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 habituÉs, 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 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 BaÏkal 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 “AthenÆum,” {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 calÈche, 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.