Rightly or wrongly—wrongly, as I think—in after years the “Norwich young man” considered himself to have received much injury at the hands of Bowring. Consequently, Bowring became the most vicious and most worthless scoundrel that ever wore shoe-leather. This was Borrow’s way: he was a prince of haters. The poet and linguist, the diplomatist, the political disciple of the illustrious Jeremy Bentham, was melted down into the Old Radical of the Appendix to “The Romany Rye,” and caricatured in the postboy’s story at the end of “Lavengro.” No accurate view of Bowring can be acquired from these acerbitous descriptions; line must be altered and colour modified with great liberality. Bowring may have made pretensions that could not be sustained, but his proper pretensions were certainly far greater than Borrow, in the berserking spirit that possessed him twenty years afterwards, was ready to admit. The polite tag with which he headed the eleventh chapter of the Appendix was:
“This very dirty man with his very dirty face
Would do any dirty act which would get him a place.”
Borrow’s lively account of the dinner party, written with Archilochian bitterness, cannot be read without many reservations. He makes out Bowring a literary pirate and a morally reprehensible cheat, a fraudulent ignoramus, trading for cheap glory on other people’s lack of knowledge, claiming an acquaintance with languages and poetry which he does not possess—evading conversation that will test his assertions, and dodging all the keen questions of the young Solon who tells the tale. Borrow poses him with his Red Rhys of Eryry, with his Ghengis Khan, and with his Koran. Finding that Borrow knows nothing of the Slavonic languages, Bowring immediately becomes garrulous on the subject of Slavonic lore and literatures; when in later years they meet again and Borrow has the Slavonic languages at the tip of his tongue, Bowring hurriedly changes the subject! That deductions have to be made from such an account of the matter is obvious; they may well be generous.
It is clear that, at the time, the young man entertained none of these opinions about Bowring, for he sought his help in a troublesome period of his own life, and was ready to engage in a literary collaboration with him. What actually happened was that, as a result of this meeting at the hospitable board of William Taylor, Borrow was induced to pursue even with greater ardour than before his translations from the Celtic and the Norse languages. It may have been largely a waste of time. Possibly George would have done better either by sticking to his law books or by cultivating his bent for original composition; but that was no fault of Bowring, from whom he received inspiration and encouragement in a course of study that was exceedingly congenial to him.
He went on delving in the musty old folios of the Corporation Library. Their yellow pages were more precious to him than aught in the world; the songs he puzzled out of the “Danica Literatura” were sweeter than the
“Celestial syrens’ harmony
That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres.”
True delight to him was the acquisition of Anglo-Saxon, the improvement of his Welsh and Scandinavian; the sum and crown of bliss was to pore over Llhuyd’s “Archæologia Britannica” and to translate Olaus Wormius—of whom he became so desperately fond that in a fit of youthful freakishness he adopted the signature “George Olaus Borrow.” His pencilled notes are still to be seen on the margins of the ancient tomes so generously handed over to his tender mercies by the city authorities.
Meanwhile, piles of notebooks and manuscripts were growing in the house in the Upper Close; the rhymed translation of “Ab Gwilym” and English versions of the old Norse ballads were proceeding laboriously but steadily. To the industry of the bookworm was added the passion of the author. “Ab Gwilym,” Olaus Wormius, and William Taylor in the aggregate were far too strong an influence for worthy Mr. Simpson of Tuck’s Court to counteract. Wigs and parchment could not stand against philology and poetry. Whatever notions Borrow ever entertained about pursuing the law as a profession gradually paled before the furor scribendi. Thomas Campbell was editing Colburn’s New Monthly, and Taylor wrote to him on behalf of Borrow. The result was the appearance in the magazine of a rhymed English version of Schiller’s ballad, “Der Taucher,” which was signed “G. O. B.”—the “O” standing for the Olaus of his adoption. This represented all that Campbell did for him. Borrow was more successful with Sir Richard Phillips, the editor and proprietor of The Monthly Magazine, to whom his name was also introduced by Taylor. In the late months of 1823 several poetical translations appeared in the Monthly. It must be confessed that they hardly reached even to the merit of mediocrity. During the same period Borrow was hard at work translating Klinger’s “Faustus” and other matters. It was not a sanitary life for a youth of twenty. The inevitable consequences were ill-health, morbid melancholy, and a particularly turbid period of Werterism, during which threats of suicide were frequent. All this has been laid at the door of William Taylor. It would be far more appropriate to charge it upon Klinger, Olaus Wormius, and Ab Gwilym. Borrow contrived very effectually “to suck melancholy out of a song.”
This, of course, was very unsatisfactory preparation for the career of a respectable solicitor in a cathedral city. His father protested in vain. Before the noble old captain died, leaving the brothers dependent on their own resources (since he had been able to make provision only just sufficient for his widow), George had decided that his association with the law should be determined at the same time as his apprenticeship. Roger Kerrison had already departed to London, and Borrow wrote to him there:
“If ever my health mends, and possibly it may by the time my clerkship expires, I intend to live in London, write plays, poetry, etc., abuse religion, and get myself prosecuted; for I would not for an ocean of gold remain any longer than I am forced in this dull and gloomy town.” [45]
Borrow’s father died on February 28th, 1824. A month later, within a day or two of the expiry of his articles, George was on the coach bound for London, accompanied by a little green box full of manuscripts, and in his pocket a letter of introduction from William Taylor to Sir Richard Phillips, the publisher. He had burnt his legal boats and destroyed his youthful bridges; he was fairly started upon the literary life.
CHAPTER III
PUBLISHER’S HACK AND
HEDGESMITH
Borrow’s “literary” life in London—where he lodged at 16, Millman Street, Bedford Row, with his friend Kerrison—was a period of the deadliest and most miserable drudgery. No author is a man of genius to his publisher, as Heine tells us. Borrow was certainly not a man of genius to Sir Richard Phillips, and their association for about ten months was a time of strain and irritation to both. Consequently, in Borrow’s opinion, Barabbas was Sir Richard Phillips. He lives only as “the publisher” in “Lavengro,” in which he is pictured as a subject fit merely for the odium and execration of the human race. Discount from this estimate of Sir Richard is highly necessary. He appears to have been a moderately inoffensive person, whose chief weakness was metaphysics, and a worse-assorted pair than he and Borrow it would be hard to imagine.
What was the literary ammunition with which Borrow expected to bring the publisher of The Monthly Magazine to his feet? It consisted wholly of translations and versifications. Their intrinsic merit was very slight, and there was no market for them. Some might be useful to fill up an odd corner, but they were certainly no staple commodity for a person intending to get a living by literature. Under the combined disadvantage of unmarketable wares and an uncongenial temperament, Borrow might well have considered himself lucky to be taken on by Phillips as a factotum to do the scavenging of his business. But while they were together the youth tasted the bitterest cup and fed on the hardest crust that Grub Street had to offer to the worshippers of the Muses. It had been more humane if Phillips had repeated to Borrow the advice which Mr. Wilcox, the bookseller, offered to Dr. Johnson when he proposed to live as an author: “You had better buy a porter’s knot.” Hard physical exertion would have served him better than the labour he endured, this child of The Wild, cooped up in London compiling criminal records or translating philosophical treatises into the German language.
