I have been reading those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which appeared in The AthenÆum. [25] I have been reading them, I may add, under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-same heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quaint talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life. So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his paper I seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian accent of the well-remembered voice—I seemed to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now stopping to watch the water-wagtail by the ponds as he descanted upon the powers of that enchanted bird—powers, like many human endowments, more glorious than pleasant, if it is sober truth, as Borrow would gravely tell, that the gipsy lad who knocks a water-wagtail on the head with a stone gains for a bride a “ladye from a far countrie,” and dazzles with his good luck all the other black-eyed young urchins of the dingle.

Though my own intimacy with Borrow did not begin till he was considerably advanced in years, and ended on his finally quitting London for Oulton, there were circumstances in our intercourse—circumstances, I mean, connected partly with temperament and partly with mutual experience—which make me doubt whether any one understood him better than I did, or broke more thoroughly through that exclusiveness of temper which isolated him from all but a few. However, be this as it may, no one at least realized more fully than I how lovable was his nature, with all his angularities—how simple and courageous, how manly and noble. His shyness, his apparent coldness, his crotchety obstinacy, repelled people, and consequently those who at any time during his life really understood him must have been very few. How was it, then, that such a man wandered about over Europe and fraternized so completely with a race so suspicious and intractable as the gipsies? A natural enough question, which I have often been asked, and this is my reply:—

Those who know the gipsies will understand me when I say that this suspicious and wary race of wanderers—suspicious and wary from an instinct transmitted through ages of dire persecutions from the Children of the Roof—will readily fraternize with a blunt, single-minded, and shy eccentric like Borrow, while perhaps the skilful man of the world may find all his tact and savoir faire useless and, indeed, in the way. And the reason of this is not far to seek, perhaps. What a gipsy most dislikes is the feeling that his “gorgio” interlocutor is thinking about him; for, alas! to be the object of “gorgio” thoughts—has it not been a most dangerous and mischievous honour to every gipsy since first his mysterious race was driven to accept the grudging hospitality of the Western world? A gipsy hates to be watched, and knows at once when he is being watched; for in tremulous delicacy of apprehension his organization is far beyond that of an Englishman, or, indeed, of any member of any of the thick-fingered races of Europe. One of the results of this excessive delicacy is that a gipsy can always tell to a surety whether a “gorgio” companion is thinking about him, or whether the “gorgio’s” thoughts are really and genuinely occupied with the fishing rod, the net, the gin, the gun, or whatsoever may be the common source of interest that has drawn them together.

Now, George Borrow, after the first one or two awkward interviews were well over, would lapse into a kind of unconscious ruminating bluntness, a pronounced and angular self-dependence, which might well disarm the suspiciousness of the most wary gipsy, from the simple fact that it was genuine. Hence, as I say, among the few who understood Borrow his gipsy friends very likely stood first—outside, of course, his family circle. And surely this is an honour to Borrow; for the gipsies, notwithstanding certain undeniable obliquities in matters of morals and cusine, are the only people left in the island who are still free from British vulgarity (perhaps because they are not British). It is no less an honour to them, for while he lived the island did not contain a nobler English gentleman than him they called the “Romany Rye.”

Borrow’s descriptions of gipsy life are, no doubt, too deeply charged with the rich lights shed from his own personality entirely to satisfy a more matter-of-fact observer, and I am not going to say that he is anything like so photographic as F. H. Groome, for instance, or so trustworthy. But then it should never be forgotten that Borrow was, before everything else, a poet. If this statement should be challenged by “the present time,” let me tell the present time that by poet I do not mean merely a man who is skilled in writing lyrics and sonnets and that kind of thing, but primarily a man who has the poetic gift of seeing through “the shows of things” and knowing where he is—the gift of drinking deeply of the waters of life and of feeling grateful to Nature for so sweet a draught; a man who, while acutely feeling the ineffable pathos of human life, can also feel how sweet a thing it is to live, having so great and rich a queen as Nature for his mother, and for companions any number of such amusing creatures as men and women. In this sense I cannot but set Borrow, with his love of nature and his love of adventure, very high among poets—as high, perhaps, as I place another dweller in tents, Sylvester Boswell himself, “the well-known and popalated gipsy of Codling Gap,” who, like Borrow, is famous for “his great knowledge in grammaring one of the ancientist langeges on record,” and whose touching preference of a gipsy tent to a roof, “on the accent of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life,” is expressed with a poetical feeling such as Chaucer might have known had he not, as a court poet, been too genteel. “Enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life!” That is what Borrow did; and how few there are that understand it.

The self-consciousness which in the presence of man produces that kind of shyness which was Borrow’s characteristic left him at once when he was with Nature alone or in the company of an intimate friend. At her, no man’s gaze was more frank and childlike than his. Hence the charm of his books. No man’s writing can take you into the country as Borrow’s can: it makes you feel the sunshine, see the meadows, smell the flowers, hear the skylark sing and the grasshopper chirrup. Who else can do it? I know of none. And as to personal intercourse with him, if I were asked what was the chief delight of this, I should say that it was the delight of bracingness. A walking tour with a self-conscious lover of the picturesque—an “interviewer” of Nature with a note-book—worrying you to admire him for admiring Nature so much, is one of those occasional calamities of life which a gentleman and a Christian must sometimes heroically bear, but the very thought of which will paralyze with fear the sturdiest Nature-worshipper, whom no crevasse or avalanche or treacherous mist can appal. But a walk and talk with Borrow as he strode through the bracken on an autumn morning had the exhilarating effect upon his companion of a draught of the brightest mountain air. And this was the result not, assuredly, of any exuberance of animal spirits (Borrow, indeed, was subject to fits of serious depression), but rather of a feeling he induced that between himself and all nature, from the clouds floating lazily over head to the scented heather, crisp and purple, under foot, there was an entire fitness and harmony—a sort of mutual understanding, indeed. There was, I say, something bracing in the very look of this silvery-haired giant as he strode along with a kind of easy sloping movement, like that of a St. Bernard dog (the most deceptive of all movements as regards pace), his beardless face (quite matchless for symmetrical beauty) beaded with the healthy perspiration drops of strong exercise, and glowing and rosy in the sun.

