To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall.
Goldington Hall, Bedford, May 24/57[208]
My dear Sir,—Your Book was put into my hands a week ago just as I was leaving London; so I e'en carried it down here, and have been reading it under the best Circumstances:—at such a Season—in the Fields as they now are—and in company with a Friend I love best in the world—who scarce ever reads a Book, but knows better than I do what they are made of from a hint.
Well, lying in a Paddock of his, I have been travelling along with you to Horncastle, etc.,—in a very delightful way for the most part; something as I have travelled, and love to travel, with Fielding, Cervantes, and Robinson Crusoe—and a smack of all these there seems to me, with something beside, in your book. But, as will happen in Travel, there were some spots I didn't like so well—didn't like at all: and sometimes wished to myself that I, a poor 'Man of Taste,' had been at your Elbow (who are a Man of much more than Taste) to divert you, or get you by some means to pass lightlier over some places. But you wouldn't have heeded me, and won't heed me, and must go your own way, I think—And in the parts I least like, I am yet thankful for honest, daring, and original Thought and Speech such as one hardly gets in these mealy-mouthed days. It was very kind of you to send me your book.
My Wife is already established at a House called 'Albert's Villa,' or some such name, at Gorlestone—but a short walk from you: and I am to find myself there in a few days. So I shall perhaps tell you more of my thoughts ere long. Now I shall finish this large Sheet with a Tetrastich of one Omar Khayyám who was an Epicurean Infidel some 500 years ago:
and am yours very truly,
Edward FitzGerald.
In a letter to Cowell about the same time—June 5, 1857—FitzGerald writes that he is about to set out for Gorleston, Great Yarmouth:
Within hail almost lives George Borrow, who has lately published, and given me, two new volumes of Lavengro called Romany Rye, with some excellent things, and some very bad (as I have made bold to write to him—how shall I face him!) You would not like the book at all I think.[210]
It was Cowell, it will be remembered, who introduced FitzGerald to the Persian poet Omar, and afterwards regretted the act. The first edition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám appeared two years later, in 1859. Edward Byles Cowell was born in Ipswich in 1826, and he was educated at the Ipswich Grammar School. It was in the library attached to the Ipswich Library Institution that Cowell commenced the study of Oriental languages. In 1842 he entered the business of his father and grandfather as a merchant and maltster. When only twenty years of age he commenced his friendship with Edward FitzGerald, and their correspondence may be found in Dr. Aldis Wright's FitzGerald Correspondence. In 1850 he left his brother to carry on the business and entered himself at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he passed six years. At intervals he read Greek with FitzGerald and, later, Persian. FitzGerald commenced to learn this last language, which was to bring him fame, when he was forty-four years of age. In 1856 Cowell was appointed to a Professorship of English History at Calcutta, and from there he sent FitzGerald a copy of the manuscript of Omar Khayyám, afterwards lent by FitzGerald to Borrow. Much earlier than this—in 1853—FitzGerald had written to Borrow:
At Ipswich, indeed, is a man whom you would like to know, I think, and who would like to know you; one Edward Cowell: a great scholar, if I may judge.... Should you go to Ipswich do look for him! a great deal more worth looking for (I speak with no sham modesty, I am sure) than yours,—E. F. G.[211]
Twenty-six years afterwards—in 1879—we find FitzGerald writing to Dr. Aldis Wright to the effect that Cowell had been seized with 'a wish to learn Welsh under George Borrow':
And as he would not venture otherwise, I gave him a Note of Introduction, and off he went, and had an hour with the old Boy, who was hard of hearing and shut up in a stuffy room, but cordial enough; and Cowell was glad to have seen the Man, and tell him that it was his Wild Wales which first inspired a thirst for this language into the Professor.[212]
This introduction and meeting are described by Professor Cowell in the following letter:[213]
Cambridge, December 10, 1892.
Dear Sir,—I fear I cannot help you much by my reminiscences of Borrow. I never had the slightest interest in the gipsies, but I always had a corner in my heart for Spain and Wales, and consequently The Bible in Spain and Wild Wales have always been favourite books. But though Borrow's works were well known to me, I never saw him but once, and what I saw of him then made me feel that he was one of those men who put the best part of themselves into their books. We get the pure gold there without the admixture of alloy which daily life seemed to impart.
I was staying one autumn at Lowestoft some ten years or more ago when I asked my dear old friend, Mr. Edward FitzGerald, to give me a letter of introduction to Mr. George Borrow. Armed with this I started on my pilgrimage and took a chaise for Oulton Hall. I remember as we drew near we turned into a kind of drift road through the fields where the long sweeping boughs of the trees hung so low that I lost my hat more than once as we drove along. My driver remarked that the old gentleman would not allow any of his trees to be cut. When we reached the hall I went in at the gate into the farmyard, but I could see nobody about anywhere. I walked up to the front door, but nobody answered my knock except some dogs, who began barking from their kennels. At last in answer to a very loud knock, the door was opened by an old gentleman whom I at once recognised by the engraving to be Borrow himself. I gave him my letter and introduced myself. He replied in a tone of humorous petulance, 'What is the good of your bringing me a letter when I haven't got my spectacles to read it?' However, he took me into his room, where I fancy my knock had roused him from a siesta. We soon got into talk. He began by some unkind remarks about one or two of our common friends, but I soon turned the subject to books, especially Spanish and Welsh books. Here I own I was disappointed in his conversation. I talked to him about Ab Gwilym, whom he speaks so highly of in Wild Wales, but his interest was languid. He did not seem interested when I told him that the London Society of Cymmrodorion were publishing in their journal the Welsh poems of Iolo Goch, the bard of Owen Glendower who fought with our Henry v., two of whose poems Borrow had given spirited translations of in Wild Wales. He told me he had heaps of translations from Welsh books somewhere in his cupboards but he did not know where to lay his hand on them. He did not show me one Welsh or Spanish book of any kind. You may easily imagine that I was disappointed with my interview and I never cared to visit him again. Borrow was a man of real genius, and his Bible in Spain and Wild Wales are unique books in their way, but with all his knowledge of languages he was not a scholar. I should be the last person to depreciate his Sleeping Bard, for I owe a great deal to it as it helped me to read the Welsh original, but it is full of careless mistakes. The very title is wrong; it should not be the Visions of the Sleeping Bard but the Visions of the Bard Sleep, as the bard or prophet Sleep shows the author in a series of dreams—his visions of life, death, and hell, which form the three chapters of the book.
Borrow knew nothing of philology. His strange version of 'Om mani padme hûm' (Oh! the gem in the lotus ho!) must have been taken from some phonetic representation of the sounds as heard by an ignorant traveller in China or Mongolia.
I have written this long letter lured on by my recollections, but after all I can tell you nothing. Surely it is best that Borrow should remain a name; we have the best part of him still living in his best books.
'He gave the people of his best;
His worst he kept, his best he gave.'
I don't see why we should trouble ourselves about his 'worst.' He had his weaker side like all of us, the foolish part of his nature as well as the wise; but 'de mortuis nil nisi bonum' especially applies in such cases.—I remain, dear sir, yours sincerely,
E. B. Cowell.
There is one short letter from FitzGerald to Borrow in Dr. Aldis Wright's FitzGerald Letters. It is dated June 1857 and from it we learn that FitzGerald lent Borrow the Calcutta manuscript of Omar Khayyám, upon which he based his own immortal translation, and from a letter to W. H. Thompson in 1861 we learn that Cowell, who had inspired the writing of FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám, Donne and Borrow were the only three friends to whom he had sent copies of his 'peccadilloes in verse' as he calls his remarkable translation,[214] and this two years after it was published. A letter, dated July 6, 1857,[215] asks for the return of FitzGerald's copy of the Ouseley manuscript of Omar Khayyám, Borrow having clearly already returned the Calcutta manuscript. This letter concludes on a pathetic note:
My old Parson Crabbe is bowing down under epileptic fits, or something like, and I believe his brave old white head will soon sink into the village church sward. Why, our time seems coming. Make way, gentlemen!
Borrow comes more than once into the story of FitzGerald's great translation of Omar Khayyám, which in our day has caused so great a sensation, and deserves all the enthusiasm that it has excited as the
' ... golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well,'
to quote Tennyson's famous eulogy. Cowell, to his after regret, for he had none of FitzGerald's dolce far niente paganism, had sent FitzGerald from Calcutta, where he was, the manuscript of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát in Persian, and FitzGerald was captured by it. Two years later, as we know, he produced the translation, which was so much more than a translation. 'Omar breathes a sort of consolation to me,' he wrote to Cowell. 'Borrow is greatly delighted with your MS. of Omar which I showed him,' he says in another letter to Cowell (June 23, 1857), 'delighted at the terseness so unusual in Oriental verse.'[216]
The next two letters by FitzGerald from my Borrow Papers are of the year 1859, the year of the first publication of the Rubáiyát: