CHAPTER XXIII—BETWEEN THE ACTS
Six three-volume editions of “The Bible in Spain” were issued within the first twelve months: ten thousand copies of a cheap edition were sold in four months. In America it was sold rapidly without benefit to Borrow. It was translated into German in 1844 and French in 1845. Borrow came up to town and did not refuse to meet princes, bishops, ambassadors, and members of Parliament. He was pleased and flattered by the sales and the reviews, and declared that he had known it would succeed. He did not quite know what to say to an invitation from the Royal Institution, but as to the Royal Academy, it would “just suit him,” because he was a safe man, he said, fitted by nature for an Academician. He did not think much of episcopal food, wine, or cigars. He was careful of his hero and disliked hearing him abused or treated indifferently. If he had many letters, he answered but few. He had made nothing yet out of literature because the getting about to receive homage, etc., had been so expensive: he did not care, for he hated to speak of money matters, yet he could not but mention the fact. When the money began to arrive he did not resent it by any means, as he was to buy a blood horse with it—no less. His letters have a jolly, bullying, but offhand and jerky tone, and they are very short. He gives Murray advice on publishing and is willing to advise the Government how to manage the Irish—“the blackguards.”
He was now, by virtue of his wife, a “landed proprietor,” and filled the part with unction, though but little satisfaction. For he was not a magistrate, and he had to get up in the middle of the night to look after “poachers and thieves,” as he says in giving a reason for an illness. In the summer-house at Oulton hung his father’s coat and sword, but it is to be noticed that to the end of his life an old friend held it “doubtful whether his father commenced his military career with a commission.” Borrow probably realised the importance of belonging to the ruling classes and having a long steady pedigree. “If report be true,” says the same friend, {201} “his mother was of French origin, and in early life an actress.” The foreignness as an asset overcame his objection to the French, and “an actress” also sounded unconventional. The friend continues: “But the subject of his family was one on which Borrow never touched. He would allude to Borrowdale as the country whence they came, and then would make mysterious allusions to his father’s pugilistic triumphs. But this is certain, that he has not left a single relation behind him.” Yet he had many relatives in Cornwall and did not scorn to visit their houses. He would only talk of his works to intimate friends, and “when he went into company it was as a gentleman, not because he was an author.”
Lady Eastlake, in March, 1844, calls him “a fine man, but a most disagreeable one; a kind of character that would be most dangerous in rebellious times—one that would suffer or persecute to the utmost. His face is expressive of wrong-headed determination.”
A little earlier than this, in October, 1843, Caroline Fox saw him “sitting on one side of the fire and his old mother on the other.” It was known to her that “his spirits always sink in wet weather, and to-day was very rainy, but he was courteous and not displeased to be a little lionised, for his delicacy is not of the most susceptible.” He was “a tall, ungainly, uncouth man,” in her opinion, “with great physical strength, a quick penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation.” In no place does he make anyone praise his voice, and, as he said, it reminded one Spanish woman of a German clockmaker’s.
But Borrow was not happy or at ease. He took a riding tour in the east of England; he walked, rowed and fished; but that was not enough. He was restless, and yet did not get away. Evidently he did not conceal the fact that he thought of travelling again. He had talked about Africa and China: he was now talking about Constantinople and Africa. He was often miserable, though he had, so far as he knew, “no particular disorder.” If at such times he was away from Oulton, he thought of his home as his only refuge in this world; if he was at home he thought of travel or foreign employment. His disease was, perhaps, now middle age, and too good a memory in his blood and in his bones. Whatever it was it was apparently not curable by his kind of Christianity, nor by a visit from the genial Ford, and a present of caviare and pheasant; nor by the never-out-of-date reminder from friends that he was very well off, etc. If he had been caught by Dissenters, as he should have been, he might by this time have had salvation, and an occupation for life, in founding a new truculent sect of Borrovians. As the Rev. the Romany Rye he might have blazed in an entertaining and becoming manner. As “a sincere member of the old-fashioned Church of England, in which he believes there is more religion, and consequently less cant, than in any other Church in the world,” there was nothing for him to do but sit down at Oulton and contemplate the fact. This and the other fact that “he eats his own bread, and is one of the very few men in England who are independent in every sense of the word,” were afterwards to be made subjects for public rejoicing in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye.”
But in his discontent at the age of forty it cannot have been entirely satisfactory, however flattering, to hear Ford, in the “Edinburgh,” saying:
“We wish he would, on some leisure day, draw up the curtain of his own eventful biography. We collected from his former work that he was not always what he now is. The pursuits and society of his youth scarcely could be denominated, in Troloppian euphemism, la crême de la crême; but they stood him in good stead; then and there was he trained for the encounter of Spain . . . whilst sowing his wild oats, he became passionately fond of horseflesh. . . .
“How much has Mr. Borrow yet to remember, yet to tell! let him not delay. His has been a life, one day of which is more crowded than is the fourscore-year vegetation of a squire or alderman. . . . Everything seems sealed on a memory, wax to receive and marble to retain. He is not subjective. He has the new fault of not talking about self. We vainly want to know what sort of person must be the pilgrim in whose wanderings we have been interested. That he has left to other pens. . . .”
Then Ford went on to identify Borrow with the mysterious Unknown of Colonel Napier’s newly-published book.
He began to write his autobiography to fulfil the expectations of Ford and his own public. It was not until 1844, exactly four years after his return from Spain, that he set out again on foreign travel. He made stops at Paris, Vienna, Constantinople, Venice, and Rome, but spent most of his time in Hungary and Roumania, visiting the Gypsies and compiling a “vocabulary of the Gypsy language as spoken in Hungary and Transylvania,” which still exists in manuscript. He was seven months away altogether.
Knapp possessed documents proving that Borrow was at this and that place, and the Gypsy vocabulary is in the British Museum, but little other record of these seven months remains. Knapp, indeed, takes it for granted that the historical conversation between Borrow and the Magyar in “The Romany Rye” was drawn from his experiences in Hungary and Transylvania in the year 1844; but that is absurd, as the chapter might have been written by a man born and bred in the reading room of the British Museum who had never met any but similar unfortunates. It is very likely that the journey was a failure, and if it had been a success, an account of it would have interrupted the progress of the autobiography, as Ford expected it to do. But the thing was too deliberate to succeed. Borrow’s right instinct was to get work which would take him abroad; he failed, and so he travelled because travel offered him relief from his melancholy and unrest. Whether or no he “satisfied his roving demon for a time,” as Mr. Walling puts it, is unknown. What is known is that he did not make this journey a subject of mystery or boasting, and that he stayed in England thereafter. He had tasted comfort and celebrity; he had a wife; he was an older man, looking weak in the eyes by the time he was fifty; and he had no motive for travel except discontent with staying at home. He tried to get away again on a mission to the Convent of St. Catherine, on Mount Sinai, to acquire manuscripts for the British Museum; but he failed, and the manuscripts went to St. Petersburg instead of Bloomsbury.