As a vigorous old man Borrow never had an equal, I think. There has been much talk of the vigour of Shelley’s friend, E. J. Trelawny. I knew that splendid old corsair, and admired his agility of limb and brain; but at seventy Borrow could have walked off with Trelawny under his arm. At seventy years of age, after breakfasting at eight o’clock in Hereford Square, he would walk to Putney, meet one or more of us at Roehampton, roam about Wimbledon and Richmond Park with us, bathe in the Fen Ponds with a north-east wind cutting across the icy water like a razor, run about the grass afterwards like a boy to shake off some of the water-drops, stride about the park for hours, and then, after fasting for twelve hours, eat a dinner at Roehampton that would have done Sir Walter Scott’s eyes good to see. Finally, he would walk back to Hereford Square, getting home late at night.

And if the physique of the man was bracing, his conversation, unless he happened to be suffering from one of his occasional fits of depression, was still more so. Its freshness, raciness, and eccentric whim no pen could describe. There is a kind of humour the delight of which is that while you smile at the pictures it draws, you smile quite as much or more to think that there is a mind so whimsical, crotchety, and odd as to draw them. This was the humour of Borrow. His command of facial expression—though he seemed to exercise it almost involuntarily and unconsciously—had, no doubt, much to do with this charm. Once, when he was talking to me about the men of Charles Lamb’s day—The London Magazine set—I asked him what kind of a man was the notorious and infamous Griffiths Wainewright. [32] In a moment Borrow’s face changed: his mouth broke into a Carker-like smile, his eyes became elongated to an expression that was at once fawning and sinister, as he said, “Wainewright! He used to sit in an armchair close to the fire and smile all the evening like this.” He made me see Wainewright and hear his voice as plainly as though I had seen him and heard him in the publishers’ parlour.

His vocabulary, rich in picturesque words of the high road and dingle, his quaint countrified phrases, might also have added to the effect of this kind of eccentric humour. “A duncie book—of course it’s duncie—it’s only duncie books that sell nowadays,” he would shout when some new “immortal poem” or “greatest work of the age” was mentioned. Tennyson, I fear, was the representative duncie poet of the time; but that was because nothing could ever make Borrow realize the fact that Tennyson was not the latest juvenile representative of a “duncie” age; for although, according to Leland, [33] the author of ‘Sordello’ is (as is natural, perhaps) the only bard known in the gipsy tent, it is doubtful whether even his name was more than a name to Borrow; indeed, I think that people who had no knowledge of Romany, Welsh, and Armenian were all more or less “duncie.” As a trap to catch the “foaming vipers,” his critics, he in ‘Lavengro’ purposely misspelt certain Armenian and Welsh words, just to have the triumph of saying in another volume that they who had attacked him on so many points had failed to discover that he had wrongly given “zhats” as the nominative of the Armenian noun for bread, while everybody in England, especially every critic, ought to know that “zhats” is the accusative form.

I will try, however, to give the reader an idea of the whim of Borrow’s conversation, by giving it in something like a dramatic form. Let the reader suppose himself on a summer’s evening at that delightful old roadside inn the Bald-Faced Stag, in the Roehampton Valley, near Richmond Park, where are sitting, over a “cup” (to use Borrow’s word) of foaming ale, Lavengro himself, one of his oldest friends, and a new acquaintance, a certain student of things in general lately introduced to Borrow and nearly, but not quite, admitted behind the hedge of Borrow’s shyness, as may be seen by the initiated from a certain rather constrained, half-resentful expression on his face. Jerry Abershaw’s [34] sword (the chief trophy of mine host) has been introduced, and Borrow’s old friend has been craftily endeavouring to turn the conversation upon that ever fresh and fruitful topic, but in vain. Suddenly the song of a nightingale, perched on a tree not far off, rings pleasantly through the open window and fills the room with a new atmosphere of poetry and romance. “That nightingale has as fine a voice,” says Borrow, “as though he were born and bred in the Eastern Counties.” Borrow is proud of being an East-Anglian, of which the student has already been made aware and which he now turns to good account in the important business he has set himself, of melting Lavengro’s frost and being admitted a member of the Open-Air Club. “Ah!” says the wily-student, “I know the Eastern Counties; no nightingales like those, especially Norfolk nightingales.” Borrow’s face begins to brighten slightly, but still he does not direct his attention to the stranger, who proceeds to remark that although the southern counties are so much warmer than Norfolk, some of them, such as Cornwall and Devon, are without nightingales. Borrow’s face begins to get brighter still, and he looks out of the window with a smile, as though he were being suddenly carried back to the green lanes of his beloved Norfolk.

