Читать книгу George Borrow, the Man and His Work - R. A. J. Walling - Страница 5

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The Borrows of Tredinnick, in the parish of St. Cleer, were proud Cornish yeomen. For centuries they had occupied the same house and farmed the same land. Now they have been scattered over the world, in true Cornish fashion, and there is not a Borrow left in the district.

Tredinnick is a little old house in a hollow, about a mile north-west of St. Cleer Church, near Liskeard, among the hills of Eastern Cornwall. It is a long, low, stone-fronted building of two storeys, backed by a row of tall elms standing at the roadside, with an apple orchard behind, and the ground at the side sloping away into a deep valley of orchards and meadows. The place is quite unpretentious; the farm is little more than fifty acres in extent, and the house has lost in the lapse of time the neatness that would have shown in the abode of Borrow’s gentillâtre. Still, for a farmhouse, it is commodious. It has walls two feet thick, and in the long, raftered, slate-floored kitchen are deep window-seats, and an open hearth and chimney-corner, the crock-hook depending in the midst. Lavengro would have rejoiced in such a place. The dining-room and sitting-room are on the other side of the entrance, and communicate—respectable but undistinguished rooms.

In this home was born, in December, 1758, Thomas, father of George Borrow. He was a posthumous child. We have a very fair picture of him in the opening chapters of “Lavengro.” We see him in youth, the favourite of his mother, whose special care of him was the cause of jealousy in his six brothers. We learn that shortly after he was eighteen his mother died, and he adopted “the profession of arms, which he followed during the remainder of his life.” But Lavengro, candidly stating that he knows little about the early life of his father, does not tell us the circumstances in which he left the homestead at Tredinnick, after bringing to a disastrous end his apprenticeship to one Edward Hambly, a maltster. He is described as “cool and collected, slow to anger, though perfectly fearless, patient of control, of great strength, and, to crown all, a proper man with his hands.” This may in some measure account for the adulation of prize-fighting which in “Lavengro,” as Mr. Birrell has pointed out, scandalised “the religious world” that had welcomed with such effusive joy “The Bible in Spain.” George Borrow inherited a love of adventure and a fondness for “the noble art,” and probably also the aversion from “gentility” apparent in the lines with which his autobiography opens. Yet it is strange that he was really proud of his gentle descent, proud of his Cornish father and his little-landed ancestry, and proud of the French extraction of his mother and the small and delicate hands he got from her.

The manner of departure of Lavengro’s father out of Cornwall had an intimate connection with that properness of his with his hands. He was at Menheniot Fair with a party of youths from Liskeard, three or four miles distant, when a row arose between young Menheniot and young Liskeard; probably some breeze of incident blew upon the embers of a village feud. Slow as he was to anger and patient of control, Borrow nevertheless entered with zest into the fray, for he headed the Liskeard party and brought the struggle to a climax by knocking down the constable. Thereafter, fearing the consequences of his adventure, he departed from the ancestral roof-tree, and began the wandering life which he was leading when he met the mother of Lavengro. And small wonder at his flight, for the constable he knocked down was none other than his own master, the head-borough, Edward Hambly. The date of the scrimmage was July 28th, 1783. He disappeared for five months. In December he turned up at Bodmin and enlisted in the Coldstream Guards, who had a recruiting party there under Captain William Morshead, later the celebrated general. The captain, knowing his antecedents, did all he could to prevent the enlistment, but without success.

Thomas Borrow may well have recalled the constable of Menheniot in later years when he did battle in Hyde Park with “big Ben Brain” (read Bryan), giving that celebrity a little useful practice for the contest in which he became “champion of England, having conquered the heroic Johnson,” and paving the way for the friendship to which all such encounters should lead. Bryan, wrote George in after years, “expired in the arms of my father, who read the Bible to him in his later moments.” What marvel that “Lavengro” is a medley of religion and beer-drinking, prize-fighting and philosophy?

Thomas vanished for several years into the privacy of a private of the Coldstreams. Such a man, however, was not likely to remain permanently in the obscurity of the ranks. He climbed steadily. After eight or nine years, spent mostly with the regiment in London, he emerged into view again as a sergeant, and in 1792 was transferred to the West Norfolk Militia, whose headquarters were at East Dereham. This was the origin of all we hear later about the pretty little town of “D—.”

