Chapter X. of the Appendix to "The Romany Rye," it was to be concluded

Transcribed from the 1912 Chapman & Hall edition by David Price, email

ccx074@pglaf.org

GEORGE BORROW

THE MAN AND HIS BOOKS

BY

EDWARD THOMAS

AUTHOR OF

"THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES," "LIGHT AND TWILIGHT," "REST AND UNREST,"

"MAURICE MAETERLINCK," ETC.

WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON

CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.

1912

Printed by

JAS. TRUSCOTT AND SON, LTD.,

London, E.C.

{picture: George Borrow, (From the painting by H. W. Phillips, R.A., in

the possession of Mr. John Murray, by whose kind permission the picture

is reproduced.): page0.jpg}

NOTE

The late Dr. W. I. Knapp's Life (John Murray) and Mr. Watts-Dunton's

prefaces are the fountains of information about Borrow, and I have

clearly indicated how much I owe to them. What I owe to my friend, Mr.

Thomas Seccombe, cannot be so clearly indicated, but his prefaces have

been meat and drink to me. I have also used Mr. R. A. J. Walling's

sympathetic and interesting "George Borrow." The British and Foreign

Bible Society has given me permission to quote from Borrow's letters to

the Society, edited in 1911 by the Rev. T. H. Darlow; and Messrs. T. C.

Cantrill and J. Pringle have put at my disposal their publication of

Borrow's journal of his second Welsh tour, wonderfully annotated by

themselves ("Y Cymmrodor," 1910). These and other sources are mentioned

where they are used and in the bibliography.

DEDICATION TO E. S. P. HAYNES

MY DEAR HAYNES,

By dedicating this book to you, I believe it is my privilege to introduce

you and Borrow. This were sufficient reason for the dedication. The

many better reasons are beyond my eloquence, much though I have

remembered them this winter, listening to the storms of Caermarthen Bay,

the screams of pigs, and the street tunes of "Fall in and follow me,"

"Yip-i-addy," and "The first good joy that Mary had."

Yours,

EDWARD THOMAS.

LAUGHARNE,

CAERMARTHENSHIRE,

_December_, 1911.

CHAPTER I--BORROW'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The subject of this book was a man who was continually writing about

himself, whether openly or in disguise. He was by nature inclined to

thinking about himself and when he came to write he naturally wrote about

himself; and his inclination was fortified by the obvious impression made

upon other men by himself and by his writings. He has been dead thirty

years; much has been written about him by those who knew him or knew

those that did: yet the impression still made by him, and it is one of

the most powerful, is due mainly to his own books. Nor has anything

lately come to light to provide another writer on Borrow with an excuse.

The impertinence of the task can be tempered only by its apparent

hopelessness and by that necessity which Voltaire did not see.

I shall attempt only a re-arrangement of the myriad details accessible to

all in the writings of Borrow and about Borrow. Such re-arrangement will

sometimes heighten the old effects and sometimes modify them. The total

impression will, I hope, not be a smaller one, though it must inevitably

be softer, less clear, less isolated, less gigantic. I do not wish, and

I shall not try, to deface Borrow's portrait of himself; I can only hope

that I shall not do it by accident. There may be a sense in which that

portrait can be called inaccurate. It may even be true that "lies--damned

lies" {1} helped to make it. But nobody else knows anything like as much

about the truth, and a peddling biographer's mouldy fragment of plain

fact may be far more dangerous than the manly lying of one who was in

possession of all the facts. In most cases the fact--to use an equivocal

term--is dead and blown away in dust while Borrow's impression is as

green as grass. His "lies" are lies only in the same sense as all

clothing is a lie.

For example, he knew a Gypsy named Ambrose Smith, and had sworn

brotherhood with him as a boy. He wrote about this Gypsy, man and boy,

and at first called him, as the manuscripts bear witness, by his real

name, though Borrow thought of him in 1842 as Petulengro. In print he

was given the name Jasper Petulengro--Petulengro being Gypsy for

shoesmith--and as Jasper Petulengro he is now one of the most

unforgetable of heroes; the name is the man, and for many Englishmen his

form and character have probably created quite a new value for the name

of Jasper. Well, Jasper Petulengro lives. Ambrose Smith died in 1878,

at the age of seventy-four, after being visited by the late Queen

Victoria at Knockenhair Park: he was buried in Dunbar Cemetery. {2}

In the matter of his own name Borrow made another creative change of a

significant kind. He was christened George Henry Borrow on July 17th

(having been born on the 5th), 1803, at East Dereham, in Norfolk. As a

boy he signed his name, George Henry Borrow. As a young man of the

Byronic age and a translator of Scandinavian literature, he called

himself in print, George Olaus Borrow. His biographer, Dr. William

Ireland Knapp, says that Borrow's first name "expressed the father's

admiration for the reigning monarch," George III.; but there is no reason

to believe this, and certainly Borrow himself made of the combination

which he finally adopted--George Borrow--something that retains not the

slightest flavour of any other George. Such changes are common enough.

John Richard Jefferies becomes Richard Jefferies; Robert Lewis Balfour

Stevenson becomes Robert Louis Stevenson. But Borrow could touch nothing

without transmuting it. For example, in his Byronic period, when he was

about twenty years of age, he was translating "romantic ballads" from the

Danish. In the last verse of one of these, called "Elvir Hill," he takes

the liberty of using the Byronic "lay":

'Tis therefore I counsel each young Danish swain who may ride in the

forest so dreary,

Ne'er to lay down upon lone Elvir Hill though he chance to be ever so

weary.

Twenty years later he used this ballad romantically in writing about his

early childhood. He was travelling with his father's regiment from town

to town and from school to school, and they came to Berwick-upon-Tweed:

{3}

"And it came to pass that, one morning, I found myself extended on the

bank of a river. It was a beautiful morning of early spring; small white

clouds were floating in the heaven, occasionally veiling the countenance

of the sun, whose light, as they retired, would again burst forth,

coursing like a racehorse over the scene--and a goodly scene it was!

Before me, across the water, on an eminence, stood a white old city,

surrounded with lofty walls, above which rose the tops of tall houses,

with here and there a church or steeple. To my right hand was a long and

massive bridge, with many arches and of antique architecture, which

traversed the river. The river was a noble one; the broadest that I had

hitherto seen. Its waters, of a greenish tinge, poured with impetuosity

beneath the narrow arches to meet the sea, close at hand, as the boom of

the billows breaking distinctly upon a beach declared. There were songs

upon the river from the fisher-barks; and occasionally a chorus,

plaintive and wild, such as I had never heard before, the words of which

I did not understand, but which at the present time, down the long avenue

of years, seem in memory's ear to sound like 'Horam, coram, dago.'

Several robust fellows were near me, some knee-deep in water, employed in

hauling the seine upon the strand. Huge fish were struggling amidst the

meshes--princely salmon--their brilliant mail of blue and silver flashing

in the morning beam; so goodly and gay a scene, in truth, had never

greeted my boyish eye.

"And, as I gazed upon the prospect, my bosom began to heave, and my tears

to trickle. Was it the beauty of the scene which gave rise to these

emotions? Possibly; for though a poor ignorant child--a half-wild

creature--I was not insensible to the loveliness of nature, and took

pleasure in the happiness and handiworks of my fellow-creatures. Yet,

perhaps, in something more deep and mysterious the feeling which then

pervaded me might originate. Who can lie down on Elvir Hill without

experiencing something of the sorcery of the place? Flee from Elvir

Hill, young swain, or the maids of Elle will have power over you, and you

will go elf-wild!--so say the Danes. I had unconsciously laid myself

down on haunted ground; and I am willing to imagine that what I then

experienced was rather connected with the world of spirits and dreams

than with what I actually saw and heard around me. Surely the elves and

genii of the place were conversing, by some inscrutable means, with the

principle of intelligence lurking within the poor uncultivated clod!

Perhaps to that ethereal principle the wonders of the past, as connected

with that stream, the glories of the present, and even the history of the

future, were at that moment being revealed! Of how many feats of

chivalry had those old walls been witness, when hostile kings contended

for their possession?--how many an army from the south and from the north

had trod that old bridge?--what red and noble blood had crimsoned those

rushing waters?--what strains had been sung, ay, were yet being sung on

its banks?--some soft as Doric reed; some fierce and sharp as those of

Norwegian Skaldaglam; some as replete with wild and wizard force as

Finland's runes, singing of Kalevale's moors, and the deeds of

Woinomoinen! Honour to thee, thou island stream! Onward mayst thou ever

roll, fresh and green, rejoicing in thy bright past, thy glorious

present, and in vivid hope of a triumphant future! Flow on, beautiful

one!--which of the world's streams canst thou envy, with thy beauty and

renown? Stately is the Danube, rolling in its might through lands

romantic with the wild exploits of Turk, Polak, and Magyar! Lovely is

the Rhine! on its shelvy banks grows the racy grape; and strange old

keeps of robber-knights of yore are reflected in its waters, from

picturesque crags and airy headlands!--yet neither the stately Danube,

nor the beauteous Rhine, with all their fame, though abundant, needst

thou envy, thou pure island stream!--and far less yon turbid river of

old, not modern renown, gurgling beneath the walls of what was once proud

Rome, towering Rome, Jupiter's town, but now vile Rome, crumbling Rome,

Batuscha's town, far less needst thou envy the turbid Tiber of bygone

fame, creeping sadly to the sea, surcharged with the abominations of

modern Rome--how unlike to thee, thou pure island stream!"

In this passage Borrow concentrates upon one scene the feelings of three

remote periods of his life. He gives the outward scene as he remembers

it forty years after, and together with the thoughts which now come into

his mind. He gives the romantic suggestion from one of the favourite

ballads of his youth, "Elvir Hill." He gives the child himself weeping,

he knows not why. Yet the passage is one and indivisible.

These, at any rate, are not "lies--damned lies."

CHAPTER II--HIS OWN HERO

Borrow's principal study was himself, and in all his best books he is the

chief subject and the chief object. Yet when he came to write

confessedly and consecutively about himself he found it no easy task. Dr.

Knapp gives an interesting account of the stages by which he approached

and executed it. His first mature and original books, "The Zincali," or

"The Gypsies of Spain," and "The Bible in Spain," had a solid body of

subject matter more or less interesting in itself, and anyone with a pen

could have made it acceptable to the public which desires information.

"The Bible of Spain" was the book of the year 1843, read by everybody in

one or other of the six editions published in the first twelve months.

These books were also full of himself. Even "The Zincali," written for

the most part in Spain, when he was a man of about thirty and had no

reason for expecting the public to be interested in himself, especially

in a Gypsy crowd--even that early book prophesied very different things.

He said in the "preface" that he bore the Gypsies no ill-will, for he had

known them "for upwards of twenty years, in various countries, and they

never injured a hair of his head, or deprived him of a shred of his

raiment." The motive for this forbearance, he said, was that they

thought him a Gypsy. In his "introduction" he satisfied some curiosity,

but raised still more, when speaking of the English Gypsies and

especially of their eminence "in those disgraceful and brutalising

exhibitions called pugilistic combats."

"When a boy of fourteen," he says, "I was present at a prize fight; why

should I hide the truth? It took place on a green meadow, beside a

running stream, close by the old church of E---, and within a league of

the ancient town of N---, the capital of one of the eastern counties. The

terrible Thurtell was present, lord of the concourse; for wherever he

moved he was master, and whenever he spoke, even when in chains, every

other voice was silent. He stood on the mead, grim and pale as usual,

with his bruisers around. He it was, indeed, who _got up_ the fight, as

he had previously done with respect to twenty others; it being his

frequent boast that he had first introduced bruising and bloodshed amidst

rural scenes, and transformed a quiet slumbering town into a den of Jews

and metropolitan thieves. Some time before the commencement of the

combat, three men, mounted on wild-looking horses, came dashing down the

road in the direction of the meadow, in the midst of which they presently

showed themselves, their horses clearing the deep ditches with wonderful

alacrity. 'That's Gypsy Will and his gang,' lisped a Hebrew pickpocket;

'we shall have another fight.' The word Gypsy was always sufficient to

excite my curiosity, and I looked attentively at the new comers.

"I have seen Gypsies of various lands, Russian, Hungarian, and Turkish;

and I have also seen the legitimate children of most countries of the

world, but I never saw, upon the whole, three more remarkable

individuals, as far as personal appearance was concerned, than the three

English Gypsies who now presented themselves to my eyes on that spot. Two

of them had dismounted, and were holding their horses by the reins. The

tallest, and, at the first glance, the most interesting of the two, was

almost a giant, for his height could not have been less than six feet

three. It is impossible for the imagination to conceive any thing more

perfectly beautiful than were the features of this man, and the most

skilful sculptor of Greece might have taken them as his model for a hero

and a god. The forehead was exceedingly lofty--a rare thing in a Gypsy;

the nose less Roman than Grecian--fine yet delicate; the eyes large,

overhung with long drooping lashes, giving them almost a melancholy

expression; it was only when they were highly elevated that the Gypsy

glance peered out, if that can be called glance which is a strange stare,

like nothing else in this world. His complexion--a beautiful olive; and

his teeth of a brilliancy uncommon even amongst these people, who have

all fine teeth. He was dressed in a coarse waggoner's slop, which,

however, was unable to conceal altogether the proportions of his noble

and Herculean figure. He might be about twenty-eight. His companion and

his captain, Gypsy Will, was, I think, fifty when he was hanged, ten

years subsequently (for I never afterwards lost sight of him), in the

front of the jail of Bury St. Edmunds. I have still present before me

his bushy black hair, his black face, and his big black eyes, full and

thoughtful, but fixed and staring. His dress consisted of a loose blue

jockey coat, jockey boots and breeches; in his hand a huge jockey whip,

and on his head (it struck me at the time for its singularity) a broad-

brimmed, high-peaked Andalusian hat, or at least one very much resembling

those generally worn in that province. In stature he was shorter than

his more youthful companion, yet he must have measured six feet at least,

and was stronger built, if possible. What brawn!--what bone!--what

legs!--what thighs! The third Gypsy, who remained on horseback, looked

more like a phantom than any thing human. His complexion was the colour

of pale dust, and of that same colour was all that pertained to him, hat

and clothes. His boots were dusty of course, for it was midsummer, and

his very horse was of a dusty dun. His features were whimsically ugly,

most of his teeth were gone, and as to his age, he might be thirty or

sixty. He was somewhat lame and halt, but an unequalled rider when once

upon his steed, which he was naturally not very solicitous to quit. I

subsequently discovered that he was considered the wizard of the gang.

{picture: John Thurtell. (From an old print.): page9.jpg}

"I have been already prolix with respect to these Gypsies, but I will not

leave them quite yet. The intended combatants at length arrived; it was

necessary to clear the ring--always a troublesome and difficult task.

Thurtell went up to the two Gypsies, with whom he seemed to be

acquainted, and, with his surly smile, said two or three words, which I,

who was standing by, did not understand. The Gypsies smiled in return,

and giving the reins of their animals to their mounted companion,

immediately set about the task which the king of the flash-men had, as I

conjecture, imposed upon them; this they soon accomplished. Who could

stand against such fellows and such whips? The fight was soon over--then

there was a pause. Once more Thurtell came up to the Gypsies and said

something--the Gypsies looked at each other and conversed; but their

words had then no meaning for my ears. The tall Gypsy shook his head.

'Very well,' said the other, in English, 'I will--that's all.'

"Then pushing the people aside, he strode to the ropes, over which he

bounded into the ring, flinging his Spanish hat high into the air.

"_Gypsy Will_.--'The best man in England for twenty pounds!'

"_Thurtell_.--'I am backer!'

"Twenty pounds is a tempting sum, and there were men that day upon the

green meadow who would have shed the blood of their own fathers for the

fifth of the price. But the Gypsy was not an unknown man, his prowess

and strength were notorious, and no one cared to encounter him. Some of

the Jews looked eager for a moment; but their sharp eyes quailed quickly

before his savage glances, as he towered in the ring, his huge form

dilating, and his black features convulsed with excitement. The

Westminster bravos eyed the Gypsy askance; but the comparison, if they

made any, seemed by no means favourable to themselves. 'Gypsy! rum

chap.--Ugly customer,--always in training.' Such were the exclamations

which I heard, some of which at that period of my life I did not

understand.

"No man would fight the Gypsy.--Yes! a strong country fellow wished to

win the stakes, and was about to fling up his hat in defiance, but he was

prevented by his friends, with--'Fool! he'll kill you!'

"As the Gypsies were mounting their horses, I heard the dusty phantom

exclaim--

"'Brother, you are an arrant ring-maker and a horse-breaker; you'll make

a hempen ring to break your own neck of a horse one of these days.'

"They pressed their horses' flanks, again leaped over the ditches, and

speedily vanished, amidst the whirlwinds of dust which they raised upon

the road.

"The words of the phantom Gypsy were ominous. Gypsy Will was eventually

executed for a murder committed in his early youth, in company with two

English labourers, one of whom confessed the fact on his death-bed. He

was the head of the clan Young, which, with the clan Smith, still haunts

two of the eastern counties."

In spite of this, Borrow said in the same book that this would probably

be the last occasion he would have to speak of the Gypsies or anything

relating to them. In "The Bible in Spain," written and revised several

years later, he changed his mind. He wrote plenty about Gypsies and

still more about himself. When he wished to show the height of the

Spanish Prime Minister, Mendizabal, he called him "a huge athletic man,

somewhat taller than myself, who measure six feet two without my shoes."

He informed the public that when he met an immense dog in strolling round

the ruins above Monte Moro, he stooped till his chin nearly touched his

knee and looked the animal full in the face, "and, as John Leyden says,

in the noblest ballad which the Land of Heather has produced:--

'The hound he yowled, and back he fled,

As struck with fairy charm.'"

When his servant Lopez was imprisoned at Villallos, Borrow had reason to

fear that the man would be sacrificed to political opponents in that

violent time, so, as he told the English minister at Madrid, he bore off

Lopez, single-handed and entirely unarmed, through a crowd of at least

one hundred peasants, and furthermore shouted: "Hurrah for Isabella the

Second." And as for mystery, "The Bible in Spain" abounds with

invitations to admiration and curiosity. Let one example suffice. He

had come back to Seville from a walk in the country when a man emerging

from an archway looked in his face and started back, "exclaiming in the

purest and most melodious French: 'What do I see? If my eyes do not

deceive me--it is himself. Yes, the very same as I saw him first at

Bayonne; then long subsequently beneath the brick wall at Novgorod; then

beside the Bosphorus; and last at--at--O my respectable and cherished

friend, where was it that I had last the felicity of seeing your well-

remembered and most remarkable physiognomy?'"

Borrows answers: "It was in the south of Ireland, if I mistake not. Was

it not there that I introduced you to the sorcerer who tamed the savage

horses by a single whisper into their ear? But tell me, what brings you

to Spain and Andalusia, the last place where I should have expected to

find you."

Baron Taylor (Isidore Justin Severin, Baron Taylor, 1789-1879) now

introduces him to a friend as "My most cherished and respectable friend,

one who is better acquainted with Gypsy ways than the Chef de Bohemiens a

Triana, one who is an expert whisperer and horse-sorcerer, and who, to

his honour I say it, can wield hammer and tongs, and handle a horse-shoe,

with the best of the smiths amongst the Alpujarras of Granada."

Borrow then lightly portrays his accomplished and extraordinary

cosmopolitan friend, with the conclusion:

"He has visited most portions of the earth, and it is remarkable enough

that we are continually encountering each other in strange places and

under singular circumstances. Whenever he descries me, whether in the

street or the desert, the brilliant hall or amongst Bedouin haimas, at

Novgorod or Stamboul, he flings up his arms and exclaims, 'O ciel! I

have again the felicity of seeing my cherished and most respectable B---.'"

Borrow could not avoid making himself impressive and mysterious. He was

impressive and mysterious without an effort; the individual or the public

was impressed, and he was naturally tempted to be more impressive. Thus,

in December of the year 1832 he had to go to London for his first meeting

with the Bible Society, who had been recommended to give him work where

he could use his knowledge of languages. As he was at Norwich, the

distance was a hundred and twelve miles, and as he was poor he walked. He

spent fivepence-halfpenny on a pint of ale, half-pint of milk, a roll of

bread and two apples during the journey, which took him twenty-seven

hours. He reached the Society's office early in the morning and waited

for the secretary. When the secretary arrived he hoped that Borrow had

slept well on his journey. Borrow said that, as far as he knew, he had

not slept, because he had walked. The secretary's surprise can be

imagined from this alone, or if not, from what followed. For Borrow went

on talking, and told the man, among other things, that he was stolen by

Gypsies when he was a boy--had passed several years with them, but had at

last been recognised at a fair in Norfolk, and brought home to his family

by an uncle. It was not to be expected that Borrow would conceal from

the public "several years" of this kind. Nevertheless, in none of his

books has he so much as hinted at a period of adoption with Gypsies when

he was a boy. Nor has that massive sleuth-hound, Dr. Knapp, discovered

any traces of such an adoption. If there is any foundation for the story

except Borrow's wish to please the secretary, it is the escapade of his

fourteenth or fifteenth year--when he and three other boys from Norwich

Grammar School played truant, intending to make caves to dwell in among

the sandhills twenty miles away on the coast, but were recognised on the

road, deceitfully detained by a benevolent gentleman and within a few

days brought back, Borrow himself being horsed on the back of James

Martineau, according to the picturesque legend, for such a thrashing that

he had to lie in bed a fortnight and must bear the marks of it while he

was flesh and blood. Borrow celebrated this escapade by a ballad in

dialogue called "The Wandering Children and the Benevolent Gentleman. An

Idyll of the Roads." {13a} There may have been another escapade of the

same kind, for Dr Knapp {13b} prints an account of how Borrow, at the age

of fifteen, and two schoolfellows lived for three days in a cave at Acle

when they ought to have been at school. But his companions were the same

in both stories, and "three days in a cave" is a very modest increase for

such a story in half-a-century. It was only fifteen years later that

Borrow took revenge upon the truth and told the story of his exile with

the Gypsies.

{picture: The Grammar School Norwich. Photo: Jarrold & Sons, Norwich:

page12.jpg}

Probably every man has more or less clearly and more or less constantly

before his mind's eye an ideal self which the real seldom more than

approaches. This ideal self may be morally or in other ways inferior,

but it remains the standard by which the man judges his acts. Some men

prove the existence of this ideal self by announcing now and then that

they are misunderstood. Or they do things which they afterwards condemn

as irrelevant or uncharacteristic and out of harmony. Borrow had an

ideal self very clearly before him when he was writing, and it is

probable that in writing he often described not what he was but what in a

better, larger, freer, more Borrovian world he would have actually

become. He admired the work of his Creator, but he would not affect to

be satisfied with it in every detail, and stepping forward he snatched

the brush and made a bolder line and braver colour. Also he ardently

desired to do more than he ever did. When in Spain he wrote to his

friend Hasfeldt at St. Petersburg, telling him that he wished to visit

China by way of Russia or Constantinople and Armenia. When indignant

with the Bible Society in 1838 he suggested retiring to "the Wilds of

Tartary or the Zigani camps of Siberia." He continued to suggest China

even after his engagement to Mrs. Clarke.

Just as he played up to the Secretary in conversation, so he played up to

the friends and the public who were allured by the stories left untold or

half-told in "The Zincali" and "The Bible in Spain." Chief among his

encouragers was Richard Ford, author (in 1845) of the "Handbook for

Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home," a man of character and style,

learned and a traveller. In 1841, before "The Bible in Spain" appeared,

Ford told Borrow how he wished that he had told more about himself, and

how he was going to hint in a review that Borrow ought to publish the

whole of his adventures for the last twenty years. The publisher's

reader, who saw the manuscript of "The Bible in Spain" in 1842, suggested

that Borrow should prefix a short account of his birth, parentage,

education and life. But already Borrow had taken Ford's hint and was

thinking of an autobiography. By the end of 1842 he was suggesting a

book on his early life, studies and adventures, Gypsies, boxers,

philosophers; and he afterwards announced that "Lavengro" was planned and

the characters sketched in 1842 and 1843. He saw himself as a public

figure that had to be treated heroically. Read, for example, his preface

to the second edition of "The Zincali," dated March 1, 1843. There he

tells of his astonishment at the success of "The Zincali," and of John

Murray bidding him not to think too much of the book but to try again and

avoid "Gypsy poetry, dry laws, and compilations from dull Spanish

authors."

