“THE CHILDREN OF THE OPEN AIR”
BEHOLD George Borrow, then, in a comfortable home on the banks of Oulton
Broad—a family man. His mother—sensible woman—declines her son’s
invitation to live with the newly-married pair. She remains in the
cottage at Norwich where her husband died. The Borrows were married in
April, 1840, by May they had settled at Oulton. It was a pleasantly
secluded estate, and Borrow’s wife had £450 a year. He had, a month
before his marriage, written to Mr. Brandram to say that he had a work
nearly ready for publication, and “two others in a state of forwardness.”
The title of the first of these books he enclosed in his letter. It was
_The Zincali_: _Or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain_. Mr. Samuel
Smiles, in his history of the House of Murray—_A Publisher and his
Friends_—thus relates the circumstances of its publication:—
In November 1840 a tall, athletic gentleman in black called upon Mr.
Murray offering a MS. for perusal and publication. . . . Mr. Murray
could not fail to be taken at first sight with this extraordinary
man. He had a splendid physique, standing six feet two in his
stockings, and he had brains as well as muscles, as his works
sufficiently show. The book now submitted was of a very uncommon
character, and neither the author nor the publisher were very
sanguine about its success. Mr. Murray agreed, after perusal, to
print and publish 750 copies of _The Gypsies in Spain_, and divide
the profits with the author.
It was at the suggestion of Richard Ford, then the greatest living
English authority on Spain, that Mr. Murray published the book. It did
not really commence to sell until _The Bible in Spain_ came a year or so
later to bring the author reputation. From November, 1840, to June,
1841, only three hundred copies had been sold in spite of friendly
reviews in some half-dozen journals, including _The Athenæum_ and _The
Literary Gazette_. The first edition, it may be mentioned, contained on
its title-page a description of the author as “late agent of the British
and Foreign Bible Society in Spain.” There is very marked compression in
the edition now in circulation, and a perusal of the first edition
reveals many interesting features that deserve to be restored for the
benefit of the curious. But nothing can make _The Zincali_ a great piece
of literature. It was summarised by the _Edinburgh Review_ at the time
as “a hotch-potch of the jockey, tramper, philologist, and missionary.”
That description, which was not intended to be as flattering as it sounds
to-day, appears more to apply to _The Bible in Spain_. But _The Zincali_
is too confused, too ill-arranged a book to rank with Borrow’s four great
works. There are passages in it, indeed, so eloquent, so romantic, that
no lover of Borrow’s writings can afford to neglect them. But this was
not the book that gypsy-loving Borrow, with the temperament of a Romany,
should have written, or could have written had he not been obsessed by
the “science” of his subject. His real work in gypsydom was to appear
later in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_. For Borrow was not a man of
science—a philologist, a folk-lorist of the first order.
No one, indeed, who had read only _The Zincali_ among Borrow’s works
could see in it any suspicion of the writer who was for all time to throw
a glamour over the gypsy, to make the “children of the open air” a
veritable cult, to earn for him the title of “the walking lord of gypsy
lore,” and to lay the foundations of an admirable succession of books
both in fact and fiction—but not one as great as his own. It is clear
that the city of Seville, with sarcastic letters from Bible Society
secretaries on one side, and some manner of love romance on the other,
was not so good a place for an author to produce a real book as Oulton
was to become. Richard Ford’s judgment was sound when he said with quite
wonderful prescience:
How I wish you had given us more about yourself, instead of the
extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing
about gypsies! I shall give you the _rap_, on that, and a hint to
publish your whole adventures for the last twenty years. {148}
Henceforth Borrow was to write about himself and to become a great author
in consequence. For in writing about himself as in _Lavengro_ and _The
Romany Rye_ he was to write exactly as he felt about the gypsies, and to
throw over them the glamour of his own point of view, the view of a man
who loved the broad highway and those who sojourned upon it. In _The
Gypsies of Spain_ we have a conventional estimate of the gypsies. “There
can be no doubt that they are human beings and have immortal souls,” he
says, even as if he were writing a letter to the Bible Society. All his
anecdotes about the gypsies are unfavourable to them, suggestive only of
them as knaves and cheats. From these pictures it is a far cry to the
creation of Jasper Petulengro and Isopel Berners. The most noteworthy
figure in _The Zincali_ is the gypsy soldier of Valdepenas, an unholy
rascal. “To lie, to steal, to shed human blood”—these are the most
marked characteristics with which Borrow endows the gypsies of Spain.
