FOOTNOTES:
[193] Borrow had The Sleeping Bard printed at his own expense in Great Yarmouth in 1860, Mr. Murray giving his imprint on the title-page. See Chapter xxxv. p. 404
[194] Which will be published in my edition of Borrow's Collected Works.
[195] Mr. James Barren of The Inverness Courier informs me that Borrow took a well-known route between Fort Augustus and Badenoch, although nowadays it is rarely used, as Wade's Road has been abandoned; it is very dilapidated. It was not quite so bad, he says, in 1858.
[196] Mr. Barron points out to me that as there was no direct railway communication Borrow must have gone to Aberdeen or Huntly, and returned from the latter town to Inverness. He must have taken a steamer from Tobermory to Fort William, and thence probably walked by Glen Spean and Laggan to Kingussie. After that he must have traversed one of the passes leading by Ben Macdhui or the Cairngorms to Aberdeenshire.
[197] Mr. Sheriff Robertson's son kindly sends me the following extract from the diary of his father, James Robertson, Sheriff of Orkney:
'Friday, 26th November, 1858.—In the evening Geo. Petrie called with "Bible Borrow." He is a man about 60, upwards of six feet in height, and of an athletic though somewhat gaunt frame. His hair is pure white though a little bit thin on the top, his features high and handsome, and his complexion ruddy and healthy. He was dressed in black, his surtout was old, his shoes very muddy. He spoke in a loud tone of voice, knows Gaelic and Irish well, quoted Ian Lom, Duncan Ban M'Intyre, etc., is publishing an account of Welsh, Irish, and Gaelic bards. He travelled—on foot principally—from Inverness to Thurso, and is going on to-morrow to Zetland. He walked lately through the upper part of Badenoch, Lochaber, and the adjacent counties, and through Mull, which he greatly admired.... In his rambles he associated exclusively with the lower classes, and when I offered to give him letters of introduction to Wm. F. Skene, Robert Chambers, Joseph Robertson, etc., he declined to accept them. His mother died lately and he was travelling, he said, to divert and throw off his melancholy. He talked very freely on all subjects that one broached, but not with precision, and he appeared to me to be an amiable man and a gentleman, but, withal, something of a projector, if not an adventurer. He is certainly eccentric. I asked him to take wine, etc., and he declined. He said he was bred at the High School of Edinburgh, and that he was there in 1813, and mentioned that he was partly educated in Ireland, and that by birth and descent he is an Englishman.'
CHAPTER XXX
THE ROMANY RYE
George Borrow's three most important books had all a very interesting history. We have seen the processes by which The Bible in Spain was built up from notebooks and letters. We have seen further the most curious apprenticeship by which Lavengro came into existence. The most distinctly English book—at least in a certain absence of cosmopolitanism—that Victorian literature produced was to a great extent written on scraps of paper during a prolonged Continental tour which included Constantinople and Budapest. In Lavengro we have only half a book, the whole work, which included what came to be published as The Romany Rye, having been intended to appear in four volumes. The first volume was written in 1843, the second in 1845, after the Continental tour, which is made use of in the description of the Hungarian, and the third volume in the years between 1845 and 1848. Then in 1852 Borrow wrote out an 'advertisement' of a fourth volume,[198] which runs as follows:
Shortly will be published in one volume. Price 10s. The Rommany Rye, Being the fourth volume of Lavengro. By George Borrow, author of The Bible in Spain.
But this volume did not make an appearance 'shortly.' Its author was far too much offended with the critics, too disheartened it may be to care to offer himself again for their gibes. The years rolled on, much of the time being spent at Yarmouth, a little of it at Oulton. There was a visit to Cornwall in 1854, and another to Wales in the same year. The Isle of Man was selected for a holiday in 1855, and not until 1857 did The Romany Rye appear. The book was now in two volumes, and we see that the word Romany had dropped an 'm':
The Romany Rye: A Sequel to 'Lavengro.' By George Borrow, author of 'The Bible in Spain,' 'The Gypsies of Spain,' etc., 'Fear God, and take your own part.' In Two Volumes. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1857.
