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. It is clear that the city of Seville, 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’s judgment was sound 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. [148]
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 Valdepenas, 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.” 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:
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.
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 done, that Borrow never replied because he was on the eve of publishing a book of his own about the gypsies.
To George Borrow, Esq.
Langham Hotel, Portland Place, March 31st, 1873.
Dear Sir,—I sincerely trust that the limited extent of our acquaintanceship will not cause this note to seem to you too presuming. Breviter, I have thrown the results of my observations among English gypsies into a very unpretending little volume consisting almost entirely of facts gathered from the Romany, without any theory. As I owe all my interest in the subject to your writings, and as I am sincerely grateful to you for the impulse which they gave me, I should like very much to dedicate my book to you. Of course if your kindness permits I shall submit the proofs to you, that you may judge whether the work deserves the honour. I should have sent you the MS., but not long after our meeting at the British Museum I left for Egypt, whence I have very recently returned, to find my publisher clamorous for the promised copy.
It is not—God knows—a mean and selfish desire to help my book by giving it the authority of your name, which induces this request. But I am earnestly desirous for my conscience’ sake to publish nothing in the Romany which shall not be true and sensible, even as all that you have written is true and sensible. Therefore, should you take the pains to glance over my proof, I should be grateful if you would signify to me any differences of opinion should there be ground for any. Dr. A. F. Pott in his Zigeuner (vol. ii. p. 224), intimates very decidedly that you took the word shastr (Exhastra de Moyses) from Sanskrit and put it into Romany; declaring that it would be very important if shaster were Romany. I mention in my book that English gypsies call the New Testament (also any MS.) a shaster, and that a betting-book on a racecourse is called a shaster “because it is written.” I do not pretend in my book to such deep Romany as you have achieved—all that I claim is to have collected certain words, facts, phrases, etc., out of the Romany of the roads—corrupt as it is—as I have found it to-day. I deal only with the gypsy of the Decadence. With renewed apology for intrusion should it seem such, I remain, yours very respectfully,
Charles G. Leland.
Francis Hindes Groome remarked when reviewing Borrow’s Word Book in 1874, [151] that when The Gypsies of Spain was published in 1841 “there were not two educated men in England who possessed the slightest knowledge of Romany.” In the intervening thirty-three years all this was changed. There was an army of gypsy scholars or scholar gypsies of whom Leland was one, Hindes Groome another, and Professor E. H. Palmer a third, to say nothing of many scholars and students of Romany in other lands. Not one of them seemed when Borrow published his Word Book of the Romany to see that he was the only man of genius among them. They only saw that he was an inferior philologist to them all. And so Borrow, who prided himself on things that he could do indifferently quite as much as upon things that he could do well, suffered once again, as he was so often doomed to suffer, for the lack of appreciation which was all in all to him, and his career went out in a veritable blizzard. He published nothing after his Romano Lavo-Lil appeared in 1874. He was then indeed a broken and a bitter man, with no further interest in life. Dedications of books to him interested him not at all. In any other mood, or a few years earlier, Leland’s book, The English Gypsies, would have gladdened his heart. In his preface Leland expresses “the highest respect for the labours of Mr. George Borrow in this field,” he quotes Borrow continually and with sympathy, and renders him honour as a philologist that has usually been withheld. “To Mr. Borrow is due the discovery that the word jockey is of gypsy origin and derived from chuckiri, which means a whip,” and he credits Borrow with the discovery of the origin of “tanner” for sixpence; he vindicates him as against Dr. A. F. Pott—a prince among students of gypsydom—of being the first to discover that the English gypsies call the Bible the shaster. But there is a wealth of scientific detail in Leland’s books that is not to be found in Borrow’s, as also there is in Francis Hindes Groome’s works. What had Borrow to do with science? He could not even give the word “Rúmani” its accent, and called it “Romany.” He “quietly appropriated,” says Groome, “Bright’s Spanish gypsy words for his own work, mistakes and all, without one word of recognition. I think one has the ancient impostor there.” “His knowledge of the strange history of the gypsies was very elementary, of their manners almost more so, and of their folk-lore practically nil,” says Groome elsewhere. Yet Mr. Hindes Groome readily acknowledges that Borrow is above all writers on the gypsies. “He communicates a subtle insight into gypsydom”—that is the very essence of the matter. Controversy will continue in the future as in the present as to whether the gypsies are all that Borrow thought them. Perhaps “corruption has crept in among them” as it did with the prize-fighters. They have intermarried with the gorgios, thrown over their ancient customs, lost all their picturesque qualities, it may be. But Borrow has preserved in literature for all time, as not one of the philologists and folk-lore students has done, a remarkable type of people. But this is not to be found in his first original work, The Zincali, nor in his last, The Romano Lavo-Lil. This glamour is to be found in Lavengro and The Romany Rye, to which books we shall come in due course. Here we need only refer to the fact that Borrow had loved the gypsies all his life—from his boyish meeting with Petulengro until in advancing years the prototype of that wonderful creation of his imagination—for this the Petulengro of Lavengro undoubtedly was—came to visit him at Oulton. Well might Leland call him “the Nestor of Gypsydom.”
