George was then a youth pretending to learn law in the respectable office of Simpson and Rackham, in Tuck’s Court, but was far more ardently engaged in studying the by-products of human society and threading the byways of literature. He had been wandering on the heath until he “came to a place where, beside a thick furze, sat a man, his eyes fixed intently on the red ball of the setting sun.” The conversation, which may be found in the twenty-fifth chapter of “Lavengro,” is one of the most remarkable and most poetical dialogues in the English tongue. It strikes with perfect accuracy the keynote of George Borrow’s life. The whole chapter is a microcosm of Borrow, his philosophy, his morals, and his tastes. Its exordium is a passionate statement of his efforts in search of the heart of things, his pursuit of the elusive answer to the eternal Question. Its middle includes some reflections on philological research, mingled in Borrow’s incomparable manner with the pathos of failure and the humour of success. It has its fling at the metaphysicians. It reports in vivid words the earnest sermon of a field preacher; it describes with great wealth of comparison and eloquence the singing of a hymn on that Norfolk moor by a crowd of commonplace people elevated to a pitch of intense feeling by religious enthusiasm: a hymn which echoed in the ears of the listener many times in after years when in the great cathedrals of the world he was disappointed with religion decked out in all the panoply of pomp and circumstance; its peroration is Mr. Petulengro’s immortal pronouncement on the problem of mortality—and its epilogue is the gypsy’s invitation to his brother to “put on the gloves, and I will try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive.”
This is the very essence of Borrow—languages, religion, hedge-philosophy, and pugilism. The only element missing from the mixture is one of his characteristic outbursts in praise of the brown ale of old England. “There’s likewise a wind on the heath” lets us some way into the heart of Borrow’s secret.
The little sapengro of Norman Cross, the inquisitive youth who discussed Death with Jasper Petulengro, and was boxed out of the mood of morbid introspection, in which he declared, “I would wish to die,” into a healthy appreciation of the sweetness of Life, played many parts in his long career. He became scoffing sceptic, Bible missionary and Papist-hater, traveller, and recluse, philologist and poet. But his principal service to his day and generation and to their posterity had nothing to do with philosophy or religion, with belabouring “Romanisers” or with evangelical propagandism, with topography or with languages, or with poetry in the academic sense. It had everything to do with his wanderings in green lanes, his “love of Nature unconfined,” his acquaintance with the gypsies, his passion for The Wild, and his devotion to the ruder athletics. Many an artist imagines that he would make a reputation as a man of business; many a wizard of accounts has secret dreams of literary fame. Borrow had an impotent desire for scholarship and the celebrity of learning; but he laboured better than he knew. His invaluable bequest is to be disinterred from the numerous pages of five books, dug out from a mass of irrelevance and banality; and its inspiration will be found in the words of Mr. Petulengro: “There’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?” [6]
The man who, preaching from this text, imposed worship on the English-speaking world, was intensely alive, intensely egoistic. Often “engrossed with the sufferings of himself and of his soul,” as one has written of his hero Byron, he yet had a keen outlook upon that part of society in which he could move freely, and, as he saw intensely, was able to produce intense impressions of his visions upon his readers. He was a strange, romantic, wayward, irresponsible man—irresponsible, that is, to any but his own code of honour, manliness and virtue.
He was a very Don Quixote of letters. He went about the world tilting at every windmill he encountered; not infrequently he would construct windmills on which to break his lance. If he was often unhorsed and maimed, that did not matter; it merely made his next onslaught more severe. In one of his contests with persons who had offended him he speaks of them as malignant pseudo-critics, by whom he would not allow himself to be poisoned. “No, no! he will rather hold them up by their tails, and show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from their broken jaws.” Possibly only a man who had been worsted in his battle could have been guilty of this. But—furor arma ministrat; this was Borrow on the war-path against his critics. The true Borrovian likes to think of Borrow at another period and in different circumstances. It was a crabbed literary person who mangled and was mangled in this fashion. The lover of his genius pictures him otherwise—the young and handsome and vigorous Lavengro, stalking over the high roads and the byways of England, disputing with scholar or with gypsy, camping in lonely dingles, conjugating Armenian verbs with Isopel Berners. He has six feet three inches of height. His hair is white, but he has the complexion of healthy youth, and eyes dark and deep as mountain tarns. He revels in the friendship of gypsies and all the vagrants of earth, and cares for few other friends. He would rather sing ballads in the tent of a Romany chal than be entertained in the palace of a prince; he prefers the society of a prize-fighter to the converse of any duke. Recall his picture of himself:
“A lad who twenty tongues can talk,
And sixty miles a day can walk;
Drink at a draught a pint of rum,
And then be neither sick nor dumb;
Can tune a song and make a verse,
And deeds of northern kings rehearse;
Who never will forsake a friend
While he his bony fist can bend;
And, though averse to brawl and strife,
Will fight a Dutchman with a knife;
Oh, that is just the lad for me,
And such is honest six-foot-three.”
Or, again, in his riper age, as he is described by Mr. Egmont Hake (Dr. Gordon Hake’s fourth son)—a huge figure of a fine old man, eccentric of humour, rich beyond measure in the experience from which he drew anecdote, full of quaint whimsy and natural conceit. He was, says Mr. Hake (Athenæum, August 13th, 1881), “a choice companion on a walk, whether across country or in the slums of Houndsditch. His enthusiasm for nature was peculiar; he could draw more poetry from a widespreading marsh with its straggling rushes than from the most beautiful scenery, and would stand and look at it with rapture.” He rejoiced in a hedge-alehouse, or a coaching inn; he was moved to passionate delight by local reminiscences of highway robbers, vagrom scoundrels, pugilists, and vagabonds of all degrees; good beer was a poem to him. Under all these impressions he expanded nobly; contact with conventional respectability shrivelled him up; his bête noire was “gentility.” His strength and vigour remained unimpaired almost to the end of his life; at seventy he would break the ice on a pond and plunge in to bathe.
No man less fit than this for literary controversy was ever born into the world. It was an evil fate that launched him upon those sordid disputations disfiguring the Appendices to “The Romany Rye,” from which the “blood and foam” passage I have quoted is drawn.
Few men bringing to the literary mart so slight a cargo as Borrow brought have obtained so great a price for it. Some of his work, judged by any conventional standard, is remarkably poor. The best of it, judged by the only proper standard (which is entirely unconventional) is so good that immortality might be predicted for it by a person inclined to take the risk of being confuted in some remotely future incarnation. A great number of the enterprises in which Borrow dissipated many years of his life may be dismissed as of no literary importance and of no possible value to any other son of man. His philology, quâ philology, is grossly unscientific; its uses are, in fact, not scientific but artistic. They reside in the quaint hues it helped him to mix on his palette, the whimsical, half-serious, half-humorous disquisitions into which an unusual word would lead him, the ease with which it enabled him to glorify his picture with the tints of foreign skies and the forms of strange men. If we are to assess his linguistic achievements by their practical and immediate results, the years Borrow spent upon them were squandered. The seeds of his philological learning,
“Like Hebrew roots, were found
To flourish most in barren ground.”