“From which well-known fact of ornithology,” continues the student, “I am driven to infer that in their choice of habitat nightingales are guided not so much by considerations of latitude as of good taste.” Borrow’s anger is evidently melting away. The talk runs still upon nightingales, and the student mentions the attempt to settle them in Scotland once made by Sir John Sinclair, who introduced nightingales’ eggs from England into robins’ nests in Scotland, in the hope that the young nightingales, after enjoying a Scotch summer, would return to the place of their birth, after the custom of English nightingales. “And did they return?” says Borrow, with as much interest as if the honour of his country were involved in the question. “Return to Scotland?” says the student quietly; “the entire animal kingdom are agreed, you know, in never returning to Scotland. Besides, the nightingales’ eggs in question were laid in Norfolk.” Conquered at last, Borrow extends the hand of brotherhood to the impudent student (whose own private opinion, no doubt, is that Norfolk is more successful in producing Nelsons than nightingales), and proceeds without more ado to tell how “poor Jerry Abershaw,” on being captured by the Bow Street runners, had left his good sword behind him as a memento of highway glories soon to be ended on the gallows tree. (By-the-bye, I wonder where that sword is now; it was bought by Mr. Adolphus Levy, of Alton Lodge, at the closing of the Bald-Faced Stag.)

From Jerry Abershaw Borrow gets upon other equally interesting topics, such as the decadence of beer and pugilism, and the nobility of the now neglected British bruiser, as exampled especially in the case of the noble Pearce, who lost his life through rushing up a staircase and rescuing a woman from a burning house after having on a previous occasion rescued another woman by blacking the eyes of six gamekeepers, who had been set upon her by some noble lord or another. Then, while the ale sparkles with a richer colour as the evening lights grow deeper, the talk gets naturally upon “lords” in general, gentility nonsense, and “hoity-toityism” as the canker at the heart of modern civilization.

II.

Borrow could look at Nature without thinking of himself—a rare gift, for Nature, as I have said, has been disappointed in man. Her great desire from the first has been to grow an organism so conscious that it can turn round and look at her with intelligent eyes. She has done so at last, but the consciousness is so high as to be self-conscious, and man cannot for egotism look at his mother after all. Borrow was a great exception. Thoreau’s self-consciousness showed itself in presence of Nature, Borrow’s in presence of man. The very basis of Borrow’s nature was reverence. His unswerving belief in the beneficence of God was most beautiful, most touching. In his life Borrow had suffered much: a temperament such as his must needs suffer much—so shy it was, so proud, and yet yearning for a close sympathy such as no creature and only solitary communing with Nature can give. Under any circumstances, I say, Borrow would have known how sharp and cruel are the flints along the road—how tender are a poet’s feet; but his road at one time was rough indeed; not when he was with his gipsy friends (for a tent is freer than a roof, according to the grammarian of Codling Gap, and roast hedgehog is the daintiest of viands), but when he was toiling in London, his fine gifts unrecognized and useless—that was when Borrow passed through the fire. Yet every sorrow and every disaster of his life he traced to the kindly hand of a benevolent and wise Father, who sometimes will use a whip of scorpions, but only to chastise into a right and happy course the children he loves.

Apart from the instinctive rectitude of his nature, it was with Borrow a deep-rooted conviction that sin never goes, and never can go, unpunished. His doctrine, indeed, was something like the Buddhist doctrine of Karma—it was based on an instinctive apprehension of the sacredness of “law” in the most universal acceptation of that word. Sylvester Boswell’s definition of a free man, in that fine, self-respective certificate of his, as one who is “free from all cares or fears of law that may come against him,” is, indeed, the gospel of every true nature-worshipper. The moment Thoreau spurned the legal tax-gatherer the law locked the nature-worshipper in gaol. To enjoy nature the soul must be free—free not only from tax-gatherers, but from sin; for every wrongful act awakes, out of the mysterious bosom of Nature herself, its own peculiar serpent, having its own peculiar stare, but always hungry and bloody-fanged, which follows the delinquent’s feet whithersoever they go, gliding through the dewy grass on the brightest morning, dodging round the trees on the calmest eve, wriggling across the brook where the wrongdoer would fain linger on the stepping-stones to soothe his soul with the sight of the happy minnows shooting between the water-weeds—following him everywhere, in short, till at last, in sheer desperation, he must needs stop and turn, and bare his breast to the fangs; when, having yielded up to the thing its fill of atoning blood, Nature breaks into her old smile again, and he goes on his way in peace.

All this Borrow understood better than any man I have ever met. Yet even into his doctrine of Providence Borrow imported such an element of whim that it was impossible to listen to him sometimes without a smile. For instance, having arrived at the conclusion that a certain lieutenant had been cruelly ill used by genteel magnates high in office, Borrow discovered that since that iniquity Providence had frowned on the British arms, and went on to trace the disastrous blunder of Balaklava to this cause. Again, having decided that Sir Walter Scott’s worship of gentility and Jacobitism had been the main cause of the revival of flunkeyism and Popery in England, Borrow saw in the dreadful monetary disasters which overclouded Scott’s last days the hand of God, whose plan was to deprive him of the worldly position Scott worshipped at the very moment when his literary fame (which he misprized) was dazzling the world.

And now as to the gipsy wanderings. As I have said, no man has been more entirely misunderstood than Borrow. That a man who certainly did (as F. H. Groome says) look like a “colossal clergyman” should have joined the gipsies, that he should have wandered over England and Europe, content often to have the grass for his bed and the sky for his hostry-roof, has astonished very much (and I believe scandalized very much) this age. My explanation of the matter is this: Among the myriads of children born into a world of brick and mortar there appears now and then one who is meant for better things—one who exhibits unmistakable signs that he inherits the blood of those remote children of the open air who, according to the old SabÆan notion, on the plains of Asia lived with Nature, loved Nature and were loved by her, and from whom all men are descended. George Borrow was one of those who show the olden strain. Now, for such a man, born in a country like England, where the modern fanaticism of house-worship has reached a condition which can only be called maniacal, what is there left but to try for a time the gipsy’s tent? On the Continent house-worship is strong enough in all conscience; but in France, in Spain, in Italy, even in Germany, people do think of something beyond the house. But here, where there are no romantic crimes, to get a genteel house, to keep (or “run”) a genteel house, or to pretend to keep (or “run”) a genteel house, is the great first cause of almost every British delinquency, from envy and malignant slander up to forgery, robbery, and murder. And yet it is a fact, as Borrow discovered (when a mere lad in a solicitor’s office), that to men in health the house need not, and should not, be the all-absorbing consideration, but should be quite secondary to considerations of honesty and sweet air, pure water, clean linen, good manners, freedom to migrate at will, and, above all, freedom from “all cares or fears of law” that may come against a man in the shape of debts, duns, and tax-gatherers.

