The fascinations of Tintagel are many and oddly mingled. The very air seems full of wraiths; the solid and substantial characters of mediæval history have their ghosts hovering about these rugged hills, no less than the more ethereal spectres of the heroes of Arthurian myth. Tintagel Castle, on the heights to the west, to which Borrow turned next day, is an ancient ruin standing on a wonderful site. It has been familiar to most people for a long time as one of the wildest and most picturesque scenes in England, and the impression may remain the same to-day in the minds of those who are imaginative enough to be able to blot out of the picture the incongruous achievements of the modern hotel-builder. But it was not so well known to any but Cornishmen when Borrow visited it, for that was long before the iron road had reached within thirty miles of it. The fable of Arthur’s birth in the impregnable fortress, Dundagil, whose remains now stand gaunt and silent on their rocky eminence, may be dismissed by a date. The architecture of the original castle was Norman; the rebuilding took place in the thirteenth century. There is now a great gulch 200 feet wide between the cliff where the two principal courts stood and the “island”; it was formerly much narrower, and is reputed to have been spanned by a drawbridge. Yet it is pleasant to dream, as Borrow did and as Tennyson did when he lived at Boscastle a year or two later meditating his Idylls, that this was the veritable scene where the blameless King held court, and the Knights of the Round Table served him. Tennyson has shackled the Arthurian legend to Tintagel with links that can never be broken. And it is also pleasant to recall the more authentic and more historical connections of the place—that twelfth century when the Castle was a great stronghold, when the little chapel of St. Julitta was founded upon the height to the west of the island; those days in the thirteenth century when Tintagel was in such height of glory, when David Prince of Wales, seeking refuge in his struggle with Henry the Third, received the hospitality of its Cornish lord. It is not a far cry across the Bristol Channel, past Lundy, to the coast of Wales, and as he looked northward over the grey sea, Borrow could hardly have resisted the customary emotions that the thought of Wales created in him, with his memories of the procession of the bards from Ab Gwylim by Elis Wyn to Gronwy Owen.
But this was rich ground for him, and he was fully employed in absorbing impressions of men and events, past and present, which he briefly recorded in the two notebooks that were afterwards meant to be expanded into his work on Cornwall. There was the quaint harbour of Boscastle near by; there was Forrabury minster, the “silent tower of Bottreux,” with its bell-legend—the story of the peal of bells which an Earl of Bottreux presented to Forrabury in order that its music might rival that of Tintagel, the wreck of the ship which conveyed them from London just off the shore while Tintagel was sounding the curfew, the warning rung for mariners on that grim lee shore by the buried bells when a storm is approaching from the Atlantic. There was the lovely waterfall of St. Knighton’s Kieve. Borrow had a taste in waterfalls, and was eloquent in describing them, though unscientific, as Dr. Russel Wallace has pointed out. The venerable evolutionist, remarking on the progress of his doctrine, illustrated it by the fact that so great a writer as George Borrow could speak of a waterfall as being in all details as it was “‘since the day of creation, and will probably remain to the day of judgment.’” There were other associations—political in kind—which would not have rejoiced him so exceedingly; he had no great love for politicians, especially of the Whig sort who had controlled most of the forty odd pocket boroughs of Cornwall. Bossiney was one of them, the hamlet close to Tintagel, whose chief claim to utility after it ceased to return two members to Parliament was that it contained a smithy.
On the wild coast to the west, at that time almost inaccessible and unknown—where now the tripper in his thousands hears the music of the Atlantic on Trebarwith Strand—he spent three days, walking long distances and reaching as far west as Pentire Point, which guards the Bay of Padstow. On the return journey he took the inland road, through St. Minver and Egloshayle (“the church by the stream”), where, to avoid the evils of continual tidal bores, a pious fifteenth-century parson got up a subscription to build the noble bridge of seventeen arches that spans the River Camel. At Pengelly, close to the celebrated slate quarries of Delabole, he made the last entry in his Cornish journal. He is sitting in the little parlour of the old Delabole Arms, and sees two prints on the wall with inscriptions in French: “Le Revd. Dr. Amour,” and “A l’Amour il faut se rendre.” “In the latter print,” says he, “quite an angelic petit maître. The March of Gentility has reached Pengelley!”
Having packed up his things at Penquite and said good-bye to his Cornish relations, he turned his face eastwards, and was in London on February 10th.
To lovers of Borrow, even to mere admirers of his genius, it must always be a cause of regret—vain enough, but none the less sorrowful—that among his numerous failures was the failure to write the book on Cornwall advertised when “The Romany Rye” was published. Perhaps a reason or two may not be far to seek. It has already been seen that “Lavengro,” on which he had expended the labour of years, was received with icy indifference by the public and with torrid hostility by the critics. The fate of his darling book did much to embitter several years of his life. The visit to Cornwall broke into this grey period like a burst of sunshine into a wintry day; it was warm and friendly there, redolent of beautiful memories of the father he adored; the simple and hospitable people he met were full of homely kindness, with just a piquant suspicion of hero-worship; the country itself was full of charm. The whole experience interested, even inspired him, and no one can doubt that while he was in Cornwall, and for some time after he left it, he fully intended that the promised book should be written. He had talked over the project with the Taylors at Penquite; later he arranged the matter with John Murray.
Then came distractions. When he returned from the land of saints and pixies to London and the east, it was to resume work upon that Appendix in which he was pouring out the overflowing vials of his wrath upon his critics, upon the army of his mortal enemies, upon the mythical myriads of those whom he supposed to be placing obstacles in the path towards official employment which he desired to tread. He filled his letters and bored his friends with the mournful burden of his complaint against Governments and authorities, lords and notabilities, who to his distorted imagination seemed to be in league against the interests and prosperity of George Henry Borrow. Amid these glooms the ray of sunshine faded. In London he had none of the liveliness that possessed him in the West; morose and melancholy moods alternated with savage outbursts against his foes—even though he spent a considerable part of his time in so cheerful a haunt as the library of the British Museum, looking for material with which to confute and confound them. At last “The Romany Rye” came out. It was as great a failure as “Lavengro.” Its reception disheartened him for literary work, and the Cornish book receded farther into the distance. Finally, his adventures in Wales intervened, and he chose rather to write of them than of the smaller subject of which he might have made a better book, fine as “Wild Wales” unquestionably is.
There was so much good material in his Cornish tour, and in the lore and gossip which he drank in so avidly, that the disjointed notes of his impressions do only create a thirst for more. In his printed works there are but few references to the Duchy in the West. There is the passage in “Lavengro” where he speaks of his father’s Cornish descent, and quotes the proverb, “In Cornwall are the best gentlemen.” And in “Wild Wales” there is another adage which he had picked up in the West—the “proverb in the Gerniweg . . . which was the language of my forefathers, saying, ‘Ne’er leave the old way for the new’”—the theme, by the way, of a Cornish ballad given in Llhuyd’s Archæologia Britannica and translated by Borrow. That is all. The book he would have written on this land of miracles and fairies, of Celtic legend, of the last struggles of the British race in England against their Germanic conquerors, the land where the language of the ancient people was spoken within the memory of gossips with whom he conversed, where the very names of people and places were fragrant of the old order, where
“By Tre, Pol, and Pen,
You may know the Cornishmen,”—
such a book would have been worth having. A Celt in mind and blood and bone, he would have written it with sympathy, and he would have found it a subject not nearly so keenly exploited as the Wales of which he afterwards wrote, or the Manxland where he compiled similar journals in a later year.