"Borromeo," he makes Murray say to him, "Borromeo, don't believe all you

hear, nor think that you have accomplished anything so very

extraordinary. . . ."

And so, he says, he sat down and began "The Bible in Spain." He proceeds

to make a picture of himself amidst a landscape by some raving Titanic

painter's hand:

"At first," he says, "I proceeded slowly,--sickness was in the land and

the face of nature was overcast,--heavy rain-clouds swam in the

heavens,--the blast howled amid the pines which nearly surround my lonely

dwelling, and the waters of the lake which lies before it, so quiet in

general and tranquil, were fearfully agitated. 'Bring lights hither, O

Hayim Ben Attar, son of the miracle!' And the Jew of Fez brought in the

lights, for though it was midday I could scarcely see in the little room

where I was writing. . . .

"A dreary summer and autumn passed by, and were succeeded by as gloomy a

winter. I still proceeded with 'The Bible in Spain.' The winter passed

and spring came with cold dry winds and occasional sunshine, whereupon I

arose, shouted, and mounting my horse, even Sidi Habismilk, I scoured all

the surrounding district, and thought but little of 'The Bible in Spain.'

"So I rode about the country, over the heaths, and through the green

lanes of my native land, occasionally visiting friends at a distance, and

sometimes, for variety's sake, I staid at home and amused myself by

catching huge pike, which lie perdue in certain deep ponds skirted with

lofty reeds, upon my land, and to which there is a communication from the

lagoon by a deep and narrow watercourse.--I had almost forgotten 'The

Bible in Spain.'

"Then came the summer with much heat and sunshine, and then I would lie

for hours in the sun and recall the sunny days I had spent in Andalusia,

and my thoughts were continually reverting to Spain, and at last I

remembered that 'The Bible in Spain' was still unfinished; whereupon I

arose and said: This loitering profiteth nothing,--and I hastened to my

summer-house by the side of the lake, and there I thought and wrote, and

every day I repaired to the same place, and thought and wrote until I had

finished 'The Bible in Spain.'

"And at the proper season 'The Bible in Spain' was given to the world;

and the world, both learned and unlearned, was delighted with 'The Bible

in Spain,' and the highest authority said, 'This is a much better book

than the Gypsies;' and the next great authority said, 'Something betwixt

Le Sage and Bunyan.' 'A far more entertaining work than Don Quixote,'

exclaimed a literary lady. 'Another Gil Blas,' said the cleverest writer

in Europe. 'Yes,' exclaimed the cool sensible Spectator, 'a Gil Blas _in

water colours_.'

"A _Gil Blas_ in water colours"--that, he says himself, pleased him

better than all the rest. He liked to think that out of his adventures

in distributing Bibles in Spain, out of letters describing his work to

his employers, the Bible Society, he had made a narrative to be compared

with the fictitious life and adventures of that gentle Spanish rogue, Gil

Blas of Santillana. No wonder that he saw himself a public figure to be

treated reverently, nay! heroically. And so when he comes to consider

somebody's suggestion that the Gypsies are of Jewish origin, he relates a

"little adventure" of his own, bringing in Mr. Petulengro and the Jewish

servant whom he had brought back with him after his last visit to Spain.

He mounts the heroic figure upon an heroic horse:

"So it came to pass," he says, "that one day I was scampering over a

heath, at some distance from my present home: I was mounted upon the good

horse Sidi Habismilk, and the Jew of Fez, swifter than the wind, ran by

the side of the good horse Habismilk, when what should I see at a corner

of the heath but the encampment of certain friends of mine; and the chief

of that camp, even Mr. Petulengro, stood before the encampment, and his

adopted daughter, Miss Pinfold, stood beside him.

"_Myself_.--'Kosko divvus, {17a} Mr. Petulengro! I am glad to see you:

how are you getting on?'

"_Mr. Petulengro_.--'How am I getting on? as well as I can. What will

you have for that nokengro?' {17b}

"Thereupon I dismounted, and delivering the reins of the good horse to

Miss Pinfold, I took the Jew of Fez, even Hayim Ben Attar, by the hand,

and went up to Mr. Petulengro, exclaiming, 'Sure ye are two brothers.'

Anon the Gypsy passed his hand over the Jew's face, and stared him in the

eyes: then turning to me, he said, 'We are not dui palor; {17c} this man

is no Roman; I believe him to be a Jew; he has the face of one; besides

if he were a Rom, even from Jericho, he could rokra a few words in

Rommany.'"

Still more important than this equestrian figure of Borrow on Sidi

Habismilk is the note on "The English Dialect of the Rommany" hidden away

at the end of the second edition of "The Zincali."

"'Tachipen if I jaw 'doi, I can lel a bit of tan to hatch: N'etist I

shan't puch kekomi wafu gorgies.'

"The above sentence, dear reader, I heard from the mouth of Mr.

Petulengro, the last time that he did me the honour to visit me at my

poor house, which was the day after Mol-divvus, {18a} 1842: he stayed

with me during the greatest part of the morning, discoursing on the

affairs of Egypt, the aspect of which, he assured me, was becoming daily

worse and worse. 'There is no living for the poor people, brother,' said

he, 'the chokengres (police) pursue us from place to place, and the

gorgios are become either so poor or miserly, that they grudge our cattle

a bite of grass by the way side, and ourselves a yard of ground to light

a fire upon. Unless times alter, brother, and of that I see no

probability, unless you are made either poknees or mecralliskoe geiro

(justice of the peace or prime minister), I am afraid the poor persons

will have to give up wandering altogether, and then what will become of

them?

"'However, brother,' he continued, in a more cheerful tone: 'I am no

hindity mush, {18b} as you well know. I suppose you have not forgot how,

fifteen years ago, when you made horse-shoes in the little dingle by the

side of the great north road, I lent you fifty cottors {18c} to purchase

the wonderful trotting cob of the innkeeper with the green Newmarket

coat, which three days after you sold for two hundred.

"'Well, brother, if you had wanted the two hundred, instead of the fifty,

I could have lent them to you, and would have done so, for I knew you

would not be long pazorrhus to me. I am no hindity mush, brother, no

Irishman; I laid out the other day twenty pounds, in buying ruponoe

peamengries; {19a} and in the Chong-gav, {19b} have a house of my own

with a yard behind it.

"'_And_, _forsooth_, _if I go thither_, _I can choose a place to light a

fire upon_, _and shall have no necessity to ask leave of these here

Gentiles_.'

"Well, dear reader, this last is the translation of the Gypsy sentence

which heads the chapter, and which is a very characteristic specimen of

the general way of speaking of the English Gypsies."

Here be mysteries. The author of "The Bible in Spain" is not only taken

for a Gypsy, but once upon a time made horse-shoes in a dingle beside the

great north road and trafficked in horses. When Borrow told John Murray

of the Christmas meeting with Ambrose Smith, whom he now called "The

Gypsy King," he said he was dressed in "true regal fashion." On the last

day of that year he told Murray that he often meditated on his "life" and

was arranging scenes. That reminder about the dingle and the wonderful

trotting cob, and the Christmas wine, was stirring his brain. In two

months time he had begun to write his "Life." He got back from the Bible

Society the letters written to them when he was their representative in

Russia, and these he hoped to use as he had already used those written in

Spain. Ford encouraged him, saying: "Truth is great and always pleases.

Never mind nimminy-pimminy people thinking subjects _low_. Things are

low in manner of handling." In the midsummer of 1843 Borrow told Murray

that he was getting on--"some parts are very wild and strange," others

are full of "useful information." In another place he called the

pictures in it Rembrandts interspersed with Claudes. At first the book

was to have been "My Life, a Drama, by George Borrow"; at the end of the

year it was "Lavengro, a Biography," and also "My Life." He was writing

slowly "to please himself." Later on he called it a biography "in the

Robinson Crusoe style." Nearly three years passed since that meeting

with Mr. Petulengro, and still the book was not ready. Ford had been

pressing him to lift a corner of the curtain which he had gradually let

fall over the seven years of his life preceding his work for the Bible

Society, but he made no promise. He was bent on putting in nothing but

his best work, and avoiding haste. In July, 1848, Murray announced,

among his "new works in preparation," "Lavengro, an Autobiography, by

George Borrow." The first volume went to press in the autumn, and there

was another announcement of "Lavengro, an Autobiography," followed by one

of "Life, a Drama." Yet again in 1849 the book was announced as

"Lavengro, an Autobiography," though the first volume already bore the

title, "Life, a Drama." In 1850 publication was still delayed by

Borrow's ill health and his reluctance to finish and have done with the

book. It was still announced as "Lavengro, an Autobiography." But at

the end of the year it was "Lavengro: the Scholar--the Gypsy--the

Priest," and with that title it appeared early in 1851. Borrow was then

forty-six years old, and the third volume of his book left him still in

the dingle beside the great north road, when he was, according to the

conversation with Mr. Petulengro, a young man of twenty-one.

{picture: East Dereham Church, Norfolk. Photo: H. T. Cave, East Dereham:

page21.jpg}

CHAPTER III--PRESENTING THE TRUTH

"Life, a Drama," was to have been published in 1849, and proof sheets

with this name and date on the title page were lately in my hands: as far

as page 168 the left hand page heading is "A Dramatic History," which is

there crossed out and "Life, a Drama" thenceforward substituted. Borrow's

corrections are worth the attention of anyone who cares for men and

books.

"Lavengro" now opens with the sentence: "On an evening of July, in the

year 18--, at East D---, a beautiful little town in a certain district of

East Anglia, I first saw the light."

The proof shows that Borrow preferred "a certain district of East Anglia"

to "The western division of Norfolk." Here the added shade of

indefiniteness can hardly seem valuable to any but the author himself. In

another place he prefers (chapter XIII.) the vague "one of the most

glorious of Homer's rhapsodies" to "the enchantments of Canidia, the

masterpiece of the prince of Roman poets."

In the second chapter he describes how, near Pett, in Sussex, as a child

less than three years old, he took up a viper without being injured or

even resisted, amid the alarms of his mother and elder brother. After

this description he comments:

"It is my firm belief that certain individuals possess an inherent power,

or fascination, over certain creatures, otherwise I should be unable to

account for many feats which I have witnessed, and, indeed, borne a share

in, connected with the taming of brutes and reptiles."

This was in the proof preceded by a passage at first modified and then

cut out, reading thus:

"In some parts of the world and more particularly in India there are

people who devote themselves to the pursuit and taming of serpents. Had

I been born in those regions I perhaps should have been what is termed a

snake charmer. That I had a genius for the profession, as probably all

have who follow it, I gave decided proof of the above instance as in

others which I shall have occasion subsequently to relate."

This he cut out presumably because it was too "informing" and too little

"wild and strange."

A little later in the same chapter he describes how, before he was four

years old, near Hythe, in Kent, he saw in a penthouse against an old

village church, "skulls of the old Danes":

"'Long ago' (said the sexton, with Borrow's aid), 'long ago they came

pirating into these parts: and then there chanced a mighty shipwreck, for

God was angry with them, and He sunk them; and their skulls, as they came

ashore, were placed here as a memorial. There were many more when I was

young, but now they are fast disappearing. Some of them must have

belonged to strange fellows, madam. Only see that one; why, the two

young gentry can scarcely lift it!' And, indeed, my brother and myself

had entered the Golgotha, and commenced handling these grim relics of

mortality. One enormous skull, lying in a corner, had fixed our

attention, and we had drawn it forth. Spirit of eld, what a skull was

yon!

"I still seem to see it, the huge grim thing; many of the others were

large, strikingly so, and appeared fully to justify the old man's

conclusion that their owners must have been strange fellows; but compared

with this mighty mass of bone they looked small and diminutive, like

those of pigmies; it must have belonged to a giant, one of those

red-haired warriors of whose strength and stature such wondrous tales are

told in the ancient chronicles of the north, and whose grave-hills, when

ransacked, occasionally reveal secrets which fill the minds of puny

moderns with astonishment and awe. Reader, have you ever pored days and

nights over the pages of Snorro? probably not, for he wrote in a language

which few of the present day understand, and few would be tempted to read

him tamed down by Latin dragomans. A brave old book is that of Snorro,

containing the histories and adventures of old northern kings and

champions, who seemed to have been quite different men, if we may judge

from the feats which they performed, from those of these days. One of

the best of his histories is that which describes the life of Harald

Haardraade, who, after manifold adventures by land and sea, now a pirate,

now a mercenary of the Greek emperor, became King of Norway, and

eventually perished at the battle of Stanford Bridge, whilst engaged in a

gallant onslaught upon England. Now, I have often thought that the old

Kemp, whose mouldering skull in the Golgotha at Hythe my brother and

myself could scarcely lift, must have resembled in one respect at least

this Harald, whom Snorro describes as a great and wise ruler and a

determined leader, dangerous in battle, of fair presence, and measuring

in height just _five ells_, neither more nor less."

Of this incident he says he need offer no apology for relating it "as it

subsequently exercised considerable influence over his pursuits," _i.e._,

his study of Danish literature; but in the proof he added also that the

incident, "perhaps more than anything else, tended to bring my

imaginative powers into action"--this he cut out, though the skulls may

have impressed him as the skeleton disinterred by a horse impressed

Richard Jefferies and haunted him in his "Gamekeeper," "Meadow Thoughts,"

and elsewhere.

Sometimes he modified a showy phrase, and "when I became ambitious of the

title of Lavengro and strove to deserve it" was cut down to "when I

became a student." When he wrote of Cowper in the third chapter he said,

to justify Cowper's melancholy, that "Providence, whose ways are not our

ways, interposed, and with the withering blasts of misery nipped that

which otherwise might have terminated in fruit, noxious and lamentable";

but he substituted a mere "perhaps" for the words about Providence. In

the description of young Jasper he changed his "short arms like" his

father, into "long arms unlike."

In the fourteenth chapter Borrow describes his father's retirement from

the army after Waterloo, and his settling down at Norwich, so poor as to

be anxious for his children's future. He speaks of poor officers who

"had slight influence with the great who gave themselves very little

trouble either about them or their families." Originally he went on

thus, but cut out the words from the proof:

"Yet I have reason for concluding that they were not altogether

overlooked by a certain power still higher than even the aristocracy of

England and with yet more extensive influence in the affairs of the

world. I allude to Providence, which, it is said, never forsakes those

who trust in it, as I suppose these old soldiers did, for I have known

many instances in which their children have contrived to make their way

gallantly in the world, unaided by the patronage of the great, whilst

others who were possessed of it were most miserably shipwrecked, being

suddenly overset by some unexpected squall, against which it could avail

them nothing."

This change is a relief to the style. The next which I shall quote is

something more than that. It shows Borrow constructing the conversation

of his father and mother when they were considering his prospects at the

age of twelve. His father was complaining of the boy's Gypsy look, and

of his ways and manners, and of the strange company he kept in

Ireland--"people of evil report, of whom terrible things were said--horse-

witches and the like." His mother made the excuse: "But he thinks of

other things now." "Other languages, you mean," said his father. But in

the proof his mother adds to her speech, "He is no longer in Ireland,"

and the father takes her up with, "So much the better for him; yet should

he ever fall into evil practices, I shall always lay it to the account of

that melancholy sojourn in Ireland and the acquaintances he formed

there."

Instead of putting into his friend, the Anglo-Germanist Williams Taylor's

mouth, the opinion "that as we are aware that others frequently

misinterpret us, we are equally liable to fall into the same error with

respect to them," he alters it to the very different one, "That there is

always some eye upon us; and that it is impossible to keep anything we do

from the world, as it will assuredly be divulged by somebody as soon as

it is his interest to do so."

In the twenty-fourth chapter Borrow makes Thurtell, the friend of

bruisers, hint, with unconscious tragic irony, at his famous end--by

dying upon the gallows for the murder of Mr. William Weare. He tells the

magistrate whom he has asked to lend him a piece of land for a

prize-fight that his own name is no matter.

"However," he continues, "a time may come--we are not yet

buried--whensoever my hour arrives, I hope I shall prove myself equal to

my destiny, however high--

"Like bird that's bred amongst the Helicons."

In the original Thurtell's quotation was:

"No poor unminded outlaw sneaking home."

This chapter now ends with the magistrate's question to young Borrow

about this man: "What is his name?" In the manuscript Borrow answered,

"John Thurtell." The proof had, "John . . ." Borrow hesitated, and in

the margin, having crossed out "John," he put the initial "J" as a

substitute, but finally crossed that out also. He was afraid of names

which other people might know and regard in a different way. Thus in the

same proof he altered "the philologist Scaliger" to "a certain

philologist": thus, too, he would not write down the name of Dereham, but

kept on calling it "pretty D---"; and when he had to refer to Cowper as

buried in Dereham Church he spoke of the poet, not by name, but as

"England's sweetest and most pious bard."

{picture: Page 1 of "Lavengro," showing Borrow's corrections.

(Photographed from the Author's proof copy, by kind permission of Mr.

Kyllmann and Mr. Thos. Seccombe.) Photo: W. J. Roberts: page27.jpg}

CHAPTER IV--WHAT IS TRUTH?

These changes in the proof of what was afterwards called "Lavengro" were,

it need hardly be said, made in order to bring the words nearer to a

representation of the idea in Borrow's brain, and nearer to a perfect

harmony with one another. Take the case of Jasper Petulengro's arm.

Borrow knew the man Ambrose Smith well enough to know whether he had a

long or a short arm: for did not Jasper say to him when he was dismal,

"We'll now go to the tents and put on the gloves, and I'll try to make

you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!" Possibly he had

a short arm like his father, but in reading the proof it must somehow

have seemed to Borrow that his Jasper Petulengro--founded on Ambrose

Smith and at many points resembling him--ought to have a long arm. The

short arm was true to "the facts"; the long arm was more impressive and

was truer to the created character, which was more important.

It was hardly these little things that kept Borrow working at "Lavengro"

for nearly half of his fourth decade and a full half of his fifth. But

these little things were part of the great difficulty of making an

harmonious whole by changing, cutting out and inserting. When Ford and

John Murray's reader asked him for his life they probably meant a plain

statement of a few "important facts," such facts as there could hardly be

two opinions about, such facts as fill the ordinary biography or "Who's

Who." Borrow knew well enough that these facts either produce no effect

in the reader's mind or they produce one effect here and a different one

there, since the dullest mind cannot blankly receive a dead statement

without some effort to give it life. Borrow was not going to commit

himself to incontrovertible statements such as are or might be made to a

Life Insurance Company. He had no command of a tombstone style and would

not have himself circumscribed with full Christian name, date of birth,

etc., as a sexton or parish clerk might have done for him. Twenty years

later indeed--in 1862--he did write such an account of himself to be

printed as part of an appendix to a history of his old school at Norwich.

It is full of dates, but they are often inaccurate, and the years 1825 to

1833 he fills with "a life of roving adventures." He cannot refrain from

calling himself a great rider, walker and swimmer, or from telling the

story of how he walked from Norwich to London--he calls it London to

Norwich--in twenty-seven hours. But in 1862 he could rely on "Lavengro"

and "The Romany Rye"; he was an author at the end of his career, and he

had written himself down to the best of his genius. The case was

different in 1842.

He saw himself as a man variously and mysteriously alive, very different

from every other man and especially from certain kinds of man. When you

look at a larch wood with a floor of fern in October at the end of

twilight, you are not content to have that wood described as so many

hundred poles growing on three acres of land, the property of a

manufacturer of gin. Still less was Borrow content to sit down at

Oulton, while the blast howled amid the pines which nearly surround his

lonely dwelling, and answer the genial Ford's questions one by one: "What

countries have you been in? What languages do you understand?" and so

on. Ford probably divined a book as substantial and well-furnished with

milestones as "The Bible in Spain," and he cheerfully told Borrow to make

the broth "thick and slab."

Ford, in fact, doubled the difficulty. Not only did Borrow feel that his

book must create a living soul, but the soul must be heroic to meet the

expectations of Ford and the public. The equestrian group had been easy

enough--himself mounted on Sidi Habismilk, with the swift Jew and the

Gypsy at his side--but the life of a man was a different matter. Nor was

the task eased by his exceptional memory. He claimed, as has been seen,

to remember the look of the viper seen in his third year. Later, in

"Lavengro," he meets a tinker and buys his stock-in-trade to set himself

up with. The tinker tries to put him off by tales of the Blazing Tinman

who has driven him from his beat. Borrow answers that he can manage the

Tinman one way or other, saying, "I know all kinds of strange words and

names, and, as I told you before, I sometimes hit people when they put me

out." At last the tinker consents to sell his pony and things on one

condition. "Tell me what's my name," he says; "if you can't, may I--."

Borrow answers: "Don't swear, it's a bad habit, neither pleasant nor

profitable. Your name is Slingsby--Jack Slingsby. There, don't stare,

there's nothing in my telling you your name: I've been in these parts

before, at least not very far from here. Ten years ago, when I was

little more than a child, I was about twenty miles from here in a post

chaise, at the door of an inn, and as I looked from the window of the

chaise, I saw you standing by a gutter, with a big tin ladle in your

hand, and somebody called you Jack Slingsby. I never forget anything I

hear or see; I can't, I wish I could. So there's nothing strange in my

knowing your name; indeed there's nothing strange in anything, provided

you examine it to the bottom. Now what am I to give you for the things?"

(I once heard a Gypsy give a similar and equal display of memory.) Dr.

Knapp has corroborated several details of "Lavengro" which confirm

Borrow's opinion of his memory. Hearing the author whom he met on his

walk beyond Salisbury, speak of the "wine of 1811, the comet year,"

Borrow said that he remembered being in the market-place of Dereham,

looking at that comet. {30} Dr Knapp first makes sure exactly when

Borrow was at Dereham in 1811 and then that there was a comet visible

during that time. He proves also from newspapers of 1820 that the fight,

in the twenty sixth chapter of "Lavengro," ended in a thunderstorm like

that described by Borrow and used by Petulengro to forecast the violent

end of Thurtell.

Now a brute memory like that, which cannot be gainsaid, is not an

entirely good servant to a man who will not put down everything he can,

like a boy at an examination. The ordinary man probably recalls all that

is of importance in his past life, though he may not like to think so,

but a man with a memory like Borrow's or with a supply of diaries like

Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff's may well ask, "What is truth?" as Borrow

often did. The facts may convey a false impression which an omission or

a positive "lie" may correct.

{picture: A page from the author's proof copy of "Lavengro," showing

Borrow's significant corrections. (Photographed by kind permission of

Mr. Kyllmann and Mr. Thos. Seccombe.) Photo: W. J. Roberts: page30.jpg}

Just at first, as has been seen, a month after his Christmas wine with Mr

Petulengro, Borrow saw his life as a drama, perhaps as a melodrama, full

of Gypsies, jockeys and horses, wild men of many lands and several

murderers. "Capital subject," he repeated. That was when he saw himself

as an adventurer and Europe craning its neck to keep him in sight. But

he knew well, and after the first flush he remembered, that he was not

merely a robust walker, rider and philologist. When he was only eighteen

he was continually asking himself "What is truth?" "I had," he says,

"involved myself imperceptibly in a dreary labyrinth of doubt, and,

whichever way I turned, no reasonable prospect of extricating myself

appeared. The means by which I had brought myself into this situation

may be very briefly told; I had inquired into many matters, in order that

I might become wise, and I had read and pondered over the words of the

wise, so called, till I had made myself master of the sum of human

wisdom; namely, that everything is enigmatical and that man is an enigma

to himself; thence the cry of 'What is truth?' I had ceased to believe

in the truth of that in which I had hitherto trusted, and yet could find

nothing in which I could put any fixed or deliberate belief. I was,

indeed, in a labyrinth! In what did I not doubt? With respect to crime

and virtue I was in doubt; I doubted that the one was blameable and the

other praiseworthy. Are not all things subjected to the law of

necessity? Assuredly; time and chance govern all things: yet how can

this be? alas!

"Then there was myself; for what was I born? Are not all things born to

be forgotten? That's incomprehensible: yet is it not so? Those

butterflies fall and are forgotten. In what is man better than a

butterfly? All then is born to be forgotten. Ah! that was a pang

indeed; 'tis at such a moment that a man wishes to die. The wise king of

Jerusalem, who sat in his shady arbours beside his sunny fishpools,

saying so many fine things, wished to die, when he saw that not only all

was vanity, but that he himself was vanity. Will a time come when all

will be forgotten that now is beneath the sun? If so, of what profit is

life? . . .

