Borrow was angry at the failure of “Lavengro,” and in the appendix to “The Romany Rye” he actually said that he had never called “Lavengro” an autobiography and never authorised anyone to call it such. This was not a lie but a somewhat frantic assertion that his critics were mistaken about his “dream.” In later years he quietly admitted that “Lavengro” gave an account of his early life.
Yet Dr. Knapp was not strictly and completely accurate in saying that the first volume of “Lavengro” is “strictly autobiographical and authentic as the whole was at first intended to be.” He could give no proof that Borrow’s memory went back to his third year or that he first handled a viper at that time. He could only show that Borrow’s accounts do not conflict with other accounts of the same matters. When they did conflict, Dr. Knapp was unduly elated by the discovery.
Take, for example, the sixteenth chapter of “Lavengro,” where he describes the horse fair at Norwich when he was a boy:
“The reader is already aware that I had long since conceived a passion for the equine race, a passion in which circumstances had of late not permitted me to indulge. I had no horses to ride, but I took pleasure in looking at them; and I had already attended more than one of these fairs: the present was lively enough, indeed horse fairs are seldom dull. There was shouting and whooping, neighing and braying; there was galloping and trotting; fellows with highlows and white stockings, and with many a string dangling from the knees of their tight breeches, were running desperately, holding horses by the halter, and in some cases dragging them along; there were long-tailed steeds, and dock-tailed steeds of every degree and breed; there were droves of wild ponies, and long rows of sober cart horses; there were donkeys and even mules: the last rare things to be seen in damp, misty England, for the mule pines in mud and rain, and thrives best with a hot sun above and a burning sand below. There were—oh, the gallant creatures! I hear their neigh upon the wind; there were—goodliest sight of all—certain enormous quadrupeds only seen to perfection in our native isle, led about by dapper grooms, their manes ribanded and their tails curiously clubbed and balled. Ha! ha!—how distinctly do they say, ha! ha!
“An old man draws nigh, he is mounted on a lean pony, and he leads by the bridle one of these animals; nothing very remarkable about that creature, unless in being smaller than the rest and gentle, which they are not; he is not of the sightliest look; he is almost dun, and over one eye a thick film has gathered. But stay! there is something remarkable about that horse, there is something in his action in which he differs from all the rest: as he advances, the clamour is hushed! all eyes are turned upon him—what looks of interest—of respect—and, what is this? people are taking off their hats—surely not to that steed! Yes, verily! men, especially old men, are taking off their hats to that one-eyed steed, and I hear more than one deep-drawn ah!
“‘What horse is that?’ said I to a very old fellow, the counterpart of the old man on the pony, save that the last wore a faded suit of velveteen, and this one was dressed in a white frock.
“‘The best in mother England,’ said the very old man, taking a knobbed stick from his mouth, and looking me in the face, at first carelessly, but presently with something like interest; ‘he is old like myself, but can still trot his twenty miles an hour. You won’t live long, my swain; tall and overgrown ones like thee never does; yet, if you should chance to reach my years, you may boast to thy great grand boys, thou hast seen Marshland Shales.’
“Amain I did for the horse what I would neither do for earl or baron, doffed my hat; yes! I doffed my hat to the wondrous horse, the fast trotter, the best in mother England; and I, too, drew a deep ah! and repeated the words of the old fellows around. ‘Such a horse as this we shall never see again, a pity that he is so old.’”
But Dr. Knapp informs us that the well-known trotting stallion, Marshland Shales, was not offered for sale by auction until 1827, when he was twenty-five years old, and ten years after the date implied in “Lavengro.” And what is more, Dr. Knapp concludes that Borrow must have been in Norwich in 1827, on the fair day, April 12.
CHAPTER V—HIS PREDECESSORS
I do not wish to make Borrow out a suffering innocent in the hands of that learned heavy-weight and wag, Dr. Knapp. Borrow was a writing man; he was sometimes a friend of jockeys, of Gypsies and of pugilists, but he was always a writing man; and the writer who is delighted to have his travels in Spain compared with the rogue romance, “Gil Blas,” is no innocent. Photography, it must be remembered, was not invented. It was not in those days thought possible to get life on to the paper by copying it with ink. Words could not be the equivalents of acts. Life itself is fleeting, but words remain and are put to our account. Every action, it is true, is as old as man and never perishes without an heir. But so are words as old as man, and they are conservative and stern in their treatment of transitory life. Every action seems new and unique to the doer, but how rarely does it seem so when it is recorded in words, how rarely perhaps it is possible for it to seem so. A new form of literature cannot be invented to match the most grand or most lovely life. And fortunately; for if it could, one more proof of the ancient lineage of our life would have been lost. Borrow did not sacrifice the proof. He had read many books in many languages, and he had a strong taste. He liked “Gil Blas,” which is a simple chain of various and surprising adventures. He liked the lives of criminals in the “Newgate Lives and Trials” (or rather “Celebrated Trials,” 1825), which he compiled for a publisher in his youth.
“What struck me most,” he said, “with respect to these lives was the art which the writers, whoever they were, possessed of telling a plain story. It is no easy thing to tell a story plainly and distinctly by mouth; but to tell one on paper is difficult indeed, so many snares lie in the way. People are afraid to put down what is common on paper, they seek to embellish their narrative, as they think, by philosophic speculations and reflections; they are anxious to shine, and people who are anxious to shine, can never tell a plain story. ‘So I went with them to a music booth, where they made me almost drunk with gin, and began to talk their flash language, which I did not understand,’ says, or is made to say, Henry Simms, executed at Tyburn some seventy years before the time of which I am speaking. I have always looked upon this sentence as a masterpiece of the narrative style, it is so concise and yet so very clear.”
Borrow read Bunyan, Sterne and Smollett: he liked Byron’s “Childe Harold” and his “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte”;—he liked that portrait with all Europe and all history for a background. Above all, he read Defoe, and in the third chapter of “Lavengro” he has described his first sight of “Robinson Crusoe” as a little child:
“The first object on which my eyes rested was a picture; it was exceedingly well executed, at least the scene which it represented made a vivid impression upon me, which would hardly have been the case had the artist not been faithful to nature. A wild scene it was—a heavy sea and rocky shore, with mountains in the background, above which the moon was peering. Not far from the shore, upon the water, was a boat with two figures in it, one of which stood at the bow, pointing with what I knew to be a gun at a dreadful shape in the water; fire was flashing from the muzzle of the gun, and the monster appeared to be transfixed. I almost thought I heard its cry. I remained motionless, gazing upon the picture, scarcely daring to draw my breath, lest the new and wondrous world should vanish of which I had now obtained a glimpse. ‘Who are those people, and what could have brought them into that strange situation?’ I asked myself; and now the seed of curiosity, which had so long lain dormant, began to expand, and I vowed to myself to become speedily acquainted with the whole history of the people in the boat. After looking on the picture till every mark and line in it were familiar to me, I turned over various leaves till I came to another engraving; a new source of wonder—a low sandy beach on which the furious sea was breaking in mountain-like billows; cloud and rack deformed the firmament, which wore a dull and leaden-like hue; gulls and other aquatic fowls were toppling upon the blast, or skimming over the tops of the maddening waves—‘Mercy upon him! he must be drowned!’ I exclaimed, as my eyes fell upon a poor wretch who appeared to be striving to reach the shore; he was upon his legs, but was evidently half smothered with the brine; high above his head curled a horrible billow, as if to engulf him for ever. ‘He must be drowned! he must be drowned!’ I almost shrieked, and dropped the book. I soon snatched it up again, and now my eye lighted on a third picture; again a shore, but what a sweet and lovely one, and how I wished to be treading it; there were beautiful shells lying on the smooth white sand, some were empty like those I had occasionally seen on marble mantelpieces, but out of others peered the heads and bodies of wondrous crayfish; a wood of thick green trees skirted the beach and partly shaded it from the rays of the sun, which shone hot above, while blue waves slightly crested with foam were gently curling against it; there was a human figure upon the beach, wild and uncouth, clad in the skins of animals, with a huge cap on his head, a hatchet at his girdle, and in his hand a gun; his feet and legs were bare; he stood in an attitude of horror and surprise; his body was bent far back, and his eyes, which seemed starting out of his head, were fixed upon a mark on the sand—a large distinct mark—a human footprint!
