Borrow, who was now in his thirty-eighth year, set to work at Oulton upon his “Bible in Spain,” which was published by Mr. John Murray, three years later, in 1843. Of his method, or lack of method, in working, something may be gathered from the preface to the second edition of “The Zincali,” which was written about the time of the issue of the former book. Mr. Murray had advised him to try his hand at something different from his “sorry trash” [41] about gipsies, and write a work that would really be of credit to the great firm in Albemarle Street. Borrow responded by starting on an account of his wanderings in Spain.
“At first I proceeded slowly—sickness was in the land, and the face of Nature was overcast—heavy rainclouds swam in the heavens, the blast howled amid the pines which nearly surround my lonely dwelling, and the waters of the lake, which lies before it, so quiet in general and tranquil, were fearfully agitated . . . A dreary summer and autumn passed by, and were succeeded by as gloomy a winter. I still proceeded with the Bible in Spain. The winter passed, and spring came, with cold dry winds and occasional sunshine, whereupon I arose, shouted, and mounting my horse, even Sidi Habismilk, I scoured all the surrounding district, and thought but little of the Bible in Spain. So I rode about the country, over the heaths, and through the green lanes of my native land, occasionally visiting friends at a distance, and sometimes, for variety’s sake, I stayed at home and amused myself by catching huge pike, which lie perdue in certain deep ponds skirted with lofty reeds, upon my land, and to which there is a communication from the lagoon by a deep and narrow watercourse. I had almost forgotten the Bible in Spain. Then came the summer with much heat and sunshine, and then I would lie for hours in the sun and recall the sunny days I had spent in Andalusia, and my thoughts were continually reverting to Spain, and at last I remembered that the Bible in Spain was still unfinished; whereupon I arose and said: ‘This loitering profiteth nothing,’ and I hastened to my summer-house by the side or the lake, and there I thought and wrote, and thought and wrote, until I had finished the ‘Bible in Spain.’”
Within a few weeks of the publication of the “Bible in Spain,” Borrow’s name was in everyone’s mouth. Attempts were made to “lionise” him; but were met with his distinct disapproval, though it was always a pleasure to him to be looked upon as a celebrity. To escape from the Mrs. Leo Hunters of fashionable society, he almost immediately fled to the Continent, where he went on another pilgrimage. Having journeyed through Turkey, Albania, Hungary, and Wallachia, he again came home to Oulton, and completed “Lavengro,” which had been commenced almost as soon as the manuscript of “The Bible in Spain” had left his hands. This book was finished in the summer-house of his garden by the broad where most of his future work was done, and was issued in 1851.
Defending himself against the critics who attacked him for intermingling truth and fiction in “Lavengro,” he afterwards wrote: “In the preface ‘Lavengro’ is stated to be a dream; and the writer takes this opportunity of stating that he never said it was an autobiography; never authorised any person to say that it was one; and that he has in innumerable instances declared in public and in private, both before and after the work was published, that it was not what is generally termed an autobiography: but a set of people who pretend to write criticisms on books, hating the author for various reasons, amongst others, because, having the proper pride of a gentleman and a scholar, he did not in the year 1843, choose to permit himself to be exhibited and made a zany of in London, and especially because he will neither associate with, nor curry favour with, them who are neither gentlemen nor scholars—attack his book with abuse and calumny.”
Interrogated by Mr. Theodore Watts as to the real nature of an autobiography, Borrow asked the question, “What is an autobiography? Is it a mere record of the incidents of a man’s life? or is it a picture of the man himself—his character, his soul?”
This, Mr. Watts thinks, was a very suggestive query of Borrow’s with regard to himself and his work. “That he sat down to write his own life in ‘Lavengro’ I know. He had no idea then of departing from the strict line of fact. Indeed, his letters to his friend, Mr. John Murray, would alone be sufficient to establish this in spite of his calling ‘Lavengro’ a dream. In the first volume he did almost confine himself to matters of fact. But as he went on he clearly found that the ordinary tapestry into which Destiny had woven the incidents of his life were not tinged with sufficient depth of colour to satisfy his sense of wonder. . . . When he wishes to dive very boldly into the ‘abysmal deeps of personality,’ he speaks and moves partly behind the mask of some fictitious character . . . Let it be remembered that it was this instinct of wonder, not the instinct of the mere poseur, that impelled him to make certain exaggerated statements about the characters themselves that are introduced into his books.”
The village of Oulton lies on the border of the marshland about a mile from the most easterly point of England, and within hearing of the beating of the billows of the wild North Sea. Borrow’s home, which was little more than a cottage, stood on the side of a slight rising bank overlooking Oulton Broad, and was sheltered from the winds of the sea and marshland by a belt of storm-rent pines. The house contained a sitting-room on either side of the entrance-hall, a kitchen, four bedrooms, and two attics. It was its smallness and compactness that commended it to Borrow, and it also had the extra recommendation to a man of his disposition of being quiet and secluded. Indeed, so out-of-the-way was its situation that to take a boat upon the broad was looked upon as the best and most direct means of attaining this isolated nook of the Broadland.
At the present time the broad, that stretches away from Lake Lothing to the westward of Borrow’s Ham, [45] is for several months of the year picturesque with the white sails of yachts and other pleasure boats that have skimmed its placid waters since the Broadland first became a holiday resort. In the early days of Borrow’s residence at Oulton, the only craft that stirred its sunlit ripples were the punts of the eel-catcher and wildfowl-seeker and the slowly gliding wherries voyaging to and from the coast and inland towns. To-day, a little colony of dwellers in red-brick villas have invaded the lonely spot where Borrow lived; but even now you have but to turn aside a few steps from the lake side to reach the edge of far-stretching marshland levels that have changed their face but little during the passage of many centuries. Farther away the marshlanders have seized upon any slight piece of rising ground to establish a firm foundation for their humble homes; here and there a grey church tower or skeleton windmill breaks the line of the level horizon. The meres and marshes have the silence of long dead years resting upon them, save where the breeze stirs the riverside reeds or a curlew cries above the ooze flats.