Against this folly of softening our bodies by “snugness” and degrading our souls by “flunkeyism,” Borrow’s early life was a protest. He saw that if it were really unwholesome for man to be shone upon by the sun, blown upon by the winds, and rained upon by the rain, like all the other animals, man would never have existed at all, for sun and wind and rain have produced him and everything that lives. He saw that for the cultivation of health, honesty, and good behaviour every man born in the temperate zone ought, unless King Circumstance says “No,” to spend in the open air eight or nine hours at least out of the twenty-four, and ought to court rather than to shun Nature’s sweet shower-bath the rain, unless, of course, his chest is weak.

The evanescence of literary fame is strikingly illustrated by recalling at this moment my first sight of Borrow. I could not have been much more than a boy, for I and a friend had gone down to Yarmouth in March to enjoy the luxury of bathing in a Yarmouth sea, and it is certainly a “good while”—to use Borrow’s phrase—since I considered that a luxury suitable to March. On the morning after our arrival, having walked some distance out of Yarmouth, we threw down our clothes and towels upon the sand some few yards from another heap of clothes, which indicated, to our surprise, that we were not, after all, the only people in Yarmouth who could bathe in a biting wind; and soon we perceived, ducking in an immense billow that came curving and curling towards the shore, such a pair of shoulders as I had not seen for a long time, crowned by a head white and glistening as burnished silver. (Borrow’s hair was white I believe, when he was quite a young man.) When the wave had broken upon the sand, there was the bather wallowing on the top of the water like a Polar bear disporting in an Arctic sun. In swimming Borrow clawed the water like a dog. I had plunged into the surf and got very close to the swimmer, whom I perceived to be a man of almost gigantic proportions, when suddenly an instinct told me that it was Lavengro himself, who lived thereabouts, and the feeling that it was he so entirely stopped the action of my heart that I sank for a moment like a stone, soon to rise again, however, in glow of pleasure and excitement: so august a presence was Lavengro’s then!

I ought to say, however, that Borrow was at that time my hero. From my childhood I had taken the deepest interest in proscribed races such as the Cagots, but especially in the persecuted children of Roma. I had read accounts of whole families being executed in past times for no other crime than that of their being born gipsies, and tears, childish and yet bitter, had I shed over their woes. Now Borrow was the recognized champion of the gipsies—the friend companion, indeed, of the proscribed and persecuted races of the world. Nor was this all: I saw in him more of the true Nature instinct than in any other writer—or so, at least, I imagined. To walk out from a snug house at Rydal Mount for the purpose of making poetical sketches for publication seemed to me a very different thing from having no home but a tent in a dingle, or rather from Borrow’s fashion of making all Nature your home. Although I would have given worlds to go up and speak to him as he was tossing his clothes upon his back, I could not do it. Morning after morning did I see him undress, wallow in the sea, come out again, give me a somewhat sour look, dress, and then stride away inland at a tremendous pace, but never could I speak to him; and many years passed before I saw him again. He was then half forgotten.

For an introduction to him at last I was indebted to Dr. Gordon Hake, the poet, who had known Borrow for many years, and whose friendship Borrow cherished above most things—as was usual, indeed, with the friends of Dr. Hake. This was done with some difficulty, for, in calling at Roehampton for a walk through Richmond Park and about the Common, Borrow’s first question was always, “Are you alone?” and no persuasion could induce him to stay unless it could be satisfactorily shown that he would not be “pestered by strangers.” On a certain morning, however, he called, and suddenly coming upon me, there was no retreating, and we were introduced. He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much annoyed. Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that drew my heart to him, for to me he was the Lavengro of my boyhood still. My own shyness had been long before fingered off by the rough handling of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier it was, yet I attacked it manfully. I knew that Borrow had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then unfortunately, like all specialists, he considered that in these his own special directions lay all the knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appeared to Borrow as the most striking characteristic of the present age was its ignorance.

Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk of his own published books or of gipsies appeared to him to be “prying,” though there I should have been quite at home. I knew, however, that in the obscure English pamphlet literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of eccentric people and strange adventurers, Borrow was very learned, and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction. I touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect. Borrow evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail. Then I touched upon beer, the British bruiser, “gentility-nonsense,” the “trumpery great”; then upon etymology, traced hoity-toityism to toit, a roof,—but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a withering smile. I tried other subjects in the same direction, but with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very scarce eighteenth-century pamphlet narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett’s supposed victim, having been attacked on the night in question by a violent bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes’ walk in the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and bore him off to sea, where he had been in service ever since. The story is true, and the pamphlet, Borrow afterwards told me (I know not on what authority), was written by Goldsmith from Gwinett’s dictation for a platter of cowheel.