Within the comparatively brief time he allowed himself, Borrow saw a great deal that was characteristic of Cornwall. It is a county of many characters, with industries and employments various if small. Its patriotic toast is: “Fish, Copper, and Tin.” To this triple sentiment agriculture might be appropriately added. Borrow saw them all. He saw farming in the hills in his own family and among their friends. He watched tin and copper mining in the Caradons, and saw how the West-countrymen
“. . . . From the bleak Cornubian shore
Dispense the mineral treasure which of old
Sidonian pilots sought,”
as the imaginative Akenside has it. Mount’s Bay was encircled by legends of the Phœnicians and their voyages to the “Cassiterides” for tin. At Newlyn—long before it became the most bepainted village in three kingdoms—and at Mousehole with his friend Burney, he saw the fishing industry in full operation. We should have had from him many a burst of the dialogue of which he was a consummate master—as with Henry Goodman, the nonagenarian of Tremar, and with the old men he met in Dolly Pentreath’s parish of Paul—and the Cornish language, once spoken throughout the South of England, would have been discussed, if not in sufficiently learned style to satisfy the expert, at any rate in a way that would have made for the entertainment of mankind at large.
We have read of his Cornish father’s prowess in “the art of fisticuffery,” and might certainly have looked for a spirited account of the affair at Bodmin Bridge when the terror of all Plymouth and Devonport was vanquished, and another of the fracas at Menheniot Fair. But we should probably also have had an essay upon an art which has always been far more popular in Cornwall than boxing—that is, the art of wrestling. We may be sure he would have expressed his patriotic preference for the Cornish over the Devonshire style. He might have agreed with Touchstone that “breaking ribs” was not sport for ladies, but he would have regretted its decline because it was a vigorous and manly game, and he would have fastened upon the career of the great wrestler Polkinghorne, whose contest with the Devonshire hero Cann, on Tamar Green at Devonport in 1826, was a Homeric battle worthy the pen of him who discoursed of that great fight in which Thurtell was “lord of the concourse.” He would have given us the true inwardness of “the Cornish hug” and the “Flying Mare,” and might even have cited the ballad of Will Treffry and Little Jan, whose untimely end left sorrowing the lady who was to have been his bride that very day:
“Then, with a desperate toss,
Will showed the Flying Hoss,
And Little Jan fell on the tan,
And never more he spake.
Oh, Little Jan, alack!
The ladies say, Oh, woe’s the day!
Oh, Little Jan, alack!”
But most of all do I miss such a treatise as should have grown out of his exploration of the Tintagel country, speculating in what degree he would have adopted the Cornish theory of Arthur, what he would have made of the mass of tradition and romance that has collected about that stretch of coast. One may imagine how his mind would have followed the legend of Arthur from its birthplace in the Far North down through his beloved Wales to the spot on which he stood before the crumbling walls of Dundagil, out of whose silent ruins Tennyson’s imagination was about to construct his marvellous picture of the stately halls of Camelot. Borrow’s would have been a vastly different story from Tennyson’s idealisation of the mystery of Arthur’s life, and still more startling would have been its contrast with the version of the master-mystic of these parts, the immortal Vicar of Morwenstow. [205] This in spite of the fact that, as Hawker said, he worked into his poem “The Record and Rationale of Keltic Cornwall, the rock, barrow, moor, mountain all there, with the spirit of our fathers rehearsing their intent”—for Hawker’s Catholic theology would have been anathema to the Papist-hater, Borrow, and the man who wrote supporting the Bull of Pius IX., promulgated that very year, would inevitably have been placed on the Borrovian index. Borrow would rather have harked back to Walter Mapes, and beyond him to Malory, and beyond him to Geoffrey of Monmouth. His Arthur’s mother would have been the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and Uther would have been his father. His Arthur would have wed the daughter of Leodegraunce, King of Camelyard; the Table Round—the most valuable accretion which Cornwall has given to the legend—would have been Arthur’s wedding present from Leodegraunce, who would have received it from Uter Pendragon, for whom it would have been made by Merlin, Prince of Enchanters. Camelot would have been Camelford, and not Winchester, nor Queen Camel in Somerset; and we might have had a discussion of the question what Shakespeare meant when he made Kent in King Lear say to the Duke of Cornwall:
“Goose, if I had you upon Sarum Plain,
I’d drive ye cackling home to Camelot.”
The argument in favour of Queen Camel is that on the moors in that neighbourhood it is customary to breed geese; but then, geese are among the common objects of the Cornish moors.
We should not have lacked, either, some examination of the scanty literature of Old Cornwall, of the Pascon Agan Arluth, the Passion of Our Lord, of the trilogy of poems on The Beginning of the World, the Passion, and the Resurrection. We should have heard of the Miracle Plays, which continued to be performed in the amphitheatres or “rounds” of Cornwall well into the seventeenth century—the ancient drama of Meriasek, Duke of Brittany, and the corrupt sixteenth-century masque of “The Creation of the World, with Noah’s Flood”; and we should have been told with approval of these plays that, like those of Brittany, they were far more reverent and more decent than the corresponding performances in the English and French languages.
Such a book, in Borrow’s inimitable prose, with the interludes and dialogues whose supreme merit Ford was quick to perceive, would have been invaluable. The subject is so luxuriant in interest and so novel that it might well have had a far greater success than anything he had written since “The Bible in Spain.” But its only place is on the long list of the Unwritten Books of the world, a literary ellipsis deplored but never to be filled.
CHAPTER XI
THE LAND OF ELIS WYN
In these years of the fulness of his manhood, the wandering spirit possessed and compelled Borrow. It dragged him all over the United Kingdom in search of such adventure and distraction as he could find. He allowed his work on “The Romany Rye” to be held up by the scheme of a tour in Wales. With his wife and Miss Clarke he spent the summer and autumn of 1854 in the land of the Cymry. This expedition was on different lines from any he had ever undertaken before. He was far more tractable than of old, far more “civilised” than when, in his youth, he had roamed the highways and lived in the hedges and the inns. He was far more comfortable, but also sadly less dramatic than while rummaging the peninsula for gypsy lore. He went about these travels with a much less romantic spirit than he had manifested in his Cornish journeys.