In 1843 Henry Wyndham Phillips, R.A., painted his portrait. He was a restless sitter until the painter remarked: “I have always heard, Mr. Borrow, that the Persian is a very fine language; is it so?” “It is, Phillips; it is.” “Perhaps you will not mind reciting me something in the Persian tongue?” said Phillips. “Dear me, no; certainly not.” And then “Mr. Borrow’s face lit up with the light that Phillips longed for, and he kept declaiming at the top of his voice, while the painter made the most of his opportunity.” {205} According to the story, Phillips had the like success with Turkish and Armenian, and successfully stilled Borrow’s desire “to get out into the fresh air and sunlight.”
In the same way, writing and literary ambition kept Borrow from travel. He stayed at home and he wrote “Lavengro,” where, speaking of the rapid flow of time in the years of his youth, he says: “Since then it has flagged often enough; sometimes it has seemed to stand entirely still: and the reader may easily judge how it fares at the present, from the circumstance of my taking pen in hand, and endeavouring to write down the passages of my life—a last resource with most people.” At one moment he got satisfaction from professing scorn of authorship, at another, speaking of Byron, he reflected:
“Well, perhaps after all it was better to have been mighty Milton in his poverty and blindness—witty and ingenious Butler consigned to the tender mercies of bailiffs, and starving Otway; they might enjoy more real pleasure than this lordling; they must have been aware that the world would one day do them justice—fame after death is better than the top of fashion in life. They have left a fame behind them which shall never die, whilst this lordling—a time will come when he will be out of fashion and forgotten. And yet I don’t know; didn’t he write Childe Harold and that ode? Yes, he wrote Childe Harold and that ode. Then a time will scarcely come when he will be forgotten. Lords, squires, and cockneys may pass away, but a time will scarcely come when Childe Harold and that ode will be forgotten. He was a poet, after all—and he must have known it; a real poet, equal to—to—what a destiny!”
It is said that in actual life Borrow refused to be introduced to a Russian scholar “simply because he moved in the literary world.” {206}
Yet again he made the glorious Gypsy say that he would rather be a book-writer than a fighting-man, because the book-writers “have so much to say for themselves even when dead and gone”:
“‘When they are laid in the churchyard, it is their own fault if people a’n’t talking of them. Who will know, after I am dead, or bitchadey pawdel, that I was once the beauty of the world, or that you, Jasper, were—’
“‘The best man in England of my inches. That’s true, Tawno—however, here’s our brother will perhaps let the world know something about us.’”
I should think, too, that Borrow was both questioner and answerer in the conversation with the literary man who had the touching mania:
“‘With respect to your present troubles and anxieties, would it not be wise, seeing that authorship causes you so much trouble and anxiety, to give it up altogether?’
“‘Were you an author yourself,’ replied my host, ‘you would not talk in this manner; once an author, ever an author—besides, what could I do? return to my former state of vegetation? no, much as I endure, I do not wish that; besides, every now and then my reason tells me that these troubles and anxieties of mine are utterly without foundation; that whatever I write is the legitimate growth of my own mind, and that it is the height of folly to afflict myself at any chance resemblance between my own thoughts and those of other writers, such resemblance being inevitable from the fact of our common human origin. . . .”
Knapp gives at length a story showing what an author Borrow was, and how little his travels had sweetened him. He had long promised to review Ford’s “Handbook for Spain,” when it should appear. In 1845 he wrote an article and sent it in to the “Quarterly” as a review of the Handbook. It had nothing to do with the book and very little to do with the subject of the book, and Lockhart, the “Quarterly” editor, suggested turning it into a review by a few interpolations and extracts. Borrow would not have the article touched. Both Lockhart and Ford advised him to send it to “Fraser’s” or another magazine where it was certain to be welcomed as a Spanish essay by the author of “The Bible in Spain.” But no: and the article was never printed anywhere.
Yet Borrow was not settling down to authorship pure and simple. He flew into a passion because a new railway line, in 1846, ran through his estate. He flew into a passion, did nothing, and remained on his estates until 1853, when he and his family went into lodgings at Yarmouth. I have not discovered how much he profited by the intrusion of the railway, except when he pilloried the contractor, his neighbour, Mr. Peto, as Flamson, in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye.” Then he tried again to be put on the Commission of the Peace, with no success. He probably spent much of his time in being either suspicious, or ambitious, or indignant. In 1847, for example, he suspected his friend Dr. Bowring—his “only friend” in 1842—of using his work to get for himself the consulship at Canton, which he was professing to obtain for Borrow. The result was the foaming abuse of “The Romany Rye,” where Bowring is the old Radical. The affair of the Sinai manuscripts followed close on this. All that he saw of foreign lands was at the Exhibition of 1851, where he frequently accosted foreigners in their own tongue, so that it began to be whispered about that he was “uncanny”: he excited so much remark that his daughter thought it better to drag him away.
He was suffering from ill-health and untranquility of mind which gave his mother anxiety, though his physical strength appears not to have degenerated, for in 1853, at Yarmouth, he rescued a man out of a stormy sea. He was an unpleasant companion for those whom he did not like or could not get on with. Thackeray tried to get up a conversation with him, his final effort being the question, “Have you seen my ‘Snob Papers’ in ‘Punch’?” To which Borrow answered: “In ‘Punch’? It is a periodical I never look at.” He once met Miss Agnes Strickland:
“Borrow was unwilling to be introduced, but was prevailed on to submit. He sat down at her side; before long she spoke with rapture of his works, and asked his permission to send him a copy of her ‘Queens of England.’ He exclaimed, ‘For God’s sake, don’t, madam, I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.’ On this he rose, fuming, as was his wont when offended, and said to Mr. Donne, ‘What a damned fool that woman is!’ The fact is that, whenever Borrow was induced to do anything unwillingly, he lost his temper.” {208}
The friend who tells this story, Gordon Hake, a poet and doctor at Bury St. Edmunds, tells also that once when he was at dinner with a banker who had recently “struck the docket” to secure payment from a friend of Borrow’s, and the banker’s wife said to him: “Oh Mr. Borrow, I have read your books with so much pleasure!” the great man exclaimed: “Pray, what books do you mean, madam? Do you mean my account books?” How touchy he was, Mr. Walling shows, by his story of Borrow in Cornwall neglecting a lady all one evening because she bore the name of the man his father had knocked down at Menheniot Fair. Several stories of his crushing remarks prove nothing but that he was big and alarming and uncontrolled.
