George Borrow: The Man and His Books

by Edward Thomas

In 1826 he was in Norwich: the “Romantic Ballads” were published there, and in May he received a letter from Allan Cunningham, whose cheery commendatory verses ushered in the book. The letter suggests that Borrow was indolent from apathy. The book had no success or notice, which Knapp puts down to his not sending out presentation copies. “I judge, however,” says he, “that he sent one to Walter Scott, and that that busy writer forgot to acknowledge the courtesy. Borrow’s lifelong hostility to Scott would thus be accounted for;” but the hostility is his reason for supposing that the copy was sent. Some time afterwards, in 1826, he was at 26, Bryanstone Street, Portman Square, and was to sit for the artist, B. R. Haydon, before going off to the South of France. If he went, he may have paid the visits to Paris, Bayonne, Italy and Spain, which he alludes to in “The Bible in Spain”; he may, as Dr. Knapp suggests, have covered the ground of Murtagh’s alleged travels in “The Romany Rye,” and have been at Pau, with Quesada’s army marching to Pamplona, at Torrelodones, and at Seville. But in a letter to the Bible Society in 1838 he spoke of his earlier acquaintance with Spain being confined almost entirely to Madrid. It may

be true, as he says in “The Zincali,” that “once in the south of France, when he was weary, hungry, and penniless, he observed one of these patterans or Gypsy trails, and, following the direction pointed out, arrived at the resting place of some Gypsies, who received him with kindness and hospitality on the faith of no other word of recommendation than patteran.” It may be true that he wandered in Italy, and rested at nightfall by a kiln “about four leagues from Genoa.” But by April, 1827, he must have been back in Norwich, according to Knapp, to see Marshland Shales at the fair. Knapp gives certain proof that he was there between September and December. Thereafter, if Knapp was right, he was translating Vidocq’s “Memoirs.” In 1829 again he was in London, at 17, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and was projecting with John Bowring a collection of “Songs of Scandinavia.” He applied for work to the Highland Society and to the British Museum, in 1830. In that summer he was at 7, Museum Street, Bloomsbury. He was not satisfied with his work or its remuneration. He thought of entering the French Army, of going to Greece, of getting work, with Bowring’s help, under the Belgian Government. His name “had been down for several years” for the purchase of a commission in the English Army, and Bowring offered to recommend him to “a corps in one of the Eastern Colonies,” where he could perfect his Arabic and Persian. In 1842 he wrote a letter to Bowring, printed by Mr. Walling, asking for “as many of the papers and manuscripts which I left at yours some twelve years ago, as you can find,” and for advice and a loan of books, and promising that Murray will send a copy of “The Bible in Spain” to “my oldest, I may say my only friend.” But whatever Bowring’s help, Borrow was “drifting on the sea of the world, and likely to be so,” and especially hurt because of the figure he must cut in the eyes of his own people. Was it now, or when he

was bookkeeper at the inn in 1825, that he saw so much of the ways of commercial travellers? [{114}]

It is not necessary to quote from the metrical translations, probably of this period, “selections from a huge, undigested mass of translation, accumulated during several years devoted to philological pursuits,” published in “The Targum” of 1835. They were made from originals in the Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Tartar, Tibetian, Chinese, Mandchou, Russian, Malo-Russian, Polish, Finnish, Anglo-Saxon, Ancient Norse, Suabian, German, Dutch, Danish, Ancient Danish, Swedish, Ancient Irish, Irish, Gaelic, Ancient British, Cambrian British, Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, Provençal, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Rommany.

I will, however, quote from “The Sleeping Bard, or Visions of the World, Death and Hell,” his translation of Elis Wyn’s “Y Bardd Cwsg.” The book would please Borrow, because in the City of Perdition Rome stands at the gate of Pride, and the Pope has palaces in the streets of Pleasure and of Lucre; because the Church of England is the fairest part of the Catholic Church, surmounted by “Queen Anne on the pinnacle of the building, with a sword in each hand”; and because the Papist is turned away from the Catholic Church by a porter with “an exceedingly large Bible.” “One fair morning,” he begins:

“One fair morning of genial April, when the earth was green and pregnant, and Britain, like a paradise, was wearing splendid liveries, tokens of the smile of the summer sun, I was walking upon the bank of the Severn, in the midst of the sweet notes of the little songsters of the wood, who appeared to be striving to break through all the measures of music, whilst pouring forth praise to the Creator. I, too, occasionally raised my voice and warbled with the feathered

choir, though in a manner somewhat more restrained than that in which they sang; and occasionally read a portion of the book of ‘The Practice of Godliness.’”

And in his vision he saw fiends drive men and women through the foul river of the Fiend to their eternal damnation, where

“I at the first glance saw more pains and torments than the heart of man can imagine or the tongue relate; a single one of which was sufficient to make the hair stand erect, the blood to freeze, the flesh to melt, the bones to drop from their places—yea, the spirit to faint. What is empaling or sawing men alive, tearing off the flesh piecemeal with iron pincers, or broiling the flesh with candles, collop fashion, or squeezing heads flat in a vice, and all the most shocking devices which ever were upon earth, compared with one of these? Mere pastime! There were a hundred thousand shoutings, hoarse cries, and strong groans; yonder a boisterous wailing and horrible outcry answering them, and the howling of a dog is sweet, delicious music when compared with these sounds. When we had proceeded a little way onward from the accursed beach, towards the wild place of Damnation, I perceived, by their own light, innumerable men and women here and there; and devils without number and without rest, incessantly employing their strength in tormenting. Yes, there they were, devils and damned, the devils roaring with their own torments, and making the damned roar by means of the torments which they inflicted upon them. I paid particular observation to the corner which was nearest me. There I beheld the devils with pitchforks, tossing the damned up into the air that they might fall headlong on poisoned hatchets or barbed pikes, there to wriggle their bowels out. After a time the wretches would crawl in multitudes, one upon another, to the top of one of the burning crags, there to be broiled like mutton; from there they would be

snatched afar, to the top of one of the mountains of eternal frost and snow, where they would be allowed to shiver for a time; thence they would be precipitated into a loathsome pool of boiling brimstone, to wallow there in conflagration, smoke and the suffocation of horrible stench; from the pool they would be driven to the marsh of Hell, that they might embrace and be embraced by the reptiles, many times worse than serpents and vipers; after allowing them half an hour’s dalliance with these creatures the devils would seize a bundle of rods of steel, fiery hot from the furnace, and would scourge them till their howling, caused by the horrible inexpressible pain which they endured, would fill the vast abode of darkness, and when the fiends deemed that they had scourged them enough, they would take hot irons and sear their bloody wounds. . . .”