To the bewilderment of Dr. Hake, I introduced the subject of Ambrose Gwinett in the same manner as I might have introduced the story of “Achilles’ wrath,” and appealed to Dr. Hake (who, of course, had never heard of the book or the man) as to whether a certain incident in the pamphlet had gained or lost by the dramatist who, at one of the minor theatres, had many years ago dramatized the story. Borrow was caught at last. “What?” said he, “you know that pamphlet about Ambrose Gwinett?” “Know it?” said I, in a hurt tone, as though he had asked me if I knew ‘Macbeth’; “of course I know Ambrose Gwinett, Mr. Borrow, don’t you?” “And you know the play?” said he. “Of course I do, Mr. Borrow?” I said, in a tone that was now a little angry at such an insinuation of crass ignorance. “Why,” said he, “it’s years and years since it was acted; I never was much of a theatre man, but I did go to see that.” “Well, I should rather think you did, Mr. Borrow,” said I. “But,” said he, staring hard at me, “you—you were not born!” “And I was not born,” said I, “when the ‘Agamemnon’ was produced, and yet one reads the ‘Agamemnon,’ Mr. Borrow. I have read the drama of ‘Ambrose Gwinett.’ I have it bound in morocco with some more of Douglas Jerrold’s early transpontine plays, and some Æschylean dramas by Mr. Fitzball. I will lend it to you, Mr. Borrow, if you like.” He was completely conquered. “Hake!” he cried, in a loud voice, regardless of my presence. “Hake! your friend knows everything.” Then he murmured to himself, “Wonderful man! Knows Ambrose Gwinett!”

It is such delightful reminiscences as these that will cause me to have as long as I live a very warm place in my heart for the memory of George Borrow.

From that time I used to see Borrow often at Roehampton, sometimes at Putney, and sometimes, but not often, in London. I could have seen much more of him than I did had not the whirlpool of London, into which I plunged for a time, borne me away from this most original of men; and this is what I so greatly lament now: for of Borrow it may be said, as it was said of a greater man still, that “after Nature made him she forthwith broke the mould.” The last time I ever saw him was shortly before he left London to live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and boiling over the West-End. Borrow came up and stood leaning over the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be. Like most people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets. Turner could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could not describe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun and had lost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it went curling round the sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and clearest air—a peculiar effect which struck Borrow deeply. I never saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and from its association with “the last of Borrow” I shall never forget it.

III.

Students of Borrow will be as much surprised as pleased to find what a large collection of documents Dr. Knapp has been able to use in compiling this long-expected biography. [50] Indeed, the collection might have been larger and richer still. For instance, in the original manuscript of ‘Zincali’ (in the possession of the present writer) there are some variations from the printed text; but, what is of very much more importance, the whole—or nearly the whole—of Borrow’s letters to the Bible Society, which Dr. Knapp believed to be lost, have been discovered in the crypt of the Bible House in which the records of the Society are stored. But even without these materials two massive volumes crammed with documents throwing light upon the life and career of a man like George Borrow must needs be interesting to the student of English literature. For among all the remarkable characters that during the middle of the present century figured in the world of letters, the most eccentric, the most whimsical, and in every way the most extraordinary was surely the man whom Dr. Knapp calls, appropriately enough, his “hero.”

It is no exaggeration to say that there was not a single point in which Borrow resembled any other writing man of his time; indeed, we cannot, at the moment, recall any really important writer of any period whose eccentricity of character can be compared with his. At the basis of the artistic temperament is generally that “sweet reasonableness” the lack of which we excuse in Borrow and in almost no one else. As to literary whim, it must not be supposed that this quality is necessarily and always the outcome of temperament. There are some authors of whom it may be said that the moment they take pen in hand they pass into their “literary mood,” a mood that in their cases does not seem to be born of temperament, but to spring from some fantastic movement of the intellect. Sterne, for instance, the greatest of all masters of whim (not excluding Rabelais), passed when in the act of writing into a literary mood which, as “Yorick,” he tried to live up to in his private life—tried in vain. With regard to Charles Lamb, his temperament, no doubt, was whimsical enough, and yet how many rich and rare passages in his writings are informed by a whim of a purely intellectual kind—a whim which could only have sprung from that delicious literary mood of his, engendered by much study of quaint old writers, into which he passed when at his desk! But whatsoever is whimsical, whatsoever is eccentric and angular, in Borrow’s writings is the natural, the inevitable growth of a nature more whimsical, more eccentric, more angular still.

That such a man should have had an extraordinary life-experience was to be expected. And an extraordinary life-experience Borrow’s was, to be sure! This alone would lend an especial interest to Borrow’s biography—the fact, we mean, of his life having been extraordinary. For in these days no lives, as a rule, are less adventurous, none, as a rule, less tinged with romance, than the lives of those who attain eminence in the world of letters. No doubt they nowadays move about from place to place a good deal; not a few of them may even be called travellers, or at least globe-trotters; but, alas! in globe-trotting who shall hope to meet with adventures of a more romantic kind than those connected with a railway collision or a storm at sea? And this was so in days that preceded ours. It was so with Scott, it was so with Dickens, it was so with even Dumas, who, chained to his desk for months and months at a stretch, could only be seen by his friends during the intervals of work. Nay, even with regard to the writing men of the far past, the more time a man gave to literary production the less time he had to drink the rich wine of life, to see the world, to study nature and nature’s enigma man.

Perhaps one reason why we have almost no record of what the greatest of all writing men was doing in the world is that while his friends were elbowing the tide of life in the streets of London, or fighting in the Low Countries, or carousing at the Mermaid Tavern, or at the Apollo Saloon, he was filling every moment with work—work which enabled him, before he reached his fifty-second year, to build up that literary monument of his, that edifice which made the monuments of the others, his contemporaries, seem like the handiwork of pigmies. But as regards Borrow, student though he was, it is not as an author that we think of him; it is as the adventurer, it is as the great Romany Rye, who discovered the most interesting people in Europe, and as a brother vagabond lived with them—lived with them “on the accont of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life,” to quote the “testimonial” of the prose-poet Sylvester Boswell.

