“‘I believe it is the crabbed Gitano,’ muttered Balseiro. ‘It is either that or English, for I understand not a word of it.’
“‘Did I not say to you,’ cried the bullfighter, ‘that you knew nothing of the crabbed Gitano? But this Inglesito does. I understood all he said. Vaya, there is none like him for the crabbed Gitano. He is a good ginete, too; next to myself, there is none like him, only he rides with stirrup leathers too short.—Inglesito, if you have need of money, I will lend you my purse. All I have is at your service, and that is not a little; I have just gained four thousand chulés by the lottery. Courage, Englishman! Another cup. I will pay all—I, Sevilla!’
“And he clapped his hand repeatedly on his breast, reiterating, ‘I, Sevilla! I—’”
Borrow breaks up his own style in the same way with foreign words. As Ford said in his “Edinburgh Review” criticism:
“To use a Gypsy term for a linguist, ‘he knows the seven jargons’; his conversations and his writings resemble an intricate mosiac, of which we see the rich effect, without comprehending the design. . . . Mr. Borrow, in whose mouth are the tongues of Babel, selects, as he dashes along currente calamo, the exact word for any idiom which best expresses the precise idea which sparkles in his mind.”
This habit of Borrow’s should be compared with Lamb’s archaisms, but, better still, with Robert Burton’s interlardation
of English and Latin in “The Anatomy of Melancholy.”
Here again what I may call his spotted dog style is only a part of the whole, and as the whole is effective, we solemnly conclude that this is due in part to the spotted dog. My last word is that here, as always in a good writer, the whole is greater than the mere sum of the parts, just as with a bad writer the part is always greater than the whole. Or a truer way of saying this is that many elements elude discovery, and therefore the whole exceeds the discoverable parts. Nor is this the whole truth, for the mixing is much if not all, and neither Borrow nor any critic knows anything about the mixing, save that the drink is good that comes of it.
CHAPTER XXIII—BETWEEN THE ACTS
Six three-volume editions of “The Bible in Spain” were issued within the first twelve months: ten thousand copies of a cheap edition were sold in four months. In America it was sold rapidly without benefit to Borrow. It was translated into German in 1844 and French in 1845. Borrow came up to town and did not refuse to meet princes, bishops, ambassadors, and members of Parliament. He was pleased and flattered by the sales and the reviews, and declared that he had known it would succeed. He did not quite know what to say to an invitation from the Royal Institution, but as to the Royal Academy, it would “just suit him,” because he was a safe man, he said, fitted by nature for an Academician. He did not think much of episcopal food, wine, or cigars. He was careful of his hero and disliked hearing him abused or treated indifferently. If he had many letters, he answered but few. He had made nothing yet out of literature because the getting about to receive homage, etc., had been so expensive: he did not care, for he hated to speak of money matters, yet he could not but mention the fact. When the money began to arrive he did not resent it by any means, as he was to buy a blood horse with it—no less. His letters have a jolly, bullying, but offhand and jerky tone, and they are very short. He gives Murray advice on publishing and is willing to advise the Government how to manage the Irish—“the blackguards.”