Borrow's Spanish portrait of himself was worthy of its background. Much
was required of him in a world where a high fantastical acrobatic
mountebankery was almost a matter of ceremony, where riders stand on
their heads in passing their rivals and cooks punt a casserole over their
heads to the wall behind by way of giving notice: much was required of
him and he proved worthy. He saw himself, I suppose, as a great
imaginative master of fiction sees a hero. His attitude cannot be called
vanity: it is too consistent and continuous and its effect by far too
powerful. He puts his own name into the speeches of other men in a
manner that is very rare: he does not start at the sound of _Don Jorge_.
He said to the silent archbishop: "I suppose your lordship knows who I
am? . . . I am he whom the _Manolos_ of Madrid call _Don Jorgito el
Ingles_; I am just come out of prison, whither I was sent for circulating
my Lord's Gospel in this Kingdom of Spain." He allows the archbishop to
put this celebrity on horseback: "_Vaya_! how you ride! It is dangerous
to be in your way." His horses are magnificent: "What," he asks, "what
is a missionary in the heart of Spain without a horse? Which
consideration induced me now to purchase an Arabian of high caste, which
had been brought from Algiers by an officer of the French legion. The
name of this steed, the best I believe that ever issued from the desert,
was Sidi Habismilk."
Who can forget Quesada and his two friends lording it on horseback over
the crowd, and Borrow shouting "_Viva_ _Quesada_," or forget the old Moor
of Tangier talking of horses?--
"'Good are the horses of the Moslems,' said my old friend; 'where will
you find such? They will descend rocky mountains at full speed and
neither trip nor fall; but you must be cautious with the horses of the
Moslems, and treat them with kindness, for the horses of the Moslems are
proud, and they like not being slaves. When they are young and first
mounted, jerk not their mouths with your bit, for be sure if you do they
will kill you--sooner or later you will perish beneath their feet. Good
are our horses, and good our riders--yea, very good are the Moslems at
mounting the horse; who are like them? I once saw a Frank rider compete
with a Moslem on this beach, and at first the Frank rider had it all his
own way, and he passed the Moslem. But the course was long, very long,
and the horse of the Frank rider, which was a Frank also, panted; but the
horse of the Moslem panted not, for he was a Moslem also, and the Moslem
rider at last gave a cry, and the horse sprang forward, and he overtook
the Frank horse, and then the Moslem rider stood up in his saddle. How
did he stand? Truly he stood on his head, and these eyes saw him. He
stood on his head in the saddle as he passed the Frank rider, and he
cried, Ha, ha! as he passed the Frank rider; and the Moslem horse cried,
Ha, ha! as he passed the Frank breed, and the Frank lost by a far
distance. Good are the Franks, good their horses; but better are the
Moslems, and better the horses of the Moslems.'"
It is said that he used to ride his black Andalusian horse in Madrid with
a Russian skin for a saddle and without stirrups. He had, he says, been
accustomed from childhood to ride without a saddle. Yet Borrow could do
without a horse. He never fails to make himself impressive. He stoops
to his knee to scare a huge and ferocious dog by looking him full in the
eyes. The spies, as he sat waiting for the magistrate at Madrid,
whisper, "He understands the seven Gypsy jargons," or "He can ride a
horse and dart a knife full as well as if he came from my own country."
The captain of the ship tells a friend in a low voice, overheard by
Borrow: "That fellow who is lying on the deck can speak Christian, too,
when it serves his purpose; but he speaks others which are by no means
Christian. He can talk English, and I myself have heard him chatter in
Gitano with the Gypsies of Triana. He is now going amongst the Moors;
and when he arrives in their country, you will hear him, should you be
there, converse as fluently in their gibberish as in Christiano--nay,
better, for he is no Christian himself. He has been several times on
board my vessel already; but I do not like him, as I consider that he
carries something about with him which is not good."
The American at Tangier is perplexed by his speaking both Moorish and
Gaelic, by hearing from an Irish woman that he is "a fairy man."
