It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Borrow’s arm, that made me ask Dr. Hake, as Borrow walked along beneath the trees, “Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air”? And then, calling to mind “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” I said, “He went into the Dingle, and lived alone—went there not as an experiment in self-education, as Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone, for the ‘horrors’ to which he was occasionally subject did not spring from solitary living. He was never disturbed by passion as was the nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi Lovell, and as Emily Brontë would certainly have been had she been placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Brontë placed Shirley.”
“But the most damning thing of all,” said Hake, “is that umbrella, gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me.”
“Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship,” said I. “So devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is quite beyond his powers. Picturesque he always is, powerful never. No one reading an account of the privations of Lavengro during the ‘Joseph Sell’ period finds himself able to realise from Borrow’s description the misery of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with starvation staring him in the face. It is not passion,” I said to Hake, “that prevents Borrow from enjoying the peace of the nature-worshipper. It is Ambition! His books show that he could never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition. To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in ‘Lavengro,’ was as great an incentive to Borrow to learn languages as to Alexander Smith’s poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.”
“Ambition and the green gamp,” said Hake. “But, look, the rainbow is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries, and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the light.”
But I soon found that if Borrow was not a perfect Child of the Open Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human kind, which the “Child of the Open Air” must needs lack.
IX. The Gypsies of Norman Cross.
Knowing Borrow’s extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of meeting strangers, Dr. Hake, while Borrow was trying to get as close to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that walk. But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why Borrow should at once take to me—reasons that had nothing whatever to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.
By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon Borrow’s character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.
Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably had their nests. By the expression on Borrow’s face as he stood and gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.
“Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was drained?” I said.