Six three-volume editions of "The Bible in Spain" were issued within the
first twelve months: ten thousand copies of a cheap edition were sold in
four months. In America it was sold rapidly without benefit to Borrow.
It was translated into German in 1844 and French in 1845. Borrow came up
to town and did not refuse to meet princes, bishops, ambassadors, and
members of Parliament. He was pleased and flattered by the sales and the
reviews, and declared that he had known it would succeed. He did not
quite know what to say to an invitation from the Royal Institution, but
as to the Royal Academy, it would "just suit him," because he was a safe
man, he said, fitted by nature for an Academician. He did not think much
of episcopal food, wine, or cigars. He was careful of his hero and
disliked hearing him abused or treated indifferently. If he had many
letters, he answered but few. He had made nothing yet out of literature
because the getting about to receive homage, etc., had been so expensive:
he did not care, for he hated to speak of money matters, yet he could not
but mention the fact. When the money began to arrive he did not resent
it by any means, as he was to buy a blood horse with it--no less. His
letters have a jolly, bullying, but offhand and jerky tone, and they are
very short. He gives Murray advice on publishing and is willing to
advise the Government how to manage the Irish--"the blackguards."
He was now, by virtue of his wife, a "landed proprietor," and filled the
part with unction, though but little satisfaction. For he was not a
magistrate, and he had to get up in the middle of the night to look after
"poachers and thieves," as he says in giving a reason for an illness. In
the summer-house at Oulton hung his father's coat and sword, but it is to
be noticed that to the end of his life an old friend held it "doubtful
whether his father commenced his military career with a commission."
Borrow probably realised the importance of belonging to the ruling
classes and having a long steady pedigree. "If report be true," says the
same friend, {201} "his mother was of French origin, and in early life an
actress." The foreignness as an asset overcame his objection to the
French, and "an actress" also sounded unconventional. The friend
continues: "But the subject of his family was one on which Borrow never
touched. He would allude to Borrowdale as the country whence they came,
and then would make mysterious allusions to his father's pugilistic
triumphs. But this is certain, that he has not left a single relation
behind him." Yet he had many relatives in Cornwall and did not scorn to
visit their houses. He would only talk of his works to intimate friends,
and "when he went into company it was as a gentleman, not because he was
an author."
Lady Eastlake, in March, 1844, calls him "a fine man, but a most
disagreeable one; a kind of character that would be most dangerous in
rebellious times--one that would suffer or persecute to the utmost. His
face is expressive of wrong-headed determination."
A little earlier than this, in October, 1843, Caroline Fox saw him
"sitting on one side of the fire and his old mother on the other." It
was known to her that "his spirits always sink in wet weather, and to-day
was very rainy, but he was courteous and not displeased to be a little
lionised, for his delicacy is not of the most susceptible." He was "a
tall, ungainly, uncouth man," in her opinion, "with great physical
strength, a quick penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable
tone and pronunciation." In no place does he make anyone praise his
voice, and, as he said, it reminded one Spanish woman of a German
clockmaker's.
But Borrow was not happy or at ease. He took a riding tour in the east
of England; he walked, rowed and fished; but that was not enough. He was
restless, and yet did not get away. Evidently he did not conceal the
fact that he thought of travelling again. He had talked about Africa and
China: he was now talking about Constantinople and Africa. He was often
miserable, though he had, so far as he knew, "no particular disorder." If
at such times he was away from Oulton, he thought of his home as his only
refuge in this world; if he was at home he thought of travel or foreign
employment. His disease was, perhaps, now middle age, and too good a
memory in his blood and in his bones. Whatever it was it was apparently
not curable by his kind of Christianity, nor by a visit from the genial
Ford, and a present of caviare and pheasant; nor by the never-out-of-date
reminder from friends that he was very well off, etc. If he had been
caught by Dissenters, as he should have been, he might by this time have
had salvation, and an occupation for life, in founding a new truculent
sect of Borrovians. As the Rev. the Romany Rye he might have blazed in
an entertaining and becoming manner. As "a sincere member of the old-
fashioned Church of England, in which he believes there is more religion,
and consequently less cant, than in any other Church in the world," there
was nothing for him to do but sit down at Oulton and contemplate the
fact. This and the other fact that "he eats his own bread, and is one of
the very few men in England who are independent in every sense of the
word," were afterwards to be made subjects for public rejoicing in the
Appendix to "The Romany Rye."