Wales—its literature, its history, its language, and its bards—had been a passion of his life. When he set about making its personal acquaintance, the heat of the amour had cooled off, and he became a tourist rather than a picaro. Some years later he published a full record of his travels and experiences. At that time the world was far less interested in George Borrow than it had been, and few people took the trouble to compare “Wild Wales” with his other books. But a later generation, which has found a new interest in him, has made many comparisons. One of the commonest observations is that the new book differs from its predecessors in that it is a mild and pleasant record of travel; idiosyncrasies and angularities are there, it is true, but the book is not all fads and angles. Many reasons have been given for this. One of the most ingenious is that Borrow was accompanied by two ladies who knew exactly what he was doing, and that he dared neither seek the vulgar adventures that give colour to his other works, nor invent them in order to add purple patches where they seemed necessary for artistic effect. One declines to adopt this theory. Borrow may have been somewhat restrained by the presence of his wife and her daughter while he lived with them at Llangollen. But he was often away for considerable periods on walking excursions, and, in the latter part of his tour, when he tramped through Wales from north to south, he was entirely alone. There could have been no restraint upon him then. He was at liberty to seek out the most disreputable company he pleased, to consort with gypsies, or tinkers, or the scum of the earth—if it can be admitted without treason that Wales contains any scum. That Borrow was induced by the influence of his womenkind to moderate the tone of his writing is a thing one cannot believe: he returned at the end of the year to their company at Yarmouth, to add some of the most vitriolic passages to “The Romany Rye.”
Two sets of circumstances may more fitly account for the character of “Wild Wales.” One is that Borrow had idealised Wales in his mind, and that he went about it determined to see only what was good and noble in the country and its people. His early enthusiasm for its language had given birth to an extraordinary passion for its literature, and a hero-worshipping devotion to its great ones. To him there were no mountains like the Welsh mountains of which he had dreamed in his boyhood among the fenlands of Norfolk. To him there were no princes to be compared with the Welsh chieftains who resisted the tide of Saxon aggression. He might pretend as stoutly as he pleased that the Anglo-Saxon race was the flower of the earth, that there were no finer fellows in the records of chivalry than the English prize-fighters, and that there was no nectar to be mentioned with English ale. But when, as in Cornwall and Wales, he was among the Celts from whom he sprang, all this superficial structure of association tumbled down, and his true and native soul breathed its proper atmosphere. Wales was all good to him. His delight and admiration were unfeigned. They appear in the book, and they appear equally in the notes unused in the book, which Dr. Knapp has preserved.
The second set of circumstances relates to the date at which the book was published. It did not appear till 1862. By that time (he would have been the last man to admit it) some home-truths had been forced upon Borrow. He had discovered that the game he played with the public in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” was not worth the candle. He wanted to write a popular book, and to regain some of the ground he had lost. The public did not like his anti-Popery screeds; he deliberately excised anything that could offend them in that respect, as will be seen. The public did not care twopence about his gypsies and would rather be without them. He deliberately avoided any reference to the gypsies of Wales, though they were perhaps the most interesting and the most intelligent of the Romany tribes inhabiting the British Isles.
During his Welsh wanderings Borrow was more than ever the philologist let loose. His joy was unbounded in the discovery of persons who said to him “Dim Saesneg,” signifying that they did not understand English, in the exercise of his Welsh upon them, in their astonishment that there should be one tall Englishman striding through Wales who could speak to them in their own vernacular. His Welsh has been criticised with a certain degree of justice. It was book-learnt. But it was a sufficiently good working medium to enable him to get into closer touch with the people than he could have done with English alone. When he was reciting Welsh verses on the top of Snowdon, a native asked him whether he came from Brittany. The variation which the Celtic language underwent in its journey through Cornwall into Armorica is surprisingly slight. The present writer was sailing once in a boat off the coast of Finistère with two Breton fishermen, exploring certain grottoes inhabited by the korrigans, which take the place of pixies in Brittany, and found some difficulty in reconciling their French with any standard known to him. But, they said, if against his next visit he would learn to speak “Ouelsh,” some interesting and profitable discourse would be easy. And they might have been, for all their appearance, two dark-eyed denizens of Mevagissey or the Cardigan coast.
If Borrow had only a literary acquaintance with the language, he had a spiritual affinity with the land and the people. Welshmen admit that “Wild Wales” is one of the finest books on their country ever produced, either by Welsh or English writers. Indeed, it could hardly fall short of that, being the work of a man fascinated by his subject, who maintained a high pitch of enthusiasm for every phase of it, whether he was escorting his ladies to see fine prospects in the neighbourhood of Llangollen or making excursions with John Jones, the Methodist weaver, or visiting simple cottages to drink milk and talk with their inhabitants of the works of the Bards and Mystics over which he had pored long years ago in the corporation library at Norwich, or entertaining rough miners with ghost stories in mountain hostelries.
While the best episodes of the tour are given in the book, the incidents recorded in his diary and omitted from the published work possess one or two features of interest. For instance, as Dr. Knapp points out, the interview with the Irishman on the road between Cerrig y Drudion and Cernioge Mawr would have been much improved in point of realism if Borrow had included in it the words of the song, “Croppies, lie down!” and the objurgations of the patriotic fiddler on each verse of this pæan of the detested Orangemen. The scene appeared in this form in his original draft. But there were reasons, already set out, why he did not want just at this time to declaim to the public:
“Whoop! Protestants, whoop!
And drink full of hope,
Bad luck to the Devil, Pretender, and Pope!
And down, down, Croppies, lie down!”
That truculent song, which had been “the delight of the young gentlemen of the Protestant Academy of that beautiful old town” of Clonmel, would not have been the delight of the British people at large when “Wild Wales” was issued from the press, and Borrow had learnt enough to know that. The other principal omission from the book is the Ghost Story of Lope de Vega. We may accept without regret the fact that he did not print the account of the duel on Wimbledon Common between Colonel Lennox and the Duke of York, which has nothing to do with anything in particular. But the Ghost Story was originally set in a most suitable framework, and would have read well. He always maintained that it was facile princeps among ghost stories, and, with due homage to the Society for Psychical Research, one may admit that his judgment was not far wrong. He got the tale from an English translation of the Romance, El Peregrino en su Patria, published in London in 1738. He told it to a company of miners assembled in the inn of Guter Vawr, with whom he had some difficulty at first in getting upon terms of amity. Borrow may have lacked colloquial knowledge of the Welsh language, but he had something which was better: he appreciated with the keenest relish its musical charm, and he admired it without stint. He understood the people and their ways of thought, and could accommodate himself to their habits. He idolised their heroes and poets. Thus he got outside himself more in “Wild Wales” than he succeeded in doing in any other book, and the observation has been very justly made upon it that it is an itinerary rather than an autobiography. Nevertheless, it throws an interesting light on some facets of his character, and is a book which his friends must love because it displays him in happier moods and under warmer skies than most of his writings.
The clouds lowered again after the exaltation of the Welsh tour. He returned from the mountains and the bards, from the rarefied atmosphere of Snowdonia and the warmth of his welcome by a Celtic society, to sordid disputes and wordy warfares about his new book, “The Romany Rye.” It was exactly four years before that Murray had begun imploring him to “give the new volumes the finishing touches.” He had been “touching” them with a vengeance, and the finish was not at all to Murray’s taste. He completed the task soon after his arrival in Yarmouth, and packed off the manuscript to Albemarle Street. That respectable thoroughfare was next door to being scandalised by the contents of the parcel. True, Murray put his criticisms in a friendly way, but they were strong criticisms, and they were backed by literary opinions of some weight. But Borrow had experienced a surfeit of critics, and his anger was supreme. He told Murray he had given him the manuscript on condition that it should not pass out of his hands, and complained that it had been shown round among several people. He declared that he was not anxious to publish it, a statement from which the usual discount must be subtracted. He proceeded to describe it as “one of the most learned works ever written” (this with Mrs. Borrow as his mouthpiece, for decency’s sake), and his manifesto then diffused itself in renewed attacks on the foes of “Lavengro,” refusal to have anything to do with Murray’s suggestion for a book on Russia, and a denunciation of England as an ingrate country. “It owed much to him, and he owed nothing to it.”
