“‘You do not speak the language very correctly,’ said I; ‘it is not Sas you should call me—’tis Sassanach,’ and forthwith I accompanied the word with a speech full of flowers of Irish rhetoric.
“The man looked upon me for a moment, fixedly, then, bending his head towards his breast, he appeared to be undergoing a kind of convulsion, which was accompanied by a sound something resembling laughter; presently he looked at me, and there was a broad grin on his features.
“‘By my shoul, it’s a thing of peace I’m thinking ye.’
“But now with a whisking sound came running down the road a hare; it was nearly upon us before it perceived us; suddenly stopping short, however, it sprang into the bog on the right-hand side; after it amain bounded the dog of peace, followed by the man, but not until he had nodded to me a farewell salutation. In a few moments I lost sight of him amidst the snow-flakes.”
This is more magical than nine-tenths of the deliberately Celtic prose or verse. I mean that it is real and credible and yet insubstantial, the too too solid flesh is melted into something like the mist over the bogland, and it recalls to us times when an account of our physical self, height, width, weight, colour, age, etc., would bear no relation whatever to the true self. In part, this effect may be due to Ireland and to the fact that Borrow was only there for one short impressionable year of his boyhood, and had never seen any other country like it. But most of it is due to Borrow’s nature and the conditions under which the autobiography was composed. While he was writing it he was probably living a more solitary and sedentary life than ever before, and could hear the voices of solitude; he was not the busy
riding missionary of “The Bible in Spain,” nor the fêted author, but the unsocial morbid tinker, philologist, boxer, and religious doubter. It has been said that “he was a Celt of Celts. His genius was truly Celtic.” [{218a}] It has been said that “he inherited nothing from Norfolk save his accent and his love of ‘leg of mutton and turnips.’” [{218b}] Yet his father, the Cornish “Celt,” appears to have been entirely unlike him, while he draws his mother, the Norfolk Huguenot, as innately sympathetic with himself. I am content to leave this mystery for Celts and anti-Celts to grow lean on. I have known Celts who said that five and five were ten or, at most, eleven; and Saxons who said twenty-five, and even fifty-five.
Borrow was writing without note books: things had therefore in his memory the importance which his nature had decreed for them, and among these things no doubt he exercised a conscious choice. Behind all was the inexplicable singular force which, Celtic or not, gave the “dream”-like, illusory quality which pervades the books in spite of more positive and arresting qualities sometimes apparently hostile to this one. It is true that his books have in them many rude or simple characters of Gypsies, jockeys, and others, living chiefly by their hands, and it is part of the conscious and unconscious object of the books to exalt them. But these people in Borrow’s hands seldom or never give the impression of coarse solid bodies well endowed with the principal appetites. There is, for example, a famous page where the young doubting Borrow listens to a Wesleyan preacher and wishes that his life had been like that man’s, and then comes upon his Gypsy friend after a long absence. He asks the Gypsy for news and hears of some deaths:
“‘What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?’ said I, as I sat down beside him
“‘My opinion of death, brother, is much the same as that in the old song of Pharaoh, which I have heard my grandam sing—
“Canna marel o manus chivios andé puv,
Ta rovel pa leste o chavo ta romi.”