Queer company the “walking lord of gipsy lore” must have kept as he sat alone in that little book-lined summer-house, hearing strange voices in the sighing of the wind through the fir-trees and the distant sobbing of the sea. Out of the shadow of the past there would come to him, not only the swarthy Romanies, but Francis Ardrey, the friend of his youth; the Armenian merchant, with whom Lavengro discussed Haik; the victim of the evil chance, who talked nonsense about the star Jupiter and told him that “touching” story of his fight against destiny; the Rev. Mr. Platitude, who would neither admit there were any Dissenters nor permit any to exist; Peter Williams, the man who committed the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost, and Winifred, his patient, constant wife; the student of Chinese, who learnt the language of the land of the Celestials from the figures on the teapots; the Hungarian, who related so many legends and traditions of the Magyars; and Murtagh, with his wonderful stories of the Pope. These were the friends with whom he spent the real life of his latter days, and it is hardly surprising that under the influence of their companionship he should have become somewhat of a recluse, and lost touch with living friends and acquaintances.
Dr. Gordon Hake, whose residence at Bury St. Edmunds was contemporary with Borrow’s settling down at Oulton, writes in his Memoirs: “George Borrow was one of those whose mental powers are strong, and whose bodily frame is yet stronger—a conjunction of forces often detrimental to a literary career in an age of intellectual predominance. His temper was good and bad; his pride was humility; his humility was pride; his vanity, in being negative, was of the most positive kind. He was reticent and candid, measured in speech, with an emphasis that makes trifles significant. Borrow was essentially hypochondriacal. Society he loved and hated alike; he loved it that he might be pointed out and talked of; he hated it because he was not the prince that he felt himself in its midst. His figure was tall, and his bearing noble; he had a finely moulded head and thick white hair—white from his youth; his brown eyes were soft, yet piercing; his nose somewhat of the Semitic type, which gave his face the cast of the young Memnon; his mouth had a generous curve, and his features, for beauty and true power, were such as can have no parallel in our portrait gallery, where it is to be hoped the likeness of him, in Mr. Murray’s possession, may one day find a place. Borrow and his family used to stay with me at Bury; I visited him, less often, at his cottage on the lake at Oulton, a fine sheet of water that flows into the sea at Lowestoft. He was much courted there by his neighbours and by visitors to the seaside. I there met Baron Alderson and his daughters, who had ridden from Lowestoft to see him.”
Borrow had many good qualities, but it must be admitted that his temper was queer and uncertain. At times he was passionate and overbearing, and he never had the necessary patience to submit to what seemed to him the inanities and boredom of admirers, hero worshippers, and others who were desirous of being brought to his notice. Mr. J. W. Donne, who occupied the position of librarian of the London Library and was afterwards reader of plays, related to Dr. Hake how on one occasion Miss Agnes Strickland urged him to introduce her to her brother author. Borrow, who was in the room at the time, offered some objection, but was at length prevailed upon to accept the introduction. Ignorant of the peculiar twists in Borrow’s nature, the gifted authoress commenced the conversation by an enthusiastic eulogy of his works, and concluded by asking permission to send him a copy of her “Queens of England.” “For God’s sake, don’t, madam,” exclaimed Borrow. “I should not know what to do with them.” He then got up in a rage, and, addressing Mr. Donne, said, “What a d--- fool that woman is!”
“He once,” writes Dr. Hake, “went with me to a dinner at Mr. Bevan’s country-house, Rougham Rookery, and placed me in an extremely awkward position. Mr. Bevan was a Suffolk banker, a partner of Mr. Oakes. He was one of the kindest and most benevolent of men. His wife was gentle, unassuming, attentive to her guests. A friend of Borrow, the heir to a very considerable estate, had run himself into difficulties and owed money, which was not forthcoming, to the Bury banking-house; and in order to secure repayment Mr. Bevan was said to have ‘struck the docket.’ I knew this beforehand from Borrow, who, however, accepted the invitation, and was seated at dinner at Mrs. Bevan’s side. This lady, a simple, unpretending woman, desirous of pleasing him, said, ‘Oh, Mr. Borrow, I have read your books with so much pleasure!’ On which he exclaimed, ‘Pray, what books do you mean, madam? Do you mean my account-books?’ On this he fretted and fumed, rose from the table, and walked up and down amongst the servants during the whole of dinner, and afterwards wandered about the rooms and passage, till the carriage could be ordered for our return home.”
On another occasion Hake and Borrow were guests together at Hardwicke House, Suffolk, a fine old Jacobean Hall, then the residence of Sir Thomas Cullum. There were also staying at the Hall at the time Lord Bristol, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, William Makepeace Thackeray, and other distinguished people. Borrow and Thackeray did not get on well together. The latter evidently felt it his duty to live up to his reputation by entertaining the company with lively sallies and witticisms. At last he approached Borrow, and inquired, “Have you read my Snob Papers in Punch?” “In Punch?” asked Borrow. “It is a periodical I never look at.”