Very little record of his friendly intercourse with men at this middle period remains. Several letters, of 1853, 1856 and 1857, alone survive to show that he met and received letters from Fitzgerald. That Fitzgerald enjoyed an evening with him in 1856 tells us little; and even so it appears that Fitzgerald only wanted to ask him to read some of the “Northern Ballads”—“but you shut the book”—and that he doubted whether Borrow wished to keep up the acquaintance. They had friends in common, and Fitzgerald had sent Borrow a copy of his “Six Dramas of Calderon,” in 1853, confessing that he had had thoughts of sending the manuscript first for an inspection. He also told Borrow when he was about to make the “dangerous experiment” of marriage with Miss Barton “of Quaker memory.” In 1857 Borrow came to see him and had the loan of the “Rubaiyat” in manuscript, and Fitzgerald showed his readiness to see more of the “Great Man.” In 1859 he sent Borrow a copy of “Omar.” He found Borrow’s “masterful manners and irritable temper uncongenial,” {209} but succeeded, unlike many other friends, in having no quarrel with him. Near the end of his life, in 1875, it was Borrow that tried to renew the acquaintance, but in vain, for Fitzgerald reminded him that friends “exist and enjoy themselves pretty reasonably without me,” and asked, was not being alone better than having company?
If Borrow had little consideration for others’ feelings, his consideration for his own was exquisite, as this story, belonging to 1856, may help to prove:
“There were three personages in the world whom he always had a desire to see; two of these had slipped through his fingers, so he was determined to see the third. ‘Pray, Mr. Borrow, who were they?’ He held up three fingers of his left hand and pointed them off with the forefinger of the right: the first, Daniel O’Connell; the second, Lamplighter (the sire of Phosphorus, Lord Berners’s winner of the Derby); the third, Anna Gurney. . . .”
One spring day during the Crimean War, when he was walking round Norfolk, he sent word to Anna Gurney to announce his coming, and she was ready to receive him.
“When, according to his account, he had been but a very short time in her presence, she wheeled her chair round and reached her hand to one of her bookshelves and took down an Arabic Grammar, and put it into his hand, asking for explanation of some difficult point, which he tried to decipher; but meanwhile she talked to him continuously; when, said he, ‘I could not study the Arabic Grammar and listen to her at the same time, so I threw down the book and ran out of the room.’ He seems not to have stopped running till he reached Old Tucker’s Inn, at Cromer, where he renewed his strength, or calmed his temper, with five excellent sausages, and then came on to Sheringham. . . .” {210a}
The distance is a very good two miles, and Borrow’s age was forty-nine.
He is said also to have been considerate towards his mother, the poor, and domestic animals. Probably he and his mother understood one another. When he could not write to her, he got his wife to do so; and from 1849 she lived with them at Oulton. As to the poor, Knapp tells us that he left behind him letters of gratitude or acknowledgment from individuals, churches, and chapels. As to animals, once when he came upon some men beating a horse that had fallen, he gave it ale of sufficient quantity and strength to set it soon upon the road trotting with the rest of its kind, after the men had received a lecture. {210b} It is also related that when a favourite old cat crawled out to die in the hedge he brought it into the house, where he “laid it down in a comfortable spot and watched it till it was dead.” His horse, Sidi Habismilk, the Arab, seems to have returned his admiration and esteem. He said himself, in “Wild Wales,” after expressing his relief that a boy and dog had not seen a weazel that ran across his path:
“I hate to see poor wild animals persecuted and murdered, lose my appetite for dinner at hearing the screams of a hare pursued by greyhounds, and am silly enough to feel disgust and horror at the squeals of a rat in the fangs of a terrier, which one of the sporting tribe once told me were the sweetest sounds in ‘natur.’”
CHAPTER XXIV—“LAVENGRO” AND “THE ROMANY RYE”
Instead of travelling over the world Borrow wrote his autobiography and spent so many years on it that his contempt for the pen had some excuse. I have already said almost all there is to say about these labours. {212} Knapp has shown that they were protracted to include matters relating to Bowring and long posterior to the period covered by the autobiography, and that the magnitude of these additions compelled him to divide the book in two. The first part was “Lavengro,” published in 1851, with an ending that is now, and perhaps was then, obviously due to the knife. The sceptical and hostile criticism of “Lavengro” delayed the appearance of the remainder of the autobiography, “The Romany Rye.”
Borrow had to reply to his critics and explain himself. This he did in the Appendix, and thus changed, the book was finished in 1853 or 1854. Something in Murray’s attitude while they were discussing publication mounted Borrow on the high horse, and yet again he fumed because Murray had expressed a private opinion and had revealed his feeling that the book was not likely to make money for anyone.
“Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” describe the author’s early adventures and, at the same time, his later opinions and mature character. In some places he turns openly aside to express his feeling or opinion at the time of writing, as, for example, in his praise of the Orangemen, or, on the very first page, where he claims to spring from a family of gentlemen, though “not very wealthy,” that the reader may see at once he is “not altogether of low and plebeian origin.” But by far more important is the indirect self-revelation when he is recalling that other distant self, the child of three or of ten, the youth of twenty.
Ford had asked Borrow for a book of his adventures and travels, something “thick and slab,” to follow “The Bible in Spain.” The result shows that Borrow had almost done with outward adventure. “The Bible in Spain” had an atmosphere composed at best of as much Spain as Borrow. But the autobiography is pure inward Borrow: except a few detachable incidents there is nothing in it which is not Borrow’s creation, nothing which would have any value apart from his own treatment of it. A man might have used “The Bible in Spain” as a kind of guide to men and places in 1843, and it is possible he would not have been wholly disappointed. The autobiography does not depend on anything outside itself, but creates its own atmosphere and dwells in it without admitting that of the outer world—no: not even by references to events like the campaign of Waterloo or the funeral of Byron; and, as if conscious that this other atmosphere must be excluded, Borrow has hardly mentioned a name which could act upon the reader as a temporary check to the charm. When he does recall contemporary events, and speaks as a Briton to Britons, the rant is of a brave degree that is almost as much his own, and it makes more intense than ever the solitude and inwardness of the individual life going on side by side with war and with politics.
“Pleasant were those days of my early boyhood; and a melancholy pleasure steals over me as I recall them. Those were stirring times of which I am speaking, and there was much passing around me calculated to captivate the imagination. The dreadful struggle which so long convulsed Europe, and in which England bore so prominent a part, was then at its hottest; we were at war, and determination and enthusiasm shone in every face; man, woman and child were eager to fight the Frank, the hereditary, but, thank God, never dreaded enemy of the Anglo-Saxon race. ‘Love your country and beat the French, and then never mind what happens,’ was the cry of entire England. Oh those were days of power, gallant days, bustling days, worth the bravest days of chivalry, at least; tall battalions of native warriors were marching through the land; there was the glitter of the bayonet and the gleam of the sabre; the shrill squeak of the fife and loud rattling of the drum were heard in the streets of county towns, and the loyal shouts of the inhabitants greeted the soldiery on their arrival or cheered them at their departure. And now let us leave the upland and descend to the sea-board; there is a sight for you upon the billows! A dozen men-of-war are gliding majestically out of port, their long buntings streaming from the top-gallant masts, calling on the skulking Frenchman to come forth from his bights and bays; and what looms upon us yonder from the fog-bank in the East? A gallant frigate towing behind her the long low hull of a crippled privateer, which but three short days ago had left Dieppe to skim the sea, and whose crew of ferocious hearts are now cursing their impudence in an English hold. Stirring times those, which I love to recall, for they were days of gallantry and enthusiasm, and were moreover the days of my boyhood.”