“Abject and vile as they have ever been, the gitános have nevertheless
found admirers in Spain,” says the author who came to be popularly
recognised as the most enthusiastic admirer of the gypsies in Spain and
elsewhere. Read to-day by the lover of Borrow’s other books _The
Zincali_ will be pronounced a readable collection of anecdotes,
interspersed with much dull matter, with here and there a piece of
admirable writing. But the book would scarcely have lived had it not
been followed by four works of so fine an individuality. Well might Ford
ask Borrow for more about himself and less of the extracts from
“blunder-headed old Spaniards.” When Borrow came to write about himself
he revealed his real kindness for the gypsy folk. He gave us Jasper
Petulengro and the incomparable description of “the wind on the heath.”
He kindled the imagination of men, proclaimed the joys of vagabondage in
a manner that thrilled many hearts. He had some predecessors and many
successors, but “none could then, or can ever again,” says the biographer
of a later Rye, “see or hear of Romanies without thinking of Borrow.” In
her biography of one of these successors in gypsy lore, Charles Godfrey
Leland, Mrs. Pennell discusses the probability that Borrow and Leland met
in the British Museum. That is admitted in a letter from Leland to
Borrow in my possession. To this letter Borrow made no reply. It was
wrong of him. But he was then—in 1873—a prematurely old man, worn out
and saddened by neglect and a sense of literary failure. For this and
for the other vagaries of those latter years Borrow will not be judged
harshly by those who read his story here. Nothing could be more
courteous than Borrow’s one letter to Leland, written in the failing
handwriting—once so excellent—of the last sad decade of his life:
22 HEREFORD SQUARE, BROMPTON, _Nov._ 2, 1871.
SIR,—I have received your letter and am gratified by the desire you
express to make my acquaintance. Whenever you please to come I shall
be happy to see you.—Yours truly,
GEORGE BORROW.
The meeting did not, through Leland’s absence from London, then take
place. Two years later it was another story. The failing powers were
more noteworthy. Borrow was by this time dead to the world, as the
documents before me abundantly testify. It is not, therefore, necessary
to assume, as Leland’s friends have done, that Borrow never replied
because he was on the eve of publishing a book of his own about the
gypsies.
TO GEORGE BORROW, ESQ.
LANGHAM HOTEL, PORTLAND PLACE, _March_ 31_st_, 1873.
DEAR SIR,—I sincerely trust that the limited extent of our
acquaintanceship will not cause this note to seem to you too
presuming. _Breviter_, I have thrown the results of my observations
among English gypsies into a very unpretending little volume
consisting almost entirely of facts gathered from the Romany, without
any theory. As I owe all my interest in the subject to your
writings, and as I am sincerely grateful to you for the impulse which
they gave me, I should like very much to dedicate my book to you. Of
course if your kindness permits I shall submit the proofs to you,
that you may judge whether the work deserves the honour. I should
have sent you the MS., but not long after our meeting at the British
Museum I left for Egypt, whence I have very recently returned, to
find my publisher clamorous for the promised copy.
It is _not_—God knows—a mean and selfish desire to help my book by
giving it the authority of your name, which induces this request.
