To this gentleman Borrow was introduced by a young farmer, no doubt Mr. Skepper, of Oulton Hall, on December 27th, 1832. It is believed that it was through the Batemans, of Norwich (of whom the late Sir Frederic Bateman, M.D., was best known), that the acquaintance with the Skeppers began, as the families had intermarried. On the very day of the introduction Mr. Cunningham wrote to the Rev. Andrew Brandram, Secretary of the Bible Society, recommending Borrow as one who could read the Bible in thirteen languages—a very produceable person, of no very defined denomination of Christians, but, thought Mr. Cunningham, of certain Christian principle. Dr. Knapp errs in stating that Borrow owed this introduction to J. J. Gurney (“Life of Borrow,” i. p. 152). Anyway, he was invited to interview the Bible Society secretaries, and when one of them hoped he had slept well, replied: “I am not aware that I fell asleep on the road; I have walked from Norwich to London.” He records that he did the hundred and twelve miles in twenty-seven hours, his outlay on the journey being 5½d. for one pint of ale, half-pint of milk, a roll of bread, and two apples. Thus began the period of Bible distribution in Russia and Spain, still a life crowded with adventures and risky situations—the tall, handsome, young Englishman now in a prison, and anon kissing his hands to a group of tittering nuns. “The Bible in Spain” was the chief enduring result of these experiences, a work which secured immediate popularity; moreover, the halo of the Bible Society shed a glamour of unquestionable respectability on Borrow’s head. At Seville, in some inexplicable way, Borrow met Mrs. Clarke (born Mary Skepper), the widow of Lieut. Clarke, by whom she had the daughter Henrietta, the “Hen” of “Wild Wales,” who in 1865 married Dr. MacOubrey, apparently both a physician and a barrister. Accompanied by her daughter, now about twenty-two, Mrs. Clarke arrived at Seville, and their ménage there with Borrow was certainly curious; but on April 3rd, 1840, the whole party, including Hayim Ben Attar, his body servant, and Sidi Habismilk, his Arab steed, boarded the “Royal Adelaide,” bound for London, where she berthed on April 16th. The Borrow party at once proceeded to the Spread Eagle
Inn, Gracechurch Street, and on April 23rd, George Henry Borrow, “gentleman, of the City of Norwich,” was married at St. Peter’s, Cornhill, in the City of London to Mary Clarke, “widow, daughter of Edmund Skepper, Esquire.” One of the witnesses was Mr. John Pilgrim, a Norwich solicitor. About May 5th the little family left London for Oulton, long to be the home of Lav-engro, and of his faithful and most helpful wife, who had an assured income of £450, with something over from the estate.
Section IV.
(1840-81)—Oulton—Authorship—Borrow’s Appearance and Leading Characteristics—Twilight, and the End.
Our Ulysses had now found a haven of refuge, and a permanent Calypso who worthily held his heart to the end.
Oulton Cottage, with its banded firs and solemn solitary lake, alive with wild fowl, was an ideal place for Borrow. He had, in his early days, loved Norwich well, and might have settled here but for what Harriet Martineau styles the shout of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days, when he appeared “as a devout agent of the Bible Society.” It is unquestionable that the jog-trot “daily-round-and-common-task” citizens of Norwich looked askance at him as a sort of lusus naturæ, what naturalists call a “sport”—not in the slangy sense. Mr. Egmont Hake (“Macmillan’s Magazine,” 1882, Vol. XLV.) went so far as to say that Borrow was “perhaps the handsomest man of his day.” On the other hand, Caroline Fox, the Quakeress, who called on Borrow in October, 1843, described him as “a tall, ungainly man, with great physical strength, quick, penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation.” It was on April 11th, 1843, that Sir Robert Peel pronounced his striking eulogy on “The Bible in Spain.”
Any appreciation of Borrow’s works is out of the question in this outline survey. He professed a great liking for his “Lives and Trials”—how full were the Lives “of wild and racy adventures, and in what racy, genuine language they were told.” These words are closely applicable to Borrow’s own writings; many of the critics fell foul of them, though Lockhart said Borrow had “a true eye for the picturesque, and a fund of real racy humour,” while Elwin, fourteen years later (1857), praised his descriptions “as accurate as they are
picturesque. They abound in dramatic and delicate strokes of nature, of which no extracts give an adequate idea, and are painted with a force that brings men, events and prospects before the eye with the vividness of reality. In this power of verbal delineation Mr. Borrow has never been outdone. . . . His descriptions of scenery have a peculiar sublimity and grace.” A little later, W. Bodham Donne, a Norfolk man and acute critic, said, “We all read Mr. Borrow’s books,” but lamented his “plunge into the worse than Irish bogs of Polemical Protestantism.” Mr. Saintsbury, one of our foremost literary essayists, while asserting, in 1886, that Borrow was not a popular author, stated that “his works greatly influenced Longfellow and Mérimée, especially the latter.” Blackwood naturally disliked Borrow, said gypsies constituted nine-tenths of his stock-in-trade, and that his chief credential to London was a letter from “an eccentric German teacher”! To-day where will you find a competent scholarly critic who is not a whole-hearted admirer of Borrow’s style? His grave and gay pictures of persons and places, are etched in with instinctive faithfulness, and clarity of atmosphere; always excepting such characters as were under the ban of his capricious hatred: “Mr. Flamson,” “the Old Radical,” Scott and his “gentility nonsense,” and so forth. It is doubtful if any but lovers of the open road, can thoroughly enter into the Borrow fellowship, but only such as Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, of the comity of wayfaring men—initiates in the charities of the roads—men who love the dewy perfume of the meadows when the day is young, the blazing splendours of noon on the highway, and the magic of moonlight in many a dale, on many a hill. Men, moreover, who find nothing “low” in listening to the tapestried talk of wayside taverns, where, indeed, even to-day many a scrap of folk-lore and remnant of age-old superstitions may be learned. The spirit of Borrow has inspired and evolved the noble army of caravanners, with Lady Grosvenor and Mr. J. Harris Stone at their head. The people who cannot appreciate Borrow are those who will not lift their eyes from the pavement to be rapt in admiration of a glorious sunset, to whom, indeed, Borrow would appear a silly enigma, or a boor. For, when “the Heavens declare the glory
of God; and the firmament showeth his handy work,” comes that rare time when the spirit—unconsciously worshipping—is uplifted in an ecstasy of wonder and joy, who then can but pity the dull eye ever abased to the grime of the trodden path?