George Borrow: The Man and His Books

by Edward Thomas

In these days when it is a remarkable thing if an author has his pocket picked, or narrowly escapes being in a ship that is wrecked, or takes poison when he is young, even the

outline of Borrow’s life is attractive. Like Byron, Ben Jonson, and Chaucer, he reminds us that an author is not bound to be a nun with a beard. He depicts himself continually, at all ages, and in all conditions of pathos or pride. Other human beings, with few exceptions, he depicts only in relation to himself. He never follows men and women here and there, but reveals them in one or two concentrated hours; and either he admires or he dislikes, and there is no mistaking it. Thus his humour is limited by his egoism, which leads him into extravagance, either to his own advantage or to the disadvantage of his enemies.

He kept good company from his youth up. Wistful or fancifully envious admiration for the fortunate simple yeomen, or careless poor men, or noble savages, or untradesmanlike fishermen, or unromanized Germani, or animals who do not fret about their souls, admiration for those in any class who are not for the fashion of these days, is a deep-seated and ancient sentiment, akin to the sentiment for childhood and the golden age. Borrow met a hundred men fit to awaken and satisfy this admiration in an age when thousands can over-eat and over-dress in comfort all the days of their life. Sometimes he shows that he himself admires in this way, but more often he mingles with them as one almost on an equality with them, though his melancholy or his book knowledge is at times something of a foil. He introduces us to fighting men, jockeys, thieves, and ratcatchers, without our running any risk of contamination. Above all, he introduces us to the Gypsies, people who are either young and beautiful or strong, or else witch-like in a fierce old age.

Izaak Walton heard the Gypsies talking under the honeysuckle hedge at Waltham, and the beggar virgin singing:

“Bright shines the sun, play, beggars play!
Here’s scraps enough to serve to-day.”

Glanvill told of the poor Oxford scholar who went away with the Gypsies and learnt their “traditional kind of learning,” and meant soon to leave them and give the world an account of what he had learned. Men like George Morland have lived for a time with Gypsies. Matthew Arnold elaborated Glanvill’s tale in a sweet Oxford strain. All these things delight us. Some day we shall be pleased even with the Gypsy’s carrion-eating and thieving, “those habits of the Gypsy, shocking to the moralist and sanitarian, and disgusting to the person of delicate stomach,” which please Mr. W. H. Hudson “rather than the romance and poetry which the scholar-Gypsy enthusiasts are fond of reading into him.” Borrow’s Gypsies are wild and uncoddled and without sordidness, and will not soon be superseded. They are painted with a lively if ideal colouring, and they live only in his books. They will not be seen again until the day of Jefferies’ wild England, “after London,” shall come, and tents are pitched amidst the ruins of palaces that had displaced earlier tents. Borrow’s England is the old England of Fielding, painted with more intensity because even as Borrow was travelling the change was far advanced, and when he was writing had been fulfilled. And now most people have to keep off the grass, except in remotest parts or in the neighbourhood of large towns where landowners are, to some extent, kept in their place. The rivers, the very roads, are not ours, as they were Borrow’s. We go out to look for them still, and of those who adventure with caravan, tent, or knapsack, the majority must be consciously under Borrow’s influence.

Yet he was no mere lover and praiser of old times. His London in 1825 is more romantic than the later London of more deliberate romances: he found it romantic; he did not merely think it would be so if only we could see it. He loved the old and the wild too well to deface his feeling by

more than an occasional comparison with the new and the refined, and these comparisons are not effective.

He is best when he is without apparent design. As a rule if he has a design it is too obvious: he exaggerates, uses the old-fashioned trick of re-appearance and recognition, or breaks out into heavy eloquence of description or meditation. These things show up because he is the most “natural” of writers. His style is a modification of the style of his age, and is without the consistent personal quality of other vigorous men’s, like Hazlitt or Cobbett. Perhaps English became a foreign language like his other thirty. Thus his books have no professional air, and they create without difficulty the illusion of reality. This lack of a literary manner, this appearance of writing like everybody else in his day, combines, with his character and habits, to endear him to a generation that has had its Pater and may find Stevenson too silky.