This, of course, was very unsatisfactory preparation for the career of a respectable solicitor in a cathedral city. His father protested in vain. Before the noble old captain died, leaving the brothers dependent on their own resources (since he had been able to make provision only just sufficient for his widow), George had decided that his association with the law should be determined at the same time as his apprenticeship. Roger Kerrison had already departed to London, and Borrow wrote to him there:
“If ever my health mends, and possibly it may by the time my clerkship expires, I intend to live in London, write plays, poetry, etc., abuse religion, and get myself prosecuted; for I would not for an ocean of gold remain any longer than I am forced in this dull and gloomy town.” [45]
Borrow’s father died on February 28th, 1824. A month later, within a day or two of the expiry of his articles, George was on the coach bound for London, accompanied by a little green box full of manuscripts, and in his pocket a letter of introduction from William Taylor to Sir Richard Phillips, the publisher. He had burnt his legal boats and destroyed his youthful bridges; he was fairly started upon the literary life.
CHAPTER III
PUBLISHER’S HACK AND HEDGESMITH
Borrow’s “literary” life in London—where he lodged at 16, Millman Street, Bedford Row, with his friend Kerrison—was a period of the deadliest and most miserable drudgery. No author is a man of genius to his publisher, as Heine tells us. Borrow was certainly not a man of genius to Sir Richard Phillips, and their association for about ten months was a time of strain and irritation to both. Consequently, in Borrow’s opinion, Barabbas was Sir Richard Phillips. He lives only as “the publisher” in “Lavengro,” in which he is pictured as a subject fit merely for the odium and execration of the human race. Discount from this estimate of Sir Richard is highly necessary. He appears to have been a moderately inoffensive person, whose chief weakness was metaphysics, and a worse-assorted pair than he and Borrow it would be hard to imagine.
What was the literary ammunition with which Borrow expected to bring the publisher of The Monthly Magazine to his feet? It consisted wholly of translations and versifications. Their intrinsic merit was very slight, and there was no market for them. Some might be useful to fill up an odd corner, but they were certainly no staple commodity for a person intending to get a living by literature. Under the combined disadvantage of unmarketable wares and an uncongenial temperament, Borrow might well have considered himself lucky to be taken on by Phillips as a factotum to do the scavenging of his business. But while they were together the youth tasted the bitterest cup and fed on the hardest crust that Grub Street had to offer to the worshippers of the Muses. It had been more humane if Phillips had repeated to Borrow the advice which Mr. Wilcox, the bookseller, offered to Dr. Johnson when he proposed to live as an author: “You had better buy a porter’s knot.” Hard physical exertion would have served him better than the labour he endured, this child of The Wild, cooped up in London compiling criminal records or translating philosophical treatises into the German language.
Phillips had just retired from the business of pure publishing, which was a gloomy fact in the prospect of Borrow’s cargo of ballads. He retained The Monthly Magazine, it was true, and had started a pretentious periodical under the resounding title of The Universal Review or Chronicle of the Literature of all Nations, apparently in the hope—which proved vain—that it would provide a career for his son. This was the Oxford Review which figures in the pages of “Lavengro.” The actual editor was the redoubtable William Gifford, and the work of which superfluous copies lay about on the floor in such prodigal profusion was his translation of Juvenal. The incongruity of such an atmosphere for the kind of genius that possessed young Borrow! With a pathetic belief in the potency of Danish ballads to move the stoniest heart and draw guineas from the tightest purse, he introduced the subject. Phillips would have none of it, and when his visitor began to declaim of
“Buckshank bold and Elphinstone,
And more than I can mention here,”
he stopped him, saying that “it was very pretty indeed, and beat Scott hollow, and Percy too”—but nobody then cared for Percy, nor for Scott either, save as a novelist. If Borrow could produce something which should rival the merits of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” by Legh Richmond, there might be a chance of doing business. The young aspirant for literary fame searched London for a copy of the book which he was recommended to imitate, and, when he found it, discovered that he could by no possibility do anything like it, for it was a religious book, “written from the heart,” and Borrow had to confess to the publisher that he did not know much about religion in an intimate way. The only thing to do was to accept that which the publisher was prepared to offer him, the task of reviewing books for the new periodical, and of collating records of “Celebrated Trials.”
Another enterprise was undertaken by Borrow, which in itself was sufficient to prove his undoing even if the life had been congenial to him. Phillips was the author of a work of philosophy entitled “The Proximate Causes of the Material Phenomena of the Universe.” In an ill moment the new recruit engaged to translate this portentous tome into German for publication. Shades of Olaus Wormius and Ab Gwilym! Borrow’s German was the first stumbling-block. It was good enough to enable him to read German works and to turn German into English, but to work with it as a colloquial tongue was quite a different matter. In this respect he had contracted to do the impossible. But even if his German had been perfect he would have been a fish out of water, for he knew nothing of metaphysics. This is not the place to discuss the value of Sir Richard Phillips’s book, which has doubtless taken up some dusty nook on a library shelf for its permanent and undisturbed place of residence. But it was enough for Borrow to be told that nobody could understand his German version: in his opinion the cause of that did not reside so much in his imperfect acquaintance with the language as in the folly of the author. Borrow did not understand him and his terminology; consequently, the theories and the language of Sir Richard Phillips were equally absurd. The contumely poured upon the publisher in “Lavengro” was probably not fully deserved. A German edition of the Philosophy, translated by Theobald and Lebret, appeared at Stuttgart in 1826, and, for what it was worth, the Germans succeeded in understanding this. But, for the rest, if Borrow was treated no worse than other publishers’ hacks were treated, his lot was no more pleasant. Phillips was exigent about the work for which he paid so meanly, and none too kindly in his manner. Even about the “Celebrated Trials,” which was the enterprise George liked best of them all, Borrow was worried in an unconscionable fashion.