Читать книгу George Borrow, the Man and His Work - R. A. J. Walling - Страница 4

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“What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?” . . . “There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”

The speakers were two young men, met casually on breezy Household Heath outside the city of Norwich; the time towards sunset on a fine evening; the year at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The tall young Englishman who questioned and the lithe swart gypsy who answered were friends of some years’ standing, but of infrequent intercourse. The one, with an absorbing curiosity in all things rare and strange, especially in rare and strange dialects and languages, the other, with a gypsy’s agile, half-developed intellect and pagan philosophy, had a common bond in their love of The Wild and their passion for pugilism and horse-dealing.

The quality of this friendship was peculiar, but not more remarkable than the manner of its origin. Norman Cross, on the North Road, is a lonely place, remote from the trafficking of the world, peopled mainly now by ghosts. In the year 1810 it was the home of several thousands of sorrowful men. There was enacted the sequel of many an incident in the world-tragedy of the Great Conflict, for on that solitary cross-road the Government had built sixteen prisons to hold six thousand Frenchmen, human spoil of war, and fenced them round with a palisade. Outside were barracks for the militia who guarded the prisoners and captives, and wooden houses for the officers who commanded the militia. It was a fantastic environment for an episode which determined the career and directed the effort of such genius as was latent in a boy of seven.

In one of the wooden huts on the roadside dwelt Captain Thomas Borrow, a Cornishman, adjutant of the West Norfolk Militia. With him were his wife, formerly Ann Perfrement, the descendant of Huguenot refugees, and their two sons, John, aged ten, and George, aged seven. The younger boy, even at that age, was fond of self-communion, of solitary wandering; shy of normal relations with his fellows and prone to scrape acquaintance with the oddest people he could find. He absorbed impressions readily; he never forgot what he saw or heard. He observed how the unhappy prisoners earned some scanty comforts by straw-plaiting; his dark face was often lit up by the light of the bonfires on which callous authority threw the dainty work of French fingers, prohibited and condemned because it interfered with the prosperity of the Bedfordshire straw industry. He was one of the astonished listeners to the adventure of the French officer who hid himself in a refuse bin and was shot out of prison and collected by the scavengers. He picked up the friendship of a snake-collector, who told him the tale of the King of the Vipers, and made him a present of a toothless snake, which thereafter he carried about in his bosom as a pet.

This companion of his lonely excursions was with him on the day when he strolled into a green lane where the gypsies had encamped. With it he turned the tables on the pair of vagabonds who threatened to assault him and drown him in the toad pond for prying into their tents; and, for his supposititious occult power over a poisonous reptile, he was endowed by them with the title of “sapengro,” or snake-master. Who had been, one moment before, a “young highwayman” and a “Bengui’s bantling” [3] became a “precious little gentleman” and a “gorgeous angel” when the snake “stared upon his enemy with its glittering eyes”; and presently was introduced with ceremony to their son, a lad of thirteen, ruddy and roguish of face, with whom he swore eternal brotherhood.

The gypsies camped in the green lane at Norman Cross were of the mighty tribe of Smith, and the roguish lad was Ambrose. It was Ambrose Smith who figured thereafter in the writings of the little sapengro as Jasper Petulengro. It was he who uttered the pæan of the sun, moon and stars, and the wind on the heath, when George Borrow met him eight or nine years afterwards near the encampment outside the city of Norwich.

George was then a youth pretending to learn law in the respectable office of Simpson and Rackham, in Tuck’s Court, but was far more ardently engaged in studying the by-products of human society and threading the byways of literature. He had been wandering on the heath until he “came to a place where, beside a thick furze, sat a man, his eyes fixed intently on the red ball of the setting sun.” The conversation, which may be found in the twenty-fifth chapter of “Lavengro,” is one of the most remarkable and most poetical dialogues in the English tongue. It strikes with perfect accuracy the keynote of George Borrow’s life. The whole chapter is a microcosm of Borrow, his philosophy, his morals, and his tastes. Its exordium is a passionate statement of his efforts in search of the heart of things, his pursuit of the elusive answer to the eternal Question. Its middle includes some reflections on philological research, mingled in Borrow’s incomparable manner with the pathos of failure and the humour of success. It has its fling at the metaphysicians. It reports in vivid words the earnest sermon of a field preacher; it describes with great wealth of comparison and eloquence the singing of a hymn on that Norfolk moor by a crowd of commonplace people elevated to a pitch of intense feeling by religious enthusiasm: a hymn which echoed in the ears of the listener many times in after years when in the great cathedrals of the world he was disappointed with religion decked out in all the panoply of pomp and circumstance; its peroration is Mr. Petulengro’s immortal pronouncement on the problem of mortality—and its epilogue is the gypsy’s invitation to his brother to “put on the gloves, and I will try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive.”