He does not confine himself to the mysterious sublime. He tells us, for
example, that Mendizabal, the Prime Minister, was a huge athletic man,
"somewhat taller than myself, who measure six-feet-two without my shoes."
Several times he was mistaken for a Jew, and once for a Rabbi, by the
Jews themselves. Add to this the expression that he put on for the
benefit of the farrier at Betanzos: he was stooping to close the vein
that had been opened in the leg of his horse, and he "looked up into the
farrier's face, arching his eyebrows. '_Carracho_! what an evil wizard!'
muttered the farrier, as he walked away."
{picture: Mendizabal, The Spanish Minister: page194.jpg}
In the wilds he grew a beard--he had one at Jaraicejo--and it is perhaps
worth noticing this, to rebut the opinion that he could not grow a beard,
and that he was therefore as other men are with the same disability. He
speaks more than once of his shedding tears, and at Lisbon he kissed the
stone above Fielding's grave. But these are little things of little
importance in the landscape portrait which emerges from the whole of the
book, of the grave adventurer, all but always equal in his boldness and
his discretion, the lord of those wild ways and wild men, who "rides in
the whirlwind and directs the storm" all over Spain.
In brief, he is the very hero that a wondering and waiting audience would
be satisfied to see appearing upon such a stage. Except Dante on his
background of Heaven and Hell, and Byron on his background of Europe and
Time, no writer had in one book placed himself with greater distinction
before the world. His glory was threefold. He was the man who was a
Gypsy in politics, because he had lived with Gypsies so long. He was the
man who said to the Spanish Prime Minister: "It is a pleasant thing to be
persecuted for the Gospel's sake." He was the man of whom it was said
_by an enemy_, after the affair of Benedict Mol, that _Don Jorge_ was at
the bottom of half the knavish farces in Spain.
Very little of Borrow's effectiveness can seriously be attributed to this
or that quality of style, for it will all amount to saying that he had an
effective style. But it may be permissible to point out that it is also
a style that is unnoticeable except for what it effects. It runs at
times to rotten Victorianism, both heavy and vague, as when he calls _El
Greco_ or Domenico "a most extraordinary genius, some of whose
productions possess merit of a very high order." He is capable of
calling the eye the "orb of vision," and the moon "the beauteous
luminary." I quote a passage lest it should seem incredible:
"The moon had arisen when we mounted our horses to return to the village,
and the rays of the beauteous luminary danced merrily on the rushing
waters of the Tagus, silvered the plain over which we were passing, and
bathed in a flood of brightness the bold sides of the calcareous hill of
Villaluengo, the antique ruins which crowned its brow. . . ."
Description, taking him away from men and from his active self, often
lured him into this kind of thing. And, nevertheless, such is Borrow
that I should by no means employ a gentleman of refinement to go over
"The Bible in Spain" and cross out the like. It all helps in the total
of half theatrical and wholly wild exuberance and robustness. Another
minute contributory element of style is the Biblical phrasing. His home
and certainly his work for the Society had made him familiar with the
Bible. He quotes it several times in passages which bring him into
comparison, if not equality, with Jesus and with Paul. A little after
quoting, "Ride on, because of the word of righteousness," he writes: "I
repaired to the aqueduct, and sat down beneath the hundred and seventh
arch, where I waited the greater part of the day, _but he came not_,
_whereupon I arose and went into the city_." He is fond of "even,"
saying, for example, or making Judah Lib say, "He bent his way unto the
East, _even to Jerusalem_." The "beauteous luminary" vein and the
Biblical vein may be said to be inseparable from the long cloak, the
sombrero, the picturesque romance and mystery of Spain, as they appeared
to one for whom romance and mystery alike were never without pomp. But
with all his rant he is invariably substantial, never aerial, and he
chequers it in a Byronic manner with a sudden prose reference to bugs, or
a question, or a piece of dialogue.
His dialogue can hardly be over-praised. It is life-like in its effect,
though not in its actual phrases, and it breaks up the narrative and
description over and over again at the right time. What he puts into the
mouth of shepherds with whom he sits round the fire is more than twice as
potent as if it were in his own narrative; he varies the point of view,
and yet always without allowing himself to disappear from the scene--he,
the _senor_ traveller. These spoken words are, it is true, in Borrow's
own style, with little or no colloquialism, but they are simpler. They
also, in their turn, are broken up by words or phrases from the language
of the speaker. The effect of this must vary with the reader. The
learned will not pause, some of the unlearned will be impatient. But as
a glossary was afterwards granted at Ford's suggestion, and is now to be
had in the cheapest editions of "The Bible in Spain," these few hundred
Spanish or Gypsy words are at least no serious stumbling block. I find
them a very distinct additional flavour in the style. A good writer can
afford these mysteries. Children do not boggle at the unpronounceable
names of a good book like "The Arabian Nights," but rather use them as
charms, like Izaak Walton's marrow of the thighbone of a heron or a piece
of mummy. The bullfighter speaks:
"'Cavaliers and strong men, this cavalier is the friend of a friend of
mine. _Es mucho hombre_. There is none like him in Spain. He speaks
the crabbed _Gitano_, though he is an _Inglesito_.'
"'We do not believe it,' replied several grave voices. 'It is not
possible.'
"'It is not possible, say you? I tell you it is.--Come forward,
Balseiro, you who have been in prison all your life, and are always
boasting that you can speak the crabbed _Gitano_, though I say you know
nothing of it--come forward and speak to his worship in the crabbed
_Gitano_.'
"A low, slight, but active figure stepped forward. He was in his shirt
sleeves, and wore a _montero_ cap; his features were handsome, but they
were those of a demon.
"He spoke a few words in the broken Gypsy slang of the prison, inquiring
of me whether I had ever been in the condemned cell, and whether I knew
what a _gitana_ was.
"'_Vamos Inglesito_,' shouted Sevilla, in a voice of thunder, 'answer the
_monro_ in the crabbed _Gitano_.'
"I answered the robber, for such he was, and one, too, whose name will
live for many years in the ruffian histories of Madrid--I answered him in
a speech of some length, in the dialect of the Estremenian Gypsies.
"'I believe it is the crabbed _Gitano_,' muttered Balseiro. 'It is
either that or English, for I understand not a word of it.'
"'Did I not say to you,' cried the bullfighter, 'that you knew nothing of
the crabbed _Gitano_? But this _Inglesito_ does. I understood all he
said. _Vaya_, there is none like him for the crabbed _Gitano_. He is a
good _ginete_, too; next to myself, there is none like him, only he rides
with stirrup leathers too short.--_Inglesito_, if you have need of money,
I will lend you my purse. All I have is at your service, and that is not
a little; I have just gained four thousand _chules_ by the lottery.
Courage, Englishman! Another cup. I will pay all--I, Sevilla!'
"And he clapped his hand repeatedly on his breast, reiterating, 'I,
Sevilla! I--'"
Borrow breaks up his own style in the same way with foreign words. As
Ford said in his "Edinburgh Review" criticism:
"To use a Gypsy term for a linguist, 'he knows the seven jargons'; his
conversations and his writings resemble an intricate mosiac, of which we
see the rich effect, without comprehending the design. . . . Mr. Borrow,
in whose mouth are the tongues of Babel, selects, as he dashes along
_currente calamo_, the exact word for any idiom which best expresses the
precise idea which sparkles in his mind."
This habit of Borrow's should be compared with Lamb's archaisms, but,
better still, with Robert Burton's interlardation of English and Latin in
"The Anatomy of Melancholy."
Here again what I may call his spotted dog style is only a part of the
whole, and as the whole is effective, we solemnly conclude that this is
due in part to the spotted dog. My last word is that here, as always in
a good writer, the whole is greater than the mere sum of the parts, just
as with a bad writer the part is always greater than the whole. Or a
truer way of saying this is that many elements elude discovery, and
therefore the whole exceeds the discoverable parts. Nor is this the
whole truth, for the mixing is much if not all, and neither Borrow nor
any critic knows anything about the mixing, save that the drink is good
that comes of it.