The reason is very simple for this faith about Isopel Berners, the prototype of Queen Ingeborg, who, as Mr. Birrell has said, need fear comparison with no damsel that ever lent sweetness to the stage, relish to rhyme, or life to novels. Borrow never created a character. He has left many portraits; but to imagine an Isopel Berners, to invent the incident, was as impossible for him as flying. The romance of Isopel Berners would never have been written if George Borrow, when he was travelling England on foot upon the money he earned by writing “Joseph Sell” and by mending kettles, had not met Isopel’s prototype in Mumper’s Dingle.
The adventures of the rest of this year of 1825 may be told very briefly. Borrow left the Dingle when it appeared certain that he would see no more of Isopel, and, with money borrowed from Jasper Petulengro—or rather forced by his gypsy friend upon an unwilling recipient—bought a fine horse and set off wandering again. His roadside encounters, with the bee-keeper and brewer of mead, with the gentleman who had learnt Chinese by the aid of the hieroglyphics on teapots, and all the rest of them, being more or less impersonal and extraneous to his own history, may be left for consideration in connection with “The Romany Rye.” He took a situation for a time as assistant in a stable-yard at a coaching inn—having abandoned the tinker’s craft and given the pony and stock-in-trade to his gypsy friends,—ultimately sold his horse at Horncastle Fair, and tramped back to Norwich, where his mother was living.
CHAPTER IV
BORROW AND BOWRING
We now have Borrow a youth of twenty-two. His life has been full of weird adventure, but to all appearances quite unprofitable in any worldly sense. His future is nebulous. Dreams are dreamed; visions are vanished. He seems to be farther from fame and fortune than when he set off in the coach for London, with the green box in the boot carrying his Danish ballads and his “Ab Gwilym.” His castles in the clouds have come crashing to earth in irremediable ruin.
Borrow was indignant with a scurvy world which had treated him harshly. The plain truth was that the world had no feeling about him at all, one way or the other. He had nothing to sell that anybody wanted to buy, and no means of making a living. He had a long road to travel before he found himself. In 1825 he went home to Norwich a failure, with the sense of defeat very strong upon him. The mother who was at once his best adviser and sincerest worshipper was not likely to chide his folly as the father had done. She was ready to receive him with demonstrations of love, and to share her little with him. This was part of the ignominy which he hated—that he was obliged to impose himself upon the household in Willow Lane. In a world out of joint, the cursed spite was that he could do nothing to set it right.
Long time he struggled hard to lift himself out of this rut. He continued to fail. When at last he did succeed, these years became to him a horrible nightmare. He would not speak of them; he tried not to think of them. He resolutely refused to permit the public a glimpse into the sordid secrets they contained. From 1825 to 1832 he lived a life of which he wished nobody to know anything. Out of some correspondence between him and Richard Ford arose the phrase, “the Veiled Period.” Ford implored him to lift the veil a little and allow his admirers to know what he was doing. There were many reasons why he declined to do so. He endeavoured to puzzle the public about it, and perhaps succeeded partly in mystifying himself. He suggested a kind of vague romance of wanderings in remote parts of Europe. Some of the suggestions were founded on a slight basis of fact; that is all that can be said for them.
As to the facts: there is no doubt that he did buy a horse with money lent to him by Ambrose Smith, and sell it at a profit. As in the case of Isopel, it may not be unwise to allow some discount off the published accounts of the transaction. Very possibly the horse was not such a fine horse as that noble animal with whose assistance Lavengro electrified the jockeys at Horncastle Fair; perhaps the profit on the sale was not so great as it was made to appear in “The Romany Rye.” But there was such a transaction. Ambrose Smith reminded him of it, long years afterwards, when he visited the great author at Oulton.
Soon after his return to Norwich, he was busy again about his literary schemes. He tried to sell copies of his translation of Klinger, which he took from the publisher in lieu of payment for the work. While with Phillips in London, he had projected a volume of poetical translations of Danish ballads. The plan then came to naught. Now he printed the book in Norwich by subscription, after a correspondence with Allan Cunningham about it. Cunningham was full of admiration for the old songs drawn from the “Kjaempe Viser.” “Swayne Vonved” was his favourite, and it remained Borrow’s own pet throughout life. Five hundred copies of the “Romantic Ballads” were printed, of which 200 were subscribed for. These, at ten and sixpence a copy, paid all the expenses of the issue. There was an arrangement under which the London publisher, John Taylor, took the rest and placed his imprint on the title-page. Cunningham gave the young poet a great deal of good advice about promoting the interests of the book. He neglected it, with characteristic self-sufficiency. He had published ballads, and if the great public did not share Mopsa’s affection for ballads in print, the nineteenth-century Autolycus could not help it, and would be content with what he could get out of the local subscribers in Norwich.
In 1826 he was in London, and in correspondence with Benjamin Haydon about sitting for a figure in one of his pictures—possibly the “Mock Election.” In the course of the correspondence Borrow speaks of proceeding presently to the South of France. This is the first hint of those brief travels on the Continent which became magnified by the pervading haze into world-wide wanderings. “Were you ever at Kiachta?” Bowring asked him in a letter some years later. He was never within some thousands of miles of Kiachta. In 1826 he probably did go tramping through part of Europe, but he did not reach the East, as some confused references in the books suggest. The tale of Murtagh in “The Romany Rye” may incorporate some of his adventures. At any rate, that alluring narrative was certainly not given to Borrow in the year 1825 at Horncastle Fair. There is clear evidence of that in the fact that a portion of it was picked up nearly thirty years later in very different circumstances.
The real itinerary of the tour of 1826 is probably by way of Paris on foot to Bayonne; across the Pyrenees into Spain; Pamplona, the Riviera, Italy, Genoa, and thence home by ship. Slight traces can be found of such a journey. There is the lightly-touched meeting with Vidocq in Paris. That delectable rascal’s career always had a strong fascination for Borrow, whose appetite for picturesque blackguards was greedy. Vidocq at this time was fifty years of age. A quarter of a century of adventure as a showman, a soldier, a galley-slave, and a highwayman had terminated in 1812 with his appointment to the head of a detective office in Paris, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. By the year 1825 the authorities were persuaded that the principle was unworkable, and dismissal ended Vidocq’s career of corruption and swindling. If Borrow met him in Paris the next year, therefore, he found his hero a free lance. The Mémoires of M. Vidocq, which appeared in 1828, and are probably at least as trustworthy as Baron Munchausen, were among Borrow’s favourite reading; his relish for literature, embloomed with the flowers of crime and perfumed by the breath of criminals, had been cultivated by the compilation of the “Celebrated Trials,” and it never left him. Vidocq and Peyrecourt loom large in passages of his works; whether they made so great a figure in his actual experiences in France is another question. He appears to have met Baron Taylor at Bayonne, and naturally found in the “picturesque and romantic” voyager a congenial companion. From these lofty associations the descent on the other side of the Pyrenees to Quesada [72] and his “Army of Faith,” the gang of frontiersmen who were helping themselves freely in the name of the Church, was sudden and severe. But Borrow seems to have fallen even further, for there is a dim suggestion of his imprisonment at Pamplona, of his emergence from gaol in a state of beggary, and his succour at the hands of a party of gypsies whose patteran he followed in the mountains. He tramped eastwards, ultimately brought up at Genoa, penniless, and was assisted by some person or persons unknown to get ship for England.