At another “Bald-faced Hind,” above Fairlop, he used to see the Gypsies, for it was their trysting place. He went in search of them in Wandsworth and Battersea and whereever
they were to be found, from Notting Hill to Epsom Downs, though they were corrupted by loss of liberty and, in his opinion, were destined soon to disappear, “merged in the dregs of the English population.” With them, as with others, his vocabulary was “rich in picturesque words of the high road and dingle.” Once he consented to join a friend in trying Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy” on Gypsy taste. The Gypsy girl was pleased with the seventeenth-century story on which the poem is based, and with some “lovely bits of description,” but she was in the main at first bewildered, and at last unsympathetic and ran away. The beauty of the girl was too much for Borrow’s power of expression—it was “really quite—quite—.” The girl’s companion, a young woman with a child, was smoking a pipe, and Borrow took it out of her mouth and asked her not to smoke till he came again, because the child was sickly and his friend put it down to the tobacco. “It ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,” said Borrow; “fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale tobacco—pheugh!” [{315}] Whether this proves Borrow’s susceptibility to female charm I cannot say, but it seems to me rather to prove a sort of connoisseurship, which is not the same thing.
Just after he was seventy, in 1874, the year of Jasper Petulengro’s death, Borrow left London for Oulton. He was no longer the walker and winter bather of a year or two before, but was frequently at lodgings in Norwich, and seen and noted as he walked in the streets or sat in the “Norfolk.” At Oulton he was much alone and was to be heard “by startled rowers on the lake” chanting verses after his fashion. His remarkable appearance, his solitariness in the neglected house and tangled garden, his conversation with Gypsies whom he allowed to camp on his land,
created something of a legend. Children called after him “Gypsy!” or “Witch!” [{316}] Towards the end he was joined at Oulton by his stepdaughter and her husband, Dr. MacOubrey. In 1879 he was too feeble to walk a few hundred yards, and furious with a man who asked his age. In 1880 he made his will. On July 26, 1881, when he was left entirely alone for the day, he died, after having expected death for some time. He was taken to West Brompton to be buried in that cemetery beside his wife.
CONCLUSION
In his introduction to “The Romany Rye,” [{317}] Hindes Groome gave a long list of Romany Ryes to show that Borrow was neither the only one nor the first. He went on to say that there must have been over a dozen Englishmen, in 1874, with a greater knowledge of the Anglo-Gypsy dialect than Borrow showed in “Romano Lavo-Lil.” He added that Borrow’s knowledge “of the strange history of the Gypsies was very elementary, of their manners almost more so, and of their folk-lore practically nil.” And yet, he concluded, he “would put George Borrow above every other writer on the Gypsies. . . . He communicates a subtle insight into Gypsydom that is totally wanting in the works—mainly philological—of Pott, Liebich . . . and their confrères.” Hindes Groome was speaking, too, from the point of view of a Romany student, not of a critic of human literature. In the same way Borrow stands above other English writers on Spain and Wales, for the insight and life that are lacking in the works of the authorities.
As a master of the living word, Borrow’s place is high, and it is unnecessary to make other claims for him. He was a wilful roamer in literature and the world, who attained to no mastery except over words. If there were many Romany Ryes before Borrow, as there were great men before Agamemnon, there was not another Borrow, as there was not another Homer.
He sings himself. He creates a wild Spain, a wild England, a wild Wales, and in them places himself, the
Gypsies, and other wildish men, and himself again. His outstanding character, his ways and gestures, irresistible even when offensive, hold us while he is in our presence. In these repressed indoor days, we like a swaggering man who does justice to the size of the planet. We run after biographies of extraordinary monarchs, poets, bandits, prostitutes, and see in them magnificent expansions of our fragmentary, undeveloped, or mistaken selves. We love strange mighty men, especially when they are dead and can no longer rob us of property, sleep, or life: we can handle the great hero or blackguard by the fireside as easily as a cat. Borrow, as his books portray him, is admirably fitted to be our hero. He stood six-feet-two and was so finely made that, in spite of his own statement which could not be less than true, others have declared him six-feet-three and six-feet-four. He could box, ride, walk, swim, and endure hardship. He was adventurous. He was solitary. He was opinionated and a bully. He was mysterious: he impressed all and puzzled many. He spoke thirty languages and translated their poetry into verse.
Moreover, he ran away. He ran away from school as a boy. He ran away from London as a youth. He ran away from England as a man. He ran away from West Brompton as an old man, to the Gypsyries of London. He went out into the wilderness and he savoured of it. His running away from London has something grand and allegorical about it. It reminds me of the Welshman on London Bridge, carrying a hazel stick which a strange old man recognised as coming from Craig-y-Dinas, and at the old man’s bidding he went to Craig-y-Dinas and to the cave in it, and found Arthur and his knights sleeping and a great treasure buried. . .