When, at the end of his fifteenth year, George Borrow completed his term of study at the Norwich Grammar School, his parents had considerable difficulty in determining upon a profession for their erratic son. In the solution of this problem he, himself, could help them but little towards a satisfactory conclusion. His strange disposition and tastes were a source of continual astonishment and mystification to the old people. What, they asked themselves, could be done with a lad whose only decided bent was in the direction of philological studies, who at an early age had attained a knowledge of Erse, and whose great pleasure it was to converse in Romany with the gipsies whom he met at the fair-ground on Norwich Castle Hill? His father was anxious that he should enter the Church; but George’s unsettled disposition was an effectual bar against his taking such a step, for he would never have been able to apply himself with sufficient attention to the necessary routine course of college study. There is little doubt that the legal profession was one for which Borrow was the least adapted, and of this he was well aware. When, however, in 1819, the time arrived for him to be articled to Messrs. Simpson and Rackham of Tuck’s Court, St. Giles, he apparently offered no objection, and his recollections of the years when he was tied to a lawyer’s desk were always pleasant to him in after-life. But these pleasant recollections had little to do with the duties of his calling—they arose rather from the fact that his work was easy, and so intermittent as to give him ample opportunity for indulging in his day-dreams. Who can doubt the personal basis of that passage in “Lavengro” in which he says: “Yes, very pleasant times were those, when within the womb of a lofty desk, behind which I sat for some hours every day, transcribing (when I imagined eyes were upon me) Yes, there was little in Borrow’s nature that was in common with that of the followers of the legal profession. What food for his wild imagination could he find in the prosy records and dry-as-dust documents of a lawyer’s office? They contained words that to him, as to many of his master’s clients, were without meaning: his thoughts wandered beyond their mazy entanglements into a realm where the law that restrained was that of Nature Borrow has left us a striking picture of the head of the firm of Simpson and Rackham; a picture drawn with that wealth of detail and uncompromising truthfulness which would have made the worthy gentleman tremble had he known at the time what a keen observer he was receiving beneath his roof. “A more respectable-looking individual was never seen,” writes his erstwhile pupil; “he really looked what he was, a gentleman of the law—there was nothing of the pettifogger about him: somewhat under middle size, and somewhat rotund in person, he was always dressed in a full suit of black, never worn long enough to become threadbare. His face was rubicund, and not without And then follows a little glimpse into the provincial life of the old Norfolk capital that shows how little change there has been in the aims and habits of a certain portion of the middle class since the first quarter of the century. “He had a handsome practice, and might have died a very rich man, much richer than he did, had he not been in the habit of giving rather expensive dinners to certain great people, who gave him nothing in return, except their company.” This worthy old gentleman must have been sorely puzzled as to what he should make of the tall, spare, serious-looking lad who was placed under his charge. He confessed to the old captain that the latter’s son was “a very extraordinary youth, a most remarkable youth, indeed;” and we can well believe him. On one occasion, Borrow showed a one-eyed beggar into his master’s private room, and installed him in an armchair “like a justice of the A sense of duty towards those who were responsible for his upbringing, does not seem to have been a strong point with George Borrow. He disliked the profession to which he was apprenticed, and it is evident that his mind was as absent from his duties as was his heart. He was always dreaming of sagas and sea-rovers, battles and bards. Shut up in his dull and dusty desk, he would
No one will deny that “the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” for have we not all thought such thoughts, and dreamt our dreams? But they are not as a rule conducive to the attainment of a mastery of the details and subtleties of law. One day an old countryman from the coast brought George a book of Danish ballads, left at his coast-line cottage by a crew of shipwrecked Danes. Once possessed of this work, he could not No, Borrow was never meant to be a lawyer; but no calling that was possible to him could have suited him so well at the time with which we are dealing. Apparently the tasks set him were so light that he had ample opportunity for the pursuance of the philological investigations that he delighted in. His efforts in this direction attracted the attention of Dr. William Taylor, who had returned to his native city after his wanderings in France and Germany. As is well known, the accomplished scholar and translator was an intimate friend of Southey’s, and it was to the poet he Describing Taylor, when he and Lavengro are discussing together the possibility of becoming a good German scholar without being an ardent smoker, Borrow writes: “The forehead of the elder individual was high, and perhaps appeared more so than it really was, from the hair being carefully brushed back, as if for the purpose of displaying to the best advantage that part of the cranium; his eyes were large and full, and of a light brown, and might have been called heavy and dull, had they not been occasionally lighted up by a sudden gleam not so brilliant, however, as that which at every inhalation shone from the bowl of a long clay pipe which he was smoking, but which, from a certain sucking sound which about this time began to be heard from the bottom, appeared to be giving notice that it would soon require replenishment from a certain canister which, together with a lighted taper, stood upon the table beside him.” That the elderly German student and his youthful emulator were kindred spirits, there is no doubt; and We have no sure knowledge of whether, while in Norwich, Borrow made the acquaintance of Old Crome. We know, however, that he was an enthusiastic admirer of the self-taught master of the Old Norwich School of artists. Still, he may never have been brought into immediate contact with him; for Crome was in his forty-sixth year when Borrow’s family first appeared in Norwich, and George was then but a young lad. But before 1821, when Old Crome died, Borrow must have learnt a good deal both of the painter and his pictures, for the admiration that he afterwards expressed can hardly have been entirely the outcome of the artist’s posthumous fame. “He has painted,” writes Borrow, “not pictures of the world, but English pictures, such as Gainsborough himself might have done; beautiful rural pieces, with trees that might well tempt the little birds to perch upon them; thou needest not run to Rome, brother” (this was written of the time when his brother John was leaving England to study art upon the Continent), “where lives the old Mariolater, after pictures of the world, whilst at home there are It would almost appear from the details of the dark-brown coat and top-boots that Borrow must have met Crome at some period of his Norwich life. From the foregoing eulogy, one would gather that his brother John was a pupil of the old painter. This may well have been the case, for Crome had many such pupils, amongst whom, as has lately been shown, were, in earlier years, some of the sisters Gurney of Earlham. |