At Dumpling Green, near by, resided Miss Ann Perfrement, sweet and twenty when Sergeant Borrow marched into her perspective. She was the daughter of a farmer who had descended from a Huguenot family, immigrants to Norfolk among many others—including the Martineaus—after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Miss Perfrement was occasionally engaged to act minor parts in plays performed at Dereham by companies sent to the country towns from the Theatre Royal in Norwich. Her stage presence fascinated the Sergeant, who had reached the age of thirty-eight proof against all feminine blandishments. He pursued his courtship of the amateur actress with ardour and success. She accepted him, and a most happy union began with their wedding on February 11th, 1793.

The movements of a regiment, even of militia, in those stirring days were apt to be incalculable. The West Norfolks threaded the United Kingdom from end to end, combining the swiftness of a bishop with the unexpected evolutions of a knight upon the chessboard. Sergeant Borrow got his commission as captain and adjutant in 1798; in 1800, either at Chelmsford or Colchester, was born his elder son, John, who became first a military officer and then an artist, and was one of Haydon’s pupils. In 1803 he was back in Norfolk, recruiting. At East Dereham, on July 5th in that year, George Borrow opened his eyes upon a world of which he was to see so much more than falls to the lot of most sons, even of soldiers.

This bundle of potentialities was named George in honour of the King his father served, and Henry after a Cornish uncle. The first few years of his life were spent, like those of the young Sternes, at the tail of the regiment, marching and countermarching in Essex, Kent, and Sussex, wandering from barracks to barracks as the exigencies of the army dictated in that day of Napoleonic scares. At the age of six he returned to “pretty D—,” and there received some of the vivid impressions he has reproduced in indelible colours upon the earlier pages of “Lavengro”—the dignified rector and Philo, the clerk, reading “their respective portions of the venerable liturgy,” and rolling “many a portentous word descriptive of the wondrous works of the Most High”; and the “Lady Bountiful, leaning on her gold-headed cane.” There he revelled in the boy’s first flush of delight over “Robinson Crusoe,” and imbibed the germs of that worship of Defoe which shines in all his work.

The next peregrination of the family was to Norman Cross, where George met the snake-catcher and received from him the present of the fangless viper with which he contrived so effectually to subdue the wrath of old Gypsy Smith and his evil-looking mort, who “wore no cap, and her long hair fell on either side of her head like horse-tails half way down her waist; her skin was dark and swarthy, like that of a toad.” We know how he was named “Sapengro,” and how brotherhood was sworn between him and the gypsies’ son Ambrose, who figures immortally as Jasper Petulengro.

The sojourn at Norman Cross lasted fifteen months. Then, in July, 1811, the regiment returned to East Dereham, where George took his introduction to the science of languages. The embryo “polyglot gentleman” laid a sound foundation upon Lilly’s Latin Grammar. However, their wanderings were by no means at an end. For years there was to be little rest and small possibility of regular schooling. In 1812 the West Norfolks were moving again—marching through the Midlands and the North by slow stages towards Edinburgh, stopping a month or two here and there. For example, at Huddersfield they billeted long enough for George to be sent to the local school. The conditions of such a life were hardly favourable to the development of scholarship upon conventional lines. How valuable they were to the cultivation of the kind of genius that lay behind the forehead of George Borrow it is difficult to overestimate. He assimilated rich and varied experience through every pore. He acquired the love of a roving life, the passionate devotion to the road, that never left him till the end of his days. His father was a wanderer before he was born; he was a wanderer himself throughout his boyhood. It was fit training for the man who was afterwards to be dubbed “the Wandering Jew of Literature.”

In April of 1813 the West Norfolks descended upon Edinburgh, Captain Thomas on horseback leading the van, and Mrs. Borrow and her boys bringing up the rear in a “po’-shay.” There were many gay days of military merry-making at Edinburgh Castle before, in the autumn, John and George were entered at the High School. Probably they spent only one session at the academy of classical learning which had, a generation earlier, turned out so great a genius as Sir Walter Scott.

There is not much in Borrow’s record of the time to illustrate that session, or to show what point in his youthful struggle with the dead languages the incipient philologist reached. Here, as ever, his interests were in the by-paths of life and learning. David Haggart was more to him than the ministrations of his painstaking master, Mr. Carson. Borrow had a catholic and withal a discriminating taste in vagabonds. It manifested itself even at this early age. Just as in later years he was fascinated by the personality of John Thurtell, so was he charmed at Edinburgh by that weird brigand Haggart, who enlisted in the West Norfolks as a drummer-boy, having been unearthed at Leith Races by one of Captain Borrow’s recruiting sergeants. The drummer-boy whom George made his companion subsequently became burglar, highway robber, murderer, and prison-breaker, and only suspended his nefarious activities at the end of the hangman’s rope in the year 1821.

