Borrow is always at his strongest when describing a pugilistic encounter: for in the saving grace of pugilism as an English accomplishment, he believed as devoutly almost as he believed in East Anglia and the Bible. It was this more than anything else that aroused the ire of the critics of “Lavengro” when it first appeared. One critical journal characterised the book as the work of a “barbarian.”
This was in 1851, when Clio seemed set upon substituting Harlequin’s wand for Britannia’s trident, seemed set upon crowning her with the cap and bells of Folly in her maudlin mood,—the marvellous and memorable year when England—while every forge in Europe was glowing with expectance, ready to beat every ploughshare into a sword—uttered her famous prophecy, that from the day of the opening of the Prince Consort’s glass show in Hyde Park, bullets, bayonets, and fists were to be institutions of a benighted past.
Very different was the prophecy of this “eccentric barbarian,” Borrow, especially as regards the abolition of the British fist. His prophecy was that the decay of pugilism would be followed by a flourishing time in England for the revolver and the assassin’s knife,—a prophecy which I can now recommend to those two converts to the virtues of Pugilism, Mr. Justice Grantham and the present Editor of the Daily News, the former of whom in passing sentence of death (at the Central Criminal Court, on Wednesday, January 11th, 1893) upon a labourer named Hosler, for stabbing one Dennis Finnessey to death in a quarrel about a pot of beer, borrowed in the most impudent manner from the “eccentric barbarian,” when he said, “If men would only use their
fists instead of knives when tempted to violence, so many people would not be hanged”; while the latter remarked that “the same thing has been said from the bench before, and cannot be said too often.” When the “eccentric barbarian” argued that pugnacity is one of the primary instincts of man—when he argued that no civilisation can ever eradicate this instinct without emasculating itself—when he argued that to clench one’s fist and “strike out” is the irresistible impulse of every one who has been assaulted, and that to make it illegal to “strike out,” to make it illegal to learn the art to “strike out” with the best effect, is not to quell the instinct, but simply to force it to express itself in other and more dangerous and dastardly ways—when he argued thus more than forty years ago, he saw more clearly than did his critics into the future—a future which held within its womb not only the American civil war and the gigantic Continental struggles whose bloody reek still “smells to heaven,” but also the present carnival of dynamite, the revolver, and the assassin’s knife.
VI. Borrow’s Gypsies.
To those who knew Borrow, the striking thing about “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” is not that there is so much about the gypsies, but that there is comparatively so little, and that he only introduces one family group. Judged from these two books the reader would conclude that he knew nothing whatever of the Lees, the Stanleys, and the most noticeable of all, the Lovells, and yet those who knew him are aware that he was thrown into contact with most of these. But here, as in everything else, Borrow’s eccentric methods can never be foreseen. The most interesting of all the gypsies are the Welsh gypsies. The Welsh variety of the Romany tongue is quite peculiar, and the Romanies of the Principality are superior to all others in these islands in intelligence and in their passion for gorgio respectability. Borrow in “Lavengro” takes the reader to the Welsh border itself, and then turns back, leaving the Welsh Romany undescribed. And in the only part of “Wild Wales” where gypsy life is afterwards glanced at, the gypsies introduced are not Welsh, but English.
The two great successes amongst Borrow’s Romany characters are undoubtedly Mrs. Petulengro’s mother (old Mrs. Herne) and her grandchild Leonora, but these are the two wicked characters of the group. It is impossible to imagine anything better told than the attempt of these two to poison Lavengro: it is drama of the rarest kind. The
terrible ironical dialogue over the prostrate and semi-conscious Lavengro, between the child-murderess and the hag-murderess who have poisoned him, is like nothing else in literature. This scene alone should make “Lavengro” immortal. In no other race than the Romany would a child of the elf-like intelligence and unconscious wickedness of Leonora be possible; but also it must be said that in no other race than the Romany would be possible a child like her who is made the subject of my sonnet, “A Gypsy Child’s Christmas,” printed in the “Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society”—a sonnet which renders in verse a real incident recorded by my friend before alluded to:—
Dear Sinfi rose and danced along “The Dells,”
Drawn by the Christmas chimes, and soon she sate
Where, ’neath the snow around the churchyard gate,
The ploughmen slept in bramble-banded cells:
The gorgios passed, half fearing gipsy spells,
While Sinfi, gazing, seemed to meditate;
She laughed for joy, then wept disconsolate:
“De poor dead gorgios cannot hear de bells.”Within the church the clouds of gorgio-breath
Arose, a steam of lazy praise and prayer,
To Him who weaves the loving Christmas-stair
O’er sorrow and sin and wintry deeps of Death;
But where stood He? Beside our Sinfi there,
Remembering childish tears in Nazareth.
Perhaps Borrow’s pictures of the gypsies, by omitting to depict the Romany woman on her loftier, her tragic side, fail to demonstrate what he well knew to be the Romany’s great racial mark of distinction all over Europe, the enormous superiority of the gypsy women over the gypsy men, not in intelligence merely, but in all the higher human qualities. While it is next to impossible to imagine a gypsy hero, gypsy heroines—women capable of the noblest things—are far from uncommon.