Dr. Knapp publishes some vigorous correspondence between Mrs. Borrow and her husband's publisher written prior to the issue of The Romany Rye. 'Mr. Borrow has not the slightest wish to publish the book,' she says. 'The manuscript was left with you because you wished to see it.'[199] This was written in 1855, the wife presumably writing at her husband's dictation. In 1857 the situation was not improved, as Borrow himself writes to Mr. Murray: 'In your last letter you talk of obliging me by publishing my verse. Now is not that speaking very injudiciously?'[200] At last, however, in April 1857, The Romany Rye appeared, and we are introduced once more to many old favourites, to Petulengro, to the Man in Black, and above all to Isopel Berners. The incidents of Lavengro are supposed to have taken place between the 24th May 1825 and the 18th July of that year. In The Romany Rye the incidents apparently occur between 19th July and 3rd August 1825. In the opinion of that most eminent of gypsy experts, Mr. John Sampson,[201] the whole of the episodes in the five volumes occurred in seventy-two days. Mr. Sampson agrees with Dr. Knapp in locating Mumper's Dingle in Momber or Monmer Lane, Willenhall, Shropshire. The dingle has disappeared—it is now occupied by the Monmer Lane Ironworks—but you may still find Dingle Bridge and Dingle Lane. The book has added to the glamour of gypsydom, and to the interest in the gypsies which we all derive from Lavengro, but Mr. Sampson makes short work of Borrow's gypsy learning on its philological side. 'No gypsy,' he says, 'ever uses chal or engro as a separate word, or talks of the dukkering dook or of penning a dukkerin.' 'Borrow's genders are perversely incorrect'; and 'Romany'—a word which can never get out of our language, let philologists say what they will—should have been 'Romani.' '"Haarsträubend" is the fitting epithet,' says Mr. Sampson, 'which an Oriental scholar, Professor Richard Pischel of Berlin, finds to describe Borrow's etymologies.' But all this is very unimportant, and the book remains in the whole of its forty-seven chapters not one whit less a joy to us than does its predecessor Lavengro, with its visions of gypsies and highwaymen and boxers.
But then there is its 'Appendix.' That appendix of eleven petulant chapters undoubtedly did Borrow harm in his day and generation. Now his fame is too great, and his genius too firmly established for these strange dissertations on men and things to offer anything but amusement or edification. They reveal, for example, the singularly non-literary character of this great man of letters. Much—too much—has been made of his dislike of Walter Scott and his writings. As a matter of fact Borrow tells us that he admired Scott both as a prose writer and as a poet. 'Since Scott he had read no modern writer. Scott was greater than Homer,' he told Frances Cobbe. But he takes occasion to condemn his 'Charlie o'er the water nonsense,' and declares that his love of and sympathy with certain periods and incidents have made for sympathy with what he always calls 'Popery.'[202] Well, looking at the matter from an entirely opposite point of view, Cardinal Newman declared that the writings of Scott had had no inconsiderable influence in directing his mind towards the Church of Rome.[203]
During the first quarter of this century a great poet was raised up in the North, who, whatever were his defects, has contributed by his works, in prose and verse, to prepare men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth. The general need of something deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may be considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he re-acted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.[204]
FACSIMILE OF A PAGE OF THE MANUSCRIPT OF THE ROMANY RYE From the Borrow Papers in the possession of the Author of 'George Borrow and his Circle'
And thus we see that Borrow had a certain prescience in this matter. 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. Of Byron he has quaint things to say, and of Wordsworth things that are neither quaint nor wise. We recall the man in the field in the twenty-second chapter of The Romany Rye who used Wordsworth's poetry as a soporific. And throughout his life Borrow's position towards his contemporaries in literature was ever contemptuous. He makes no mention of Carlyle or Ruskin or Matthew Arnold, and they in their turn, it may be added, make no mention of him or of his works. Thackeray he snubbed on one of the few occasions they met, and Browning and Tennyson were alike unrevealed to him. Borrow indeed stands quite apart from the great literature of a period in which he was a striking and individual figure. Lacking appreciation in this sphere of work, he wrote of 'the contemptible trade of author,' counting it less creditable than that of a jockey.
But all this is a digression from the progress of our narrative of the advent of The Romany Rye. The book was published in an edition of 1000 copies in April 1857, and it took thirty years to dispose of 3750 copies. Not more than 2000 copies of his book were sold in Great Britain during the twenty-three remaining years of Borrow's life. What wonder that he was embittered by his failure! The reviews were far from favourable, although Mr. Elwin wrote not unkindly in an article in the Quarterly Review called 'Roving Life in England.' No critic, however, was as severe as The Athenæum, which had called Lavengro 'balderdash' and referred to The Romany Rye as the 'literary dough' of an author 'whose dullest gypsy preparation we have now read.' In later years, when, alas! it was too late, The Athenæum, through the eloquent pen of Theodore Watts, made good amends. But William Bodham Donne wrote to Borrow with adequate enthusiasm: