Herbert George Jenkins

“ He must be independent of the world, not only in material things, but in those intangible qualities of the spirit. It was this that lost him Isopel Berners, whose love he awakened by a strong right arm and quenched with an Armenian noun. Again, his independence stood in the way of his happiness. A man is a king, he seemed to think, and the attribute of kings is their splendid isolation, their godlike solitude. If his Ego were lonely and crying out for sympathy, Borrow thought it a moment for solitude, in which to discipline his insurgent spirit. ”

“ The condition of affairs at Seville was as bad if not worse than at Cadiz. There was scarcely any communication with the capital, the diligences no longer ran, and even the fearless arrieros (muleteers) declined to set out. Famine, plunder and murder were let loose over the land. Bands of banditti robbed, tortured and slew in the name of Don Carlos. They stripped the peasantry of all they possessed, and the poor wretches in turn became brigands and preyed upon those weaker than themselves. Through all this Borrow had to penetrate in order to reach Madrid. ”

“ He has been called tactless, until the word seems to have become permanently identified with his name; how unjustly is shown by a very hasty examination of his masterly diplomacy, both in Russia and Spain. Diplomacy, as Borrow understood it, was the art of being persuasive when persuasion would obtain for him his object, and firm, even threatening, when strong measures were best calculated to suit his ends. It is only the fool who defines tact as the gentle art of pleasing everybody. Diplomacy is the art of getting what you want at the expense of displeasing as few people as possible. ”

“ Borrow created something of a sensation in the neighbourhood. As a celebrity his autograph was much sought after; but he would gratify nobody. His hosts experienced many little surprises from their guest’s strange ways. He would plunge into a moorland pool to fetch a bird that had fallen to his gun, or, round the family fireside, he would shout his ballads of the North, at one time alarming his audience by seizing a carving-knife and brandishing it about in the air to emphasize the passionate nature of his song. ”

“ Borrow would rush precipitately from the house where he was a guest; he would be unpardonably rude to some inoffensive and well-meaning woman who thought to please him by admiring his books; he would magnify a fight between their respective dogs into a deadly feud between himself and the rector of his parish: thus he made enemies by the dozen and, incidentally, earned for himself an extremely unenviable reputation. A hero with a lovable nature is twice a hero, because he is possessed of those qualities that commend themselves to the greater number. ”

“ Nature it appeared had framed Borrow in a moment of magnificence, and, lest he should be enticed away from her, had instilled into his soul a hatred of all things artificial and at variance with her august decrees. He was shy and suspicious with the men and women who regulated their lives by the narrow standards of civilisation and decorum; but with the children of the tents and the vagrants of the wayside he was a single-minded man, eager to learn the lore of the open air. ”

“ To the vicar of St Cleer and his family, Borrow was a very welcome visitor. Mr Berkeley’s eldest son, a boy of ten years of age, on being introduced to the distinguished caller, gazed at him for some moments and then without a word left the room and, going straight to his mother in another apartment cried, “Well, mother, that is a man.” Borrow was delighted when he heard of the child’s enthusiasm. Mr Berkeley give a picture of his distinguished visitor far more prepossessing than many that exist. ”

“ By the expenditure of five pounds ten shillings, plus the cost of a smock-frock and some provisions, George Borrow, linguist, editor and translator, became a travelling tinker. With his dauntless little pony, Ambrol, he set out, a tinkering Ulysses, indifferent to what direction he took, allowing the pony to go whither he felt inclined. At first he experienced some apprehension at passing the night with only a tent or the stars as a roof. Rain fell to mar the opening day of the adventure, but the pony, with unerring instinct, led his new master to one of Slingsby’s usual camping grounds. ”

“ Thus it came about that George Borrow was proclaimed brother to the gypsy’s son Ambrose, [12b] who as Jasper Petulengro figures so largely in Lavengro and The Romany Rye, and is credited with that exquisitely phrased pagan glorification of mere existence:
“Life is sweet, brother . . . There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?” [13a]
The Borrows were nomads, permitted by God and the king to tarry not over long in any one place. ”

“ The Bible in Spain was selling in its thousands. The press had proclaimed it a masterpiece. He had seen himself a great man. The writer of a great book, however, does not occupy a position so kinglike in its loneliness as does gentleman a gypsy, round whom flock the gitanos to kiss his hand and garments as if he were a god or a hero. The literary and social worlds that The Bible in Spain opened to Borrow were not to be awed by his mystery, or, disciplined into abject hero-worship by one of those steady penetrating gazes, which cowed jockeys and alguacils. ”

“ The moment was an awful one, when George Borrow, the well-known author of Lavengro, and The Bible in Spain, dashed into the surf and saved one life, and through his instrumentality the others were saved. We ourselves have known this brave and gifted man for years, and, daring as was this deed we have known him more than once to risk his life for others. ”

“ It was an ideal city for a warrior to take his rest in; but probably what counted most with Captain Borrow was the Grammar School—more than the Norman Cathedral, the grim old Castle that stands guardian-like upon its mound, the fact of its being a garrison town, or even the traditions that surrounded the place. He had two sons who must be appropriately sent out into the world, and Norwich offered facilities for educating both. He accordingly took a small house in Willow Lane, to which access was obtained by a covered passage then called King’s, but now Borrow’s Court. ”