But I am earnestly desirous for my conscience’ sake to publish
nothing in the Romany which shall not be true and sensible, even as
all that you have written is true and sensible. Therefore, _should_
you take the pains to glance over my proof, I should be grateful if
you would signify to me any differences of opinion should there be
ground for any. Dr. A. F. Pott in his _Zigeuner_ (vol. ii. p. 224),
intimates very decidedly that you took the word _shastr_ (Exhastra de
Moyses) from Sanskrit and put it into Romany; declaring that it would
be very important if _shaster_ were Romany. I mention in my book
that English gypsies call the New Testament (also any MS.) a
_shaster_, and that a betting-book on a racecourse is called a
_shaster_ “because it is written.” I do not pretend in my book to
such deep Romany as you have achieved—all that I claim is to have
collected certain words, facts, phrases, etc., out of the Romany of
the roads—corrupt as it is—as I have found it to-day. I deal only
with the gypsy of the _Decadence_. With renewed apology for
intrusion should it seem such, I remain, yours very respectfully,
CHARLES G. LELAND.
Francis Hindes Groome remarked when reviewing Borrow’s _Word Book_ in
1874, {151} that when _The Gypsies of Spain_ was published in 1841 “there
were not two educated men in England who possessed the slightest
knowledge of Romany.” In the intervening thirty-three years all this was
changed. There was an army of gypsy scholars or scholar gypsies of whom
Leland was one, Hindes Groome another, and Professor E. H. Palmer a
third, to say nothing of many scholars and students of Romany in other
lands. Not one of them seemed when Borrow published his _Word Book of
the Romany_ to see that he was the only man of genius among them. They
only saw that he was an inferior philologist to them all. And so Borrow,
who prided himself on things that he could do indifferently quite as much
as upon things that he could do well, suffered once again, as he was so
often doomed to suffer, for the lack of appreciation which was all in all
to him, and his career went out in a veritable blizzard. He published
nothing after his _Romano Lavo-Lil_ appeared in 1874. He was then indeed
a broken and a bitter man, with no further interest in life. Dedications
of books to him interested him not at all. In any other mood, or a few
years earlier, Leland’s book, _The English Gypsies_, would have gladdened
his heart. In his preface Leland expresses “the highest respect for the
labours of Mr. George Borrow in this field,” he quotes Borrow continually
and with sympathy, and renders him honour as a philologist that has
usually been withheld. “To Mr. Borrow is due the discovery that the word
_jockey_ is of gypsy origin and derived from _chuckiri_, which means a
whip,” and he credits Borrow with the discovery of the origin of “tanner”
for sixpence; he vindicates him as against Dr. A. F. Pott—a prince among
students of gypsydom—of being the first to discover that the English
gypsies call the Bible the _shaster_. But there is a wealth of
scientific detail in Leland’s books that is not to be found in Borrow’s,
as also there is in Francis Hindes Groome’s works. What had Borrow to do
with science? He could not even give the word “Rúmani” its accent, and
called it “Romany.” He “quietly appropriated,” says Groome, “Bright’s
Spanish gypsy words for his own work, mistakes and all, without one word
of recognition. I think one has the ancient impostor there.” “His
knowledge of the strange history of the gypsies was very elementary, of
their manners almost more so, and of their folk-lore practically _nil_,”
says Groome elsewhere. Yet Mr. Hindes Groome readily acknowledges that
Borrow is above all writers on the gypsies. “He communicates a subtle
insight into gypsydom”—that is the very essence of the matter.
Controversy will continue in the future as in the present as to whether
the gypsies are all that Borrow thought them. Perhaps “corruption has
crept in among them” as it did with the prize-fighters. They have
intermarried with the gorgios, thrown over their ancient customs, lost
all their picturesque qualities, it may be. But Borrow has preserved in
literature for all time, as not one of the philologists and folk-lore
students has done, a remarkable type of people. But this is not to be
found in his first original work, _The Zincali_, nor in his last, _The
Romano Lavo-Lil_. This glamour is to be found in _Lavengro_ and _The
Romany Rye_, to which books we shall come in due course. Here we need
only refer to the fact that Borrow had loved the gypsies all his
life—from his boyish meeting with Petulengro until in advancing years the
prototype of that wonderful creation of his imagination—for this the
Petulengro of _Lavengro_ undoubtedly was—came to visit him at Oulton.
Well might Leland call him “the Nestor of Gypsydom.”