If the year of the great Exhibition was an unfortunate year for the commercial fortunes of “Lavengro,” the Exhibition itself had certain irresistible attractions for “Lavengro’s” author. It had drawn to London a large congregation of the peoples of the earth, and the thought that in Hyde Park twenty languages were chiming a rare cacophony was too much for him. He went off to town to see the show, taking his step-daughter with him. The tall man with the white hair, striding about under the glass roof, soon began to create a minor sensation, which was by no means to the liking of Miss Clarke. To see a group of foreigners in converse was enough for him. He went up to them and addressed them in their own tongue, and repeated the process so often that it began to be whispered about that he was “uncanny,” and he excited so much remark that his daughter thought it better to drag him away.
While Borrow was at Oulton struggling with the composition of “Lavengro,” quarrelling with the vicar, denouncing Sir Morton Peto, procrastinating with his publisher, and passing some of the most miserable, if the most fruitful years of his life, he made an acquaintance which ripened into an important and valuable friendship. The Misses Harvey introduced the Borrows to Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, then resident as a physician at Bury St. Edmund’s—the friendly critic of “Lavengro” already mentioned. Visits were paid and repaid by the two families at Bury and at Oulton, and a close association and familiarity grew up. Dr. Hake thus becomes one of the most trustworthy and most interesting authorities on this portion of Borrow’s life, and relates many exceedingly suggestive stories illustrating the varied and strangely contradictory phases of Borrow’s character. His sketch of the personality of his friend, inscribed in his “Memoirs,” has often been quoted. Its principal value is that it brings out with the authority of a medical man the cause of much that frequently seems inexplicable in Borrow—his native hypochondria, and the reason for his violent antipathy towards society, and especially “genteel” society: “Society he loved and hated alike; he loved it that he might be pointed out and talked of; he hated it because he was not the prince he felt himself in its midst.” I refer again in this connection to the view proffered to me by Mr. Watts-Dunton, gleaned from intercourse with Borrow at a later period of his life, that his denunciation of respectability and “gentility-nonsense” was simply by way of revenge upon the Philistines; that he loved real respectability and good repute, worshipped fame and success, and equally hated insignificance and failure.
Dr. Hake’s anecdotes illustrate his impatience of much of the kind of fame and notice he attracted, the outbursts of violence with which he greeted people who did not appeal to him, and the intensity of his egoism. Poor Agnes Strickland was anxious to be introduced to him, and, after expressing her great admiration of his books, she begged to be allowed to send him a copy of her “Queens of England.” Borrow cried, “For God’s sake don’t, madam; I should not know what to do with them.” And, getting up, he said to Mr. Donne, of the London Library, who had introduced the ill-assorted pair, “What a d— fool that woman is!” There was Mrs. Bevan, the wife of the Suffolk banker, with whom he went to dine, Dr. Hake being of the company. Borrow knew that the bank had dealt, as he thought, rigorously with a friend who was in financial straits. Mrs. Bevan, who, of course, had no responsibility in this matter, sat next to Borrow at dinner. Dr. Hake describes her as “a simple, unpretending woman, desirous of pleasing him,” which she sought to do by describing the pleasure with which she had read his books. “Pray, what books do you mean, madam?” said Borrow. “Do you mean my account-books?” And he rose from the table, walking up and down the room during dinner, and wandered about the house till the carriage was ordered. There was Thackeray, whom he met at Hardwicke House, in Suffolk. Thackeray ventured to ask him whether he had read the “Snob Papers” in Punch. “In Punch?” said Borrow. “It is a periodical I never look at!”
Instances of his boorishness could be multiplied, but it is sufficiently proved. Let us see what there is on the other side of the account.
There is a tale told by Mr. Ewing Ritchie [140] which illustrates the fact that Borrow thoroughly detested the practice of snubbing—when he witnessed it as a third person. A clergyman at the supper table at Oulton Hall (then let to a tenant who was a Nonconformist) made an onslaught upon a young Independent minister for holding Calvinistic opinions. The occasion of this Christian dispute was the more appropriate as they had all just returned from an undenominational meeting of the Bible Society, at which Borrow had made a speech. The minister stood up to the cleric, and told him that the Thirty-nine Articles to which he had sworn assent were Calvinistic. The reply to this was that there was a mode of explaining away the Articles: we were not bound to take the words “in their natural sense.” The young Nonconformist confessed that he did not understand that way out of the difficulty, and subsided. Then Borrow stepped into the fray, “opening fire on the clergyman,” says Mr. Ritchie, “in a very unexpected manner, and giving him such a setting-down as the hearers, at any rate, never forgot. All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms was held up by Borrow to ridicule, and the clergyman was beaten at every point.” The comment of the young minister to Mr. Ritchie was, “Never did I hear one man give another such a dressing as on that occasion.” It was very like to be tremendous when Borrow had his Protestant bonnet on and at the same time thought he saw a member of the Church he loved making himself ridiculous.