“Pleasant were those days,” and there is a “melancholy pleasure” in recalling them. The two combine in this autobiography with strange effect, for they set the man side by side with the child as an invisible companion haunting him.
Whatever was the change that came over Borrow in the ’forties, and showed itself in melancholy and unrest, this long-continued contemplation of his childhood betrayed him into a profound change of tone. Neither Africa nor the East could have shown him as much mystery as this wide England of a child ignorant of geography, and it kept hold of him for twice as long as Spain. It offered him relief and escape, and gladly did he accept them, and deeply he indulged in them. He found that he had that within himself as wild as any mountain or maniac-haunted ruin of Spain. For example, he recalled his schooldays in Ireland, and how one day he set out to visit his elder brother, the boy lieutenant:
“The distance was rather considerable, yet I hoped to be back by evening fall, for I was now a shrewd walker, thanks to constant practice. I set out early, and, directing my course towards the north, I had in less than two hours accomplished considerably more than half of the journey. The weather had been propitious: a slight frost had rendered the ground firm to the tread, and the skies were clear; but now a change came over the scene, the skies darkened, and a heavy snow-storm came on; the road then lay straight through a bog, and was bounded by a deep trench on both sides; I was making the best of my way, keeping as nearly as I could in the middle of the road, lest, blinded by the snow which was frequently borne into my eyes by the wind, I might fall into the dyke, when all at once I heard a shout to windward, and turning my eyes I saw the figure of a man, and what appeared to be an animal of some kind, coming across the bog with great speed, in the direction of myself; the nature of the ground seemed to offer but little impediment to these beings, both clearing the holes and abysses which lay in their way with surprising agility; the animal was, however, some slight way in advance, and, bounding over the dyke, appeared on the road just before me. It was a dog, of what species I cannot tell, never having seen the like before or since; the head was large and round; the ears so tiny as scarcely to be discernible; the eyes of a fiery red; in size it was rather small than large; and the coat, which was remarkably smooth, as white as the falling flakes. It placed itself directly in my path, and showing its teeth, and bristling its coat, appeared determined to prevent my progress. I had an ashen stick in my hand, with which I threatened it; this, however, only served to increase its fury; it rushed upon me, and I had the utmost difficulty to preserve myself from its fangs.
“‘What are you doing with the dog, the fairy dog?’ said a man, who at this time likewise cleared the dyke at a bound.
“He was a very tall man, rather well dressed as it should seem; his garments, however, were like my own, so covered with snow that I could scarcely discern their quality.
“‘What are ye doing with the dog of peace?’
“‘I wish he would show himself one,’ said I; ‘I said nothing to him, but he placed himself in my road, and would not let me pass.’
“‘Of course he would not be letting you till he knew where ye were going.’
“‘He’s not much of a fairy,’ said I, ‘or he would know that without asking; tell him that I am going to see my brother.’
“‘And who is your brother, little Sas?’
“‘What my father is, a royal soldier.’
“‘Oh, ye are going then to the detachment at ---; by my shoul, I have a good mind to be spoiling your journey.’
“‘You are doing that already,’ said I, ‘keeping me here talking about dogs and fairies; you had better go home and get some salve to cure that place over your eye; it’s catching cold you’ll be in so much snow.’
“On one side of the man’s forehead there was a raw and staring wound, as if from a recent and terrible blow.
“‘Faith, then, I’ll be going, but it’s taking you wid me I will be.’
“‘And where will you take me?’
“‘Why, then, to Ryan’s Castle, little Sas.’
“‘You do not speak the language very correctly,’ said I; ‘it is not Sas you should call me—’tis Sassanach,’ and forthwith I accompanied the word with a speech full of flowers of Irish rhetoric.
“The man looked upon me for a moment, fixedly, then, bending his head towards his breast, he appeared to be undergoing a kind of convulsion, which was accompanied by a sound something resembling laughter; presently he looked at me, and there was a broad grin on his features.
“‘By my shoul, it’s a thing of peace I’m thinking ye.’
“But now with a whisking sound came running down the road a hare; it was nearly upon us before it perceived us; suddenly stopping short, however, it sprang into the bog on the right-hand side; after it amain bounded the dog of peace, followed by the man, but not until he had nodded to me a farewell salutation. In a few moments I lost sight of him amidst the snow-flakes.”
This is more magical than nine-tenths of the deliberately Celtic prose or verse. I mean that it is real and credible and yet insubstantial, the too too solid flesh is melted into something like the mist over the bogland, and it recalls to us times when an account of our physical self, height, width, weight, colour, age, etc., would bear no relation whatever to the true self. In part, this effect may be due to Ireland and to the fact that Borrow was only there for one short impressionable year of his boyhood, and had never seen any other country like it. But most of it is due to Borrow’s nature and the conditions under which the autobiography was composed. While he was writing it he was probably living a more solitary and sedentary life than ever before, and could hear the voices of solitude; he was not the busy riding missionary of “The Bible in Spain,” nor the fêted author, but the unsocial morbid tinker, philologist, boxer, and religious doubter. It has been said that “he was a Celt of Celts. His genius was truly Celtic.” {218a} It has been said that “he inherited nothing from Norfolk save his accent and his love of ‘leg of mutton and turnips.’” {218b} Yet his father, the Cornish “Celt,” appears to have been entirely unlike him, while he draws his mother, the Norfolk Huguenot, as innately sympathetic with himself. I am content to leave this mystery for Celts and anti-Celts to grow lean on. I have known Celts who said that five and five were ten or, at most, eleven; and Saxons who said twenty-five, and even fifty-five.
Borrow was writing without note books: things had therefore in his memory the importance which his nature had decreed for them, and among these things no doubt he exercised a conscious choice. Behind all was the inexplicable singular force which, Celtic or not, gave the “dream”-like, illusory quality which pervades the books in spite of more positive and arresting qualities sometimes apparently hostile to this one. It is true that his books have in them many rude or simple characters of Gypsies, jockeys, and others, living chiefly by their hands, and it is part of the conscious and unconscious object of the books to exalt them. But these people in Borrow’s hands seldom or never give the impression of coarse solid bodies well endowed with the principal appetites. There is, for example, a famous page where the young doubting Borrow listens to a Wesleyan preacher and wishes that his life had been like that man’s, and then comes upon his Gypsy friend after a long absence. He asks the Gypsy for news and hears of some deaths:
“‘What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?’ said I, as I sat down beside him
“‘My opinion of death, brother, is much the same as that in the old song of Pharaoh, which I have heard my grandam sing—
“Canna marel o manus chivios andé puv,
Ta rovel pa leste o chavo ta romi.”