This is the very essence of Borrow—languages, religion, hedge-philosophy, and pugilism. The only element missing from the mixture is one of his characteristic outbursts in praise of the brown ale of old England. “There’s likewise a wind on the heath” lets us some way into the heart of Borrow’s secret.

The little sapengro of Norman Cross, the inquisitive youth who discussed Death with Jasper Petulengro, and was boxed out of the mood of morbid introspection, in which he declared, “I would wish to die,” into a healthy appreciation of the sweetness of Life, played many parts in his long career. He became scoffing sceptic, Bible missionary and Papist-hater, traveller, and recluse, philologist and poet. But his principal service to his day and generation and to their posterity had nothing to do with philosophy or religion, with belabouring “Romanisers” or with evangelical propagandism, with topography or with languages, or with poetry in the academic sense. It had everything to do with his wanderings in green lanes, his “love of Nature unconfined,” his acquaintance with the gypsies, his passion for The Wild, and his devotion to the ruder athletics. Many an artist imagines that he would make a reputation as a man of business; many a wizard of accounts has secret dreams of literary fame. Borrow had an impotent desire for scholarship and the celebrity of learning; but he laboured better than he knew. His invaluable bequest is to be disinterred from the numerous pages of five books, dug out from a mass of irrelevance and banality; and its inspiration will be found in the words of Mr. Petulengro: “There’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?” [6]

The man who, preaching from this text, imposed worship on the English-speaking world, was intensely alive, intensely egoistic. Often “engrossed with the sufferings of himself and of his soul,” as one has written of his hero Byron, he yet had a keen outlook upon that part of society in which he could move freely, and, as he saw intensely, was able to produce intense impressions of his visions upon his readers. He was a strange, romantic, wayward, irresponsible man—irresponsible, that is, to any but his own code of honour, manliness and virtue.

He was a very Don Quixote of letters. He went about the world tilting at every windmill he encountered; not infrequently he would construct windmills on which to break his lance. If he was often unhorsed and maimed, that did not matter; it merely made his next onslaught more severe. In one of his contests with persons who had offended him he speaks of them as malignant pseudo-critics, by whom he would not allow himself to be poisoned. “No, no! he will rather hold them up by their tails, and show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from their broken jaws.” Possibly only a man who had been worsted in his battle could have been guilty of this. But—furor arma ministrat; this was Borrow on the war-path against his critics. The true Borrovian likes to think of Borrow at another period and in different circumstances. It was a crabbed literary person who mangled and was mangled in this fashion. The lover of his genius pictures him otherwise—the young and handsome and vigorous Lavengro, stalking over the high roads and the byways of England, disputing with scholar or with gypsy, camping in lonely dingles, conjugating Armenian verbs with Isopel Berners. He has six feet three inches of height. His hair is white, but he has the complexion of healthy youth, and eyes dark and deep as mountain tarns. He revels in the friendship of gypsies and all the vagrants of earth, and cares for few other friends. He would rather sing ballads in the tent of a Romany chal than be entertained in the palace of a prince; he prefers the society of a prize-fighter to the converse of any duke. Recall his picture of himself:

“A lad who twenty tongues can talk,

And sixty miles a day can walk;

Drink at a draught a pint of rum,

And then be neither sick nor dumb;

Can tune a song and make a verse,

And deeds of northern kings rehearse;

Who never will forsake a friend

While he his bony fist can bend;

And, though averse to brawl and strife,

Will fight a Dutchman with a knife;

Oh, that is just the lad for me,

And such is honest six-foot-three.”

Or, again, in his riper age, as he is described by Mr. Egmont Hake (Dr. Gordon Hake’s fourth son)—a huge figure of a fine old man, eccentric of humour, rich beyond measure in the experience from which he drew anecdote, full of quaint whimsy and natural conceit. He was, says Mr. Hake (Athenæum, August 13th, 1881), “a choice companion on a walk, whether across country or in the slums of Houndsditch. His enthusiasm for nature was peculiar; he could draw more poetry from a widespreading marsh with its straggling rushes than from the most beautiful scenery, and would stand and look at it with rapture.” He rejoiced in a hedge-alehouse, or a coaching inn; he was moved to passionate delight by local reminiscences of highway robbers, vagrom scoundrels, pugilists, and vagabonds of all degrees; good beer was a poem to him. Under all these impressions he expanded nobly; contact with conventional respectability shrivelled him up; his bête noire was “gentility.” His strength and vigour remained unimpaired almost to the end of his life; at seventy he would break the ice on a pond and plunge in to bathe.