Borrow’s books not only took a long time to write, but had a bad habit of hanging about after they had been written. Many things happened before “The Romany Rye” appeared to a bewildered public, holding the critics “up by their tails.” In the meantime, the Romany Rye himself had been wandering again. He was, as De Quincey said of Descartes, “as restless as a hyena.” In 1855 he took his wife and Miss Clarke to another out-of-the-way corner of Celtic Britain—the Isle of Man. Making Douglas his headquarters, he explored the country thoroughly, generally alone and on foot. He was on the look-out for the material for another book, which, as in the case of the Cornish volume, remained a project. He did get as far as the title, “Bayr Jairgey and Glion Doo: The Red Path and the Black Valley,” and prepared an introduction for it.
The Isle of Man was at that time, in the literary sense, an unoccupied country, and Borrow would have worked over a fertile field of virgin soil if he had carried out his purpose. There was no Manx Society; there was no Manx Miscellany. The Runes were there for him to decipher and describe; the poetry and the history of the island were at his disposal to exploit. “In lone farmhouses and cottages situated in gills and glens” were the “smoke-stained volumes” of “carvals” in manuscript, poems of the people, which he diligently searched out while penetrating the recesses of the island. The carvals—Anglice, carols—are mostly on Biblical subjects and of no great antiquity. Borrow got possession of two volumes and examined the contents of many. He had only a slight acquaintance with the Manx language, but his general knowledge of Gaelic stood him in good stead as he puzzled his way through the carval of “Joseph,” or of “David and Goliath,” or of “The Evil Women,” of which last he remarks that it is written in dispraise of the sex and recalls the poem of Simonides on the same subject. It is the work of an eighteenth-century smuggler named Moore, whose misogyny was displayed in an original fashion—by picking out all the bad characters of the feminine persuasion in the Holy Scriptures and relating their most wicked deeds. Borrow says it “is a curious piece, and must certainly have found its way abroad without clerical sanction.” He was not more interested in these effusions than in the scanty printed literature of the island—such as the ballads of “Brown William” and “Myle Charaine.” The former (“Ilian Dhu” in the vernacular) commemorates one John William Christian, a Receiver of the Isle of Man, who at the time of the Restoration was executed on Hangoe Hill because he had surrendered to Cromwell. [218] Borrow translated this poem, and also the ballad of “Myle Charaine,” the miser, which he entitles “Mollie Charane.” His version was published in Once a Week. He was fond enough of it to go hunting for the miser’s descendants on a lonely curragh, much to the amazement of the good people, who could not understand that the possession of an ancestor who happened to have been mentioned in a poem was any good reason for the invasion of their privacy. His keenest taste, however, took him much farther back into the mists of the past than the balladists of the eighteenth century. Was not the early history of the island a record of the lives and deeds of his beloved Danes and Norsemen? Were not their sepulchral monuments to be seen in the Runic stones? And, more distant still, were there not the legends and the fragments of half-lost songs of Finn, the Celtic hero whose exploits are celebrated in so many lands? He had encountered Finn in Ireland. He had found him in Cornwall under the wing of the Irish guide, Cronan. Here he met him again. Walking with Borrow on Snaefell, a miner of Laxey, James Skillicorn (who was the donor of one of his two volumes of carvals) recited a Manx tradition of Finn—“a mighty man of valour and a swift runner.”
There were two giants (so the tale ran) rejoicing in the name of Finn; of these, Finn McCoul, a huge giant, was Scottish, and Finn McCoyle, a lesser giant, was Manx. The Scots Finn, hearing rumours of the fame of the Manx Finn, and feeling some jealousy, decided to visit him in order that they might try their strength. So he waded across from the southernmost point of Scotland to the northernmost point of the island. Finn’s wife answered the door to him, and was at once stricken with amazement and fear at his gigantic proportions. She saw that her husband, who was inside lying on the bed, would be no match for him, and therefore told him that McCoyle was not at home.
“Who is the great fellow lying on the bed?” asked McCoul.
“Only a little son of ours,” said the astute Mrs. McCoyle.
The visiting giant then asked for something to eat, and she said she would give him a cake such as they were in the habit of eating, and presented him with an iron platter.
McCoul crunched it to powder between his teeth, and swallowed it with the utmost relish.
Then McCoyle, assuming the part his wife had invented for him, and pretending to be the son of a mighty father, offered to take McCoul out to his father’s playing-ground and show him the ball with which he played. Having reached the place, McCoyle directed the visitor’s attention to a round crag of rock, weighing something more than a ton, which he said was his father’s skittle-ball. “Can you do anything with that?” he asked.
McCoul seized it, threw it a mile high, and caught it again.
“Well done!” cried the crafty McCoyle. “Let’s see you do it again.”
And as he threw the rock up into the sky again, McCoyle went behind him and gave him a push which sent him over the cliff, where he was dashed in a thousand pieces.
“Such an end,” says the tale, “may all those have who come over the water expressly, as the Scottish giant did, to bully the decent people of Man.”
In Cornwall Borrow found the ancient language dead; in the Isle of Man he found it rapidly dying out of common use, and not much cultivated for literary purposes. The Church services in Manx were being discontinued. Deploring all this greatly, he still went on studying it. He was no lover of Methodists—placing them in one of his comprehensive categories with “Whigs, Muggletonians, and Latter-day Saints.” But his political and religious prejudices did not interfere with his love of the Celtic tongues or his devotion to poetry in any form, and when he had nothing else to do he sat in his lodgings and read Killey’s translation into Manx of the Methodist Hymn Book. Killey’s other chief work was the translation of Parnell’s “Hermit.” Why anybody should want to translate that highly overrated piece of Queen Annery into any language at all, it is hard to say. His choice of subjects, however, did not deter Borrow from paying homage to him and going to see his daughter, with whom he had a discussion on the effects of Methodism in the island. It was summed up in the best Borrovian oracular manner: “The Methodists have done much good in Man,” he said to her, “but their doctrines and teaching have contributed much to destroy the poetical traditions of the people.” This dictum was very like that which R. S. Hawker proclaimed of the Methodists in Cornwall. But Hawker did not allow that they had done any good at all. Wesley, he said, caused the Cornish people to “change their Sins and called it conversion. . . . With my last Breath I protest that the Man Wesley corrupted and depraved instead of improving the West of England. . . . The Vices of the Body are not after all, bad as they are, so hateful as the Sins of the Mind.” Borrow was nearer the truth than Hawker. But it may be doubted whether the spread of Methodism had much, if anything, to do with the evanishment of old poetic traditions; the march of industrialism and the increasing fluidity of population were the real culprits.