Mr. John Murray, in his “Reminiscences,” has also given instances of Borrow’s strange behaviour in other people’s houses; but there is reason to believe that he often keenly reproached himself afterwards for giving way in public to such unseemly displays of temper and spleen. That his heart was in the right place and he was not lacking in powers of restraint, are facts fully demonstrated by the following incident. He was invited to meet Dr. Robert Latham at the house of Dr. Hake, who had many inward tremors at what might be the outcome of bringing them together. Latham was in the habit of indulging somewhat too freely at table, and under such circumstances, as might be expected, was often deficient in tact and courtesy.
“All, like most things that are planned, began well. But with Latham life was a game of show. He had to put forth all his knowledge of subjects in which he deemed Borrow was an adept. He began with horse-racing. Borrow quietly assented. He showed off all he knew of the ring. Borrow freely responded. He had to show what he knew of publishers, instancing the Longmans. Borrow said, ‘I suppose you dine with your publishers sometimes?’ It was Latham’s opportunity; he could not resist it, and replied, ‘Never; I hope I should never do anything so low. You do not dine with Mr. John Murray, I presume?’ ‘Indeed, I do,’ said Borrow, emotionally. ‘He is a most kind friend. When I have had sickness in my house he has been unfailing in his goodness towards me. There is no man I value more.’ Latham’s conversation was fast falling under the influence of wine; with this his better taste departed from him. ‘I have heard,’ he said, ‘that you are a brave man over a bottle of wine. Now, how many bottles can you get through at a sitting?’ Borrow saw what the other was; he was resolved not to take offence at what was only impertinent and self-asserting, so he said, ‘When I was in Madrid I knew a priest who would sit down alone to his two bottles.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Latham, with his knowing look and his head on one side like a bird, ‘but what I want to know is, how many bottles you can manage at one sitting?’ ‘I once knew another priest,’ said Borrow, ‘it was at Oporto; I have seen him get through two bottles by himself.’ By this time Latham was a little unsteady, he slipped from his chair as if it had been an inclined plane and lay on the carpet. He was unable to rise, but he held his head up with a cunning smile, saying, ‘This must be a very disreputable house.’ Borrow saw Latham after this at times on his way to me, and always stopped to say a kind word to him, seeing his forlorn condition.”
Given as he was to snubbing and browbeating others, Borrow was not a man to sit silent and see another man badly treated without raising hand or voice in his defence. Proof of this is found in an instructive story related by Mr. J. Ewing Ritchie in his chatty “East Anglian Reminiscences.” “One good anecdote I heard about George Borrow,” writes Mr. Ritchie. “My informant was an Independent minister, at the time supplying the pulpit at Lowestoft and staying at Oulton Hall, then inhabited by a worthy dissenting tenant. One night a meeting of the Bible Society was held at Mutford Bridge, at which the party from the Hall attended, and where George Borrow was one of the speakers. After the meeting was over, all the speakers went back to supper at Oulton Hall, and my friend among them, who, in the course of the supper, found himself violently attacked by a clergyman for holding Calvinistic opinions. Naturally my friend replied that the clergyman was bound to do the same. ‘How do you make that out?’ ‘Why, the Articles of your Church are Calvinistic, and to them you have sworn assent!’ ‘Oh yes, but there is a way of explaining them away!’ ‘How so?’ said my friend. ‘Oh,’ replied the clergyman, ‘we are not bound to take the words in their natural sense.’ My friend, an honest, blunt East Anglian, intimated that he did not understand that way of evading the difficulty; but he was then a young man and did not like to continue the discussion further. However, George Borrow, who had not said a word hitherto, entered into the discussion, opening fire on the clergyman in a very unexpected manner, and giving him such a setting down as the hearers, at any rate, never forgot. All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms was held up by Borrow to ridicule, and the clergyman was beaten at every point. ‘Never,’ says my friend, ‘did I hear one man give another such a dressing as on that occasion.’”
Borrow was often asked by visitors to Oulton if it was his intention to leave behind him the necessary material for the compilation of a biography of his strange career. This, however, he could never be persuaded to do. He maintained that “Lavengro,” “The Romany Rye,” and “The Bible in Spain,” contained all of his life that it was necessary for posterity to know. It was not the man but his works that should live, he would say, and his books contained the best part of himself. While in London, however, at the house which he took in Hereford Square, Brompton, he consented to sit for his portrait, the artist being Henry Philips. This picture afterwards passed into the possession of his step-daughter, Mrs. Henrietta MacOubrey.
Of the painting of this portrait a very good story is told. Borrow was a very bad sitter, he was ever anxious to get out into the fresh air and sunlight. Philips was greatly hindered by this restlessness, but one day he hit upon a plan which conquered the chafing child of Nature and served his own purpose admirably. He was aware of Borrow’s wonderful gift of tongues and the fascination that philological studies had for him. So he remarked, “I have always heard, Mr. Borrow, that the Persian is a very fine language; is it so?” “It is, Philips; it is,” replied “Lavengro.” “Perhaps you will not mind reciting me something in the Persian tongue?” “Dear me, no; certainly not.” And then Borrow’s face lit up with the light that Philips longed for, and he commenced declaiming at the top of his voice, while the painter made the most of his opportunity. When he found his subject was lapsing into silence, and that the old feeling of weariness and boredom was again creeping upon him, he would start him off again by saying, “I have always heard that the Turkish—or the Armenian—is a very fine language,” with a like result, until at length the portrait was completed.