No man less fit than this for literary controversy was ever born into the world. It was an evil fate that launched him upon those sordid disputations disfiguring the Appendices to “The Romany Rye,” from which the “blood and foam” passage I have quoted is drawn.

Few men bringing to the literary mart so slight a cargo as Borrow brought have obtained so great a price for it. Some of his work, judged by any conventional standard, is remarkably poor. The best of it, judged by the only proper standard (which is entirely unconventional) is so good that immortality might be predicted for it by a person inclined to take the risk of being confuted in some remotely future incarnation. A great number of the enterprises in which Borrow dissipated many years of his life may be dismissed as of no literary importance and of no possible value to any other son of man. His philology, quâ philology, is grossly unscientific; its uses are, in fact, not scientific but artistic. They reside in the quaint hues it helped him to mix on his palette, the whimsical, half-serious, half-humorous disquisitions into which an unusual word would lead him, the ease with which it enabled him to glorify his picture with the tints of foreign skies and the forms of strange men. If we are to assess his linguistic achievements by their practical and immediate results, the years Borrow spent upon them were squandered. The seeds of his philological learning,

“Like Hebrew roots, were found

To flourish most in barren ground.”

They produced a meagre crop of translations, of no consequence either as exercises or as poetry. But that would be a perverse view to take of Borrow’s studies. Their virtue was not in their verbal fruits, but in the quality they added to his later work. For example, those “deeds of northern kings rehearsed” were rehearsed a great deal better by other people, and the works of Elis Wyn had been more efficiently dealt with by a Welshman. But would the shining history of Isopel Berners have been as glorious if Lavengro had not been the sort of man to compare her with Ingeborg, the northern queen who engaged and defeated in single combat each of her long string of redoubtable brothers? Or would not the fascinating converse of Lavengro with the Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, have lost half its charm if the young man had not been able to talk familiarly with him of Master Elis Wyn and the Bardd Cwsg? It is the reflected colour of all this word-learning that gives it a high place in Borrow’s development.

He began to study languages almost before he was out of frocks. He did not find his métier till he was thirty-eight: “The Zincali; or, The Gypsies of Spain” was published in 1841. This was late for a man who had been so deeply devoted to the pen. His processes were slow, too. His other books of any significance numbered only four, and they occupied twenty-one years in gestation. “The Bible in Spain” was dated 1842, “Lavengro” appeared in 1850, “The Romany Rye” in 1857, and “Wild Wales” in 1862. Much was concentrated in these few works, laboriously elaborated as they were, and produced with horrible pangs of travail. They crystallised—if such a term may be used of Borrow—the experiences of a long life of wandering through the world, and they recorded the opinions collected or developed by a self-centred man of violent prejudices. They provide an almost unparalleled conglomeration of good and bad, of false and sound. They commit inexcusable crimes against every canon of taste—and they have in them the true stuff of poetry and romance. The glamour of these last is over them all. The poetry of Borrow, one of the most natural poets who have written in English, takes its spring in the keen observation and appreciation of the elemental joys found in Nature’s least-trodden ways, and the elemental humours of her least sophisticated children. It recalls Sidney’s epigram of the excellent poets that never versified and the versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets. For Borrow’s verse, on the whole, is villainous, and much of his prose is truest poetry. He restored to us, at any rate for a time, the picaresque element in romantic literature, and revived our indulgent fondness for the good-humoured villains of low life.

With the jovial virtues of Le Sage, however, Borrow combined in a remarkable way some of the quaintest characteristics of Sterne. The mark of “Shandyism” is strong upon portions of his work—but let it be said at once that the philo-pugilist Borrow is absolutely free from any taint of the pornographic double entendre of the Rev. Laurence Sterne, M.A. Captain Tom Borrow often rivals My Uncle Toby, and the battle with Ben Bryan in Hyde Park may be compared as a staple reminiscence with the Siege of Namur; but there is no Widow Wadman in “Lavengro.” Ab Gwilym becomes in some points as delightful as Slawkenbergius, and there are episodes in “The Bible in Spain” and “Lavengro” which may compare with the stories of the Dead Ass and of Lefevre, the Monk and Maria; but it can be said of Borrow’s books with more truth than a sententious critic once said it of Sterne’s, that they may be submitted to the taste, feeling, good sense, and candour of the public “without the least apprehension that the perusal of any part of them will be followed by consequences unfavourable to the interests of society.” It may be a negative virtue that a book fails “to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of innocence”; but, for what it is worth, any book of Borrow’s has that merit.