“Reader, is it necessary to name the book which now stood open in my hand, and whose very prints, feeble expounders of its wondrous lines, had produced within me emotions strange and novel? Scarcely, for it was a book which has exerted over the minds of Englishmen an influence certainly greater than any other of modern times, which has been in most people’s hands, and with the contents of which even those who cannot read are to a certain extent acquainted; a book from which the most luxuriant and fertile of our modern prose writers have drunk inspiration; a book, moreover, to which, from the hardy deeds which it narrates, and the spirit of strange and romantic enterprise which it tends to awaken, England owes many of her astonishing discoveries both by sea and land, and no inconsiderable part of her naval glory.
“Hail to thee, spirit of De Foe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee? England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could spare them easier far than De Foe, ‘unabashed De Foe,’ as the hunchbacked rhymer styled him.”
It was in this manner, he declares, that he “first took to the paths of knowledge,” and when he began his own “autobiography” he must have well remembered the opening of “Robinson Crusoe”:—“I was born in the year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, named Kreutznaer, who first settled at Hull,” though Borrow himself would have written it: “I was born in the year 16---, in the City of Y---, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, named Kruschen, who first settled at H---.” Probably he remembered also that other fictitious autobiography of Defoe’s, “The Adventures of Captain Singleton,” of the child who was stolen and disposed of to a Gypsy and lived with his good Gypsy mother until she happened to be hanged, a little too soon for him to be “perfected in the strolling trade.” Defoe had told him long before Richard Ford that he need not be afraid of being low. He could always give the same excuse as Defoe in “Moll Flanders”—“as the best use is to be made even of the worst story, the moral, ’tis hoped, will keep the reader serious, even where the story might incline him to be otherwise.” In fact, Borrow did afterwards claim that his book set forth in as striking a way as any “the kindness and providence of God.” Even so, De Quincey suggested as an excuse in his “Confessions” the service possibly to be rendered to other opium-eaters. Borrow tells us in the twenty-second chapter of “Lavengro” how he sought for other books of adventure like “Robinson Crusoe”—which he will not mention by name!—and how he read many “books of singular power, but of coarse and prurient imagination.” One of these, “The English Rogue,” he describes as a book “written by a remarkable genius.” He might have remembered in its preface the author lamenting that, though it was meant for the life of a “witty extravagant,” readers would regard it as the author’s own life, “and notwithstanding all that hath been said to the contrary many still continue in this belief.” He might also have remembered that the apology for portraying so much vice was that the ugliness of it—“her vizard-mask being remov’d”—“cannot but cause in her (quondam) adorers, a loathing instead of loving.” The dirty hero runs away as a boy and on the very first day tires of nuts and blackberries and longs “to taste of the fleshpots again.” He sleeps in a barn until he is waked, pursued and caught by Gypsies. He agrees to stay with them, and they have a debauch of eating, drinking and fornication, which makes him well content to join the “Ragged Regiment.” They colour his face with walnut juice so that he looks a “true son of an Egyptian.” Hundreds of pages are filled thereafter by tediously dragging in, mostly from other books, joyless and leering adventures of low dishonesty and low lust. Another book of the kind which Borrow knew was the life of Bamfylde Moore-Carew, born in 1693 at a Devonshire rectory. He hunted the deer with some of his schoolfellows from Tiverton and they played truant for fear of punishment. They fell in with some Gypsies feasting and carousing and asked to be allowed to “enlist into their company.” The Gypsies admitted them after the “requisite ceremonies” and “proper oaths.” The philosophy of Carew or his historian is worth noticing. He says of the Gypsies:
“There are perhaps no people so completely happy as they are, or enjoy so great a share of liberty. The king is elective by the whole people, but none are allowed to stand as candidates for that honour but such as have been long in their society, and perfectly studied the nature and institution of it; they must likewise have given repeated proofs of their personal wisdom, courage and capacity; this is better known as they always keep a public record or register of all remarkable (either good or bad) actions performed by any of their society, and they can have no temptation to make choice of any but the most worthy, as their king has no titles or legislative employments to bestow, which might influence or corrupt their judgments.
“The laws of these people are few and simple, but most exactly and punctually observed; the fundamental of which is that strong love and mutual regard for each member in particular and for the whole community in general, which is inculcated into them from the earliest infancy. . . . Experience has shown them that, by keeping up their nice sense of honour and shame, they are always enabled to keep their community in better order than the most severe corporal punishments have been able to effect in other governments.
“But what has still more tended to preserve their happiness is that they know no other use of riches than the enjoyment of them. They know no other use of it than that of promoting mirth and good humour; for which end they generously bring their gains into a common stock, whereby they whose gains are small have an equal enjoyment with those whose profits are larger, excepting only that a mark or ignominy is affixed on those who do not contribute to the common stock proportionately to their abilities and the opportunities they have of gain, and this is the source of their uninterrupted happiness; fully this means they have no griping usurer to grind them, no lordly possessor to trample on them, nor any envyings to torment them; they have no settled habitations, but, like the Scythian of old, remove from place to place, as often as their convenience or pleasure requires it, which render their life a perpetual source of the greatest variety.
“By what we have said above, and much more that we could add of the happiness of these people and of their peculiar attachment to each other, we may account for what has been matter of much surprise to the friends of our hero, viz., his strong attachment, for the space of about forty years, to this community, and his refusing the large offers that have been made to quit their society.”
Carew himself met with nothing but success in his various impersonations of Tom o’ Bedlam, a rat-catcher, a non-juring clergyman, a shipwrecked Quaker, and an aged woman with three orphan grandchildren. He was elected King of the Beggars, and lost the dignity only by deliberate abdication. “The restraints of a town not suiting him after the free rambling life he had led, he took a house in the country, and having acquired some property on the decease of a relation, he was in a position to purchase a residence more suited to his taste, and lived for some years a quiet life ‘respected best by those who knew him best.’”
