The catalogue of Borrow’s languages is thus largely and rapidly extended. We need not stay to inquire how he obtained them all, nor need we assume that his acquaintance with them was in any sense complete or scientific. It was probably little more than a dictionary acquaintance; he had an extraordinary facility for getting the rudiments of a language in a few weeks with little more assistance than the dictionary could supply. His Welsh and Danish studies are the most important to notice here; they had a considerable influence upon the course of his life during the few years now approaching. “Ab Gwilym” and the ballads of the Norsemen obsessed him.
A personage visited Taylor at Norwich in the year 1821 to whom this sort of young man could not fail to be interesting. It was John Bowring, on a business mission to the city. Borrow was a guest at a dinner party given by Taylor in July of that year, when Bowring was present with Lewis Evans, a Welsh doctor who had physicked the army in Spain during the Peninsular War. The philological mood was strong on Borrow—and Bowring was certainly a considerable philologist. He had recently made one of his long journeys on the Continent, combining business pains with literary joys in his accustomed manner, and had compiled an anthology which he described as a “Specimen of Russian Poets.” This collection it was which inspired the present of a diamond ring, conferred on him by Alexander I. A man of such stamp must naturally have appeared something of a hero in the eyes of this youth. Why is it that he makes anything but a heroic figure in Borrow’s works?
Rightly or wrongly—wrongly, as I think—in after years the “Norwich young man” considered himself to have received much injury at the hands of Bowring. Consequently, Bowring became the most vicious and most worthless scoundrel that ever wore shoe-leather. This was Borrow’s way: he was a prince of haters. The poet and linguist, the diplomatist, the political disciple of the illustrious Jeremy Bentham, was melted down into the Old Radical of the Appendix to “The Romany Rye,” and caricatured in the postboy’s story at the end of “Lavengro.” No accurate view of Bowring can be acquired from these acerbitous descriptions; line must be altered and colour modified with great liberality. Bowring may have made pretensions that could not be sustained, but his proper pretensions were certainly far greater than Borrow, in the berserking spirit that possessed him twenty years afterwards, was ready to admit. The polite tag with which he headed the eleventh chapter of the Appendix was:
“This very dirty man with his very dirty face
Would do any dirty act which would get him a place.”
Borrow’s lively account of the dinner party, written with Archilochian bitterness, cannot be read without many reservations. He makes out Bowring a literary pirate and a morally reprehensible cheat, a fraudulent ignoramus, trading for cheap glory on other people’s lack of knowledge, claiming an acquaintance with languages and poetry which he does not possess—evading conversation that will test his assertions, and dodging all the keen questions of the young Solon who tells the tale. Borrow poses him with his Red Rhys of Eryry, with his Ghengis Khan, and with his Koran. Finding that Borrow knows nothing of the Slavonic languages, Bowring immediately becomes garrulous on the subject of Slavonic lore and literatures; when in later years they meet again and Borrow has the Slavonic languages at the tip of his tongue, Bowring hurriedly changes the subject! That deductions have to be made from such an account of the matter is obvious; they may well be generous.
It is clear that, at the time, the young man entertained none of these opinions about Bowring, for he sought his help in a troublesome period of his own life, and was ready to engage in a literary collaboration with him. What actually happened was that, as a result of this meeting at the hospitable board of William Taylor, Borrow was induced to pursue even with greater ardour than before his translations from the Celtic and the Norse languages. It may have been largely a waste of time. Possibly George would have done better either by sticking to his law books or by cultivating his bent for original composition; but that was no fault of Bowring, from whom he received inspiration and encouragement in a course of study that was exceedingly congenial to him.
He went on delving in the musty old folios of the Corporation Library. Their yellow pages were more precious to him than aught in the world; the songs he puzzled out of the “Danica Literatura” were sweeter than the
“Celestial syrens’ harmony
That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres.”
True delight to him was the acquisition of Anglo-Saxon, the improvement of his Welsh and Scandinavian; the sum and crown of bliss was to pore over Llhuyd’s “Archæologia Britannica” and to translate Olaus Wormius—of whom he became so desperately fond that in a fit of youthful freakishness he adopted the signature “George Olaus Borrow.” His pencilled notes are still to be seen on the margins of the ancient tomes so generously handed over to his tender mercies by the city authorities.
Meanwhile, piles of notebooks and manuscripts were growing in the house in the Upper Close; the rhymed translation of “Ab Gwilym” and English versions of the old Norse ballads were proceeding laboriously but steadily. To the industry of the bookworm was added the passion of the author. “Ab Gwilym,” Olaus Wormius, and William Taylor in the aggregate were far too strong an influence for worthy Mr. Simpson of Tuck’s Court to counteract. Wigs and parchment could not stand against philology and poetry. Whatever notions Borrow ever entertained about pursuing the law as a profession gradually paled before the furor scribendi. Thomas Campbell was editing Colburn’s New Monthly, and Taylor wrote to him on behalf of Borrow. The result was the appearance in the magazine of a rhymed English version of Schiller’s ballad, “Der Taucher,” which was signed “G. O. B.”—the “O” standing for the Olaus of his adoption. This represented all that Campbell did for him. Borrow was more successful with Sir Richard Phillips, the editor and proprietor of The Monthly Magazine, to whom his name was also introduced by Taylor. In the late months of 1823 several poetical translations appeared in the Monthly. It must be confessed that they hardly reached even to the merit of mediocrity. During the same period Borrow was hard at work translating Klinger’s “Faustus” and other matters. It was not a sanitary life for a youth of twenty. The inevitable consequences were ill-health, morbid melancholy, and a particularly turbid period of Werterism, during which threats of suicide were frequent. All this has been laid at the door of William Taylor. It would be far more appropriate to charge it upon Klinger, Olaus Wormius, and Ab Gwilym. Borrow contrived very effectually “to suck melancholy out of a song.”