Phillips had just retired from the business of pure publishing, which was a gloomy fact in the prospect of Borrow’s cargo of ballads. He retained The Monthly Magazine, it was true, and had started a pretentious periodical under the resounding title of The Universal Review or Chronicle of the Literature of all Nations, apparently in the hope—which proved vain—that it would provide a career for his son. This was the Oxford Review which figures in the pages of “Lavengro.” The actual editor was the redoubtable William Gifford, and the work of which superfluous copies lay about on the floor in such prodigal profusion was his translation of Juvenal. The incongruity of such an atmosphere for the kind of genius that possessed young Borrow! With a pathetic belief in the potency of Danish ballads to move the stoniest heart and draw guineas from the tightest purse, he introduced the subject. Phillips would have none of it, and when his visitor began to declaim of
“Buckshank bold and Elphinstone,
And more than I can mention here,”
he stopped him, saying that “it was very pretty indeed, and beat Scott hollow, and Percy too”—but nobody then cared for Percy, nor for Scott either, save as a novelist. If Borrow could produce something which should rival the merits of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” by Legh Richmond, there might be a chance of doing business. The young aspirant for literary fame searched London for a copy of the book which he was recommended to imitate, and, when he found it, discovered that he could by no possibility do anything like it, for it was a religious book, “written from the heart,” and Borrow had to confess to the publisher that he did not know much about religion in an intimate way. The only thing to do was to accept that which the publisher was prepared to offer him, the task of reviewing books for the new periodical, and of collating records of “Celebrated Trials.”
Another enterprise was undertaken by Borrow, which in itself was sufficient to prove his undoing even if the life had been congenial to him. Phillips was the author of a work of philosophy entitled “The Proximate Causes of the Material Phenomena of the Universe.” In an ill moment the new recruit engaged to translate this portentous tome into German for publication. Shades of Olaus Wormius and Ab Gwilym! Borrow’s German was the first stumbling-block. It was good enough to enable him to read German works and to turn German into English, but to work with it as a colloquial tongue was quite a different matter. In this respect he had contracted to do the impossible. But even if his German had been perfect he would have been a fish out of water, for he knew nothing of metaphysics. This is not the place to discuss the value of Sir Richard Phillips’s book, which has doubtless taken up some dusty nook on a library shelf for its permanent and undisturbed place of residence. But it was enough for Borrow to be told that nobody could understand his German version: in his opinion the cause of that did not reside so much in his imperfect acquaintance with the language as in the folly of the author. Borrow did not understand him and his terminology; consequently, the theories and the language of Sir Richard Phillips were equally absurd. The contumely poured upon the publisher in “Lavengro” was probably not fully deserved. A German edition of the Philosophy, translated by Theobald and Lebret, appeared at Stuttgart in 1826, and, for what it was worth, the Germans succeeded in understanding this. But, for the rest, if Borrow was treated no worse than other publishers’ hacks were treated, his lot was no more pleasant. Phillips was exigent about the work for which he paid so meanly, and none too kindly in his manner. Even about the “Celebrated Trials,” which was the enterprise George liked best of them all, Borrow was worried in an unconscionable fashion.
Of course, there was another life than this: his own private life, his intercourse with such friends as he had already in London and with the new acquaintances he made during his unconventional wanderings about the city. His brother John, the artist, reached London on April 29th, commissioned to induce Benjamin Haydon to paint the portrait of a Mr. Robert Hawkes, who was Mayor of Norwich in 1822. John had been asked to do the portrait himself, but distrusted his powers and preferred that the commission should go to Haydon. George went with his brother to interview “the painter of the Heroic,” who was not by way of painting provincial mayors as a matter of preference, but was in the chronic state of impecuniosity which made the fee of a hundred pounds an irresistible bait. The mission was successful. Haydon went down to Norwich, and executed a portrait of the worthy Mr. Hawkes “striding under a Norman arch out of the cathedral.” The Norman arch seems to have been suggested locally, and it appealed strongly to Haydon’s sense of the grandiose, though many people may be inclined to agree with George that the mayors of the day, as a rule, would have been better painted issuing from The Chequers or The Brewers Three.
Whatever distractions he could discover or invent, Borrow’s life was miserable, and brought on severe attacks of melancholia, which he first described as “the Horrors” and afterwards as “the Fear.” “What a life! What a dog’s life!” he tells us he would exclaim after “escaping” from the presence of the publisher. His woes, real and imaginary—and a great many of them were the effect of his morbid imaginings—drove him to desperate thoughts. After his brother’s visit, Knapp tells us, he wrote to Kerrison: “Dear Roger,—Come to me immediately. I believe I am dying.” He was probably very far from dying, but Kerrison had an idea that George was liable to suicidal impulses, did not like assuming the responsibility for such an irresponsible person, and shifted his lodgings. The mood passed, and Borrow went on hawking his ballads among the publishers of London with no more success than before. He relates how he called on “glorious John” twenty times without success. We are not to place too much reliance upon the exactitude of this statement. Meanwhile, the “Celebrated Trials” was going on. It was a tremendous compilation, with little of Borrow’s own work in it. Its 3,600 pages represented nearly a year’s adventures among the bookstalls and the files of old newspapers and fly-sheets. One piece of characteristic literary work with which he endowed the world was his translation of Klinger’s “Faustus,” which shortly appeared. This had been done at Norwich in the Simpson & Rackham days. Finally, the book of “Trials” was completed, and the Universal Review died of inanition. “I did not like reviewing at all . . . I never could understand why reviews were instituted,” says Lavengro. And he continued to detest reviewers and reviewing to the end of his days. In 1853, when Whitwell Elwin was deputising for Lockhart as editor of the Quarterly, he met Borrow. Their interview, Elwin’s son tells us, was characteristic of both: “Borrow was just then very sore with his slashing critics, and, on someone mentioning that Elwin was a quartering reviewer, he said, ‘Sir, I wish you a better employment!’”
At the death of the Universal Review, his relations with Phillips came to an end. He had little money and no resources. Once more he resumed the weary round, tramping in search of purchasers for his translations, and gradually approaching a condition of penury, but maintaining his attitude of aggression and independence. It is into this brief period that he has worked some of the most effective scenes of “Lavengro,” the friendship with the old apple-woman who had a stall on London Bridge, and with the Armenian merchant to whom he suggested that his wealth should be devoted to the liberation and aggrandisement of Armenia. Languages and poetry still obsessed his dreams. But audacious poverty at last bit a deeper wound than could be salved by poetry, and he resolved, only just too late, to accept an engagement the Armenian had offered him. It was sharp upon his disappointment at finding that the Armenian had taken him at his word, and gone away bent upon the conquest of Persia, that, returning from an excursion to Greenwich, Blackheath, and Shooter’s Hill, in the course of which he came upon the “Petulengros” in camp, he saw a notice in a bookseller’s window, “Wanted, a Novel or Tale.” “Lavengro” relates how he shut himself up from the 13th to the 18th of May, and wrote “The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell,” which he sold to the bookseller for twenty pounds.
How much of all this is truth and how much is fiction it is difficult to determine. There is probably a basis of fact for it. Borrow, with all his imagination and all his romance, was not an inventive writer, and though the idea of “Joseph Sell” may have been suggested by the history of “Rasselas,” it is more probable that by some stroke of luck of this kind he did obtain the money with which to set out on his tour of the English roads. The circumstance that no “Life of Joseph Sell” has ever been discovered is nothing to set against this probability, and against the feeling with which Lavengro narrates its inception and accomplishment. Borrow’s love of mystification entirely accounts for it. There was a choice between saying exactly what he did, what his tale or history was entitled, and obscuring the whole matter by a fictitious name; and it would not have been Borrow if he had not chosen the latter course. By whatever work, he did obtain money enough to allow him to shake the dust of London off his shoes and begin those wanderings through English rural districts which provided the adventures described in the second and better half of “Lavengro.”
Borrow was big and strong and a magnificent walker; never before, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, had there appeared on English roads so majestic-looking a tramp, with bundle and stick. He went south-west to Salisbury Plain, and there is a powerful account in “Lavengro” of sunrise at Stonehenge. The only thing to compare with it is Thomas Hardy’s prose-poem of the same magical place by moonlight. One cannot read without a thrill the passage where, “taking off my hat I advanced slowly, and cast myself with my face upon the dewy earth in the middle of the portal of giants. The spirit of Stonehenge was strong upon me.”
There is little, of importance to Borrow’s own life, to decipher in the story of his wayfaring which is not incorporated in the book itself. Perhaps one of the most weird of his adventures was the encounter with the scholar and gentleman afflicted by the “touching” mania; one of the most sensational the attempt made by Mrs. Herne, the gypsy crone, to poison him with a doctored cake; one of the most impressive his meeting with the Welsh Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife, Winifred—Peter Williams who suffered tortures untold because he imagined that in his boyhood he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. He met Romanist missionaries, who at that time were very active on the highways and byways of England; dog-fighters and prize-fighters; everywhere out-of-the-way adventures occurred to him. He bought the stock-in-trade of Jack Slingsby, a hedgesmith and tinker, who was afraid to remain on the roads because of the enmity of the terrible bully, Blazing Bosvile, alias the Flaming Tinman; and in the course of his wanderings in search of business, he pulled up in Mumper’s Dingle, where was enacted the romance of Isopel Berners. The scene is said to have been identified as Mumber Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire.
In all the writings of Borrow there is but one episode of love. This romantic wanderer, so far as he informs us or we can ascertain, had been only once in love in nearly forty years, and that for a few weeks; nor was he then so deeply immersed that he took any particular pains to bring the lady to his own way of thinking. But this one episode has endowed English literature with a figure which takes a proud place in the gallery of fair women, the figure of Isopel Berners. Like everything else in Lavengro’s life, his sweetheart must be remarkable, his courtship must be unconventional, the adventure must have a vague and misty ending.
Watch Isopel as she descends, with her donkey and cart, behind the Flaming Tinman and Moll, his mort, into Mumper’s Dingle, where Lavengro has camped.
“Dashing past the other horse and cart, which by this time had reached the bottom of the pass, appeared an exceedingly tall woman—or rather girl, for she could scarcely have been above eighteen. She was dressed in a tight bodice and a blue stuff gown; hat, bonnet, or cap she had none, and her hair, which was flaxen, hung down on her shoulders unconfined; her complexion was fair, and her features handsome, with a determined but open expression.”
In conversation with the Flaming Tinman, who is working himself up to the proper pitch of a quarrel with the amateur tinker, the tall girl remarks that she would engage to thrash that weedy-looking youth with one hand. Forth bursts Lavengro, with his eternal Norse lore: “‘You might beat me with no hands at all,’ said I, ‘fair damsel, only by looking at me—I never saw such a face and figure—both regal—why, you look like Ingeborg, Queen of Norway; she had twelve brothers, and could lick them all, though they were heroes:
“‘On Dovrefeld, in Norway,
Were once together seen
The twelve heroic brothers
Of Ingeborg, the queen!’”
A pretty invocation, indeed, to a hawker travelling with a donkey-cart!
“None of your chaffing, young fellow,” said the tall girl, “or I will give you what shall make you wipe your face; be civil, or you will rue it.”
Lavengro admitted that he was “perhaps a peg too high,” and offered her “something a bit lower.” It was a Romany couplet. The rage of the tall girl, whilom Queen Ingeborg, may be imagined when she found herself associated with the gypsies; there is no despite of gypsies quite so deep as that of the English of the “lower orders,” as they might say at Marlborough. And, after a little more of Lavengro’s solemn chaff: “Before I could put myself on guard, she struck me a blow on the face which had nearly brought me to the ground.”
Fit exordium to the love-story of travelling hawker and hedge-tinker, to be promoted later by lessons in Armenian given by the Knight of the Solder-iron to the Damsel of the Donkey-cart. And the scene that follows—Lavengro’s fight with the Flaming Tinman, who transferred his mortal enmity for Jack Slingsby to the temporary owner of Jack Slingsby’s stock-in-trade—is a fit sequel. The heroic combat was the real beginning of the courtship. “The tall girl” saw foul play on the part of the Tinman, and immediately became “the young man’s” champion and assumed the office of his second. It was by her advice, after he had been knocked off his legs several times by the Tinman’s flashing fist, that, instead of fighting with his left, he got in the blow with his “long right” that settled the hash of Blazing Bosvile. The Tinman and his mort took themselves off after this discomfiture, leaving Lavengro and Isopel Berners in undisputed possession of the Dingle.
We learn little about Isopel in details of fact, except that she was born in “Long Melford workhouse,” and put “out to service,” where she experienced all the joys that were usually stored up in service for workhouse girls in the early part of the nineteenth century. When her mistress attempted to knock her down with a besom, Belle knocked down the mistress with her fist. So she went back to the Great House, was put in a dark cell, and fed for a fortnight on bread and water. At her next essay to serve she was no more fortunate; this time she knocked down her master for being rude to her, and had to fly the house. A travelling hawkeress, going the roads with silk and linen, took a fancy to her, and carried her on many journeys. Belle protected her from insult and violence; in return the old woman, at her death, left the girl her stock. She was thus in business on her own account, and casually travelling with the Bosviles, when she fell in with Lavengro.
In his erratic way, Borrow paints a charming idyll of the few succeeding weeks during which they lived in the Dingle: an idyll of natural beauty, and a picture of such womanly modesty and strength of character as to make Isopel Berners one of the heroines the heart cherishes. The uneducated Amazon, the feminine pugilist, who can take her own part in any quarrel, is by nature a modest girl, a woman with the finest perceptions and the most delicate instincts; she has a vein of poetry in her composition which gives her a certain affinity with the wandering philologist, who has in turn a vein of chivalry in his. While she dwells in her tent and he in his, while she goes up and down the neighbourhood on her business, and Lavengro stays in the Dingle to make new shoes for her donkey, Isopel is all the time dreaming what might have been. For all his chivalry, the young man is strange and plain-spoken, rarely paying a compliment, never making an advance, boring her with philological disquisitions, talking of things indifferent to her, pestering her with Armenian declensions, or sitting dull and silent while he sips the tea she has made for him. Here is a characteristic passage:
“I took another cup; we were again silent. ‘It is rather uncomfortable,’ said I at last, ‘for people to sit together without having anything to say.’