“ Intimate though his acquaintance with the gypsies of other countries had been, Borrow was aghast at the depravity of those of Spain. The men were drunkards, brigands, and murderers; the women unchaste, and inveterate thieves. Their language was terrifying in its foulness. They seemed to have no religion save a misty glimmering of metempsychosis, which had come down to them through the centuries, and having been very wicked in this world they asked, with some show of reason, why they should live again. ”

“ But now, let me entreat you to enter into our feelings a little, and to consider what we owe to Mr Graydon. If we have at times thought him imprudent, we have seen enough in him to make us both admire and love him. He has ever approved himself as an upright, faithful, conscientious, indefatigable agent; one who has shrunk from no trials and no dangers; one who has gone through in our service many and extraordinary hardships. ”

“ If the Gypsies were all that is evil, judged by conventional standards, they at least loyally stood by each other in the face of a common foe. Borrow knew Ambrose Petulengro to be a liar, a thief, in fact most things that it is desirable a man should not be; yet he was equally sure that under no circumstances would he forsake a friend to whom he stood pledged. There seems to be little doubt that Borrow’s fame with the Gypsies spread throughout England and the Continent. “Everybody as ever see’d the white-headed Romany Rye never forgot him.” ”

“ No woman whose cleverness had not reached the point of inspiration could have lived in intimate association with so capricious and masterful a man as George Borrow. John Hasfeldt, in sending his congratulations, had seemed to suggest that Borrow was one of those abstruse works of nature that require close and constant study. ”

“ With the unerring instinct of a hypersensitive nature, he knew his merit, his honesty, his capacity—knew that he possessed one thing that eventually commands success, which “through life has ever been of incalculable utility to me, and has not unfrequently supplied the place of friends, money, and many other things of almost equal importance—iron perseverance, without which all the advantages of time and circumstance are of very little avail in any undertaking.” ”

“ Mr Petulengro had become the head of his tribe, his father and mother having been transported for passing bad money. He was now a man, with a wife, a child, and also a mother-in-law, who took a violent dislike to the tall, fair-haired gorgio. Borrow’s life was much broadened by his intercourse with Mr Petulengro. He was often at the gypsy encampment on Mousehold, a heath just outside Norwich, where, under the tuition of his host, he learned the Romany tongue with such rapidity as to astonish his instructor and earn for him among the gypsies the name of “Lav-engro,” word-fellow or word-master. ”

“ One quality Borrow possessed in common with many other men of strange and taciturn personality. He could always make friends when he chose. Ostlers, scholars, farmers, gypsies; it mattered not one jot to him what, or who they were. He could earn their respect and obtain their good-will, if he wished to do so. He demanded of men that they should have done things, or be capable of doing things. They must know everything there was to be known about some one thing; and the ostler, than whom none could groom a horse better, was worthy of being ranked with the best man in the land. ”

“ It is the work of a critic who regarded literature as a thing to be approached, both by author and reviewer, with grave and deliberate ceremony, not with enthusiasm or prejudice. From any other source the following words would not have possessed the significance they did, coming from a man of such sane ideas with the courage to express them:—
“Various portions of the history are known to be a faithful narrative of Mr Borrow’s career, while we ourselves can testify, as to many other parts of his volumes, that nothing can excel the fidelity with which he has described both men and things. ”

“ Borrow’s own generation would have laughed at such a value being put upon anything in Lavengro.
Another thing against the books success was its style. It lacked what has been described as the poetic ecstacy or sentimental verdure of the age. Trope, imagery, mawkishness, were all absent, for Borrow had gone back to his masters, at whose head stood the glorious Defoe. Borrow’s style was as individual as the man himself. By a curious contradiction, the tendency is to overlook literary lapses in the very man towards whom so little latitude was allowed in other directions. ”

“ The population round about was entirely an agricultural one, and all united in hating the gypsies as their greatest enemies, because of their depredations. Add to this the fact that Borrow was a frequenter of public-houses, of which there were seven in the village, and was wont to boast that you could get at the true man only after he had been mellowed into speech by good English ale. Then he would open his heart and unburden his mind of all the accumulated knowledge that he possessed, and add something to the epic of the soil. Borrow’s overbearing manner made people shy of him. ”

“ He has created the atmosphere of Wales as he did that of the gypsy encampment. He shows the jealous way in which the Welsh cling to their language, and their suspicion of the Saesneg, or Saxon. Above all, he shows how national are the Welsh poets, belonging not to the cultured few; but to the labouring man as much as to the landed proprietor. Borrow earned the respect of the people, not only because he knew their language; but on account of his profound knowledge of their literature, their history, and their traditions. ”

“ Sir Richard Phillips had told him to live on bread and water. He now did so.
For a week he wrote ceaselessly at the Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell, the Great Traveller. He wrote with the feverish energy of a man who sees the shadow of actual starvation cast across his manuscript. When the tale was finished there remained the work of revision, and after that, worst of all, fears lest the bookseller were already suited.
Fortune, however, was kind to him, and he was successful in extracting for his story the sum of twenty pounds. Borrow had not mixed among gypsies for nothing. ”

“ Miss Cobbe would not humour an egoist, because constitutionally women, especially clever women, dislike them, unless they wish to marry them. When she heard it said, as it very frequently was said, that Borrow was a gypsy by blood, she caustically remarked that if he were not he “ought to have been.” Miss Cobbe had living with her a Miss Lloyd who, “amused by his quaint stories and his (real or sham) enthusiasm for Wales, . . . cultivated his acquaintance. I,” continued Miss Cobbe frankly, “never liked him, thinking him more or less of a hypocrite.” ”