George Borrow: The Man and His Books

by Edward Thomas

The American at Tangier is perplexed by his speaking both Moorish and Gaelic, by hearing from an Irish woman that he is “a fairy man.”

He does not confine himself to the mysterious sublime. He tells us, for example, that Mendizabal, the Prime Minister, was a huge athletic man, “somewhat taller than myself, who measure six-feet-two without my shoes.” Several times he was mistaken for a Jew, and once for a Rabbi, by the Jews themselves. Add to this the expression that he put on for the benefit of the farrier at Betanzos: he was stooping to close the vein that had been opened in the leg of his horse, and he “looked up into the farrier’s face, arching his eyebrows. ‘Carracho! what an evil wizard!’ muttered the farrier, as he walked away.”

In the wilds he grew a beard—he had one at Jaraicejo—and it is perhaps worth noticing this, to rebut the opinion that he could not grow a beard, and that he was therefore as other men are with the same disability. He speaks more

than once of his shedding tears, and at Lisbon he kissed the stone above Fielding’s grave. But these are little things of little importance in the landscape portrait which emerges from the whole of the book, of the grave adventurer, all but always equal in his boldness and his discretion, the lord of those wild ways and wild men, who “rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm” all over Spain.

In brief, he is the very hero that a wondering and waiting audience would be satisfied to see appearing upon such a stage. Except Dante on his background of Heaven and Hell, and Byron on his background of Europe and Time, no writer had in one book placed himself with greater distinction before the world. His glory was threefold. He was the man who was a Gypsy in politics, because he had lived with Gypsies so long. He was the man who said to the Spanish Prime Minister: “It is a pleasant thing to be persecuted for the Gospel’s sake.” He was the man of whom it was said by an enemy, after the affair of Benedict Mol, that Don Jorge was at the bottom of half the knavish farces in Spain.

Very little of Borrow’s effectiveness can seriously be attributed to this or that quality of style, for it will all amount to saying that he had an effective style. But it may be permissible to point out that it is also a style that is unnoticeable except for what it effects. It runs at times to rotten Victorianism, both heavy and vague, as when he calls El Greco or Domenico “a most extraordinary genius, some of whose productions possess merit of a very high order.” He is capable of calling the eye the “orb of vision,” and the moon “the beauteous luminary.” I quote a passage lest it should seem incredible:

“The moon had arisen when we mounted our horses to return to the village, and the rays of the beauteous luminary danced merrily on the rushing waters of the Tagus, silvered the plain over which we were passing, and bathed in a flood

of brightness the bold sides of the calcareous hill of Villaluengo, the antique ruins which crowned its brow. . . .”

Description, taking him away from men and from his active self, often lured him into this kind of thing. And, nevertheless, such is Borrow that I should by no means employ a gentleman of refinement to go over “The Bible in Spain” and cross out the like. It all helps in the total of half theatrical and wholly wild exuberance and robustness. Another minute contributory element of style is the Biblical phrasing. His home and certainly his work for the Society had made him familiar with the Bible. He quotes it several times in passages which bring him into comparison, if not equality, with Jesus and with Paul. A little after quoting, “Ride on, because of the word of righteousness,” he writes: “I repaired to the aqueduct, and sat down beneath the hundred and seventh arch, where I waited the greater part of the day, but he came not, whereupon I arose and went into the city.” He is fond of “even,” saying, for example, or making Judah Lib say, “He bent his way unto the East, even to Jerusalem.” The “beauteous luminary” vein and the Biblical vein may be said to be inseparable from the long cloak, the sombrero, the picturesque romance and mystery of Spain, as they appeared to one for whom romance and mystery alike were never without pomp. But with all his rant he is invariably substantial, never aerial, and he chequers it in a Byronic manner with a sudden prose reference to bugs, or a question, or a piece of dialogue.