Even by his personal appearance Borrow was marked off from his fellow-men. As a gipsy girl once remarked, “Nobody as ever see’d the white-headed Romany Rye ever forgot him.” Standing considerably above six feet in height, he was built as perfectly as a Greek statue, and his practice of athletic exercises gave his every movement the easy elasticity of an athlete under training. As to his countenance, “noble” is the only word that can be used to describe it. The silvery whiteness of the thick crop of hair seemed to add in a remarkable way to the beauty of the hairless face, but also it gave a strangeness to it, and this strangeness was intensified by a certain incongruity between the features (perfect Roman-Greek in type) and the Scandinavian complexion, luminous and sometimes rosy as an English girl’s. An increased intensity was lent by the fair skin to the dark lustre of the eyes. What struck the observer, therefore, was not the beauty but the strangeness of the man’s appearance. It was not this feature or that which struck the eye, it was the expression of the face as a whole. If it were possible to describe this expression in a word or two, it might, perhaps, be called a shy self-consciousness.

How did it come about, then, that a man shy, self-conscious, and sensitive to the last degree, became the Ulysses of the writing fraternity, wandering among strangers all over Europe, and consorting on intimate terms with that race who, more than all others, are repelled by shy self-consciousness—the gipsies? This, perhaps, is how the puzzle may be explained. When Borrow was talking to people in his own class of life there was always in his bearing a kind of shy, defiant egotism. What Carlyle calls the “armed neutrality” of social intercourse oppressed him. He felt himself to be in the enemy’s camp. In his eyes there was always a kind of watchfulness, as if he were taking stock of his interlocutor and weighing him against himself. He seemed to be observing what effect his words were having, and this attitude repelled people at first. But the moment he approached a gipsy on the heath, or a poor Jew in Houndsditch, or a homeless wanderer by the wayside, he became another man. He threw off the burden of restraint. The feeling of the “armed neutrality” was left behind, and he seemed to be at last enjoying the only social intercourse that could give him pleasure. This it was that enabled him to make friends so entirely with the gipsies. Notwithstanding what is called “Romany guile” (which is the growth of ages of oppression), the basis of the Romany character is a joyous frankness. Once let the isolating wall which shuts off the Romany from the “Gorgio” be broken through, and the communicativeness of the Romany temperament begins to show itself. The gipsies are extremely close observers; they were very quick to notice how different was Borrow’s bearing towards themselves from his bearing towards people of his own race, and Borrow used to say that “old Mrs. Herne and Leonora were the only gipsies who suspected and disliked him.”

Thus it came about that the gipsies and the wanderers generally were almost the only people in any country who saw the winsome side of Borrow. A truly winsome side he had. Yes, notwithstanding all that has been said about him to the contrary, Borrow was a most interesting and charming companion. We all have our angularities; we all have unpleasant facets of character when occasion offers for showing them. But there are some unfortunate people whose angularities are for ever chafing and irritating their friends. Borrow was one of these. It is very rarely indeed that one meets a friend or an acquaintance of Borrow’s who speaks of him with the kindness he deserved. When a friend or an acquaintance relates an anecdote of him the asperity with which he does so is really remarkable and quite painful. It was—it must have been—far from Dr. Gordon Hake’s wish to speak unkindly of his old friend who remained to the last deeply attached to him. And yet few things have done more to prejudice the public against Borrow than the Doctor’s tale of Lavengro’s outrage at Rougham Rookery, the residence of the banker Bevan, one of the kindest and most benevolent men in Suffolk.

This story, often told by Hake, appeared at last in print in his memoirs. Invited to dinner by Mr. Bevan, Borrow accepted the invitation and, according to the anecdote, thus behaved: During dinner Mrs. Bevan, thinking to please him, said, “Oh, Mr. Borrow, I have read your books with so much pleasure!” On which Borrow exclaimed, “Pray what books do you mean, ma’am—do you mean my account books?” Then, rising from the table, he walked up and down among the servants during the whole dinner, and afterwards wandered about the rooms and passages till the carriage could be ordered for his return home. A monstrous proceeding truly, and not to be condoned by any circumstances. Yet some part of its violence may, perhaps, thus be explained. Borrow’s loyalty to a friend was proverbial—until he and the friend quarrelled. A man who dared say an ungenerous word against a friend of Borrow’s ran the risk of being knocked down. Borrow on this occasion had been driven half mad with rage—unreasoning, ignorant rage—against the Bury banking-house, because it had “struck the docket” against a friend of Borrow’s, the heir to a considerable estate, who had got into difficulties. What Borrow yearned to do was, as he told the present writer, to cane the banker. He had, as far as his own reputation went, far better have done this and taken the consequences than have insulted the banker’s wife—one of the most gentle, amiable, and unassuming ladies in Suffolk. Dr. Knapp speaks very sharply of Miss Cobb’s remarks upon Borrow, and certainly these remarks are made with a great deal too much acidity. But if the Borrovian is to lose temper with every one who girds at Borrow he will lead a not very comfortable life.

Dr. Knapp has no doubt whatever that ‘Lavengro’ is in the main an autobiography. We have none. The only question is how much Dichtung is mingled with the Wahrheit. Had it not been for the amazingly clumsy pieces of fiction which he threw into the narrative—such incidents as that of his meeting on the road the sailor son of the old apple-woman of London Bridge, and the exaggerated description of the man sent to sleep by reading Wordsworth—few readers would have doubted the autobiographical nature of ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye.’ Such incidents as these shed an air of unreality over the whole.

