“His books show that he could never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition. To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was as great an incentive . . . to learn languages as to Alexander Smith’s poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry. . . . But I soon found that if he was not a perfect Child of the Open Air—he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human kind which the Child of the Open Air must needs lack.”
There was much talk during that ramble of the herons of Whittlesea Mere—which Mr. Watts-Dunton identified as the scene of some of the adventures in the early part of “Lavengro”—of viper-taming, of the East Anglian gypsies, of horses (and especially of the descendants of “Shales”), of the quality of the sea-water off the east coast, and of like matters dear to the heart of Borrow. The East Anglian in his new companion completely conquered Borrow. They sang a duet in praise of the glassy Ouse, which was the only river in England adequate to reflect the rainbow, and of the wet sands of the Norfolk coast. The last passage of the dialogue that Mr. Watts-Dunton has set down is an amusing example of the complacency with which they agreed on the superiority of East Anglia to any other spot under heaven:
“It is on sand alone that the sea strikes its true music—Norfolk sand; a rattle is not music.”
“The best of the sea’s lutes,” I said, “is made by the sands of Cromer.”
Thus was the entente ratified. It endured till Borrow finally left London to end his days not far from the sound of the sea’s best lute.
CHAPTER XIV
THE PASSING OF THE ROMANY RYE
When “The Romano Lavo-Lil” came out at the beginning of 1874, the public were already in possession of Leland’s great book, which finally “queered the pitch” for Borrow. The two would not bear comparison as a study of the Romany language, for Borrow had worked so hurriedly that his vocabulary was much less complete than he might have made it. There are a large number of gypsy words in various parts of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” which he failed to incorporate in the new book; and others acquired at Yetholm were also omitted. But it was not only in comparison with Leland’s that Borrow’s last words on the gypsies seemed feeble. Many much more learned persons had been publishing monumental works on the subject—Pott, Miklosich, Paspati, to mention only three. The new philological spirit had been operating on the Romany; the gypsy tongue had been treated with as much care and skill as though it were one of the great literary languages; whereas, when “The Zincali” was offered to the public, as Mr. Hindes Groome pointed out in The Academy, “there were not two educated men in England who possessed the slightest knowledge of Romany.”
Mr. Groome was fair, even generous, in some of his acknowledgments. On the other hand, The Athenæum had no bowels of compassion for the veteran; it did not temper justice with mercy. Though it had to confess that not a few of those who had studied the gypsies and their language “owed their first taste for the subject to the perusal of Mr. Borrow’s books,” it could not “allow merely sentimental reasons to prevent us from telling the honest truth,” but forthwith told it in terms of perfect candour.
Amidst this demonstration of the fact that he had outlived his age, Borrow decided to leave London once and for all, and to return to his home on the shores of Oulton Broad, where he was finally lost to the sight of a world not patient of him. As he told Mr. Watts-Dunton, he was going down into East Anglia to die. For many years before the publication of his last book, he had been very little in the limelight. The public which had hailed “The Bible in Spain” with almost delirious delight had grown older. In the absence of regular literary appeals to its attention by Borrow, it had imagined him already dead. Some American celebrities at one of Mrs. Procter’s Sunday afternoons were discussing Borrow and Latham with Mr. Watts-Dunton, who told them “an anecdote of a whimsical meeting” between these two. Was it the computation of his capacity for “bottles at a sitting” which Latham endeavoured to get out of Borrow at Dr. Gordon Hake’s? “My anecdote,” adds Watts-Dunton, “was fully appreciated and enjoyed by my auditors till I chanced to let fall the fact that both heroes of the quaint adventure were still alive, that they occasionally met at Putney, and that I had quite lately been seeking for sundews on Wimbledon Common with the one and strolling through Richmond Park with the other. Then the look that passed from face to face showed how dangerous it is to indulge on all occasions in the coxcombry of mere truth. And afterwards my brilliant hostess did not fail to let me know how grievously my character for veracity had suffered for having talked about two men as being alive who were well known to have been dead years ago—‘talked of them as though I had just left them at luncheon.’ And yet at this very time Latham and Borrow were, in the eyes of a few of England’s most illustrious men, the important names they had always been.” [253]
Borrow’s leave-taking of London had its apotheosis from the same pen in a brilliant and much-quoted passage:
“The last time I ever saw George Borrow was shortly before he left London to live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and boiling over the West End. Borrow came up and stood leaning over the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be. Like most people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets. Turner could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could not describe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun and had lost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it went curling round the sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and clearest air—a peculiar effect which struck Borrow deeply. I never saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and, from its association with ‘the last of Borrow,’ I shall never forget it.”