Borrow trod the red path and explored the black glen—whose magnificence he did not praise too highly—and inspected carvals, climbed walls to look at carved stones, sketched with Henrietta, and generally enjoyed himself for several weeks. It was the autumn of the fall of Sebastopol. The news reached the island on September 10th, and provoked some of Borrow’s most fiery denunciations of politicians and soldiers—the offence being that the French had taken the Malakoff and the British had been repulsed from the Redan. “The war might have been gloriously settled nearly a year ago by the English, and they have got all the credit of the affair, but for the inactivity and indecision of that miserable creature Raglan, the aristocratical leader of the English and the secret friend of the Russians. . . . Much shouting in Douglas and firing of guns in the harbour, though for what reason it would be difficult to say.”
Borrow’s patriotism was of a peculiar kind. He had the type of mind which was generally “agin the Government,” and few of the operations of British statesmanship, either at home or abroad, gave him any satisfaction. Yet there never was a man who took more pride in the fact that he was an Englishman. The sight of The Rock moved him to paroxysms of patriotism. When he begins a paragraph, “O, England!” the experienced reader knows what to expect, and all Radicals and other subversive persons may “stand clear,” as they say at sea. But even they will forgive him because the quality of his martial music is so high.
“O England! long, long may it be before ere the sun of thy glory sink beneath the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous clouds are now gathering rapidly round thee, still, still may it please the Almighty to disperse them, and to grant thee a futurity longer in duration and still brighter in renown than thy past! Or, if thy doom be at hand, may that doom be a noble one and worthy of her who has been styled the Old Queen of the Waters. May thou sink, if thou dost sink, amid blood and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more than one nation to participate in thy downfall! Of all fates, may it please the Lord to preserve thee from a disgraceful and a slow decay; becoming, ere extinct, a scorn and a mockery for those selfsame foes who now, though they envy and abhor thee, still fear thee, nay, even against their will, honour and respect thee.”
Nor will the reader be shocked or surprised to learn that these somewhat unpacific and heathen sentiments formed “part of a broken prayer for my native land, which, after my usual thanksgiving, I breathed to the Almighty ere retiring to rest that Sunday night at Gibraltar.” Like many other Englishmen, he seemed to find more to admire in the institutions and the character of his country when he was at a distance than when he was at home.
The principal authority for the Manx incidents is Dr. Knapp, who gives fully the journals of the tour from which some extracts have been made.
CHAPTER XII
LONDON AGAIN
On the return to Yarmouth, the trials of a crotchety temper were resumed. Murray’s reception of “The Romany Rye” so inflamed Borrow’s anger that in April, 1856, he recalled the precious manuscript in the curtest of curt notes. Murray, nothing loth to rid himself of this wild book, with its tigerish animadversions upon the literary world at large, packed it up and sent it to Yarmouth, where it remained for another year. Its author, in high dudgeon, kept his mind as far as possible off his grievances by tramping about East Anglia and endeavouring to reawaken the sensations of his youth upon the English roads. He rejoices in the sight of a coach, which even then seemed a strange anachronism, so thoroughly had the railway revolutionised the conditions of travel. He is carried back thirty years to the days of Thurtell by a meeting with an old man who remembered the mill between Painter and Oliver, and could call up visions of the concourse of pilfering rascals assembled on that occasion, so that the adjoining field was found next day to be strewn with empty pocket-books! He sees a horse fall down and refuse to rise in a street of King’s Lynn, and at once becomes the horse-doctor, advising the administration of reviving ale according to one story, and according to another administering it himself.
Among the visits he paid during these excursions was one to Miss Anna Gurney at North Repps; he took a speedy departure when she began to propound to him questions in Arabic grammar, and consoled himself with a dinner at “Tucker’s.” But this was the kind of life and experience which, sending his memory back to his early exploits by grassy lane and windy heath, was bound to turn his thoughts again to the manuscript stowed away at Yarmouth in which so many of those adventures were depicted. In the following February he withdrew it from its hiding-place, read it over afresh with great relish, and decided that it must be published. Such good stuff should be withheld from the public no longer, Murray or no Murray.
Thus an ultimatum was despatched to Albemarle Street. The eminent publisher was informed that, if he did not bring out “The Romany Rye,” some less eminent publisher would be applied to. The firm, always excellent friends to Borrow, resolved to humour him, but in the letter in which the bargain was clinched Mr. Murray could not resist a sly dig; he said the work would be published “to oblige him.” Whereat Borrow told him that he believed his intentions were good, but that “people with the best of intentions occasionally do a great deal of harm.” “The Romany Rye” appeared in May.
If the reception of “Lavengro” disappointed its author, no less can be said of the reception of its sequel. The majority of the critics did not like it any better than Borrow liked them. Even his friend Whitwell Elwin, who reviewed it for the Quarterly, reproved him vigorously for the violence and vulgarity of the Appendix, and threw Bentley at him in this wise: “No author was ever written down except by himself.” But Elwin was fair, and more prescient than most of his contemporaries. He admitted that “Lavengro” had not had its due, and said that it contained “passages which, in their way, are not surpassed by anything in English literature.” He spoke with warmth of the truth and vividness of the descriptions of both scenes and persons, the purity, force, and simplicity of the language, which “should confer immortality upon many of its pages.” Elwin did not write without knowledge when he said that “various parts of the history are known to be a faithful narrative of Mr. Borrow’s career, while we ourselves can testify as to many other parts of his volumes, that nothing can excel the fidelity with which he has described both men and things. Far from his showing any tendency to exaggeration, such of his characters as we chance to have known—and they are not a few—are rather within the truth than beyond it. . . . There can be no doubt that the larger part, and possibly the whole, of the work is a narrative of actual occurrences.”
The review which most correctly anticipated the verdict of a later generation, a generation that knew not Borrow but was emancipated from some of the prejudices of the ’fifties, was that of the Saturday Review. The writer saw the charm of these books—their raciness, their naturalistic humour, their spirit of romance. He penetrated the secret of Borrow’s style when he spoke of his “almost affectedly simple language.” He realised the permanent power of a writer who could make such wonderfully strong impressions without actual categorical description of scenery or persons. Otherwise, the treatment of the book was cool and neglectful, or hostile—in either case highly unsatisfactory to Borrow. Perhaps we, who can read “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” together, and view them in a different atmosphere, are hardly able to make sufficient allowance for the conduct of critics who had this sequel to a half-forgotten book pitched on their tables after an interval of six years, and found that its most vigorous passages consisted of terrific denunciations of their harmless selves.
