George Borrow Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903

It is a singular coincidence, perhaps, that during one and the same summer we should be celebrating centenaries of Samuel Pepys and George Borrow. Pepys died in the early summer of 1703; Borrow was born in July, 1803. Unlike each other in almost every respect, they are dui palor, {213b} as Borrow would say, in one very material point. The reputation of each of them has risen to such a point that, except for injudicious and exaggerated praise, it can have little to fear in the future; and in each case this reputation is based primarily upon autobiography. Among the world's autobiographers the author of "Lavengro" is entitled, we feel sure, to rank with St. Augustine, Cellini, Pepys, Rousseau, Franklin; and, for truthfulness, it is very probable, if we could only estimate it properly, that he would have to be put at the top of the class. His nearest competitor in this respect would undoubtedly be Pepys, and the veracity in both cases not the result of a double share of innate truthfulness, but very largely an accident, due to lack of invention and an absence of that powerful literary style which in the case of a Leigh Hunt or a Stevenson distorts everything that passes through it. In Pepys the malignity of the literary fairy is more than compensated by the worthy secretary's insatiable appetite for life; in Borrow by the wanderlust or extraordinary passion and faculty for adventure, which makes his best books such an ambrosial hash of sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, gipsies, prisons, half-in-halves, _cosas de Espana_--what you will.

George Henry Borrow, to give him for once his full baptismal name, was born at East Dereham, "a beautiful little town in the western division of Norfolk," on July 5, 1803. His father, who came of an old Cornish family, was in his forty-fifth year when Borrow was born, having married ten years previously Anne Perfrement, of a family which had migrated from Dauphine in the days of Dutch William. The father was captain in a marching regiment, the West Norfolk Militia. Like Sterne's therefore, Borrow's early life was nomadic, and his school-life was broken between Edinburgh, Clonmel, and Norwich. But his real mentors were found in this last city, where he came in contact with a French emigre named d'Eterville. Here, too, he fell under the influence of "godless Billy" Taylor, and dreamt of writing plays and poems and abusing religion. Here, too, while he ought to have been studying law, he was claiming acquaintance with gipsies, bruisers, and shady characters, such as the notorious Thurtell. A more dangerous influence to Borrow than any, perhaps, was that of Sir John Bowring, a plausible polyglot, who deliberately used his facility in acquiring and translating tongues as a ladder to an administrative post abroad. Borrow, as was perhaps natural, put a wrong construction upon his sympathy, and his apparently disinterested ambition to leave no poetic fragment in Russian, Swedish, Polish, Servian, Bohemian, or Hungarian unrendered into English. He determined to emulate a purpose so lofty in its detachment, and the mistake cost him dear, for it led him for long years into a veritable cul de sac of literature; it led also to the accentuation of that pseudo-philological mania which played such havoc with the ordinary development of rational ideas in a man in many respects so sane as Borrow.