"'Would I had never been born!' I said to myself; and a thought would

occasionally intrude. But was I ever born? Is not all that I see a

lie--a deceitful phantom? Is there a world, and earth, and sky? . . ."

If he no longer articulated these doubts he was still not as sure of

himself as Ford imagined. He was, by the way, seldom sure of his own

age, and Dr. Knapp {31} gives four instances of his underestimating it by

two and even five years. Whatever may be the explanation of this, after

three years' work at "Lavengro" he "will not be hurried for anyone." He

was probably finding that, with no notebooks or letters to help, the work

was very different from the writing of "The Bible in Spain," which was

pieced together out of long letters to the Bible Society, and, moreover,

was written within a few years of the events described. The events of

his childhood and youth had retired into a perspective that was beyond

his control: he would often be tempted to change their perspective, to

bring forward some things, to set back others. In any case these things

were no longer mere solid material facts. They were living a silent life

of spirits within his brain. He took to calling the book his "life" or

"autobiography," not "Life: a Drama." It was advertised as such; but he

would not have it. At the last moment he refused to label it an

autobiography, because he knew that it was inadequate, and that in any

case other men would not understand or would misunderstand it. He must

have felt certain that the fair figure of "Don Jorge," created in "The

Bible of Spain," had been poisoned for most readers by many a passage in

"Lavengro," like that where he doubted the existence of self and sky and

stars, or where he told of the breakdown in his health when he was

sixteen and of the gloom that followed:

"But how much more quickly does strength desert the human frame than

return to it! I had become convalescent, it is true, but my state of

feebleness was truly pitiable. I believe it is in that state that the

most remarkable feature of human physiology frequently exhibits itself.

Oh, how dare I mention the dark feeling of mysterious dread which comes

over the mind, and which the lamp of reason, though burning bright the

while, is unable to dispel! Art thou, as leeches say, the concomitant of

disease--the result of shattered nerves? Nay, rather the principle of

woe itself, the fountain head of all sorrow co-existent with man, whose

influence he feels when yet unborn, and whose workings he testifies with

his earliest cries, when, 'drowned in tears,' he first beholds the light;

for, as the sparks fly upward, so is man born to trouble, and woe doth he

bring with him into the world, even thyself, dark one, terrible one,

causeless, unbegotten, without a father. Oh, how frequently dost thou

break down the barriers which divide thee from the poor soul of man, and

overcast its sunshine with thy gloomy shadow. In the brightest days of

prosperity--in the midst of health and wealth--how sentient is the poor

human creature of thy neighbourhood! how instinctively aware that the

floodgates of horror may be cast open, and the dark stream engulf him for

ever and ever! Then is it not lawful for man to exclaim, 'Better that I

had never been born!' Fool, for thyself thou wast not born, but to

fulfil the inscrutable decrees of thy Creator; and how dost thou know

that this dark principle is not, after all, thy best friend; that it is

not that which tempers the whole mass of thy corruption? It may be, for

what thou knowest, the mother of wisdom, and of the great works: it is

the dread of the horror of the night that makes the pilgrim hasten on his

way. When thou feelest it nigh, let thy safety word be 'Onward'; if thou

tarry, thou art overwhelmed. Courage! build great works--'tis urging

thee--it is ever nearest the favourites of God--the fool knows little of

it. Thou wouldst be joyous, wouldst thou? then be a fool. What great

work was ever the result of joy, the puny one? Who have been the wise

ones, the mighty ones, the conquering ones of this earth? the joyous? I

believe not. The fool is happy, or comparatively so--certainly the least

sorrowful, but he is still a fool; and whose notes are sweetest, those of

the nightingale, or of the silly lark?

* * * * *

"'What ails you, my child?' said a mother to her son, as he lay on a

couch under the influence of the dreadful one; 'what ails you? you seem

afraid!'

"_Boy_.--'And so I am; a dreadful fear is upon me.'

"_Mother_.--'But of what? there is no one can harm you; of what are you

apprehensive?'

"_Boy_.--'Of nothing that I can express; I know not what I am afraid of,

but afraid I am.'

"_Mother_.--'Perhaps you see sights and visions; I knew a lady once who

was continually thinking that she saw an armed man threaten her, but it

was only an imagination, a phantom of the brain.'

"_Boy_.--'No armed man threatens me; and 'tis not a thing that would

cause me any fear. Did an armed man threaten me, I would get up and

fight him; weak as I am, I would wish for nothing better, for then,

perhaps, I should lose this fear; mine is a dread of I know not what, and

there the horror lies.'

"_Mother_.--'Your forehead is cool, and your speech collected. Do you

know where you are?'

"_Boy_.--'I know where I am, and I see things just as they are; you are

beside me, and upon the table there is a book which was written by a

Florentine; all this I see, and that there is no ground for being afraid.

I am, moreover, quite cool, and feel no pain--but, but--'

"And then there was a burst of 'gemiti, sospiri ed alti guai.' Alas,

alas, poor child of clay! as the sparks fly upward, so wast thou born to

sorrow--Onward!"

And if men passed over this as a youthful distemper, rather often

recurring, what would they make of his saying that "Fame after death is

better than the top of fashion in life"? Would they not accuse him of

entertaining them, as he did his companion and half-sweetheart of the

dingle, Isopel Berners, "with strange dreams of adventure, in which he

figures in opaque forests, strangling wild beasts, or discovering and

plundering the hordes of dragons; and sometimes . . . other things far

more genuine--how he had tamed savage mares, wrestled with Satan, and had

dealings with ferocious publishers"?

He did not simplify the matter by his preface. There he announced that

the book was "a dream." He had, he said, endeavoured to describe a

dream, partly of adventure, in which will be found copious notices of

books and many descriptions of life and manners, some in a very unusual

form. A dream containing "copious notices of books"! A dream in three

volumes and over a thousand pages! A dream which he had "endeavoured to

describe"! From these three words it was necessary to suppose that it

was a real dream, not a narrative introduced by the machinery of a dream,

like "Pilgrim's Progress," and "The Dream of Fair Women." And so it was.

The book was not an autobiography but a representation of a man's life in

the backward dream of memory. He had refused to drag the events of his

life out of the spirit land, to turn them into a narrative on the same

plane as a newspaper, leaving readers to convert them back again into

reality or not, according to their choice or ability. His life seemed to

him a dream, not a newspaper obituary, not an equestrian statue on a

pedestal in Albemarle Street opposite John Murray's office.

The result was that "the long-talked-of autobiography" disappointed those

who expected more than a collection of bold picaresque sketches. "It is

not," complained the "Athenaeum," "an autobiography, even with the

licence of fiction;" "the interest of autobiography is lost," and as a

work of fiction it is a failure. "Fraser's Magazine" said that it was

"for ever hovering between Romance and Reality, and the whole tone of the

narrative inspires profound distrust. Nay, more, it will make us

disbelieve the tales in 'The Zincali' and 'The Bible in Spain.'" Another

critic found "a false dream in the place of reality, a shadowy nothing in

the place of that something all who had read 'The Bible in Spain' craved

and hoped for from his pen." His friend, William Bodham Donne, in

"Tait's Edinburgh Magazine," explained how "Lavengro" was "not exactly

what the public had been expecting." Another friend, Whitwell Elwin, in

the "Quarterly Review," reviewing "Lavengro" and its continuation, "The

Romany Rye," not only praised the truth and vividness of the

descriptions, but said that "various portions of the history are known to

be a faithful narrative of Mr. Borrow's career, while we ourselves can

testify, as to many other parts of his volumes, that nothing can excel

the fidelity with which he has described both men and things," and "why

under these circumstances he should envelop the question in mystery is

more than we can divine. There can be no doubt that the larger part, and

possibly the whole, of the work is a narrative of actual occurrences, and

just as little that it would gain immensely by a plain avowal of the

fact." I have suggested that there were good reasons for not calling the

work an autobiography. Dr. Knapp has shown in his fortieth chapter that

the narrative was interrupted to admit lengthy references to much later

events for purposes of "occult vengeance"; and that these interruptions

helped to cause the delay and to change the title there can be little

doubt.

Borrow was angry at the failure of "Lavengro," and in the appendix to

"The Romany Rye" he actually said that he had never called "Lavengro" an

autobiography and never authorised anyone to call it such. This was not

a lie but a somewhat frantic assertion that his critics were mistaken

about his "dream." In later years he quietly admitted that "Lavengro"

gave an account of his early life.

Yet Dr. Knapp was not strictly and completely accurate in saying that the

first volume of "Lavengro" is "strictly autobiographical and authentic as

the whole was at first intended to be." He could give no proof that

Borrow's memory went back to his third year or that he first handled a

viper at that time. He could only show that Borrow's accounts do not

conflict with other accounts of the same matters. When they did

conflict, Dr. Knapp was unduly elated by the discovery.

Take, for example, the sixteenth chapter of "Lavengro," where he

describes the horse fair at Norwich when he was a boy:

"The reader is already aware that I had long since conceived a passion

for the equine race, a passion in which circumstances had of late not

permitted me to indulge. I had no horses to ride, but I took pleasure in

looking at them; and I had already attended more than one of these fairs:

the present was lively enough, indeed horse fairs are seldom dull. There

was shouting and whooping, neighing and braying; there was galloping and

trotting; fellows with highlows and white stockings, and with many a

string dangling from the knees of their tight breeches, were running

desperately, holding horses by the halter, and in some cases dragging

them along; there were long-tailed steeds, and dock-tailed steeds of

every degree and breed; there were droves of wild ponies, and long rows

of sober cart horses; there were donkeys and even mules: the last rare

things to be seen in damp, misty England, for the mule pines in mud and

rain, and thrives best with a hot sun above and a burning sand below.

There were--oh, the gallant creatures! I hear their neigh upon the wind;

there were--goodliest sight of all--certain enormous quadrupeds only seen

to perfection in our native isle, led about by dapper grooms, their manes

ribanded and their tails curiously clubbed and balled. Ha! ha!--how

distinctly do they say, ha! ha!

"An old man draws nigh, he is mounted on a lean pony, and he leads by the

bridle one of these animals; nothing very remarkable about that creature,

unless in being smaller than the rest and gentle, which they are not; he

is not of the sightliest look; he is almost dun, and over one eye a thick

film has gathered. But stay! there _is_ something remarkable about that

horse, there is something in his action in which he differs from all the

rest: as he advances, the clamour is hushed! all eyes are turned upon

him--what looks of interest--of respect--and, what is this? people are

taking off their hats--surely not to that steed! Yes, verily! men,

especially old men, are taking off their hats to that one-eyed steed, and

I hear more than one deep-drawn ah!

"'What horse is that?' said I to a very old fellow, the counterpart of

the old man on the pony, save that the last wore a faded suit of

velveteen, and this one was dressed in a white frock.

"'The best in mother England,' said the very old man, taking a knobbed

stick from his mouth, and looking me in the face, at first carelessly,

but presently with something like interest; 'he is old like myself, but

can still trot his twenty miles an hour. You won't live long, my swain;

tall and overgrown ones like thee never does; yet, if you should chance

to reach my years, you may boast to thy great grand boys, thou hast seen

Marshland Shales.'

"Amain I did for the horse what I would neither do for earl or baron,

doffed my hat; yes! I doffed my hat to the wondrous horse, the fast

trotter, the best in mother England; and I, too, drew a deep ah! and

repeated the words of the old fellows around. 'Such a horse as this we

shall never see again, a pity that he is so old.'"

But Dr. Knapp informs us that the well-known trotting stallion, Marshland

Shales, was not offered for sale by auction until 1827, when he was

twenty-five years old, and ten years after the date implied in

"Lavengro." And what is more, Dr. Knapp concludes that Borrow must have

been in Norwich in 1827, on the fair day, April 12.

CHAPTER V--HIS PREDECESSORS

I do not wish to make Borrow out a suffering innocent in the hands of

that learned heavy-weight and wag, Dr. Knapp. Borrow was a writing man;

he was sometimes a friend of jockeys, of Gypsies and of pugilists, but he

was always a writing man; and the writer who is delighted to have his

travels in Spain compared with the rogue romance, "Gil Blas," is no

innocent. Photography, it must be remembered, was not invented. It was

not in those days thought possible to get life on to the paper by copying

it with ink. Words could not be the equivalents of acts. Life itself is

fleeting, but words remain and are put to our account. Every action, it

is true, is as old as man and never perishes without an heir. But so are

words as old as man, and they are conservative and stern in their

treatment of transitory life. Every action seems new and unique to the

doer, but how rarely does it seem so when it is recorded in words, how

rarely perhaps it is possible for it to seem so. A new form of

literature cannot be invented to match the most grand or most lovely

life. And fortunately; for if it could, one more proof of the ancient

lineage of our life would have been lost. Borrow did not sacrifice the

proof. He had read many books in many languages, and he had a strong

taste. He liked "Gil Blas," which is a simple chain of various and

surprising adventures. He liked the lives of criminals in the "Newgate

Lives and Trials" (or rather "Celebrated Trials," 1825), which he

compiled for a publisher in his youth.

"What struck me most," he said, "with respect to these lives was the art

which the writers, whoever they were, possessed of telling a plain story.

It is no easy thing to tell a story plainly and distinctly by mouth; but

to tell one on paper is difficult indeed, so many snares lie in the way.

People are afraid to put down what is common on paper, they seek to

embellish their narrative, as they think, by philosophic speculations and

reflections; they are anxious to shine, and people who are anxious to

shine, can never tell a plain story. 'So I went with them to a music

booth, where they made me almost drunk with gin, and began to talk their

flash language, which I did not understand,' says, or is made to say,

Henry Simms, executed at Tyburn some seventy years before the time of

which I am speaking. I have always looked upon this sentence as a

masterpiece of the narrative style, it is so concise and yet so very

clear."

Borrow read Bunyan, Sterne and Smollett: he liked Byron's "Childe Harold"

and his "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte";--he liked that portrait with all

Europe and all history for a background. Above all, he read Defoe, and

in the third chapter of "Lavengro" he has described his first sight of

"Robinson Crusoe" as a little child:

"The first object on which my eyes rested was a picture; it was

exceedingly well executed, at least the scene which it represented made a

vivid impression upon me, which would hardly have been the case had the

artist not been faithful to nature. A wild scene it was--a heavy sea and

rocky shore, with mountains in the background, above which the moon was

peering. Not far from the shore, upon the water, was a boat with two

figures in it, one of which stood at the bow, pointing with what I knew

to be a gun at a dreadful shape in the water; fire was flashing from the

muzzle of the gun, and the monster appeared to be transfixed. I almost

thought I heard its cry. I remained motionless, gazing upon the picture,

scarcely daring to draw my breath, lest the new and wondrous world should

vanish of which I had now obtained a glimpse. 'Who are those people, and

what could have brought them into that strange situation?' I asked

myself; and now the seed of curiosity, which had so long lain dormant,

began to expand, and I vowed to myself to become speedily acquainted with

the whole history of the people in the boat. After looking on the

picture till every mark and line in it were familiar to me, I turned over

various leaves till I came to another engraving; a new source of wonder--a

low sandy beach on which the furious sea was breaking in mountain-like

billows; cloud and rack deformed the firmament, which wore a dull and

leaden-like hue; gulls and other aquatic fowls were toppling upon the

blast, or skimming over the tops of the maddening waves--'Mercy upon him!

he must be drowned!' I exclaimed, as my eyes fell upon a poor wretch who

appeared to be striving to reach the shore; he was upon his legs, but was

evidently half smothered with the brine; high above his head curled a

horrible billow, as if to engulf him for ever. 'He must be drowned! he

must be drowned!' I almost shrieked, and dropped the book. I soon

snatched it up again, and now my eye lighted on a third picture; again a

shore, but what a sweet and lovely one, and how I wished to be treading

it; there were beautiful shells lying on the smooth white sand, some were

empty like those I had occasionally seen on marble mantelpieces, but out

of others peered the heads and bodies of wondrous crayfish; a wood of

thick green trees skirted the beach and partly shaded it from the rays of

the sun, which shone hot above, while blue waves slightly crested with

foam were gently curling against it; there was a human figure upon the

beach, wild and uncouth, clad in the skins of animals, with a huge cap on

his head, a hatchet at his girdle, and in his hand a gun; his feet and

legs were bare; he stood in an attitude of horror and surprise; his body

was bent far back, and his eyes, which seemed starting out of his head,

were fixed upon a mark on the sand--a large distinct mark--a human

footprint!

"Reader, is it necessary to name the book which now stood open in my

hand, and whose very prints, feeble expounders of its wondrous lines, had

produced within me emotions strange and novel? Scarcely, for it was a

book which has exerted over the minds of Englishmen an influence

certainly greater than any other of modern times, which has been in most

people's hands, and with the contents of which even those who cannot read

are to a certain extent acquainted; a book from which the most luxuriant

and fertile of our modern prose writers have drunk inspiration; a book,

moreover, to which, from the hardy deeds which it narrates, and the

spirit of strange and romantic enterprise which it tends to awaken,

England owes many of her astonishing discoveries both by sea and land,

and no inconsiderable part of her naval glory.

"Hail to thee, spirit of De Foe! What does not my own poor self owe to

thee? England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could

spare them easier far than De Foe, 'unabashed De Foe,' as the hunchbacked

rhymer styled him."

It was in this manner, he declares, that he "first took to the paths of

knowledge," and when he began his own "autobiography" he must have well

remembered the opening of "Robinson Crusoe":--"I was born in the year

1632, in the City of York, of a good family, though not of that country,

my father being a foreigner of Bremen, named Kreutznaer, who first

settled at Hull," though Borrow himself would have written it: "I was

born in the year 16---, in the City of Y---, of a good family, though not

of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, named Kruschen,

who first settled at H---." Probably he remembered also that other

fictitious autobiography of Defoe's, "The Adventures of Captain

Singleton," of the child who was stolen and disposed of to a Gypsy and

lived with his good Gypsy mother until she happened to be hanged, a

little too soon for him to be "perfected in the strolling trade." Defoe

had told him long before Richard Ford that he need not be afraid of being

low. He could always give the same excuse as Defoe in "Moll

Flanders"--"as the best use is to be made even of the worst story, the

moral, 'tis hoped, will keep the reader serious, even where the story

might incline him to be otherwise." In fact, Borrow did afterwards claim

that his book set forth in as striking a way as any "the kindness and

providence of God." Even so, De Quincey suggested as an excuse in his

"Confessions" the service possibly to be rendered to other opium-eaters.

Borrow tells us in the twenty-second chapter of "Lavengro" how he sought

for other books of adventure like "Robinson Crusoe"--which he will not

mention by name!--and how he read many "books of singular power, but of

coarse and prurient imagination." One of these, "The English Rogue," he

describes as a book "written by a remarkable genius." He might have

remembered in its preface the author lamenting that, though it was meant

for the life of a "witty extravagant," readers would regard it as the

author's own life, "and notwithstanding all that hath been said to the

contrary many still continue in this belief." He might also have

remembered that the apology for portraying so much vice was that the

ugliness of it--"her _vizard-mask_ being remov'd"--"cannot but cause in

her (_quondam_) adorers, a _loathing_ instead of _loving_." The dirty

hero runs away as a boy and on the very first day tires of nuts and

blackberries and longs "to taste of the _fleshpots_ again." He sleeps in

a barn until he is waked, pursued and caught by Gypsies. He agrees to

stay with them, and they have a debauch of eating, drinking and

fornication, which makes him well content to join the "Ragged Regiment."

They colour his face with walnut juice so that he looks a "true son of an

Egyptian." Hundreds of pages are filled thereafter by tediously dragging

in, mostly from other books, joyless and leering adventures of low

dishonesty and low lust. Another book of the kind which Borrow knew was

the life of Bamfylde Moore-Carew, born in 1693 at a Devonshire rectory.

He hunted the deer with some of his schoolfellows from Tiverton and they

played truant for fear of punishment. They fell in with some Gypsies

feasting and carousing and asked to be allowed to "enlist into their

company." The Gypsies admitted them after the "requisite ceremonies" and

"proper oaths." The philosophy of Carew or his historian is worth

noticing. He says of the Gypsies:

"There are perhaps no people so completely happy as they are, or enjoy so

great a share of liberty. The king is elective by the whole people, but

none are allowed to stand as candidates for that honour but such as have

been long in their society, and perfectly studied the nature and

institution of it; they must likewise have given repeated proofs of their

personal wisdom, courage and capacity; this is better known as they

always keep a public record or register of all remarkable (either good or

bad) actions performed by any of their society, and they can have no

temptation to make choice of any but the most worthy, as their king has

no titles or legislative employments to bestow, which might influence or

corrupt their judgments.

"The laws of these people are few and simple, but most exactly and

punctually observed; the fundamental of which is that strong love and

mutual regard for each member in particular and for the whole community

in general, which is inculcated into them from the earliest infancy. . . .

Experience has shown them that, by keeping up their nice sense of

honour and shame, they are always enabled to keep their community in

better order than the most severe corporal punishments have been able to

effect in other governments.

"But what has still more tended to preserve their happiness is that they

know no other use of riches than the enjoyment of them. They know no

other use of it than that of promoting mirth and good humour; for which

end they generously bring their gains into a common stock, whereby they

whose gains are small have an equal enjoyment with those whose profits

are larger, excepting only that a mark or ignominy is affixed on those

who do not contribute to the common stock proportionately to their

abilities and the opportunities they have of gain, and this is the source

of their uninterrupted happiness; fully this means they have no griping

usurer to grind them, no lordly possessor to trample on them, nor any

envyings to torment them; they have no settled habitations, but, like the

Scythian of old, remove from place to place, as often as their

convenience or pleasure requires it, which render their life a perpetual

source of the greatest variety.

"By what we have said above, and much more that we could add of the

happiness of these people and of their peculiar attachment to each other,

we may account for what has been matter of much surprise to the friends

of our hero, viz., his strong attachment, for the space of about forty

years, to this community, and his refusing the large offers that have

been made to quit their society."

Carew himself met with nothing but success in his various impersonations

of Tom o' Bedlam, a rat-catcher, a non-juring clergyman, a shipwrecked

Quaker, and an aged woman with three orphan grandchildren. He was

elected King of the Beggars, and lost the dignity only by deliberate

abdication. "The restraints of a town not suiting him after the free

rambling life he had led, he took a house in the country, and having

acquired some property on the decease of a relation, he was in a position

to purchase a residence more suited to his taste, and lived for some

years a quiet life 'respected best by those who knew him best.'"

A very different literary hero of Borrow's was William Cobbett, in spite

of his radical opinions. Cobbett was a man who wrote, as it were, with

his fist, not the tips of his fingers. When I begin to read him I think

at once of a small country town where men talk loudly to one another at a

distance or as they walk along in opposite directions, and the voices

ring as their heels do on the cobbles. He is not a man of arguments, but

of convictions. He is so full of convictions that, though not an

indolent man, he has no time for arguments. "On this stiff ground," he

says in North Wiltshire, "they grow a good many beans and give them to

the pigs with whey; which makes excellent pork for the _Londoners_; but

which must meet with a pretty hungry stomach to swallow it in Hampshire."

When he was being shouted down at Lewes in 1822, and someone moved that

he should be put out of the room, he says: "I rose that they might see

the man that they had to put out." The hand that holds the bridle holds

the pen. The night after he has been hare-hunting--Friday, November the

sixteenth, 1821, at Old Hall, in Herefordshire--he writes down this note

of it:

"A whole day most delightfully passed a hare-hunting, with a pretty pack

of hounds kept here by Messrs. Palmer. They put me upon a horse that

seemed to have been made on purpose for me, strong, tall, gentle and

bold; and that carried me either over or through every thing. I, who am

just the weight of a four-bushel sack of good wheat, actually sat on her

back from daylight in the morning to dusk (about nine hours) without once

setting my foot on the ground. Our ground was at Orcop, a place about

four miles distance from this place. We found a hare in a few minutes

after throwing off; and, in the course of the day, we had to find four,

and were never more than ten minutes in finding. A steep and naked

ridge, lying between two flat valleys, having a mixture of pretty large

fields and small woods, formed our ground. The hares crossed the ridge

forward and backward, and gave us numerous views and very fine sport. I

never rode on such steep ground before; and, really, in going up and down

some of the craggy places, where the rain had washed the earth from the

rocks, I did think, once or twice of my neck, and how Sidmouth would like

to see me. As to the _cruelty_, as some pretend, of this sport, that

point I have, I think, settled, in one of the chapters of my 'Year's

Residence in America.' As to the expense, a pack, even a full pack of

harriers, like this, costs less than two bottles of wine a day with their

inseparable concomitants. And as to the _time_ spent, hunting is

inseparable from _early rising_; and, with habits of early rising, who

ever wanted time for any business?"

