(1) Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces by George Borrow. Norwich: Printed and Published by S. Wilkin, Upper Haymarket, 1826.
(2) Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces by George Borrow. London: Published by John Taylor, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, 1826.
(3) Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces, by George Borrow. London: Published by Wightman and Cramp, 24 Paternoster Row, 1826.
The book contains an introduction in verse by Allan Cunningham, whose acquaintance Borrow seems to have made in London. It commences:
Sing, sing, my friend, breathe life again
Through Norway’s song and Denmark’s strain:
On flowing Thames and Forth, in flood,
Pour Haco’s war-song, fierce and rude.
Cunningham had not himself climbed very far up the literary ladder in 1825, although he was forty-one years of age. At one time a stonemason in a Scots village, he had entered Chantrey’s studio, and was “superintendent of the works” to that eminent sculptor at the time when Borrow called upon him in London, and made an acquaintance which never seems to have extended beyond this courtesy to the younger man’s Danish Ballads. The point of sympathy of course was that in the year 1825 Cunningham had published The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern.
Five hundred copies of the Romantic Ballads were printed in Norwich by S. Wilkin, about two hundred being subscribed for, mainly in that city, the other three hundred being dispatched to London—to Taylor, whose name appears on the London title-page, although he seems to have passed on the book very quickly to Wightman and Cramp, for what reason we are not informed. Borrow tells us that the two hundred subscriptions of half a guinea “amply paid expenses,” but he must have been cruelly disappointed, as he was doomed to be more than once in his career, by the lack of public appreciation outside of Norwich. Yet there were many reasons for this. If Scott had made the ballad popular, he had also destroyed it for a century—perhaps for ever—by substituting the novel as the favourite medium for the storyteller. Great ballads we were to have in every decade from that day to this, but never another “best seller” like Marmion or The Lady of the Lake. Our popular poets had to express themselves in other ways. Then Borrow, although his verse has been underrated by those who have not seen it at its best, or who are incompetent to appraise poetry, was not very effective here, notwithstanding that the stories in verse in Romantic Ballads are all entirely interesting. This fact is most in evidence in a case where a real poet, not of the greatest, has told the same story. We owe a rendering of “The Deceived Merman” to both George Borrow and Matthew Arnold, but how widely different the treatment! The story is of a merman who rose out of the water and enticed a mortal—fair Agnes or Margaret—under the waves; she becomes his wife, bears him children, and then asks to return to earth. Arriving there she refuses to go back when the merman comes disconsolately to the church-door for her. Here are a few lines from the two versions, which demonstrate that here at least Borrow was no poet and that Arnold was a very fine one:
| GEORGE BORROW | MATTHEW ARNOLD |
| “Now, Agnes, Agnes list to me, Thy babes are longing so after thee.” “I cannot come yet, here must I stay Until the priest shall have said his say.” And when the priest had said his say, She thought with her mother at home she’d stay. “O Agnes, Agnes, list to me, Thy babes are sorrowing after thee.” “Let them sorrow and sorrow their fill, But back to them never return I will.” | We climbed on the graves, on the stones
worn with rains, And we gazed up the aisles through the small leaded panes. She sate by the pillar; we saw her clear: “Margaret, hist! come quick, we are here! Dear heart,” I said, “we are long alone; The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.” But, ah, she gave me never a look, For her eyes were sealed on the holy book! Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door. Come away, children, call no more! Come away, come down, call no more! |
It says much for the literary proclivities of Norwich at this period that Borrow should have had so kindly a reception for his book as the subscription list implies. At the end of each of Wilkin’s two hundred copies a “list of subscribers” is given. It opens with the name of the Bishop of Norwich, Dr. Bathurst; it includes the equally familiar names of the Gurdons, Gurneys, Harveys, Rackhams, Hares (then as now of Stow Hall), Woodhouses—all good Norfolk or Norwich names that have come down to our time. Mayor Hawkes, who is made famous in Lavengro by Haydon’s portrait, is there also. Among London names we find John Bowring, Borrow’s new friend, and later to be counted an enemy, Thomas Campbell, Benjamin Haydon and John Timbs. But the name that most strikes the eye is that of “Thurtell.” Three of the family are among the subscribers including Mr. George Thurtell of Eaton, near Norwich, brother of the murderer; there also is the name of John Thurtell, executed for murder exactly a year before. This would seem to imply that Borrow had been a long time collecting these names and subscriptions, and doubtless before the all-too-famous crime of the previous year he had made Thurtell promise to become a subscriber, and, let us hope, had secured his half-guinea. That may account, with so sensitive and impressionable a man as our author, for the kindly place that Weare’s unhappy murderer always had in his memory. Borrow, in any case, was now, for a few years, to become more than ever a vagabond. Not a single further appeal did he make to an unsympathetic literary public for a period of five years at least.