“‘Were you thinking of your company?’ said Belle.
“‘What company?’ said I.
“‘The present company.’
“‘The present company? Oh, ah!—I remember that I said one only feels uncomfortable in being silent with a companion when one happens to be thinking of the companion. Well, I had been thinking of you the last two or three minutes, and had just come to the conclusion that, to prevent us both feeling occasionally uncomfortable towards each other, having nothing to say, it would be as well to have a standing subject on which to employ our tongues. Belle, I have determined to give you lessons in Armenian.’”
Which he proceeds forthwith to do. What was a girl to make of a man like that? When that Lavengro’s heart was sore thereafter for the lack of Belle Berners, he had to thank his moroseness and his Armenian nouns for it.
So proceeded, without passion, without even a symptom of philandering on either side, the Romance of Mumper’s Dell—dreadfully misunderstood by the postilion who sheltered there in the thunderstorm, and by Mrs. Chikno when the gypsies encamped near by—but never advancing, so far as the two chief actors were concerned. It is continued from the last volume of “Lavengro” into the first volume of the “Romany Rye.” In the latter, for a hundred pages we are waiting upon some development of it; but it is as elusive as a pixy. We continually tremble upon the brink of a declaration. Take this scene, powerful but inconclusive. Upon the departure of Mr. and Mrs. Petulengro, after their visit of ceremony:
“Then you are going?” said I, when Belle and I were left alone.
“Yes,” said Belle; “I am going on a journey; my affairs compel me.”
“But you will return again?” said I.
“Yes,” said Belle; “I shall return once more.”
“Once more,” said I. “What do you mean by once more? The Petulengros will soon be gone; and will you abandon me in this place?”
“You were alone here,” said Belle, “before I came, and I suppose you found it agreeable, or you would not have stayed in it.”
“Yes,” said I. “That was before I knew you; but having lived with you here, I should be very loth to live here without you.”
“Indeed,” said Belle. “I did not know that I was of so much consequence to you. Well—the day is wearing away—I must go and harness Traveller to the cart.”
He does some little service for her, as harnessing the donkey and putting the bundles into the cart. The narrative proceeds, and the chapter ends thus:
“I put the bundles into the cart, and then led Traveller and the cart up the winding path to the mouth of the dingle. Belle followed. At the top I delivered the reins into her hands, we looked at each other steadfastly for some time. Belle then departed, and I returned to the dingle, where, seating myself on my stone, I remained for upwards of an hour in thought.”
Great is ellipsis—but romance cannot live by ellipsis alone. The next chapter begins, “On the following morning,” and is a spirited account of a feast of roast sucking-pig in the gypsy encampment!
There is never room for a doubt that Lavengro was by this time fairly in love with Belle. But there is also no room for doubt that Belle had realised that he was not for her, nor was she for him. Their ways lay apart. Belle’s way was the broad road of the Atlantic to America, where she hoped to conduct her life free from the disadvantages that attended the career in England of a workhouse girl with a name which, as Lavengro had told her, belonged to the nomenclatures of the ancient aristocracy. His way was through many strange lands, through a life of adventure and turmoil, to an old age of mingled glory, hypochondria, and megrims. So that Belle had resolved to nip the romance in the bud, and her last journey from the Dingle was made with the purpose of selling her donkey and cart and her silks and linens, and going to Liverpool to take ship for the New World. She returned once more, as she had promised. It was late at night; Lavengro was asleep in his tent; but he had banked up the fire, and placed the kettle over it. The little noise of her arrival woke him, and he dressed so as to go out and unharness her donkey. Now that it was all impossible, and Belle had made her irrevocable decision, Lavengro, of course, came to the point. On their last day together, he set her conjugating the Armenian verb siriel, and when he had worried her through it, told her that the English equivalent of siriel was “to love.” And, in his whimsical, moonshiny, teasing way, having driven Isopel to tears, he suddenly proposed to her that they should be off together to America, settle down in some forest, and conjugate the verb siriel conjugally!
And, as there was never a doubt that Lavengro had managed to get himself in love with Belle, so there was never a doubt that Belle was strongly tempted to acknowledge that she loved this strange fellow of six feet three with the black eyes and the white hair and the long right arm, who could beat Blazing Bosvile and make donkey shoes, and mend kettles and talk all the languages that were heard in the Tower of Babel. But well for Belle’s peace of mind that she resisted the temptation; for Lavengro, the constitutional wanderer, would have led her a pretty life when they had buried themselves in the depths of an American forest to conjugate Armenian verbs!
The next morning he set off with his friend Jasper for a horse fair, leaving Belle behind. “On arriving at the extremity of the plain, I looked towards the dingle. Isopel Berners stood at the mouth; the beams of the early morning sun shone full on her noble face and figure. I waved my hand towards her. She slowly lifted up her right arm. I turned away, and never saw Isopel Berners again.”
For while Lavengro was away Belle departed from the Dingle, and left never a trace behind her. Now that he had lost the treasure upon which he had set so small a price, Lavengro was very sore at heart, and would have given much to recall her and to consummate his day-dreams. But all that he ever heard of her again was in a letter addressed by her to “the young man in Mumper’s Dingle.” Herein she explained why she had refused his offer, which, if he had made it in the early part of their acquaintance, she would have accepted. She proffered him some very good advice about his manners, told him she thought he was a bit mad at bottom, gave him a lock of her glorious hair, and left this maxim with him: “Fear God, and take your own part.” Which was so much to Lavengro’s liking that he made it the motto of the second portion of his life-story, “The Romany Rye”; and there it is to this day under his name, and over the imprint of Mr. Murray.
Was Isopel Berners a reality, and did Borrow meet her in Mumper’s Dingle? Or is the whole of this history an invention? Dr. Knapp’s elaborate researches do not help us much, because there is no documentary evidence about the episode. He can merely tell us that Borrow did make such a journey, did buy a tinker’s stock-in-trade, and did live in Mumper’s Dingle. So that we must look for internal evidence.
I have no doubt that Isopel Berners was a reality, and a very substantial one; I have no doubt that she was extraordinarily tall, strong, and beautiful; and that her hair was wonderfully fine. I do not insist that she was either as tall, as strong, or as beautiful as she is painted in “Lavengro”; for Shorsha had a habit of exaggerating—it was one of the many constitutional defects of his character; he could not help it.
The reason is very simple for this faith about Isopel Berners, the prototype of Queen Ingeborg, who, as Mr. Birrell has said, need fear comparison with no damsel that ever lent sweetness to the stage, relish to rhyme, or life to novels. Borrow never created a character. He has left many portraits; but to imagine an Isopel Berners, to invent the incident, was as impossible for him as flying. The romance of Isopel Berners would never have been written if George Borrow, when he was travelling England on foot upon the money he earned by writing “Joseph Sell” and by mending kettles, had not met Isopel’s prototype in Mumper’s Dingle.
