Clement King Shorter

“ The author of Lavengro, The Romany Rye, The Bible in Spain, and Wild Wales is one of those kings of literature who never need to number their tribe. His personality will always secure him an attendant company, who, when he pipes, must dance.
This is to sum up the situation to perfection. You cannot force people to become readers of Borrow by argument, by criticism, or by the force of authority. You reach the stage of admiration and even love by effects which rise remote from all questions of style or taste. ”

“ The lovely cathedral with its fine Norman arches, the Erpingham Gate so splendidly Gothic, the noble Castle Keep so imposingly placed with the cattle-market below—these are all as Borrow saw them nearly a century ago. So also is the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where Sir Thomas Browne lies buried. And to the picturesque Mousehold Heath you may still climb and recall one of the first struggles for liberty and progress that past ages have seen, the Norfolk rising under Robert Kett which has only not been glorified in song and in picture, because—
Treason doth never prosper—what’s the reason? ”

“ This delay is the more astonishing as Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain was one of the most famous books of its day. Ford’s father, Sir Richard Ford, was a friend of William Pitt, and twice sat in Parliament, being at one time Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. He ended his official career as a police magistrate at Bow Street, but deserves to be better known to fame as the creator of the mounted police force of London. Ford was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, inheriting a fortune from his father, and from his mother an extraordinary taste for art. ”

“ I am old in the knowledge of the world and those who dwell upon it, and would rather trust myself to the loving mercies of the hungry wolves of the Spanish mountains, than to the generosity and sense of justice of the Radicals of England. However determined you may show yourself, no reasonable person can cast any blame upon you, for from the contents of your letter, it appears, that your enemies have kept no terms with you, and entirely unprovoked, have done all in their power to outrage and harrow your feelings. Enough on this point.
Toledo was formerly the capital of Spain. ”

“ At the best Borrow’s zeal for religion was of the order of Dr. Keate, the famous headmaster of Eton—“Blessed are the pure in heart . . . if you are not pure in heart, by God, I’ll flog you!” Borrow had got his New Testaments printed, and he wanted to distribute them because he wished to see still more of the world, and had no lack of courage to carry out any well-defined scheme of the organisation which was employing him. Borrow had thrown out constant hints in his letters home. People had suggested to him, he said, that he was printing Testaments for which he would never find readers. ”

“ In Wild Wales we have George Borrow in his most genial mood. There are none of the hair-breadth escapes and grim experiences of The Bible in Spain, none of the romance and the glamour of Lavengro and its sequel, but there is good humour, a humour that does not obtain in the three more important works, and there is an amazing amount of frank candour of a biographical kind. We even have a reference to Isopel Berners, referred to by Captain Bosvile as “the young woman you used to keep company with . . . a fine young woman and a virtuous.” It is the happiest of Borrow’s books, and not unnaturally. ”

“ To say, as does a recent critic, that “there is something in Borrow after all; not so much as most people suppose, but still a great deal,” [270b] is to miss the compelling power of his best books as they strike those with whom they are among the finest things in literature. In attempting to interest new readers in the man—and this book is not for the sect called Borrovians, to whom I recommend the earlier biographies, but for a wider public which knows not Borrow—I hope I shall succeed in sending many to those incomparable works, which have given me so many pleasant hours. ”

“ Two, they say, are company and three are none; two men could ride in a gig for sixty miles without much difficulty, and an odd man often spoils sport. At any rate, they left me out, and one day they came back full of malignant pride and joy and exultation, and they flourished their information before me with boastings and laughter at my ferocious jealousy; for they had seen, and talked with, and eaten and drunk with, and sat at the feet of the veritable George Borrow, and had grasped his mighty hand. ”

“ One who has read and delighted in everything Mr. Borrow has yet published ventures to say how great has been his delight in reading Wild Wales. No philologist or linguist, I am yet an untiring walker and versifier: and really I think that few things are pleasanter than to walk and to versify. ”

“ Written by a man of intense personality, irresistible in his hold upon your attention, they take you far afield from weary cares and business into the enamouring airs of the open world, and into days when the countryside was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form the worst side of ‘civilised’ life in cities. They give you the sense of emancipation, of manumission into the liberty of the winding road and fragrant forest, into the freshness of an ancient country-life, into a milieu where men are not copies of each other. ”

“ But Borrow, in good truth, cared little for modern English literature. His heart was entirely with the poets of other lands—the Scandinavians and the Kelts. In Virgil he apparently took little interest, nor in the great poetry of Greece, Rome and England, although we find a reference to Theocritus and Dante in his books. Fortunately for his fame he had read Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and, above all, Robinson Crusoe, which last book, first read as a boy of six, coloured his whole life. Defoe and Fielding and Bunyan were the English authors to whom he owed most. ”