A very different literary hero of Borrow’s was William Cobbett, in spite of his radical opinions. Cobbett was a man who wrote, as it were, with his fist, not the tips of his fingers. When I begin to read him I think at once of a small country town where men talk loudly to one another at a distance or as they walk along in opposite directions, and the voices ring as their heels do on the cobbles. He is not a man of arguments, but of convictions. He is so full of convictions that, though not an indolent man, he has no time for arguments. “On this stiff ground,” he says in North Wiltshire, “they grow a good many beans and give them to the pigs with whey; which makes excellent pork for the Londoners; but which must meet with a pretty hungry stomach to swallow it in Hampshire.” When he was being shouted down at Lewes in 1822, and someone moved that he should be put out of the room, he says: “I rose that they might see the man that they had to put out.” The hand that holds the bridle holds the pen. The night after he has been hare-hunting—Friday, November the sixteenth, 1821, at Old Hall, in Herefordshire—he writes down this note of it:
“A whole day most delightfully passed a hare-hunting, with a pretty pack of hounds kept here by Messrs. Palmer. They put me upon a horse that seemed to have been made on purpose for me, strong, tall, gentle and bold; and that carried me either over or through every thing. I, who am just the weight of a four-bushel sack of good wheat, actually sat on her back from daylight in the morning to dusk (about nine hours) without once setting my foot on the ground. Our ground was at Orcop, a place about four miles distance from this place. We found a hare in a few minutes after throwing off; and, in the course of the day, we had to find four, and were never more than ten minutes in finding. A steep and naked ridge, lying between two flat valleys, having a mixture of pretty large fields and small woods, formed our ground. The hares crossed the ridge forward and backward, and gave us numerous views and very fine sport. I never rode on such steep ground before; and, really, in going up and down some of the craggy places, where the rain had washed the earth from the rocks, I did think, once or twice of my neck, and how Sidmouth would like to see me. As to the cruelty, as some pretend, of this sport, that point I have, I think, settled, in one of the chapters of my ‘Year’s Residence in America.’ As to the expense, a pack, even a full pack of harriers, like this, costs less than two bottles of wine a day with their inseparable concomitants. And as to the time spent, hunting is inseparable from early rising; and, with habits of early rising, who ever wanted time for any business?”
Borrow could not resist this man’s plain living and plain thinking, or his sentences that are like acts—like blows or strides. And if he had needed any encouragement in the expression of prejudices, Cobbett offered it. The following, from “Cottage Economy,” will serve as an example. It is from a chapter on “Brewing”:—
“The practice of tea drinking must render the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as I have shown, it deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back. Hence succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed, and, in short, all the characteristics of idleness for which, in his case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The tea drinking fills the public-house, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon as they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the teatable is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches them idleness. The everlasting dawdling about with the slops of the tea-tackle gives them a relish for nothing that requires strength and activity. When they go from home, they know how to do nothing that is useful, to brew, to bake, to make butter, to milk, to rear poultry; to do any earthly thing of use they are wholly unqualified. To shut poor young creatures up in manufactories is bad enough; but there at any rate they do something that is useful; whereas the girl that has been brought up merely to boil the teakettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to fix his affections upon her.
“But is it in the power of any man, any good labourer who has attained the age of fifty, to look back upon the last thirty years of his life, without cursing the day in which tea was introduced into England? Where is there such a man who cannot trace to this cause a very considerable part of all the mortifications and sufferings of his life? When was he ever too late at his labour; when did he ever meet with a frown, with a turning off and with pauperism on that account, without being able to trace it to the teakettle? When reproached with lagging in the morning, the poor wretch tells you that he will make up for it by working during his breakfast time! I have heard this a hundred and a hundred times over. He was up time enough; but the teakettle kept him lolling and lounging at home; and now instead of sitting down to a breakfast upon bread, bacon and beer, which is to carry him on to the hour of dinner, he has to force his limbs along under the sweat of feebleness, and at dinner-time to swallow his dry bread, or slake his half-feverish thirst at the pump or the brook. To the wretched teakettle he has to return at night with legs hardly sufficient to maintain him; and then he makes his miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it had he made his wife brew beer instead of making tea. If he now and then gladdens his heart with the drugs of the public-house, some quarrel, some accident, some illness is the probable consequence; to the affray abroad succeeds an affray at home; the mischievous example reaches the children, cramps them or scatters them, and misery for life is the consequence.” As Cobbett wrote against tea so was Borrow to write against the Pope.
Being a reading and a writing man who had set down all his most substantial adventures in earlier books, Borrow, says Mr. Thomas Seccombe, had no choice but “to interpret autobiography as ‘autobiographiction.’” {50} Parts of the autobiography, he says, are “as accurate and veracious as John Wesley’s ‘Journal,’ but the way in which the dingle ingredients” [in the stories of Isopel Berners, the postillion, and the Man in Black] “are mingled, and the extent to which lies—damned lies—or facts predominate, will always be a fascinating topic for literary conjecture.” It must not be forgotten, however, that Borrow never called the published book his autobiography. He did something like what I believe young writers often do; he described events in his own life with modifications for the purpose of concealment in some cases and of embellishment in others. If he had never labelled it an autobiography there would have been no mystery, and the conclusion of readers would be that most of it could not have been invented, but that the postillion’s story, for example, is a short story written to embody some facts and some opinions, without any appearance of being the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If Borrow made a set of letters to the Bible Society into a book like “Gil Blas,” he could hardly do less—especially when he had been reminded of the fact—with his remoter adventures; and having taken out dates and names of persons and places he felt free. He produced his view of himself, as De Quincey did in his “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” This view was modified by his public reputation, by his too potent memory and the need for selection, by his artistic sense, and by his literary training. So far from suffering by the two elements, if they are to be separated, of fiction and autobiography, “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” gain immensely. The autobiographical form—the use of the first person singular—is no mere device to attract an interest and belief as in “Captain Singleton” and a thousand novels. Again and again we are made perfectly certain that the man could not have written otherwise. He is sounding his own depths, and out of mere shyness, at times, uses the transparent amateur trick of pretending that he was writing of someone else. Years afterwards, when Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him, “What is the real nature of autobiography?” he answered in questions: “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?”
CHAPTER VI—THE BIOGRAPHER’S MATERIAL
“Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” give Borrow’s character and soul by direct and indirect means. Their truth and fiction produce a consistent picture which we feel to be true. Dr. Knapp has shown, where the facts are accessible, that Borrow does not much neglect, mislay or pervert them. But neither Dr. Knapp nor anyone else has captured facts which would be of any significance had Borrow told us nothing himself. Some of the anecdotes lap a branch here and there; some disclose a little rotten wood or fungus; others show the might of a great limb, perhaps a knotty protuberance with a grotesque likeness, or the height of the whole; others again are like clumsy arrogant initials carved on the venerable bark. I shall use some of them, but for the most part I shall use Borrow’s own brush both to portray and to correct.