The disappointed author went off alone in August to seek solace in a second tour through the country which still held the warmest place in his affections. He walked through the greater part of South Wales to the very tip of the Pembrokeshire promontory, and then cut across to Hereford and Shropshire. At Uppington and Donnington he sought out the tracks of Gronwy Owen, and returned to London and Yarmouth once more full of his Celtic bards and prophets. Occasionally antiquarian researches were interrupted to give time for original vaticinations on public affairs. He was a fierce opinionist, who contrived as a rule to find his opinions on the side which was against the constituted authority, whatever it might be. The conduct of Indian policy during the Mutiny pleased him no better than the conduct of the Russian war. In a letter to Murray, after defending the tone of “The Romany Rye” on the ground that it denounced boldly the evils which were hurrying the country to destruction and had kindled God’s anger against it, “namely, the pride, insolence, cruelty, covetousness, and hypocrisy of its people, and, above all, that rage for gentility which must be indulged in at the expense of every good and honourable feeling,” he goes on to discuss affairs in the East. Some of his choicest anathemas are reserved for “the miserable newspapers,” which proclaimed a firm determination to put down the rebels in India, “but forget to tell us how India is to be held without the sepoys.” The international situation seemed to his hypochondriac mind to be full of irremediable gloom, and he turned again, sighing, from these melancholy reflections to his Welsh poets. His passionate desire was reawakened to reveal the wonders of Cymric literature to a stiff-necked generation of Englishmen. He had turned out once more his translation of the “Visions” of Elis Wyn, which had been too strong for the stomach of the little bookseller of Smithfield nearly thirty years before. He delivered it to Murray on his way back from Wales. Borrow suggested that it would be likely to sell if it could be adorned with three engravings by Cruikshank—“the dance of the fairies in the first part; another the old poet in Hades flinging a skull at the head of Elis Wyn in the second; and the last, the personification of Sin in the third part at the very conclusion.” But Murray was no more impressed with the saleable quality of the Sleeping Bard than the bookseller of Smithfield had been; Cruikshank continued to throw stones at the Bottle Imp instead of flinging skulls at Elis Wyn, and the manuscript went back to Yarmouth.
All literary enterprises were suddenly set aside in August, 1858, by a family tragedy. No less a phrase can describe Borrow’s loss when his mother died, for the bonds between them were exceedingly close. Her love had a poignant quality which was sharpened by the anxiety, well-concealed from him, with which his weaknesses filled her. His love for her was more than filial. It had kept him in East Anglia for many years; it had an important influence, which has been previously suggested, upon his attitude towards the Catholic Church; he could never forget that it was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes that drove his mother’s family out of France.
The death occurred rather suddenly. The severance had so extreme an effect upon him that he was inconsolable during many weeks. At last, to obtain distraction, he set off on a walking tour in the Highlands. He devoted much of his time to roaming all over the island of Mull, which he described as perhaps the wildest country in Europe. He noted that the place-names of Mull strongly resembled those of the Isle of Man, and wrote scraps of discourse on the Gaelic dialects. Leaving Mull, he penetrated, principally on foot, into the farthest north, crossing to Orkney and Shetland at the end of November. A quiet seven months at Yarmouth followed, and in June, 1859, he paid a visit to Ireland. Mrs. Borrow and Miss Clarke remained in Dublin while he plodded through the country. He walked to the wilds of Connemara, pursuing his customary line of inquiry into language and legend, and thence extended his tramp to the Giants’ Causeway. In Dublin he studied with zest the records of the associations which were exploring the ancient literature of the country, and gloated over the stories of Finn and Ossian. He became a member of the Ossianic Society soon after his arrival in the Irish capital. Unfortunately, Borrow left no record of the tour or of his studies in Dublin.
Ireland was, indeed, soon forgotten after his return home in November. At Yarmouth he came almost immediately under the magic spell of Wales again. The unpublished manuscript of “The Sleeping Bard” could not be allowed to slumber any longer, and he determined to issue the book at his own expense. Murray made a graceful compromise; though he would not undertake the publication, he allowed Borrow to use his valuable imprint, so that 250 copies were turned out by Denew the printer of Yarmouth, with the notification on the title-page that the book was published by John Murray. Apparently Borrow came to the conclusion that if Elis Wyn was to be reviewed adequately, he must do it himself. In the Quarterly Review for January, 1861, appeared an anonymous article on “The Welsh and their Literature.” All the sprites which inhabited Borrow’s portfolios knew that the main part of this article had been there for many years. It appeared in the Quarterly, polished up, and interleaved with references to the translation of the “Bardd Cwsg.” It was admired by those who were interested in the subject, and they were at any rate sufficiently numerous to buy up the whole edition of Elis Wyn in a month. The book was held in very favourable opinion by Welshmen. This was the last literary work of any sort he did in East Anglia, to which he was shortly to bid farewell for fourteen years.
Borrow and his wife departed from Yarmouth at the end of June, 1860, and took lodgings at No. 21, Montagu Street, Portman Square. The special reason for their residence in the East of England had vanished with the death of his mother, and they had been discussing for some time the project of taking a house in London. There he counted upon closer touch with the literary world. In a sense, he obtained it, for he was in constant companionship with a few choice friends; but for the purposes of a biographer the removal to town was disastrous. After the first year or two he made no conspicuous figure in literature, his correspondence almost ceased, and the records of his movements first become scanty and then vanish altogether. They are to be found in casual references among the reminiscences of the limited circle of his associates—Frances Power Cobbe, Charles Godfrey Leland, and Theodore Watts-Dunton. And, with the last name excepted, it is no very prepossessing picture that we get of him. Miss Clarke had been left at Oulton during the period of house-hunting. She joined them after they had taken No. 22, Hereford Square, Brompton, where they had Miss Cobbe for a near neighbour.
Having installed his household gods there, Borrow began to occupy himself with the most congenial employments he could discover. There was “Wild Wales.” The beloved book was on the stocks; it was being worked up with the affection he bestowed on no other subject. But he did not permit it to absorb him. There were many things to be done in London by a lover of common adventures and a student of social byways. There were rambles in the streets and in the environs of London, where odd characters were far more numerous than in East Anglia, or Wales, or Cornwall. There were gypsies—degenerate gypsies who lived in houses, still more degenerate gypsies who plied petty commerce in caravans, and the remnants of the real blood who camped in the outskirts of the metropolis, and were not unwilling to converse with “the London caloro” when he found his way among them. There was an occasional race; there was an occasional fight. A foot race at Brompton between “Deerfoot,” the Seneca Indian, and Jackson, “the American deer,” in October, 1861, was the subject of a lively description in his notebook.
Borrow tried some of his friends a good deal, even now that he was mellowing. But he had not lost the art of being jovial, and there are records of festivities at which he very successfully entertained those whom he might call his “pals.” Richmond was a favourite resort. One dinner party at the Star and Garter, when Borrow was host, comprised John Murray, his partner Cooke, and his brother-in-law, Dr. David Smith, of Edinburgh. It was a gargantuan feast for that day; it cost Borrow £6 3s., of which £4 1s. 6d. was for wine. His studies in the poetry of many lands went on concurrently with his entertainments and his work on Wales. The habit of translation was ingrained, and could not be conquered. He continued turning poems and legends into English from the Celtic tongues, from Danish, Turkish, and Russian. But no book came of all this industry. The public were still callously indifferent to Borrow’s poetical versions, as they had been in other years. They had put up with some of Bowring’s anthologies, but had now tired even of his Magyars and Serbs. The prevailing sentiment about this kind of literary ware was represented by a ludicrous parody which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine:
|
|
The utmost Borrow could do was to induce the editor of Once a Week—which had just entertained a very different kind of angel unawares in the person of George Meredith—to publish a series of ballads and stories from the Manx, Russian, Danish, and old Norse.