The regiment left Edinburgh for home in 1814, on the cessation of the war. The mustering-out took place at Norwich, where feastings and congratulations were the order of many days. George’s parents lodged at the Crown and Angel Inn, while he was sent to the Grammar School. This time there was some hope that he might be able to continue his studies undisturbed. Napoleon prevented its realisation by escaping from Elba and getting the Norfolk militiamen sent to Ireland, where sympathetic disturbances were occurring. They did not embark at Harwich, however, until after the battle of Waterloo. From Cork they went to Clonmel, and George had his first taste of the fascinating country whose very name always seemed to exercise a spell upon him. At Clonmel he was sent to school, and began to learn Greek. What was of greater consequence, he met a wild Irish boy, the Murtagh who figures so finely in “Lavengro.” Murtagh taught him Erse in return for a pack of cards. But even more important still, it was here that he learned to ride on horseback and picked up the love of horse-flesh which was one of the grand passions of his life. Oh, that cob!—on which he rode round the Devil’s Mountain—“may the sod lie lightly over the bones of the strongest, speediest, and most gallant of its kind.”

The wanderings of the elder Borrows finally ceased in 1816. After the Irish campaign, they returned to Norwich to settle down, and took a house in Willow Lane. George, now thirteen, was sent again to the Grammar School to receive his first regular course of “education.” Fortunately, the process was quite unable to interfere with his natural development. It was hardly possible that a boy who had been beating about the roads and townships of the three kingdoms ever since he could toddle, had learnt snake-charming and the Irish language, explored the mysteries of gypsyism and horse-dealing, and picked up such a collection of odds and ends of lore as reposed in his retentive brain, should comfortably abandon his vagrom modes of thought and life for the mechanical lessons and the conventional ways of a Grammar School ruled by a martinet. His wander-years had quite unfitted him for methodical study, and he found even less interest in the common pursuits of the school than does the average healthy rascal of thirteen. Consequently, he had no soft corner in the heart of the “head,” Edward Valpy, a pedagogue of the ancient style who had no toleration for intransigence, and never risked the spoiling of the child by any economy of the rod.

George had some Latin and a little Greek, picked up at Huddersfield and Edinburgh and Clonmel, but he had probably found Murtagh a more congenial authority than the excellent Lilly, and his Erse was more than his Greek. Now that his body was moored to the desk at Norwich, his mind wandered wantonly from the languages he had to study to those for which, in the Valpeian régime, there was no provision. With his never-failing capacity for picking up the quaintest and most out-of-the-way people to be found about him, he made the acquaintance of Father D’Éterville, the “elderly personage . . . rather tall and something of a robust make,” who wore “a snuff-coloured coat and drab pantaloons . . . an immense frill, seldom of the purest white, but invariably of the finest French cambric,” and told the young student that if he wished to be a poet he should emulate Monsieur Boileau rather than the vagabond Dante! The Rev. Thomas D’Éterville was a French émigré who had come over in 1792, and had qualifications from the University of Caen. With him George studied French and Italian, and made a beginning of Spanish.

Among his contemporaries drilled and thrashed by Valpy were several men who obtained varying degrees of fame in the world of thought and action. The Grammar School boys of the time included James Martineau, Sir Archdale Wilson, and Rajah Brooke of Sarawak. Their achievements were considerable, but it is, in one mind at all events, an open question whether Borrow’s did not excel them all. Certainly no man of them made so many idolatrous friends, and probably no man so many bitter enemies.

George was no ordinary schoolboy. His devotion to learning was intense, but peculiar to himself. In his boyish pranks and recreations he was just as unconventional. On one occasion, the wander-fever having seized him, he communicated it to three friends of his own age. They decided to run away from school, with some wild idea of emulating the feats of his favourite Robinson Crusoe. The plan, worked out by Borrow, was that they should escape to the Norfolk coast and take any ship that would convey them out of England. Till they could find some convenient means of emigration, they proposed to conceal themselves in a lair upon the shore, and to subsist by forays upon the portable and comestible property of the people of the district. The adventure began early in the morning and terminated within a few hours. They were discovered some dozen miles away by a gentleman who recognised one of them, and ignominiously restored to the affection of their parents—and the insatiable wrath of Valpy. The “head” took Borrow, as the ringleader, and flogged him severely. It was said that for this purpose the culprit was “horsed” on the back of Martineau, and that the punishment was so bad that Borrow had to keep his bed for a fortnight. George could with difficulty forget a slight or forgive an injury, real or imaginary, and Dr. Knapp declares that he hated Martineau ever afterwards, and up to the time of his death would never visit any house where he knew he must meet the theologian. It is true that he did not care to meet Martineau, but the reason assigned for his aversion must be given up as a fable. Martineau ridiculed the story, and asserted with every show of truth that he never “horsed” Borrow.