An entirely erroneous belief in the marketable value of Danish ballads, Welsh triads, Russian folk-songs, and the like in rococo English translations after the Bowring pattern led Borrow to exchange an attorney's office for a garret in Grub-street. His immediate ambition was something between Goldsmith's and Chatterton's ballads, Homeric odes, epics, plays; he was, at all hazards, to write something grand--"to be stared at, lifted on peoples' shoulders." He found his Griffiths in Sir Richard Phillips, the radical alderman and philanthropic sweater, under whose tender mercies he rapidly developed a suicidal tendency, until in May, 1825, a windfall of 20 pounds enabled him to break his chain and escape to the highway and the dingle and the picturesque group of moochers and gipsies enshrined for ever in the pages of "Lavengro." The central portion of this marvellous composition is occupied by the Dingle episode, in which Lavengro (the "word-master," Borrow's gipsy name for himself) is revealed to us in conflict with "the flaming Tinman" and in colloquy with his Romany friend, Jasper Petulengro, with a subtle papistical propagandist, "the man in black," with the typical gipsy chi, Ursula, and with the peerless Isopel Berners. His account of his relations with her we take to be strictly and almost literally accurate. He was powerfully attracted by the magnanimity of spirit no less than by the physical charm of this Brynhildic damsel, tall, straight, and blonde, with loose-flowing flaxen hair, and with a carriage, especially of the neck and shoulders, which reminded the postilion of a certain marchioness of his acquaintance. But Borrow was of a cold temperament, a despiser and mistruster of young women, whom he regarded primarily as invaluable repositories of nursery lore, folk-song, tradition, and similar toys, about which his male friends were apt to be reticent. The attraction was so strong that he had serious thoughts of emigrating with "the beauteous Queen of the Dingle," but he dallied with the idea with characteristic waywardness until it was too late. He sought to postpone awkward decisions, to divert himself and amuse Isopel by making his charmer learn Armenian--the language which he happened at the time to be studying. Isopel bore with it for some time, but the imposition of the verb "to love" in Armenian convinced her that the word-master was not only insane, but also inhuman. Love-making and Armenian do not go well together, and Belle could not feel that the man who proposed to conjugate the verb "to love" in Armenian was master of his intentions in plain English. It was even so. The man of tongues lacked speech wherewith to make manifest his passion; the vocabulary of the word-master was insufficient to convince the workhouse girl of one of the plainest meanings a man can well have. When the distracted Borrow had reached the decision that it was high time to give over his "mocking and scoffing," and returned with this resolve to the dingle, Isopel Berners had quitted it, never to return. She ran away to the nearest sea-port, and took shipping to America. Lavengro with some anguish steeled his heart against following her. The scene of these transactions was a wooded glen or dingle a few miles from Willenhall, in Staffordshire, where Lavengro and Isopel were encamped in their respective tents, having as their neighbours the gipsy clan of which Jasper was the chief. Upon the whole the Dingle chapters are perhaps the most brilliant and the most enduring that Borrow ever achieved. Their interest is greatly enhanced by the fact that they are probably a naked transcript from actual fact, for Borrow was a poor hand at invention. He rarely, if ever, invented a character. His surest source of inspiration was the unadorned truth.

After the experience of a summer in the open, Borrow, who was now twenty-two, relapsed into the indifferent versification of Danish ballads and Welsh bards, was severely fleeced in obscure journeyings in Southern Europe, and so gained some experience for future use, vainly sought a post, on the strength of his linguistic attainments, as an assistant in the British Museum Library, and was reduced to writing reactionary political leaders for a Norwich paper; he was, in fact, waiting, like Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up, or, in his own graphic phrase, "digging holes in the sand and filling them up again."

