Docteur Faust_, the translator has substituted Auxerre for Nuremberg.
What makes me think that Borrow used only the French version in his
translation is the fact that in his preface he refers to the engravings
of that version, one of which he reproduced; whereas the engravings are
in the German version as well.
Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger (1752–1831), who was responsible for
Borrow’s “first book,” was responsible for much else of an epoch-making
character. It was he who by one of his many plays, _Sturm und Drang_,
gave a name to an important period of German literature. In 1780 von
Klinger entered the service of Russia, and in 1790 married a natural
daughter of the Empress Catherine. Thus his novel, _Faust’s Leben_,
_Thaten und Höllenfahrt_, was actually first published at St. Petersburg
in 1791. This was seventeen years before Goethe published his first part
of _Faust_, a book which by its exquisite poetry was to extinguish for
all self-respecting Germans Klinger’s turgid prose. Borrow, like the
translator of Rousseau’s _Confessions_ and of many another classic, takes
refuge more than once in the asterisk. Klinger’s _Faustus_, with much
that was bad and even bestial, has merits. The devil throughout shows
his victim a succession of examples of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Borrow
nowhere mentions Klinger’s name in his book, of which the title-page
runs:
Faustus: His Life, Death, and Descent into Hell. Translated from the
German. London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1825.
I doubt very much if he really knew who was the author, as the book in
both the German editions I have seen as well as in the French version
bears no author’s name on its title-page. A letter of Borrow’s in the
possession of an American collector indicates that he was back in Norwich
in September, 1825, after, we may assume, three months’ wandering among
gypsies and tinkers. It is written from Willow Lane, and is apparently
to the publishers of _Faustus_:
As your bill will become payable in a few days, I am willing to take
thirty copies of _Faustus_ instead of the money. The book has been
_burnt_ in both the libraries here, and, as it has been talked about,
I may perhaps be able to dispose of some in the course of a year or
so.
This letter clearly demonstrates that the guileless Simpkin and the
equally guileless Marshall had paid Borrow for the right to publish
_Faustus_, and even though part of the payment was met by a bill, I think
we may safely find in the transaction whatever verity there may be in the
_Joseph Sell_ episode. “Let me know how you sold your manuscript,”
writes Borrow’s brother to him so late as the year 1829. And this was
doubtless _Faustus_. The action of the Norwich libraries in burning the
book would clearly have had the sympathy of one of its few reviewers had
he been informed of the circumstance. It is thus that the _Literary
Gazette_ for 16th July, 1825, refers to Borrow’s little book:
This is another work to which no respectable publisher ought to have
allowed his name to be put. The political allusions and metaphysics,
which may have made it popular among a low class in Germany, do not
sufficiently season its lewd scenes and coarse descriptions for
British palates. We have occasionally publications for the
fireside—these are only fit for the fire.
Borrow returned then to Norwich in the autumn of 1825 a disappointed man
so far as concerned the giving of his poetical translations to the world,
from which he had hoped so much. No “spirited publisher” had been
forthcoming, although Dr. Knapp’s researches have unearthed a “note” in
_The Monthly Magazine_, which, after the fashion of the anticipatory
literary gossip of our day, announced that Olaus Borrow was about to
issue _Legends and Popular Superstitions of the North_, “in two elegant
volumes.” But this never appeared. Quite a number of Borrow’s
translations from divers languages had appeared from time to time,
beginning with a version of Schiller’s “Diver” in _The New Monthly
Magazine_ for 1823, continuing with Stolberg’s “Ode to a Mountain
Torrent” in _The Monthly Magazine_, and including the “Deceived Merman.”
These he collected into book form and, not to be deterred by the coldness
of heartless London publishers, issued them by subscription. Three
copies of the slim octavo book lie before me, with separate title-pages:
(1) Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous
Pieces by George Borrow. Norwich: Printed and Published by S. Wilkin,
Upper Haymarket, 1826.
(2) Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous
Pieces by George Borrow. London: Published by John Taylor, Waterloo
Place, Pall Mall, 1826.
(3) Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous
Pieces, by George Borrow. London: Published by Wightman and Cramp, 24
Paternoster Row, 1826.
The book contains an introduction in verse by Allan Cunningham, whose
acquaintance Borrow seems to have made in London. It commences:
Sing, sing, my friend, breathe life again
Through Norway’s song and Denmark’s strain:
On flowing Thames and Forth, in flood,
Pour Haco’s war-song, fierce and rude.