All writers upon Borrow fall into the mistake of considering him to have been an East Anglian. They might as well call Charlotte BrontË a Yorkshirewoman as call Borrow an East Anglian. He was, of course, no more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman. He had at bottom no East Anglian characteristics. He inherited nothing from Norfolk save his accent and his love of “leg of mutton and turnips.” Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the locality that has given birth to a man influences him throughout his life. The fact of Borrow’s having been born in East Anglia was the result of accident. His father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his native place and enlist as a common soldier. Afterwards he became a recruiting officer, and moved about from one part of Great Britain and Ireland to another. It so chanced that while staying at East Dereham, in Norfolk, he met and fell in love with a lady of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow’s father, and very little in the veins of his mother. Borrow’s ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French. But such was the sublime egotism of Borrow—perhaps we should have said such is the sublime egotism of human nature—that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe.

There is, it must be confessed, something to us very agreeable in Dr. Knapp’s single-minded hero-worship. A scholar and a philologist himself, he seems to have devoted a large portion of his life to the study of Borrow—following in Lavengro’s footsteps from one country to another with unflagging enthusiasm. Now and again, undoubtedly, this hero-worship runs to excess: the faults of style and of method in Borrow’s writings are condoned or are passed by unobserved by Dr. Knapp, while the most unanswerable strictures upon them by others are resented. For instance, at the end of the following extract from the report of the gentleman who read ‘Zincali’ for Mr. Murray, he appends a note of exclamation, as though he considers the admirable advice given to be eccentric or bad:—

“The Dialogues are amongst the best parts of the book; but in several of them the tone of the speakers, of those especially who are in humble life, is too correct and elevated, and therefore out of character. This takes away from their effect. I think it would be very advisable that Mr. Borrow should go over them with reference to this point, simplifying a few of the terms of expression and introducing a few contractions—don’ts, can’ts, &c. This would improve them greatly.”

Now the truth is that Mr. Murray’s reader, whoever he was, [60] pointed out the one great blemish in all Borrow’s dramatic pictures of gipsy life, wheresoever the scene may be laid. Take his pictures of English gipsies. The reader has only to compare the dialogue between gipsies given in that photographic study of Romany life ‘In Gipsy Tents’ with the dialogues in ‘Lavengro’ to see how the illusion in Borrow’s narrative is disturbed by the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers. After all allowance is made for the Romany’s love of high-sounding words, it considerably weakens our belief in Mr. and Mrs. Petulengro, Ursula, and the rest, to find them using complex sentences and bookish words which, even among English people, are rarely heard in conversation.

Dr. Knapp says emphatically that Borrow never created a character, and that the originals are easily recognizable to one who thoroughly knows the times and Borrow’s writings. This is true, no doubt, as regards people with whom he was brought into contact at Norwich, and, indeed, generally before the period of his gipsy wanderings. It must not be supposed, however, that such characters as the man who “touched” to avert the evil chance and the man who taught himself Chinese are in any sense portraits. They have so many of Borrow’s own peculiarities that they might rather be called portraits of himself. There was nothing that Borrow strove against with more energy than the curious impulse, which he seems to have shared with Dr. Johnson, to touch the objects along his path in order to save himself from the evil chance. He never conquered the superstition. In walking through Richmond Park he would step out of his way constantly to touch a tree, and he was offended if the friend he was with seemed to observe it. Many of the peculiarities of the man who taught himself Chinese were also Borrow’s own.

“But what about Isopel Berners?” the reader will ask. “How much of truth and how much of fiction went to the presentation of this most interesting character?” Seeing that Dr. Knapp has at his command such an immense amount of material in manuscript, the reader will feel some disappointment at discovering that the book tells us nothing new about her. The character he names Isopel Berners was just the sort of girl in every way to attract Borrow, and if he had had the feeblest spark of the love-passion in his constitution one could almost imagine his falling in love with her. Yet even the portrait of Isopel is marred by Borrow’s impulse towards exaggeration. He must needs describe her as being taller than himself, and as he certainly stood six feet three Isopel would have been far better suited to sit by the side of Borrow’s friend the “Norfolk giant,” Hales, in the little London public-house where he latterly resided, than to become famous as a fighting woman who could conquer the Flaming Tinman. Few indeed have been the women who could stand up for long before a trained boxer, and these must needs be not too tall, and moreover they must have their breasts padded after the manner of a well-known gipsy girl who excelled in this once fashionable accomplishment. Even then a woman’s instinct impels her to guard her chest more carefully than she guards her face, and this leads to disaster. Altogether Borrow, by his wilful exaggeration, makes the reader a little sceptical about Isopel, who was really an East Anglian road-girl of the finest type, known to the Boswells, and remembered not many years ago. All that Dr. Knapp has derived from the documents in his possession concerning her is the following extraordinary passage from the original manuscript, which Borrow struck out of ‘Lavengro.’ He says:—

“As to the remarkable character introduced into ‘Lavengro’ and ‘Romany Rye’ under the name of Isopel Berners, I have no light from the MSS. of George Borrow, save the following fragment, which perhaps I ought to have suppressed. I am sorry if it dispel any illusions:—

“(Loquitur Petulengro) ‘My mind at present rather inclines towards two wives. I have heard that King Pharaoh had two, if not more. Now, I think myself as good a man as he; and if he had more wives than one, why should not I, whose name is Petulengro?’

“‘But what would Mrs. Petulengro say?’

