To Mrs. George Borrow
Ballina, County Mayo, Thursday Morning.
My dear Carreta,—I write to you a few lines. I have now walked 270 miles, and have passed through Leinster and Connaught. I have suffered a good deal of hardship, for this is a very different country to walk in from England. The food is bad and does not agree with me. I shall be glad to get back, but first of all I wish to walk to the Causeway. As soon as I have done that I shall get on railroad and return, as I find there is a railroad from Londonderry to Dublin. Pray direct to me at Post Office, Londonderry. I have at present about seven pounds remaining, perhaps it would bring me back to Dublin; however, to prevent accidents, have the kindness to enclose me an order on the Post Office, Londonderry, for five pounds. I expect to be there next Monday, and to be home by the end of the week. Glad enough I shall be to get back to you and Hen. I got your letter at Galway. What you said about poor Flora was comforting—pray take care of her. Don’t forget the order. I hope to write in a day or two a kind of duplicate of this. I send Hen. heath from Connemara, and also seaweed from a bay of the Atlantic. I have walked across Ireland; the country people are civil; but I believe all classes are disposed to join the French. The idolatry and popery are beyond conception. God bless you, dearest.
George Borrow.
Love to Hen. and poor Flora. (Keep this.)
CHAPTER XXIX
“the romany rye”
George Borrow’s three most important books had all a very interesting history. We have seen the processes by which The Bible in Spain was built up from note-books and letters. We have seen further the most curious apprenticeship by which Lavengro came into existence. The most distinctly English book—at least in a certain absence of cosmopolitanism—that Victorian literature produced was to a great extent written on scraps of paper during a prolonged Continental tour which included Constantinople and Budapest. In Lavengro we have only half a book, the whole work, which included what came to be published as The Romany Rye, having been intended to appear in four volumes. The first volume was written in 1843, the second in 1845, after the Continental tour, which is made use of in the description of the Hungarian, and the third volume in the years between 1845 and 1848. Then in 1852 Borrow wrote out an “advertisement” of a fourth volume, which runs as follows:
Shortly will be published in one volume. Price 10s. The Rommany Rye, Being the fourth volume of Lavengro. By George Borrow, author of The Bible in Spain.
But this volume did not make an appearance “shortly.” Its author was far too much offended with the critics, too disheartened it may be to care to offer himself again for their gibes. The years rolled on, much of the time being spent at Yarmouth, a little of it at Oulton. There was a visit to Cornwall in 1854, and another to Wales in the same year. The Isle of Man was selected for a holiday in 1855, and not until 1857 did The Romany Rye appear. The book was now in two volumes, and we see that the word Romany had dropped an “m”:
The Romany Rye: A Sequel to “Lavengro.” By George Borrow, author of “The Bible in Spain,” “The Gypsies of Spain,” etc., “Fear God, and take your own part.” In Two Volumes. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1857.
We are introduced once more to many old favourites, to Petulengro, to the Man in Black, and above all to Isopel Berners. The incidents of Lavengro are supposed to have taken place between the 24th May, 1825, and the 18th July of that year. In The Romany Rye the incidents apparently occur between 19th July and 3rd August, 1825. In the opinion of that most eminent of gypsy experts, Mr. John Sampson, the whole of the episodes in the five volumes occurred in seventy-two days. Mr. Sampson agrees with Dr. Knapp in locating Mumper’s Dingle in Momber or Monmer Lane, Willenhall, Shropshire. The dingle has disappeared—it is now occupied by the Monmer Lane Ironworks—but you may still find Dingle Bridge and Dingle Lane. The book has added to the glamour of gypsydom, and to the interest in the gypsies which we all derive from Lavengro, but Mr. Sampson makes short work of Borrow’s gypsy learning on its philological side. “No gypsy,” he says, “ever uses chal or engro as a separate word, or talks of the dukkering dook or of penning a dukkerin.” “Borrow’s genders are perversely incorrect”; and “Romany”—a word which can never get out of our language, let philologists say what they will—should have been “Romani.” “‘Haarsträubend’ is the fitting epithet,” says Mr. Sampson, “which an Oriental scholar, Professor Richard Pischel of Berlin, finds to describe Borrow’s etymologies.” But all this is very unimportant, and the book remains in the whole of its forty-seven chapters not one whit less a joy to us than does its predecessor Lavengro, with its visions of gypsies and highwaymen and boxers.
But then there is its “Appendix.” That appendix of eleven petulant chapters undoubtedly did Borrow harm in his day and generation. Now his fame is too great, and his genius too firmly established for these strange dissertations on men and things to offer anything but amusement or edification. They reveal, for example, the singularly non-literary character of this great man of letters. Much—too much—has been made of his dislike of Walter Scott and his writings. As a matter of fact Borrow tells us that he admired Scott both as a prose writer and as a poet. “Since Scott he had read no modern writer. Scott was greater than Homer,” he told Frances Cobbe. But he takes occasion to condemn his “Charlie o’er the water nonsense,” and declares that his love of and sympathy with certain periods and incidents have made for sympathy with what he always calls “Popery.” Well, looking at the matter from an entirely opposite point of view, Cardinal Newman declared that the writings of Scott had had no inconsiderable influence in directing his mind towards the Church of Rome.
During the first quarter of this century a great poet was raised up in the North, who, whatever were his defects, has contributed by his works, in prose and verse, to prepare men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth. The general need of something deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may be considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he re-acted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.
And thus we see that Borrow had a certain prescience in this matter. But Borrow, in good truth, cared little for modern English literature. His heart was entirely with the poets of other lands—the Scandinavians and the Kelts. In Virgil he apparently took little interest, nor in the great poetry of Greece, Rome and England, although we find a reference to Theocritus and Dante in his books. Fortunately for his fame he had read Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and, above all, Robinson Crusoe, which last book, first read as a boy of six, coloured his whole life. Defoe and Fielding and Bunyan were the English authors to whom he owed most. Of Byron he has quaint things to say, and of Wordsworth things that are neither quaint nor wise. We recall the man in the field in the twenty-second chapter of The Romany Rye who used Wordsworth’s poetry as a soporific. And throughout his life Borrow’s position towards his contemporaries in literature was ever contemptuous. He makes no mention of Carlyle or Ruskin or Matthew Arnold, and they in their turn, it may be added, make no mention of him or of his works. Thackeray he snubbed on one of the few occasions they met, and Browning and Tennyson were alike unrevealed to him. Borrow indeed stands quite apart from the great literature of a period in which he was a striking and individual figure. Lacking appreciation in this sphere of work, he wrote of “the contemptible trade of author,” counting it less creditable than that of a jockey.