“ From Munich I went to Ratisbon, a fine old place, and there I embarked in a steamer which goes down the Danube, the noblest river in Europe—you cannot conceive anything equal to the grandeur of its banks. Almost all the way from Ratisbon to Vienna it runs amongst huge mountains covered with forests from the top to the bottom; the stream is wonderfully rapid, running like a mill flush; the waters are whitish, being continually fed by the snows of the Alps. ”

“ Old Crome died in 1821, and then John went to London to study under Haydon. Borrow declares that his brother had real taste for painting, and that “if circumstances had not eventually diverted his mind from the pursuit, he would have attained excellence, and left behind him some enduring monument of his powers.” “He lacked, however,” he tells us, “one thing, the want of which is but too often fatal to the sons of genius, and without which genius is little more than a splendid toy in the hands of the possessor—perseverance, dogged perseverance.” ”

“ Hake replied, “And yet Lavengro had an advantage over me, for he understood nobody. Every individuality with which he was brought into contact had, as no one knows better than you, to be tinged with colours of his own before he could see it at all.” That, of course, was true enough; and Hake’s asperities when speaking of Borrow in Memoirs of Eighty Years,—asperities which have vexed a good many Borrovians,—simply arose from the fact that it was impossible for two such men to understand each other. ”

“ I remember that on one occasion when she and Miss Clarke had come to Brunswick House they were talking with my mother in the temporary absence of George Borrow, who, so far as I can recall, had gone into another room to discuss business with John Pilgrim.
“Ah!” she said, “George is a good man, but he is a strange creature. Do you know he will say to me after breakfast, ‘Mary, I am going for a walk,’ and then I do not see anything more of him for three months. And all the time he will be walking miles and miles. Once he went right into Scotland, and never once slept in a house. ”

“ There’s one part of London where all the Irish live—at least the worst of them—and there they hatch their villainies to speak this tongue.”
And Borrow followed his father’s prejudices throughout his life, although in the one happy year in which he wrote The Bible in Spain he was able to do justice to the country that had inspired so much of his work:
Honour to Ireland and her “hundred thousand welcomes”! Her fields have long been the greenest in the world; her daughters the fairest; her sons the bravest and most eloquent. May they never cease to be so. ”

“ He delighted to go for long walks and enter into conversation with any one he might meet on the road, and lead them into histories of their lives, belongings, and experiences. When they used some word peculiar to Norfolk (or Suffolk) countrymen he would say, “Why, that’s a Danish word.” By and by the man would use another peculiar expression, “Why, that’s Saxon”; a little later on another, “Why, that’s French.” And he would add, “Why, what a wonderful man you are to speak so many languages.” One man got very angry, but Mr. Borrow was quite unconscious that he had given any offence. ”

“ The people, moreover, are kind and good, and not continually boasting of themselves and country like the French. About nine days ago I wrote to my dear mother from Augsburg; I hope she received the letter, and that she informed you, my dearest, as I entreated her to do. I am now a great way from you; Vienna is one of the cities in Europe the most distant from England, double as far as Madrid, and more remote even than St. Petersburg; it is about one thousand miles from Paris. The Austrians are quite a distinct race, differing very much from the Prussians and the people of the North of Germany. ”

“ Many poets have died young—Shelley and Keats for example—to whom this public recognition was refused in their lifetime. But given the happiness of reaching middle age, this recognition has never failed. It came, for example, to Wordsworth and Coleridge long after their best work was done. It came with more promptness to all the great Victorian novelists. This recognition did not come in their lifetime to two Suffolk friends, Edward FitzGerald with Omar Khayyám and George Borrow with Lavengro. In the case of FitzGerald there was probably no consciousness that he had produced a great poem. ”

“ In Lavengro Borrow recalls childish memories of Canterbury and of Hythe, at which latter place he saw the church vault filled with ancient skulls as we may see it there to-day. And after that the book which impressed itself most vividly upon his memory was Robinson Crusoe. How much he came to revere Defoe the pages of Lavengro most eloquently reveal to us. “Hail to thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee?” In 1810–11 his father was in the barracks at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire. ”

“ Even for one so prone to hate both books and bookmen there was always the wind on the heath, the gypsy encampment, the now famous “broad,” not then the haunt of innumerable trippers. But Borrow ever loved wandering more than writing. Almost immediately after his marriage—in 1840—he hinted to the Bible Society of a journey to China; a year later, in June, 1841, he suggested to Lord Clarendon that Lord Palmerston might give him a consulship: he consulted Hasfeld as to a possible livelihood in Berlin, and Ford as to travel in Africa. ”