George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

Before he departed from London, Borrow, returning some books to Bowring, utters (September 17th) one of those ejaculations on public affairs which he subsequently inserted as tags to many of his letters: “More Revolutions, I see. The King of Saxony has run away, and the Kent peasantry are burning stacks and houses. Where will all this end?”

A dozen plans for carving a way to undying fame and modest fortune, all equally futile, were built up and fell down about this time. Apparently Borrow could not rid himself of the delusion that a hungry world was waiting to devour the beauties of the Gaelic Bards, if only they were served up in a suitable form for general consumption. He launched at the devoted heads of the Highland Society of London a scheme under which the Society was to employ (and pay) him for two years in translating the Gaelic Bards into English verse. The scheme left the Highland Society as cold as the Bards would have left the reading world. He turned his artillery upon the British Museum. The Codex Exoniensis was to be copied; he applied for the work, but without success. It was done in 1831 by one of the regular officials of the Museum. Discouraged but not dismayed, he sought other employment in Bloomsbury, and asked Bowring to put in a word for him. The Doctor pointed out that in his position it was necessary to go about such a matter with discretion. It would not do for him to originate an application, but if the authorities of the Museum could be induced to seek his opinion, he would give Borrow such a character as would “take you to the top of Hecla itself. You have claims, strong ones, and I should rejoice to see you niched in the British Museum.” But this design failed like the rest. In a letter to Bowring he described himself, with melancholy eloquence, as “drifting upon the sea of the world, and likely to be so.” To Borrow there was “no fiercer hell than failure”; but the inferno was of his own creation. His greatest failure was the failure to realise that there was no sort of demand for the work he insisted on doing, and that its intrinsic value was far below the standard at which he placed it.

Compelled thus to abandon his literary ambitions for the present, he turned his efforts in another direction. He began the pursuit of a shimmering phantom over which, in the course of his life, he contrived to waste a great deal of valuable time. Upon what he based the idea does not appear, but Borrow seems to have imagined that he had some claim to official employment abroad. It did not much matter whether the work was made for him by the British Government or by a foreign State, so long as he should be given the opportunity of displaying his philological prowess in foreign parts. After the appearance of the joint article in the Foreign Quarterly, as Bowring seemed to be able to do nothing for him at the British Museum, Borrow asked him to see what he could do towards getting him a post under the Belgian Government. Bowring made the application, but without success; the Belgians were not at the moment in need of any English assistance, however talented. Borrow keenly recognised his friend’s diligence in the matter, and turned his heaviest artillery on the Ministry at Brussels, who were so obstinately blind to the advantages of having Mr. George Borrow in their service. They did not seem, he said in a letter to Bowring written from Willow Lane, Norwich, and dated September 11th, 1831, either to know or to care for the opinion of the great Cyrus, whose advice to his captains he quoted from Xenophon: “Take no heed from what countries ye fill up your ranks, but seek recruits as ye do horses, not those particularly who are of your own country, but those of merit.” Belgium, having failed to appreciate the worth of George Borrow, at once became the most contemptible nation on earth:

“The Belgians will only have such recruits as are born in Belgium, and when we consider the heroic manner in which the native Belgian army defended the person of their new sovereign in the last conflict with the Dutch, can we blame them for their determination? It is rather singular, however, that, resolved as they are to be served only by themselves, they should have sent for 50,000 Frenchmen to clear their country of a handful of Hollanders, who have generally been considered the most unwarlike people in Europe, and who, if they had had fair play given them, would long ere this time have replanted the Orange flag on the towers of Brussels and made the Belgians what they deserved to be—hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

This sardonic outburst is one of the earliest samples of the polemical style which Borrow was to develop so strongly in later years.

As he could neither go to fight Bedouins under Clausel nor enter the Belgian service in Europe, it appears to have occurred to his friend Bowring that he might care to follow in his father’s footsteps, and that the British service might suit him at a pinch. If Borrow would like to purchase a commission, Bowring offered to introduce his name to the War Secretary. Borrow replied that his name had been down for several years for the purchase of a commission, but he had never had sufficient interest to procure an appointment. He would not now mind serving in the militia if they were to be embodied for service in Ireland (“that unhappy country”), but he wished to leave the question open for a few months in order to see whether something more promising turned up. If he had not secured employment within two or three months, he would then ask Bowring to redeem his promise in the matter of the War Secretary, and to recommend him to a corps in one of the Eastern colonies on the plea that he was “well grounded in Arabic” and had some talent for languages:

“I flatter myself that I could do a great deal in the East, provided I could once get there, either in a civil or military capacity. There is much talk at present about translating European books in the two great languages, the Arabic and Persian. Now, I believe that with my enthusiasm for these tongues I could, if resident in the East, become in a year or two better acquainted with them than any European has been yet, and more capable of executing such a task. . . .”

This letter concluded with a postscript in which he requested that his best remembrances might be presented to Mrs. Bowring and to Edgar, their son; and, he added, “tell them they will both be starved.

“There is now a report in the street that twelve corn-stacks are blazing within twenty miles of this place. I have lately been wandering about Norfolk, and I am sorry to say that the minds of the peasantry are in a horrible state of excitement. I have repeatedly heard men and women in the harvest-field swear that not a grain of the corn they were cutting should be eaten, and that they would as lieve be hanged as live. I am afraid all this will end in a famine and a rustic war.”

Reform staved off the “rustic war,” and other things intervened to prevent Borrow from carrying out his half-formed intention of becoming a military man.