The monotony of Borrow’s life at Oulton was varied by occasional visits to London and excursions into Wales and to the Isle of Man. In his travels through Wales he was accompanied by his wife and step-daughter. How the journey was brought about he explains in the first chapter of “Wild Wales,” a work which, published in 1862, was the outcome of his ramblings in the Principality. “In the summer of 1854, myself, wife and daughter, determined upon going into Wales, to pass a few months there. We are country-people of a corner of East Anglia, and, at the time of which I am speaking, had been residing so long on our own little estate that we had become tired of the objects around us, and conceived that we should be all the better for changing the scene for a short period. We were undetermined for some time with respect to where we should go. I proposed Wales from the first, but my wife and daughter, who have always had rather a hankering after what is fashionable, said they thought it would be more advisable to go to Harrogate or Leamington. On my observing that these were terrible places for expense, they replied that though the price of corn had of late been shamefully low we had a spare hundred pounds or two in our pockets and could afford to pay for a little insight into fashionable life. I told them that there was nothing I so much hated as fashionable life, but that, as I was anything but a selfish person, I would endeavour to stifle my abhorrence of it for a time and attend them either to Leamington or Harrogate. By this speech I obtained my wish, even as I knew I should, for my wife and daughter instantly observed that, after all, they thought we had better go into Wales, which, though not so fashionable as either Leamington or Harrogate, was a very picturesque country, where they had no doubt they should get on very well, more especially as I was acquainted with the Welsh language.”
This is Borrow’s account of how he obtained his own way; it would have been interesting had his wife and step-daughter also recorded their version of the affair.
Borrow’s mother, who had given up her house in Willow Lane, died at Oulton, in 1860. The same year Borrow published a small volume, entitled “The Sleeping Bard,” a translation from the Welsh of Elis Wyn. During the years 1862–3 various translations of his appeared in Once a Week, a magazine that then numbered amongst its contributors such writers as Harriet Martineau and S. Baring-Gould, and artists as Leech, Keene, Tenniel, Millais and Du Maurier. Amongst these translations were “The Hailstorm, or the Death of Bui,” from the ancient Norse; “The Count of Vendal’s Daughter,” from the ancient Danish; “Harald Harfagr,” from the Norse; “Emelian the Fool,” and “The Story of Yashka with the Bear’s Ear,” from the Russian; and several ballads from the Manx. Other translations from the Danish of Oehlenschlaeger are still in the possession of Mrs. MacOubrey, and have never been printed. His last book, “The Romano Lavo-Lil,” was issued in 1872.
Between 1860 and 1870, Borrow spent a good deal of his time in London, at his house in Hereford Square. This was mainly on account of the ill-health of his wife, who died there in 1869, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery. After her death, however, he returned to Oulton, telling Mr. Watts that he was going down into East Anglia to die.
From that time his life was lived more apart from the world than ever. His visitors were few; and fewer still were the visits he paid to others. During his latter years his tall, erect, somewhat mysterious figure was often seen in the early hours of summer mornings or late at night on the lonely pathways that wind in and out from the banks of Oulton Broad. He loved to be mysterious, and the village children used to hush their voices and draw aside at his approach. They looked upon him with fear and awe—for had they not seen him stop and talk with the gipsies, who ran away with little children? But in his heart, Borrow was fond of the little ones, though it amused him to watch the impression his strange personality made upon them. Older people he seldom spoke to when out on his solitary rambles; but sometimes he would flash out such a glance from beneath his broad-brimmed hat and shaggy eyebrows as would make timid country-folk hasten on their way filled with vague thoughts and fears of the evil eye. Mr. John Murray has referred to this love of mystery on the part of his father’s friend, and also to his moody and variable temperament; while Mr. G. T. Bettany has related how he enjoyed creating a sensation by riding about on a fine Arab horse which he brought home with him from Turkey in 1844.
Still Borrow was not unpopular with the villagers, many of whom, long after his death, remembered little acts of kindness on his part by which they had benefited. To the sick and infirm he was always a good friend, though his almost invariable remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to were wine and ale. He was exceedingly fond of animals, and nothing aroused his wrath more than to see them badly treated. On one occasion, while out walking not far from his home, he encountered some men who were ill-using a fallen horse. He remonstrated with them, and his words, backed by his commanding figure, prevailed upon them to desist from their cruelty. He then sent one of them for a bowl of ale. When it was brought, he knelt down on the road beside the exhausted animal, and poured it down its throat. Having afterwards assisted the men in getting the horse upon its feet, he left them, but not before he had given them a severe lecture on the treatment of dumb animals in general and fallen horses in particular.
At another time, a favourite old cat that was ill, crawled out of his house to die in the garden hedge. Borrow no sooner missed the poor creature than he went in search of it, and brought it indoors in his arms. He then laid it down in a comfortable spot, and sat and watched it till it was dead.
Owing to the somewhat eccentric manner in which he passed his latter days, there were some persons who assumed after his death that in his declining years he lacked the attention of friends, and the little comforts and considerations that are due to old age. Yet this was not so; if the world heard little of him from the time of his final retirement into rural seclusion, and lost sight of him and believed him dead, it was his own choosing that they should remain in ignorance. He had had his day, a longer and fuller one than falls to the lot of most of the sons of men, and, when the weight of years began to tell upon him, he chose to live out the little time that was left to him amidst such scenes as were in harmony with his nature. He died at Oulton on July 26, 1881, just three weeks after the completion of his seventy-eighth year. His step-daughter, Mrs. MacOubrey, the Henrietta of “Wild Wales,” who had a sincere affection for him, was his constant attendant during his last illness, and was with him at the end. He was buried at Brompton Cemetery, where his body lies beside that of his wife. Not long after his death, his Oulton home was pulled down. All that now remains to mark the spot where it once stood are the old summer-house in which he loved to linger, and the ragged fir-trees that sighed the requiem of his last hours.
CHAPTER VI: BORROW AND PUGILISM
During the first quarter of the present century pugilism was rampant in the Eastern Counties of England. A pugilistic encounter was then looked upon as an affair of national interest, and people came in their thousands from far and near to witness it. The Norwich neighbourhood was noted for its prize-fights, and Borrow had the names of all the champions at his tongue’s end. Cobbett, Cribb, Belcher, Tom Spring of Bedford, Black Richmond, Irish Randall—he was acquainted with the records of them all, as well as with those of the leading fighting-men amongst the gipsies. They were to him the leaders of the old spirit of English aggressiveness, and as such he revered them. His pen was always ready to defend a straightforward bruiser, with whom, he contended, the Roman gladiator and the Spanish bull-fighter were not to be compared. He, himself, was no mean student of the art of self-defence, and there is some ground for believing that the scene between Lavengro and the Flaming Tinman, in which the burly tinker succumbs to the former’s prowess after a warm encounter in the Mumpers’ Dingle, is founded upon an event which occurred during Borrow’s wayward progress through rural England.
On the publication of “Lavengro,” Borrow’s evident partiality for the pugilists of his day brought down upon him a torrent of criticism and condemnation. Who, it was asked, but a man of coarse instincts could have found pleasure in mingling with brutal fighting-men and describing their desperate exploits? The writer of a work who went out of his way to drag in such characters and scenes as these could be little better than a barbarian!
Borrow was not a man to sit down quietly under such attacks as these; he waited his opportunity, and then had his fling. At the end of “The Romany Rye,” there appeared an Appendix, in which the author set himself the task of smashing his critics. This same Appendix is an amazing piece of writing; in it Borrow slashes right and left as might a gallant swordsman who found himself alone in the midst of a mob bent on his destruction. Mr. Augustine Birrell regrets that it was ever printed; but there are few who will agree with him; it contains too many good things that Borrovians would be loth to lose.
Borrow’s defence is carried on in his own peculiar and inimitable style, it is an onslaught into the camp of the enemy. Speaking of the prize-fighters, whom a reviewer condemned as blackguards, he exclaims defiantly, “Can the rolls of the English aristocracy exhibit names belonging to more noble, more heroic men than those who were called respectively Pearce, Cribb, and Spring? Did ever one of the English aristocracy contract the seeds of fatal consumption by rushing up the stairs of a burning edifice, even to the topmost garret, and rescuing a woman from seemingly inevitable destruction? The writer says no. A woman was rescued from the top of a burning house; but the man who rescued her was no aristocrat; it was Pearce, not Percy, who ran up the burning stairs.” And so he goes on, overwhelming his opponents with a tornado of generalities that have nothing whatever to do with prize-fighting, and yet how delightful it all is!
There were other critics—Borrow always had plenty of critics—who found it difficult to make his admiration for the prize-ring fit in with his denunciation in one passage of “those disgraceful and brutalising exhibitions called pugilistic combats.” The explanation has been suggested that for once the “John Bull” Borrow, with his patriotic exaltation of all things English, gave way before the proselytising agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society. It would be hard to find a writer who does not contradict himself at times, and Borrow was so much a man of “moods” that it would be uncharitable to set him down as a hypocrite, as Caroline Fox does, because all his sayings and doings do not tally with a superhuman exactitude.
But whether it was in respect to the number of glasses of ale that he drank on his Welsh rambles—and has not “Wild Wales” been called “The Epic of Ale?”—or his associations with the great fighting-men of his day, he was never ashamed to admit his liking both for the ale and the men. “Why should I hide the truth?” he asks, when telling of his presence when a boy of fourteen at a prize-fight which took place near Norwich. Thurtell, whose boast it was that he had introduced bruising into East Anglia, had arranged the fight, which was ever after memorable to Borrow for the appearance on the scene of Gipsy Will and his celebrated gang. This well-known Romany, who was afterwards hanged outside the gaol at Bury St. Edmunds for a murder committed in his youth, was a sturdy, muscular fellow, six feet in height, who rendered himself especially noticeable by wearing a broad-brimmed, high-peaked Andalusian hat. He was anxious on this occasion to fight the best man in England for twenty pounds (not a very tempting sum in the light of our more advanced days); but no one accepted the challenge, though a young countryman was anxious to do so until assured by his friends that the notorious gipsy would certainly kill him.
Borrow has gone out of his way in “The Gipsies of Spain” to give a full description of this Gipsy Will and his notable companions. At the risk of wearying some readers who deprecate the prize-ring and its cosmopolitan environment, the writer quotes something of this description, as it appears in one of the less known of Borrow’s works:
“Some time before the commencement of the combat, three men, mounted on wild-looking horses came dashing down the road in the direction of the meadow, in the midst of which they presently showed themselves, their horses clearing the deep ditches with wonderful alacrity. ‘That’s Gipsy Will and his gang,’ lisped a Hebrew pickpocket; ‘we shall have another fight.’ The word gipsy was always sufficient to excite my curiosity, and I looked attentively at the new-comers.
“I have seen gipsies of various lands, Russian, Hungarian, and Turkish; and I have also seen the legitimate children of most countries of the world; but I never saw, upon the whole, three more remarkable individuals, as far as personal appearance was concerned, than the three English gipsies who now presented themselves to my eyes on that spot. Two of them had dismounted, and were holding their horses by the reins. The tallest, and, at the first glance, the most (!) interesting of the two, was almost a giant, for his height could not have been less than six feet three. It is impossible for the imagination to conceive anything more perfectly beautiful than were the features of this man, and the most skilful sculptor of Greece might have taken them as his model for a hero and a god. The forehead was exceedingly lofty, a rare thing in a gipsy; the nose less Roman than Grecian, fine, yet delicate; the eyes large, overhung with long drooping lashes, giving them almost a melancholy expression; it was only when the lashes were elevated that the gipsy glance was seen, if that can be called a glance which is a strange stare, like nothing else in the world. His complexion was a beautiful olive; and his teeth were of a brilliancy uncommon even among these people, who have all fine teeth. He was dressed in a coarse waggoner’s slop, which, however, was unable to conceal altogether the proportions of his noble and Herculean figure. He might be about twenty-eight. His companion and his captain, Gipsy Will, was, I think, fifty, when he was hanged ten years subsequently. I have still present before me his bushy black hair, his black face, and his big black eyes, fixed and staring. His dress consisted of a loose blue jockey coat, jockey boots and breeches; in his hand was a huge jockey whip, and on his head (it struck me at the time for its singularity) a broad-brimmed, high-peaked, Andalusian hat, or at least one very much resembling those generally worn in that province. In stature he was shorter than his more youthful companion, yet he must have measured six feet at least, and was stronger built, if possible. What brawn! what bone! what legs! what thighs! The third gipsy, who remained on horseback, looked more like a phantom than anything human. His complexion was the colour of pale dust, and of that same colour was all that pertained to him, hat and clothes. His boots were dusty, of course, and his very horse was of a dusty dun. His features were whimsically ugly, most of his teeth were gone, and as to his age, he might be thirty or sixty. He was somewhat lame and halt; but an unequalled rider when once upon his steed, which he was naturally not very solicitous to quit. I subsequently discovered that he was considered the wizard of the gang.”
Any one who is familiar with the living descendants of the Romanies of Borrow’s early lifetime will know that amongst the few characteristics of their fathers that have been preserved down to the present day is that skill at boxing or fisticuffs which was an absolute necessity in a time when their hand was against every man and every man’s hand against them. Nearly all the male Romanies are possessed of a lithe, sinewy, active frame, combined with a quickness of hand and eye that gives them a considerable advantage over less alert antagonists of heavier build. They are not, as a rule, in a hurry to come to blows, for they know that in the event of injury or police-court proceedings resulting from an encounter, prejudice is strongly against the gipsy. Still, the Romany blood pulses quickly, and when it flies to the swarthy cheek and sets the eyes flashing, the time has come for someone to beware. The writer has seen something of the gipsy’s skill and adroitness under such conditions, and the impression made was a lasting one. He has known, too, of a small, slim-built Romany thrashing a strong, six-feet-high constable, for unwarrantable interference with the former’s mother in a public bar. The Romany race is fast dying out from our midst; but it is dying what the sportsman would call “game.”
Although Borrow’s obvious admiration for the brawny men of the prize-ring brought him almost universal condemnation, his opinions were unchanged by his critics’ wrath and denunciations. There were many points in his father’s character for which he held him in esteem and affection; but he admired him most because he had once vanquished Big Ben Brain in a fight in Hyde Park.
“He was always at his best,” writes Mr. Theodore Watts, “in describing a pugilistic encounter; for in the saving grace of pugilism as an English accomplishment, he believed as devoutly as he believed in East Anglia and the Bible.”
CHAPTER VII: BORROW AND THE EAST ANGLIAN GIPSIES
East Anglia has for centuries been a favourite roaming ground for certain of the families of the true Romany tribe. The reason for this, assigned by the gipsies themselves, is not a flattering one to East Englanders. They will tell you, if you are in their confidence, that they come to East Anglia on account of the simplicity and gullibility of its inhabitants. Nowhere else can the swarthy chals find gorgios so ready to purchase a doctored nag, or the dark-eyed chis so easily cozen credulous villagers and simple servant-girls by the mysteries of dukkeripen. Every fair-ground and race-course is dotted with their travelling vans; the end of every harvest sees them congregate on the village greens; the “making up” of the North Sea fishing-boats attracts them to the Eastern coast.
It may well be that Borrow first made the acquaintance of the Romanies when a child at East Dereham, for there is a heath just outside the little town which has long been their central halting-place for the district. If this was the case, he has left no record of such a meeting: in all probability, had his wondering eyes rested upon their unfamiliar faces and smouldering camp-fires he would have shared the childish fears instilled by kitchen and nursery legends and have fled the scene. It was outside Norman Cross that he first came into close contact with the alien wanderers. Straying into a green lane he fell in with a low tent from which smoke was issuing, and in front of which a man was carding plaited straw, while a woman was engaged in the manufacture of spurious coin. Their queer appearance, so unlike that of any men or women he had hitherto encountered, excited his lively curiosity; but, ere he had time to examine them closely, they were down upon him with threats and curses. Violence was about to be done to him when a viper, which he had concealed in his jacket, lifted its head from his bosom, and the gipsies’ wrath at being discovered changed to awe of one who fearlessly handled such a deadly creature. From that day Borrow’s interest in the Romany tribe continued to widen and deepen, until, at length, when fame and fortune were his, it led him to take extended journeys into Hungary, Wallachia, and other European countries for the purpose of searching out the descendants of the original wanderers from the East and learning from them their language, customs and history.
Borrow himself says that he could remember no time when the mere mention of the name of gipsy did not awaken within him feelings hard to be described. He could not account for it, but some of the Romanies, he remarks, “to whom I have stated this circumstance have accounted for it on the supposition that the soul which at present animates my body has at some former period tenanted that of one of their people, for many among them are believers in metempsychosis and, like the followers of Bouddha, imagine that their souls by passing through an infinite number of bodies, attain at length sufficient purity to be admitted to a state of perfect rest and quietude, which is the only idea of heaven they can form.”