Dr. Jessopp was another of his schoolfellows. He has an anecdote of Borrow appearing at school one day, his face stained brown with walnut juice, and of Valpy, inquiring sententiously, “Borrow, are you suffering from jaundice, or is it only dirt?”

Such hours of leisure as were not occupied by D’Éterville and his French and Italian, or by the explorations into Spanish and the Romany, were given up to his worship of Nature and his devotion to sport. He fished in the Yare at Earlham, and went fowling over the surrounding fields and marshes with “a condemned musket bearing somewhere on its lock in rather antique characters, ‘Tower, 1746.’” But, above all, he haunted Harford Bridge. For at Harford Bridge did not the amazing John Thurtell reside? This son of a respectable alderman of Norwich had been in warlike adventures abroad, but now that the wars were over had returned to his native parts to get such entertainment out of life as a man might to whom every form of sport came gaily welcome, and the more violent it was the more gaily. So distinguished a patron of the prize-ring and so ungenteel a gentleman was certain to make a strong appeal to young Borrow, who made his acquaintance and acquired from him the art of boxing. As we have seen, his father, the captain, had been a bruiser when occasion demanded, and had fought Ben Bryan. His fondness for the sport was hereditary. He developed it during his visits to Thurtell, and it never left him. One of the kinds of “canting nonsense” denounced in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye” is the “unmanly cant”—a phrase in which he summed up all objections to the practice of fisticuffs. His mentor in the noble art is lightly sketched in “The Zincali” in connection with the description of a prize-fight. The “terrible Thurtell, lord of the concourse,” made a sad ending. He committed the murder which inspired the familiar ballad of “William Weare”:

“He cut his throat from ear to ear,

His brains he battered in;

His name was Mr. William Weare,

He lived in Lyon’s Inn.”

Thurtell induced Weare, who had relieved him of £400 at a gaming-table, to drive to Elstree in Hertfordshire, where he disposed of him in the artistic fashion just related. One of his companions turned King’s evidence, and he was hanged at Hertford in 1823. [34]

So, learning his grammar at school, visiting D’Éterville at Strangers’ Hall for French and Italian, trespassing on the grounds of the admirable Mr. Gurney in search of fish, being initiated into the art and mystery of pugilism, strolling to Thorpe, and Eaton, and Cringleford, George passed two years. He was fourteen when he saw the fight depicted in “The Zincali.” The next year he was one of the spectators at the great annual Tombland Fair, when he encountered once more the gypsy Ambrose Smith, and went with him to the encampment on Mousehold Heath, discoursing by the way of the quality of beauty, as exemplified in the person of Tawno Chikno and the earl’s daughter who fell in love with him, and making the acquaintance of the weird old hag “whose name was Herne and she came of the hairy ones.” While the gypsies remained in camp on Mousehold Heath, the lad visited them frequently, and was introduced by Jasper—terribly angering his mother-in-law, Mrs. Herne—into the mysteries of the Romany language. His extraordinary facility in acquiring and retaining words obtained for him the nickname of Lavengro, or “word-fellow.”

George left school in 1819, and was articled to the firm of Simpson & Rackham, solicitors, of Tuck’s Court, Norwich, apparently on the advice of his friend Roger Kerrison, son of a substantial citizen. Though it is clear that he never entertained any enthusiasm for the profession, he diligently pursued his studies at the irksome desk. They were not, however, those of the law, but of languages and poetry. By devoting himself to his parchments and his law books, and seeking to fill the station of life to which he had been dedicated, he might have made an indifferently bad country solicitor. Thank heaven, nothing was further from his thoughts. He was taken specially under the wing of the head of the firm, William Simpson, then Town Clerk, and an excellent good fellow. George lodged in his house in the Upper Close. Tuck’s Court, where he sat at the desk, was nearly opposite the old Norfolk Hotel.

It was not long before he added another to his strange gallery of cronies—a Welsh groom employed by a gentleman living at the end of the court, a queer, mis-shapen man, the butt of George’s fellow-clerks, who hailed his every appearance with the ballad of:

“Taffy was a Welshman,

Taffy was a thief.”

To Borrow, however, he was not a freak of nature, sent by a kindly Providence to lighten the laborious hours of Simpson & Rackham’s office, but a man who knew the Welsh language, and might assist him in learning it. In return for his help, George induced the other boys to cease their persecution, and declared that this had the effect of releasing the Welshman from the horns of a dilemma—for he was cogitating whether “to hang himself from the balk of the hayloft or to give his master warning.” So he won his way into the epic of “Dafydd ab Gwilym” and the songs of the Welsh bards.