The adventures of the rest of this year of 1825 may be told very briefly. Borrow left the Dingle when it appeared certain that he would see no more of Isopel, and, with money borrowed from Jasper Petulengro—or rather forced by his gypsy friend upon an unwilling recipient—bought a fine horse and set off wandering again. His roadside encounters, with the bee-keeper and brewer of mead, with the gentleman who had learnt Chinese by the aid of the hieroglyphics on teapots, and all the rest of them, being more or less impersonal and extraneous to his own history, may be left for consideration in connection with “The Romany Rye.” He took a situation for a time as assistant in a stable-yard at a coaching inn—having abandoned the tinker’s craft and given the pony and stock-in-trade to his gypsy friends,—ultimately sold his horse at Horncastle Fair, and tramped back to Norwich, where his mother was living.
CHAPTER IV
BORROW AND BOWRING
We now have Borrow a youth of twenty-two. His life has been full of weird adventure, but to all appearances quite unprofitable in any worldly sense. His future is nebulous. Dreams are dreamed; visions are vanished. He seems to be farther from fame and fortune than when he set off in the coach for London, with the green box in the boot carrying his Danish ballads and his “Ab Gwilym.” His castles in the clouds have come crashing to earth in irremediable ruin.
Borrow was indignant with a scurvy world which had treated him harshly. The plain truth was that the world had no feeling about him at all, one way or the other. He had nothing to sell that anybody wanted to buy, and no means of making a living. He had a long road to travel before he found himself. In 1825 he went home to Norwich a failure, with the sense of defeat very strong upon him. The mother who was at once his best adviser and sincerest worshipper was not likely to chide his folly as the father had done. She was ready to receive him with demonstrations of love, and to share her little with him. This was part of the ignominy which he hated—that he was obliged to impose himself upon the household in Willow Lane. In a world out of joint, the cursed spite was that he could do nothing to set it right.
Long time he struggled hard to lift himself out of this rut. He continued to fail. When at last he did succeed, these years became to him a horrible nightmare. He would not speak of them; he tried not to think of them. He resolutely refused to permit the public a glimpse into the sordid secrets they contained. From 1825 to 1832 he lived a life of which he wished nobody to know anything. Out of some correspondence between him and Richard Ford arose the phrase, “the Veiled Period.” Ford implored him to lift the veil a little and allow his admirers to know what he was doing. There were many reasons why he declined to do so. He endeavoured to puzzle the public about it, and perhaps succeeded partly in mystifying himself. He suggested a kind of vague romance of wanderings in remote parts of Europe. Some of the suggestions were founded on a slight basis of fact; that is all that can be said for them.
As to the facts: there is no doubt that he did buy a horse with money lent to him by Ambrose Smith, and sell it at a profit. As in the case of Isopel, it may not be unwise to allow some discount off the published accounts of the transaction. Very possibly the horse was not such a fine horse as that noble animal with whose assistance Lavengro electrified the jockeys at Horncastle Fair; perhaps the profit on the sale was not so great as it was made to appear in “The Romany Rye.” But there was such a transaction. Ambrose Smith reminded him of it, long years afterwards, when he visited the great author at Oulton.
Soon after his return to Norwich, he was busy again about his literary schemes. He tried to sell copies of his translation of Klinger, which he took from the publisher in lieu of payment for the work. While with Phillips in London, he had projected a volume of poetical translations of Danish ballads. The plan then came to naught. Now he printed the book in Norwich by subscription, after a correspondence with Allan Cunningham about it. Cunningham was full of admiration for the old songs drawn from the “Kjaempe Viser.” “Swayne Vonved” was his favourite, and it remained Borrow’s own pet throughout life. Five hundred copies of the “Romantic Ballads” were printed, of which 200 were subscribed for. These, at ten and sixpence a copy, paid all the expenses of the issue. There was an arrangement under which the London publisher, John Taylor, took the rest and placed his imprint on the title-page. Cunningham gave the young poet a great deal of good advice about promoting the interests of the book. He neglected it, with characteristic self-sufficiency. He had published ballads, and if the great public did not share Mopsa’s affection for ballads in print, the nineteenth-century Autolycus could not help it, and would be content with what he could get out of the local subscribers in Norwich.
In 1826 he was in London, and in correspondence with Benjamin Haydon about sitting for a figure in one of his pictures—possibly the “Mock Election.” In the course of the correspondence Borrow speaks of proceeding presently to the South of France. This is the first hint of those brief travels on the Continent which became magnified by the pervading haze into world-wide wanderings. “Were you ever at Kiachta?” Bowring asked him in a letter some years later. He was never within some thousands of miles of Kiachta. In 1826 he probably did go tramping through part of Europe, but he did not reach the East, as some confused references in the books suggest. The tale of Murtagh in “The Romany Rye” may incorporate some of his adventures. At any rate, that alluring narrative was certainly not given to Borrow in the year 1825 at Horncastle Fair. There is clear evidence of that in the fact that a portion of it was picked up nearly thirty years later in very different circumstances.
The real itinerary of the tour of 1826 is probably by way of Paris on foot to Bayonne; across the Pyrenees into Spain; Pamplona, the Riviera, Italy, Genoa, and thence home by ship. Slight traces can be found of such a journey. There is the lightly-touched meeting with Vidocq in Paris. That delectable rascal’s career always had a strong fascination for Borrow, whose appetite for picturesque blackguards was greedy. Vidocq at this time was fifty years of age. A quarter of a century of adventure as a showman, a soldier, a galley-slave, and a highwayman had terminated in 1812 with his appointment to the head of a detective office in Paris, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. By the year 1825 the authorities were persuaded that the principle was unworkable, and dismissal ended Vidocq’s career of corruption and swindling. If Borrow met him in Paris the next year, therefore, he found his hero a free lance. The Mémoires of M. Vidocq, which appeared in 1828, and are probably at least as trustworthy as Baron Munchausen, were among Borrow’s favourite reading; his relish for literature, embloomed with the flowers of crime and perfumed by the breath of criminals, had been cultivated by the compilation of the “Celebrated Trials,” and it never left him. Vidocq and Peyrecourt loom large in passages of his works; whether they made so great a figure in his actual experiences in France is another question. He appears to have met Baron Taylor at Bayonne, and naturally found in the “picturesque and romantic” voyager a congenial companion. From these lofty associations the descent on the other side of the Pyrenees to Quesada [72] and his “Army of Faith,” the gang of frontiersmen who were helping themselves freely in the name of the Church, was sudden and severe. But Borrow seems to have fallen even further, for there is a dim suggestion of his imprisonment at Pamplona, of his emergence from gaol in a state of beggary, and his succour at the hands of a party of gypsies whose patteran he followed in the mountains. He tramped eastwards, ultimately brought up at Genoa, penniless, and was assisted by some person or persons unknown to get ship for England.
This is as far as Dr. Knapp has been able to trace the elusory course of the Wandering Jew of Literature. The theory that he acted as the travelling commissioner of a London newspaper finds no support. By 1827 he was back in Norwich, keeping his mother’s small household accounts, visiting the Tombland Fair to inspect “Marshland Shales,” the glorious chieftain of all the equine race, grubbing for booksellers, writing articles for newspapers. It was a mean and anxious way of life, abominable to Borrow, who hated poverty and was ashamed of it. Therein may be sought the real reason why he “veiled” these years of his life. His next appearance in the literary arena is in the distinguished company of Dr. John Bowring.
