It came to pass that after a while I wrote my book on “The English Gypsies and their Language,” and sent a note
to Mr. Borrow in which I asked permission to dedicate it to him. I sent it to the care of Mr. Murray, who subsequently assured me that Mr. Borrow had actually received it. Now Mr. Borrow had written thirty years before some sketches and fragments on the same subject, which would, I am very certain, have remained unpublished to this day but for me. He received my note on Saturday—never answered it—and on Monday morning advertised in all the journals his own forthcoming work on the same subject.
Now, what is sincere truth is, that when I learned this I laughed. I thought very little of my own work, and if Mr. Borrow had only told me that it was in the way of his I would have withdrawn it at once, and that with right goodwill, for I had so great a respect for the Nestor of gypsyism that I would have been very glad to have gratified him with such a small sacrifice. But it was not in him to suspect or imagine so much common decency in any human heart, and so he craftily, and to my great delight and satisfaction, “got ahead” of me. For, to tell the truth of truth, I was pleased to my soul that I had caused him to make and publish the work.
I have said too hastily that it was written thirty years before. What I believe is, that Mr. Borrow had by him a vocabulary, and a few loose sketches, which he pitchforked together, but that the book itself was made and cemented into one with additions for the first time after he received my note. He was not, take him altogether, over-scrupulous. Sir Patrick Colquhoun told me that once when he was at Constantinople, Mr. Borrow came there, and gave it out that he was a marvellous Oriental scholar. But there was great scepticism on this subject at the Legation, and one day at the table-d’hôte, where the great writer and divers young diplomatists dined, two who were seated on either side of Borrow began to talk in Arabic, speaking to him, the result being that he was obliged to confess that he not only did not understand what they were saying, but did not even know
what the language was. Then he was tried in Modern Greek, with the same result. The truth was that he knew a great deal, but did all in his power to make the world believe it was far more—like the African king, or the English prime minister, who, the longer his shirts were made, insisted on having the higher collars, until the former trailed on the ground and the latter rose above the top of his head—“when they came home from the wash!”
What I admire in Borrow to such a degree that before it his faults or failings seem very trifling, is his absolutely vigorous, marvellously varied originality, based on direct familiarity with Nature, but guided and cultured by the study of natural, simple writers, such as Defoe and Smollett. I think that the “interest” in or rather sympathy for gypsies, in his case as in mine, came not from their being curious or dramatic beings, but because they are so much a part of free life, of out-of-doors Nature; so associated with sheltered nooks among rocks and trees, the hedgerow and birds, river-sides, and wild roads. Borrow’s heart was large and true as regarded English rural life; there was a place in it for everything which was of the open air and freshly beautiful. He was not a view-hunter of “bits,” trained according to Ruskin and the deliberate word-painting of a thousand novels and Victorian picturesque poems; but he often brings us nearer to Nature than they do, not by photography, but by casually letting fall a word or trait, by which we realise not only her form but her soul. Herein he was like Washington Irving, who gives us the impression of a writer who was deeply inspired with calm sweet sunny views of Nature, yet in whose writings literal description is so rarely introduced, that it is a marvel how much the single buttercup lights up the landscape for a quarter of a mile, when a thousand would produce no effect whatever. This may have possibly been art in Irving—art of the most subtle kind—but in Borrow it was instinct, and hardly intentional. In this respect he was superior even to Whitman.
And here I would say, apropos of Carlyle, Tennyson, Irving, Borrow, Whitman, and some others whom I have met, that with such men in only one or two interviews, one covers more ground and establishes more intimacy than with the great majority of folk whom we meet and converse with hundreds of times. Which fact has been set forth by Wieland in his work on Democritus or the Abderites so ingeniously, as people expressed it a century ago, or so cleverly, as we now say, or so sympathetically, as an Italian would say, that my pen fails to utter the thoughts which arise in me compared to what he has written.
When the summer came, or on the 1st of August, we started on a grand tour about England. First we went to Salisbury. I was deeply interested in the Cathedral there, because it is possibly the only great Gothic structure of the kind in Europe which was completed in a single style during a single reign. Stonehenge was to me even more remarkable, because it is more mysterious. Its stupendous barbarism or archaic character, involving a whole lost cycle of ideas, contrasts so strangely with the advanced architectural skill displayed in the cutting and fitting of the vast blocks, that the whole seems to be a mighty paradox. This was the work of many thousands of men—of very well directed labour under the supervision of architects who could draw and measure skilfully with a grand sense of proportion or symmetry, who had, however, not attained to ornament—a thing without parallel in humanity. This is absolutely bewildering, as is the utter want of all indication as to its real purpose. The old British tradition that the stones were brought by magic from Africa, coupled with what Sir John Lubbock and others declare as to similar remains on the North African coast, suggest something, but what that was remains to be discovered. Men have, however, developed great works of the massive and simple order in poetry, as well as in architecture. The Nibelungen Lied is a Stonehenge. There are in it only one or two similes or decorations. “Simplicity is its sole ornament.”
From Salisbury we went to Wells. The cathedrals of England form the pages of a vast work in which there is written the history of a paradox or enigma as marvellous as that of Stonehenge; and it is this—that the farther back we go, even into a really barbarous age, almost to the time when Roman culture had died and the mediæval had not begun, the more exquisite are the proportions of buildings, the higher their tone, and, as in the case of Early and Decorated English, the more beautiful their ornament. That is to say, that exactly in the time when, according to all our modern teaching and ideas, there should have been no architectural art, it was most admirably developed, while, on the contrary, in this end of the nineteenth century, when theory, criticism, learning, and science abound, it is in its lowest and most depraved state, its highest flights aiming at nothing better than cheap imitation of old examples. The age which produced the Romanesque architecture, whether in northern Italy, along the Rhine as the Lombard, or in France and England as Norman, was extremely barbarous, bloody, and illiterate; and yet in the noblest and grandest conceptions of architectural art it surpassed all the genius of this our time as the sun surpasses a star. While we know that man has advanced, it still remains true that the history of architecture alone for the past thousand years indicates a steady retrogression and decay in art, and this constitutes the stupendous paradox to which I have alluded. But Milton has fully explained to us that when the devils in hell built the first great temple or palace—Pandemonium—they achieved the greatest work of architecture ever seen!
York Cathedral made on me a hundred times deeper and more sympathetic impression than St. Peter’s of Rome. There is a grandeur of unity and a sense of a single cultus in it which the Renaissance never reached in anything. Even from the days of Orcagna there is an element of mixed motives and incoherence in the best of Italian architecture and sculpture. It requires colour to effect that which Norman