Borrow could not resist this man's plain living and plain thinking, or

his sentences that are like acts--like blows or strides. And if he had

needed any encouragement in the expression of prejudices, Cobbett offered

it. The following, from "Cottage Economy," will serve as an example. It

is from a chapter on "Brewing":--

"The practice of tea drinking must render the frame feeble and unfit to

encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as I have shown, it

deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back.

Hence succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a

lurking in the bed, and, in short, all the characteristics of idleness

for which, in his case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The

tea drinking fills the public-house, makes the frequenting of it

habitual, corrupts boys as soon as they are able to move from home, and

does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the teatable is no

bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches

them idleness. The everlasting dawdling about with the slops of the tea-

tackle gives them a relish for nothing that requires strength and

activity. When they go from home, they know how to do nothing that is

useful, to brew, to bake, to make butter, to milk, to rear poultry; to do

any earthly thing of use they are wholly unqualified. To shut poor young

creatures up in manufactories is bad enough; but there at any rate they

do something that is useful; whereas the girl that has been brought up

merely to boil the teakettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable

from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer,

and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to fix his

affections upon her.

"But is it in the power of any man, any good labourer who has attained

the age of fifty, to look back upon the last thirty years of his life,

without cursing the day in which tea was introduced into England? Where

is there such a man who cannot trace to this cause a very considerable

part of all the mortifications and sufferings of his life? When was he

ever too late at his labour; when did he ever meet with a frown, with a

turning off and with pauperism on that account, without being able to

trace it to the teakettle? When reproached with lagging in the morning,

the poor wretch tells you that he will make up for it by _working during

his breakfast time_! I have heard this a hundred and a hundred times

over. He was up time enough; but the teakettle kept him lolling and

lounging at home; and now instead of sitting down to a breakfast upon

bread, bacon and beer, which is to carry him on to the hour of dinner, he

has to force his limbs along under the sweat of feebleness, and at dinner-

time to swallow his dry bread, or slake his half-feverish thirst at the

pump or the brook. To the wretched teakettle he has to return at night

with legs hardly sufficient to maintain him; and then he makes his

miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years

sooner than he would have found it had he made his wife brew beer instead

of making tea. If he now and then gladdens his heart with the drugs of

the public-house, some quarrel, some accident, some illness is the

probable consequence; to the affray abroad succeeds an affray at home;

the mischievous example reaches the children, cramps them or scatters

them, and misery for life is the consequence." As Cobbett wrote against

tea so was Borrow to write against the Pope.

Being a reading and a writing man who had set down all his most

substantial adventures in earlier books, Borrow, says Mr. Thomas

Seccombe, had no choice but "to interpret autobiography as

'autobiographiction.'" {50} Parts of the autobiography, he says, are "as

accurate and veracious as John Wesley's 'Journal,' but the way in which

the dingle ingredients" [in the stories of Isopel Berners, the

postillion, and the Man in Black] "are mingled, and the extent to which

lies--damned lies--or facts predominate, will always be a fascinating

topic for literary conjecture." It must not be forgotten, however, that

Borrow never called the published book his autobiography. He did

something like what I believe young writers often do; he described events

in his own life with modifications for the purpose of concealment in some

cases and of embellishment in others. If he had never labelled it an

autobiography there would have been no mystery, and the conclusion of

readers would be that most of it could not have been invented, but that

the postillion's story, for example, is a short story written to embody

some facts and some opinions, without any appearance of being the whole

truth and nothing but the truth. If Borrow made a set of letters to the

Bible Society into a book like "Gil Blas," he could hardly do

less--especially when he had been reminded of the fact--with his remoter

adventures; and having taken out dates and names of persons and places he

felt free. He produced his view of himself, as De Quincey did in his

"Confessions of an English Opium Eater." This view was modified by his

public reputation, by his too potent memory and the need for selection,

by his artistic sense, and by his literary training. So far from

suffering by the two elements, if they are to be separated, of fiction

and autobiography, "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" gain immensely. The

autobiographical form--the use of the first person singular--is no mere

device to attract an interest and belief as in "Captain Singleton" and a

thousand novels. Again and again we are made perfectly certain that the

man could not have written otherwise. He is sounding his own depths, and

out of mere shyness, at times, uses the transparent amateur trick of

pretending that he was writing of someone else. Years afterwards, when

Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him, "What is the real nature of autobiography?"

he answered in questions: "Is it a mere record of the incidents of a

man's life? or is it a picture of the man himself--his character, his

soul?"

CHAPTER VI--THE BIOGRAPHER'S MATERIAL

"Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" give Borrow's character and soul by

direct and indirect means. Their truth and fiction produce a consistent

picture which we feel to be true. Dr. Knapp has shown, where the facts

are accessible, that Borrow does not much neglect, mislay or pervert

them. But neither Dr. Knapp nor anyone else has captured facts which

would be of any significance had Borrow told us nothing himself. Some of

the anecdotes lap a branch here and there; some disclose a little rotten

wood or fungus; others show the might of a great limb, perhaps a knotty

protuberance with a grotesque likeness, or the height of the whole;

others again are like clumsy arrogant initials carved on the venerable

bark. I shall use some of them, but for the most part I shall use

Borrow's own brush both to portray and to correct.

CHAPTER VII--PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST

The five works of Borrow's maturity--from "The Zincali: or the Gypsies of

Spain," written when he had turned thirty, to "Wild Wales," written when

he had turned fifty--have this in common, and perhaps for their chief

quality, that of set purpose and by inevitable accident they reveal

Borrow, the body and the spirit of the man. Together they compose a

portrait, if not a small gallery of portraits. Of these the most

deliberate is the one that emerges from "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye."

In these books, written after he had passed forty, he described the first

twenty-two years of his life, without, so far as is known, using any

notebooks or other contemporary documents. As I have said before, the

literal accuracy of such a description must have been limited by his

power and his willingness to see things as they were. In some ways there

is no greater stranger to the youth of twenty than the man of forty who

was once that youth, and if he overcomes that strangeness it is often by

the perilous process of concealing the strangeness and the difference.

The result is--or is it an individual misfortune of mine?--that the

figure of "Lavengro" seems to me, more often than not, and on the whole,

to be nearer the age of forty than of twenty. The artist, that is to

say, dominates his subject, the tall overgrown youth of twenty-two, as

grey as a badger. It is very different in "The Bible in Spain," where

artist and subject are equally matched, and both mature. In "Lavengro"

there is a roundabout method, a painful poring subtlety and minuteness, a

marvellous combination of Sterne and Defoe, resulting in something very

little like any book written by either man: in "The Bible in Spain" a

straightforward, confident, unqualified revelation that seems almost

unconsidered.

CHAPTER VIII--CHILDHOOD

And now for some raw bones of the life of a man who was born in 1803 and

died in 1881, bones picked white and dry by the winds of thirty, forty,

fifty, and a hundred years.

Thomas Borrow, his father, an eighth and youngest son, was born in 1758

of a yeoman family long and still settled in Cornwall, near Liskeard. He

worked for some time on his brother's farm. At nineteen he joined the

Militia and was apprenticed to a maltster, but, having knocked his master

down in a free fight at Menheniot Fair in 1783, disappeared and enlisted

as a private in the Coldstream Guards. He was then a man of fresh

complexion and light brown hair, just under five feet eight inches in

height. He was a sergeant when he was transferred nine years later to

the West Norfolk Regiment of Militia. In 1798 he was promoted to the

office of adjutant with the rank of captain. In 1793 he had married Ann

Perfrement, a tenant farmer's daughter from East Dereham, and probably of

French Protestant descent, whom he had first met when she was playing a

minor part as an amateur at East Dereham with a company from the Theatre

Royal at Norwich. She had, says Borrow, dark brilliant eyes, oval face,

olive complexion, and Grecian forehead.

The first child of this marriage, John Thomas, was born in 1800. Borrow

describes this elder brother as a beautiful child of "rosy, angelic face,

blue eyes and light chestnut hair," yet of "not exactly an Anglo-Saxon

countenance," having something of "the Celtic character, particularly in

the fire and vivacity which illumined it." John was his father's

favourite. He entered the army and became a lieutenant, but also, and

especially after the end of the war, a painter, studying under B. R.

Haydon and old Crome. He went out to Mexico in the service of a mining

company in 1826, and died there in 1834.

George Borrow was born in 1803 at another station of the regiment, East

Dereham. He calls himself a gloomy child, a "lover of nooks and retired

corners . . . sitting for hours together with my head on my breast . . .

conscious of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of a strange

sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and for which I

could assign no real cause whatever." A maidservant thought him a little

wrong in the head, but a Jew pedlar rebuked her for saying so, and said

the child had "all the look of one of our people's children," and praised

his bright eyes. With the regiment he travelled along the Sussex and

Kent coast during the next four years. They were at Pett in 1806, and

there he tells us that he first handled a viper, fearless and unharmed.

In 1806 also they were at Hythe, where he saw the skulls of the Danes.

They were at Canterbury in 1807, and near there was the scene of his

eating the "green, red, and purple" berries from the hedge and suffering

convulsions. They were, says Dr. Knapp, from the regimental records,

never at Winchester, but at Winchelsea. In 1809 and 1810 they were back

at Dereham, which was then the home of Eleanor Fenn, his "Lady

Bountiful," widow of the editor of the "Paston Letters," Sir John Fenn.

He had "increased rapidly in size and in strength," but not in mind, and

could read only imperfectly until "Robinson Crusoe" drew him out. He

went to church twice on Sundays, and never heard God's name without a

tremor, "for I now knew that God was an awful and inscrutable being, the

maker of all things; that we were His children, and that we, by our sins,

had justly offended Him; that we were in very great peril from His anger,

not so much in this life as in another and far stranger state of being

yet to come; that we had a Saviour withal to whom it was necessary to

look for help: upon this point, however, I was yet very much in the dark,

as, indeed, were most of those with whom I was connected. The power and

terrors of God were uppermost in my thoughts; they fascinated though they

astounded me."

{picture: Borrow's birth-place, East Dereham, Norfolk. Photo: H. T.

Cave, East Dereham: page57.jpg}

Later in 1810 he was at Norman Cross, in Huntingdonshire, and was free to

wander alone by Whittlesea Mere. There he met the old viper-hunter and

herbalist, into whose mouth he puts the tale of the King of the Vipers.

There he met the Gypsies. He answered their threats with a viper that

had lain hid in his breast; they called him "Sapengro, a chap who catches

snakes and plays tricks with them." He was sworn brother to Jasper, the

son, who despised him for being puny.

The Borrows were at Dereham again in 1811, and George went to school "for

the acquisition of Latin," and learnt the whole of Lilly's Grammar by

heart. Other marches of the regiment left him time to wonder at that

"stupendous erection, the aqueduct at Stockport"--to visit Durham and "a

capital old inn" there, where he had "a capital dinner off roast Durham

beef, and a capital glass of ale, which I believe was the cause of my

being ever after fond of ale"--so he told the Durham miner whom he met on

his way to the Devil's Bridge, in Cardiganshire--and to attend school at

Huddersfield in 1812 and at Edinburgh in 1813 and 1814.

He mentions the frequent fights at the High School and the pitched

battles between the Old and the New Town. Climbing the Castle Rock was

his favourite diversion, and on one "horrible edge" he came upon David

Haggart sitting and thinking of William Wallace:

"And why were ye thinking of him?" Borrow says that he asked the lad.

"The English hanged him long since, as I have heard say."

"I was thinking," he answered, "that I should wish to be like him."

"Do ye mean," Borrow says that he said, "that ye would wish to be

hanged?"

This youth was a drummer boy in Captain Borrow's regiment. Borrow

describes him upsetting the New Town champion in one of the bickers.

Seven years later he was condemned to death at Edinburgh, and to earn a

little money for his mother he dictated an account of his life to the

prison chaplain before he died. It was published in 1821 with the title:

"The Life of David Haggart, alias John Wilson, alias John Morison, alias

Barney M'Coul, alias John M'Colgan, alias David O'Brien, alias the

Switcher. Written by himself, while under sentence of death." It is

worth reading, notable in itself and for its style.

He was a gamekeeper's son, and being a merry boy was liberally tipped by

sportsmen. Yet he ran away from home at the age of ten. One of his

first exploits was the stealing of a bantam cock. It belonged to a woman

at the back of the New Town of Edinburgh, says he, and he took a great

fancy to it, "for it was a real beauty and I offered to _buy_, but

mistress would not _sell_, so I got another cock, and set the two a

fighting, and then off with my prize." This is like Mr. W. B. Yeats'

Paddy Cockfight in "Where there is nothing"; he got a fighting cock from

a man below Mullingar--"The first day I saw him I fastened my eyes on

him, he preyed on my mind, and next night if I didn't go back every foot

of nine miles to put him in my bag." When he was twelve he got drunk at

the Leith races and enlisted in the Norfolk Militia, which had a

recruiting party for patriots at the races. "I learned," he says, "to

beat the drum very well in the course of three months, and afterwards

made considerable progress in blowing the bugle-horn. I liked the red

coat and the soldiering well enough for a while, but soon tired. We were

too much confined, and there was too little pay for me;" and so he got

his discharge. "The restraining influences of military discipline," says

Dr. Knapp, "gradually wore away." He went back to school even, but in

vain. He was "never happier in his life" than when he "fingered all this

money"-- 200 pounds acquired by theft. He worked at his trade of

thieving in many parts of Scotland and Ireland. As early as 1818 he was

sentenced to death, but escaped, and, being recognised by a policeman,

killed him and got clear away. He served one or two sentences and

escaped from another. He escaped a third time, with a friend, after

hitting the gaoler in such a manner that he afterwards died. The friend

was caught at once, but David ran well--"never did a fox double the

hounds in better style"--and got away in woman's clothes. As he was

resting in a haystack after his run of ten miles in an hour, he heard a

woman ask "if that lad was taken that had broken out of Dumfries Gaol,"

and the answer: "No; but the gaoler died last night at ten o'clock." He

got arrested in Ireland through sheer carelessness, was recognised and

taken in irons to Dumfries again--and so he died.

In 1814 and 1815 Borrow was for a time at the Grammar School at Norwich,

but sailed with the regiment "in the autumn of the year 1815" for

Ireland. "On the eighth day of our voyage," he says, "we were in sight

of Ireland. The weather was now calm and serene, the sun shone brightly

on the sea and on certain green hills in the distance, on which I

descried what at first sight I believed to be two ladies gathering

flowers, which, however, on our near approach, proved to be two tall

white towers, doubtless built for some purpose or other, though I did not

learn for what." He was at "the Protestant Academy" at Clonmel, and

"read the Latin tongue and the Greek letters with a nice old clergyman."

From a schoolfellow he learnt something of the Irish tongue in exchange

for a pack of cards.

School, he says, had helped him to cast aside, in a great degree, his

unsocial habits and natural reserve, and when he moved to Templemore,

where there was no school, he roamed about the wild country, "sometimes

entering the cabins of the peasantry with a 'God's blessing upon you good

people!'" Here, as in Scotland, he seems to have done as he liked. His

father had other things to do than look after the child whom he was later

on to upbraid for growing up in a displeasing way. Ireland made a strong

impression upon the boy, if we may judge from his writing about it when

he looked back on those days. He recalls, in "Wild Wales," hearing the

glorious tune of "Croppies lie Down" in the barrack yard at Clonmel.

Again and again he recalls Murtagh, the wild Irish boy who taught him

Irish for a pack of cards. In Ireland he learnt to be "a frank rider"

without a saddle, and had awakened in him his "passion for the equine

race": and here he had his cob shoed by a "fairy smith" who first roused

the animal to a frenzy by uttering a strange word "in a sharp pungent

tone," and then calmed it by another word "in a voice singularly modified

but sweet and almost plaintive." Above all there is a mystery which

might easily be called Celtic about his memories of Ireland, due chiefly

to something in his own blood, but also to the Irish atmosphere which

evoked that something in its perfection.

After less than a year in Ireland the regiment was back at Norwich, and

war being at an end, the men were mustered out in 1815.

{picture: Borrow's Court, Norwich. Photo: Jarrold & Sons, Norwich:

page61.jpg}

CHAPTER IX--SCHOOLDAYS

The Borrows now settled at Norwich in what was then King's Court and is

now Borrow's Court, off Willow Lane. George Borrow, therefore, again

attended the Grammar School of Norwich. He could then, he says, read

Greek. His father's dissatisfaction was apparently due to some

instinctive antipathy for the child, who had neither his hair nor his

eyes, but was "absolutely swarthy, God forgive me! I had almost said

like that of a Gypsy." As in Scotland and Ireland, so now at Norwich,

Captain Borrow probably let the boy do what he liked. As for Mrs.

Borrow, perhaps she favoured the boy, who took after her in eyes and

complexion, if not also in temperament. Her influence was of an

unconscious kind, strengthening her prenatal influence; unlike her

husband, she had no doubt that "Providence" would take care of the boy.

Borrow, at least, thought her like himself. In a suppressed portion of

the twentieth chapter of "Lavengo" he makes his parents talk together in

the garden, and the mother having a story to tell suggests their going in

because it is growing dark. The father says that a tale of terror is the

better for being told in the dark, and hopes she is not afraid. The

mother scoffs at the mention of fear, and yet, she says, she feels a

thrill as if something were casting a cold shadow on her. She wonders if

this feeling is like the indescribable fear, "which he calls the shadow,"

which sometimes attacks her younger child. "Never mind the child or his

shadow," says the father, and bids her go on. And from what follows the

mother has evidently told the story before to her son. This dialogue may

very well express the contrast between husband and wife and their

attitudes towards their younger son. Borrow very eloquently addresses

his father as "a noble specimen of those strong single-minded Englishmen,

who, without making a parade either of religion or loyalty, feared God

and honoured their king, and were not particularly friendly to the

French," and as a pugilist who almost vanquished the famous Ben Bryan;

but he does not conceal the fact that he was "so little to thee that thou

understoodst me not."

At Norwich Grammar School Borrow had as schoolfellows James Martineau and

James Brooke, afterwards Rajah of Sarawak. The headmaster was one Edward

Valpy, who thrashed Borrow, and there is nothing more to be said. The

boy was fond of study but not of school. "For want of something better

to do," he taught himself some French and Italian, but wished he had a

master. A master was found in a French _emigre_, the Rev. Thomas

D'Eterville, who gave private lessons to Borrow, among others, in French,

Italian and Spanish. His other teachers were an old musket with which he

shot bullfinches, blackbirds and linnets, a fishing rod with which he

haunted the Yare, and the sporting gent, John Thurtell, who taught him to

box and accustomed him to pugilism.

Something is known of Thurtell apart from Borrow. He was the son of a

man who was afterwards Mayor of Norwich. He had been a soldier and he

was now in business. He arranged prize fights and boxed himself. He

afterwards murdered a man who had dishonestly relieved him of 400 pounds

at gambling, and he was executed for the offence at Hertford in 1824. The

trial was celebrated. It was there that a "respectable" man was defined

by a witness as one who "kept a gig." The trial was included in the

"Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence" which

Borrow compiled in 1825; and Borrow may have written this description of

the accused:

"Thurtell was dressed in a plum-coloured frock coat, with a drab

waistcoat and gilt buttons, and white corded breeches. His neck had a

black stock on, which fitted as usual stiffly up to the bottom of the

cheek and end of the chin, and which therefore pushed forward the flesh

on this part of the face so as to give an additionally sullen weight to

the countenance. The lower part of the face was unusually large,

muscular and heavy, and appeared to hang like a load to the head, and to

make it drop like the mastiff's jowl. The upper lip was long and large,

and the mouth had a severe and dogged appearance. His nose was rather

small for such a face, but it was not badly shaped; his eyes, too, were

small and buried deep under his protruding forehead, so indeed as to defy

detection of their colour. The forehead was extremely strong, bony and

knotted--and the eyebrows were forcibly marked though irregular--that

over the right eye being nearly straight and that on the left turning up

to a point so as to give a very painful expression to the whole face. His

hair was of a good lightish brown, and not worn after any fashion. His

frame was exceedingly well knit and athletic."

An eye witness reports that seven hours before his execution, Thurtell

said: "It is perhaps wrong in my situation, but I own I should like to

read Pierce Egan's account of the great fight yesterday" (meaning that

between Spring and Langan). He slept well through his last night, and

said: "I have dreamt many odd things, but I never dreamt anything about

_this business_ since I have been in Hertford." Pierce Egan described

the trial and execution, and how Thurtell bowed in a friendly and

dignified manner to someone--"we believe, Mr. Pierce Egan"--in the crowd

about the gallows. Pierce Egan did not mention the sound of his cracking

neck, but Borrow is reported to have said it was a shame to hang such a

man as Thurtell: "Why, when his neck broke it went off like a pistol."

Thurtell is the second of Borrow's friends who preceded him in fame.

During his school days under Valpy, Borrow met his sworn brother

again--the Gypsy Petulengro. He places this meeting at the Tombland Fair

at Norwich, and Dr. Knapp fixes it, precisely, on March 19, 1818.

According to Borrow's account, which is the only one, he was shadowed and

then greeted by Jasper Petulengro. They went together to the Gypsy

encampment on Household Heath, and they were together there often again,

in spite of the hostility of one Gypsy, Mrs. Herne, to Borrow. He says

that he went with them to fairs and markets and learnt their language in

spite of Mrs. Herne, so that they called him Lav-engro, or Word Master.

The mighty Tawno Chikno also called him Cooro-mengro, because of his

mastery with the fist. He was then sixteen. He is said to have stained

his face to darken it further, and to have been asked by Valpy: "Is that

jaundice or only dirt, Borrow?"

CHAPTER X--LEAVING SCHOOL

With so much liberty Borrow desired more. He played truant and, as we

have seen, was thrashed for it. He was soon to leave school for good,

though there is nothing to prove that he left on account of this

escapade, or that the thrashing produced the "symptoms of a rapid

decline," with a failure of strength and appetite, which he speaks of in

the eighteenth chapter of "Lavengro," after the Gypsies had gone away. He

was almost given over by the physicians, he tells us, but cured by an

"ancient female, a kind of doctress," with a decoction of "a bitter root

which grows on commons and desolate places." An attack of "the dark

feeling of mysterious dread" came with convalescence.

But "never during any portion of my life did time flow on more speedily,"

he says, than during the next two or three years. After some hesitation

between Church and Law, he was articled in 1819 to Messrs. Simpson and

Rackham, solicitors, of Tuck's Court, St. Giles', Norwich, and he lived

with Simpson in the Upper Close. As a friend said, the law was an

excellent profession for those who never intend to follow it. As Borrow

himself said, "I have ever loved to be as explicit as possible; on which

account, perhaps, I never attained to any proficiency in the law." Borrow

sat faithfully at his desk and learned a good deal of Welsh, Danish,

Hebrew, Arabic, Gaelic, and Armenian, making translations from these

languages in prose and verse. In "Wild Wales" he recalls translating

Danish poems "over the desk of his ancient master, the gentleman

solicitor of East Anglia," and learning Welsh by reading a Welsh

"Paradise Lost" side by side with the original, and by having lessons on

Sunday afternoons at his father's house from a groom named Lloyd.

His chief master was William Taylor, the "Anglo-Germanist" of "Lavengro."

Taylor was born in 1765. He studied in Germany as a youth and returned

to England with a great enthusiasm for German literature. He translated

Goethe's "Iphigenia" (1793), Lessing's "Nathan" (1791), Wieland's

"Dialogues of the Gods," etc. (1795); he published "Tales of Yore,"

translated from several languages, and a "Letter concerning the two first

chapters of Luke," in 1810, "English Synonyms discriminated" in 1813, and

an "Historical Survey of German Poetry," interspersed with various

translations, in 1823-30. He was bred among Unitarians, read Hume,

Voltaire and Rousseau, disliked the Church, and welcomed the French

Revolution, though he was no friend to "the cause of national ambition

and aggrandisement." He belonged to a Revolution Society at Norwich, and

in 1790 wrote from Paris calling the National Assembly "that well-head of

philosophical legislation, whose pure streams are now overflowing the

fairest country upon earth and will soon be sluiced off into the other

realms of Europe, fertilising all with the living energy of its waters."

In 1791 he and his father withdrew their capital from manufacture and

William Taylor devoted himself to literature. Hazlitt speaks of the

"style of philosophical criticism which has been the boast of the

'Edinburgh Review,'" as first introduced into the "Monthly Review" by

Taylor in 1796. Scott said that Taylor's translation of Burger's

"Lenore" made him a poet. Sir James Mackintosh learned the Taylorian

language for the sake of the man's "vigour and originality"--"As the

Hebrew is studied for one book, so is the Taylorian by me for one

author."

{picture: William Taylor, of Norwich: page66.jpg}

I will give a few hints at the nature of his speculation. In one of his

letters he speaks of stumbling on "the new hypothesis that the

Nebuchadnezzar of Scripture is the Cyrus of Greek History," and second,

that "David, the Jew, a favourite of this prince, wrote all those oracles

scattered in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel relative to his enterprises,

for the particularisation of which they afford ample materials." Writing

of his analysis, in the "Critical Review," of Paulus' Commentary on the

New Testament, he blames the editor for a suppression--"an attempt to

prove, from the first and second chapter of Luke, that Zacharias, who

wrote these chapters, meant to hold himself out as the father of Jesus

Christ as well as of John the Baptist. The Jewish idea of being

conceived of the Holy Ghost did not exclude the idea of human parentage.

The rabbinical commentator on Genesis explains this." He was called

"Godless Billy Taylor," but says he: "When I publish my other pamphlet in

proof of the great truth that Jesus Christ wrote the 'Wisdom' and

translated the 'Ecclesiasticus' from the Hebrew of his grandfather

Hillel, you will be convinced (that I am convinced) that I and I alone am

a precise and classical Christian; the only man alive who thinks

concerning the person and doctrines of Christ what he himself thought and

taught." His "Letter concerning the two first chapters of Luke" has the

further title, "Who was the father of Christ?" He calls "not absolutely

indefensible" the opinion of the anonymous German author of the "Natural

History of Jesus of Nazareth," that Joseph of Arimathaea was the father

of Jesus Christ. He mentions that "a more recent anonymous theorist,

with greater plausibility, imagines that the acolytes employed in the

Temple of Jerusalem were called by the names of angels, Michael, Raphael,

Gabriel, accordingly as they were stationed behind, beside, or before,

the mercy-seat; and that the Gabriel of the Temple found means to impose

on the innocence of the virgin." "This," he says, "is in many ways

compatible with Mary's having faithfully given the testimony put together

by Luke." He gives at great length the arguments in favour of Zacharias

as the father, and tells Josephus' story of Mundus and Paulina. {68}

Norwich was then "a little Academe among provincial cities," as Mr.

Seccombe calls it; he continues:

"Among the high lights of the illuminated capital of East Anglia were the

Cromes, the Opies, John Sell Cotman, Elizabeth Fry, Dr. William Enfield

(of Speaker fame), and Dr. Rigby, the father of Lady Eastlake; but pre-

eminent above all reigned the twin cliques of Taylors and Martineaus, who

amalgamated at impressive intervals for purposes of mutual elevation and

refinement.

"The salon of Susannah Taylor, the mother of Sarah Austin, the wife of

John Taylor, hymn writer and deacon of the seminal chapel, the once noted

Octagon, in Norwich, included in its zenith Sir James Mackintosh, Mrs.

Barbauld, Crabb Robinson, the solemn Dr. John Alderson, Amelia Opie,

Henry Reeve of Edinburgh fame, Basil Montagu, the Sewards, the Quaker

Gurneys of Earlham, and Dr. Frank Sayers, whom the German critics

compared to Gray, who had handled the Norse mythology in poetry, to which

Borrow was introduced by Sayer's private biographer, the eminent and

aforesaid William Taylor" [no relation of _the_ "Taylors of Norwich"]

"whose 'Jail-delivery of German Studies' the jealous Thomas Carlyle

stigmatized in 1830 as the work of a natural-born English Philistine."

Nevertheless, in spite of _the_ Taylors and the Martineaus, says William

Taylor's biographer, Robberds: "The love of society almost necessarily

produces the habit of indulging in the pleasures of the table; and,

though he cannot be charged with having carried this to an immoderate

excess, still the daily repetition of it had taxed too much the powers of

nature and exhausted them before the usual period." Taylor died in 1836

and was remembered best for his drinking and for his bloated appearance.

Harriet Martineau wrote of him in her autobiography:

"William Taylor was managed by a regular process, first of feeding, then

of wine-bibbing, and immediately after of poking to make him talk: and

then came his sayings, devoured by the gentlemen and making ladies and

children aghast;--defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had

rescued him from it: information given as certain that 'God Save the

King' was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon,--that Christ was

watched on the day of His supposed ascension, and observed to hide

Himself till dark, and then to make His way down the other side of the

mountain; and other such plagiarisms from the German Rationalists. When

William Taylor began with 'I firmly believe,' we knew that something

particularly incredible was coming. . . . His virtues as a son were

before our eyes when we witnessed his endurance of his father's brutality

of temper and manners, and his watchfulness in ministering to the old

man's comfort in his infirmities. When we saw, on a Sunday morning,

William Taylor guiding his blind mother to chapel, and getting her there

with her shoes as clean as if she had crossed no gutters in those flint-

paved streets, we could forgive anything that had shocked or disgusted us

at the dinner table. But matters grew worse in his old age, when his

habits of intemperance kept him out of the sight of the ladies, and he

got round him a set of ignorant and conceited young men, who thought they

could set the world right by their destructive tendencies. One of his

chief favourites was George Borrow. . . ."

Another of "the harum-scarum young men" taken up by Taylor and introduced

"into the best society the place afforded," writes Harriet Martineau, was

Polidori.

Borrow was introduced to Taylor in 1820 by "Mousha," the Jew who taught

him Hebrew. Taylor "took a great interest" in him and taught him German.

"What I tell Borrow _once_," he said, "he ever remembers." In 1821

Taylor wrote to Southey, who was an early friend:

"A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller's 'Wilhelm Tell,'

with the view of translating it for the Press. His name is George Henry

Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity; indeed he

has the gift of tongues, and, though not yet eighteen, understands twelve

languages--English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish,

French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese; he would like to get into the

Office for Foreign Affairs, but does not know how."

Borrow was at that time a "reserved and solitary" youth, tall, spare,

dark complexioned and usually dressed in black, who used to be seen

hanging about the Close and talking through the railings of his garden to

some of the Grammar School boys. He was a noticeable youth, and he told

his father that a lady had painted him and compared his face to that of

Alfieri's Saul.

{picture: Tuck's Court, Norwich. Photo: Jarrold & Sons, Norwich:

page70.jpg}

Borrow pleased neither his master nor his father by his knowledge of

languages, though it was largely acquired in the lawyer's office. "The

lad is too independent by half," Borrow makes his father say, after

painting a filial portrait of the old man, "with locks of silver gray

which set off so nobly his fine bold but benevolent face, his faithful

consort at his side, and his trusty dog at his feet." Nor did the youth

please himself. He was languid again, tired even of the Welsh poet, Ab

Gwilym. He was anxious about his father, who was low spirited over his

elder son's absence in London as a painter, and over his younger son's

misconduct and the "strange notions and doctrines"--especially the

doctrine that everyone has a right to dispose as he thinks best of that

which is his own, even of his life--which he had imbibed from Taylor.

Taylor was "fond of getting hold of young men and, according to orthodox

accounts, doing them a deal of harm." {71a} His views, says Dr. Knapp,

sank deep "into the organism of his pupil," and "would only be

eradicated, if at all, through much suffering." Dr. Knapp thought that

the execution of Thurtell ought to have produced a "favourable change in

his mode of thinking"--as if prize fighting and murder were not far more

common among Christians than atheists. But if Borrow had never met

Taylor he would have met someone else, atheist or religious enthusiast,

who would have lured him from the straight, smooth, flowery path of

orthodoxy; otherwise he might have been a clergyman or he might have been

Dr. Knapp, but he would not have been George Borrow. "What is truth?" he

asked. "Would that I had never been born!" he said to himself. And it

was an open air ranter, not a clergyman or unobtrusive godly man, that

made him exclaim: "Would that my life had been like his--even like that

man's." Then the Gypsy reminded him of "the wind on the heath" and the

boxing gloves.

When his father asked Borrow what he proposed to do, {71b} seeing that he

was likely to do nothing at law, he had nothing to suggest. Southey

apparently could not help him to the Foreign Office. The only opening

that can have seemed possible to him was literature. He might, for

example, produce a volume of translations like the "Specimen of Russian

Poets" (1820) of John Bowring, whom he met at Taylor's. Bowring, a man

of twenty-nine in 1821, was the head of a commercial firm and afterwards

a friend of Borrow and the author of many translations from Russian,

Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Servian, Hungarian and Bohemian song. He was, as

the "Old Radical" of "The Romany Rye," Borrow's victim in his lifetime,

and after his death the victim of Dr. Knapp as the supposed false friend

of his hero. The mud thrown at him had long since dried, and has now

been brushed off in a satisfactory manner by Mr. R. A. J. Walling. {72}

{picture: Tom Shelton, Jack Randall: page72.jpg}

CHAPTER XI--LITERATURE AND LANGUAGES

When Borrow was in his nineteenth year--according to Dr. Knapp's

estimate--he told his father what he had done: "I have learned Welsh, and

have translated the songs of Ab Gwilym, some ten thousand lines, into

English rhyme. I have also learnt Danish, and have rendered the old book

of Ballads into English metre. I have learned many other tongues, and

have acquired some knowledge even of Hebrew and Arabic." He read and

conversed with William Taylor; he read alone in the Guildhall of Norwich,

where the Corporation Library offered him the books from which he gained

"his knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and early English, Welsh or British,

Northern or Scandinavian learning"--so writes Dr. Knapp, who has seen the

"neat young pencilled notes" of Borrow in Edmund Lhuyd's 'Archaeologia

Britannica' and the 'Danica Literatura Antiquissima' of Olaus Wormius,

etc. He tells us himself that he passed entire nights in reading an old

Danish book, till he was almost blind.

In 1823 Borrow began to publish his translations. Taylor introduced him

to Thomas Campbell, then editor of the "New Monthly," and to Sir Richard

Phillips, editor and proprietor of the "Monthly Magazine." Both editors

printed Borrow's works.

Sir Richard Phillips was particularly flattering: he used Borrow's

article on "Danish Poetry and Ballad Writing" and about six hundred lines

of translation from German, Danish, Swedish and Dutch poetry in the first

year of the connection, usually with the signature, "George Olaus

Borrow." I will quote only one specimen, his version of Goethe's "Erl

King" ("Monthly Magazine," December, 1823):

Who is it that gallops so late on the wild!

O it is the father that carries his child!

He presses him close in his circling arm,

To save him from cold, and to shield him from harm.

"Dear baby, what makes ye your countenance hide?"

"Spur, father, your courser and rowel his side;

The Erl-King is chasing us over the heath;"

"Peace, baby, thou seest a vapoury wreath?"

"Dear boy, come with me, and I'll join in your sport,

And show ye the place where the fairies resort;

My mother, who dwells in the cool pleasant mine

Shall clothe thee in garments so fair and so fine."

"My father, my father, in mercy attend,

And hear what is said by the whispering fiend."

"Be quiet, be quiet, my dearly-loved child;

'Tis naught but the wind as it stirs in the wild."

"Dear baby, if thou wilt but venture with me,

My daughter shall dandle thy form on her knee;

My daughter, who dwells where the moon-shadows play,

Shall lull ye to sleep with the song of the fay."

"My father, my father, and seest thou not

His sorceress daughter in yonder dark spot?"

"I see something truly, thou dear little fool,--

I see the great alders that hang by the pool."

"Sweet baby, I doat on that beautiful form,

And thou shalt ride with me the wings of the storm."

"O father, my father, he grapples me now,

And already has done me a mischief, I vow."

The father was terrified, onward he press'd,

And closer he cradled the child to his breast,

And reach'd the far cottage, and, wild with alarm,

He found that the baby hung dead on his arm!

The only criticism that need be passed on this is that any man of some

intelligence and patience can hope to do as well: he seldom wrote any

verse that was either much better or much worse. At the same time it

must not be forgotten that the success of the translation is no measure

of the impression made on the young Borrow by the legend.

His translations from Ab Gwilym are not interesting either to lovers of

that poet or to lovers of Borrow: some are preserved in a sort of life in

death in the pages of "Wild Wales."

From the German he had also translated F. M. Von Klinger's "Faustus: his

life, death and descent into hell." {75a} The preface announces that

"although scenes of vice and crime are here exhibited, it is merely in

the hope that they may serve as beacons, to guide the ignorant and unwary

from the shoals on which they might otherwise be wrecked." He insisted,

furthermore, that the book contained "the highly useful advice," that

everyone should bear their lot in patience and not seek "at the expense

of his repose to penetrate into those secrets which the spirit of man,

while dressed in the garb of mortality cannot and must not unveil. . . .

To the mind of man all is dark; he is an enigma to himself; let him live,

therefore, in the hope of once seeing clearly; and happy indeed is he who

in that manner passeth his days."

From the Danish of Johannes Evald, he translated "The Death of Balder," a

play, into blank verse with consistently feminine endings, as in this

speech of Thor to Balder: {75b}

How long dost think, degenerate son of Odin,

Unmanly pining for a foolish maiden,

And all the weary train of love-sick follies,

Will move a bosom that is steel'd by virtue?

Thou dotest! Dote and weep, in tears swim ever;

But by thy father's arm, by Odin's honour,

Haste, hide thy tears and thee in shades of alder!

Haste to the still, the peace-accustom'd valley,

Where lazy herdsmen dance amid the clover.

There wet each leaf which soft the west wind kisses,

Each plant which breathes around voluptuous odours,

With tears! There sigh and moan, and the tired peasant

Shall hear thee, and, behind his ploughshare resting,

Shall wonder at thy grief, and pity Balder!

There are lyrics interspersed. The following is sung by three Valkyries

marching round the cauldron before Rota dips the fatal spear that she is

to present to Hother:

In juice of rue

And trefoil too;

In marrow of bear

And blood of Trold,

Be cool'd the spear,

Threetimes cool'd,

When hot from blazes

Which Nastroud raises

For Valhall's May.

1st Valk. Whom it woundeth,

It shall slay.

2nd Whom it woundeth,

It shall slay.

3rd Whom it woundeth,

It shall slay.

In 1826 he was to publish "Romantic Ballads," translated from the Gaelic,

Danish, Norse, Swedish, and German, with eight original pieces. He

"hoped shortly" to publish a complete translation of the "Kjaempe Viser"

and of Gaelic songs, made by him "some years ago." Few of these are

valuable or interesting, but I must quote "Svend Vonved" because Borrow

himself so often refers to it. The legend haunted him of "that strange

melancholy Swayne Vonved, who roams about the world propounding people

riddles; slaying those who cannot answer, and rewarding those who can

with golden bracelets." When he was walking alone in wild weather in

Cornwall he roared it aloud:

Svend Vonved sits in his lonely bower;

He strikes his harp with a hand of power;

His harp returned a responsive din;

Then came his mother hurrying in:

Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

In came his mother Adeline,

And who was she, but a queen so fine:

"Now hark, Svend Vonved! out must thou ride

And wage stout battle with knights of pride."

Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

"Avenge thy father's untimely end;

To me, or another, thy gold harp lend;

This moment boune thee, and straight begone!

I rede thee, do it, my own dear son."

Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

Svend Vonved binds his sword to his side;

He fain will battle with knights of pride.

"When may I look for thee once more here?

When roast the heifer and spice the beer?"

Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

"When stones shall take, of themselves, a flight

And ravens' feathers are waxen white,

Then may'st thou expect Svend Vonved home:

In all my days, I will never come."

Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

If we did not know that Borrow used these verses as a kind of incantation

we should be sorry to have read them. But one of the original pieces in

this book is as good in itself as it is interesting. I mean "Lines to

Six-foot-three":

A lad, who twenty tongues can talk,

And sixty miles a day can walk;

Drink at a draught a pint of rum,

And then be neither sick nor dumb;

Can tune a song, and make a verse,

And deeds of northern kings rehearse;

Who never will forsake his friend,

While he his bony fist can bend;

And, though averse to brawl and strife,

Will fight a Dutchman with a knife.

O that is just the lad for me,

And such is honest six-foot three.

A braver being ne'er had birth

Since God first kneaded man from earth;

O, I have come to know him well,

As Ferroe's blacken'd rocks can tell.

Who was it did, at Suderoe,

The deed no other dared to do?

Who was it, when the Boff had burst,

And whelm'd me in its womb accurst,

Who was it dashed amid the wave,

With frantic zeal, my life to save?

Who was it flung the rope to me?

O, who, but honest six-foot three!

Who was it taught my willing tongue,

The songs that Braga fram'd and sung?

Who was it op'd to me the store

Of dark unearthly Runic lore,

And taught me to beguile my time

With Denmark's aged and witching rhyme;

To rest in thought in Elvir shades,

And hear the song of fairy maids;

Or climb the top of Dovrefeld,

Where magic knights their muster held!

Who was it did all this for me?

O, who, but honest six-foot three!

Wherever fate shall bid me roam,

Far, far from social joy and home;

'Mid burning Afric's desert sands;

Or wild Kamschatka's frozen lands;

Bit by the poison-loaded breeze

Or blasts which clog with ice the seas;

In lowly cot or lordly hall,

In beggar's rags or robes of pall,

'Mong robber-bands or honest men,

In crowded town or forest den,

I never will unmindful be

Of what I owe to six-foot three.

That form which moves with giant grace--

That wild, tho' not unhandsome face;

That voice which sometimes in its tone

Is softer than the wood-dove's moan,

At others, louder than the storm

Which beats the side of old Cairn Gorm;

That hand, as white as falling snow,

Which yet can fell the stoutest foe;

And, last of all, that noble heart,

Which ne'er from honour's path would start,

Shall never be forgot by me--

So farewell, honest six-foot three.

This is already pure Borrow, with a vigour excusing if not quite

transmuting its rant. He creates a sort of hero in his own image, and it

should be read as an introduction and invocation to "Lavengro" and "The

Romany Rye." It is one of the few contemporary records of Borrow at

about the age when he wrote "Celebrated Trials," made horse-shoes and

fought the Blazing Tinman. So far as I know, it was more than ten years

before he wrote anything so good again, and he never wrote anything

better in verse, unless it is the song of the "genuine old English

gentleman," in the twenty-fourth chapter of "Lavengro":

"Give me the haunch of a buck to eat, and to drink Madeira old,

And a gentle wife to rest with, and in my arms to fold,

An Arabic book to study, a Norfolk cob to ride,

And a house to live in shaded with trees, and near to a river side;

With such good things around me, and blessed with good health withal,

Though I should live for a hundred years, for death I would not call."

The only other verse of his which can be remembered for any good reason

is this song from the Romany, included among the translations from thirty

languages and dialects which he published, in 1835, with the title of

"Targum," and the appropriate motto: "The raven has ascended to the nest

of the nightingale." The Gypsy verses are as follows:

The strength of the ox,

The wit of the fox,

And the leveret's speed,--

Full oft to oppose

To their numerous foes,

The Rommany need.

Our horses they take,

Our waggons they break,

And ourselves they seize,

In their prisons to coop,

Where we pine and droop,

For want of breeze.

When the dead swallow

The fly shall follow

O'er Burra-panee,

Then we will forget

The wrongs we have met

And forgiving be.

It will not be necessary to say anything more about Borrow's verses.

Poetry for him was above all declamatory sentiment or wild narrative, and

so he never wrote, and perhaps never cared much for poetry, except

ballads and his contemporary Byron. He desired, as he said in the note

to "Romantic Ballads," not the merely harmonious but the grand, and he

condemned the modern muse for "the violent desire to be smooth and

tuneful, forgetting that smoothness and tunefulness are nearly synonymous

with tameness and unmeaningness." He once said of Keats: "They are

attempting to resuscitate him, I believe." He regarded Wordsworth as a

soporific merely.

CHAPTER XII--LONDON

Early in 1824, and just before George Borrow's articles with the

solicitors expired, Captain Borrow died. He left all that he had to his

widow, with something for the maintenance and education of the younger

son during his minority. Borrow had already planned to go to London, to

write, to abuse religion and to get himself prosecuted. A month later,

the day after the expiration of his articles, before he had quite reached

his majority, he went up to London. He was "cast upon the world" in no

very hopeful condition. He had lately been laid up again--was it by the

"fear" or something else?--by a complaint which destroyed his strength,

impaired his understanding and threatened his life, as he wrote to a

friend: he was taking mercury for a cure. But he had his translations

from Ab Gwilym and his romantic ballads, and he believed in them. He

took them to Sir Richard Phillips, who did not believe in them, and had

moreover given up publishing. According to his own account, which is

very well known (Lavengro, chapter XXX.), Sir Richard suggested that he

should write something in the style of the "Dairyman's Daughter" instead.

Men of this generation, fortunate at least in this ignorance, probably

think of the "Dairyman's Daughter" as a fictitious title, like the

"Oxford Review" (which stood for "The Universal Review") and the "Newgate

Lives" (which should have been "Celebrated Trials," etc.). But such a

book really was published in 1811. It was an "authentic narrative" by a

clergyman of the Church of England named Legh Richmond, who thought it

"delightful to trace and discover the operations of Divine love among the

poorer classes of mankind." The book was about the conversion and holy

life and early death of a pale, delicate, consumptive dairyman's daughter

in the Isle of Wight. It became famous, was translated into many

languages, and was reprinted by some misguided or malevolent man not long

ago. I will give a specimen of the book which the writer of "Six-foot-

three" was asked to imitate:

"Travellers, as they pass through the country, usually stop to inquire

whose are the splendid mansions which they discover among the woods and

plains around them. The families, titles, fortune, or character of the

respective owners, engage much attention. . . . In the meantime, the

lowly cottage of the poor husbandman is passed by as scarcely deserving

of notice. Yet, perchance, such a cottage may often contain a treasure

of infinitely more value than the sumptuous palace of the rich man; even

"the pearl of great price." If this be set in the heart of the poor

cottager, it proves a jewel of unspeakable value, and will shine among

the brightest ornaments of the Redeemer's crown, in that day when he

maketh up his "jewels."

{picture: Sir Richard Phillips. (From the painting by James Saxon in The

National Portrait Gallery.) Photo: Emery Walker: page82.jpg}

"Hence, the Christian traveller, while he bestows, in common with others,

his due share of applause on the decorations of the rich, and is not

insensible to the beauties and magnificence which are the lawfully

allowed appendages of rank and fortune, cannot overlook the humbler

dwelling of the poor. And if he should find that true piety and grace

beneath the thatched roof, which he has in vain looked for amidst the

worldly grandeur of the rich, he remembers the word of God. . . . He

sees, with admiration, that 'the high and lofty One, that inhabiteth

eternity, whose name is Holy, who dwelleth in the high and holy place,

dwelleth with _him also_ that is of a contrite and humble spirit,' Isaiah

lvii., 15; and although heaven is his throne, and the earth his

footstool, yet when a home is to be built, and a place of rest to be

sought for himself, he says, 'To this man will I look, even to him that

is poor, and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word,' Isaiah

lxvi., 1, 2. When a home is thus tenanted, faith beholds this

inscription written on the walls, _The Lord lives here_. Faith,

therefore, cannot pass it by unnoticed, but loves to lift up the latch of

the door, and sit down, and converse with the poor, though perhaps

despised, inhabitant. Many a sweet interview does faith obtain when she

thus takes her walks abroad. Many such a sweet interview have I myself

enjoyed beneath the roof where dwelt the Dairyman and his little family.

"I soon perceived that his daughter's health was rapidly on the decline.

The pale, wasting consumption, which is the Lord's instrument for

removing so many thousands every year from the land of the living, made

hasty strides on her constitution. The hollow eye, the distressing

cough, and the often too flattering red on the cheek, foretold the

approach of death.

"I have often thought what a field for usefulness and affectionate

attention, on the part of ministers and Christian friends, is opened by

the frequent attacks and lingering progress of _consumptive_ illness. How

many such precious opportunities are daily lost, where Providence seems

in so marked a way to afford time and space for serious and Godly

instruction! Of how many may it be said: 'The way of peace have they not

known'; for not one friend ever came nigh to warn them to 'flee from the

wrath to come.'

"But the Dairyman's Daughter was happily made acquainted with the things

which belonged to her everlasting peace before the present disease had

taken root in her constitution. In my visits to her I might be said

rather to receive information than to impart it. Her mind was abundantly

stored with Divine truths, and her conversations truly edifying. The

recollection of it still produces a thankful sensation in my heart."

Nevertheless, when Borrow had bought a copy of this book he was willing

to do what was asked, and to attempt also to translate into German

Phillips' "Proximate Causes of the Material Phenomena of the Universe,"

or what the translator called "his tale of an apple and a pear." But

Phillips changed his mind about the "Dairyman's Daughter" and

commissioned a compilation of "Newgate Lives and Trials" instead. Borrow

failed with the translation of the "Proximate Causes" but liked very well

the compiling of the "Celebrated Trials"--of Joan of Arc, Cagliostro,

Mary Queen of Scots, Raleigh, the Gunpowder Plotters, Queen Caroline,

Thurtell, the Cato Street Conspirators, and many more--in six volumes. He

also wrote reviews for Phillips' Magazine, and contributed more

translations of poetry and many scraps of "Danish Traditions and

Superstitions," like the following:

"At East Hessing, in the district of Calling, there was once a rural

wedding; and when the morning was near at hand, the guests rushed out of

the house with much noise and tumult. When they were putting their

horses to the carts, in order to leave the place, each of them boasted

and bragged of his bridal present. But when the uproar was at the

highest, and they were all speaking together, a maiden dressed in green,

and with a bulrush plaited over her head, came from a neighbouring

morass, and going up to the fellow who was noisiest and bragged most of

his bridal gift, she said, 'What will you give to Lady Boe?' The boor,

who was half intoxicated from the brandy and ale he had swallowed, seized

a whip, and answered, 'Three strokes of my waggon-whip.' But at the same

moment he fell a corpse to the ground."

If translation like this is journeyman's work for the journeyman, for

Borrow it was of great value because it familiarised him with the

marvellous and the supernatural and so helped him towards the expression

of his own material and spiritual adventures. The wild and often other-

worldly air of much of his work is doubtless due to his wild and other-

worldly mind, but owes a considerable if uncertain debt to his reading of

ballads and legends, which give a little to the substance of his work and

far more to the tone of it. Among other things translated at this time

he mentions the "Saga of Burnt Njal."

He was not happy in London. He had few friends there, and perhaps those

he had only disturbed without sweetening his solitude. One of these was

a Norwich friend, named Roger Kerrison, who shared lodgings with him at

16, Millman Street, Bedford Row. Borrow confided in Kerrison, and had

written to him before leaving Norwich in terms of perhaps unconsciously

worked-up affection. But Borrow's low spirits in London were more than

Kerrison could stand. When Borrow was proposing a short visit to Norwich

his friend wrote to John Thomas Borrow, suggesting that he should keep

his brother there for a time, or else return with him, for this reason.

Borrow had "repeatedly" threatened suicide, and unable to endure his fits

of desperation Kerrison had gone into separate lodgings: if his friend

were to return in this state and find himself alone he would "again make

some attempt to destroy himself." Nothing was done, so far as is known,

and he did not commit suicide. It is a curious commentary on the work of

hack writers that this youth should have written as a note to his

translation of "The Suicide's Grave," {85} that it was not translated for

its sentiments but for its poetry; "although the path of human life is

rough and thorny, the mind may always receive consolation by looking

forward to the world to come. The mind which rejects a future state has

to thank itself for its utter misery and hopelessness." His malady was

youth, aggravated, the food reformer would say, by eating fourteen

pennyworth of bread and cheese at a meal, and certainly aggravated by

literary ambition.

Judging from the thirty-first chapter of "Lavengro," he was exceptionally

sensitive at this time to all impressions--probably both pleasant and

unpleasant. He describes himself on his first day gazing at the dome of

St. Paul's until his brain became dizzy, and he thought the dome would

fall and crush him, and he shrank within himself, and struck yet deeper

into the heart of the big city. He stood on London Bridge dazed by the

mighty motion of the waters and the multitude of men and "horses as large

as elephants. There I stood, just above the principal arch, looking

through the balustrade at the scene that presented itself--and such a

scene! Towards the left bank of the river, a forest of masts, thick and

close, as far as the eye could reach; spacious wharfs, surmounted with

gigantic edifices; and, far away, Caesar's Castle, with its White Tower.

To the right, another forest of masts, and a maze of buildings, from

which, here and there, shot up to the sky chimneys taller than

Cleopatra's Needle, vomiting forth huge wreaths of that black smoke which

forms the canopy--occasionally a gorgeous one--of the more than Babel

city. Stretching before me, the troubled breast of the mighty river,

and, immediately below, the main whirlpool of the Thames--the Maelstrom

of the bulwarks of the middle arch--a grisly pool, which, with its

superabundance of horror, fascinated me. Who knows but I should have

leapt into its depths?--I have heard of such things--but for a rather

startling occurrence which broke the spell. As I stood upon the bridge,

gazing into the jaws of the pool, a small boat shot suddenly through the

arch beneath my feet. There were three persons in it; an oarsman in the

middle, whilst a man and woman sat at the stern. I shall never forget

the thrill of horror which went through me at this sudden apparition.

What!--a boat--a small boat--passing beneath that arch into yonder

roaring gulf! Yes, yes, down through that awful water-way, with more

than the swiftness of an arrow, shot the boat, or skiff, right into the

jaws of the pool. A monstrous breaker curls over the prow--there is no

hope; the boat is swamped, and all drowned in that strangling vortex. No!

the boat, which appeared to have the buoyancy of a feather, skipped over

the threatening horror, and the next moment was out of danger, the

boatman--a true boatman of Cockaigne, that--elevating one of his skulls

in sign of triumph, the man hallooing, and the woman, a true Englishwoman

that--of a certain class--waving her shawl. Whether any one observed

them save myself, or whether the feat was a common one, I know not; but

nobody appeared to take any notice of them. As for myself, I was so

excited, that I strove to clamber up the balustrade of the bridge, in

order to obtain a better view of the daring adventurers. Before I could

accomplish my design, however, I felt myself seized by the body, and,

turning my head, perceived the old fruit-woman, who was clinging to me."

On this very day, in his account, he first met the "fiery, enthusiastic

and open-hearted," pleasure-loving young Irishman, whom he calls Francis

Ardry, who took him to the theatre and to "the strange and eccentric

places of London," and no doubt helped to give him the feeling of "a

regular Arabian Nights' entertainment." C. G. Leland {87} tells a story

told to him by one who might have been the original of Ardry. The story

is the only independent evidence of Borrow's London life. This "old

gentleman" had been in youth for a long time the most intimate friend of

George Borrow, who was, he said, a very wild and eccentric youth. "One

night, when skylarking about London, Borrow was pursued by the police, as

he wished to be, even as Panurge so planned as to be chased by the night-

watch. He was very tall and strong in those days, a trained shoulder-

hitter, and could run like a deer. He was hunted to the Thames, and

there they thought they had him. But the Romany Rye made for the edge,

and leaping into the wan water, like the Squyre in the old ballad, swam

to the other side, and escaped."

It is no wonder he "did not like reviewing at all," especially as he

"never could understand why reviews were instituted; works of merit do

not require to be reviewed, they can speak for themselves, and require no

praising; works of no merit at all will die of themselves, they require

no killing." He forgot "The Dairyman's Daughter," and he could not

foresee the early fate of "Lavengro" itself. He preferred manlier crime

and riskier deception to reviewing. As he read over the tales of rogues,

he says, he became again what he had been as a boy, a necessitarian, and

could not "imagine how, taking all circumstances into consideration,

these highwaymen, these pickpockets, should have been anything else than

highwaymen and pickpockets."

These were the days of such books as "The Life and Extraordinary

Adventures of Samuel Denmore Hayward, denominated the Modern Macheath,

who suffered at the Old Bailey, on Tuesday, November 27, 1821, for the

Crime of Burglary," by Pierce Egan, embellished with a highly-finished

miniature by Mr. Smart, etched by T. R. Cruikshank; and a facsimile of

his handwriting. London, 1822."

It is a poor book, and now has descendants lower in the social scale. It

pretends to give "a most awful but useful lesson to the rising

generation" by an account of the criminal whose appearance as a boy "was

so superior to other boys of his class in life as to have the look of a

gentleman's child." He naturally became a waiter, and "though the

situation did not exactly accord with his ambition, it answered his

purpose, because it afforded him an opportunity of studying _character_,

and being in the company of gentlemen." He was "a generous high-minded

fellow towards the ladies," and became the fancy man of someone else's

mistress, living "in the style of a gentleman _solely_ at the expense of

the beautiful Miss ---." His "unembarrassed and gentlemanly" behaviour

survived even while he was being searched, and he entered the chapel

before execution "with a firm step, accompanied with the most gentlemanly

deportment." The end came nevertheless: "Bowing to the sheriffs and the

few persons around him with all the manners of an accomplished gentleman,

he ascended the drop with a firmness that astonished everyone present;

and resigned his eventful life without scarce a struggle."

The moral was the obvious one. "His talents were his misfortunes." The

biographer pretends to believe that, though the fellow lived in luxury,

he must always have had a harassed mind; the truth being that he himself

would have had a harassed mind if he had played so distinguished a part.

"The chequered life of that young man," he says, "abounding with

incidents and facts almost incredible, and scarcely ever before practised

with so much art and delusion in so short a period, impressively points

out the danger arising from the possession of _great talents_ when

perverted or _misapplied_."

He points out, furthermore, how vice sinks before virtue. "For instance,

view the countenances of thieves, who are regaling themselves on the most

expensive liquors, laughing and singing, how they are changed in an

instant by the appearance of police officers entering a room in search of

them. . . ."

Finally, "let the youth of London bear in mind that honesty is the best

policy. . . .

"In this happy country, where every individual has an opportunity of

raising himself to the highest office in the State, what might the

abilities of the unfortunate Hayward have accomplished for him if he had

not deviated from the paths of virtue? There is no place like London in

the world where a man of talents meets with so much encouragement and

liberality; his society is courted, and his presence gives a weight to

any company in which he appears; if supported by a good character."

But the crime was the thing. Of a different class was John Hamilton

Reynolds' "The Fancy." This book, published in 1820, would have wholly

delighted Borrow. I will quote the footnote to the "Lines to Philip

Samson, the Brummagem Youth":

"Of all the great men of this age, in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism,

there is no one of such transcendent talent as Randall;--no one who

combines the finest natural powers with the most elegant and finished

acquired ones. The late Professor Stewart (who has left the learned

ring) is acknowledged to be clever in philosophy, but he is a left-handed

metaphysical fighter at best, and cannot be relied upon at closing with

his subject. Lord Byron is a powerful poet, with a mind weighing

fourteen stone; but he is too sombre and bitter, and is apt to lose his

temper. Randall has no defect, or at best he has not yet betrayed the

appearance of one. His figure is remarkable, when _peeled_, for its

statue-like beauty, and nothing can equal the alacrity with which he uses

either hand, or the coolness with which he _receives_. His goodness on

his legs, Boxiana (a Lord Eldon in the skill and caution of his

judgments) assures us, is unequalled. He doubles up an opponent, as a

friend lately declared, as easily as though he were picking a flower or

pinching a girl's cheek. He is about to fight Jos. Hudson, who

challenged him lately at the Royal Tennis Court. Randall declared, that

'though he had declined fighting, he would _accommodate Joshua_'; a kind

and benevolent reply, which does equal honour to his head and heart. The

editor of this little volume, like Goldfinch in the 'Road to Ruin,'

'would not stay away for a thousand pounds.' He has already looked about

for a tall horse and a taxed cart, and he has some hopes of compassing a

drab coat and a white hat, for he has no wish to appear singular at such

scenes."

Reynolds, like Borrow, was an admirer of Byron, and he anticipated Borrow

in the spirit of his remark to John Murray that the author's trade was

contemptible compared with the jockey's. At that moment it was

unquestionably so. Soon even reviewing failed. The "Universal Review"

died at the beginning of 1825, and Borrow seems to have quarrelled with

Phillips because some Germans had found the German of his translation as

unintelligible as he had found the publisher's English. He had nothing

left but his physical strength, his translations, and a very little

money. When he had come down to half-a-crown, he says, he thought of

accepting a patriotic Armenian's invitation to translate an Armenian work

into English; only the Armenian went away.

CHAPTER XIII--"JOSEPH SELL"

Then, on a fair day on Blackheath, he met Mr. Petulengro again who said

he looked ill and offered him the loan of 50 pounds, which he would not

accept, nor his invitation to join the band. Dr. Knapp confidently gives

the date of May 12 to this incident because that is the day of the annual

fair. Then seeing an advertisement: "A Novel or Tale is much wanted,"

outside a bookseller's shop, Borrow wrote "The Life and Adventures of

Joseph Sell, the Great Traveller." Did he? Dr. Knapp thinks he did, but

that the story had another name, and is to be sought for in such

collections of 1825 and 1826 as "Watt's Literary Souvenir." As Borrow

speaks of the materials of it having come from his own brain, and as Dr.

Knapp says he could not invent, why not conclude that it was

autobiographical?

There is no evidence except that the account sounds true, and might very

well be true. Dr. Knapp thinks that he wrote this book, and that he did

many other things which he said he did, because wherever there is any

evidence it corroborates Borrow's statements except in small matters of

names and dates. In the earlier version of "Lavengro," represented by a

manuscript and a proof, "Ardry" is "Arden," "Jasper" is "Ambrose," and

the question "What is his name?" is answered by "Thurtell," instead of a

blank. Now there was an Ambrose Smith whom Borrow knew, and Thurtell was

such a man as he describes in search of a place for the fight. Therefore,

Dr. Knapp would be inclined to say that Borrow did know a young man named

Arden. And, furthermore, as Isopel is called Elizabeth in that earlier

version, Isopel did exist, but her name was Elizabeth: she was, says Mr.

Watts-Dunton, "really an East Anglian road girl" (not a Gypsy) "of the

finest type, known to the Boswells and remembered not many years ago."

And speaking of Isopel--there is a story still to be heard at Long

Melford of a girl "who lived on the green and ran away with the Gypsy,"

in about the year 1825. With this may possibly be connected another

story: of a young painter of dogs and horses who was living at Melford in

1805 and seduced either one or two sisters of the warden of the hospital

or almshouse, and had two illegitimate children, one at any rate a girl.

The Great House was one used, but not built, for a workhouse: it stood

near the vicarage at Melford, but has now disappeared, and apparently its

records with it.

Borrow did not invent, says Knapp, which is absurd. Some of his

reappearances, recognitions and coincidences must be inventions. The

postillion's tale must be largely invention. But it is not fair or

necessary to retort as Hindes Groome did: "Is the Man in Black then also

a reality, and the Reverend Mr. Platitude? In other words, did

Tractarianism exist in 1825, eight years before it was engendered by

Keble's sermon?" For Borrow was unscrupulous or careless about time and

place. But it is fair and necessary to say, as Hindes Groome did, that

some of the unverities in "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" are "probably

due to forgetfulness," the rest to "love of posing, but much more to an

honest desire to produce an amusing and interesting book." {93a} Borrow

was a great admirer of the "Memoirs" {93b} of Vidocq," principal agent of

the French police till 1827--now proprietor of the paper manufactory at

St. Maude," and formerly showman, soldier, galley slave, and highwayman.

Of this book the editor says:

"It is not our province or intention to enter into a discussion of the

veracity of Vidocq's "Memoirs": be they true or false, were they purely

fiction from the first chapter to the last, they would, from fertility of

invention, knowledge of human nature, and easy style, rank only second to

the novels of Le Sage."

It was certainly with books such as this in his mind that Borrow composed

his autobiography, but it goes so much deeper that it is at every point a

revelation, usually of actual events and emotions, always of thought and

taste. In these "Memoirs" of Vidocq there is a man named Christian, or

Caron, with a reputation for removing charms cast on animals, and he

takes Vidocq to his Gypsy friends at Malines:

"Having traversed the city, we stopped in the Faubourg de Louvain, before

a wretched looking house with blackened walls, furrowed with wide

crevices, and many bundles of straw as substitutes for window glasses. It

was midnight, and I had time to make my observations by the moonlight,

for more than half an hour elapsed before the door was opened by one of

the most hideous old hags I ever saw in my life. We were then introduced

to a long room where thirty persons of both sexes were indiscriminately

smoking and drinking, mingling in strange and licentious positions. Under

their blue loose frocks, ornamented with red embroidery, the men wore

blue velvet waistcoats with silver buttons, like the Andalusian

muleteers; the clothing of the women was all of one bright colour; there

were some ferocious countenances amongst them, but yet they were all

feasting. The monotonous sound of a drum, mingled with the howling of

two dogs tied under the table, accompanied the strange songs, which I

mistook for a funeral psalm. The smoke of tobacco and wood which filled

this den, scarcely allowed me to perceive in the midst of the room a

woman, who, adorned with a scarlet turban, was performing a wild dance

with the most wanton postures."

Dr. Knapp, on insufficient evidence, attributes the translation to

Borrow. But certainly Borrow might have incorporated this passage in his

own work almost word for word without justifying a charge either of

plagiarism or untruth. Other men had written fiction as if it were

autobiography; he was writing autobiography as if it were fiction; he

used his own life as a subject for fiction. Ford crudely said that

Borrow "coloured up and poetised" his adventures.

CHAPTER XIV--OUT OF LONDON

If Borrow is taken literally, he was at Blackheath on May 12, 1825, sold

his "Life of Joseph Sell" on the 20th, and left London on the 22nd. "For

some months past I had been far from well, and my original indisposition,

brought on partly by the peculiar atmosphere of the Big City, partly by

anxiety of mind, had been much increased by the exertions which I had

been compelled to make during the last few days. I felt that, were I to

remain where I was, I should die, or become a confirmed valetudinarian. I

would go forth into the country, travelling on foot, and, by exercise and

inhaling pure air, endeavour to recover my health, leaving my subsequent

movements to be determined by Providence."

He says definitely in the appendix to "The Romany Rye," that he fled from

London and hack-authorship for "fear of a consumption." Walking on an

unknown road out of London the "poor thin lad" felt tired at the ninth

milestone, and thought of putting up at an inn for the night, but instead

took the coach to ---, _i.e._, Amesbury.

The remaining ninety chapters of "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" are

filled by the story of the next four months of Borrow's life and by

stories told to him during that period. The preceding fifty-seven

chapters had sufficed for twenty-two years. "The novelty" of the new

itinerant life, says Mr. Thomas Seccombe, {96} "graved every incident in

the most vivid possible manner upon the writer's recollection." After

walking for four days northwest from Salisbury he met an author, a rich

man who was continually touching things to avert the evil chance, and

with him he stayed the night. On the next day he bought a pony and cart

from the tinker, Jack Slingsby, with the purpose of working on the

tinker's beat and making horse-shoes. After some days he was visited

down in a Shropshire dingle by a Gypsy girl, who poisoned him at the

instigation of his enemy, old Mrs. Herne. Only the accidental appearance

of the Welsh preacher, Peter Williams, saved him. Years afterwards, in

1854, it may be mentioned here, he told a friend in Cornwall that his

fits of melancholy were due to the poison of a Gypsy crone. He spent a

week in the company of the preacher and his wife, and was about to cross

the Welsh border with them when Jasper Petulengro reappeared, and he

turned back. Jasper told him that Mrs. Herne had hanged herself out of

disappointment at his escape from her poison. This made it a point of

honour for Jasper to fight Borrow, whose bloody face satisfied him in

half an hour: he even offered Borrow his sister Ursula for a wife. Borrow

refused, and settled alone in Mumper's Dingle, which was perhaps Mumber

Lane, five miles from Willenhall in Staffordshire. {97} Here he fought

the Flaming Tinman, who had driven Slingsby out of his beat. The Tinman

brought with him his wife and Isopel Berners, the tall fair-haired girl

who struck Borrow first with her beauty and then with her right arm.

Isopel stayed with Borrow after the defeat of the Tinman, and their

companionship in the dingle fills a very large part of "Lavengro" and

"The Romany Rye," with interruptions and diversions from the Man in

Black, the gin-drinking priest, who was then at work undermining the

Protestantism of old England. Isopel stood by him when suffering from

"indescribable horror," and recommended "ale, and let it be strong."

Borrow makes her evidently inclined to marry him; for example, when she

says that if she goes to America she will go alone "unless--unless that

should happen which is not likely," and when he says ". . . If I had the

power I would make you queen of something better than the dingle--Queen

of China. Come, let us have tea," and "'Something less would content

me,' said Belle, sighing, as she rose to prepare our evening meal"--and

when at the postillion's suggestion of a love affair, she buries her face

in her hands. "She would sigh, too," he says, "as I recounted the many

slights and degradations I had received at the hands of ferocious

publishers." In one place Borrow says: "I am, of course, nothing to her,

but she is mistaken in thinking she is nothing to me." Borrow represents

himself as tyrannically imposing himself upon the girl as teacher of

Armenian, enlivening the instruction with the one mild _double entendre_,

of "I decline a mistress." At times they seem on terms of as perfect

good fellowship as ever was, with a touch of post-matrimonial

indifference; but Isopel had fits of weeping and Borrow of listlessness.

Borrow was uncommonly fond of prophetic tragic irony. As he made

Thurtell unconsciously suggest to the reader his own execution, so he

makes Isopel say one day when she is going a journey: "I shall return

once more." Lavengro starts but thinks no more of it.

While she was away he began to think: "I began to think, 'What was likely

to be the profit of my present way of life; the living in dingles, making

pony and donkey shoes, conversing with Gypsy-women under hedges, and

extracting from them their odd secrets?' What was likely to be the

profit of such a kind of life, even should it continue for a length of

time?--a supposition not very probable, for I was earning nothing to

support me, and the funds with which I had entered upon this life were

gradually disappearing. I was living, it is true, not unpleasantly,

enjoying the healthy air of heaven; but, upon the whole, was I not sadly

misspending my time? Surely I was; and, as I looked back, it appeared to

me that I had always been doing so. What had been the profit of the

tongues which I had learned? had they ever assisted me in the day of

hunger? No, no! it appeared to me that I had always misspent my time,

save in one instance, when by a desperate effort I had collected all the

powers of my imagination, and written the 'Life of Joseph Sell'; but even

when I wrote the 'Life of Sell,' was I not in a false position? Provided

I had not misspent my time, would it have been necessary to make that

effort, which, after all, had only enabled me to leave London, and wander

about the country for a time? But could I, taking all circumstances into

consideration, have done better than I had? With my peculiar temperament

and ideas, could I have pursued with advantage the profession to which my

respectable parents had endeavoured to bring me up? It appeared to me

that I could not, and that the hand of necessity had guided me from my

earliest years, until the present night in which I found myself seated in

the dingle, staring on the brands of the fire. But ceasing to think of

the past which, as irrecoverably gone, it was useless to regret, even

were there cause to regret it, what should I do in future? Should I

write another book like the 'Life of Joseph Sell;' take it to London, and

offer it to a publisher? But when I reflected on the grisly sufferings

which I had undergone whilst engaged in writing the 'Life of Sell,' I

shrank from the idea of a similar attempt; moreover, I doubted whether I

possessed the power to write a similar work--whether the materials for

the life of another Sell lurked within the recesses of my brain? Had I

not better become in reality what I had hitherto been merely playing at--a

tinker or a Gypsy? But I soon saw that I was not fitted to become either

in reality. It was much more agreeable to play the Gypsy or the tinker,

than to become either in reality. I had seen enough of gypsying and

tinkering to be convinced of that. All of a sudden the idea of tilling

the soil came into my head; tilling the soil was a healthful and noble

pursuit! but my idea of tilling the soil had no connection with Britain;

for I could only expect to till the soil in Britain as a serf. I thought

of tilling it in America, in which it was said there was plenty of wild,

unclaimed land, of which any one, who chose to clear it of its trees,

might take possession. I figured myself in America, in an immense

forest, clearing the land destined, by my exertions, to become a fruitful

and smiling plain. Methought I heard the crash of the huge trees as they

fell beneath my axe; and then I bethought me that a man was intended to

marry--I ought to marry; and if I married, where was I likely to be more

happy as a husband and a father than in America, engaged in tilling the

ground? I fancied myself in America, engaged in tilling the ground,

assisted by an enormous progeny. Well, why not marry, and go and till

the ground in America? I was young, and youth was the time to marry in,

and to labour in. I had the use of all my faculties; my eyes, it is

true, were rather dull from early study, and from writing the 'Life of

Joseph Sell'; but I could see tolerably well with them, and they were not

bleared. I felt my arms, and thighs, and teeth--they were strong and

sound enough; so now was the time to labour, to marry, eat strong flesh,

and beget strong children--the power of doing all this would pass away

with youth, which was terribly transitory. I bethought me that a time

would come when my eyes would be bleared, and perhaps, sightless; my arms

and thighs strengthless and sapless; when my teeth would shake in my

jaws, even supposing they did not drop out. No going a wooing then--no

labouring--no eating strong flesh, and begetting lusty children then; and

I bethought me how, when all this should be, I should bewail the days of

my youth as misspent, provided I had not in them founded for myself a

home, and begotten strong children to take care of me in the days when I

could not take care of myself; and thinking of these things, I became

sadder and sadder, and stared vacantly upon the fire till my eyes closed

in a doze."