The Norwich Castle Hill provided Borrow with many opportunities of observing the habits of the East Anglian Romanies, who, in his day, attended in considerable numbers the horse sales and fairs that were held in the old city. Thither would come the Smiths or Petulengros, Bosviles, Grays and Pinfolds; and often, when they left the Hill, he would accompany them to their camps on Mousehold Heath and to neighbouring fairs and markets. Their daring horsemanship fascinated him, while the strange tongue they employed amongst themselves when bargaining with the farmers and dealers, aroused in him a curiosity that could only be satisfied by a closer acquaintance with its form and meaning. Many of the chals and chis to be met with in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” were transferred to the pages of those works from the East Anglian heaths and fairsteads. It was on a heath not far from his Suffolk home that he introduced the Jew of Fez to Jasper Petulengro in order that he might refute the theory entertained by one of his critics that the Romanies were nothing less than the descendants of the two lost tribes of Israel.
The village of Oulton, too, gave him many chances of intercourse with the gipsies. Within five minutes’ walk of his home there is a spot where they frequently assembled, and where a few of them may sometimes be seen even at the present day. The writer has reason to know that the gipsies looked upon Borrow with no small amount of curiosity, for they were unaccustomed to meet with gorgios of his position who took so keen an interest in their sayings and doings. As a rule, they are exceedingly suspicious of the approaches of any one outside the Romany pale; and it must not be assumed that he was popular with them because he usually succeeded in extracting from them the information he required. There was something about Borrow that made it hard to evade his questioning; he had such a masterful way with him, and his keen eyes fixed upon a man as though they would pierce him through and read his most secret thoughts. He himself attributes his success with the gipsies to his knowledge of the Romany tongue and customs, while they firmly believed that he had gipsy blood in his veins. “He has known them,” he says, writing of himself as the author of “The Zincali,” “for upwards of twenty years in various countries, and they never injured a hair of his head or deprived him of a shred of his raiment; but he is not deceived as to the motive of their forbearance: they thought him a Rom, and on this supposition they hurt him not, their love of ‘the blood’ being their most distinguishing characteristic.” This error on their part served his purpose well, as it enabled him to obtain from them a great deal of curious knowledge that would never have come into his possession had it been known he was one of the despised gorgios. He was known amongst them as the Romany Rye; but that is a name by which, even at the present day, they distinguished any stranger who can “rokkra Romany” to the extent of a dozen words.
Although Borrow spent so much time amongst the East Anglian gipsies, it is often difficult to ascertain the exact localities in which he met with them. He seldom condescends to give the date of any incident, and as infrequently does he choose to enlighten us as to his precise whereabouts when it occurred. Then, too, one might conclude that his investigations were almost wholly confined to two families, those of the Smiths or Petulengros, and Hernes. As Mr. Watts has aptly remarked, one would imagine from all that is said about these families in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” that he knew nothing about the other Romanies of the Eastern Counties. Yet he must have been familiar also with the Bosviles, Grays, and Pinfolds, some descendants of whom still haunt the heaths and greens of Eastern England. According to Borrow, the Petulengros were continually turning up wherever he might wander. Jasper Petulengro’s nature seems something akin to that of the Wandering Jew; and yet, if we may believe “Lavengro” and our own knowledge, the Smiths look upon East Anglia as their native heath. First, he appears in the green lane near Norman Cross; then at Norwich Fair and on Mousehold Heath; again at Greenwich Fair, where he tries to persuade Lavengro to take to the gipsy life; and once more in the neighbourhood of the noted dingle of the Isopel Berners episode. This, of course, is due to the exigencies of what Mr. Watts calls a “spiritual biography,” and it is evident that whenever anything particularly striking pertaining to the Romanies occurs to Borrow the Romanies themselves promptly appear to illustrate it.
Yet we know that Jasper Petulengro was a genuine character, even if he comes to us under a fictitious name. He was a representative of one of the oldest of the East Anglian gipsy families, and a personal friend of Borrow, who found in him much that was in common with his own nature. Borrow has left a dependable record of a meeting which took place between them at his Oulton home, during the Christmas of 1842. “He stayed with me during the greater part of the morning, discoursing on the affairs of Egypt, the aspect of which, he assured me, was becoming daily worse and worse. There is no living for the poor people, brother, said he, the chokengres (police) pursue us from place to place, and the gorgios are become either so poor or miserly, that they grudge our cattle a bite of grass by the wayside, and ourselves a yard of ground to light a fire upon. Unless times alter, brother, and of that I see no probability, unless you are made either poknees or mecralliskoe geiro (Justice of the Peace or Prime Minister), I am afraid the poor persons will have to give up wandering altogether, and then what will become of them?”
Yet there was much of Borrow’s nature that was in common with that of Jasper Petulengro. Often the swarthy, horse-dealing gipsy was the mouthpiece through which he breathed forth his own abhorrence of conventional restraints and the thronging crowds of busy streets. He loved the open air country life that he lived near the Suffolk coast, where the fresh salt winds sweep up from the sea across gorse-clad denes and pleasant pasture-lands. He was happiest when amongst the “summer saturated heathen” of the heath and glen. Who can doubt that the much-quoted conversation in the twenty-fifth chapter of “Lavengro,” gives expression to much of Borrow’s own philosophy?
“Life is sweet, brother.”
“Do you think so?”
“Think so! There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”
“I would wish to die?”
“You talk like a gorgio—which is the same as talking like a fool—were you a Romany chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed! A Romany chal would wish to live for ever!”
“In sickness, Jasper?”
“There’s the sun and stars, brother.”
