Borrow is not describing Gypsy life but the “dream” of his own early life. I should say that he succeeds, because his words work upon the indifferent reader in something like the same way as memory worked upon himself. The physical activity, the “low life,” and the open air of the books are powerful. These and the England of his youth gave Borrow his refuge from middle age and Victorian England of the middle class. “Youth,” he says in “The Romany Rye,” “is the only season for enjoyment, and the first twenty-five years of one’s life are worth all the rest of the longest life of man, even though these five and twenty be spent in penury and contempt, and the rest in the possession of wealth, honour, respectability, ay, and many of them in strength and health. . . .” Still more emphatically did he think the same when he was looking on his past life in the dingle, feeling his arms and thighs and teeth, which were strong and sound; “so now was the time
to labour, to marry, to eat strong flesh, and beget strong children—the power of doing all this would pass away with youth, which was terribly transitory.”
Youth and strength or their extreme opposites alone attracted him, and therefore he is best in writing of men, if we except the tall Brynhild, Isopel, and the old witch, Mrs. Herne, than whom “no she bear of Lapland ever looked more fierce and hairy.” In the same breath as he praises youth he praises England, pouring scorn on those who traverse Spain and Portugal in quest of adventures, “whereas there are ten times more adventures to be met with in England than in Spain, Portugal, or stupid Germany to boot.” It was the old England before railways, though Mr. Petulengro heard a man speaking of a wonderful invention that “would set aside all the old roads, which in a little time would be ploughed up, and sowed with corn, and cause all England to be laid down with iron roads, on which people would go thundering along in vehicles, pushed forward by fire and smoke.” Borrow makes another of his characters also foretell the triumph of railways, and I insist on quoting part of the sentence as another example of Borrow’s mysterious way: the speaker has had his information from the projector of the scheme: “which he has told me many of the wisest heads of England have been dreaming of during a period of six hundred years, and which it seems was alluded to by a certain Brazen Head in the story-book of Friar Bacon, who is generally supposed to have been a wizard, but in reality was a great philosopher. Young man, in less than twenty years, by which time I shall be dead and gone, England will be surrounded with roads of metal, on which armies may travel with mighty velocity, and of which the walls of brass and iron by which the friar proposed to defend his native land are types.” And yet he makes little of the practical difference between the England of railways and
the England of coaches; in fact he hated the bullying coachmen so that he expressed nothing but gladness when they had disappeared from the road. No: it was first as the England of the successful wars with Napoleon, and second as the England of his youth that he idealised it—the country of Byron and Farmer George, not that of Tennyson, Victoria and Albert; for as Byron was one of the new age and yet looked back to Pope and down on Wordsworth, so did Borrow look back.
His English geography is far vaguer than his Spanish. He creeps—walking or riding—over this land with more mystery. The variety and difficulties of the roads were less, and actual movement fills very few pages. He advances not so much step by step as adventure by adventure. Well might he say, a little impudently, “there is not a chapter in the present book which is not full of adventures, with the exception of the present one, and this is not yet terminated”—it ends with a fall from his horse which stuns him. There is an air of somnambulism about some of the travel, especially when he is escaping alone from London and hack-writing. He shows great art in his transitions from day to day, from scene to scene, making it natural that one hour of one day should have the importance of the whole of another year, and one house more than the importance of several day’s journeys. It matters not that he crammed more than was possible between Greenwich and Horncastle fairs, probably by transplanting earlier or later events. Time and space submit to him: his old schoolfellows were vainly astonished that he gave no chapters to them and his years at Norwich Grammar School. Thus England seems a great and a strange land on Borrow’s page, though he does not touch the sea or the mountains, or any celebrated places except Stonehenge. His England is strange, I think, because it is presented according to a purely spiritual
geography in which the childish drawling of “Witney on the Windrush manufactures blankets,” etc., is utterly forgot. Few men have the courage or the power to be honestly impressionistic and to say what they feel instead of compromising between that and what they believe to be “the facts.”
It is also strange on account of the many adventures which it provides, and these will always attract attention, because England in 1911 is not what it was in 1825, but still more because few men, especially writing men, ever take their chance upon the roads of England for a few months together. At the same time it must be granted that Borrow had a morbid fear of being dull or at least of being ordinary. He was a partly conscious provider of entertainment when he made the book so thick with incidents, scenes and portraits, and each incident, scene and portrait so perfect after its kind. Where he overdoes his emphasis or refinement, can only be decided by differing tastes. Some, for example, cannot abide his description of the sleepless man who had at last discovered a perfect opiate in Wordsworth’s poetry. I find myself stopping short at the effect of sherry and Popish leanings on the publican and his trade, and still more the effect of his return to ale and commonsense religion: how everyone bought his liquids and paid for them and wanted to treat him, while the folk of his parish had already made him a churchwarden. This might have been writ sarcastic by a witty Papist.
Probably Borrow used the device of recognition and reappearances to satisfy a rather primitive taste in fiction, and to add to the mystery, though I will again suggest that a man who travelled and went about among men as he did would take less offence at these things. The re-appearances of Jasper are natural enough, except at the ford when Borrow is about to pass into Wales: those of Ardry
less so. But when Borrow contrives to hear more of the old china collector and of Isopel also from the jockey, and shuffles about the postillion, Murtagh, the Man in Black, and Platitude, and introduces Sir John Bowring for punishment, he makes “The Romany Rye” much inferior to “Lavengro.”