Cunningham had not himself climbed very far up the literary ladder in
1825, although he was forty-one years of age. At one time a stonemason
in a Scots village, he had entered Chantrey’s studio, and was
“superintendent of the works” to that eminent sculptor at the time when
Borrow called upon him in London, and made an acquaintance which never
seems to have extended beyond this courtesy to the younger man’s _Danish
Ballads_. The point of sympathy of course was that in the year 1825
Cunningham had published _The Songs of Scotland_, _Ancient and Modern_.
Five hundred copies of the _Romantic Ballads_ were printed in Norwich by
S. Wilkin, about two hundred being subscribed for, mainly in that city,
the other three hundred being dispatched to London—to Taylor, whose name
appears on the London title-page, although he seems to have passed on the
book very quickly to Wightman and Cramp, for what reason we are not
informed. Borrow tells us that the two hundred subscriptions of half a
guinea “amply paid expenses,” but he must have been cruelly disappointed,
as he was doomed to be more than once in his career, by the lack of
public appreciation outside of Norwich. Yet there were many reasons for
this. If Scott had made the ballad popular, he had also destroyed it for
a century—perhaps for ever—by substituting the novel as the favourite
medium for the storyteller. Great ballads we were to have in every
decade from that day to this, but never another “best seller” like
_Marmion_ or _The Lady of the Lake_. Our _popular_ poets had to express
themselves in other ways. Then Borrow, although his verse has been
underrated by those who have not seen it at its best, or who are
incompetent to appraise poetry, was not very effective here,
notwithstanding that the stories in verse in _Romantic Ballads_ are all
entirely interesting. This fact is most in evidence in a case where a
real poet, not of the greatest, has told the same story. We owe a
rendering of “The Deceived Merman” to both George Borrow and Matthew
Arnold, but how widely different the treatment! The story is of a merman
who rose out of the water and enticed a mortal—fair Agnes or
Margaret—under the waves; she becomes his wife, bears him children, and
then asks to return to earth. Arriving there she refuses to go back when
the merman comes disconsolately to the church-door for her. Here are a
few lines from the two versions, which demonstrate that here at least
Borrow was no poet and that Arnold was a very fine one:
GEORGE BORROW MATTHEW ARNOLD
“Now, Agnes, Agnes list to me, We climbed on the graves, on
Thy babes are longing so after the stones worn with rains,
thee.” And we gazed up the aisles
“I cannot come yet, here must through the small leaded
I stay panes.
Until the priest shall have She sate by the pillar; we saw
said his say.” her clear:
And when the priest had said “Margaret, hist! come quick,
his say, we are here!
She thought with her mother at Dear heart,” I said, “we are
home she’d stay. long alone;
“O Agnes, Agnes, list to me, The sea grows stormy, the
Thy babes are sorrowing after little ones moan.”
thee.” But, ah, she gave me never a
“Let them sorrow and sorrow look,
their fill, For her eyes were sealed on
But back to them never return the holy book!
I will.” Loud prays the priest; shut
stands the door.
Come away, children, call no
more!
Come away, come down, call no
more!
It says much for the literary proclivities of Norwich at this period that
Borrow should have had so kindly a reception for his book as the
subscription list implies. At the end of each of Wilkin’s two hundred
copies a “list of subscribers” is given. It opens with the name of the
Bishop of Norwich, Dr. Bathurst; it includes the equally familiar names
of the Gurdons, Gurneys, Harveys, Rackhams, Hares (then as now of Stow
Hall), Woodhouses—all good Norfolk or Norwich names that have come down
to our time. Mayor Hawkes, who is made famous in _Lavengro_ by Haydon’s
portrait, is there also. Among London names we find John Bowring,
Borrow’s new friend, and later to be counted an enemy, Thomas Campbell,
Benjamin Haydon and John Timbs. But the name that most strikes the eye
is that of “Thurtell.” Three of the family are among the subscribers
including Mr. George Thurtell of Eaton, near Norwich, brother of the
murderer; there also is the name of John Thurtell, executed for murder
exactly a year before. This would seem to imply that Borrow had been a
long time collecting these names and subscriptions, and doubtless before
the all-too-famous crime of the previous year he had made Thurtell
promise to become a subscriber, and, let us hope, had secured his
half-guinea. That may account, with so sensitive and impressionable a
man as our author, for the kindly place that Weare’s unhappy murderer
always had in his memory. Borrow, in any case, was now, for a few years,
to become more than ever a vagabond. Not a single further appeal did he
make to an unsympathetic literary public for a period of five years at
least.