The Life of George Borrow

by Clement King Shorter

When I knew Mr. Borrow he lived in a lovely cottage whose garden sloped down to the edge of Oulton Broad. He had a wooden room built on the very margin of the water, where he had many strange old books in various languages. I remember he once put one before me, telling me to read it. “Oh, I can’t,” I replied. He said, “You ought, it’s your own language.” It was an old Saxon book. He used to spend a great deal of his time in this room writing, translating, and at times singing strange words in a stentorian voice, while passers-by on the lake would stop to listen with astonishment and curiosity to the singular sounds. He was 6 feet 3 inches, a splendid man, with handsome hands and feet. He wore neither whiskers, beard, nor moustache. His features were very handsome, but his eyes were peculiar, being round and rather small, but very piercing, and now and then fierce. He would sometimes sing one of his Romany songs, shake his fist at me and look quite wild. Then he would ask, “Aren’t you afraid of me?” “No, not at all,” I would say. Then he would look just as gentle and kind, and say, “God bless you, I would not hurt a hair of your head.” He was an expert swimmer, and used to go out bathing, and dive under water an immense time. On one occasion he was bathing with a friend, and after plunging in nothing was seen of him for some while. His friend began to be alarmed, when he heard Borrow’s voice a long way off exclaiming, “There, if that had been written in one of my books they would have said it was a lie, wouldn’t they?” He was very fond of animals, and the animals were fond of him. He would go for a walk with two dogs and a cat following him. The cat would go a quarter of a mile or so and then turn back home. He delighted to go for long walks and enter into conversation with any one he might meet on the road, and lead them into histories of their lives, belongings, and experiences. When they used some word peculiar to Norfolk (or Suffolk) countrymen he would say, “Why, that’s a Danish word.” By and by the man would use another peculiar expression, “Why, that’s Saxon”; a little later on another, “Why, that’s French.” And he would add, “Why, what a wonderful man you are to speak so many languages.” One man got very angry, but Mr. Borrow was quite unconscious that he had given any offence. He spoke a great number of languages, and at the Exhibition of 1851, whither he went with his stepdaughter, he spoke to the different foreigners in their own language, until his daughter saw some of them whispering together and looking as if they thought he was “uncanny,” and she became alarmed and drew him away. He, however, did not like to hear the English language adulterated with the introduction of foreign words. If his wife or friends used a foreign word in conversation, he would say, “What’s that, trying to come over me with strange languages.”

I have gone for many a walk with him at Oulton. He used to go on, singing to himself or quite silent, quite forgetting me until he came to a high hill, when he would turn round, seize my hand, and drag me up. Then he would sit down and enjoy the prospect. He was a great lover of nature, and very fond of his trees. He quite fretted if, by some mischance, he lost one. He did not shoot or hunt. He rode his Arab at times, but walking was his favourite exercise. He was subject to fits of nervous depression. At times also he suffered from sleeplessness, when he would get up and walk to Norwich (25 miles), and return the next night recovered. His fondness for the gypsies has been noticed. At Oulton he used to allow them to encamp in his grounds, and he would visit them, with a friend or alone, talk to them in Romany, and sing Romany songs. He was very fond of ghost stories and believed in the supernatural. He was keenly sympathetic with any one who was in trouble or suffering. He was no man of business and very guileless, and led a very harmless, quiet life at Oulton, spending his evenings at home with his wife and step-daughter, generally reading all the evening. He was very hospitable in his own home, and detested meanness. He was moderate in eating and drinking, took very little breakfast, but ate a very great quantity at dinner, and then had only a draught of cold water before going to bed. He wrote much in praise of “strong ale,” and was very fond of good ale, of whose virtue he had a great idea. Once I was speaking of a lady who was attached to a gentleman, and he asked, “Well, did he make her an offer?” “No,” I said. “Ah,” he exclaimed, “if she had given him some good ale he would.” But although he talked so much about ale I never saw him take much. He was very temperate, and would eat what was set before him, often not thinking of what he was doing, and he never refused what was offered him. He took much pleasure in music, especially of a light and lively character. My sister would sing to him, and I played. One piece he seemed never to tire of hearing. It was a polka, “The Redowa,” I think, and when I had finished he used to say, “Play that again, E—.” He was very polite and gentlemanly in ladies’ society, and we all liked him.

It is refreshing to read this tribute, from which I have omitted nothing salient, because a very disagreeable Borrow has somehow grown up into a tradition. I note in reading some of the reviews of Dr. Knapp’s Life that he is charged, or half-charged, with suppressing facts, “because they do not reflect credit upon the subject of his biography.” Now, there were really no facts to suppress. Borrow was at times a very irritable man, he was a very self-centred one. His egotism might even be pronounced amazing by those who had never met an author. But those of us who have, recognise that with very few exceptions they are all egotists, although some conceal it from the unobservant more deftly than others. Many authors of power have died young and unrecognised; but recognition has usually come to those men of genius who have lived into middle age. It did not come to Borrow. He had therefore a right to be soured. This sourness found expression in many ways. Borrow, most sound of churchmen, actually quarrelled with his vicar over the tempers of their respective dogs. Both the vicar, the Rev. Edwin Proctor Denniss, and his parishioner wrote one another acrid letters. Here is Borrow’s parting shot:

Circumstances over which Mr. Borrow has at present no control will occasionally bring him and his family under the same roof with Mr. Denniss; that roof, however, is the roof of the House of God, and the prayers of the Church of England are wholesome from whatever mouth they may proceed.

