George Borrow and His Circle / Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters of Borrow and His Friends

by Clement King Shorter

'THE CHILDREN OF THE OPEN AIR'

Behold George Borrow, then, in a comfortable home on the banks of Oulton Broad—a family man. His mother—sensible woman—declines her son's invitation to live with the newly-married pair. She remains in the cottage at Norwich where her husband died. The Borrows were married in April 1840, by May they had settled at Oulton. It was a pleasantly secluded estate, and Borrow's wife had £450 a year. He had, a month before his marriage, written to Mr. Brandram to say that he had a work nearly ready for publication, and 'two others in a state of forwardness.' The title of the first of these books he enclosed in his letter. It was The Zincali: Or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain. Mr. Samuel Smiles, in his history of the House of Murray—A Publisher and his Friends—thus relates the circumstances of its publication:—

In November 1840 a tall, athletic gentleman in black called upon Mr. Murray offering a MS. for perusal and publication.... Mr. Murray could not fail to be taken at first sight with this extraordinary man. He had a splendid physique, standing six feet two in his stockings, and he had brains as well as muscles, as his works sufficiently show. The book now submitted was of a very uncommon character, and neither the author nor the publisher were very sanguine about its success. Mr. Murray agreed, after perusal, to print and publish 750 copies of The Gypsies of Spain, and divide the profits with the author.

It was at the suggestion of Richard Ford, then the greatest living English authority on Spain, that Mr. Murray published the book. It did not really commence to sell until The Bible in Spain came a year or so later to bring the author reputation.[144] From November 1840 to June 1841 only three hundred copies had been sold in spite of friendly reviews in some half dozen journals, including The Athenæum and The Literary Gazette. The first edition, it may be mentioned, contained on its title-page a description of the author as 'late agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society in Spain.'[145] There is very marked compression in the edition now in circulation, and a perusal of the first edition reveals many interesting features that deserve to be restored for the benefit of the curious. But nothing can make The Zincali a great piece of literature. It was summarised by the Edinburgh Review at the time as 'a hotch-potch of the jockey, tramper, philologist, and missionary.' That description, which was not intended to be as flattering as it sounds to-day, appears more to apply to The Bible in Spain. But The Zincali is too confused, too ill-arranged a book to rank with Borrow's four great works. There are passages in it, indeed, so eloquent, so romantic, that no lover of Borrow's writings can afford to neglect them. But this was not the book that gypsy-loving Borrow, with the temperament of a Romany, should have written, or could have written had he not been obsessed by the 'science' of his subject. His real work in gypsydom was to appear later in Lavengro and The Romany Rye. For Borrow was not a man of science—a philologist, a folk-lorist of the first order.

No one, indeed, who had read only The Zincali among Borrow's works could see in it any suspicion of the writer who was for all time to throw a glamour over the gypsy, to make the 'children of the open air' a veritable cult, to earn for him the title of 'the walking lord of gypsy lore,' and to lay the foundations of an admirable succession of books both in fact and fiction—but not one as great as his own. The city of Seville, it is clear, with sarcastic letters from Bible Society secretaries on one side, and some manner of love romance on the other, was not so good a place for an author to produce a real book as Oulton was to become. Richard Ford hit the nail on the head when he said with quite wonderful prescience:

How I wish you had given us more about yourself, instead of the extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing about gypsies! I shall give you the rap, on that, and a hint to publish your whole adventures for the last twenty years.[146]

Henceforth Borrow was to write about himself and to become a great author in consequence. For in writing about himself as in Lavengro and The Romany Rye he was to write exactly as he felt about the gypsies, and to throw over them the glamour of his own point of view, the view of a man who loved the broad highway and those who sojourned upon it. In The Gypsies of Spain we have a conventional estimate of the gypsies. 'There can be no doubt that they are human beings and have immortal souls,' he says, even as if he were writing a letter to the Bible Society. All his anecdotes about the gypsies are unfavourable to them, suggestive only of them as knaves and cheats. From these pictures it is a far cry to the creation of Jasper Petulengro and Isopel Berners. The most noteworthy figure in The Zincali is the gypsy soldier of Valdepeñas, an unholy rascal. 'To lie, to steal, to shed human blood'—these are the most marked characteristics with which Borrow endows the gypsies of Spain. 'Abject and vile as they have ever been, the gitános have nevertheless found admirers in Spain,' says the author who came to be popularly recognised as the most enthusiastic admirer of the gypsies in Spain and elsewhere. Read to-day by the lover of Borrow's other books The Zincali will be pronounced a readable collection of anecdotes, interspersed with much dull matter, with here and there a piece of admirable writing. But the book would scarcely have lived had it not been followed by four works of so fine an individuality. Well might Ford ask Borrow for more about himself and less of the extracts from 'blunder-headed old Spaniards.' When Borrow came to write about himself he revealed his real kindness for the gypsy folk. He gave us Jasper Petulengro and the incomparable description of 'the wind on the heath.' He kindled the imagination of men, proclaimed the joys of vagabondage in a manner that thrilled many hearts. He had some predecessors and many successors, but 'none could then, or can ever again,' says the biographer of a later Rye, 'see or hear of Romanies without thinking of Borrow.'[147] In her biography of one of these successors in gypsy lore, Charles Godfrey Leland, Mrs. Pennell discusses the probability that Borrow and Leland met in the British Museum. That is admitted in a letter from Leland to Borrow in my possession. To this letter Borrow made no reply. It was wrong of him. But he was then—in 1873—a prematurely old man, worn out and saddened by neglect and a sense of literary failure. For this and for the other vagaries of those latter years Borrow will not be judged harshly by those who read his story here. Nothing could be more courteous than Borrow's one letter to Leland, written in the failing handwriting—once so excellent—of the last sad decade of his life:

AN APPLICATION FOR A BOOK IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, WITH BORROWS SIGNATURE

22 Hereford Square, Brompton, Nov. 2, 1871.

Sir,—I have received your letter and am gratified by the desire you express to make my acquaintance. Whenever you please to come I shall be happy to see you.—Yours truly,

George Borrow.[148]

The meeting did not, through Leland's absence from London, then take place. Two years later it was another story. The failing powers were more noteworthy. Borrow was by this time dead to the world, as the documents before me abundantly testify. It is not, therefore, necessary to assume, as Leland's friends have all done, that Borrow never replied because he was on the eve of publishing a book of his own about the gypsies. There seems no reason to assume, as Dr. Knapp does and as Leland does, that this was the reason for the unanswered letter: