In his introduction to “The Romany Rye,” {317} Hindes Groome gave a long list of Romany Ryes to show that Borrow was neither the only one nor the first. He went on to say that there must have been over a dozen Englishmen, in 1874, with a greater knowledge of the Anglo-Gypsy dialect than Borrow showed in “Romano Lavo-Lil.” He added that Borrow’s knowledge “of the strange history of the Gypsies was very elementary, of their manners almost more so, and of their folk-lore practically nil.” And yet, he concluded, he “would put George Borrow above every other writer on the Gypsies. . . . He communicates a subtle insight into Gypsydom that is totally wanting in the works—mainly philological—of Pott, Liebich . . . and their confrÈres.” Hindes Groome was speaking, too, from the point of view of a Romany student, not of a critic of human literature. In the same way Borrow stands above other English writers on Spain and Wales, for the insight and life that are lacking in the works of the authorities.

As a master of the living word, Borrow’s place is high, and it is unnecessary to make other claims for him. He was a wilful roamer in literature and the world, who attained to no mastery except over words. If there were many Romany Ryes before Borrow, as there were great men before Agamemnon, there was not another Borrow, as there was not another Homer.

He sings himself. He creates a wild Spain, a wild England, a wild Wales, and in them places himself, the Gypsies, and other wildish men, and himself again. His outstanding character, his ways and gestures, irresistible even when offensive, hold us while he is in our presence. In these repressed indoor days, we like a swaggering man who does justice to the size of the planet. We run after biographies of extraordinary monarchs, poets, bandits, prostitutes, and see in them magnificent expansions of our fragmentary, undeveloped, or mistaken selves. We love strange mighty men, especially when they are dead and can no longer rob us of property, sleep, or life: we can handle the great hero or blackguard by the fireside as easily as a cat. Borrow, as his books portray him, is admirably fitted to be our hero. He stood six-feet-two and was so finely made that, in spite of his own statement which could not be less than true, others have declared him six-feet-three and six-feet-four. He could box, ride, walk, swim, and endure hardship. He was adventurous. He was solitary. He was opinionated and a bully. He was mysterious: he impressed all and puzzled many. He spoke thirty languages and translated their poetry into verse.

Moreover, he ran away. He ran away from school as a boy. He ran away from London as a youth. He ran away from England as a man. He ran away from West Brompton as an old man, to the Gypsyries of London. He went out into the wilderness and he savoured of it. His running away from London has something grand and allegorical about it. It reminds me of the Welshman on London Bridge, carrying a hazel stick which a strange old man recognised as coming from Craig-y-Dinas, and at the old man’s bidding he went to Craig-y-Dinas and to the cave in it, and found Arthur and his knights sleeping and a great treasure buried. . .

The Gipsyrie at Battersea. Photo: W. J. Roberts

In these days when it is a remarkable thing if an author has his pocket picked, or narrowly escapes being in a ship that is wrecked, or takes poison when he is young, even the outline of Borrow’s life is attractive. Like Byron, Ben Jonson, and Chaucer, he reminds us that an author is not bound to be a nun with a beard. He depicts himself continually, at all ages, and in all conditions of pathos or pride. Other human beings, with few exceptions, he depicts only in relation to himself. He never follows men and women here and there, but reveals them in one or two concentrated hours; and either he admires or he dislikes, and there is no mistaking it. Thus his humour is limited by his egoism, which leads him into extravagance, either to his own advantage or to the disadvantage of his enemies.

He kept good company from his youth up. Wistful or fancifully envious admiration for the fortunate simple yeomen, or careless poor men, or noble savages, or untradesmanlike fishermen, or unromanized Germani, or animals who do not fret about their souls, admiration for those in any class who are not for the fashion of these days, is a deep-seated and ancient sentiment, akin to the sentiment for childhood and the golden age. Borrow met a hundred men fit to awaken and satisfy this admiration in an age when thousands can over-eat and over-dress in comfort all the days of their life. Sometimes he shows that he himself admires in this way, but more often he mingles with them as one almost on an equality with them, though his melancholy or his book knowledge is at times something of a foil. He introduces us to fighting men, jockeys, thieves, and ratcatchers, without our running any risk of contamination. Above all, he introduces us to the Gypsies, people who are either young and beautiful or strong, or else witch-like in a fierce old age.