When a man dies, he is cast into the earth, and his wife and child sorrow over him. If he has neither wife nor child, then his father and mother, I suppose; and if he is quite alone in the world, why, then, he is cast into the earth, and there is an end of the matter.’
“‘And do you think that is the end of man?’
“‘There’s an end of him, brother, more’s the pity.’
“‘Why do you say so?’
“‘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 Rommany Chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed!—A Rommany 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. Dosta, we’ll now go to the tents and put on the gloves; and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!’”
But how delicate it is, the two lads talking amidst the furze of Mousehold Heath at sunset. And so with the rest. As he grows older the atmosphere thins but never quite fades away; even Thurtell, the bull-necked friend of bruisers, is as much a spirit as a man.
Mr. Watts-Dunton has complained {220} that Borrow makes Isopel taller than Borrow, and therefore too tall for beauty. But Borrow was not writing for readers who knew, or for those who, if they knew, always remembered, that he was six-feet-two. We know that Lavengro is tall, but we are not told so just before hearing that Isopel is taller; and the effect is that we think, not too distinctly, of a girl who somehow succeeds in being very tall and beautiful. If Borrow had said: “Whereas I was six feet two inches, the girl was six feet two and three-quarter inches,” it would have been different, and it would not have been Borrow, who, as I say, was not writing of ponderable, measurable bodies, but of possible immortal souls curiously dressed in flesh that can be almost as invisible. So again, Mr. Watts-Dunton says:
“With regard to Isopel Berners, neither Lavengro, nor the man she thrashed when he stole one of her flaxen hairs to conjure with, gives the reader the faintest idea of Isopel’s method of attack or defence, and we have to take her prowess on trust. In a word Borrow was content to give us the wonderful, without taking that trouble to find for it a logical basis which a literary master would have taken. And instances might easily be multiplied of this exaggeration of Borrow’s, which is apt to lend a sense of unreality to some of the most picturesque pages of ‘Lavengro.’”
But would Mr. Watts-Dunton seriously like to have these scenes touched up by Driscoll or Sullivan. Borrow did not write for real or imaginary connoisseurs.
I do not mean that a man need sacrifice his effect upon the ordinary man by satisfying the connoisseur. No one, for example, will deny that a ship by Mr. Joseph Conrad is as beautiful and intelligible as one by Stevenson; but neither would it be safe to foretell that Mr. Conrad’s, the more accurate, will seem the more like life in fifty years’ time. Borrow is never technical. If he quotes Gypsy it is not for the sake of the colour effect on those who read Gypsy as they run. His effects are for a certain distance and in a certain atmosphere where technicality would be impertinent.
Mr. Hindes Groome {221a} was more justified in saying:
“Mr. Borrow, no doubt, knows the Gypsies well, and could describe them perfectly. But his love of effect leads him away. In his wish to impress his reader with a certain mysterious notion of himself, he colours his Gypsy pictures (the form of which is quite accurate) in a fantastic style, which robs them altogether of the value they would have as studies from life.”
For Groome wrote simply as a Gypsy student. He collected data which can be verified, but do not often give an impression of life, except the life of a young Cambridge man who is devoted to Gypsies. The “Athenæum” reviewer {221b} begs the question by calling the Gypsy dialogues of Hindes Groome, photographic; and is plainly inaccurate in saying that if they are compared with those in “Lavengro” “the illusion in Borrow’s narrative is disturbed by the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers.” For Borrow’s dialogues do produce an effect of some kind of life; those of Hindes Groome instruct us or pique our curiosity, but unless we know Gypsies, they produce no life-like effect.
Who else but Borrow could make the old viper-catcher thus describe the King of the Vipers?—
“It may be about seven years ago that I happened to be far down yonder to the west, on the other side of England, nearly two hundred miles from here, following my business. It was a very sultry day, I remember, and I had been out several hours catching creatures. It might be about three o’clock in the afternoon, when I found myself on some heathy land near the sea, on the ridge of a hill, the side of which, nearly as far down as the sea, was heath; but on the top there was arable ground, which had been planted, and from which the harvest had been gathered—oats or barley, I know not which—but I remember that the ground was covered with stubble. Well, about three o’clock, as I told you before, what with the heat of the day and from having walked about for hours in a lazy way, I felt very tired; so I determined to have a sleep, and I laid myself down, my head just on the ridge of the hill, towards the field, and my body over the side down amongst the heath; my bag, which was nearly filled with creatures, lay at a little distance from my face; the creatures were struggling in it, I remember, and I thought to myself, how much more comfortably off I was than they; I was taking my ease on the nice open hill, cooled with the breezes, whilst they were in the nasty close bag, coiling about one another, and breaking their very hearts all to no purpose; and I felt quite comfortable and happy in the thought, and little by little closed my eyes, and fell into the sweetest snooze that ever I was in in all my life; and there I lay over the hill’s side, with my head half in the field, I don’t know how long, all dead asleep. At last it seemed to me that I heard a noise in my sleep, something like a thing moving, very faint, however, far away; then it died, and then it came again upon my ear, as I slept, and now it appeared almost as if I heard crackle, crackle; then it died again, or I became yet more dead asleep than before, I know not which, but I certainly lay some time without hearing it. All of a sudden I became awake, and there was I, on the ridge of the hill, with my cheek on the ground towards the stubble, with a noise in my ear like that of something moving towards me, among the stubble of the field; well, I lay a moment or two listening to the noise, and then I became frightened, for I did not like the noise at all, it sounded so odd; so I rolled myself on my belly, and looked towards the stubble. Mercy upon us! there was a huge snake, or rather a dreadful viper, for it was all yellow and gold, moving towards me, bearing its head about a foot and a half above the ground, the dry stubble crackling beneath its outrageous belly. It might be about five yards off when I first saw it, making straight towards me, child, as if it would devour me. I lay quite still, for I was stupefied with horror, whilst the creature came still nearer; and now it was nearly upon me, when it suddenly drew back a little, and then—what do you think?—it lifted its head and chest high in the air, and high over my face as I looked up, flickering at me with its tongue as if it would fly at my face. Child, what I felt at that moment I can scarcely say, but it was a sufficient punishment for all the sins I ever committed; and there we two were, I looking up at the viper, and the viper looking down upon me, flickering at me with its tongue. It was only the kindness of God that saved me: all at once there was a loud noise, the report of a gun, for a fowler was shooting at a covey of birds, a little way off in the stubble. Whereupon the viper sunk its head and immediately made off over the ridge of the hill, down in the direction of the sea. As it passed by me, however—and it passed close by me—it hesitated a moment, as if it was doubtful whether it should not seize me; it did not, however, but made off down the hill. It has often struck me that he was angry with me, and came upon me unawares for presuming to meddle with his people, as I have always been in the habit of doing.”