So, before going to bed, he filled the kettle in case Isopel should

return during the night. He fell asleep and was dreaming hard and

hearing the sound of wheels in his dream "grating amidst sand and

gravel," when suddenly he awoke. "The next moment I was awake, and found

myself sitting up in my tent; there was a glimmer of light through the

canvas caused by the fire; a feeling of dread came over me, which was

perhaps natural, on starting suddenly from one's sleep in that wild lone

place; I half imagined that some one was nigh the tent; the idea made me

rather uncomfortable, and to dissipate it I lifted up the canvas of the

door and peeped out, and, lo! I had an indistinct view of a tall figure

standing by the tent. 'Who is that?' said I, whilst I felt my blood rush

to my heart. 'It is I,' said the voice of Isopel Berners; 'you little

expected me, I dare say; well, sleep on, I do not wish to disturb you.'

'But I was expecting you,' said I, recovering myself, 'as you may see by

the fire and the kettle. I will be with you in a moment.'

"Putting on in haste the articles of dress which I had flung off, I came

out of the tent, and addressing myself to Isopel, who was standing beside

her cart, I said--'Just as I was about to retire to rest I thought it

possible that you might come to-night, and got everything in readiness

for you. Now, sit down by the fire whilst I lead the donkey and cart to

the place where you stay; I will unharness the animal, and presently come

and join you.' 'I need not trouble you,' said Isopel; 'I will go myself

and see after my things.' 'We will go together,' said I, 'and then

return and have some tea.' Isopel made no objection, and in about half

an hour we had arranged everything at her quarters. I then hastened and

prepared tea. Presently Isopel rejoined me, bringing her stool; she had

divested herself of her bonnet, and her hair fell over her shoulders; she

sat down, and I poured out the beverage, handing her a cup. 'Have you

made a long journey to-night?' said I. 'A very long one,' replied

Belle,' I have come nearly twenty miles since six o'clock.' 'I believe I

heard you coming in my sleep,' said I; 'did the dogs above bark at you?'

'Yes,' said Isopel, 'very violently; did you think of me in your sleep?'

'No,' said I, 'I was thinking of Ursula and something she had told me.'

'When and where was that?' said Isopel. 'Yesterday evening,' said I,

'beneath the dingle hedge.' 'Then you were talking with her beneath the

hedge?' 'I was,' said I, 'but only upon Gypsy matters. Do you know,

Belle, that she has just been married to Sylvester, so you need not think

that she and I . . . ' 'She and you are quite at liberty to sit where

you please,' said Isopel. 'However, young man,' she continued, dropping

her tone, which she had slightly raised, 'I believe what you said, that

you were merely talking about Gypsy matters, and also what you were going

to say, if it was, as I suppose, that she and you had no particular

acquaintance.' Isopel was now silent for some time. 'What are you

thinking of?' said I. 'I was thinking,' said Belle, 'how exceedingly

kind it was of you to get everything in readiness for me, though you did

not know that I should come.' 'I had a presentiment that you would

come,' said I; 'but you forget that I have prepared the kettle for you

before, though it was true I was then certain that you would come.' 'I

had not forgotten your doing so, young man,' said Belle; 'but I was

beginning to think that you were utterly selfish, caring for nothing but

the gratification of your own strange whims.' 'I am very fond of having

my own way,' said I, 'but utterly selfish I am not, as I dare say I shall

frequently prove to you. You will often find the kettle boiling when you

come home.' 'Not heated by you,' said Isopel, with a sigh. 'By whom

else?' said I; 'surely you are not thinking of driving me away?' 'You

have as much right here as myself,' said Isopel, 'as I have told you

before; but I must be going myself.' 'Well,' said I, 'we can go

together; to tell you the truth, I am rather tired of this place.' 'Our

paths must be separate,' said Belle. 'Separate,' said I, 'what do you

mean? I shan't let you go alone, I shall go with you; and you know the

road is as free to me as to you; besides, you can't think of parting

company with me, considering how much you would lose by doing so;

remember that you scarcely know anything of the Armenian language; now,

to learn Armenian from me would take you twenty years.'

"Belle faintly smiled. 'Come,' said I, 'take another cup of tea.' Belle

took another cup of tea, and yet another; we had some indifferent

conversation, after which I arose and gave her donkey a considerable feed

of corn. Belle thanked me, shook me by the hand, and then went to her

own tabernacle, and I returned to mine."

He torments her once more with Armenian and makes her speak in such a way

that the reader sees--what he himself did not then see--that she was too

sick with love for banter. She bade him farewell with the same

transparent significance on the next day, when he was off early to a

fair. "I waved my hand towards her. She slowly lifted up her right arm.

I turned away and never saw Isopel Berners again." That night as he was

going home he said: "Isopel Berners is waiting for me, and the first word

that I shall hear from her lips is that she has made up her mind. We

shall go to America, and be so happy together." She sent him a letter of

farewell, and he could not follow her, he would not try, lest if he

overtook her she should despise him for running after her.

I can only say that it is an extraordinary love-making, but then all love-

making, when truthfully reported, is extraordinary. There can be little

doubt, therefore, that this episode is truthfully reported. Borrow

himself has made a comment on himself and women through the mouth of

Jasper. The Gypsy had overheard him talking to his sister Ursula for

three hours under a hedge, and his opinion was: "I begin to think you

care for nothing in this world but old words and strange stories." When,

afterwards, invited to kiss the same Ursula, he refused, "having," he

says, "inherited from nature a considerable fund of modesty, to which was

added no slight store acquired in the course of my Irish education,"

_i.e._ at the age of twelve.

After Isopel had gone he bought a fine horse with the help of a loan of

50 pounds from Jasper, and travelled with it across England, meeting

adventures and hearing of others. He was for a time bookkeeper at a

coaching inn, still with some pounds in his purse. At Horncastle, which

he mentions more than once by name, he sold the horse for 150 pounds. As

the fair at Horncastle lasted from the 11th to the 21st of August, the

date of this last adventure is almost exactly fixed. Here the book ends.

{picture: Horncastle Horse Fair. (From an old print.): page104.jpg}

CHAPTER XV--AN EARLY PORTRAIT

At the end of these travels Borrow had turned twenty-two. His brother

John painted his portrait, but it has disappeared, and Borrow himself, as

if fearing lest no adequate picture of him should remain, took pains to

leave the material for one. It is a peculiarity of his books that people

whom he meets and converses with often remark on his appearance. He must

himself have been tolerably familiar with it and used to comment on it.

He told his father that a lady thought him like Alfieri's Saul; at a

later date Haydon, the painter, said he would "make a capital Pharaoh."

Years before, when he was a boy, Petulengro recognised him after a long

absence, because there was something in his face to prevent people from

forgetting him. Mrs. Herne, his Gypsy enemy, praised him for his

"singular and outrageous ugliness." He was lean, long-limbed and tall,

having reached his full height of six-feet-two probably before the end of

his teens; he had plenty of room to fill before becoming a big man, and

yet he was already powerful and clearly destined to be a big man. His

hair had for some time been rapidly becoming grey, and was soon to be

altogether white: it had once been black, and his strongly-marked

eyebrows were still dark brown. His face was oval and inclining to olive

in complexion; his nose rounded, but not too large; his mouth good and

well-moulded; his eyes dark brown and noticeable indescribably, either

through their light or through the curve of the eyelids across them. "You

have a flash about that eye of yours," says the old apple woman, and it

is she that notices the "blob of foam" on his lips, while he is musing

aloud, exclaiming "Necessity!" and cracking his finger-joints. He had an

Irish look, or so thought his London acquaintance, Ardry. He looked

"rather wild" at times and he had a way of clenching his fist when he was

determined not to be put upon, as the bullying coachman found who had

said: "One-and-ninepence, sir, or the things which you have brought with

you will be taken away from you." Yet he had small hands for his size

and "long white fingers," which "would just serve for the business," said

the thimble-rigger. Though ready to hit people when he is angry, "a more

civil and pleasant-spoken person than yourself," says Ursula, "can't be

found." His own opinion was "that he was not altogether deficient in

courage and in propriety of behaviour. . . . That his appearance was not

particularly against him, his face not being like that of a convicted

pickpocket, nor his gait resembling that of a fox that has lost his

tail." It is as a "poor thin lad" that he commends himself to us,

through the mouth of the old apple woman, at his setting out from London,

but as he gets on he shows himself "an excellent pedestrian."

Already in London he has made one or two favourable impressions, as when

he convinces the superb waiter that he is "accustomed to claret." But it

is upon the roads that he wishes to shine. When the Man in Black asks

how he knows him, he answers that "Gypsies have various ways of obtaining

information." Later on, he makes the Man in Black address him as

"Zingaro." He impresses the commercial traveller as "a confounded

sensible young fellow, and not at all opinionated," and Lord Whitefeather

as a highwayman in disguise, and the Gypsies as one who never spoke a bad

word and never did a bad thing. This is his most impressive moment, when

the jockey discovers that he is the Romany Rye and tells him there is

scarcely a part of England where he has not heard the name of the Romany

Rye mentioned by the Gypsies. Here he makes another praise him. Now let

him mount the fine horse he has bought with 50 pounds borrowed from a

Gypsy, and is about to sell for 150 pounds at Horncastle Fair.

"After a slight breakfast I mounted the horse, which, decked out in his

borrowed finery, really looked better by a large sum of money than on any

former occasion. Making my way out of the yard of the inn, I was

instantly in the principal street of the town, up and down which an

immense number of horses were being exhibited, some led, and others with

riders. 'A wonderful small quantity of good horses in the fair this

time!' I heard a stout jockey-looking individual say, who was staring up

the street with his side towards me. 'Halloo, young fellow!' said he, a

few moments after I had passed, 'whose horse is that? Stop! I want to

look at him!' Though confident that he was addressing himself to me, I

took no notice, remembering the advice of the ostler, and proceeded up

the street. My horse possessed a good walking step; but walking, as the

reader knows, was not his best pace, which was the long trot, at which I

could not well exercise him in the street, on account of the crowd of men

and animals; however, as he walked along, I could easily perceive that he

attracted no slight attention amongst those who, by their jockey dress

and general appearance, I imagined to be connoisseurs; I heard various

calls to stop, to none of which I paid the slightest attention. In a few

minutes I found myself out of the town, when, turning round for the

purpose of returning, I found I had been followed by several of the

connoisseur-looking individuals, whom I had observed in the fair. 'Now

would be the time for a display,' thought I; and looking around me I

observed two five-barred gates, one on each side of the road, and

fronting each other. Turning my horse's head to one, I pressed my heels

to his sides, loosened the reins, and gave an encouraging cry, whereupon

the animal cleared the gate in a twinkling. Before he had advanced ten

yards in the field to which the gate opened, I had turned him round, and

again giving him cry and rein, I caused him to leap back again into the

road, and still allowing him head, I made him leap the other gate; and

forthwith turning him round, I caused him to leap once more into the

road, where he stood proudly tossing his head, as much as to say, 'What

more?' 'A fine horse! a capital horse!' said several of the

connoisseurs. 'What do you ask for him?' 'Too much for any of you to

pay,' said I. 'A horse like this is intended for other kind of customers

than any of you.' 'How do you know that?' said one; the very same person

whom I had heard complaining in the street of the paucity of good horses

in the fair. 'Come, let us know what you ask for him?' 'A hundred and

fifty pounds!' said I; 'neither more nor less.' 'Do you call that a

great price?' said the man. 'Why, I thought you would have asked double

that amount! You do yourself injustice, young man.' 'Perhaps I do,'

said I, 'but that's my affair; I do not choose to take more.' 'I wish

you would let me get into the saddle,' said the man; 'the horse knows

you, and therefore shows to more advantage; but I should like to see how

he would move under me, who am a stranger. Will you let me get into the

saddle, young man?' 'No,' said I, 'I will not let you get into the

saddle.' 'Why not?' said the man. 'Lest you should be a Yorkshireman,'

said I, 'and should run away with the horse.' 'Yorkshire?' said the man;

'I am from Suffolk; silly Suffolk--so you need not be afraid of my

running away with the horse.' 'Oh! if that's the case,' said I, 'I

should be afraid that the horse would run away with you; so I will by no

means let you mount.' 'Will you let me look in his mouth?' said the man.

'If you please,' said I; 'but I tell you, he's apt to bite.' 'He can

scarcely be a worse bite than his master,' said the man, looking into the

horse's mouth; 'he's four off. I say, young man, will you warrant this

horse?' 'No,' said I; 'I never warrant horses; the horses that I ride

can always warrant themselves.' 'I wish you would let me speak a word to

you,' said he. 'Just come aside. It's a nice horse,' said he, in a half

whisper, after I had ridden a few paces aside with him. 'It's a nice

horse,' said he, placing his hand upon the pommel of the saddle and

looking up in my face, 'and I think I can find you a customer. If you

would take a hundred, I think my lord would purchase it, for he has sent

me about the fair to look him up a horse, by which he could hope to make

an honest penny.' 'Well,' said I, 'and could he not make an honest

penny, and yet give me the price I ask?' 'Why,' said the go-between, 'a

hundred and fifty pounds is as much as the animal is worth, or nearly so;

and my lord, do you see . . .' 'I see no reason at all,' said I, 'why I

should sell the animal for less than he is worth, in order that his

lordship may be benefited by him; so that if his lordship wants to make

an honest penny, he must find some person who would consider the

disadvantage of selling him a horse for less than it is worth, as

counterbalanced by the honour of dealing with a lord, which I should

never do; but I can't be wasting my time here. I am going back to the . . .,

where if you, or any person, are desirous of purchasing the horse,

you must come within the next half-hour, or I shall probably not feel

disposed to sell him at all.' 'Another word, young man,' said the

jockey; but without staying to hear what he had to say, I put the horse

to his best trot, and re-entering the town, and threading my way as well

as I could through the press, I returned to the yard of the inn, where,

dismounting, I stood still, holding the horse by the bridle."

As no one else troubled to paint Borrow either at Horncastle or any other

place, and as he took advantage of the fact to such purpose, I must leave

this portrait as it is, only I shall remind the reader that it is not a

photograph but a portrait of the painter. A little time ago this painter

was a consumptive-looking literary hack, and is still a philologist, with

eyes a bit dim from too much reading, and subject to frantic

melancholy;--a liker of solitude and of men and women who do not disturb

it, but a man accustomed to men and very well able to deal with them.

CHAPTER XVI--THE VEILED PERIOD

The last words of "The Romany Rye" narrative are: "I shouldn't wonder if

Mr. Petulengro and Tawno Chikno came originally from India. I think I'll

go there." This is his way of giving impressiveness to the "veiled

period" of the following seven or eight years, for the benefit of those

who had read "The Zincali" and "The Bible in Spain," and had been allured

by the hints of earlier travel. In "The Zincali" he has spoken of seeing

"Gypsies of various lands, Russian, Hungarian and Turkish; and also the

legitimate children of most countries of the world": of being "in the

shop of an Armenian at Constantinople," and "lately at Janina in

Albania." In "The Bible in Spain" he had spoken of "an acquaintance of

mine, a Tartar Khan." He had described strange things, and said: "This

is not the first instance in which it has been my lot to verify the

wisdom of the saying, that truth is sometimes wilder than fiction;" he

had met Baron Taylor and reminded the reader of other meetings "in the

street or the desert, the brilliant hall or amongst Bedouin haimas, at

Novgorod or Stambul." Before 1833 he had been in Paris and Madrid. "I

have been everywhere," he said to the simple company at a Welsh inn.

Speaking to Colonel Napier in 1839 at Seville, he said that he had picked

up the Gypsy tongue "some years ago in Moultan," and he gave the

impression that he had visited most parts of the East.

A little too much has been made of this "veiled period," not by Borrow,

but by others. It would have been fair to surmise that if he chose not

to write about this period of his life, either there was very little in

it, or there was something in it which he was unwilling--perhaps

ashamed--to disclose; and what has been discovered suggests that he was

in an unsettled state--writing to please himself and perhaps also the

booksellers, travelling a little and perhaps meeting some of the

adventures which he crammed into those few months of 1825, suffering from

"the horrors" either in solitude or with no confidant but his mother.

Borrow himself took no great pains to preserve the veil. For instance,

in the preface to his translation of "Y Bardd Cwsg" in 1860, he says that

it was made "in the year 1830 at the request of a little Welsh bookseller

of his acquaintance" in Smithfield.

In 1826 he was in Norwich: the "Romantic Ballads" were published there,

and in May he received a letter from Allan Cunningham, whose cheery

commendatory verses ushered in the book. The letter suggests that Borrow

was indolent from apathy. The book had no success or notice, which Knapp

puts down to his not sending out presentation copies. "I judge,

however," says he, "that he sent one to Walter Scott, and that that busy

writer forgot to acknowledge the courtesy. Borrow's lifelong hostility

to Scott would thus be accounted for;" but the hostility is his reason

for supposing that the copy was sent. Some time afterwards, in 1826, he

was at 26, Bryanstone Street, Portman Square, and was to sit for the

artist, B. R. Haydon, before going off to the South of France. If he

went, he may have paid the visits to Paris, Bayonne, Italy and Spain,

which he alludes to in "The Bible in Spain"; he may, as Dr. Knapp

suggests, have covered the ground of Murtagh's alleged travels in "The

Romany Rye," and have been at Pau, with Quesada's army marching to

Pamplona, at Torrelodones, and at Seville. But in a letter to the Bible

Society in 1838 he spoke of his earlier acquaintance with Spain being

confined almost entirely to Madrid. It may be true, as he says in "The

Zincali," that "once in the south of France, when he was weary, hungry,

and penniless, he observed one of these patterans or Gypsy trails, and,

following the direction pointed out, arrived at the resting place of some

Gypsies, who received him with kindness and hospitality on the faith of

no other word of recommendation than patteran." It may be true that he

wandered in Italy, and rested at nightfall by a kiln "about four leagues

from Genoa." But by April, 1827, he must have been back in Norwich,

according to Knapp, to see Marshland Shales at the fair. Knapp gives

certain proof that he was there between September and December.

Thereafter, if Knapp was right, he was translating Vidocq's "Memoirs." In

1829 again he was in London, at 17, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and

was projecting with John Bowring a collection of "Songs of Scandinavia."

He applied for work to the Highland Society and to the British Museum, in

1830. In that summer he was at 7, Museum Street, Bloomsbury. He was not

satisfied with his work or its remuneration. He thought of entering the

French Army, of going to Greece, of getting work, with Bowring's help,

under the Belgian Government. His name "had been down for several years"

for the purchase of a commission in the English Army, and Bowring offered

to recommend him to "a corps in one of the Eastern Colonies," where he

could perfect his Arabic and Persian. In 1842 he wrote a letter to

Bowring, printed by Mr. Walling, asking for "as many of the papers and

manuscripts which I left at yours some twelve years ago, as you can

find," and for advice and a loan of books, and promising that Murray will

send a copy of "The Bible in Spain" to "my oldest, I may say my _only_

friend." But whatever Bowring's help, Borrow was "drifting on the sea of

the world, and likely to be so," and especially hurt because of the

figure he must cut in the eyes of his own people. Was it now, or when he

was bookkeeper at the inn in 1825, that he saw so much of the ways of

commercial travellers? {114}

It is not necessary to quote from the metrical translations, probably of

this period, "selections from a huge, undigested mass of translation,

accumulated during several years devoted to philological pursuits,"

published in "The Targum" of 1835. They were made from originals in the

Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Tartar, Tibetian, Chinese, Mandchou,

Russian, Malo-Russian, Polish, Finnish, Anglo-Saxon, Ancient Norse,

Suabian, German, Dutch, Danish, Ancient Danish, Swedish, Ancient Irish,

Irish, Gaelic, Ancient British, Cambrian British, Greek, Modern Greek,

Latin, Provencal, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Rommany.

I will, however, quote from "The Sleeping Bard, or Visions of the World,

Death and Hell," his translation of Elis Wyn's "Y Bardd Cwsg." The book

would please Borrow, because in the City of Perdition Rome stands at the

gate of Pride, and the Pope has palaces in the streets of Pleasure and of

Lucre; because the Church of England is the fairest part of the Catholic

Church, surmounted by "Queen Anne on the pinnacle of the building, with a

sword in each hand"; and because the Papist is turned away from the

Catholic Church by a porter with "an exceedingly large Bible." "One fair

morning," he begins:

"One fair morning of genial April, when the earth was green and pregnant,

and Britain, like a paradise, was wearing splendid liveries, tokens of

the smile of the summer sun, I was walking upon the bank of the Severn,

in the midst of the sweet notes of the little songsters of the wood, who

appeared to be striving to break through all the measures of music,

whilst pouring forth praise to the Creator. I, too, occasionally raised

my voice and warbled with the feathered choir, though in a manner

somewhat more restrained than that in which they sang; and occasionally

read a portion of the book of 'The Practice of Godliness.'"

And in his vision he saw fiends drive men and women through the foul

river of the Fiend to their eternal damnation, where

"I at the first glance saw more pains and torments than the heart of man

can imagine or the tongue relate; a single one of which was sufficient to

make the hair stand erect, the blood to freeze, the flesh to melt, the

bones to drop from their places--yea, the spirit to faint. What is

empaling or sawing men alive, tearing off the flesh piecemeal with iron

pincers, or broiling the flesh with candles, collop fashion, or squeezing

heads flat in a vice, and all the most shocking devices which ever were

upon earth, compared with one of these? Mere pastime! There were a

hundred thousand shoutings, hoarse cries, and strong groans; yonder a

boisterous wailing and horrible outcry answering them, and the howling of

a dog is sweet, delicious music when compared with these sounds. When we

had proceeded a little way onward from the accursed beach, towards the

wild place of Damnation, I perceived, by their own light, innumerable men

and women here and there; and devils without number and without rest,

incessantly employing their strength in tormenting. Yes, there they

were, devils and damned, the devils roaring with their own torments, and

making the damned roar by means of the torments which they inflicted upon

them. I paid particular observation to the corner which was nearest me.

There I beheld the devils with pitchforks, tossing the damned up into the

air that they might fall headlong on poisoned hatchets or barbed pikes,

there to wriggle their bowels out. After a time the wretches would crawl

in multitudes, one upon another, to the top of one of the burning crags,

there to be broiled like mutton; from there they would be snatched afar,

to the top of one of the mountains of eternal frost and snow, where they

would be allowed to shiver for a time; thence they would be precipitated

into a loathsome pool of boiling brimstone, to wallow there in

conflagration, smoke and the suffocation of horrible stench; from the

pool they would be driven to the marsh of Hell, that they might embrace

and be embraced by the reptiles, many times worse than serpents and

vipers; after allowing them half an hour's dalliance with these creatures

the devils would seize a bundle of rods of steel, fiery hot from the

furnace, and would scourge them till their howling, caused by the

horrible inexpressible pain which they endured, would fill the vast abode

of darkness, and when the fiends deemed that they had scourged them

enough, they would take hot irons and sear their bloody wounds. . . ."

And this would have particularly pleased Borrow, who disliked and

condemned smoking:

"For one of late origin I will not deny, O Cerberus, that thou hast

brought to us many a booty from the island of our enemies, by means of

tobacco, a weed the cause of much deceit; for how much deceit is

practised in carrying it about, in mixing it, and in weighing it: a weed

which entices some people to bib ale; others to curse, swear, and to

flatter in order to obtain it, and others to tell lies in denying that

they use it: a weed productive of maladies in various bodies, the excess

of which is injurious to every man's body, without speaking of his

_soul_: a weed, moreover, by which we get multitudes of the poor, whom we

should never get did they not set their love on tobacco, allow it to

master them, and pull the bread from the mouths of their children."

