George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

there is everything in favour of the supposition that, in marrying Mrs. Clarke, Borrow wrought better for himself than a man of his temperament usually has an actuarial expectation of doing in matrimony. Moreover, he did infinitely better than a great number of literary persons who have taken the plunge in similar circumstances. There was no such tragedy about his marriage as befell his friend and neighbour Edward FitzGerald; indeed, there was no tragedy at all. Its absence is due to Mrs. Borrow’s remarkable personality, her wifely qualities, unfailing devotion to him in all his fads and moods and whimsies. She was a perfect “helpmeet”; she provided him with a buffer to absorb some of the shocks of outrageous fortune; she was a patient amanuensis and an indefatigable secretary.

The picture one constructs of his wife from the materials—slight enough—that Borrow himself gives, and from the correspondence extant, is that of the “flower of wifely patience”—a woman in whom tact has been developed to such a degree as to become a kind of extra sense. She was married to one of the queerest specimens of mankind that Nature ever evolved; yet she secured in their union happiness for both. Her affection for him was true and deep; it was strong enough even to prevail over idiosyncrasies that might easily have been fatal to any chance of domestic peace, to say nothing of marital bliss. She was one of the women to whom “patience hath such mild composure given” that even Borrow failed to destroy her equanimity and self-possession. Behind her hero-worship appears now and then an illuminating gleam of feminine commonsense—just a shooting ray upon some foible; but whenever it seems likely to show Borrow in a specifically unfavourable light it is immediately switched off.

Near the easternmost point of land in England, on the margin of Oulton Broad, in a spot where the roar of the North Sea could be heard, was the cottage in which the best of his remaining years were to be passed. Here he was to prosecute amid the solemn marshland the eternal search for truth and happiness, and to find that the pursuit was even more difficult for him than for the majority of mankind. The house contained few rooms, but sufficient for the requirements of the little family, and its quietude and isolation were special recommendations to Borrow in the particular mood in which he then found himself. The scenery was of a character for which he had strong affection, and the place itself was linked with one or two of the powerful emotions of his youth. The Broad stretched away from the end of his garden, and he overlooked it from the summer-house he built as a study. Behind the house: and almost surrounding it, were plantations of pine trees. For the rest, only an occasional tower or windmill broke the level horizon. The scene is different, more varied, and much fuller of life at the present day, when the virtues of the Broads as pleasure waters and of the country round as a residential district have been discovered and exploited. But in certain hours and seasons it is easy to imagine Oulton as George Borrow knew it.

Miss Elizabeth Harvey has left us a picture of Borrow as the friends of this period recalled him. [109] In his wooden pavilion “on the very margin of the water,” she tells us, “he had many strange old books in various languages. I remember he once put one before me, telling me to read it. ‘Oh, I can’t,’ I replied. He said, ‘You ought: it’s your own language.’ It was an old Saxon book. He used to spend a great deal of his time in this room, writing, translating, and at times singing strange words in a stentorian voice, while passers-by on the lake would stop to listen with astonishment and curiosity to the singular sounds.” A note on his personal appearance, by the same hand, may help to keep his figure in mind: “He was six feet three, a splendid man, with handsome hands and feet. He wore neither whiskers, beard, nor moustache. His features were very handsome, but his eyes were peculiar, being round and rather small, but very piercing, and now and then fierce. He would sometimes sing one of his Romany songs, shake his fist at me, and look quite wild. Then he would ask, ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ ‘No, not at all,’ I would say. Then he would look just as gentle and kind, and say, ‘God bless you, I would not hurt a hair of your head.’” Here was he, then, when he set up author in real earnest, and induced “glorious John” to publish the first book that resulted from his adventures in foreign parts. This was “The Zincali; or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain, with an Original Collection of their Songs and Poetry, and a Copious Dictionary of their Language.” Most of the compilation—for such it is, and a desultory compilation at that—had been made during his five years in Spain. It was written at odd times, “chiefly in ventas and posadas, whilst wandering through the country in the arduous and unthankful task of distributing the Gospel among its children.”

In its published form “The Zincali” was an amalgam of several schemes that had occurred to the author from time to time during his Spanish wanderings. He had projected a collection of the rhymes and proverbial sayings of the gypsies of Spain, inspired thereto by the material he had gathered at Badajoz and Merida, to which additions were made some years later at Seville with the assistance of Juan Antonio Bailly, a French courier with a considerable acquaintance among the Câlé. He had also proposed a glossary of Câlo and English, which afterwards resolved itself into a limited vocabulary of words occurring in the songs and sayings that he and Bailly had collected. Both these schemes were imperfectly executed. Borrow’s knowledge of the Spanish-gypsy language was quite empirical, and Bailly’s collections were either written by illiterate persons, or taken down from the lips of people who spoke a corrupted jargon. Borrow and Bailly made a large number of translations from obscure Spanish authors—and this was the material from which “The Zincali” was constructed. He eked it out with a quantity of out-of-the-way information and anecdote acquired during his association with gypsies in England and Russia, and in the course of much miscellaneous browsing among books. A more unscientific process of writing “An Account of the Gypsies of Spain, etc.,” it would be hard to devise. There were half a hundred works of more or less utility which he might have consulted, and there is no evidence that he had seen more than a tithe of that number. But, pari passu, there is certainly no evidence that if he had seen them all he would have produced a better book. In fact, here, as in every other case, his work does not depend for its charm and its value upon any scientific basis whatever, but upon the idiosyncrasies of Borrow himself, the mordant style, the quaint observation, the atmosphere with which he contrives to invest his subject. “The Zincali” was read at first, as it is read now, not so much for the accuracy of its history or its philology as for its intrinsic interest as literature.