CHAPTER VII—PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST
The five works of Borrow’s maturity—from “The Zincali: or the Gypsies of Spain,” written when he had turned thirty, to “Wild Wales,” written when he had turned fifty—have this in common, and perhaps for their chief quality, that of set purpose and by inevitable accident they reveal Borrow, the body and the spirit of the man. Together they compose a portrait, if not a small gallery of portraits. Of these the most deliberate is the one that emerges from “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.” In these books, written after he had passed forty, he described the first twenty-two years of his life, without, so far as is known, using any notebooks or other contemporary documents. As I have said before, the literal accuracy of such a description must have been limited by his power and his willingness to see things as they were. In some ways there is no greater stranger to the youth of twenty than the man of forty who was once that youth, and if he overcomes that strangeness it is often by the perilous process of concealing the strangeness and the difference. The result is—or is it an individual misfortune of mine?—that the figure of “Lavengro” seems to me, more often than not, and on the whole, to be nearer the age of forty than of twenty. The artist, that is to say, dominates his subject, the tall overgrown youth of twenty-two, as grey as a badger. It is very different in “The Bible in Spain,” where artist and subject are equally matched, and both mature. In “Lavengro” there is a roundabout method, a painful poring subtlety and minuteness, a marvellous combination of Sterne and Defoe, resulting in something very little like any book written by either man: in “The Bible in Spain” a straightforward, confident, unqualified revelation that seems almost unconsidered.
CHAPTER VIII—CHILDHOOD
And now for some raw bones of the life of a man who was born in 1803 and died in 1881, bones picked white and dry by the winds of thirty, forty, fifty, and a hundred years.
Thomas Borrow, his father, an eighth and youngest son, was born in 1758 of a yeoman family long and still settled in Cornwall, near Liskeard. He worked for some time on his brother’s farm. At nineteen he joined the Militia and was apprenticed to a maltster, but, having knocked his master down in a free fight at Menheniot Fair in 1783, disappeared and enlisted as a private in the Coldstream Guards. He was then a man of fresh complexion and light brown hair, just under five feet eight inches in height. He was a sergeant when he was transferred nine years later to the West Norfolk Regiment of Militia. In 1798 he was promoted to the office of adjutant with the rank of captain. In 1793 he had married Ann Perfrement, a tenant farmer’s daughter from East Dereham, and probably of French Protestant descent, whom he had first met when she was playing a minor part as an amateur at East Dereham with a company from the Theatre Royal at Norwich. She had, says Borrow, dark brilliant eyes, oval face, olive complexion, and Grecian forehead.
The first child of this marriage, John Thomas, was born in 1800. Borrow describes this elder brother as a beautiful child of “rosy, angelic face, blue eyes and light chestnut hair,” yet of “not exactly an Anglo-Saxon countenance,” having something of “the Celtic character, particularly in the fire and vivacity which illumined it.” John was his father’s favourite. He entered the army and became a lieutenant, but also, and especially after the end of the war, a painter, studying under B. R. Haydon and old Crome. He went out to Mexico in the service of a mining company in 1826, and died there in 1834.
George Borrow was born in 1803 at another station of the regiment, East Dereham. He calls himself a gloomy child, a “lover of nooks and retired corners . . . sitting for hours together with my head on my breast . . . conscious of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of a strange sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and for which I could assign no real cause whatever.” A maidservant thought him a little wrong in the head, but a Jew pedlar rebuked her for saying so, and said the child had “all the look of one of our people’s children,” and praised his bright eyes. With the regiment he travelled along the Sussex and Kent coast during the next four years. They were at Pett in 1806, and there he tells us that he first handled a viper, fearless and unharmed. In 1806 also they were at Hythe, where he saw the skulls of the Danes. They were at Canterbury in 1807, and near there was the scene of his eating the “green, red, and purple” berries from the hedge and suffering convulsions. They were, says Dr. Knapp, from the regimental records, never at Winchester, but at Winchelsea. In 1809 and 1810 they were back at Dereham, which was then the home of Eleanor Fenn, his “Lady Bountiful,” widow of the editor of the “Paston Letters,” Sir John Fenn. He had “increased rapidly in size and in strength,” but not in mind, and could read only imperfectly until “Robinson Crusoe” drew him out. He went to church twice on Sundays, and never heard God’s name without a tremor, “for I now knew that God was an awful and inscrutable being, the maker of all things; that we were His children, and that we, by our sins, had justly offended Him; that we were in very great peril from His anger, not so much in this life as in another and far stranger state of being yet to come; that we had a Saviour withal to whom it was necessary to look for help: upon this point, however, I was yet very much in the dark, as, indeed, were most of those with whom I was connected. The power and terrors of God were uppermost in my thoughts; they fascinated though they astounded me.”
Later in 1810 he was at Norman Cross, in Huntingdonshire, and was free to wander alone by Whittlesea Mere. There he met the old viper-hunter and herbalist, into whose mouth he puts the tale of the King of the Vipers. There he met the Gypsies. He answered their threats with a viper that had lain hid in his breast; they called him “Sapengro, a chap who catches snakes and plays tricks with them.” He was sworn brother to Jasper, the son, who despised him for being puny.
The Borrows were at Dereham again in 1811, and George went to school “for the acquisition of Latin,” and learnt the whole of Lilly’s Grammar by heart. Other marches of the regiment left him time to wonder at that “stupendous erection, the aqueduct at Stockport”—to visit Durham and “a capital old inn” there, where he had “a capital dinner off roast Durham beef, and a capital glass of ale, which I believe was the cause of my being ever after fond of ale”—so he told the Durham miner whom he met on his way to the Devil’s Bridge, in Cardiganshire—and to attend school at Huddersfield in 1812 and at Edinburgh in 1813 and 1814.
He mentions the frequent fights at the High School and the pitched battles between the Old and the New Town. Climbing the Castle Rock was his favourite diversion, and on one “horrible edge” he came upon David Haggart sitting and thinking of William Wallace:
“And why were ye thinking of him?” Borrow says that he asked the lad. “The English hanged him long since, as I have heard say.”
“I was thinking,” he answered, “that I should wish to be like him.”
“Do ye mean,” Borrow says that he said, “that ye would wish to be hanged?”
This youth was a drummer boy in Captain Borrow’s regiment. Borrow describes him upsetting the New Town champion in one of the bickers. Seven years later he was condemned to death at Edinburgh, and to earn a little money for his mother he dictated an account of his life to the prison chaplain before he died. It was published in 1821 with the title: “The Life of David Haggart, alias John Wilson, alias John Morison, alias Barney M’Coul, alias John M’Colgan, alias David O’Brien, alias the Switcher. Written by himself, while under sentence of death.” It is worth reading, notable in itself and for its style.