The Bowring episode in Borrow’s life is one of its most remarkable and least explicable features. Bowring seems to have been a good friend to Borrow for many years, to have engaged with him in literary collaboration, and to have exerted himself in various directions on his behalf. His reward, so far as Borrow’s works go, is a scurrilous sketch of himself in “Lavengro,” a long denunciation in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye,” and the bitter hatred of a man who knew how to hate as fiercely as he could love intensely. The whole story of their severance is obscure, but there can be little doubt that Borrow was entirely in the wrong, that the charges he made against Bowring of treachery and falsehood were baseless, and that of many people pilloried in Borrow’s books Bowring was among the least deserving such scurvy treatment. We have observed already the circumstances of the first meeting between Borrow and Bowring at Taylor’s house in Norwich. We shall see that Bowring came to his rescue when he was in the sorest straits, and was, in fact, doing much to help him during part of the “veiled period.”
It has been the writer’s fortune to secure [73] a series of letters from Borrow to Bowring, which throw much light upon his schemes and modes of life in the last three of those mysterious years between his return from the Continent and his engagement by the Bible Society. He did not remain long in Norwich. In 1829 he was in London, residing at No. 17, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and deeply employed about certain translations of Scandinavian poetry which were to form the basis of a new book on more elaborate lines than those of the “Romantic Ballads.” Bowring and Borrow had a plan for issuing in collaboration a collection of English versions, with interpretations, of those Northern poets whom a purblind public, not yet obsessed by the Scandinavian spirit in poetry and music, resolutely disregarded and despised. This was the “literary project” of which the world heard so much in the Appendix. The arrangements went so far that a prospectus of the work was put out. The title proposed was “The Songs of Scandinavia,” and the collection was to be published in two volumes octavo. The project remained a project, and the niche left by expectant librarians for the two octavo volumes was never filled. But in connection with the negotiations and arrangements between Borrow and Bowring a correspondence occurred which is full of interest and contains one or two characteristic bits of Borrovian humour. Incidentally, the letters, if taken in sequence, and read together with another one of the year 1842, show that, up to a time not far ante-dating the publication of “The Romany Rye,” with its gross attack on Bowring, the two men were on the best possible terms. Indeed, in 1842 Borrow speaks of his old collaborator as “my oldest, I may say my only, friend.” [75]
It were greatly to be wished that the sordid dispute with Bowring might be numbered among the delenda of Borrow’s history, but some mention of it will be necessary. Unhappily, no satisfactory explanation can be given which is at all flattering to Borrow. For these letters prove conclusively that he introduced into “Lavengro” and its sequel opinions about Bowring which he certainly did not hold at the time of which he was writing.
In 1829 their Scandinavian scheme was in the tideway. They had written and they had met for the discussion of their plans; Borrow had done a great deal of translation. He was exceedingly anxious that at any rate the first volume should appear at once; for, as he said in a letter written on the last day of the year, he was “terribly afraid of being forestalled in the Kiampe Viser by some of those Scotch blackguards, who affect to translate from all languages, of which they are fully as ignorant as Lockhart is of Spanish.” The italicised passage is underlined in Borrow’s letter; it is a curious foretaste of some of the choicer invective which he afterwards bestowed on Scott and the Scots, and of his disagreement with Lockhart. The preparations were hurried on with a view to the appearance of the first part of the book in February. The drafting of the prospectus was left to Borrow, and on January 8th (1830) he sent a copy to Bowring for his inspection, inviting “the correction of your master-hand.” He had, he said, “endeavoured to frame a Danish style,” but was not sure whether he had succeeded. “Alter, I pray you,” he exclaimed, “whatever false logic has crept into it, find a remedy for its incoherencies, and render it fit for its intended purpose.” There follows a delightful touch of egotism. He has, he explains, had a rising headache for two days, which has “almost” prevented him from doing anything. But, he adds with fine nonchalance, “I sat down this morning and translated a hundred lines of the ‘May Day’”—as though a hundred lines of English verse were a trifle which he threw off without effort, malgré his “rising headache.”
Bowring examined the prospectus, made what revisions he thought necessary, and sent it back.
“I approve of the prospectus in every respect,” wrote Borrow (January 14th). “It is businesslike, and there is nothing flashy in it. I do not wish to suggest one alteration.” He goes on to describe the energy with which he is working, and speaks of having rendered four hundred lines in one day! The last paragraph of this letter displays Borrow in a different attitude towards reviews and reviewing from that which he adopted in after years. “When you see the foreign editor,” he tells Bowring,
“I should feel much obliged if you would speak to him about my reviewing Tegnér, and inquire whether a good article on Welsh poetry would be received. I have the advantage of not being a Welshman. I would speak the truth, and would give translations from some of the best Welsh poetry; and I really believe that my translations would not be the worst that have been made from the Welsh tongue.”
But this condition of things, in which the romantic ferment caused by Steffens and Oehlenschläger in Denmark was to be reproduced in England by Borrow’s translations, did not last long. Difficulties arose in connection with the publication of the proposed book, and the enthusiasm paled as the year progressed. The two volumes receded from view; the twin mountain in labour finally brought forth a review article of some forty pages. This was despatched in the summer to the Foreign Quarterly Review, was held back for twelve months, and appeared at last in the number for June, 1831. In this Bowring wrote in lively style on Danish and Norwegian literature, and Borrow supplied sixteen specimens of verse.
In the meantime, Bowring was doing what he could to assist his protégé to some profitable employment. He sent him an ancient manuscript which Grundtvig, the Danish poet, wanted to have transcribed. Borrow said (June 7th) the task would not be overpaid at £49, but as he was “doing nothing particular” at the time, and might learn something from it, he would do it for £20. Bowring also exerted his influence to get him work in the magazines. During the summer of 1830, Borrow flitted from Great Russell Street to No. 7, Museum Street, and in the autumn, went to Norwich for a holiday. In the letter (September 14th) in which he tells Bowring of his proposal to leave London for Norwich, we get the first hint of a project which now and then flashed through his mind for a year or two—that of entering the military service: “I have thought of attempting to get into the French service, as I should like prodigiously to serve under Clausel in the next Bedouin campaign.” This remained a thought, though, as we shall see, other plans of the same character went a little further. In the same letter he complained that he was very unwell, but traced his malady to ennui and unsettled prospects, and hoped that cold bathing in October and November would prove of some service to him. There is no reference in this correspondence to one task which he himself asserts he achieved in 1830. That was the translation of Elis Wyn. At the instance of “a little bookseller of my acquaintance” in Smithfield, he rendered from the Welsh Wyn’s, “Visions of the Sleeping Bard.” This was the nearest approach he made to the promise of literary success; but even here his malign fate dogged him. When the little bookseller saw the translation, he begged off the bargain on the plea that “the terrible descriptions of vice and torment would frighten the genteel part of the English public out of their wits. . . . Myn Diawl! I had no idea till I read him in English that Elis Wyn had been such a terrible fellow!” The sly dig at the “genteel” public may be reasonably attributed to the bookmaker rather than to the bookseller.