The interview between Borrow and the Rev. Whitwell Elwin has been previously mentioned (p. [52]). “What party are you in the Church?” he suddenly exclaimed to the Rector of Booton. “Tractarian, Moderate, or Evangelical? I am happy to say I am the old High.” “I am happy to say I am not,” replied Elwin. A conversation thus begun with unpromising differences of opinion about the ethics of review-writing, and continued in an atmosphere of theological disputation, would ordinarily have ended in a violent quarrel. Borrow must have been in an especially benignant mood that day, for he allowed Elwin to throw aspersions upon his pronunciation of the Norfolk dialect, and yet did not bring the séance to a conclusion with lightning in his eyes, thunder on his brows, and storms of invective flowing from his eloquent tongue. “Borrow boasted,” says Elwin, “of his proficiency in the Norfolk dialect, which he endeavoured to speak as broadly as possible. I told him that he had not cultivated it with his usual success.” But the clouds cleared, the protagonists became warm friends, and promised to visit each other. It does not appear that Elwin ever went to Oulton, but Borrow did go to Booton, exerted himself to please his hosts by calling upon his stores of anecdote and adventure, and entranced the children of the rectory by singing gypsy songs to them. It will be remembered that Elwin was then editing the Quarterly Review as deputy for Lockhart. He begged Borrow to “try his hand at an article for the Review.” But Borrow was far too sore with reviews and reviewers to entertain such a proposal; the incident of Ford’s “Handbook,” too, was recent. “Never!” he cried. “I have made a resolution never to have anything to do with such a blackguard trade!”
The Booton episode is related mainly because it offers an opportunity of referring to a trait of Borrow which has been the subject of strange misrepresentation. Dr. Jessopp wrote for the Daily Chronicle [142] a review of a new edition of “The Romany Rye,” in which the following remarkable passage occurred:
“Of anything like animal passion there is not a trace in all his many volumes. Not a hint that he ever kissed a woman or ever took a little child upon his knee. He was beardless; his voice was not the voice of a man. His outbursts of wrath never translated themselves into uncontrollable acts of violence; they showed themselves in all the rancorous hatred that could be put into words—the fire smouldered in that sad heart of his. Those big bones and huge muscles and the strong brain were never to be reproduced in an offspring to be proud of. How if he were the Narses of literature—one who could be only what he was, though we are always inclined to lament that he was not something more?”
One does not care to discuss the principal suggestion here involved, save to say that there is not a tittle of evidence to support it, that it cannot be believed by any student of some of the most robust and most virile works in the English language, and that the alleged facts upon which it is based have been categorically contradicted by Mr. Thomas Hake (the eldest son of Dr. Gordon Hake) in an interesting letter to Mr. Watts-Dunton. [143] This gentleman, the author of several novels, who knew more of Borrow than anyone else, must not be confounded with his younger brother, Mr. Egmont Hake (mentioned on page [8]), the well-known author of “The Story of Chinese Gordon.” It will be a great pity if Mr. Thomas Hake does not give us his reminiscences of the author of “Lavengro.” One point, however, of Dr. Jessopp’s impeachment of Borrow may be taken up without offence. There is not a hint, says Dr. Jessopp, that Borrow “ever kissed a woman or ever took a little child upon his knee.” It is a new demand upon biographers that they shall record, even by way of hint, the osculatory adventures of their heroes, and possibly the best reply is that there is certainly no hint that he never kissed a woman, and there is plenty of testimony to the fact that he was no misogynist. But if a hint will suffice it may be found in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s account of the conversation between them and the gypsy woman Perpinia, whom he warned against smoking tobacco while she was suckling an infant: “It ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,” growled Borrow. “Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale tobacco—pheugh!” The inference is so obvious that one need not pursue the argument by inversion of the story. When one comes to Dr. Jessopp’s picture of Borrow in his relation to children, however, there is a large quantity of direct evidence gathered from many quarters which proves it to be erroneous. Mr. Thomas Hake, in the letter just cited, says:
“When our family lived at Bury St. Edmund’s in the ’fifties, my father, as you know, was one of Borrow’s most intimate friends, and he was frequently at our house, and Borrow and my father were a good deal in correspondence (as Dr. Knapp’s book shows), and my impression of Borrow is exactly the contrary of that which it would be if he in the least resembled Dr. Jessopp’s description of him. At that time George was in the nursery and I was a child. He took a wonderfully kind interest in us all . . . but the one he took most notice of was George, chiefly because he was a very massive child. It was then that he playfully christened him ‘Hales,’ because he said that the child would develop into a second ‘Norfolk giant.’ You will remember that he always addressed George by that name.”