He was a gamekeeper’s son, and being a merry boy was liberally tipped by sportsmen. Yet he ran away from home at the age of ten. One of his first exploits was the stealing of a bantam cock. It belonged to a woman at the back of the New Town of Edinburgh, says he, and he took a great fancy to it, “for it was a real beauty and I offered to buy, but mistress would not sell, so I got another cock, and set the two a fighting, and then off with my prize.” This is like Mr. W. B. Yeats’ Paddy Cockfight in “Where there is nothing”; he got a fighting cock from a man below Mullingar—“The first day I saw him I fastened my eyes on him, he preyed on my mind, and next night if I didn’t go back every foot of nine miles to put him in my bag.” When he was twelve he got drunk at the Leith races and enlisted in the Norfolk Militia, which had a recruiting party for patriots at the races. “I learned,” he says, “to beat the drum very well in the course of three months, and afterwards made considerable progress in blowing the bugle-horn. I liked the red coat and the soldiering well enough for a while, but soon tired. We were too much confined, and there was too little pay for me;” and so he got his discharge. “The restraining influences of military discipline,” says Dr. Knapp, “gradually wore away.” He went back to school even, but in vain. He was “never happier in his life” than when he “fingered all this money”—£200 acquired by theft. He worked at his trade of thieving in many parts of Scotland and Ireland. As early as 1818 he was sentenced to death, but escaped, and, being recognised by a policeman, killed him and got clear away. He served one or two sentences and escaped from another. He escaped a third time, with a friend, after hitting the gaoler in such a manner that he afterwards died. The friend was caught at once, but David ran well—“never did a fox double the hounds in better style”—and got away in woman’s clothes. As he was resting in a haystack after his run of ten miles in an hour, he heard a woman ask “if that lad was taken that had broken out of Dumfries Gaol,” and the answer: “No; but the gaoler died last night at ten o’clock.” He got arrested in Ireland through sheer carelessness, was recognised and taken in irons to Dumfries again—and so he died.
In 1814 and 1815 Borrow was for a time at the Grammar School at Norwich, but sailed with the regiment “in the autumn of the year 1815” for Ireland. “On the eighth day of our voyage,” he says, “we were in sight of Ireland. The weather was now calm and serene, the sun shone brightly on the sea and on certain green hills in the distance, on which I descried what at first sight I believed to be two ladies gathering flowers, which, however, on our near approach, proved to be two tall white towers, doubtless built for some purpose or other, though I did not learn for what.” He was at “the Protestant Academy” at Clonmel, and “read the Latin tongue and the Greek letters with a nice old clergyman.” From a schoolfellow he learnt something of the Irish tongue in exchange for a pack of cards.
School, he says, had helped him to cast aside, in a great degree, his unsocial habits and natural reserve, and when he moved to Templemore, where there was no school, he roamed about the wild country, “sometimes entering the cabins of the peasantry with a ‘God’s blessing upon you good people!’” Here, as in Scotland, he seems to have done as he liked. His father had other things to do than look after the child whom he was later on to upbraid for growing up in a displeasing way. Ireland made a strong impression upon the boy, if we may judge from his writing about it when he looked back on those days. He recalls, in “Wild Wales,” hearing the glorious tune of “Croppies lie Down” in the barrack yard at Clonmel. Again and again he recalls Murtagh, the wild Irish boy who taught him Irish for a pack of cards. In Ireland he learnt to be “a frank rider” without a saddle, and had awakened in him his “passion for the equine race”: and here he had his cob shoed by a “fairy smith” who first roused the animal to a frenzy by uttering a strange word “in a sharp pungent tone,” and then calmed it by another word “in a voice singularly modified but sweet and almost plaintive.” Above all there is a mystery which might easily be called Celtic about his memories of Ireland, due chiefly to something in his own blood, but also to the Irish atmosphere which evoked that something in its perfection.
After less than a year in Ireland the regiment was back at Norwich, and war being at an end, the men were mustered out in 1815.
CHAPTER IX—SCHOOLDAYS
The Borrows now settled at Norwich in what was then King’s Court and is now Borrow’s Court, off Willow Lane. George Borrow, therefore, again attended the Grammar School of Norwich. He could then, he says, read Greek. His father’s dissatisfaction was apparently due to some instinctive antipathy for the child, who had neither his hair nor his eyes, but was “absolutely swarthy, God forgive me! I had almost said like that of a Gypsy.” As in Scotland and Ireland, so now at Norwich, Captain Borrow probably let the boy do what he liked. As for Mrs. Borrow, perhaps she favoured the boy, who took after her in eyes and complexion, if not also in temperament. Her influence was of an unconscious kind, strengthening her prenatal influence; unlike her husband, she had no doubt that “Providence” would take care of the boy. Borrow, at least, thought her like himself. In a suppressed portion of the twentieth chapter of “Lavengo” he makes his parents talk together in the garden, and the mother having a story to tell suggests their going in because it is growing dark. The father says that a tale of terror is the better for being told in the dark, and hopes she is not afraid. The mother scoffs at the mention of fear, and yet, she says, she feels a thrill as if something were casting a cold shadow on her. She wonders if this feeling is like the indescribable fear, “which he calls the shadow,” which sometimes attacks her younger child. “Never mind the child or his shadow,” says the father, and bids her go on. And from what follows the mother has evidently told the story before to her son. This dialogue may very well express the contrast between husband and wife and their attitudes towards their younger son. Borrow very eloquently addresses his father as “a noble specimen of those strong single-minded Englishmen, who, without making a parade either of religion or loyalty, feared God and honoured their king, and were not particularly friendly to the French,” and as a pugilist who almost vanquished the famous Ben Bryan; but he does not conceal the fact that he was “so little to thee that thou understoodst me not.”
At Norwich Grammar School Borrow had as schoolfellows James Martineau and James Brooke, afterwards Rajah of Sarawak. The headmaster was one Edward Valpy, who thrashed Borrow, and there is nothing more to be said. The boy was fond of study but not of school. “For want of something better to do,” he taught himself some French and Italian, but wished he had a master. A master was found in a French émigré, the Rev. Thomas D’Eterville, who gave private lessons to Borrow, among others, in French, Italian and Spanish. His other teachers were an old musket with which he shot bullfinches, blackbirds and linnets, a fishing rod with which he haunted the Yare, and the sporting gent, John Thurtell, who taught him to box and accustomed him to pugilism.
Something is known of Thurtell apart from Borrow. He was the son of a man who was afterwards Mayor of Norwich. He had been a soldier and he was now in business. He arranged prize fights and boxed himself. He afterwards murdered a man who had dishonestly relieved him of £400 at gambling, and he was executed for the offence at Hertford in 1824. The trial was celebrated. It was there that a “respectable” man was defined by a witness as one who “kept a gig.” The trial was included in the “Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence” which Borrow compiled in 1825; and Borrow may have written this description of the accused:
“Thurtell was dressed in a plum-coloured frock coat, with a drab waistcoat and gilt buttons, and white corded breeches. His neck had a black stock on, which fitted as usual stiffly up to the bottom of the cheek and end of the chin, and which therefore pushed forward the flesh on this part of the face so as to give an additionally sullen weight to the countenance. The lower part of the face was unusually large, muscular and heavy, and appeared to hang like a load to the head, and to make it drop like the mastiff’s jowl. The upper lip was long and large, and the mouth had a severe and dogged appearance. His nose was rather small for such a face, but it was not badly shaped; his eyes, too, were small and buried deep under his protruding forehead, so indeed as to defy detection of their colour. The forehead was extremely strong, bony and knotted—and the eyebrows were forcibly marked though irregular—that over the right eye being nearly straight and that on the left turning up to a point so as to give a very painful expression to the whole face. His hair was of a good lightish brown, and not worn after any fashion. His frame was exceedingly well knit and athletic.”