But in 1862 occurred a literary event whose importance was very slowly realised. “Wild Wales” appeared. Its reception by the critics was exceedingly curious. Most of the newspapers ignored it altogether; others were unjust to the point of savagery. For concentrated malice, the Cornhill notice would be difficult to surpass. “Really,” wrote the reviewer (obviously as closely in touch with Borrow and his subject as a cat with the differential calculus), “it is too much to demand that we should read the record of every glass of ale which Mr. Borrow drank—usually with his criticism of its quality—or be patient under the fatiguing triviality of, ‘I paid my bill and departed,’ which occurs incessantly.” But, lest it should be imagined that Borrow was either drinking beer or paying hotel bills all the time he was in Wales, the reviewer went on grudgingly to admit that “snatches of commonplace conversation and intensely prosaic translations of Welsh-poems swell out this book and render it rather tiresome reading.” At least one notice was both fair and complimentary, and foreshadowed the very high opinion in which the book is held at the present day by Welshmen. That was the article in the Spectator, which described it as “the first really clever book we remember to have seen in which an honest attempt is made to do justice to the Welsh literature. . . . In the course of his wanderings Mr. Borrow caught very happily the salient points in the Welsh character, and he has depicted them with those light, free touches which none but George Borrow can hit off to such perfection.” True, the Spectator discovered “the fine Roman hand” of Mr. Borrow in some of the speeches of his friends, but felt sure that the conversations were in substance faithfully recorded.
Borrow was in his sixtieth year when “Wild Wales” was published. In spite of the extraordinary extent and variety of his activities, he was by no means an old man. He retained his physical vigour; his mental force was unimpaired. He was to have twenty years more of life in which to accumulate new experiences and contract a rare friendship or two. Yet he had certainly outgrown his vogue. The older public that had hailed some of his writing with demonstrative joy had gone; he had not found—nor was to find while he lived—the newer public that could enter into the spirit in which he did his work. It is a little disconcerting, but not really a matter for surprise, that after the publication of “Wild Wales” Borrow gradually sank out of view. He buried himself still deeper in his philological studies. At intervals he vanished from London to make tours in various parts of the British Islands. Rough notes of these may be consulted in Knapp; they were never polished into anything like literary form. In 1865 came another severance: Miss Clarke, his step-daughter, married Dr. William MacOubrey, and went to live at Belfast. The “old Hen” of Borrow’s letters, the “Henrietta” of “Wild Wales,” had been a member of his household ever since the golden days of sunny Seville, and he had a very deep and sincere affection for her. He did not, of course, feel the separation so acutely as did his wife, who had never parted from her for more than a few weeks at a time during the forty-seven years since she was born; and it was Mrs. Borrow who planned a visit to the Orange capital in the following year. She was escorted to Belfast by her husband, who left her there with Mrs. MacOubrey, while he went off to Scotland. Crossing to Stranraer, he set out upon a lonely tramp in the Lowlands and the Border Country. He visited Abbotsford, but, his rage against Sir Walter Scott having subsided, his notes are as mild as a guidebook. Pushing on to Edinburgh, he returned to Glasgow by rail, and took the steamer to Belfast, spending the remaining weeks of the holiday in Ulster, with pedestrian trips to Lisburn and Antrim.
The journey through the Border was not without some literary fruit, as will be seen. For some years Borrow had been absorbed in Welsh and Danish poetry; but just now his attention was returning to the gypsy friends of his youth. At Kirk Yetholm, a few miles south-east of Kelso, dwelt Esther Blyth, the descendant of a famous gypsy king, herself endowed with a royal title, “the Queen of the Nokkums.” Her majesty was sought out and “interviewed,” and the notes of this encounter were worked into a chapter of the last book Borrow ever wrote.
CHAPTER XIII
DEATH OF MRS. BORROW
During the visit to Belfast Mrs. Borrow had been unwell, and her ill-health was her husband’s principal cause of anxiety for the following three years. In 1867 they visited Bognor, where she was revivified by the sea breezes, while he made tours through Hampshire and the New Forest. The next year complications arose in the administration of the Oulton estate, and they had to go into Norfolk to extricate the business. On their return, Mrs. Borrow failed rapidly. Weakened by heart disease and dropsy, and worried by the prospect of litigation with a neighbour, her illness took a serious form, and threw Borrow into a state of melancholy in which “the Horrors” attacked him, as we find by a reference in Miss Cobbe’s autobiography. She speaks of having one night “cheered him and sent him off quite brisk” after a bout of this kind, her method being to engage him in theological argument “in a serious way”! He “abounded in my sense of the nonexistence of Hell.” If the processes by which they sought to remove Borrow’s megrims were original, the sympathy and solicitude of Miss Cobbe and Miss Lloyd were unfailing. But none of the cares of friendship, no effort on Borrow’s part, could avail to stave off the disaster that approached. His wife grew worse, and on January 30th, 1869, succumbed to an aggregation of maladies, just in time to obviate the necessity (foreshadowed by Dr. Playfair, who was called in at the end) of sequestration because of mental affliction.
Thus sadly closed the long partnership of thirty years so romantically begun at Seville in “a dream of sunshine and shade, of falling water and flowers.” Mrs. Borrow had reached the age of seventy-three, and was seven years older than her husband. His grief was terrible. He had lost her who had been in literal fact his better half, who had inspired his courage and fought his “Horrors” for him, had organised his business, and had been wife and friend, counsellor and physician, amanuensis and private secretary rolled into one. “Poor old Borrow is in a sad state,” wrote Miss Cobbe. In his distraught condition friendliness suffered. He hesitated to “trouble anyone with his sorrows” and, when over-persuaded to dine out, was melancholy, “so cross so rude,” as said Miss Cobbe on one occasion. Her narrative of the attempts she made to drag him out of himself is luminous with humour—conscious and unconscious. There was much innocent malice in the fashion in which she set her superior knowledge of Norse lore against his, parrying his Firbolgs with her Keatinge, and his Tuatha-de-Danaan with her Hakon of Norway. But she did not perceive that the most humorous thing of all was the fact that she should attempt to raise a bereaved man out of his despair by touching him in his most tender intellectual spots.
For a year after the death of his wife Borrow buried himself in books—out-of-the-way books, archaic books, as usual. Drake’s “Historia Anglo-Scotica” figures in the list. He declared to Miss Cobbe that he had read no modern writer since Scott. This was not literally accurate. He had read and admired Dickens, for, in a letter to Luis de Usóz, he spoke of him as “a second Fielding . . . who, in certain novels founded on life in London and the provinces, as displayed in every grade of society from the lowest to the highest, has evinced such talent, such humour, variety and profound knowledge of character, that he charms his readers—at least, those that have the capacity to comprehend him. . . . Read, as soon as you can, all the writings of ‘Boz,’ and I am sure you will thank me all your life for having disclosed to you a mine of such delectable reading.” [241] His opinion of Scott had undergone considerable modification since the days of the Appendix and “Charlie-o’er-the-Waterism,” for he said that “Scott was greater than Homer!” (The italics and the note of astonishment are Miss Cobbe’s.)
Another sweeping dictum of his on the same occasion was that the Norse stories were “far grander than the Greek.” But Borrow was addicted to impulsive generalisations, and we need pay no more special attention to these judgments promulgated in Hereford Square than to the declarations made at various times that Gronwy Owen’s account of the toppling down of the crag of Snowdon on the Judgment Day was better than anything in Homer, that Horace and Martial were not superior to Ab Gwilym, and that Huw Morris was the finest lyrical poet of the seventeenth century.