Interesting as these comparisons may be to his admirers, Borrow must not be judged by any purely literary standards. One discerning critic, Mr. Thomas Seccombe, has observed that he “wrote with infinite difficulty.” That is evident in almost every page. He had no fatal facility in composition. He developed no graces of style. The man who loves Stevenson is probably a man who will also love Borrow, but for reasons quite apart from style. Borrow’s awkward forms and ugly lapses were calculated to make Stevenson’s delicately tuned literary organism shudder in its marrow. Their likeness lies in their love of Out-of-Doors, their capacity for discovering and enjoying the unusual adventure in the commonplace environment.

I doubt whether Borrow definitely and consciously copied his style from anybody, or modelled it on any man’s writings; but if we are to go anywhere for his master we must go to Defoe, whose “wondrous volume” was his “only study and principal source of amusement” in his very small boyhood at East Dereham. How he apostrophises the wizard! “Hail to thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee? England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could spare them easier far than Defoe, ‘unabashed Defoe,’ as the hunchbacked rhymer styled him.” England may not owe to Defoe all that Borrow declares she does of her “astonishing discoveries both by sea and land,” and her “naval glory,” but she certainly owes to him some of the gift that Borrow bestowed upon her. George had many other points of resemblance to the “illiterate fellow” of Swift’s satire besides this—that they were both at divers times accused of being illiterate fellows, and both answered back with compound interest of invective. Both were not only writing men, but also men of action. Both prided themselves something unduly upon their philological attainments. Both did late in life the literary work that won them lasting fame. Above all, they shared what Defoe wittily described as his “natural infirmity of homely, plain writing.” That is, they had command of a tense, nervous, vigorous English without ornate excrescences or fanciful refinements of any kind—the style which is greatest because it is no style at all, the style which bites into the mind and irritates the imagination. Both were able to give verisimilitude to the most fantastical narratives; both were masters of the form of autobiographical fiction. The parallel may finish with the remark that neither of them was a bookish man.

Borrow was not even a great reader. He spent many hours among books—but such books! They were mainly collections of ballads picked from a variety of languages fit “to add a storey to the Tower of Babel,” the detritus of the libraries he visited. He was fond of an uncommon book, whatever its intrinsic merit, but he was fonder of an uncommon human being. Men were his books. A ghostly procession of the authors with whom Borrow had hobnobbed—leaving out of account his investigations in shady paths on behalf of the Newgate Calendar—would afford a motley spectacle of tatterdemalions, the rag, tag, and bobtail of literature. He had inflated ambitions of scholarship, but, in fact, he had received only an ill-regulated education, and his taste refused all conventional rules as inventions of the Devil.

The Bible, Shakespeare in a lesser degree, and Defoe most of all—these were his classics. No bad assortment, either; but the restriction of one’s reading to these three would hardly testify to a catholic taste. His favourite poet was Byron. The two are as unlike in most particulars of their dispositions and careers as two heirs of mortality can be; but it is not difficult to realise that Byron’s life and poetry would touch deep springs in the nature of Borrow. Like Byron, he worked all his affections, all his passions, all his prejudices into the very texture of his books, and in them ran through all the gamut of his most violent emotions. Like Byron, he had a fond weakness for melancholy—what Goethe called “the hypochondriac humour.” As in the case of Byron, his melancholy alternated with spasms of furious elemental rage, expressed in the unbridled vituperation of his fellow men. So that, though no two characters more widely different figure in literary history, there were points of contact and bases of agreement between them. It was, indeed, a soul attuned to Borrow who wrote:

“’Tis sweet to win, no matter how, one’s laurels,

By blood or ink; ’tis sweet to put an end

To strife: ’tis sometimes sweet to have our quarrels

Particularly with a tiresome friend:

Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels;

Dear is the helpless creature we defend

Against the world: and dear the schoolboy spot

We ne’er forget, though there we are forgot.”

The lines may be said to depict Borrow in some of his best-known aspects—winning laurels by blood and ink, quarrelling with tiresome friends, rejoicing in the good things of life, defending his dependents, and treasuring the memories of his childhood.

