George Borrow

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 Dauphiné 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 emigré named d’Éterville.  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 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.