The men talk together, Jasper telling about the passing of the “old-fashioned good-tempered constables,” the advent of railways, and the spoiling of road life.
“. . . ‘Now, madam,’ said Mrs. Petulengro, ‘I have braided your hair in our fashion: you look very beautiful, madam; more beautiful, if possible, than before.’ Belle now rose, and came forward with her tire-woman. Mr. Petulengro was loud in his applause, but I said nothing, for I did not think Belle was improved in appearance by having submitted to the ministry of Mrs. Petulengro’s
hand. Nature never intended Belle to appear as a Gypsy; she had made her too proud and serious. A more proper part for her was that of a heroine, a queenly heroine,—that of Theresa of Hungary, for example; or, better still, that of Brynhilda the Valkyrie, the beloved of Sigurd, the serpent-killer, who incurred the curse of Odin, because, in the tumult of spears, she sided with the young king, and doomed the old warrior to die, to whom Odin had promised victory.
“Belle looked at me for a moment in silence; then turning to Mrs. Petulengro, she said, ‘You have had your will with me; are you satisfied?’ ‘Quite so, madam,’ said Mrs. Petulengro, ‘and I hope you will be so too, as soon as you have looked in the glass.’ ‘I have looked in one already,’ said Belle,’ and the glass does not flatter.’ . . .”
Here it is easy to notice how the uncolloquial and even ugly English does not destroy the illusion of the scene, but entirely subserves it and makes these two or three pages fine painter’s work for richness and still drama.
I have not forgotten the Man in Black, though I gladly would. Not that I am any more in sympathy with his theology than Borrow’s, if it is more interesting and venerable. But in this priest, Borrow’s method, always instinctively intense if not exaggerated, falls to caricature. I have no objection to caricature; when it is of a logical or incidental kind I enjoy it, even in “The Romany Rye”; I enjoy, for example, the snoring Wordsworthian, without any prejudice against Wordsworth. “The Catholic Times” as late as 1900 was still angry with Borrow’s “crass anti-Catholic bigotry.” I should have expected them to laugh consumedly at a priest, a parson and a publican who deserve places in the same gallery with wicked earls and noble savages of popular fiction. It may be true that this “creation of Borrow’s most studied hatred” is, as Mr. Seccombe says, [{242}] “a triumph
of complex characterisation.” He is “a joyous liver and an unscrupulous libertine, sceptical as Voltaire, as atheistic as a German professor, as practical as a Jew banker, as subtle as a Jesuit, he has as many ways of converting the folks among whom he is thrown as Panurge had of eating the corn in ear. For the simple and credulous—crosses and beads; for the hard-hearted and venal—material considerations; for the cultured and educated—a fine tissue of epigrams and anthropology; for the ladies—flattery and badinage. A spiritual ancestor of Anatole France’s marvellous full-length figure of Jerôme Coignard, Borrow’s conception takes us back first to Rabelais and secondly to the seventeenth-century conviction of the profound Machiavellism of Jesuitry.”
But in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” he is an intruder with a design of turning these books into tracts. He is treated far more elaborately than any other character except the author’s, and with a massive man’s striving after subtlety. Moreover, Borrow has made it impossible to ignore him or to cut him out, by interlacing him with every other character in these two books. With sad persistency and naïve ingenuity he brings it about that every one shall see, or have seen in the past, this terrible priest. Borrow’s natural way of dealing with such a man would be that of the converted pugilist who, on hearing of an atheist in the vicinity, wanted to go and “knock the beggar down for Jesus’ sake”; and a variation upon this would have been delightful and in harmony with the rest of the book. But clever as the priest is, Borrow himself is stronger, honester and cleverer, too. Of course, the priest leads him to some good things. Above all, he leads to the incident of the half-converted publican, who is being ruined by sherry and Popery. Borrow pursuades him to take ale, which gives him the courage to give up thoughts of conversion, and to
turn on his enemies and re-establish himself, to make a good business, become a churchwarden, and teach boxing to the brewer’s sons, because it is “a fine manly English art and a great defence against Popery.” It is at least a greater defence than Borrow’s pen, or deserves to be.