But in his discontent at the age of forty it cannot have been entirely
satisfactory, however flattering, to hear Ford, in the "Edinburgh,"
saying:
"We wish he would, on some leisure day, draw up the curtain of his own
eventful biography. We collected from his former work that he was not
always what he now is. The pursuits and society of his youth scarcely
could be denominated, in Troloppian euphemism, _la creme de la creme_;
but they stood him in good stead; then and there was he trained for the
encounter of Spain . . . whilst sowing his wild oats, he became
passionately fond of horseflesh. . . .
"How much has Mr. Borrow yet to remember, yet to tell! let him not delay.
His has been a life, one day of which is more crowded than is the
fourscore-year vegetation of a squire or alderman. . . . Everything seems
sealed on a memory, wax to receive and marble to retain. He is not
subjective. He has the new fault of not talking about self. We vainly
want to know what sort of person must be the pilgrim in whose wanderings
we have been interested. That he has left to other pens. . . ."
Then Ford went on to identify Borrow with the mysterious Unknown of
Colonel Napier's newly-published book.
He began to write his autobiography to fulfil the expectations of Ford
and his own public. It was not until 1844, exactly four years after his
return from Spain, that he set out again on foreign travel. He made
stops at Paris, Vienna, Constantinople, Venice, and Rome, but spent most
of his time in Hungary and Roumania, visiting the Gypsies and compiling a
"vocabulary of the Gypsy language as spoken in Hungary and Transylvania,"
which still exists in manuscript. He was seven months away altogether.
Knapp possessed documents proving that Borrow was at this and that place,
and the Gypsy vocabulary is in the British Museum, but little other
record of these seven months remains. Knapp, indeed, takes it for
granted that the historical conversation between Borrow and the Magyar in
"The Romany Rye" was drawn from his experiences in Hungary and
Transylvania in the year 1844; but that is absurd, as the chapter might
have been written by a man born and bred in the reading room of the
British Museum who had never met any but similar unfortunates. It is
very likely that the journey was a failure, and if it had been a success,
an account of it would have interrupted the progress of the
autobiography, as Ford expected it to do. But the thing was too
deliberate to succeed. Borrow's right instinct was to get work which
would take him abroad; he failed, and so he travelled because travel
offered him relief from his melancholy and unrest. Whether or no he
"satisfied his roving demon for a time," as Mr. Walling puts it, is
unknown. What is known is that he did not make this journey a subject of
mystery or boasting, and that he stayed in England thereafter. He had
tasted comfort and celebrity; he had a wife; he was an older man, looking
weak in the eyes by the time he was fifty; and he had no motive for
travel except discontent with staying at home. He tried to get away
again on a mission to the Convent of St. Catherine, on Mount Sinai, to
acquire manuscripts for the British Museum; but he failed, and the
manuscripts went to St. Petersburg instead of Bloomsbury.
In 1843 Henry Wyndham Phillips, R.A., painted his portrait. He was a
restless sitter until the painter remarked: "I have always heard, Mr.
Borrow, that the Persian is a very fine language; is it so?" "It is,
Phillips; it is." "Perhaps you will not mind reciting me something in
the Persian tongue?" said Phillips. "Dear me, no; certainly not." And
then "Mr. Borrow's face lit up with the light that Phillips longed for,
and he kept declaiming at the top of his voice, while the painter made
the most of his opportunity." {205} According to the story, Phillips had
the like success with Turkish and Armenian, and successfully stilled
Borrow's desire "to get out into the fresh air and sunlight."
In the same way, writing and literary ambition kept Borrow from travel.
He stayed at home and he wrote "Lavengro," where, speaking of the rapid
flow of time in the years of his youth, he says: "Since then it has
flagged often enough; sometimes it has seemed to stand entirely still:
and the reader may easily judge how it fares at the present, from the
circumstance of my taking pen in hand, and endeavouring to write down the
passages of my life--a last resource with most people." At one moment he
got satisfaction from professing scorn of authorship, at another,
speaking of Byron, he reflected:
"Well, perhaps after all it was better to have been mighty Milton in his
poverty and blindness--witty and ingenious Butler consigned to the tender
mercies of bailiffs, and starving Otway; they might enjoy more real
pleasure than this lordling; they must have been aware that the world
would one day do them justice--fame after death is better than the top of
fashion in life. They have left a fame behind them which shall never
die, whilst this lordling--a time will come when he will be out of
fashion and forgotten. And yet I don't know; didn't he write Childe
Harold and that ode? Yes, he wrote Childe Harold and that ode. Then a
time will scarcely come when he will be forgotten. Lords, squires, and
cockneys may pass away, but a time will scarcely come when Childe Harold
and that ode will be forgotten. He was a poet, after all--and he must
have known it; a real poet, equal to--to--what a destiny!"
It is said that in actual life Borrow refused to be introduced to a
Russian scholar "simply because he moved in the literary world." {206}
Yet again he made the glorious Gypsy say that he would rather be a book-
writer than a fighting-man, because the book-writers "have so much to say
for themselves even when dead and gone":
"'When they are laid in the churchyard, it is their own fault if people
a'n't talking of them. Who will know, after I am dead, or bitchadey
pawdel, that I was once the beauty of the world, or that you, Jasper,
were--'
"'The best man in England of my inches. That's true, Tawno--however,
here's our brother will perhaps let the world know something about us.'"
I should think, too, that Borrow was both questioner and answerer in the
conversation with the literary man who had the touching mania:
"'With respect to your present troubles and anxieties, would it not be
wise, seeing that authorship causes you so much trouble and anxiety, to
give it up altogether?'
"'Were you an author yourself,' replied my host, 'you would not talk in
this manner; once an author, ever an author--besides, what could I do?
return to my former state of vegetation? no, much as I endure, I do not
wish that; besides, every now and then my reason tells me that these
troubles and anxieties of mine are utterly without foundation; that
whatever I write is the legitimate growth of my own mind, and that it is
the height of folly to afflict myself at any chance resemblance between
my own thoughts and those of other writers, such resemblance being
inevitable from the fact of our common human origin. . . ."
Knapp gives at length a story showing what an author Borrow was, and how
little his travels had sweetened him. He had long promised to review
Ford's "Handbook for Spain," when it should appear. In 1845 he wrote an
article and sent it in to the "Quarterly" as a review of the Handbook. It
had nothing to do with the book and very little to do with the subject of
the book, and Lockhart, the "Quarterly" editor, suggested turning it into
a review by a few interpolations and extracts. Borrow would not have the
article touched. Both Lockhart and Ford advised him to send it to
"Fraser's" or another magazine where it was certain to be welcomed as a
Spanish essay by the author of "The Bible in Spain." But no: and the
article was never printed anywhere.
Yet Borrow was not settling down to authorship pure and simple. He flew
into a passion because a new railway line, in 1846, ran through his
estate. He flew into a passion, did nothing, and remained on his estates
until 1853, when he and his family went into lodgings at Yarmouth. I
have not discovered how much he profited by the intrusion of the railway,
except when he pilloried the contractor, his neighbour, Mr. Peto, as
Flamson, in the Appendix to "The Romany Rye." Then he tried again to be
put on the Commission of the Peace, with no success. He probably spent
much of his time in being either suspicious, or ambitious, or indignant.
In 1847, for example, he suspected his friend Dr. Bowring--his "only
friend" in 1842--of using his work to get for himself the consulship at
Canton, which he was professing to obtain for Borrow. The result was the
foaming abuse of "The Romany Rye," where Bowring is the old Radical. The
affair of the Sinai manuscripts followed close on this. All that he saw
of foreign lands was at the Exhibition of 1851, where he frequently
accosted foreigners in their own tongue, so that it began to be whispered
about that he was "uncanny": he excited so much remark that his daughter
thought it better to drag him away.
He was suffering from ill-health and untranquility of mind which gave his
mother anxiety, though his physical strength appears not to have
degenerated, for in 1853, at Yarmouth, he rescued a man out of a stormy
sea. He was an unpleasant companion for those whom he did not like or
could not get on with. Thackeray tried to get up a conversation with
him, his final effort being the question, "Have you seen my 'Snob Papers'
in 'Punch'?" To which Borrow answered: "In 'Punch'? It is a periodical
I never look at." He once met Miss Agnes Strickland:
"Borrow was unwilling to be introduced, but was prevailed on to submit.
He sat down at her side; before long she spoke with rapture of his works,
and asked his permission to send him a copy of her 'Queens of England.'
