“‘The best man in England of my inches. That’s true, Tawno—however, here’s our brother will perhaps let the world know something about us.’”
I should think, too, that Borrow was both questioner and answerer in the conversation with the literary man who had the touching mania:
“‘With respect to your present troubles and anxieties, would it not be wise, seeing that authorship causes you so much trouble and anxiety, to give it up altogether?’
“‘Were you an author yourself,’ replied my host, ‘you would not talk in this manner; once an author, ever an author—besides, what could I do? return to my former state of vegetation? no, much as I endure, I do not wish that; besides, every now and then my reason tells me that these troubles and anxieties of mine are utterly without foundation; that whatever I write is the legitimate growth of my own mind, and that it is the height of folly to afflict myself at any chance resemblance between my own thoughts and those of other writers, such resemblance being inevitable from the fact of our common human origin. . . .”
Knapp gives at length a story showing what an author Borrow was, and how little his travels had sweetened him.
He had long promised to review Ford’s “Handbook for Spain,” when it should appear. In 1845 he wrote an article and sent it in to the “Quarterly” as a review of the Handbook. It had nothing to do with the book and very little to do with the subject of the book, and Lockhart, the “Quarterly” editor, suggested turning it into a review by a few interpolations and extracts. Borrow would not have the article touched. Both Lockhart and Ford advised him to send it to “Fraser’s” or another magazine where it was certain to be welcomed as a Spanish essay by the author of “The Bible in Spain.” But no: and the article was never printed anywhere.
Yet Borrow was not settling down to authorship pure and simple. He flew into a passion because a new railway line, in 1846, ran through his estate. He flew into a passion, did nothing, and remained on his estates until 1853, when he and his family went into lodgings at Yarmouth. I have not discovered how much he profited by the intrusion of the railway, except when he pilloried the contractor, his neighbour, Mr. Peto, as Flamson, in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye.” Then he tried again to be put on the Commission of the Peace, with no success. He probably spent much of his time in being either suspicious, or ambitious, or indignant. In 1847, for example, he suspected his friend Dr. Bowring—his “only friend” in 1842—of using his work to get for himself the consulship at Canton, which he was professing to obtain for Borrow. The result was the foaming abuse of “The Romany Rye,” where Bowring is the old Radical. The affair of the Sinai manuscripts followed close on this. All that he saw of foreign lands was at the Exhibition of 1851, where he frequently accosted foreigners in their own tongue, so that it began to be whispered about that he was “uncanny”: he excited so much remark that his daughter thought it better to drag him away.
He was suffering from ill-health and untranquility of mind which gave his mother anxiety, though his physical strength appears not to have degenerated, for in 1853, at Yarmouth, he rescued a man out of a stormy sea. He was an unpleasant companion for those whom he did not like or could not get on with. Thackeray tried to get up a conversation with him, his final effort being the question, “Have you seen my ‘Snob Papers’ in ‘Punch’?” To which Borrow answered: “In ‘Punch’? It is a periodical I never look at.” He once met Miss Agnes Strickland:
“Borrow was unwilling to be introduced, but was prevailed on to submit. He sat down at her side; before long she spoke with rapture of his works, and asked his permission to send him a copy of her ‘Queens of England.’ He exclaimed, ‘For God’s sake, don’t, madam, I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.’ On this he rose, fuming, as was his wont when offended, and said to Mr. Donne, ‘What a damned fool that woman is!’ The fact is that, whenever Borrow was induced to do anything unwillingly, he lost his temper.” [{208}]
The friend who tells this story, Gordon Hake, a poet and doctor at Bury St. Edmunds, tells also that once when he was at dinner with a banker who had recently “struck the docket” to secure payment from a friend of Borrow’s, and the banker’s wife said to him: “Oh Mr. Borrow, I have read your books with so much pleasure!” the great man exclaimed: “Pray, what books do you mean, madam? Do you mean my account books?” How touchy he was, Mr. Walling shows, by his story of Borrow in Cornwall neglecting a lady all one evening because she bore the name of the man his father had knocked down at Menheniot Fair. Several