Having put together at Oulton these notes, memoranda, rhymes, translations, descriptions, and scraps of a gypsy vocabulary, Borrow took the compost to John Murray, who agreed to publish an edition of 750 copies. The book attracted certain minds attuned to the Borrovian spirit, and it was admitted to display the supreme virtue of originality. The voice of Murray, above all, was encouraging, and to Borrow that was the voice of the “Mæcenas of British literature.” In spite of occasional difficulties, he held Mr. Murray in unfailing honour, and was proud to have his work sealed with the cachet of Albemarle Street. The close association of the Murrays with Richard Ford, whose “Handbook” was long the classic English work on Spain, had important results for Borrow. Ford was living in retirement at Heavitree, near Exeter—the haven where, half a century later, George Gissing found rest in his last days—and to him the manuscript of “The Zincali” was sent for critical observation. Ford’s knowledge of Spain was extensive and peculiar, and he immediately perceived in Borrow a man after his own heart, who preferred byways to highways, was full of curious learning, and invariably took the unconventional outlook. [112] His criticism of the book was what might have been expected. It took the form of a regret that Borrow had not given his readers more of himself “instead of the extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing about gypsies.” But, on the whole, both Murray and Ford were pleased. So were the reviewers. As to the public, they bought the work very slowly. It appeared in April, 1841, and by June only three hundred copies had been sold. Murray explained this genially by declaring that the state of politics had shed a blight over literature; no book was selling, and Borrow’s only shared the fate of the rest.

But before this a new enterprise had been designed. It was to be an account of Borrow’s personal adventures while engaged in the circulation of the Scriptures in the Peninsula. The scheme appealed strongly to Ford, and Murray thought well of it. Ford was “delighted” to know that Borrow meditated such a work. “The more odd personal adventures the better, and still more so if dramatic; that is, giving the exact conversations.” “I have given him much advice,” said Ford in a letter to Addington, “to avoid Spanish historians and poetry like prussic acid; to stick to himself, his biography, and queer adventures.” And Borrow wrote to Ford: “I shall attend to all your advice. The book will consist entirely of my personal adventures, travels, etc., in that country during five years. I met with a number of strange characters, all of whom I have introduced; the most surprising of them is my Greek servant, who accompanied me in my ride of 1,500 miles.” And again: “‘The Bible in Spain’ is a rum, very rum, mixture of gypsyism, Judaism, and missionary adventure, and I have no doubt will be greedily read.” Here was the impulse from which arose “The Bible in Spain.”

The book which gave Borrow his first and greatest vogue was a compilation based mainly on the letters he had sent home in the form of reports to the Bible Society. They were unquestionably the most remarkable reports from a literary point of view, and the most unconventional from a religious point of view, that had ever been received by the grave and reverend seniors of Earl Street. The Society had been staggered once or twice. Borrow’s confession that he was a little “superstitious,” his reference to the “prophetess” of Manzanares, his “luck”—all these were foreign phrases, and distasteful to the pundits of the Bible Society. They chid Borrow; but they put up with him until the final disruption, and now, when he applied for permission to use his letters in connection with the new book, they treated him very well. There were some episodes—the squabble with Graydon among them—for which they were not anxious to secure more publicity, a very natural feeling; but, Borrow giving assurances, they “cheerfully forwarded the letters to him.”

The relations between the Bible Society and this astounding missionary of theirs provide a quaint chapter in literary history. Throughout a great part of their intercourse with him they seem to have remained in a state of bland and childlike innocence with regard to the real character and the actual personality of their agent. They were aware of his eccentricity, but apparently blind to the causes from which the eccentricity sprang. This was the quality which gave his letters from Spain their value for the purposes of the book he now began to edit.

The year 1841 was gloomy, with bad weather and much disease. It was the year when the murrain first appeared in Great Britain and spread havoc throughout the agricultural districts. Of all men Borrow was most delicately affected by the moods of Nature round him, most sympathetically attuned—wild and fierce where Nature was fierce and wild, gentle and sunny amid fair meads in fine weather. And during this miserable year he found it hard to make progress with his writing. Next spring the change came with a rush, cold and dry, with bright days merging into a glorious summer. The country called Borrow out. He tells us that he spent most of his time riding his Arab horse “over heaths and through the green lanes of my native land,” or staying at home and fishing for big pike in the ponds near Oulton Broad, or basking in the sun. He worshipped Sidi Habismilk, and the horse worshipped his master so manifestly as almost to encourage the belief that Borrow was really a “horse-wizard.” The Arab followed him about like a dog. But this magnetism of his was not confined to horses; it was exercised equally over dogs and cats. Miss Harvey mentions that when Borrow set out from Oulton for a walk, he was often accompanied by two dogs and a cat. Grimalkin would, of course, be satisfied with much less pedestrianism than her master and the dogs, and would turn back home after a quarter of a mile or so. These diversions occupied him well into the summer. It was only when the heat and his own laziness began to remind him of sun-baked Andalusia that the big book came to his mind as a duty to be done. In actual fact, it would seem that the bulk of the manuscript was in the hands of Murray by the middle of the year in the form of a fair copy made by Mrs. Borrow from the letters and from the new connecting links which the author scribbled, as he says, “higgledypiggledy” on the blank leaves of account-books and the backs of envelopes.