Not many people remain in Cornwall now who can remember Borrow, but a few years ago I found memories of the man and his eccentricities still lively among old inhabitants. Borrow amazed them not only by his personal peculiarities, but by his intellectual superiority to “they Borrowses.” There were many Borrows round about, small farmers, excellent and worthy undistinguished people, the friends and equals of their neighbours; the staggering fact was that such a wonder, such a celebrity, such a walking encyclopædia of information on matters of which they had never heard, should have sprung from the Borrow stock. His “curious ways” were subject of remark, but his popularity rose superior to his manners: in a few short weeks he obtained a reputation for liveliness hardly second to that of his father.
I have been told that he roamed the Caradons in all weathers without a hat, in search of sport and specimens, antiquities and dialects. He often carried a gun. If a bird that fell to him dropped in a moorland pool, he would plunge in after it and come out dripping water and beaming triumph. Little parties he attended at Penquite, at the vicarage, at the houses of friends in Liskeard, were
“. . . As merry
As, first, good company, good wine, good welcome
Can make good people.”
He himself kept the fireside circle roaring with his constant flow of gypsy songs and stories. But it was an essential point that the parties should not be genteel. “Lavengro” had not long been written, and he was then engaged upon its sequel. Shortly he was to be writing—if it were not already written—that chapter of the Appendix on “gentility-nonsense.” It was, in fact, just the zenith of the anti-gentility campaign. Once he went from Penquite into Liskeard to dine with Mr. Bernard Anstis. The despiteful demon seized him at the ex-Mayor’s hospitable board. Gentility showed its cloven hoof in some form or other; in the midst of dinner Borrow protested silently against the apparition by keeping his handkerchief in his pocket and dragging out for ostentatious use the old, greasy, rust-stained, powder-grimed rag he kept about him for cleaning his gun during expeditions on the moors. He seemed, said one, now departed (John Abraham, of Liskeard), who related to me this story, to be “perpetually repeating to himself old Burton’s maxim that ‘of all vanities and fopperies, to brag of gentility is the greatest.’ Yet he was proud of the fact that his father derived from what he called the Cornish ‘gentillâtre.’” Mr. Taylor was a member of a card club in Liskeard, to which belonged the doctors and lawyers and other professional gentlemen of the town. Borrow was taken in to play cards with them. But it was far too tame for him. While they settled down to their rubber, he stole out to explore the back slums of the town, “picking up all the disreputable characters he could find, working off his knowledge of ‘cant’ on them, and getting out of them what he could.”
Borrow met at St. Cleer a kindred spirit in the vicar, Berkeley. This was an Irishman of the North—not to put too fine a point on it, an Orangeman,—a man of some pretensions to learning and a great “original,” as they might say in Cornwall. Berkeley’s militant Protestantism was quite as fierce as Borrow’s. But for a certain Irish cob, as he tells us, Borrow might have become a mere philologist. It was in Ireland that he first developed the taste for petty adventure which he now indulged to the full in the wilds of Cornwall. Here was common ground. Berkeley piled coals on the fire of his anti-Papist enthusiasm. The good vicar was, withal, convivial in disposition, exiled among a people cloaking their essential kindness under a serious demeanour, and exceedingly abstemious. He was open-hearted and open-handed when he had money, which was not always. He suffered once at the hands of ruthless bailiffs. As a burning Protestant, he was on amicable terms with the Dissenters, who formed the majority of his parishioners in Methodist Cornwall; he was a bitter enemy of Ritualism, and “Popery” was his bête noire. This piquant personality presided over the destinies of the parish of St. Cleer at a time when the fortunes of the Church of England reached their lowest ebb in Cornwall, and the Methodist societies flourished like the green bay-tree. It is related that for a considerable time the only regular attendant at church, in addition to the parson, was a schoolmaster of episcopal sympathies, who walked a mile and a half of a Sunday morning to hear Berkeley’s denunciation of the Papists echoing through an empty building.
Berkeley was one of those Irish Protestants to whom Borrow had paid tribute as a “most remarkable body of men who during two centuries have fought a good fight in Ireland in the cause of civilisation and religious truth . . . where . . . though surrounded with difficulties of every kind, they have maintained their ground; amidst darkness they have held up a lamp, and it would be well for Ireland were all her children like these, her adopted ones.” This is highly controversial ground, upon which there is no need to enter, save for the purpose of remarking that the man who had recently written that was like to be a friendly soul to Berkeley. And during his stay in Cornwall he was frequently at the vicarage. He would, as Berkeley related to Dr. Knapp in the character-sketch he reproduces, “suddenly spring from his seat and walk to and fro the room in silence; anon he would clap his hands and sing a gypsy song, or perchance would chant forth a translation of some Viking poem; after which he would sit down again and chat about his father, whose memory he revered, as he did his mother’s.” [154] He had the “Horrors” more than once. He told Berkeley that these attacks of depression were the result of the attempt made by a gypsy crone to poison him, as related in “Lavengro.” The vicar and his wife visited Penquite one evening, and found Borrow sitting, sunk in despair, by the side of a huge fire, taking no notice of person or thing. He remained wrapped in his mood of melancholy for hours, and was only roused from it when Mrs. Berkeley sat down at the piano and softly played some old Scots and Irish airs. Then, after a while, he jumped up and danced about the room, and began to shout a joyous melody. The “Horrors” had been conjured away, and he was another man. He made up for his previous obsession by giving the company liberally of his best, pouring out good stories and side-splitting anecdotes as fast as he could recite them. And, as Mrs. Berkeley was leaving the room, he said to her, “Your music was as David’s harp to my soul.”
One of the sources of Borrow’s pride in his father was his long and loyal service as a soldier; he had no respect for people who beat the sword into a ploughshare. Berkeley records his retort upon a young man who was telling how he had retired from the army because “the army was—aw—no place for a gentleman now.”
“I should judge,” said Borrow, “that it was rather the other way.”
“Aw—what do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Why, this: that the army is no place for a man who is not a gentleman, and that such a person was right in leaving it.”