CHAPTER XXI
“The Bible in Spain”
In an admirable appreciation of our author, the one in which he gives the oft-quoted eulogy concerning him as “the delightful, the bewitching, the never-sufficiently-to-be-praised George Borrow,” Mr. Birrell records the solace that may be found by small boys in the ambiguities of a title-page, or at least might have been found in it in his youth and in mine. In those days in certain Puritan circles a very strong line was drawn between what was known as Sunday reading, and reading that might be permitted on week-days. The Sunday book must have a religious flavour. There were magazines with that particular flavour, every story in them having a pious moral withal. Very closely watched and scrutinised was the reading of young people in those days and in those circles. Mr. Birrell, doubtless, speaks from autobiographical memories when he tells us of a small boy with whose friends The Bible in Spain passed muster on the strength of its title-page. For Mr. Birrell is the son of a venerated Nonconformist minister; and perhaps he, or at least those who were of his household, had this religious idiosyncrasy. It may be that the distinction which pervaded the evangelical circles of Mr. Birrell’s youth as to what were Sunday books, as distinct from books to be read on week-days, has disappeared. In any case think of the advantage of the boy of that generation who was able to handle a book with so unexceptionable a title as The Bible in Spain. His elders would succumb at once, particularly if the boy had the good sense to call their attention to the sub-title—“The Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula.” Nothing could be said by the most devout of seniors against so prepossessing a title-page. But what of the boy who had thus passed the censorship? What a revelation of adventure was open to him. Perhaps he would skip the “preachy” parts in which Borrow was doubtless sincere, although the sincerity has so uncertain a ring to-day. Here are five passages, for example, which do not seem to belong to the book:
In whatever part of the world I, a poor wanderer in the Gospel’s cause, may chance to be
very possibly the fate of St. Stephen might overtake me; but does the man deserve the name of a follower of Christ who would shrink from danger of any kind in the cause of Him whom he calls his Master? “He who loses his life for my sake shall find it,” are words which the Lord Himself uttered. These words were fraught with consolation to me, as they doubtless are to every one engaged in propagating the Gospel, in sincerity of heart, in savage and barbarian lands.
Unhappy land! not until the pure light of the Gospel has illumined thee, wilt thou learn that the greatest of all gifts is charity!
and I thought that to convey the Gospel to a place so wild and remote might perhaps be considered an acceptable pilgrimage in the eyes of my Maker. True it is that but one copy remained of those which I had brought with me on this last journey; but this reflection, far from discouraging me in my projected enterprise, produced the contrary effect, as I called to mind that, ever since the Lord revealed Himself to man, it has seemed good to Him to accomplish the greatest ends by apparently the most insufficient means; and I reflected that this one copy might serve as an instrument for more good than the four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine copies of the edition of Madrid.
I shall not detain the course of my narrative with reflections as to the state of a Church which, though it pretends to be founded on scripture, would yet keep the light of scripture from all mankind, if possible. But Rome is fully aware that she is not a Christian Church, and having no desire to become so, she acts prudently in keeping from the eyes of her followers the page which would reveal to them the truths of Christianity.