An eye witness reports that seven hours before his execution, Thurtell said: “It is perhaps wrong in my situation, but I own I should like to read Pierce Egan’s account of the great fight yesterday” (meaning that between Spring and Langan). He slept well through his last night, and said: “I have dreamt many odd things, but I never dreamt anything about this business since I have been in Hertford.” Pierce Egan described the trial and execution, and how Thurtell bowed in a friendly and dignified manner to someone—“we believe, Mr. Pierce Egan”—in the crowd about the gallows. Pierce Egan did not mention the sound of his cracking neck, but Borrow is reported to have said it was a shame to hang such a man as Thurtell: “Why, when his neck broke it went off like a pistol.”
Thurtell is the second of Borrow’s friends who preceded him in fame.
During his school days under Valpy, Borrow met his sworn brother again—the Gypsy Petulengro. He places this meeting at the Tombland Fair at Norwich, and Dr. Knapp fixes it, precisely, on March 19, 1818. According to Borrow’s account, which is the only one, he was shadowed and then greeted by Jasper Petulengro. They went together to the Gypsy encampment on Household Heath, and they were together there often again, in spite of the hostility of one Gypsy, Mrs. Herne, to Borrow. He says that he went with them to fairs and markets and learnt their language in spite of Mrs. Herne, so that they called him Lav-engro, or Word Master. The mighty Tawno Chikno also called him Cooro-mengro, because of his mastery with the fist. He was then sixteen. He is said to have stained his face to darken it further, and to have been asked by Valpy: “Is that jaundice or only dirt, Borrow?”
CHAPTER X—LEAVING SCHOOL
With so much liberty Borrow desired more. He played truant and, as we have seen, was thrashed for it. He was soon to leave school for good, though there is nothing to prove that he left on account of this escapade, or that the thrashing produced the “symptoms of a rapid decline,” with a failure of strength and appetite, which he speaks of in the eighteenth chapter of “Lavengro,” after the Gypsies had gone away. He was almost given over by the physicians, he tells us, but cured by an “ancient female, a kind of doctress,” with a decoction of “a bitter root which grows on commons and desolate places.” An attack of “the dark feeling of mysterious dread” came with convalescence.
But “never during any portion of my life did time flow on more speedily,” he says, than during the next two or three years. After some hesitation between Church and Law, he was articled in 1819 to Messrs. Simpson and Rackham, solicitors, of Tuck’s Court, St. Giles’, Norwich, and he lived with Simpson in the Upper Close. As a friend said, the law was an excellent profession for those who never intend to follow it. As Borrow himself said, “I have ever loved to be as explicit as possible; on which account, perhaps, I never attained to any proficiency in the law.” Borrow sat faithfully at his desk and learned a good deal of Welsh, Danish, Hebrew, Arabic, Gaelic, and Armenian, making translations from these languages in prose and verse. In “Wild Wales” he recalls translating Danish poems “over the desk of his ancient master, the gentleman solicitor of East Anglia,” and learning Welsh by reading a Welsh “Paradise Lost” side by side with the original, and by having lessons on Sunday afternoons at his father’s house from a groom named Lloyd.
His chief master was William Taylor, the “Anglo-Germanist” of “Lavengro.” Taylor was born in 1765. He studied in Germany as a youth and returned to England with a great enthusiasm for German literature. He translated Goethe’s “Iphigenia” (1793), Lessing’s “Nathan” (1791), Wieland’s “Dialogues of the Gods,” etc. (1795); he published “Tales of Yore,” translated from several languages, and a “Letter concerning the two first chapters of Luke,” in 1810, “English Synonyms discriminated” in 1813, and an “Historical Survey of German Poetry,” interspersed with various translations, in 1823-30. He was bred among Unitarians, read Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau, disliked the Church, and welcomed the French Revolution, though he was no friend to “the cause of national ambition and aggrandisement.” He belonged to a Revolution Society at Norwich, and in 1790 wrote from Paris calling the National Assembly “that well-head of philosophical legislation, whose pure streams are now overflowing the fairest country upon earth and will soon be sluiced off into the other realms of Europe, fertilising all with the living energy of its waters.” In 1791 he and his father withdrew their capital from manufacture and William Taylor devoted himself to literature. Hazlitt speaks of the “style of philosophical criticism which has been the boast of the ‘Edinburgh Review,’” as first introduced into the “Monthly Review” by Taylor in 1796. Scott said that Taylor’s translation of Burger’s “Lenore” made him a poet. Sir James Mackintosh learned the Taylorian language for the sake of the man’s “vigour and originality”—“As the Hebrew is studied for one book, so is the Taylorian by me for one author.”
I will give a few hints at the nature of his speculation. In one of his letters he speaks of stumbling on “the new hypothesis that the Nebuchadnezzar of Scripture is the Cyrus of Greek History,” and second, that “David, the Jew, a favourite of this prince, wrote all those oracles scattered in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel relative to his enterprises, for the particularisation of which they afford ample materials.” Writing of his analysis, in the “Critical Review,” of Paulus’ Commentary on the New Testament, he blames the editor for a suppression—“an attempt to prove, from the first and second chapter of Luke, that Zacharias, who wrote these chapters, meant to hold himself out as the father of Jesus Christ as well as of John the Baptist. The Jewish idea of being conceived of the Holy Ghost did not exclude the idea of human parentage. The rabbinical commentator on Genesis explains this.” He was called “Godless Billy Taylor,” but says he: “When I publish my other pamphlet in proof of the great truth that Jesus Christ wrote the ‘Wisdom’ and translated the ‘Ecclesiasticus’ from the Hebrew of his grandfather Hillel, you will be convinced (that I am convinced) that I and I alone am a precise and classical Christian; the only man alive who thinks concerning the person and doctrines of Christ what he himself thought and taught.” His “Letter concerning the two first chapters of Luke” has the further title, “Who was the father of Christ?” He calls “not absolutely indefensible” the opinion of the anonymous German author of the “Natural History of Jesus of Nazareth,” that Joseph of Arimathæa was the father of Jesus Christ. He mentions that “a more recent anonymous theorist, with greater plausibility, imagines that the acolytes employed in the Temple of Jerusalem were called by the names of angels, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, accordingly as they were stationed behind, beside, or before, the mercy-seat; and that the Gabriel of the Temple found means to impose on the innocence of the virgin.” “This,” he says, “is in many ways compatible with Mary’s having faithfully given the testimony put together by Luke.” He gives at great length the arguments in favour of Zacharias as the father, and tells Josephus’ story of Mundus and Paulina. {68}
Norwich was then “a little Academe among provincial cities,” as Mr. Seccombe calls it; he continues:
“Among the high lights of the illuminated capital of East Anglia were the Cromes, the Opies, John Sell Cotman, Elizabeth Fry, Dr. William Enfield (of Speaker fame), and Dr. Rigby, the father of Lady Eastlake; but pre-eminent above all reigned the twin cliques of Taylors and Martineaus, who amalgamated at impressive intervals for purposes of mutual elevation and refinement.
“The salon of Susannah Taylor, the mother of Sarah Austin, the wife of John Taylor, hymn writer and deacon of the seminal chapel, the once noted Octagon, in Norwich, included in its zenith Sir James Mackintosh, Mrs. Barbauld, Crabb Robinson, the solemn Dr. John Alderson, Amelia Opie, Henry Reeve of Edinburgh fame, Basil Montagu, the Sewards, the Quaker Gurneys of Earlham, and Dr. Frank Sayers, whom the German critics compared to Gray, who had handled the Norse mythology in poetry, to which Borrow was introduced by Sayer’s private biographer, the eminent and aforesaid William Taylor” [no relation of the “Taylors of Norwich”] “whose ‘Jail-delivery of German Studies’ the jealous Thomas Carlyle stigmatized in 1830 as the work of a natural-born English Philistine.”
Nevertheless, in spite of the Taylors and the Martineaus, says William Taylor’s biographer, Robberds: “The love of society almost necessarily produces the habit of indulging in the pleasures of the table; and, though he cannot be charged with having carried this to an immoderate excess, still the daily repetition of it had taxed too much the powers of nature and exhausted them before the usual period.” Taylor died in 1836 and was remembered best for his drinking and for his bloated appearance. Harriet Martineau wrote of him in her autobiography:
“William Taylor was managed by a regular process, first of feeding, then of wine-bibbing, and immediately after of poking to make him talk: and then came his sayings, devoured by the gentlemen and making ladies and children aghast;—defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had rescued him from it: information given as certain that ‘God Save the King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon,—that Christ was watched on the day of His supposed ascension, and observed to hide Himself till dark, and then to make His way down the other side of the mountain; and other such plagiarisms from the German Rationalists. When William Taylor began with ‘I firmly believe,’ we knew that something particularly incredible was coming. . . . His virtues as a son were before our eyes when we witnessed his endurance of his father’s brutality of temper and manners, and his watchfulness in ministering to the old man’s comfort in his infirmities. When we saw, on a Sunday morning, William Taylor guiding his blind mother to chapel, and getting her there with her shoes as clean as if she had crossed no gutters in those flint-paved streets, we could forgive anything that had shocked or disgusted us at the dinner table. But matters grew worse in his old age, when his habits of intemperance kept him out of the sight of the ladies, and he got round him a set of ignorant and conceited young men, who thought they could set the world right by their destructive tendencies. One of his chief favourites was George Borrow. . . .”
Another of “the harum-scarum young men” taken up by Taylor and introduced “into the best society the place afforded,” writes Harriet Martineau, was Polidori.
Borrow was introduced to Taylor in 1820 by “Mousha,” the Jew who taught him Hebrew. Taylor “took a great interest” in him and taught him German. “What I tell Borrow once,” he said, “he ever remembers.” In 1821 Taylor wrote to Southey, who was an early friend:
“A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s ‘Wilhelm Tell,’ with the view of translating it for the Press. His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity; indeed he has the gift of tongues, and, though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese; he would like to get into the Office for Foreign Affairs, but does not know how.”
Borrow was at that time a “reserved and solitary” youth, tall, spare, dark complexioned and usually dressed in black, who used to be seen hanging about the Close and talking through the railings of his garden to some of the Grammar School boys. He was a noticeable youth, and he told his father that a lady had painted him and compared his face to that of Alfieri’s Saul.
Borrow pleased neither his master nor his father by his knowledge of languages, though it was largely acquired in the lawyer’s office. “The lad is too independent by half,” Borrow makes his father say, after painting a filial portrait of the old man, “with locks of silver gray which set off so nobly his fine bold but benevolent face, his faithful consort at his side, and his trusty dog at his feet.” Nor did the youth please himself. He was languid again, tired even of the Welsh poet, Ab Gwilym. He was anxious about his father, who was low spirited over his elder son’s absence in London as a painter, and over his younger son’s misconduct and the “strange notions and doctrines”—especially the doctrine that everyone has a right to dispose as he thinks best of that which is his own, even of his life—which he had imbibed from Taylor. Taylor was “fond of getting hold of young men and, according to orthodox accounts, doing them a deal of harm.” {71a} His views, says Dr. Knapp, sank deep “into the organism of his pupil,” and “would only be eradicated, if at all, through much suffering.” Dr. Knapp thought that the execution of Thurtell ought to have produced a “favourable change in his mode of thinking”—as if prize fighting and murder were not far more common among Christians than atheists. But if Borrow had never met Taylor he would have met someone else, atheist or religious enthusiast, who would have lured him from the straight, smooth, flowery path of orthodoxy; otherwise he might have been a clergyman or he might have been Dr. Knapp, but he would not have been George Borrow. “What is truth?” he asked. “Would that I had never been born!” he said to himself. And it was an open air ranter, not a clergyman or unobtrusive godly man, that made him exclaim: “Would that my life had been like his—even like that man’s.” Then the Gypsy reminded him of “the wind on the heath” and the boxing gloves.
When his father asked Borrow what he proposed to do, {71b} seeing that he was likely to do nothing at law, he had nothing to suggest. Southey apparently could not help him to the Foreign Office. The only opening that can have seemed possible to him was literature. He might, for example, produce a volume of translations like the “Specimen of Russian Poets” (1820) of John Bowring, whom he met at Taylor’s. Bowring, a man of twenty-nine in 1821, was the head of a commercial firm and afterwards a friend of Borrow and the author of many translations from Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Servian, Hungarian and Bohemian song. He was, as the “Old Radical” of “The Romany Rye,” Borrow’s victim in his lifetime, and after his death the victim of Dr. Knapp as the supposed false friend of his hero. The mud thrown at him had long since dried, and has now been brushed off in a satisfactory manner by Mr. R. A. J. Walling. {72}
CHAPTER XI—LITERATURE AND LANGUAGES
When Borrow was in his nineteenth year—according to Dr. Knapp’s estimate—he told his father what he had done: “I have learned Welsh, and have translated the songs of Ab Gwilym, some ten thousand lines, into English rhyme. I have also learnt Danish, and have rendered the old book of Ballads into English metre. I have learned many other tongues, and have acquired some knowledge even of Hebrew and Arabic.” He read and conversed with William Taylor; he read alone in the Guildhall of Norwich, where the Corporation Library offered him the books from which he gained “his knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and early English, Welsh or British, Northern or Scandinavian learning”—so writes Dr. Knapp, who has seen the “neat young pencilled notes” of Borrow in Edmund Lhuyd’s ‘Archæologia Britannica’ and the ‘Danica Literatura Antiquissima’ of Olaus Wormius, etc. He tells us himself that he passed entire nights in reading an old Danish book, till he was almost blind.
In 1823 Borrow began to publish his translations. Taylor introduced him to Thomas Campbell, then editor of the “New Monthly,” and to Sir Richard Phillips, editor and proprietor of the “Monthly Magazine.” Both editors printed Borrow’s works.
Sir Richard Phillips was particularly flattering: he used Borrow’s article on “Danish Poetry and Ballad Writing” and about six hundred lines of translation from German, Danish, Swedish and Dutch poetry in the first year of the connection, usually with the signature, “George Olaus Borrow.” I will quote only one specimen, his version of Goethe’s “Erl King” (“Monthly Magazine,” December, 1823):
Who is it that gallops so late on the wild!
O it is the father that carries his child!
He presses him close in his circling arm,
To save him from cold, and to shield him from harm.“Dear baby, what makes ye your countenance hide?”