Izaak Walton heard the Gypsies talking under the honeysuckle hedge at Waltham, and the beggar virgin singing:

“Bright shines the sun, play, beggars play!
Here’s scraps enough to serve to-day.”

Glanvill told of the poor Oxford scholar who went away with the Gypsies and learnt their “traditional kind of learning,” and meant soon to leave them and give the world an account of what he had learned. Men like George Morland have lived for a time with Gypsies. Matthew Arnold elaborated Glanvill’s tale in a sweet Oxford strain. All these things delight us. Some day we shall be pleased even with the Gypsy’s carrion-eating and thieving, “those habits of the Gypsy, shocking to the moralist and sanitarian, and disgusting to the person of delicate stomach,” which please Mr. W. H. Hudson “rather than the romance and poetry which the scholar-Gypsy enthusiasts are fond of reading into him.” Borrow’s Gypsies are wild and uncoddled and without sordidness, and will not soon be superseded. They are painted with a lively if ideal colouring, and they live only in his books. They will not be seen again until the day of Jefferies’ wild England, “after London,” shall come, and tents are pitched amidst the ruins of palaces that had displaced earlier tents. Borrow’s England is the old England of Fielding, painted with more intensity because even as Borrow was travelling the change was far advanced, and when he was writing had been fulfilled. And now most people have to keep off the grass, except in remotest parts or in the neighbourhood of large towns where landowners are, to some extent, kept in their place. The rivers, the very roads, are not ours, as they were Borrow’s. We go out to look for them still, and of those who adventure with caravan, tent, or knapsack, the majority must be consciously under Borrow’s influence.

Yet he was no mere lover and praiser of old times. His London in 1825 is more romantic than the later London of more deliberate romances: he found it romantic; he did not merely think it would be so if only we could see it. He loved the old and the wild too well to deface his feeling by more than an occasional comparison with the new and the refined, and these comparisons are not effective.

He is best when he is without apparent design. As a rule if he has a design it is too obvious: he exaggerates, uses the old-fashioned trick of re-appearance and recognition, or breaks out into heavy eloquence of description or meditation. These things show up because he is the most “natural” of writers. His style is a modification of the style of his age, and is without the consistent personal quality of other vigorous men’s, like Hazlitt or Cobbett. Perhaps English became a foreign language like his other thirty. Thus his books have no professional air, and they create without difficulty the illusion of reality. This lack of a literary manner, this appearance of writing like everybody else in his day, combines, with his character and habits, to endear him to a generation that has had its Pater and may find Stevenson too silky.

More than most authors Borrow appears greater than his books, though he is their offspring. It is one of his great achievements to have made his books bring forth this lusty and mysterious figure which moves to and fro in all of them, worthy of the finest scenes and making the duller ones acceptable. He is not greater than his books in the sense that he is greater than the sum of them: as a writer he made the most out of his life. But in the flesh he was a fine figure of a man, and what he wrote has added something, swelling him to more than human proportions, stranger and more heroical. So we come to admire him as a rare specimen of the genus homo, who had among other faculties that of writing English; and at last we have him armed with a pen that is mightier than a sword, but with a sword as well, and what he writes acquires a mythical value. Should his writing ever lose the power to evoke this figure, it might suffer heavily. We to-day have many temptations to over praise him, because he is a Great Man, a big truculent outdoor wizard, who comes to our doors with a marvellous company of Gypsies and fellows whose like we shall never see again and could not invent. When we have used the impulse he may give us towards a ruder liberty, he may be neglected; but I cannot believe that things so much alive as many and many a page of Borrow will ever die.