The passages quoted from “Lavengro” are representative only of the spirit of the book, which, as I have suggested, diminishes with Borrow’s increasing years, but pervades the physical activity, the “low life” and open air, and prevails over them. I will give one other example of his by no means everyday magic—the incident of the poisoned cake. The Gypsy girl Leonora discovers him and betrays him to his enemy, old hairy Mrs. Herne:
“Leaning my back against the tree I was not long in falling into a slumber; I quite clearly remember that slumber of mine beneath the ash tree, for it was about the sweetest slumber that I ever enjoyed; how long I continued in it I don’t know; I could almost have wished that it had lasted to the present time. All of a sudden it appeared to me that a voice cried in my ear, ‘Danger! danger! danger!’ Nothing seemingly could be more distinct than the words which I heard; then an uneasy sensation came over me, which I strove to get rid of, and at last succeeded, for I awoke. The Gypsy girl was standing just opposite to me, with her eyes fixed upon my countenance; a singular kind of little dog stood beside her.
“‘Ha!’ said I, ‘was it you that cried danger? What danger is there?’
“‘Danger, brother, there is no danger; what danger should there be? I called to my little dog, but that was in the wood; my little dog’s name is not danger, but stranger; what danger should there be, brother.’
“‘What, indeed, except in sleeping beneath a tree; what is that you have got in your hand?’
“‘Something for you,’ said the girl, sitting down and proceeding to untie a white napkin; ‘a pretty manricli, so sweet, so nice; when I went home to my people I told my grandbebee how kind you had been to the poor person’s child, and when my grandbebee saw the kekaubi, she said, “Hir mi devlis, it won’t do for the poor people to be ungrateful; by my God, I will bake a cake for the young harko mescro.”’
“‘But there are two cakes.’
“‘Yes, brother, two cakes, both for you; my grandbebee meant them both for you—but list, brother, I will have one of them for bringing them. I know you will give me one, pretty brother, grey-haired brother—which shall I have, brother?’
“In the napkin were two round cakes, seemingly made of rich and costly compounds, and precisely similar in form, each weighing about half a pound.
“‘Which shall I have, brother?’ said the Gypsy girl.
“‘Whichever you please.’
“‘No, brother, no, the cakes are yours, not mine, it is for you to say.’
“‘Well, then, give me the one nearest you, and take the other.’
“‘Yes, brother, yes,’ said the girl; and taking the cakes, she flung them into the air two or three times, catching them as they fell, and singing the while. ‘Pretty brother, grey-haired brother—here, brother,’ said she, ‘here is your cake, this other is mine. . . .’”
I cannot afford to quote the whole passage, but it is at once as real and as phantasmal as the witch scene in “Macbeth.” He eats the poisoned cake and lies deadly sick. Mrs. Herne and Leonora came to see the effect of the poison:
“‘Ha, ha! bebee, and here he lies, poisoned like a hog.’
“‘You have taken drows, sir,’ said Mrs. Herne; ‘do you hear, sir? drows; tip him a stave, child, of the song of poison.’
“And thereupon the girl clapped her hands, and sang—
“The Rommany churl
And the Rommany girl
To-morrow shall hie
To poison the sty,
And bewitch on the mead
The farmer’s steed.”
“‘Do you hear that, sir?’ said Mrs. Herne; ‘the child has tipped you a stave of the song of poison: that is, she has sung it Christianly, though perhaps you would like to hear it Romanly; you were always fond of what was Roman. Tip it him Romanly, child.’”
It is not much use to remark on “the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers.” Iago’s vocabulary is not colloquial when he says:
“Not poppy nor mandragora
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
That thou ow’dst yesterday.”
Borrow is not describing Gypsy life but the “dream” of his own early life. I should say that he succeeds, because his words work upon the indifferent reader in something like the same way as memory worked upon himself. The physical activity, the “low life,” and the open air of the books are powerful. These and the England of his youth gave Borrow his refuge from middle age and Victorian England of the middle class. “Youth,” he says in “The Romany Rye,” “is the only season for enjoyment, and the first twenty-five years of one’s life are worth all the rest of the longest life of man, even though these five and twenty be spent in penury and contempt, and the rest in the possession of wealth, honour, respectability, ay, and many of them in strength and health. . . .” Still more emphatically did he think the same when he was looking on his past life in the dingle, feeling his arms and thighs and teeth, which were strong and sound; “so now was the time to labour, to marry, to eat strong flesh, and beget strong children—the power of doing all this would pass away with youth, which was terribly transitory.”
Youth and strength or their extreme opposites alone attracted him, and therefore he is best in writing of men, if we except the tall Brynhild, Isopel, and the old witch, Mrs. Herne, than whom “no she bear of Lapland ever looked more fierce and hairy.” In the same breath as he praises youth he praises England, pouring scorn on those who traverse Spain and Portugal in quest of adventures, “whereas there are ten times more adventures to be met with in England than in Spain, Portugal, or stupid Germany to boot.” It was the old England before railways, though Mr. Petulengro heard a man speaking of a wonderful invention that “would set aside all the old roads, which in a little time would be ploughed up, and sowed with corn, and cause all England to be laid down with iron roads, on which people would go thundering along in vehicles, pushed forward by fire and smoke.” Borrow makes another of his characters also foretell the triumph of railways, and I insist on quoting part of the sentence as another example of Borrow’s mysterious way: the speaker has had his information from the projector of the scheme: “which he has told me many of the wisest heads of England have been dreaming of during a period of six hundred years, and which it seems was alluded to by a certain Brazen Head in the story-book of Friar Bacon, who is generally supposed to have been a wizard, but in reality was a great philosopher. Young man, in less than twenty years, by which time I shall be dead and gone, England will be surrounded with roads of metal, on which armies may travel with mighty velocity, and of which the walls of brass and iron by which the friar proposed to defend his native land are types.” And yet he makes little of the practical difference between the England of railways and the England of coaches; in fact he hated the bullying coachmen so that he expressed nothing but gladness when they had disappeared from the road. No: it was first as the England of the successful wars with Napoleon, and second as the England of his youth that he idealised it—the country of Byron and Farmer George, not that of Tennyson, Victoria and Albert; for as Byron was one of the new age and yet looked back to Pope and down on Wordsworth, so did Borrow look back.