Surely that is a kind of quarrel we have all had in our day, and we think ourselves none the less virtuous in consequence. Then there was Borrow’s very natural ambition to be made a magistrate of Suffolk. He tells Mr. John Murray in 1842 that he has caught a bad cold by getting up at night in pursuit of poachers and thieves. “A terrible neighbourhood this,” he adds, “not a magistrate dare do his duty.” And so in the next year he wrote again to the same correspondent:

Present my compliments to Mr. Gladstone, and tell him that the Bible in Spain will have no objection to becoming one of the “Great Unpaid.”

Mr. Gladstone, although he had admired The Bible in Spain, and indeed had even suggested the modification of one of its sentences, did nothing. Lockhart, Lord Clarendon, and others who were applied to were equally powerless or indifferent. Borrow never got his magistracy. To-day no man of equal eminence in literature could possibly have failed of so slight an ambition. Moreover, Borrow wanted to be a J.P., not from mere snobbery as many might, but for a definite, practical object. I am afraid he would not have made a very good magistrate, and perhaps inquiry had made that clear to the authorities. Lastly, there was Borrow’s quarrel with the railway which came through his estate. He had thoughts of removing to Bury, where Dr. Hake lived, or to Troston Hall, once the home of the interesting Capell Lofft. But he was not to leave Oulton. In intervals of holidays, journeys, and of sojourn in Yarmouth it was to remain his home to the end. In 1849 his mother joined him at Oulton. She had resided for thirty-three years at the Willow Lane Cottage. She was now seventy-seven years of age. She lived on near her son as a tenant of his tenant at Oulton Hall until her death nine years later, dying in 1858 in her eighty-seventh year. She lies buried in Oulton Churchyard, with a tomb thus inscribed:

Sacred to the memory of Ann Borrow, widow of Captain Thomas Borrow. She died on the 16th of August 1858, aged eighty-six years and seven months. She was a good wife and a good mother.

During these years at Oulton we have many glimpses of Borrow. Dr. Jessopp, for example, has recorded in The Athenæum newspaper his own hero-worship for the author of Lavengro, whom he was never to meet. This enthusiasm for Lavengro was shared by certain of his Norfolk friends of those days:

Among those friends were two who, I believe, are still alive, and who about the year 1846 set out, without telling me of their intention, on a pilgrimage to Oulton to see George Borrow in the flesh. In those days the journey was not an inconsiderable one; and though my friends must have known that I would have given my ears to be of the party, I suppose they kept their project to themselves for reasons of their own. Two, they say, are company and three are none; two men could ride in a gig for sixty miles without much difficulty, and an odd man often spoils sport. At any rate, they left me out, and one day they came back full of malignant pride and joy and exultation, and they flourished their information before me with boastings and laughter at my ferocious jealousy; for they had seen, and talked with, and eaten and drunk with, and sat at the feet of the veritable George Borrow, and had grasped his mighty hand. To me it was too provoking. But what had they to tell?

They found him at Oulton, living, as they affirmed, in a house which belonged to Mrs. Borrow and which her first husband had left her. The household consisted of himself, his wife, and his wife’s daughter; and among his other amusements he employed himself in training some young horses to follow him about like dogs and come at the call of his whistle. As my two friends were talking with him Borrow sounded his whistle in a paddock near the house, which, if I remember rightly, was surrounded by a low wall. Immediately two beautiful horses came bounding over the fence and trotted up to their master. One put his nose into Borrow’s outstretched hand and the other kept snuffing at his pockets in expectation of the usual bribe for confidence and good behaviour. Borrow could not but be flattered by the young Cambridge men paying him the frank homage they offered, and he treated them with the robust and cordial hospitality characteristic of the man. One or two things they learnt which I do not feel at liberty to repeat.

Mr. Arthur W. Upcher of Sheringham Hall, Cromer, also provided in The Athenæum a quaint reminiscence of Borrow in which he recalled that Lavengro had called upon Miss Anna Gurney. This lady had, assuredly with less guile, treated him much as Frances Cobbe would have done. She had taken down an Arabic grammar, and put it into his hand, asking for explanation of some difficult point which he tried to decipher; but meanwhile she talked to him continuously. “I could not,” said Borrow, “study the Arabic grammar and listen to her at the same time, so I threw down the book and ran out of the room.” He soon after met Mr. Upcher, to whom he made an interesting revelation: