The Life of George Borrow

by Herbert George Jenkins

The Zincali had been begun at Badajos with the Romany songs or rhymes copied down as recited by his gypsy friends. To these he had subsequently added, being assisted by a French courier, Juan Antonio Bailly, who translated the songs into Spanish. These translations were originally intended to be published in a separate work, as was the Vocabulary, which forms part of The Zincali. Had Borrow sought to make two separate works of the “Songs” and “Vocabulary,” there is very considerable doubt if they would have fared any better than the everlasting Ab Gwilym; but either with inspiration, or acting on some one’s wise counsel, he determined to subordinate them to an account of the Spanish Gypsies.

As a piece of bookmaking The Zincali is by no means notable. Borrow himself refers to it (page 354) as “this strange wandering book of mine.” In construction it savours rather of the method by which it was originally inspired; but for all that it is fascinating reading, saturated with the atmosphere of vagabondage and the gypsy encampment. It was not necessarily a book for the scholar and the philologist, many of whom scorned it on account of its rather obvious carelessnesses and inaccuracies. Borrow was not a writer of academic books. He lacked the instinct for research which alone insures accuracy.

It was particularly appropriate that Borrow’s first book should be about the Gypsies, who had always exercised so strange an attraction for him that he could not remember the time “when the very name of Gypsy did not awaken within me feelings hard to be described.” [337a] His was not merely an interest in their strange language, their traditions, their folk-lore; it was something nearer and closer to the people themselves. They excited his curiosity, he envied their mode of life, admired their clannishness, delighted in their primitive customs. Their persistence in warring against the gentile appealed strongly to his instinctive hatred of “gentility nonsense”; and perhaps more than anything else, he envied them the stars and the sun and the wind on the heath.

“Romany matters have always had a peculiar interest for me,” [337b] he affirms over and over again in different words, and he never lost an opportunity of joining a party of gypsies round their camp-fire. His knowledge of the Romany people was not acquired from books. Apparently he had read very few of the many works dealing with the mysterious race he had singled out for his particular attention. With characteristic assurance he makes the sweeping assertion that “all the books which have been published concerning them [the Gypsies] have been written by those who have introduced themselves into their society for a few hours, and from what they have seen or heard consider themselves competent to give the world an idea of the manners and customs of the mysterious Romany.” [338a]

His attitude towards the race is curious. He recognised the Gypsies as liars, rogues, cheats, vagabonds, in short as the incarnation of all the vices; yet their fascination for him in no way diminished. He could mix with them, as with other vagabonds, and not become harmed by their broad views upon personal property, or their hundred and one tricks and dishonesties. He was a changed man when in their company, losing all that constraint that marked his intercourse with people of his own class.

He had laboured hard to bring the light of the Gospel into their lives. He made them translate for him the Scriptures into their tongue; but it was the novelty of the situation, aided by the glass of Malaga wine he gave them, not the beauty of the Gospel of St Luke, that aroused their interest and enthusiasm. To this, Borrow’s own eyes were open. “They listened with admiration,” he says; “but, alas! not of the truths, the eternal truths, I was telling them, but to find that their broken jargon could be written and read.” [338b]

On one occasion, having refused to one of his congregation the loan of two barias (ounces of gold), he proceeded to read to the whole assembly instead the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed in Romany. Happening to glance up, he found not a gypsy in the room, but squinted, “the Gypsy fellow, the contriver of the jest, squinted worst of all. Such are Gypsies.” [338c]

It was indeed the novelty that appealed to them. They greeted with a shout of exultation the reading aloud a translation that they themselves had dictated; but they remained unmoved by the Christian teaching it contained. For all these discouragements Borrow persisted, and perhaps none of his efforts in Spain produced less result than this “attempt to enlighten the minds of the Gitanos on the subject of religion.” [339]

If the Gypsies were all that is evil, judged by conventional standards, they at least loyally stood by each other in the face of a common foe. Borrow knew Ambrose Petulengro to be a liar, a thief, in fact most things that it is desirable a man should not be; yet he was equally sure that under no circumstances would he forsake a friend to whom he stood pledged. There seems to be little doubt that Borrow’s fame with the Gypsies spread throughout England and the Continent. “Everybody as ever see’d the white-headed Romany Rye never forgot him.”