“‘Why, to tell you the truth, brother, it was she who first put the thought into my mind. She has always, you know, had strange notions in her head, gorgiko notions, I suppose we may call them, about gentility and the like, and reading and writing. Now, though she can neither read nor write herself, she thinks that she is lost among our people and that they are no society for her. So says she to me one day, “Pharaoh,” says she, “I wish you would take another wife, that I might have a little pleasant company. As for these here, I am their betters.” “I have no objection,” said I; “who shall it be? Shall it be a Cooper or a Stanley?” “A Cooper or a Stanley!” said she, with a toss of her head, “I might as well keep my present company as theirs; none of your rubbish; let it be a gorgie, one that I can speak an idea with”—that was her word, I think. Now I am thinking that this here Bess of yours would be just the kind of person both for my wife and myself. My wife wants something gorgiko, something genteel. Now Bess is of blood gorgious; if you doubt it, look in her face, all full of pawno ratter, white blood, brother; and as for gentility, nobody can make exceptions to Bess’s gentility, seeing she was born in the workhouse of Melford the Short, where she learned to read and write. She is no Irish woman, brother, but English pure, and her father was a farmer.

“‘So much as far as my wife is concerned. As for myself, I tell you what, brother, I want a strapper; one who can give and take. The Flying Tinker is abroad, vowing vengeance against us all. I know what the Flying Tinker is, so does Tawno. The Flying Tinker came to our camp. “Damn you all,” says he, “I’ll fight the best of you for nothing.”—“Done!” says Tawno, “I’ll be ready for you in a minute.” So Tawno went into his tent and came out naked. “Here’s at you,” says Tawno. Brother, Tawno fought for two hours with the Flying Tinker, for two whole hours, and it’s hard to say which had the best of it or the worst. I tell you what, brother, I think Tawno had the worst of it. Night came on. Tawno went into his tent to dress himself and the Flying Tinker went his way.

“‘Now suppose, brother, the Flying Tinker comes upon us when Tawno is away. Who is to fight the Flying Tinker when he says: “D---n you, I will fight the best of you”? Brother, I will fight the Flying Tinker for five pounds; but I couldn’t for less. The Flying Tinker is a big man, and though he hasn’t my science, he weighs five stone heavier. It wouldn’t do for me to fight a man like that for nothing. But there’s Bess, who can afford to fight the Flying Tinker at any time for what he’s got, and that’s three ha’pence. She can beat him, brother; I bet five pounds that Bess can beat the Flying Tinker. Now, if I marry Bess, I’m quite easy on his score. He comes to our camp and says his say. “I won’t dirty my hands with you,” says I, “at least not under five pounds; but here’s Bess who’ll fight you for nothing.” I tell you what, brother, when he knows that Bess is Mrs. Pharaoh, he’ll fight shy of our camp; he won’t come near it, brother. He knows Bess don’t like him, and what’s more, that she can lick him. He’ll let us alone; at least I think so. If he does come, I’ll smoke my pipe whilst Bess is beating the Flying Tinker. Brother, I’m dry, and will now take a cup of ale.’”

Why did Borrow reject this passage? Was it owing to his dread of respectability’s frowns?—or was it not rather because he felt that here his exaggeration, his departure from the true in quest of the striking, did not recommend itself to his cooler judgment? For those who know anything of the gipsies would say at once that it would have been impossible for Mrs. Petulengro to make this suggestion; and that, even if she had made it, Mr. Petulengro would not have dared to broach it to any English road-girl, least of all to a girl like Isopel Berners. The passage, however, is the most interesting document that Dr. Knapp has published.

What may be called the Isopel Berners chapter of Borrow’s life was soon to be followed by the “veiled period”—that is to say, the period between the point where ends ‘The Romany Rye’ and the point where the Bible Society engages Borrow.

Dr. Knapp’s mind seems a good deal exercised concerning this period. Borrow having chosen to draw the veil over that period, no one has any right to raise it—or, rather, perhaps no one would have had any right to do so had not Borrow himself thrown such a needless mystery around it. In considering any matter in connexion with Borrow it is always necessary to take into account the secretiveness of his disposition, and also his passion for posing. He had a child’s fondness for the wonderful. It is through his own love of mystification that students like Dr. Knapp must needs pry into these matters—must needs ask why Borrow drew the veil over seven years—must needs ask whether during the “veiled period” he led a life of squalid misery, compared with which his sojourn with Isopel Berners in Mumpers’ Dingle was luxury, or whether he was really travelling, as he pretended to have been, over the world.

By yielding to his instinct as a born showman he excites a curiosity which would otherwise be unjustifiable. Even if Dr. Knapp had been able to approach Borrow’s stepdaughter—which he seems not to have been able to do—it is pretty certain that she could have told him nothing of that mysterious seven years. For about this subject the people to whom Borrow seems to have been most reticent were his wife and her daughter. Indeed, it was not until after his wife’s death that he would allude to this period even to his most intimate friends. One of the very few people to whom he did latterly talk with anything like frankness about this period in his life—Dr. Gordon Hake—is dead; and perhaps there is not more than about one other person now living who had anything of his confidence.

With regard to this veiled period, people who read the idyllic pictures in ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye’ of the life of a gipsy gentleman working as a hedge-smith in the dingle or by the roadside seem to forget that Borrow was then working not for amusement, but for bread, and they forget how scant the bread must have been that could be bought for the odd sixpence or the few coppers that he was able to earn. To those, however, who do not forget this it needs no revelation from documents, and none from any surviving friend, to come to the conclusion that as Borrow was mainly living in England during these seven years (continuing for a considerable time his life of a wanderer, and afterwards living as an obscure literary struggler in Norwich), his life was during this period one of privation, disappointment, and gloom. It was for him to decide what he would give to the public and what he would withhold.

The concluding chapter of Dr. Knapp’s book is not only pathetic—it is painful. In the summer of 1874 Borrow left London, bade adieu to Mr. Murray and a few friends, and returned to Oulton—to die. On the 26th of July, 1881, he was found dead in his home at Oulton, in his seventy-ninth year.