In the preface to this book as it was finally published in 1860, Borrow

said that the little Welsh bookseller had rejected it for fear of being

ruined--"The terrible descriptions of vice and torment would frighten the

genteel part of the English public out of their wits. . . . I had no

idea, till I read him in English, that Elis Wyn had been such a terrible

fellow."

In September, 1830, Borrow left London and returned to Norwich, having

done nothing which attracted attention or deserved to. His brother's

opinion was that his want of success in life was due chiefly to his being

unlike other people. So far as his failure in literature went, it was

due to the fact that he was doing either poorly or only moderately well

work that very few people wanted to read, viz., chiefly verse

translations from unfashionable languages. It may be also that his

health was partly the cause and was in turn lowered by the long continued

failure. When Borrow, at the age of forty or more, came to write about

the first twenty-two years of his life, he not only described himself

suffering from several attacks of "the horrors," but also with almost

equal vividness three men suffering from mental afflictions of different

kinds: the author who lived alone and was continually touching things to

avert the evil chance; the old man who had saved himself from being

overwhelmed in his terrible misfortunes by studying the inscriptions on

Chinese pots, but could not tell the time; and the Welshman who wandered

over the country preaching and living piously, but haunted by the

knowledge that in his boyhood he had committed the sin against the Holy

Ghost. The most vivid description of his "horrors," which he said in

1834 always followed if they did not result from weakness, is in the

eighty-fourth chapter of "Lavengro":

"Heaviness had suddenly come over me, heaviness of heart, and of body

also. I had accomplished the task which I had imposed upon myself, and

now that nothing more remained to do, my energies suddenly deserted me,

and I felt without strength, and without hope. Several causes, perhaps,

co-operated to bring about the state in which I then felt myself. It is

not improbable that my energies had been overstrained during the work,

the progress of which I have attempted to describe; and every one is

aware that the results of overstrained energies are feebleness and

lassitude--want of nourishment might likewise have something to do with

it. During my sojourn in the dingle my food had been of the simplest and

most unsatisfying description, by no means calculated to support the

exertions which the labour I had been engaged upon required; it had

consisted of coarse oaten cakes, and hard cheese, and for beverage I had

been indebted to a neighbouring pit, in which, in the heat of the day, I

frequently saw, not golden or silver fish, but frogs and efts swimming

about. I am, however, inclined to believe that Mrs. Herne's cake had

quite as much to do with the matter as insufficient nourishment. I had

never entirely recovered from the effects of its poison, but had

occasionally, especially at night, been visited by a grinding pain in the

stomach, and my whole body had been suffused with cold sweat; and indeed

these memorials of the drow have never entirely disappeared--even at the

present time they display themselves in my system, especially after much

fatigue of body, and excitement of mind. So there I sat in the dingle

upon my stone, nerveless and hopeless, by whatever cause or causes that

state had been produced--there I sat with my head leaning upon my hand,

and so I continued a long, long time. At last I lifted my head from my

hand, and began to cast anxious, unquiet looks about the dingle--the

entire hollow was now enveloped in deep shade--I cast my eyes up; there

was a golden gleam on the tops of the trees which grew towards the upper

parts of the dingle; but lower down, all was gloom and twilight--yet,

when I first sat down on my stone, the sun was right above the dingle,

illuminating all its depths by the rays which it cast perpendicularly

down--so I must have sat a long, long time upon my stone. And now, once

more, I rested my head upon my hand, but almost instantly lifted it again

in a kind of fear, and began looking at the objects before me, the forge,

the tools, the branches of the trees, endeavouring to follow their rows,

till they were lost in the darkness of the dingle; and now I found my

right hand grasping convulsively the three forefingers of the left, first

collectively, and then successively, wringing them till the joints

cracked; then I became quiet, but not for long.

"Suddenly I started up, and could scarcely repress the shriek which was

rising to my lips. Was it possible? Yes, all too certain; the evil one

was upon me; the inscrutable horror which I had felt in my boyhood had

once more taken possession of me. I had thought that it had forsaken me;

that it would never visit me again; that I had outgrown it; that I might

almost bid defiance to it; and I had even begun to think of it without

horror, as we are in the habit of doing of horrors of which we conceive

we run no danger; and lo! when least thought of, it had seized me again.

Every moment I felt it gathering force, and making me more wholly its

own. What should I do?--resist, of course; and I did resist. I grasped,

I tore, and strove to fling it from me; but of what avail were my

efforts? I could only have got rid of it by getting rid of myself; it

was a part of myself, or rather it was all myself. I rushed among the

trees, and struck at them with my bare fists, and dashed my head against

them, but I felt no pain. How could I feel pain with that horror upon

me! and then I flung myself on the ground, gnawed the earth, and

swallowed it; and then I looked round; it was almost total darkness in

the dingle, and the darkness added to my horror. I could no longer stay

there; up I rose from the ground, and attempted to escape; at the bottom

of the winding path which led up the acclivity I fell over something

which was lying on the ground; the something moved, and gave a kind of

whine. It was my little horse, which had made that place its lair; my

little horse; my only companion and friend, in that now awful solitude. I

reached the mouth of the dingle; the sun was just sinking in the far

west, behind me; the fields were flooded with his last gleams. How

beautiful everything looked in the last gleams of the sun! I felt

relieved for a moment; I was no longer in the horrid dingle; in another

minute the sun was gone, and a big cloud occupied the place where he had

been; in a little time it was almost as dark as it had previously been in

the open part of the dingle. My horror increased; what was I to do?--it

was of no use fighting against the horror; that I saw; the more I fought

against it, the stronger it became. What should I do: say my prayers?

Ah! why not? So I knelt down under the hedge, and said, 'Our father';

but that was of no use; and now I could no longer repress cries; the

horror was too great to be borne. What should I do: run to the nearest

town or village, and request the assistance of my fellow-men? No! that I

was ashamed to do; notwithstanding the horror was upon me, I was ashamed

to do that. I knew they would consider me a maniac, if I went screaming

amongst them; and I did not wish to be considered a maniac. Moreover, I

knew that I was not a maniac, for I possessed all my reasoning powers,

only the horror was upon me--the screaming horror! But how were

indifferent people to distinguish between madness and this screaming

horror? So I thought and reasoned; and at last I determined not to go

amongst my fellow men, whatever the result might be. I went to the mouth

of the dingle, and there, placing myself on my knees, I again said the

Lord's Prayer; but it was of no use; praying seemed to have no effect

over the horror; the unutterable fear appeared rather to increase than

diminish; and I again uttered wild cries, so loud that I was apprehensive

they would be heard by some chance passenger on the neighbouring road; I

therefore went deeper into the dingle; I sat down with my back against a

thorn bush; the thorns entered my flesh, and when I felt them, I pressed

harder against the bush; I thought the pain of the flesh might in some

degree counteract the mental agony; presently I felt them no longer; the

power of the mental horror was so great that it was impossible, with that

upon me, to feel any pain from the thorns. I continued in this posture a

long time, undergoing what I cannot describe, and would not attempt if I

were able. Several times I was on the point of starting up and rushing

anywhere; but I restrained myself, for I knew I could not escape from

myself, so why should I not remain in the dingle? So I thought and said

to myself, for my reasoning powers were still uninjured. At last it

appeared to me that the horror was not so strong, not quite so strong

upon me. Was it possible that it was relaxing its grasp, releasing its

prey? O what a mercy! but it could not be--and yet I looked up to

heaven, and clasped my hands, and said 'Our Father.' I said no more; I

was too agitated; and now I was almost sure that the horror had done its

worst.

"After a little time I arose, and staggered down yet farther into the

dingle. I again found my little horse on the same spot as before, I put

my hand to his mouth; he licked my hand. I flung myself down by him and

put my arms round his neck, the creature whinnied, and appeared to

sympathise with me; what a comfort to have any one, even a dumb brute, to

sympathise with me at such a moment! I clung to my little horse, as if

for safety and protection. I laid my head on his neck, and felt almost

calm; presently the fear returned, but not so wild as before; it

subsided, came again, again subsided; then drowsiness came over me, and

at last I fell asleep, my head supported on the neck of the little horse.

I awoke; it was dark, dark night--not a star was to be seen--but I felt

no fear, the horror had left me. I arose from the side of the little

horse, and went into my tent, lay down, and again went to sleep. . . ."

It may be said that the man who had gone through this, and could describe

it, would find it easy enough to depict other sufferings of the same

kind, though in later or less violent stages. It is certain, however,

that for such a one to acquire the habit of touching was easy. He says

himself, that after the night with the author who had this habit and who

feared ideas more than thunder and lightning, he himself touched things

and wondered if "the long-forgotten influence" had returned. Mr. Walling

says that "he has been informed" that Borrow "suffered in his youth from

the touching mania," and like many other readers probably, I had

concluded the same. But Mr. Watts-Dunton had already told us that "in

walking through Richmond Park," when an old man, Borrow "would step out

of his way constantly to touch a tree and was offended if observed." The

old man diverting himself with Chinese inscriptions on teapots would be

an easy invention for Borrow; he may not have done this very thing, but

he had done similar things. Here again, Mr. Walling says that "he has

been told" the incident was drawn from Borrow's own experience. As to

Peter Williams and the sin against the Holy Ghost, Borrow hinted to him

that his case was not exceptional:

"'Dost thou then imagine,' said Peter, 'the sin against the Holy Ghost to

be so common an occurrence?'

"'As you have described it,' said I, 'of very common occurrence,

especially amongst children, who are, indeed, the only beings likely to

commit it.'

"'Truly,' said Winifred, 'the young man talks wisely.'

"Peter was silent for some moments, and appeared to be reflecting; at

last, suddenly raising his head, he looked me full in the face, and,

grasping my hand with vehemence, he said, 'Tell me, young man, only one

thing, hast thou, too, committed the sin against the Holy Ghost?'

"'I am neither Papist nor Methodist,' said I, 'but of the Church, and,

being so, confess myself to no one, but keep my own counsel; I will tell

thee, however, had I committed at the same age, twenty such sins as that

which you committed, I should feel no uneasiness at these years--but I am

sleepy, and must go to rest.'"

This is due to probably something more than a desire to make himself and

his past impressive. The man's story in several places reminds me of

Borrow, where, for instance, after he has realised his unpardonable sin,

he runs wild through Wales, "climbing mountains and wading streams, burnt

by the sun, drenched by the rain," so that for three years he hardly knew

what befel him, living with robbers and Gypsies, and once about to fling

himself into the sea from a lofty rock.

If it be true, as it is likely, that Borrow suffered in a more extended

manner than he showed in his accounts of the horrors, the time of the

suffering is still uncertain. Was it before his first escape from

London, as he says in "Lavengro"? Was it during his second long stay in

London or after his second escape? Or was it really not long before the

actual narrative was written in the 'forties? There is some reason for

thinking so. The most vivid description of "the horrors," and the

account of the touching gentleman and of Peter Williams, together with a

second reference to "the horrors" or the "evil one," all occur in a

section of "Lavengro" equal to hardly more than a sixth of the whole. And

further, when Borrow was writing "Wild Wales," or when he met the sickly

young man at the "Castle Inn" of Caernarvon, he thought of himself as

always having had "the health of an elephant." I should be inclined to

conclude at least that when he was forty great mental suffering was still

fresh in his mind, something worse than the heavy melancholy which

returned now and then when he was past fifty.

CHAPTER XVII--THE BIBLE SOCIETY: RUSSIA

From the phrase, "He said in '32," which Borrow uses of himself in

Chapter X. of the Appendix to "The Romany Rye," it was to be concluded

that he was writing political articles in 1832; and Dr. Knapp was able to

quote a manuscript of the time where he says that "there is no Radical

who would not rejoice to see his native land invaded by the bitterest of

her foreign enemies," etc., and also a letter, printed in the "Norfolk

Chronicle," on August 18, 1832, on the origin of the word "Tory."

At the end of this year he became friendly with the family of Skepper,

including the widowed Mrs. Mary Clarke, then 36 years old, who lived at

Oulton Hall, near Lowestoft, in Suffolk. With or through them he met the

Rev. Francis Cunningham, Vicar of St. Margaret's, Lowestoft, who had

married a sister of the Quaker banker, Joseph John Gurney, and through

the offices of these two, Borrow was invited to go before the British and

Foreign Bible Society, as a candidate for employment in some branch of

the Society's work where his knowledge of languages would be useful. He

walked to London for the purpose in December, 1832. The Society was

satisfied and sent him back to Norwich to learn the Manchu-Tartar

language. There he wrote a letter, which, if we take Dr. Knapp's word

for it, was "a sort of recantation of the Taylorism of 1824." Being now

near thirty, and perhaps having his worst "horrors" behind him, or at

least having reason to think so if he was already fond of Mrs. Clarke,

whom he afterwards married, it was easy for him to fall into the same way

of speaking as these good and kindly people, and to abuse Buddhism, which

he did not understand, for their delectation. Mrs. Clarke had four or

five hundred pounds a year of her own, and one child, a daughter, then

about fourteen years old. Perhaps it was natural that he should remember

then, as he did later, the words of the cheerful and forgetful wise man:

"I have been young and now am grown old, yet never have I seen the

righteous forsaken, or his seed begging bread."

From a gloomily fanatical atheist Borrow changed to a cheerfully

fanatical Protestant, described as "of the middle order in society, and a

very produceable person." {126} He was probably never a good atheist of

the reasonable critical type like William Taylor, whose thinking was too

dull and too difficult for him. Above all it was too negative and

unrelated to anything but the brain for the man who wrote "Lines to Six-

foot-three" and consorted with Gypsies. He had taken atheism along with

Taylor's literary and linguistic teaching, perhaps with some eagerness at

first as a form of protest against conventionally pious and respectable

Norwich life. The Bible Society and Mrs. Clarke and her friends came

radiant and benevolent to his "looped and windowed" atheism. They gave

him friends and money: they gave him an occupation on which he felt, and

afterwards found, that he could spend his hesitating energies. He

gathered up all his powers to serve the Bible Society. He suffered

hunger, cold, imprisonment, wounded feet, long hours of indoor labour and

long hours of dismal attendance upon inexorable official delay.

Personally he irritated Mr. Brandram, the secretary, and his bold and

unexpected ways gave the Society something to put up with, but he was

always a faithful and enthusiastic servant. He had many reasons for

being grateful to them. He, who was going to get himself imprisoned for

atheism, had already become, as Mr. Cunningham thought, a man "of certain

Christian principle," if "of no very exactly defined denomination of

Christians." He certainly did become an unquestioning wild

missionary--though not merely wild, for he was discreet in his boldness;

he was careful to save the Society money; he made himself respected by

the highest English and Spanish officials in Spain; so that in 1837, for

the first time in the Society's history, an English ambassador made their

cause a national one. He wanted to shout and the Bible Society gave him

something to shout for. He wanted to fight and they gave him something

to fight for. Twenty years afterwards, in writing the Appendix to "The

Romany Rye," he looked back on his travels in Spain as on a campaign:

"It is true he went to Spain with the colours of that Society on his

hat--oh! the blood glows in his veins! oh! the marrow awakes in his old

bones when he thinks of what he accomplished in Spain in the cause of

religion and civilisation with the colours of that Society on his hat,

and its weapon in his hand, even the sword of the word of God; how with

that weapon he hewed left and right, making the priests fly before him,

and run away squeaking: 'Vaya! que demonio es este!' Ay, and when he

thinks of the plenty of bible swords which he left behind him, destined

to prove, and which have already proved, pretty calthrops in the heels of

Popery. 'Hallo! Batuschca,' he exclaimed the other night, on reading an

article in a newspaper; 'what do you think of the present doings in

Spain? Your old friend the zingaro, the gitano who rode about Spain, to

say nothing of Galicia, with the Greek Buchini behind him as his squire,

had a hand in bringing them about; there are many brave Spaniards

connected with the present movement who took Bibles from his hands, and

read them and profited by them."

He was as sure in 1839 as in 1857 of the diabolic power and intention of

Popery, that "unrelenting fiend," whose secrets few, he said, knew more

than himself. {128a}

In the gladness of his now fully exerted powers of body and mind,

travelling in wild country and observing and conflicting with men, he

adopted not merely the unctuous phraseology of "I am at present, thanks

be to the Lord, comfortable and happy," {128b} but a more attractive

religious arrogance. "That I am an associate of Gypsies and

fortune-tellers I do not deny," he says, "and why should I be ashamed of

their company when my Master mingled with publicans and thieves." {128c}

He painted himself as a possible martyr among the wild Catholics, a St.

Stephen. When he suffered at the same time from hardship and the

Society's disfavour, he exclaimed: "It was God's will that I, who have

risked all and lost almost all in the cause, be taunted, suspected, and

the sweat of agony and tears which I have poured out be estimated at the

value of the water of the ditch or the moisture which exudes from rotten

dung. But I murmur not, and hope I shall at all times be willing to bow

to the dispensations of the Almighty." {128d} He exulted in melodramatic

nature, in the sublime of Salvator Rosa, in the desperate, wild, and

strange. His very prayers, as reported by himself to the Secretary,

distressed the Society because they were "passionate." True, he could

sometimes, under the inspiration of the respectable Secretary, write like

a perfect middle-class English Christian. He condemned the Sunday

amusements of Hamburg, for example, remarking that "England, with all her

faults, has still some regard to decency, and will not tolerate such a

shameful display of vice" (as rope-dancing) "in so sacred a season, when

a decent cheerfulness is the freest form in which the mind or countenance

ought to invest themselves." {129a} He argued against the translator of

the Bible into Manchu that concessions should not be made to a Chinese

way of thought, because it was the object of the Society to wean the

Chinese from their own customs and observances, not to encourage them.

But the opposite extreme was more congenial to Borrow. He would go to

the market place in a remote Spanish village and display his Testaments

on the outspread horsecloth, crying: "Peasants, peasants, I bring you the

Word of God at a cheap price." {129b} He would disguise himself,

travelling with a sack of Testaments on his donkey; and when a woman

asked if it was soap he had, he answered: "Yes; it is soap to wash souls

clean." This was the man to understand Peter Williams, the Welsh

preacher who had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost and wandered

about preaching and refusing a roof. Neither must it be forgotten that

this was the man who, in a conversation not reported to the Bible

Society, said: "What befalls my body or soul was written in a _gabicote_

a thousand years before the foundation of the world."

Borrow was only seven weeks in getting so far as to be able to translate

from Manchu, though it had been said, as he pointed out, that the

language took five or six years to acquire. It cost him an even shorter

time to acquire the dialect of his employers, for in less than a month

after he had retired to Norwich to learn Manchu, he was writing thus:

"Revd. and Dear Sir,--I have just received your communication, and

notwithstanding it is Sunday morning, and the bells with their loud and

clear voices are calling me to church, I have sat down to answer it by

return of post. . . .

"Return my kind and respected friend, Mr. Brandram, my best thanks for

his present of 'The Gypsies' Advocate,' and assure him that, next to the

acquirement of Mandchou, the conversion and enlightening of those

interesting people occupy the principal place in my mind. . . . {130}

Never had his linguistic power a greater or more profitable triumph than

in this acquisition. As this was probably a dialect not unknown at

Earlham, Norwich, and Oulton, among people whom he loved, respected, or

beheld successful, the difficulty of the task was a little decreased.

Thurtell and Haggart had passed away, Petulengro had not yet reappeared.

There was no one to tell him that he was living in a country and an age

that were afterwards to appear among the most ignorant and cruel on

record. He himself had not yet discovered the "gentility-nonsense," nor

did he ever discover that gentility was of the same family, if it was not

an albinism of the same species, as pious and oily respectability. So

delighted was he with the new dialect that he rolled it on his tongue to

the confusion of habitues, who had to rap him over the knuckles for

speaking of becoming "useful to the Deity, to man, and to himself."

In July, 1833, Borrow was appointed, with a salary of 200 pounds a year

and expenses, to go to St. Petersburg, to help in editing a Manchu

translation of the New Testament, or transcribing and collating a

translation of the Old, accompanied by a warning against "a tone of

confidence in speaking of yourself" in such a phrase as "useful to the

Deity, to man, and to yourself." Borrow accepted the correction, and

Norwich laughed at him in his new suit. At the end of July he sailed,

and as at this time he had no objection to gentility he regretted the end

of his passage with so many "genteel, well-bred and intelligent

passengers," though he had suffered from sea-sickness, followed by "the

horrors."

St. Petersburg he thought the finest of the many capitals he had seen. He

made the acquaintance of several men who could help him with their

learning and their books, and above all he gained the friendship of John

P. Hasfeldt, a Dane, a little older than himself, who was interpreter to

the Danish Legation and teacher of European languages, evidently a man

after Borrow's own heart, with his opinion that "The greater part of

those products of art, called 'the learned,' would not be able to earn a

living if our Lord were not a guardian of fools." The copying of the Old

Testament was finished by the end of the year, without having prevented

Borrow from profiting by his unusual facilities for the acquisition of

languages. He had then to superintend, or as it fell out, to help

largely with his own hands, the printing of the first Manchu translation

of the New Testament, with type which had first to be cleansed of ten

years' rust and with compositors who knew nothing of Manchu. Lacking

almost in time to eat or to sleep he impressed the Bible Society by his

prodigious labours under "the blessing of a kind and gracious Providence

watching over the execution of a work in which the wide extension of the

Saviour's glory is involved."

He was living cheaply, suffering sometimes from "the horrors," and curing

them with port wine--sending money home to his mother, bidding her to

employ a maid and to read and "think as much of God as possible." Nor

was he doing merely what he was bound to do. For example, he translated

some of the "Homilies of the Church of England" into Russian and into

Manchu. He also published in St. Petersburg his "Targum" and "Talisman,"

a short further collection of translations from Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and

from Russian national songs. The work was finished and formally and

kindly approved by the Bible Society. He had proposed long before that

he should distribute the books himself, wandering overland with them by

Lake Baikal and Kiakhta right to Pekin; but the Russian Government

refused a passport. Dr. Knapp believes that this intention of going

among the Tartars and overland from Russia to Pekin was the sole ground

for his crediting himself with travels in the Far East. In the flesh he

had to content himself with a journey to Novgorod and Moscow. As he had

visited the Jews at Hamburg so he did the Gypsies at Moscow. This

adventure moved him to his first characteristic piece of prose, in a

letter to the Society. This letter, which was afterwards printed in the

"Athenaeum," {132} and incorporated in "The Zincali," mentions the

Gypsies who have become successful singers and married noblemen, but

continues:

"It is not, however, to be supposed that all the female Gypsies are of

this high, talented and respectable order: amongst them are many low and

profligate females, who sing at taverns or at the various gardens in the

neighbourhood, and whose husbands and male connexions subsist by horse

jobbing and like kinds of traffic. The principal place of resort of this

class is Marina Rotche, lying about two versts from Moscow, and thither I

drove, attended by a _valet de place_. Upon my arriving there, the

Gypsies swarmed out from their tents, and from the little tradeer, or

tavern, and surrounded me; standing on the seat of the caleche, I

addressed them in a loud voice in the dialect of the English Gypsies,

with which I have some slight acquaintance. A scream of wonder instantly

arose, and welcomes and greetings were poured forth in torrents of

musical Rommany, amongst which, however, the most prominent air was, 'Ah

kak mi toute karmama,' 'Oh, how we love you'; for at first they supposed

me to be one of their brothers, who they said, were wandering about in

Turkey, China, and other parts, and that I had come over the great

pawnee, or water, to visit them. . . . I visited this place several times

during my sojourn at Moscow, and spoke to them upon their sinful manner

of living, upon the advent and suffering of Christ Jesus, and expressed,

upon my taking leave of them, a hope that they would be in a short period

furnished with the word of eternal life in their own language, which they

seemed to value and esteem much higher than the Russian."

The tone of this letter suggests that it was meant for the Bible

Society--and a copy was addressed to them--but at this date it is

possible to see in it an outline of the Gypsy gentleman, very much the

gentleman, the "colossal clergyman" of later days.

Borrow liked the Russians, and for some reasons was sorry to leave them

and Hasfeldt in September, 1835. But for other reasons he was glad. He

would see his mother and comfort her for the loss of her elder son in

November, 1833, as he had already done to some extent by telling her that

he would "endeavour to get ordained." He also would see Mrs. Clarke,

with whom he had been corresponding for the past two years. Both she and

his mother had been unwilling for him to go to Pekin.