Before he departed from London, Borrow, returning some books to Bowring, utters (September 17th) one of those ejaculations on public affairs which he subsequently inserted as tags to many of his letters: “More Revolutions, I see. The King of Saxony has run away, and the Kent peasantry are burning stacks and houses. Where will all this end?”
A dozen plans for carving a way to undying fame and modest fortune, all equally futile, were built up and fell down about this time. Apparently Borrow could not rid himself of the delusion that a hungry world was waiting to devour the beauties of the Gaelic Bards, if only they were served up in a suitable form for general consumption. He launched at the devoted heads of the Highland Society of London a scheme under which the Society was to employ (and pay) him for two years in translating the Gaelic Bards into English verse. The scheme left the Highland Society as cold as the Bards would have left the reading world. He turned his artillery upon the British Museum. The Codex Exoniensis was to be copied; he applied for the work, but without success. It was done in 1831 by one of the regular officials of the Museum. Discouraged but not dismayed, he sought other employment in Bloomsbury, and asked Bowring to put in a word for him. The Doctor pointed out that in his position it was necessary to go about such a matter with discretion. It would not do for him to originate an application, but if the authorities of the Museum could be induced to seek his opinion, he would give Borrow such a character as would “take you to the top of Hecla itself. You have claims, strong ones, and I should rejoice to see you niched in the British Museum.” But this design failed like the rest. In a letter to Bowring he described himself, with melancholy eloquence, as “drifting upon the sea of the world, and likely to be so.” To Borrow there was “no fiercer hell than failure”; but the inferno was of his own creation. His greatest failure was the failure to realise that there was no sort of demand for the work he insisted on doing, and that its intrinsic value was far below the standard at which he placed it.
Compelled thus to abandon his literary ambitions for the present, he turned his efforts in another direction. He began the pursuit of a shimmering phantom over which, in the course of his life, he contrived to waste a great deal of valuable time. Upon what he based the idea does not appear, but Borrow seems to have imagined that he had some claim to official employment abroad. It did not much matter whether the work was made for him by the British Government or by a foreign State, so long as he should be given the opportunity of displaying his philological prowess in foreign parts. After the appearance of the joint article in the Foreign Quarterly, as Bowring seemed to be able to do nothing for him at the British Museum, Borrow asked him to see what he could do towards getting him a post under the Belgian Government. Bowring made the application, but without success; the Belgians were not at the moment in need of any English assistance, however talented. Borrow keenly recognised his friend’s diligence in the matter, and turned his heaviest artillery on the Ministry at Brussels, who were so obstinately blind to the advantages of having Mr. George Borrow in their service. They did not seem, he said in a letter to Bowring written from Willow Lane, Norwich, and dated September 11th, 1831, either to know or to care for the opinion of the great Cyrus, whose advice to his captains he quoted from Xenophon: “Take no heed from what countries ye fill up your ranks, but seek recruits as ye do horses, not those particularly who are of your own country, but those of merit.” Belgium, having failed to appreciate the worth of George Borrow, at once became the most contemptible nation on earth:
“The Belgians will only have such recruits as are born in Belgium, and when we consider the heroic manner in which the native Belgian army defended the person of their new sovereign in the last conflict with the Dutch, can we blame them for their determination? It is rather singular, however, that, resolved as they are to be served only by themselves, they should have sent for 50,000 Frenchmen to clear their country of a handful of Hollanders, who have generally been considered the most unwarlike people in Europe, and who, if they had had fair play given them, would long ere this time have replanted the Orange flag on the towers of Brussels and made the Belgians what they deserved to be—hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
This sardonic outburst is one of the earliest samples of the polemical style which Borrow was to develop so strongly in later years.
As he could neither go to fight Bedouins under Clausel nor enter the Belgian service in Europe, it appears to have occurred to his friend Bowring that he might care to follow in his father’s footsteps, and that the British service might suit him at a pinch. If Borrow would like to purchase a commission, Bowring offered to introduce his name to the War Secretary. Borrow replied that his name had been down for several years for the purchase of a commission, but he had never had sufficient interest to procure an appointment. He would not now mind serving in the militia if they were to be embodied for service in Ireland (“that unhappy country”), but he wished to leave the question open for a few months in order to see whether something more promising turned up. If he had not secured employment within two or three months, he would then ask Bowring to redeem his promise in the matter of the War Secretary, and to recommend him to a corps in one of the Eastern colonies on the plea that he was “well grounded in Arabic” and had some talent for languages:
“I flatter myself that I could do a great deal in the East, provided I could once get there, either in a civil or military capacity. There is much talk at present about translating European books in the two great languages, the Arabic and Persian. Now, I believe that with my enthusiasm for these tongues I could, if resident in the East, become in a year or two better acquainted with them than any European has been yet, and more capable of executing such a task. . . .”
This letter concluded with a postscript in which he requested that his best remembrances might be presented to Mrs. Bowring and to Edgar, their son; and, he added, “tell them they will both be starved.
“There is now a report in the street that twelve corn-stacks are blazing within twenty miles of this place. I have lately been wandering about Norfolk, and I am sorry to say that the minds of the peasantry are in a horrible state of excitement. I have repeatedly heard men and women in the harvest-field swear that not a grain of the corn they were cutting should be eaten, and that they would as lieve be hanged as live. I am afraid all this will end in a famine and a rustic war.”
Reform staved off the “rustic war,” and other things intervened to prevent Borrow from carrying out his half-formed intention of becoming a military man.
CHAPTER V
IN FOREIGN PARTS
“Romance brought up” the year 1832. It was a year full of events with an important bearing on the course of Borrow’s life. In the first place, he became acquainted with the Skeppers, of Oulton Hall, near Lowestoft. The introduction to this family issued in a friendship with Mr. Skepper’s sister, the widow of a young naval officer named Clarke. In Mrs. Clarke, a woman somewhat older than himself—she was thirty-six and he was twenty-nine—he met the woman who was to bring into his life its fairest influence and its rarest happiness. But the story of this romance must be postponed for a few pages in order to the relation of a sequence of affairs without which it cannot be understood. They resulted from sundry conversations about Borrow—between the Skeppers and the Rev. Francis Cunningham, Rector of Pakefield, and in turn between Cunningham and Joseph Gurney, his brother-in-law, from whose meadows at Earlham George had fished in boyhood.
Both Cunningham and Gurney were interested in the work of the Bible Society, and between them the idea was hatched of employing Borrow’s philological learning in its behalf. The Society happened at the moment to be looking for a man to superintend the printing of the New Testament in Manchu. There were many negotiations, and ultimately the engagement was consummated which made Borrow’s modest fortune.