His English geography is far vaguer than his Spanish. He creeps—walking or riding—over this land with more mystery. The variety and difficulties of the roads were less, and actual movement fills very few pages. He advances not so much step by step as adventure by adventure. Well might he say, a little impudently, “there is not a chapter in the present book which is not full of adventures, with the exception of the present one, and this is not yet terminated”—it ends with a fall from his horse which stuns him. There is an air of somnambulism about some of the travel, especially when he is escaping alone from London and hack-writing. He shows great art in his transitions from day to day, from scene to scene, making it natural that one hour of one day should have the importance of the whole of another year, and one house more than the importance of several day’s journeys. It matters not that he crammed more than was possible between Greenwich and Horncastle fairs, probably by transplanting earlier or later events. Time and space submit to him: his old schoolfellows were vainly astonished that he gave no chapters to them and his years at Norwich Grammar School. Thus England seems a great and a strange land on Borrow’s page, though he does not touch the sea or the mountains, or any celebrated places except Stonehenge. His England is strange, I think, because it is presented according to a purely spiritual geography in which the childish drawling of “Witney on the Windrush manufactures blankets,” etc., is utterly forgot. Few men have the courage or the power to be honestly impressionistic and to say what they feel instead of compromising between that and what they believe to be “the facts.”
It is also strange on account of the many adventures which it provides, and these will always attract attention, because England in 1911 is not what it was in 1825, but still more because few men, especially writing men, ever take their chance upon the roads of England for a few months together. At the same time it must be granted that Borrow had a morbid fear of being dull or at least of being ordinary. He was a partly conscious provider of entertainment when he made the book so thick with incidents, scenes and portraits, and each incident, scene and portrait so perfect after its kind. Where he overdoes his emphasis or refinement, can only be decided by differing tastes. Some, for example, cannot abide his description of the sleepless man who had at last discovered a perfect opiate in Wordsworth’s poetry. I find myself stopping short at the effect of sherry and Popish leanings on the publican and his trade, and still more the effect of his return to ale and commonsense religion: how everyone bought his liquids and paid for them and wanted to treat him, while the folk of his parish had already made him a churchwarden. This might have been writ sarcastic by a witty Papist.
Probably Borrow used the device of recognition and reappearances to satisfy a rather primitive taste in fiction, and to add to the mystery, though I will again suggest that a man who travelled and went about among men as he did would take less offence at these things. The re-appearances of Jasper are natural enough, except at the ford when Borrow is about to pass into Wales: those of Ardry less so. But when Borrow contrives to hear more of the old china collector and of Isopel also from the jockey, and shuffles about the postillion, Murtagh, the Man in Black, and Platitude, and introduces Sir John Bowring for punishment, he makes “The Romany Rye” much inferior to “Lavengro.”
These devices never succeed, except where their extravagance makes us laugh heartily—as when on Salisbury Plain he meets returning from Botany Bay the long lost son of his old London Bridge apple-woman. The devices are unnecessary and remain as stiffening stains upon a book that is otherwise full of nature and human nature.
CHAPTER XXV—“LAVENGRO” AND “THE ROMANY RYE”: THE CHARACTERS
As the atmosphere of the two autobiographical books is more intense and pure than that of “The Bible in Spain,” so the characters in it are more elaborate. “The Bible in Spain” contained brilliant sketches and suggestions of men and women. In the autobiography even the sketches are intimate, like that of the “Anglo-Germanist,” William Taylor; and they are not less surprising than the Spanish sketches, from the Rommany chal who “fought in the old Roman fashion. He bit, he kicked, and screamed like a wild cat of Benygant; casting foam from his mouth, and fire from his eyes”—from this man upwards and downwards. Some are highly finished, and these are not always the best. For example, the portrait of his father, the stiff, kindly, uncomprehending soldier, strikes me as a little too much “done to a turn.” It is a little too like a man in a book, and so perfectly consistent, except for that one picturesque weakness—the battle with Big Ben, whose skin was like a toad. Borrow probably saw and cared very little for his father, and therefore found it too easy to idealise and produce a mere type, chiefly out of his head. His mother is more certainly from life, and he could not detach himself from her sufficiently to make her clear; yet he makes her his own mother plainly enough. His brother has something of the same unreality and perfection as his father. These members of his family belong to one distinct class of studies which includes among others the publisher, Sir Richard Phillips. They are of persons not quite of his world whom he presents to us with admiration, or, on the other hand, with dislike, but in either case without sympathy. They do not contribute much to the special character of the autobiography, except in humour. The interviews with Sir Richard Phillips, in particular, give an example of Borrow’s obviously personal satire, poisonous and yet without rancour. He is a type. He is the charlatan, holy and massive and not perfectly self-convincing. When Borrow’s money was running low and he asked the publisher to pay for some contributions to a magazine, now deceased:
“‘Sir,’ said the publisher, ‘what do you want the money for?’
“‘Merely to live on,’ I replied; ‘it is very difficult to live in this town without money.’
“‘How much money did you bring with you to town?’ demanded the publisher.
“‘Some twenty or thirty pounds,’ I replied.
“‘And you have spent it already?’
“‘No,’ said I, ‘not entirely; but it is fast disappearing.’
“‘Sir,’ said the publisher, ‘I believe you to be extravagant; yes, sir, extravagant!’
“‘On what grounds do you suppose me to be so?’
“‘Sir,’ said the publisher, ‘you eat meat.’
“‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I eat meat sometimes; what should I eat?’
“‘Bread, sir,’ said the publisher; ‘bread and cheese.’
“‘So I do, sir, when I am disposed to indulge; but I cannot often afford it—it is very expensive to dine on bread and cheese, especially when one is fond of cheese, as I am. My last bread and cheese dinner cost me fourteen pence. There is drink, sir; with bread and cheese one must drink porter, sir.’
“‘Then, sir, eat bread—bread alone. As good men as yourself have eaten bread alone; they have been glad to get it, sir. If with bread and cheese you must drink porter, sir, with bread alone you can, perhaps, drink water, sir.’
“However, I got paid at last for my writings in the review, not, it is true, in the current coin of the realm, but in certain bills; there were two of them, one payable at twelve, and the other at eighteen months after date.”
The incident serves to diversify the narrative, and may be taken from his own London experiences, while the particular merriment of the rhyme is Borrow’s; but it is not of the essence of the book, and fits only indifferently into the mysterious “Arabian Nights” London, the city of the gallant Ardry and the old apple-woman who called him “dear” and called Moll Flanders “blessed Mary Flanders.” Sir Richard will not mysteriously re-appear, nor will Captain and Mrs. Borrow. I should say, in fact, that characters of this class have scarcely at all the power of motion. What is more, they take us not only a little way out of Borrow’s world sometimes, but away from Borrow himself.
Apart from these characters, the men and women of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” are all in harmony with one another, with Borrow, and with Borrow’s world. Jasper Petulengro and his wife, his sister Ursula, the gigantic Tawno Chikno, the witch Mrs. Herne, and the evil sprite Leonora, Thurtell, the fighting men, the Irish outlaw Jerry Grant, who was suspected of raising a storm by “something Irish and supernatural” to win a fight, Murtagh, that wicked innocent, the old apple-woman, Blazing Bosville, Isopel Berners, the jockey who drove one hundred and ten miles in eleven hours to see “the only friend he ever had in the world,” John Thurtell, and say, “God Almighty bless you, Jack!” before the drop fell, the old gentleman who had learned “Sergeant Broughton’s guard” and knocked out the bullying coachman, the Welsh preacher and his wife, the Arcadian old bee-keeper, the rat-catcher—all these and their companions are woven into one piece by the genius of their creator, Borrow. I can imagine them all greeting him together as the Gypsies did, and much as the jockey did afterwards:
“Here the Gipsy gemman see,
With his Roman jib and his rome and dree—
Rome and dree, rum and dry
Rally round the Rommany Rye.”
He waves his wand and they disappear. He made them as Jerry Grant made the storm and beat Sergeant Bagg. In “Lavengro” he actually does raise such a storm, though Knapp affected to discover it in a newspaper of the period. Sampson and Martin are fighting at North Walsham, and a storm comes on:
“There’s wind and dust, a crash, rain and hail; is it possible to fight amidst such a commotion? Yes! the fight goes on; again the boy strikes the man full on the brow, but it is no use striking that man, his frame is of adamant. ‘Boy, thy strength is beginning to give way, thou art becoming confused’; the man now goes to work, amidst rain and hail. ‘Boy, thou wilt not hold out ten minutes longer against rain, hail, and the blows of such an antagonist.’
“And now the storm was at its height; the black thundercloud had broken into many, which assumed the wildest shapes and the strangest colours, some of them unspeakably glorious; the rain poured in a deluge, and more than one water-spout was seen at no great distance: an immense rabble is hurrying in one direction; a multitude of men of all ranks, peers and yokels, prize-fighters and Jews, and the last came to plunder, and are now plundering amidst that wild confusion of hail and rain, men and horses, carts and carriages. But all hurry in one direction, through mud and mire; there’s a town only three miles distant which is soon reached, and soon filled, it will not contain one-third of that mighty rabble; but there’s another town farther on—the good old city is farther on, only twelve miles; what’s that! who’ll stay here? onward to the old town.
“Hurry skurry, a mixed multitude of men and horses, carts and carriages, all in the direction of the old town; and, in the midst of all that mad throng, at a moment when the rain gushes were coming down with particular fury, and the artillery of the sky was pealing as I had never heard it peal before, I felt some one seize me by the arm—I turned round and beheld Mr. Petulengro.
“‘I can’t hear you, Mr. Petulengro,’ said I; for the thunder drowned the words which he appeared to be uttering.
“‘Dearginni,’ I heard Mr. Petulengro say, ‘it thundereth. I was asking, brother, whether you believe in dukkeripens?’
“‘I do not, Mr. Petulengro; but this is strange weather to be asking me whether I believe in fortunes.’
“‘Grondinni,’ said Mr. Petulengro, ‘it haileth. I believe in dukkeripens, brother.’
“‘And who has more right,’ said I, ‘seeing that you live by them? But this tempest is truly horrible.’
“‘Dearginni, grondinni ta villaminni! It thundereth, it haileth, and also flameth,’ said Mr. Petulengro. ‘Look up there, brother!’
“I looked up. Connected with this tempest there was one feature to which I have already alluded—the wonderful colours of the clouds. Some were of vivid green; others of the brightest orange; others as black as pitch. The Gypsy’s finger was pointed to a particular part of the sky.
“‘What do you see there, brother?’
“‘A strange kind of cloud.’
“‘What does it look like, brother?’
“‘Something like a stream of blood.’
“‘That cloud foreshoweth a bloody dukkeripen.’
“‘A bloody fortune!’ said I. ‘And whom may it betide?’
“Down the way, dashing and splashing, and scattering man, horse, and cart to the left and right, came an open barouche, drawn by four smoking steeds, with postillions in scarlet jackets, and leather skull-caps. Two forms were conspicuous in it; that of the successful bruiser, and of his friend and backer, the sporting gentleman of my acquaintance.
“‘His!’ said the Gypsy, pointing to the latter, whose stern features wore a smile of triumph, as, probably recognizing me in the crowd, he nodded in the direction of where I stood, as the barouche hurried by.
“There went the barouche, dashing through the rain gushes’, and in it one whose boast it was that he was equal to ‘either fortune.’ Many have heard of that man—many may be desirous of knowing yet more of him. I have nothing to do with that man’s after life—he fulfilled his dukkeripen. ‘A bad, violent man!’ Softly, friend; when thou wouldst speak harshly of the dead, remember that thou hast not yet fulfilled thy own dukkeripen!”
As Borrow fits these pugilists into the texture of his autobiography, so he does men who appear not once but a dozen times. Take Jasper Petulengro out of the books and he does not amount to much. In them he is a figure of most masculine beauty, a king, a trickster, and thief, but simple, good with his fists, loving life, manly sport and fair play. He and Borrow meet and shake hands as “brothers” when they are little boys. They meet again, by chance, as big boys, and Jasper says: “Your blood beat when mine was near, as mine always does at the coming of a brother; and we became brothers in that lane.” Jasper laughs at the Sapengro and Lavengro and horse-witch because he lacks two things, “mother sense and gentle Rommany,” and he has something to do with teaching Borrow the Gypsy tongue and Gypsy ways, and the “mother sense” of shifting for himself. The Gypsies approve him also as “a pure fist master.” In return he teaches Mrs. Chikno’s child to say his prayers in Rommany. They were willing—all but Mrs. Herne—that he should marry Mr. Petulengro’s sister, Ursula. It is always by chance that they meet, and chance is very favourable. They meet at significant times, as when Borrow has been troubled by the preacher and the state of his own soul, or when he is sick of London and hack-writing and poverty. In fact, the Gypsies, and his “brother” Jasper in particular, returning and returning, are the motive of the book. They connect Borrow with what is strange, with what is simple, and with what is free. The very last words of “The Romany Rye,” spoken as he is walking eastward, are “I shouldn’t wonder if Mr. Petulengro and Tawno Chikno came originally from India. I think I’ll go there.” They are not a device. The re-appearances of these wandering men are for the most part only pleasantly unexpected. Their mystery is the mystery of nature and life. They keep their language and their tents against the mass of civilization and length of time. They are foreigners but as native as the birds. It is Borrow’s triumph to make them as romantic as their reputation while yet satisfying Gypsy students as to his facts.
Jasper is almost like a second self, a kind of more simple, atavistic self, to Borrow, as in that characteristic picture, where he is drawing near to Wales with his friends, the Welsh preacher and his wife. A brook is the border and they point it out. There is a horseman entering it: “he stops in the middle of it as if to water his steed.” They ask Lavengro if he will come with them into Wales. They persuade him:
“‘I will not go with you,’ said I. ‘Dost thou see that man in the ford?’
“‘Who is staring at us so, and whose horse has not yet done drinking? Of course I see him.’