“Spur, father, your courser and rowel his side;
The Erl-King is chasing us over the heath;”
“Peace, baby, thou seest a vapoury wreath?”“Dear boy, come with me, and I’ll join in your sport,
And show ye the place where the fairies resort;
My mother, who dwells in the cool pleasant mine
Shall clothe thee in garments so fair and so fine.”“My father, my father, in mercy attend,
And hear what is said by the whispering fiend.”
“Be quiet, be quiet, my dearly-loved child;
’Tis naught but the wind as it stirs in the wild.”“Dear baby, if thou wilt but venture with me,
My daughter shall dandle thy form on her knee;
My daughter, who dwells where the moon-shadows play,
Shall lull ye to sleep with the song of the fay.”“My father, my father, and seest thou not
His sorceress daughter in yonder dark spot?”
“I see something truly, thou dear little fool,—
I see the great alders that hang by the pool.”“Sweet baby, I doat on that beautiful form,
And thou shalt ride with me the wings of the storm.”
“O father, my father, he grapples me now,
And already has done me a mischief, I vow.”The father was terrified, onward he press’d,
And closer he cradled the child to his breast,
And reach’d the far cottage, and, wild with alarm,
He found that the baby hung dead on his arm!
The only criticism that need be passed on this is that any man of some intelligence and patience can hope to do as well: he seldom wrote any verse that was either much better or much worse. At the same time it must not be forgotten that the success of the translation is no measure of the impression made on the young Borrow by the legend.
His translations from Ab Gwilym are not interesting either to lovers of that poet or to lovers of Borrow: some are preserved in a sort of life in death in the pages of “Wild Wales.”
From the German he had also translated F. M. Von Klinger’s “Faustus: his life, death and descent into hell.” {75a} The preface announces that “although scenes of vice and crime are here exhibited, it is merely in the hope that they may serve as beacons, to guide the ignorant and unwary from the shoals on which they might otherwise be wrecked.” He insisted, furthermore, that the book contained “the highly useful advice,” that everyone should bear their lot in patience and not seek “at the expense of his repose to penetrate into those secrets which the spirit of man, while dressed in the garb of mortality cannot and must not unveil. . . . To the mind of man all is dark; he is an enigma to himself; let him live, therefore, in the hope of once seeing clearly; and happy indeed is he who in that manner passeth his days.”
From the Danish of Johannes Evald, he translated “The Death of Balder,” a play, into blank verse with consistently feminine endings, as in this speech of Thor to Balder: {75b}
How long dost think, degenerate son of Odin,
Unmanly pining for a foolish maiden,
And all the weary train of love-sick follies,
Will move a bosom that is steel’d by virtue?
Thou dotest! Dote and weep, in tears swim ever;
But by thy father’s arm, by Odin’s honour,
Haste, hide thy tears and thee in shades of alder!
Haste to the still, the peace-accustom’d valley,
Where lazy herdsmen dance amid the clover.
There wet each leaf which soft the west wind kisses,
Each plant which breathes around voluptuous odours,
With tears! There sigh and moan, and the tired peasant
Shall hear thee, and, behind his ploughshare resting,
Shall wonder at thy grief, and pity Balder!
There are lyrics interspersed. The following is sung by three Valkyries marching round the cauldron before Rota dips the fatal spear that she is to present to Hother:
In juice of rue
And trefoil too;
In marrow of bear
And blood of Trold,
Be cool’d the spear,
Threetimes cool’d,
When hot from blazes
Which Nastroud raises
For Valhall’s May.1st Valk. Whom it woundeth,
It shall slay.2nd Whom it woundeth,
It shall slay.3rd Whom it woundeth,
It shall slay.
In 1826 he was to publish “Romantic Ballads,” translated from the Gaelic, Danish, Norse, Swedish, and German, with eight original pieces. He “hoped shortly” to publish a complete translation of the “Kjæmpe Viser” and of Gaelic songs, made by him “some years ago.” Few of these are valuable or interesting, but I must quote “Svend Vonved” because Borrow himself so often refers to it. The legend haunted him of “that strange melancholy Swayne Vonved, who roams about the world propounding people riddles; slaying those who cannot answer, and rewarding those who can with golden bracelets.” When he was walking alone in wild weather in Cornwall he roared it aloud:
Svend Vonved sits in his lonely bower;
He strikes his harp with a hand of power;
His harp returned a responsive din;
Then came his mother hurrying in:
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.In came his mother Adeline,
And who was she, but a queen so fine:
“Now hark, Svend Vonved! out must thou ride
And wage stout battle with knights of pride.”
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.“Avenge thy father’s untimely end;
To me, or another, thy gold harp lend;
This moment boune thee, and straight begone!
I rede thee, do it, my own dear son.”
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.Svend Vonved binds his sword to his side;
He fain will battle with knights of pride.
“When may I look for thee once more here?
When roast the heifer and spice the beer?”
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.“When stones shall take, of themselves, a flight
And ravens’ feathers are waxen white,
Then may’st thou expect Svend Vonved home:
In all my days, I will never come.”
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.
If we did not know that Borrow used these verses as a kind of incantation we should be sorry to have read them. But one of the original pieces in this book is as good in itself as it is interesting. I mean “Lines to Six-foot-three”:
A lad, who twenty tongues can talk,
And sixty miles a day can walk;
Drink at a draught a pint of rum,
And then be neither sick nor dumb;
Can tune a song, and make a verse,
And deeds of northern kings rehearse;
Who never will forsake his friend,
While he his bony fist can bend;
And, though averse to brawl and strife,
Will fight a Dutchman with a knife.
O that is just the lad for me,
And such is honest six-foot three.A braver being ne’er had birth
Since God first kneaded man from earth;
O, I have come to know him well,
As Ferroe’s blacken’d rocks can tell.
Who was it did, at Suderöe,
The deed no other dared to do?
Who was it, when the Boff had burst,
And whelm’d me in its womb accurst,
Who was it dashed amid the wave,
With frantic zeal, my life to save?
Who was it flung the rope to me?
O, who, but honest six-foot three!Who was it taught my willing tongue,
The songs that Braga fram’d and sung?
Who was it op’d to me the store
Of dark unearthly Runic lore,
And taught me to beguile my time
With Denmark’s aged and witching rhyme;
To rest in thought in Elvir shades,
And hear the song of fairy maids;
Or climb the top of Dovrefeld,
Where magic knights their muster held!
Who was it did all this for me?
O, who, but honest six-foot three!Wherever fate shall bid me roam,
Far, far from social joy and home;
’Mid burning Afric’s desert sands;
Or wild Kamschatka’s frozen lands;
Bit by the poison-loaded breeze
Or blasts which clog with ice the seas;
In lowly cot or lordly hall,
In beggar’s rags or robes of pall,
’Mong robber-bands or honest men,
In crowded town or forest den,
I never will unmindful be
Of what I owe to six-foot three.That form which moves with giant grace—
That wild, tho’ not unhandsome face;
That voice which sometimes in its tone
Is softer than the wood-dove’s moan,
At others, louder than the storm
Which beats the side of old Cairn Gorm;
That hand, as white as falling snow,
Which yet can fell the stoutest foe;
And, last of all, that noble heart,
Which ne’er from honour’s path would start,
Shall never be forgot by me—
So farewell, honest six-foot three.