George Borrow: The Man and His Books

by Edward Thomas

He was as sure in 1839 as in 1857 of the diabolic power and intention of Popery, that “unrelenting fiend,” whose secrets few, he said, knew more than himself. [{128a}]

In the gladness of his now fully exerted powers of body and mind, travelling in wild country and observing and conflicting with men, he adopted not merely the unctuous phraseology of “I am at present, thanks be to the Lord, comfortable and happy,” [{128b}] but a more attractive religious arrogance. “That I am an associate of Gypsies and fortune-tellers I do not deny,” he says, “and why should I be ashamed of their company when my Master mingled with publicans and thieves.” [{128c}] He painted himself as a possible martyr among the wild Catholics, a St. Stephen. When he suffered at the same time from hardship and the Society’s disfavour, he exclaimed: “It was God’s will that I, who have risked all and lost almost all in the cause, be taunted, suspected, and the sweat of agony and tears which I have poured out be estimated at the value of the water of the ditch or the moisture which exudes from rotten dung. But I murmur not, and hope I shall at all times be willing to bow to the dispensations of the Almighty.” [{128d}] He exulted in melodramatic nature, in the sublime of Salvator Rosa, in the desperate, wild, and strange. His very prayers, as reported by himself to the Secretary, distressed the Society because they were “passionate.” True, he could sometimes, under the inspiration of the respectable Secretary, write like a perfect middle-class English Christian. He condemned the Sunday amusements of Hamburg, for example, remarking that “England, with all her faults, has still some regard to decency, and

will not tolerate such a shameful display of vice” (as rope-dancing) “in so sacred a season, when a decent cheerfulness is the freest form in which the mind or countenance ought to invest themselves.” [{129a}] He argued against the translator of the Bible into Manchu that concessions should not be made to a Chinese way of thought, because it was the object of the Society to wean the Chinese from their own customs and observances, not to encourage them. But the opposite extreme was more congenial to Borrow. He would go to the market place in a remote Spanish village and display his Testaments on the outspread horsecloth, crying: “Peasants, peasants, I bring you the Word of God at a cheap price.” [{129b}] He would disguise himself, travelling with a sack of Testaments on his donkey; and when a woman asked if it was soap he had, he answered: “Yes; it is soap to wash souls clean.” This was the man to understand Peter Williams, the Welsh preacher who had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost and wandered about preaching and refusing a roof. Neither must it be forgotten that this was the man who, in a conversation not reported to the Bible Society, said: “What befalls my body or soul was written in a gabicote a thousand years before the foundation of the world.”

Borrow was only seven weeks in getting so far as to be able to translate from Manchu, though it had been said, as he pointed out, that the language took five or six years to acquire. It cost him an even shorter time to acquire the dialect of his employers, for in less than a month after he had retired to Norwich to learn Manchu, he was writing thus:

“Revd. and Dear Sir,—I have just received your communication, and notwithstanding it is Sunday morning,

and the bells with their loud and clear voices are calling me to church, I have sat down to answer it by return of post. . . .

“Return my kind and respected friend, Mr. Brandram, my best thanks for his present of ‘The Gypsies’ Advocate,’ and assure him that, next to the acquirement of Mandchou, the conversion and enlightening of those interesting people occupy the principal place in my mind. . . . [{130}]

Never had his linguistic power a greater or more profitable triumph than in this acquisition. As this was probably a dialect not unknown at Earlham, Norwich, and Oulton, among people whom he loved, respected, or beheld successful, the difficulty of the task was a little decreased. Thurtell and Haggart had passed away, Petulengro had not yet reappeared. There was no one to tell him that he was living in a country and an age that were afterwards to appear among the most ignorant and cruel on record. He himself had not yet discovered the “gentility-nonsense,” nor did he ever discover that gentility was of the same family, if it was not an albinism of the same species, as pious and oily respectability. So delighted was he with the new dialect that he rolled it on his tongue to the confusion of habitués, who had to rap him over the knuckles for speaking of becoming “useful to the Deity, to man, and to himself.”

In July, 1833, Borrow was appointed, with a salary of £200 a year and expenses, to go to St. Petersburg, to help in editing a Manchu translation of the New Testament, or transcribing and collating a translation of the Old, accompanied by a warning against “a tone of confidence in speaking of yourself” in such a phrase as “useful to the Deity, to man, and to yourself.” Borrow accepted the correction, and Norwich laughed at him in his new suit.

At the end of July he sailed, and as at this time he had no objection to gentility he regretted the end of his passage with so many “genteel, well-bred and intelligent passengers,” though he had suffered from sea-sickness, followed by “the horrors.”