He exclaimed, 'For God's sake, don't, madam, I should not know where to
put them or what to do with them.' On this he rose, fuming, as was his
wont when offended, and said to Mr. Donne, 'What a damned fool that woman
is!' The fact is that, whenever Borrow was induced to do anything
unwillingly, he lost his temper." {208}
The friend who tells this story, Gordon Hake, a poet and doctor at Bury
St. Edmunds, tells also that once when he was at dinner with a banker who
had recently "struck the docket" to secure payment from a friend of
Borrow's, and the banker's wife said to him: "Oh Mr. Borrow, I have read
your books with so much pleasure!" the great man exclaimed: "Pray, what
books do you mean, madam? Do you mean my account books?" How touchy he
was, Mr. Walling shows, by his story of Borrow in Cornwall neglecting a
lady all one evening because she bore the name of the man his father had
knocked down at Menheniot Fair. Several stories of his crushing remarks
prove nothing but that he was big and alarming and uncontrolled.
{picture: Gordon Hake. From the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By
kind permission of Mrs. George Gordon Hake: page209.jpg}
Very little record of his friendly intercourse with men at this middle
period remains. Several letters, of 1853, 1856 and 1857, alone survive
to show that he met and received letters from Fitzgerald. That
Fitzgerald enjoyed an evening with him in 1856 tells us little; and even
so it appears that Fitzgerald only wanted to ask him to read some of the
"Northern Ballads"--"but you shut the book"--and that he doubted whether
Borrow wished to keep up the acquaintance. They had friends in common,
and Fitzgerald had sent Borrow a copy of his "Six Dramas of Calderon," in
1853, confessing that he had had thoughts of sending the manuscript first
for an inspection. He also told Borrow when he was about to make the
"dangerous experiment" of marriage with Miss Barton "of Quaker memory."
In 1857 Borrow came to see him and had the loan of the "Rubaiyat" in
manuscript, and Fitzgerald showed his readiness to see more of the "Great
Man." In 1859 he sent Borrow a copy of "Omar." He found Borrow's
"masterful manners and irritable temper uncongenial," {209} but
succeeded, unlike many other friends, in having no quarrel with him. Near
the end of his life, in 1875, it was Borrow that tried to renew the
acquaintance, but in vain, for Fitzgerald reminded him that friends
"exist and enjoy themselves pretty reasonably without me," and asked, was
not being alone better than having company?
If Borrow had little consideration for others' feelings, his
consideration for his own was exquisite, as this story, belonging to
1856, may help to prove:
"There were three personages in the world whom he always had a desire to
see; two of these had slipped through his fingers, so he was determined
to see the third. 'Pray, Mr. Borrow, who were they?' He held up three
fingers of his left hand and pointed them off with the forefinger of the
right: the first, Daniel O'Connell; the second, Lamplighter (the sire of
Phosphorus, Lord Berners's winner of the Derby); the third, Anna
Gurney. . . ."
One spring day during the Crimean War, when he was walking round Norfolk,
he sent word to Anna Gurney to announce his coming, and she was ready to
receive him.
"When, according to his account, he had been but a very short time in her
presence, she wheeled her chair round and reached her hand to one of her
bookshelves and took down an Arabic Grammar, and put it into his hand,
asking for explanation of some difficult point, which he tried to
decipher; but meanwhile she talked to him continuously; when, said he, 'I
could not study the Arabic Grammar and listen to her at the same time, so
I threw down the book and ran out of the room.' He seems not to have
stopped running till he reached Old Tucker's Inn, at Cromer, where he
renewed his strength, or calmed his temper, with five excellent sausages,
and then came on to Sheringham. . . ." {210a}
The distance is a very good two miles, and Borrow's age was forty-nine.
He is said also to have been considerate towards his mother, the poor,
and domestic animals. Probably he and his mother understood one another.
When he could not write to her, he got his wife to do so; and from 1849
she lived with them at Oulton. As to the poor, Knapp tells us that he
left behind him letters of gratitude or acknowledgment from individuals,
churches, and chapels. As to animals, once when he came upon some men
beating a horse that had fallen, he gave it ale of sufficient quantity
and strength to set it soon upon the road trotting with the rest of its
kind, after the men had received a lecture. {210b} It is also related
that when a favourite old cat crawled out to die in the hedge he brought
it into the house, where he "laid it down in a comfortable spot and
watched it till it was dead." His horse, Sidi Habismilk, the Arab, seems
to have returned his admiration and esteem. He said himself, in "Wild
Wales," after expressing his relief that a boy and dog had not seen a
weazel that ran across his path:
"I hate to see poor wild animals persecuted and murdered, lose my
appetite for dinner at hearing the screams of a hare pursued by
greyhounds, and am silly enough to feel disgust and horror at the squeals
of a rat in the fangs of a terrier, which one of the sporting tribe once
told me were the sweetest sounds in 'natur.'"