He began to write his autobiography to fulfil the expectations of Ford and his own public. It was not until 1844, exactly four years after his return from Spain, that he set out again on foreign travel. He made stops at Paris, Vienna, Constantinople, Venice, and Rome, but spent most of his time in Hungary and Roumania, visiting the Gypsies and compiling a “vocabulary of the Gypsy language as spoken in Hungary and Transylvania,” which still exists in manuscript. He was seven months away altogether.
Knapp possessed documents proving that Borrow was at this and that place, and the Gypsy vocabulary is in the
British Museum, but little other record of these seven months remains. Knapp, indeed, takes it for granted that the historical conversation between Borrow and the Magyar in “The Romany Rye” was drawn from his experiences in Hungary and Transylvania in the year 1844; but that is absurd, as the chapter might have been written by a man born and bred in the reading room of the British Museum who had never met any but similar unfortunates. It is very likely that the journey was a failure, and if it had been a success, an account of it would have interrupted the progress of the autobiography, as Ford expected it to do. But the thing was too deliberate to succeed. Borrow’s right instinct was to get work which would take him abroad; he failed, and so he travelled because travel offered him relief from his melancholy and unrest. Whether or no he “satisfied his roving demon for a time,” as Mr. Walling puts it, is unknown. What is known is that he did not make this journey a subject of mystery or boasting, and that he stayed in England thereafter. He had tasted comfort and celebrity; he had a wife; he was an older man, looking weak in the eyes by the time he was fifty; and he had no motive for travel except discontent with staying at home. He tried to get away again on a mission to the Convent of St. Catherine, on Mount Sinai, to acquire manuscripts for the British Museum; but he failed, and the manuscripts went to St. Petersburg instead of Bloomsbury.
In 1843 Henry Wyndham Phillips, R.A., painted his portrait. He was a restless sitter until the painter remarked: “I have always heard, Mr. Borrow, that the Persian is a very fine language; is it so?” “It is, Phillips; it is.” “Perhaps you will not mind reciting me something in the Persian tongue?” said Phillips. “Dear me, no; certainly not.” And then “Mr. Borrow’s face lit up with the light that Phillips longed for, and he kept declaiming
at the top of his voice, while the painter made the most of his opportunity.” [{205}] According to the story, Phillips had the like success with Turkish and Armenian, and successfully stilled Borrow’s desire “to get out into the fresh air and sunlight.”
In the same way, writing and literary ambition kept Borrow from travel. He stayed at home and he wrote “Lavengro,” where, speaking of the rapid flow of time in the years of his youth, he says: “Since then it has flagged often enough; sometimes it has seemed to stand entirely still: and the reader may easily judge how it fares at the present, from the circumstance of my taking pen in hand, and endeavouring to write down the passages of my life—a last resource with most people.” At one moment he got satisfaction from professing scorn of authorship, at another, speaking of Byron, he reflected:
“Well, perhaps after all it was better to have been mighty Milton in his poverty and blindness—witty and ingenious Butler consigned to the tender mercies of bailiffs, and starving Otway; they might enjoy more real pleasure than this lordling; they must have been aware that the world would one day do them justice—fame after death is better than the top of fashion in life. They have left a fame behind them which shall never die, whilst this lordling—a time will come when he will be out of fashion and forgotten. And yet I don’t know; didn’t he write Childe Harold and that ode? Yes, he wrote Childe Harold and that ode. Then a time will scarcely come when he will be forgotten. Lords, squires, and cockneys may pass away, but a time will scarcely come when Childe Harold and that ode will be forgotten. He was a poet, after all—and he must have known it; a real poet, equal to—to—what a destiny!”
It is said that in actual life Borrow refused to be introduced to a Russian scholar “simply because he moved in the literary world.” [{206}]
Yet again he made the glorious Gypsy say that he would rather be a book-writer than a fighting-man, because the book-writers “have so much to say for themselves even when dead and gone”:
“‘When they are laid in the churchyard, it is their own fault if people a’n’t talking of them. Who will know, after I am dead, or bitchadey pawdel, that I was once the beauty of the world, or that you, Jasper, were—’