Not long after these passages at arms with Miss Cobbe, he was suddenly plunged again into the old romantic interest of gypsyism. Towards the end of 1870 he received a letter from C. G. Leland, who had then been about eighteen months in England, and was pursuing his studies of the English gypsies on more scientific and more thorough lines than Borrow had ever adopted. No two men were farther apart in literary characteristics than Borrow and Leland. The author of the “Hans Breitmann” ballads is far better known to the larger world as a writer of comic verse than as a student of languages and folklore. “Hans Breitmann’s Barty” and “Ping-Wing, the Pieman’s Son” are in everybody’s mouth; “The English Gypsies and their Language” and his “Gypsy Sorcery” are familiar mainly to the elect. The humour of Borrow and that of Leland are of widely different character. Leland’s gay spirit lights a lamp of jocund fancy; Borrow’s humour is elemental, and, when his art adds quality to it, the quality is sardonic. Yet these two were attuned in a remarkable way, and on the subject of gypsyism and philology their tastes were in common. Borrow—leaving out of account a little natural jealousy—could hardly fail to be attracted to the man who was to write so vividly later of his intimacy with all “the lords and earls of Little Egypt” in the south of England, and of those sojourns in the tents which involved “a great deal of strangely picturesque rural life, night-scenes by firelight, in forests and by river banks, and marvellously odd reminiscences of other days.” And there were other interests held by both—for Leland was a Celtic scholar; did he not “discover” Shelta, and know all about the olden men, who
“. . . sat with ghosts on a stormy shore
And spoke in a tongue men speak no more”?
Leland told Borrow in his first letter that he was a lover of his books, and had read them all five times, with the exception of “The Bible in Spain” and “Wild Wales,” which he had only read once. He had been seeking in vain for some mutual friend to introduce them, and now put himself forward modestly as the author of “a collection of ballads satirising Germany and the Germans, under the title of ‘Hans Breitmann.’” Borrow wrote giving an invitation. Leland acknowledged it in a charming letter, announcing that he had asked his publishers to send Borrow copies of “Breitmann” and “The Music Lesson of Confucius.” The former was offered as an oblation to the gypsy gods; it contained a ballad “written by myself in the German Romany jib . . . which I would gladly learn from yourself whether it be worth anything or not.” The second was a delicate compliment to Borrow, for in it was a poem “suggested by a passage in ‘The Romany Rye,’ referring to the melancholy Sven Vonved, the Northern Sphynx, who went about giving out riddles and gold rings.” Leland ran on about gypsies and the Romany tongue, tinkers and rat-catchers, horses and hunting, in his inimitable way, declaring, “My dear Mr. Borrow, for all this you are entirely responsible. More than twenty years ago your books had an incredible influence on me, and now you see the results.”
At the meeting which followed, Leland told Borrow that he was preparing a work on the English gypsies, and it is fairly clear that this fact induced Borrow to write his own last book, “The Romano Lavo-Lil,” or Word-Book of the Gypsies. There have been found even Borrovians to regret that this book was ever published. Most of the criticism lavished upon it is no doubt justified. It is quite as unscientific, quite as useless as a lexicon, as its assailants said. Its miscellaneous contents are not to be compared for vigour and interest with his earlier work. But the true lover of Borrow would not have it absent from the little shelf which holds his books, even if it were only for the tale of Ryley Bosvil, and the interview with Esther Blyth—a reminiscence of his visit to Kirk Yetholm to see the “Queen of the Nokkums” during the Border tour. “The Romano Lavo-Lil” did not appear, however, till 1874. In the meantime, he edited a third edition of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” in one volume each, for Murray (1872), and recast his translation of the Gospel of Luke in the Calo.
An acquaintance he formed during the late years of his London life was that of Mr. William Mackay, who subsequently went to live at Oulton Broad. Mr. Mackay has related one or two anecdotes spiced with a very piquant frankness, for he is apparently no worshipper of Borrow, and has taken pains to dispute the claims advanced by those who are. He speaks of one occasion when they went together to a tavern on the edge of a great common, where Borrow called for “swipes.” This was the beerhouse title of the poorest kind of ale. Mr. Mackay says that Borrow affected it because it was the drink of his Romany friends. When he “had taken a pull at the pewter, he pointed out to me a yokel at the end of the apartment. The foolish bumpkin was slumbering. Borrow, in a stage whisper, gravely assured me that the man was a murderer, and confided to me, with all the emphasis of honest conviction, the scene and details of his crime. Subsequently I ascertained that the elaborate incidents and fine touches of local colour were but the coruscations of a too vivid imagination, and that the villain of the ale-house on the common was as innocent as the author of ‘The Romany Rye.’” It may not unreasonably seem to dispassionate persons that Borrow took a pull not only at the pewter, but at his friend’s leg as well.
But Mr. Mackay is able to throw an interesting light on one or two facets of his character—notably on his love of pugilism for its own sake. Outside Borrow’s own books, I do not know any sketch that gives a more living idea of his joy in combat than this. “It was a fine thing,” says Mr. Mackay, “to see the great man tackle a tramp. Then he scented the battle from afar, bearing down on the enemy with quivering nostril. If the nomad happened to be a gypsy, he was courteously addressed; but if he were a mere native tatterdemalion, inclined to be truculent, Borrow’s coat was off in a moment, and the challenge to decide there and then who was the better man flung forth. I have never seen such challenges accepted, for Borrow was robust and towering. But those who have seen him ‘put his dukes up’ affirm that he gave an excellent account of himself.”
There is also a glimpse in these notes [245] of Borrow’s attitude towards the great, though the story is not attested in any way and may be merely ben trovato. When a member of the Russian Embassy called on him in Hereford Square to request for his Imperial master a copy of “Targum,” Borrow “rudely told the official to let his master fetch it himself!”
The most pregnant friendship of the later days remains to be mentioned. Two souls of close affinity discovered each other in 1872. In that year Borrow encountered Mr. Theodore Watts. The fortunate fates threw these two men together: Mr. Watts-Dunton, as we know him, has done more for the true interpretation of Borrow than any other man. He brought to the study of the Borrow books and the elucidation of the Borrow character an intimate knowledge of the quaint things that Borrow loved. He brought an extensive and peculiar acquaintance with the tortuous paths in which Borrow roamed, whether they were literary, or philological, or merely geographical. Nobody has so deeply penetrated the Borrovian psychology; the pity of it is that his criticism and appreciation are scattered through the inaccessible files of journals and reviews, or appear as “introductions” to various editions of Borrow’s works, and have never been collected.
The story of their meeting on the common ground of friendship with Dr. Gordon Hake is, of course, familiar to all Borrovians. It had results so wide, however, that some account of it is due. For many years before the date mentioned, Mr. Watts-Dunton, with his amour of Natura benigna, his gypsyism, his cult of the open air, had naturally been strongly drawn towards such a personality as Borrow’s, and had learnt to love his strange books. He had seen the white-haired giant swimming in the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him till the day at Gordon Hake’s house at Roehampton, when Borrow’s approach, “striding across the common,” was announced. They got into touch with difficulty. Kindred spirits as they were, Borrow’s whimsies, his strangely mingled egoism and shyness, placed obstacles in the way of sympathy.