Borrow’s adventures were now of a character different from those of his schoolboy days. He began to enter upon profound intellectual waters. His mania for languages grew upon him. We have already seen him acquiring Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and Erse. He now set about Welsh, Danish, and other tongues, and in pursuit of German he fell in with William Taylor. The meeting had an important influence upon his development. Taylor was a scholar of fine parts, a man deeply versed in German literature at a time when, as Professor Dowden has said, “German characters were as undecipherable to most Englishmen as Assyrian arrow-heads.” He was the friend of Southey, whom he entertained in Norwich at the house, No. 21, King Street, which was the resort of all the wit and learning that centred in the city. Taylor found young Borrow a man after his own heart, took to him readily, and offered to teach him German. It is hardly necessary to say that George accepted such an invitation, nor that he learnt a good deal more than German at the feet of Taylor, whose views on most questions were advanced and unrestricted. The scholar was an agnostic in matters of religion, and an iconoclast in many sorts. His great failing was drunkenness: he ultimately became a sot.

Miss Martineau wrote that:

“In Taylor’s old age . . . his habits of intemperance kept him out of sight of the ladies, and he got around him a set of ignorant and conceited young men, who thought they could set the world right by their destructive propensities. One of his chief favourites was George Borrow, as George Borrow himself has given us to understand. When this polyglot gentleman appeared before the public as a devout agent of the Bible Society in foreign parts, there was one burst of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days.”

Professor Dowden has pleasantly reminded us of the delight Harriet Martineau took in “pricking a literary windbag”; sometimes she pricked more substantial things, and her rapier broke. At any rate, she is hardly a good witness on the subject of Borrow, for no love was lost between the families.

And Taylor, at the time when he took up George, was a man of some consequence in the literary world, apart from “the little Academe” of Norwich. He knew his Kotzebue, his Goethe, his Schiller, his Klopstock; he was in himself a reference library of what was then outlandish knowledge. He raised a bright light above the intellectual circle of the city, in spite of the sarcasm of Harriet Martineau, who rallies his eccentricity, his “defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had rescued him from it, information, given as certain, that ‘God Save the King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon”—and so forth. But his solid claim to consideration is good; he lives as “the Anglo-Germanist” of Borrow’s books rather than as “godless Billy Taylor.”

I have taken leave to doubt that Borrow’s melancholy was the fruit of the theological opinions he acquired from Taylor. Effort has been made to trace all his sufferings to this association, and to the moral disintegration that is supposed to have set in as the result of his intercourse with an atheist. It seems to me an unfair and regrettable imputation. Borrow was destined to go through his Werterian period, and, child of the Celtic spirit that he was, it was bound to be a period of acute strain and stress. He felt all things intensely. If he had not encountered the mocking philosophy of “Billy Taylor” through personal contact, he would have met it elsewhere. It could no more be missed by the youth of 1820 than by the youth of a later century.

What we know with certainty of Taylor is that he was the earliest scholar and critic to divine what there was in George Borrow and to encourage his literary bent. We have to be grateful to him for that. He wrote to Southey:

“A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s ‘Wilhelm Tell,’ with a view of translating it for the Press. His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity; indeed, he has the gift of tongues and, though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.”

The catalogue of Borrow’s languages is thus largely and rapidly extended. We need not stay to inquire how he obtained them all, nor need we assume that his acquaintance with them was in any sense complete or scientific. It was probably little more than a dictionary acquaintance; he had an extraordinary facility for getting the rudiments of a language in a few weeks with little more assistance than the dictionary could supply. His Welsh and Danish studies are the most important to notice here; they had a considerable influence upon the course of his life during the few years now approaching. “Ab Gwilym” and the ballads of the Norsemen obsessed him.

A personage visited Taylor at Norwich in the year 1821 to whom this sort of young man could not fail to be interesting. It was John Bowring, on a business mission to the city. Borrow was a guest at a dinner party given by Taylor in July of that year, when Bowring was present with Lewis Evans, a Welsh doctor who had physicked the army in Spain during the Peninsular War. The philological mood was strong on Borrow—and Bowring was certainly a considerable philologist. He had recently made one of his long journeys on the Continent, combining business pains with literary joys in his accustomed manner, and had compiled an anthology which he described as a “Specimen of Russian Poets.” This collection it was which inspired the present of a diamond ring, conferred on him by Alexander I. A man of such stamp must naturally have appeared something of a hero in the eyes of this youth. Why is it that he makes anything but a heroic figure in Borrow’s works?

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.”