His deliverance was effected in rather a singular manner. About 1833 he became acquainted with the Skeppers of Oulton Hall, in that pleasant stretch of country which borders on the river Waveney. By Mrs. Clarke (afterwards Mrs. Borrow), the widowed sister of the owner of the Hall, he was introduced to the Rev. Francis Cunningham, rector of Pakefield, a fine type of the Evangelical clergyman of a past generation, who had married the sister of Joseph John Gurney. It seemed to this good man that Borrow's gift of tongues might well be employed in the service of the Bible Society, of which the famous Norfolk Quaker was an influential member. The hour of the former would-be martyr to infidelity had now come; he was taken into the regular service of the society upon an average salary of about 250 pounds, in addition to expenses, and was employed as editor, translator, and colporteur of Bibles in strange lands. The labours of the next eight years of his life were as fruitful and honourable as those of the preceding eight had been desultory and obscure. His first commission was to go to St. Petersburg and there edit and superintend the setting up and printing of Lipoftsof's version of the New Testament into Manchu. Borrow acquired the language and performed his task with an almost incredible expedition. He also learned Russian, and in the summer of 1835 proposed to the society that he should himself distribute the work which he had seen through the press upon the confines of the Far East. This scheme was scotched by the refusal of the Russian Government to grant him the necessary authorization and passports. But Borrow's energies were transferred to a project which scarcely, if at all, less deserves the epithet Quixotic. It was to disseminate a Castilian translation of the Vulgate (made by Father Scio at Valencia between 1790 and 1793) in Spain and Portugal. To disperse Bibles in Papua or in Park-lane were, it might be argued, an enterprise fully as hopeful as to scatter them in Galicia or La Mancha; but this is neither here nor there, and the stimulus that was lacking in other directions was abundantly supplied to the society and their emissary by the fact that, according to the regla quinta of the old Index, all Spanish versions of the Bible or of any part of it were absolutely forbidden, and that as a necessary consequence the Bible was a book as unfamiliar in Spain as it was held to be dangerous and revolutionary. Spain was to Borrow what the Harley Ministry was to Swift. It seemed to develop in him an almost superhuman activity and power; and, fond of cant as Borrow's employers too often were, it is infinitely to their credit that they not only tolerated but even applauded the unconventional epistles which he wrote to them of his exploits during his three long journeys in Spain, which with two brief intervals occupied him from November, 1835, down to April, 1840. These letters with the addition of a few chapters and a number of insignificant changes made up "The Bible in Spain," which was published by John Murray on December 10, 1812, when "El Gitano," as the enthusiastic Ford dubbed the author, literally woke up to find himself famous. His experience for a season was that of "the man Sterne"; he dined with peers, Ambassadors, and Bishops, and, like Major Pendennis, was particularly complacent with Bishops. We might here for a moment compare his position to that of Johnson in 1763. He had gone down into the arena and fought his wild beasts, and had come up triumphant, as Johnson had done after the Dictionary. He still had difficulties to meet and debts to face, for he had gradually become estranged from "the sub-committee," and the Bible Society suddenly found that "no sphere remained open in which his services could be utilized." Fortunately, he had provided for his future, not by obtaining a pension, but by marrying, in April, 1840, an old ally of his, Mary Clarke, a widow with a good jointure (over 400 pounds a year), a skilful hand at dumplings and treacle posset, and "an excellent woman of business." He was now fifteen years older than when he had "lost" Isopel. The motives which prompted this scorner of matrimony to marry a woman seven or eight years his senior were similar, it may be surmised, to those which actuated Disraeli on his marriage. The compact was based upon convenience and mutual esteem, and there is no reason to doubt that it conduced not only to Borrow's comfort and security, but also to his happiness. There were no children. The "daughter" whose accomplishments Borrow celebrated in the exordium to "Wild Wales" was his stepdaughter, Henrietta Clarke. He seemed now in an enviable position, with a small but agreeable freehold on the banks of Oulton Broad, able to indulge in "idleness and the pride of literature" to his heart's content. If he had had a "club" or a Boswell about him, he might still have been tolerably happy. But he was not a clubbable man, Borrow! Nevertheless it was during the years that followed that, like Johnson, he achieved his best title to fame, the wondrous five volumes of autobiography so capriciously planned and so strangely entitled "Lavengro--Romany Rye." The stimulus in his case was largely, we believe, if not mainly, pecuniary. "Money is our best friend" he wrote to his wife in 1844. He wanted a purse of his own to travel and give dinners with, for the edge of episcopal hospitality was already wearing off. He desired too, no doubt, to put a coping stone to his fame. Already in January, 1843, he wrote to his publisher that he had begun upon a Robinson Borrow, and Murray, Ford, and other friends threw up their caps. The publisher may have well seen a veritable gold mine in prospect. One has only to imagine the fervent curiosity which the personal element in "The Bible in Spain," so suggestive of mystery and romance, must have exalted in the reading public of 1843, to perceive that any such anticipation was fully warranted by the facts of the case. Here was a book which bore upon its title-page its passport to Sunday reading as a good, serious, missionary work, but for which it was manifest, as the surprised and delighted reader proceeded, that not Bishop Heber or the good Schwartz, but Mendoza and Lesage had been taken as models. May not people well have wondered (the good, pious English folk, to whom "luck" was a scandal, as the Bible Society's secretary wrote to Borrow) what manner of man this muleteer-missionary might be? The incongruity was only heightened by familiarity with Borrow's Pharaoh-like visage, abundant grey hair, and tall blonde Scandinavian figure, which reminded those who came under his spell of those roving Northmen of the days of simple medieval devotion, who were wont to signalize their conversion from heathen darkness by a Mediterranean venture, combining the characters of a piratical cruise and a pious pilgrimage. But if publisher and client were justified in believing that they had discovered an autobiographical El Dorado, they were, none the less, to be sadly undeceived.