To go to St. Petersburg on this business of the Bible Society’s was an adventure after Borrow’s own heart. He had passed through some exceedingly stormy waters, and in this employment he found a secure and congenial harbour. He could well afford to regard lightly the critical attitude of certain people in Norwich, who did not forget to recall the episode of “godless Billy Taylor.” Their temper was reflected in the letter of Harriet Martineau referring to Borrow as a “polyglot gentleman,” and remarking that his appearance as “a devout agent of the Bible Society” evoked “one shout of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days.” Borrow did not like their laughter, and he did not forgive their contempt. But for the time he was too busy with the actualities of his new situation to trouble about them, and too elated with his suddenly brightened prospects to be cast down by the jeers of the scornful.
He was going a journey into a far country, and he was going on a more or less philological errand. His task was to undertake the production in the Russian capital of the Manchu version of the Sacred Books made by Lipotsof. Invited to London to see the officials of the Society, he set off in high spirits—and on foot. The long road stretched for a hundred and twelve miles between Norwich and London—that road which some ten years before he had travelled by coach with the little green box of poetical translations. He now tramped it in 27½ hours, and his expenses en route amounted to fivepence halfpenny! This feat was one of his favourite boasts. It was, in its way, a remarkable achievement. Few big, healthy young men would care to undertake such long-sustained exertion on a pint of ale, half a pint of milk, a roll of bread, and two apples. But such is Borrow’s tale of his commissariat arrangements on this expedition.
The Society desired him to learn the Manchu language before he set out for Russia. They gave him six months for the purpose. Even for a meteoric philologist like Borrow, who swallowed a language by memorising its dictionary, six months meant short commons. He could not possibly acquire more than a nodding acquaintance with that most difficult of the tongues of Babel. However, he set about his task with zeal.
There is one amusing passage in the correspondence between him and the Secretary of the Bible Society. Observe the true Borrovian spirit asserting itself in the letter where he expresses pleasure at the prospect of “becoming useful to the Deity, to man, and to myself.” Observe the solemn admonition of the good secretary, when he perceived that a sense of human frailty was not one of Borrow’s most striking characteristics: “Doubtless you mean the prospect of glorifying God.” Thereafter, the Borrovian spirit was subdued (in correspondence) to the proper standard of orthodoxy.
At the end of June, 1833, he set sail for St. Petersburg, by way of Hamburg, and was highly delighted with the Russian capital. He made his way into the acquaintanceship of a number of literary people, in whose society he found congenial entertainment. Among them he speedily established for himself quite a reputation. It was here that he began his long friendship with Hasfeldt, which produced a prolific correspondence. Hasfeldt was a Dane attached to the Russian Government, and a linguist of attainments, who added to his income by the teaching of European languages. He conceived a remarkable fondness for “tall George,” as he called him; the affection was returned as fully as Borrow could return a friendship, and that was in much higher measure than many estimates of him suggest. He met Russian scholars, and found many opportunities for extending his philological studies in the direction of the Oriental languages.
His work on the Chinese version was hard and long. He had to use German printers, who did not always feel for the task the enthusiasm which Borrow expected everybody to throw into anything in which he himself was concerned. They had to be bribed with vodka, and other things, in order that progress might be secured. The Bible Society presumably swallowed the vodka in their delight at the energy Borrow displayed, and they passed a resolution to pay him any expenses to which he might be put in the execution of the commission. He had to furbish up an old fount of type in the Chinese character, that had been lying rusting in a cellar for many years, and to get everything in order himself, because, of course, it was impossible to obtain compositors who knew anything of the Manchu. He even turned printer. So keen was the zest with which he entered into the work that he submitted a proposal to the Society to undertake the distribution of the books when they were printed, going overland to China, and looking in upon the Tartars on the way! Without doubt he would have done it but for the fact that the Russian Government refused to grant him a passport for the purpose. It is characteristic of Borrow that years afterwards he said, and doubtless thought, that he had been overland to China.
The work of printing done, he paid a hurried visit to Moscow, gathering impressions for the description of the Kremlin to be found in “The Bible in Spain,” and on September 9th, 1835, he left St. Petersburg for England, having spent the previous night in a solemn leave-taking of Hasfeldt. While in St. Petersburg hard at work, and feeling run down, he had “the Horrors” several times, but affected to have found a cure for it in the shape of strong port wine. It was during his stay in Russia that the news arrived of the death of his brother John in Mexico. He had discovered other activities to occupy him besides the translation of the Testament into Chinese. He turned homilies of the Church of England into Russian and Manchu, and did translations of some of the sacred Buddhist books from Manchu into English. He conceived at the moment no high opinion of the Buddhist philosophy. “You will be surprised,” he writes to the Rev. F. Cunningham, “that Satan by such inconsistent trash should have been able to ensnare the souls of millions!” If that had been read in the Martineau household there might have been another “burst of laughter.” It was while he was in St. Petersburg, too, that he published his “Targum,” a collection of poetic translations from thirty different languages and dialects. When Pushkin, the poet, after Borrow’s departure, received a presentation copy of this book, he expressed his great regret that he had not met the author.
Borrow reached London on the 18th September, and went down to Norfolk, feeling anxious again about his future, and hoping that the Bible Society would be able to find some further employment for him. He was not disappointed. The Society had not yet given up hope that they might find a way to send him to China, but in the meantime they resolved to commission him to Portugal. On November 2nd they passed a resolution that he should be asked to go to Lisbon and Oporto to inquire about “means and channels for promoting the circulation of the Holy Scriptures in Portugal.” [91] Here is the origin of two of his books, of which one was “The Bible in Spain.” On November 6th he sailed from London, touching at Falmouth on the 8th, and was at Lisbon on the 13th. He was to confer with one Wilby about the work; but, Wilby being away, Borrow consoled himself with the company of Captain Heyland, of the 35th Foot, whose acquaintance he had made on the voyage. With him he made several trips, upon one of which he met the bohémienne landlady of Cintra. During this first expedition to the Peninsula, he set up relations with the gypsies of Spain, which provided the germ of the first of his books that attracted anything like general attention. At Badajoz he encountered a gypsy tribe, by whom he was detained ten days. In that time he had translated the Gospel of Saint Luke into the Câlo, or Spanish gypsy language, and the version was subsequently printed by the Bible Society. One of the Romany chals, Antonio Lopez, accompanied him most of the way to Madrid, delaying three days at Merida in a gypsy house. Antonio finally went off with a gitana. Borrow bought a donkey from the girl, and rode on the animal’s back as far as Talavera, where he sold it to a Toledo Jew whom he met on the road. The rest of the journey to Madrid he did by the diligence, like a common Christian.
By the time of his arrival there, he had formed a definite project of printing the New Testament in Spanish and in Spain, without comment or note of any sort. The law would prohibit the circulation of such a book if it were printed outside and brought into the country. It was decided to use the current Catholic version, in order not to excite any more prejudices than could be helped, and to sell cheaply, and thus to spread the book among people who had never seen it before. This was a time in Spain of constant political excitement, chronic Ministerial change, and periodical revolution; and Borrow had much trouble in getting official recognition for the enterprise, without which he might as well have left it alone. But the way was smoothed for him by Sir George Villiers, the British Minister, and at the end of twelve months he returned to England with an active campaign mapped out in his mind, for which he soon obtained the approval of the Society. In a letter to his mother about this, he remarked that his “ordination” would be put off till his return. This is the first and the last that we hear of any proposal to enter the Church.