He threw himself into his works in such a fashion that it is impossible to elucidate them without reference to his personal career, or to understand his proceedings without reference to his books. They are all more or less in the autobiographical form, and they are all more or less real autobiographies: how much more and how much less it is often difficult to say. The secret of the books, the reason for the fascination they exert upon mankind, must be found in the man; his own secret must be sought in two directions. One has already been indicated—his love of The Wild. From his gypsies and wanderers, his hedge-tinkers and vagroms, all the denizens of the heath and the green lanes—the society which began to vanish with the enclosure of the English fields, and is fast disappearing from the land,—material unpromising and uncongenial enough to the general, Borrow contrived to extract fine poetry and mildly thrilling romance.

And how was it that a man whose pet weakness was his idolatry of the Anglo-Saxons, who joyed in thinking himself representative of what was best and manliest in a race whose aversion from the Romany is so pronounced, was the man of all others in England who seemed to get into closest touch with the gypsies, to understand them and to be understood of them? Perhaps a little because of his philological craze and the avidity with which he set himself to pick up their language. But the real explanation is that, in fact, Borrow was no Anglo-Saxon at all. His vainglorious boasts of Anglo-Saxon breeding were based on nothing more substantial than the fact that his father and mother happened to be living in Norfolk at the time when he came into the world. He was a Celt of Celts. His genius was truly Celtic. His father was a Cornishman whose family had resided in the West-country peninsula—Lord Courtney’s “emerald, set in a sapphire sea”—for many generations, and was a Cornish and therefore a Celtic family to the very tips of its numerous fingers. His mother was of French descent. Here was a pretty parentage for a bluff and hearty champion of optimistic and progressive Anglo-Saxondom!

Borrow was fond of Norfolk: the rest was affectation. He had all the Celtic characteristics—the quick and lively imagination, the poetic temperament, the intensely emotional nature, the tendency to melancholy. The only writer who, within my knowledge, has laid effective stress on this is Mr. Watts-Dunton. Borrow loved the wide level landscapes, the marshes and broads of East Anglia, just as FitzGerald did, a descendant of Irishmen who was born in the East. Various reasons conspired to produce this affection. Norfolk was the scene of his boyish exploits. In Norfolk lived the mother he worshipped. There he met the wife who was his truest friend and finest comrade. But the spirit of East Anglia, the Teutonic tradition, did not preside over Borrow’s destiny and direct his moral and intellectual fortunes. It was the spirit of Old Cornwall, its remote hills peeping out of vales of mystery towards an empyrean where every cloud breathed legend, the land of weird imaginings, of saintly lore, and chivalric romance. The bluff and blunt and downright John-Bullery that Borrow affected was but a pose; the heat of the fires of the Underworld creeps up into his work, and the pale light of the Overworld shines down upon it. He is constantly on the brink of moral tragedy and ever listening to the rumble of the spiritual upheaval. What stirs him most to eloquence and deep feeling is Celtic Ireland or Celtic Wales, the wild music of the speech of Murtagh the Papist gossoon, the “noble mountains, green fields, and majestic woods” of the Cymric land.

Many peculiarities of Borrow, on a superficial examination, seem to offer flat contradiction to this view. His “Poperyphobia” appears to be difficult to reconcile with his unquestionable sympathy with the Celtic spirit of Ireland. He affects the Orange hue; whenever he sees a Catholic head he hits it. We need not seek far for the explanation. His mother was of a Huguenot family which had been driven out of France by the persecutions of the Catholic Church: Borrow idolised his mother. Further, it never mattered to him whether an injury was two days or two centuries old; he hated the offender just the same. His father had quarrelled, long before George was born, with a gentleman named Hambly. To the end of his life Borrow swore that a person named Hambly could never be good. His adulation of violent sports and his pathetic belief in the immaculate supremacy of the English in all athletics are other facts which on the surface may seem to upset the theory of an obsessing Celtic mysticism. But even here his ancestry counts for much. The Cornish were ever devoted to athletic contests; their cousins the Welsh are in one of the realms of sport unparalleled and unapproachable. Borrow’s good-ale-of-old-England fetish surprised the decent and sober people of Wales, and his “wishy-washy tea” is the national beverage of Cornwall. But his devotion to malt liquor was a part of his protest against “gentility-nonsense” and “temperance-canting,” about which he raved with even more than usual violence and incoherence. In the mid-Victorian age in which he wrote, the glorification of beer-swilling was as un-“genteel” as even Borrow could have desired.

All these idiosyncrasies, however, count for little beside the deeper characteristics of Borrow’s life and work, over which the Celtic genius reigned. Racial traits were strongly marked in him, and he is a standing refutation of Mr. George Moore’s dictum that “the land makes the Celt,” and that it is not a question of race. In this heredity we must look for the beginnings of any proper view of Borrow.