“In blindness, Jasper?”
“There’s the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever.”
Like Bamfylde Moore Carew, though for a different reason, it was to the gipsy life that Borrow turned after his unsuccessful literary work in London. Disappointed and despondent, he fled the scenes that had witnessed his failures. It is easy to imagine how great must have been his sense of freedom when he cast off the shackles of city life, and breathed again the air of the hills and pine-woods of rural England. With the poet whose bones rest in the midst of the little town of his birth, he felt and all his life maintained, that
“’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
And we are weeds without it. All constraint,
Except what wisdom lays on evil men,
Is evil; hurts the faculties, impedes
Their progress in the road of science; blinds
The eyesight of discovery, and begets
In those that suffer it, a sordid mind
Bestial, a meagre intellect, unfit
To be the tenant of man’s noble form.”
The gipsies of the first quarter of the present century possessed the distinctive characteristics of their type in a far more marked degree than their descendants of to-day. There were few amongst them who had not a fair knowledge of the old Romany tongue, though they were utterly ignorant of its source. Questioned as to where their ancestors came from, they would tell you Egypt; and “business of Egypt” was their name for the mysteries of fortune-telling, and the other questionable proceedings they engaged in. Several of their families were fairly well-to-do in the eyes of their tribe, though the fact was carefully concealed from inquisitive gorgios. Often a gipsy gry-engro, or horse-dealer, would have a score or more horses on his hands at a time, while, not infrequently, his sales on a fair-day would amount to £50 or £60. The women of his camp would be gaudily and expensively dressed, and bedecked in heavy gold jewelry: he, himself, would often spend five or six pounds on a suit of clothes, and half a guinea on a silk handkerchief for his neck. Few of the women ever thought of marrying out of the Romany tribe, and their virtue and constancy were an example to all classes of society.
This last-mentioned fact is the more striking in view of the intense admiration often felt for the handsome chis by men who were not of the gipsy race. Commenting upon it not long ago, [77] an Athenæum reviewer said: “Between some Englishmen and gipsy women there is an extraordinary attraction—an attraction, we may say in passing, which did not exist between Borrow and the gipsy women with whom he was brought into contact. Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn to any woman, she would have been of the Scandinavian type; she would have been what he used to call a Brynhild. It was tall blondes he really admired. Hence, notwithstanding his love of the economies of gipsy life, his gipsy women are all mere scenic characters, they clothe and beautify the scene: they are not dramatic characters. When he comes to delineate a heroine, Isopel Bernes, she is physically the very opposite of the Romany chi—a Scandinavian Brynhild, in short.”
Mr. Watts has remarked on Borrow’s neglect to portray the higher traits in the gipsy woman’s character. Mrs. Herne and her grandchild Leonora, who are instanced as the two great successes of his Romany group, are both steeped in wickedness, and by omitting to draw a picture of the women’s loftier side, he is said to have failed to demonstrate their great claim for distinction. There is a good deal of truth in this accusation; and yet it cannot be admitted wholly justifiable. In “The Romany Rye” we have a whole chapter devoted to the emphasising of the chastity of the Romany girls, and their self-sacrificing devotion to their husbands. Ursula marries a lazy, good-for-nothing chal, and then expressess her willingness to steal and swindle in order to keep him in comfort. The method is not commendable, but the object that prompts it is highly praiseworthy—from a Romany point of view.
But to-day the old race of genuine Romanies is fast dying out, and soon we shall have wholly lost the traces of a people who for many centuries have constituted a familiar feature of English country life. One of the last surviving chals of an old East Anglian gipsy family, in reply to a remark of the writer said, not long ago, “Yes, it is quite true that the old race of gipsies is dying out; there are very few of the real old Romanies to be met with at the present day. ‘Mumpers’ there are in plenty; folks who sell baskets and peddle clothes-pegs; but they are not of the true gipsy breed. At one time a gipsy never married out of his or her own tribe; but that day has gone, and there has been reared a mixed race with little of the true blood in them. Marrying into the ‘mumping’ and house-dwelling families has brought this about, and soon there will be no true Romanies left. Here and there you may meet a few, such as the Grays, Lees, and Coopers, and one or two of the Pinfolds; but they, too, are going the way of the rest. Yes, as you say, it is a pity, for after all the Romanies are a strange people, and, bad as they may have been, they were not without their good points. They knew a good horse when they saw one, and they let people see how a man, if he chooses, can shift for himself, without being beholden to any one. Anyhow, they have given clever men something to puzzle their brains about, and their language is not, as some would have it, a mere thieves ‘patter,’ but is a good, if not a better one, than that which the clever men speak themselves.”
“Yes,” went on my Romany friend, “this old language seems to interest a good many of the clever men. I have known some of them come to our tents and vans and write down the words and their meaning as we told them. I did not mind their doing it; but some of my people did not like it, and told them lies, and put them off with all sorts of queer stories. They were afraid the men should put the words into their books, and then it might be awkward for the gipsies when they wished to have a little talk amongst themselves on matters that were nobody’s business but their own. Very few of the gipsies can read, so they did not learn the language in that way; most of us who know anything of it picked it up from our fathers and mothers when we were young. My father used to teach me certain sayings about horses that were very useful when we were dealing at the fairs. Now, however, some people who are not gipsies know more about these things than we do ourselves.”
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Footnotes:
[41] “The Zincali; or, An Account of the Gipsies of Spain,” issued in two volumes in 1841.
[45] This is the name that was given to a small inlet during Borrows residence at Oulton. To-day it is sometimes called Burrough’s Ham.
[77] Athenæum, March 28, 1896.