He was in sympathy with vagrants and vagabonds—a taste that was perhaps emphasised by the months he spent in preparing Celebrated Trials. If those months of hack work taught him sympathy with pariahs, it also taught him to write strong, nervous English.
He was one of the most remarkable characters of his century—whimsical, eccentric, lovable, inexplicable; possessed of an odd, dry humour that sometimes failed him when most he needed it. He lived and died a stranger to the class to which he belonged, and was the intimate friend and associate of that dark and mysterious personage, Mr Petulengro. He hated his social equals, and admired Tamerlane and Jerry Abershaw. It has been said [473] that he was born three centuries too late, and that he belonged to the age when men dropped mysteriously down the river in ships, later to return with strange stories and great treasure from the Spanish Main. Mr Watts-Dunton has said:—
“When Borrow was talking to people in his own class of life there was always in his bearing a kind of shy, defiant egotism. What Carlyle called the ‘armed neutrality’ of social intercourse oppressed him. He felt himself to be in the enemy’s camp. In his eyes there was always a kind of watchfulness, as if he were taking stock of his interlocutor and weighing him against himself. He seemed to be observing what effect his words were having, and this attitude repelled people at first. But the moment he approached a gypsy on the heath, or a poor Jew in Houndsditch, or a homeless wanderer by the wayside, he became another man. He threw off the burden of restraint. The feeling of the ‘armed neutrality’ was left behind, and he seemed to be at last enjoying the only social intercourse that could give him pleasure. This it was that enabled him to make friends so entirely with the gypsies. Notwithstanding what is called ‘Romany guile’ (which is the growth of ages of oppression), the basis of the Romany character is a joyous frankness. Once let the isolating wall which shuts off the Romany from the ‘Gorgio’ be broken through, and the communicativeness of the Romany temperament begins to show itself. The gypsies are extremely close observers; they were very quick to notice how different was Borrow’s bearing towards themselves from his bearing towards people of his own race, and Borrow used to say that ‘old Mrs Herne and Leonora were the only gypsies who suspected and disliked him.’” [474a]
This convincing character sketch seems to show the real Borrow. It accounts even for that high-piping, artificial voice (a gypsy trait) that he assumed when speaking with those who were not his intimate friends, and which any sudden interest in the conversation would cause him to abandon in favour of his own deep, rich tones. Mr F. J. Bowring, himself no friend of Borrow’s for very obvious reasons, has described this artificial intonation as something between a beggar’s whine and the high-pitched voice of a gypsy—in sort, a falsetto. He tells how, on one occasion, when in conversation with Borrow, he happened to mention to him something of particular interest concerning the gypsies, Borrow became immensely interested, immediately dropped the falsetto and spoke in his natural voice, which Mr Bowring describes as deep and manly.
Even his friends were led sometimes into criticisms that appear unsympathetic. [474b] He was, Dr Hake has said, “essentially hypochondriacal. Society he loved and hated alike: he loved it that he might be pointed out and talked of; he hated it because he was not the prince that he felt himself in its midst.” [474c] It is the son who shows the better understanding, although there is no doubt about Dr Hake’s loyalty to Borrow. There is a faithful presentation of a man such as Borrow really seems to have been, in the following words:—
“Few men have ever made so deep an impression on me as George Borrow. His tall, broad figure, his stately bearing, his fine brown eyes, so bright yet soft, his thick white hair, his oval beardless face, his loud rich voice and bold heroic air were such as to impress the most indifferent lookers-on. Added to this there was something not easily forgotten in the manner in which he would unexpectedly come to our gates, singing some gypsy song, and as suddenly depart.” [475a]
If Borrow wrote that he was ashamed of being an Englishman and referred to their “pinched and mortified expressions,” if he found the virtues of the Saxons “uncouth and ungracious,” he never permitted others to make disparaging remarks about his country or his countrymen. [475b] He was typically English in this: agree with his strictures, add a word or two of dispraise of the English, and there appeared a terrifying figure of a patriot; “not only an Englishman but an East Englishman,” which in Borrow’s vocabulary meant the finest of the breed. He might with more truth have said a Cornishman. “I could not command myself when I heard my own glorious land traduced in this unmerited manner,” [475c] he once exclaimed. He permitted to himself, and to himself only, a certain latitude in such matters.
That Borrow exaggerated is beyond all question, but it must not be called deliberate. He desired to give impressions of scenes and people, and he was inclined to emphasize certain features. Isopel Berners he wished it to be known was a queenly creature, and he described her as taller than himself (he was 6 feet 2 inches without his shoes). Exaggeration is colour, not form. A disbelief in his having encountered the convict son of the old apple-woman near Salisbury does not imply that the old woman herself is a fiction. Borrow insisted upon Norfolk as his county, “where the people eat the best dumplings in the world, and speak the purest English.” He even spoke with a strong, if imperfect, East Anglian accent. As a matter of fact his father was Cornish and his mother of Huguenot stock. It would be absurd to argue from this obvious exaggeration of the actual facts that Borrow was a myth.
Then he has been taken to task for not being a philologist as well as a linguist. He may have used the word philologist somewhat loosely on occasion. “Think what the reader would have lost,” says one eminent but by no means prejudiced critic [476] with real sympathy and insight, “had Borrow waited to verify his etymologies.” In all probability Nature will never produce a Humboldt-Le Sage combination of intellect. Language was to Borrow merely the key that permitted him access to the chamber of men’s minds. It must be confessed that sometimes he invaded the sacred precincts of philology. His chapter on the Basque language in The Bible in Spain has been described as “utterly frantic,” and German philologists, speechless in their astonishment, have expressed themselves upon his conclusions in marks of exclamation! He was not qualified to discourse upon the science of language.
He was a staunch member of the Church of England, because he believed there was in it more religion than in any other Church; but this did not hinder him from consorting with the godless children of the tents, or contributing towards the upkeep of Nonconformist-schools. The gypsies honoured and trusted him because, crooked themselves, they appreciated straightness and clean living in another. They had never known him use a bad word or do a bad thing. He was, on occasion, arrogant, overbearing, ungracious, in short all the unattractive things that a proud and masterful man can be; but his friendship was as strong as the man himself; his charity above the narrow prejudices of sect. When he threw his tremendous power into any enterprise or undertaking, it was with the determination that it should succeed, if work and self-sacrifice could make it. “The wisest course,” he thought, was, “ . . . to blend the whole of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the philosophy of the publican and something more, to enjoy one’s pint and pipe and other innocent pleasures, and to think every now and then of death and judgment.” [477]