George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

And Mr. Watts-Dunton paid tribute to Borrow of a sonnet melodising their talk of the “Children of the Open Air,” and making contrast of the lot of lovers of the sun and wind with the habitants of London:

“. . . . Where men wither and choke,
Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
And love of woods and wild-wind prophecies—
Yea, every voice that to their father spoke;
And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
Leave never a meadow, outside Paradise.”

At the age of seventy-one there was not much left for the solitary spirit to achieve. It was not easy to make new friendships, and even the old ones were difficult to nurture at Oulton. He made one effort to get Edward FitzGerald over from Woodbridge to see him. FitzGerald, twenty years before, had been an ardent admirer of Borrow’s work. Sending him a copy of his translation of Calderon’s plays, he remarked that he was a man “who both did fine things in his own language and was deep read in those of others.” Their correspondence was not extensive, but FitzGerald’s letters are of considerable interest. For example, they show that Borrow was in the secret of old Omar. FitzGerald wrote that “Cowell, to whom I sent a copy, was naturally alarmed at it, he being a very religious man; nor have I given any other copy but to George Borrow . . . and to old Donne . . .” [255] This was a copy of the edition printed in 1859 by Quaritch. But two years before the premature birth of the great poem, FitzGerald had lent Borrow his manuscript of the quatrains, and in asking for the return of it, he wrote: “I only want a look at him. . . . You shall have Omar back directly, or whenever you want him, and I should really like to make you a copy (taking my time) of the best quatrains. I am now looking over the Calcutta manuscript, which has 500!—very many quite as good as those in the manuscript you have; but very many in both manuscripts are well omitted. . . .” FitzGerald had been at Oulton about 1850. In 1856 he had visited Borrow again at Yarmouth, and of that meeting he says expressively, “I enjoyed my evening.” He did not fail, of course, to rub against some of Borrow’s angles. According to Mr. Benson (“Edward FitzGerald,” in the “English Men of Letters” series), he “found this strange pilgrim’s masterful manners and irritable temper uncongenial,” but Mr. Benson admits that FitzGerald said, long afterwards, “he was almost the only friend Borrow had never quarrelled with.” The irritation could have been but slight, if it could be called irritation at all: in one of his wayward moods Borrow banged home the covers of the book just as his guest was about to ask him to read some of the Northern Ballads. This incident is mentioned without rancour by FitzGerald, in a letter in which he makes Borrow a present of Redhouse’s “New Turkish Dictionary,” declares what a pleasant evening he had spent at Yarmouth, and lets his friend into the secret of his amazing marriage.

“I must tell you. I am come up here” (he writes from London) “on my way to Chichester to be—married! to Miss Barton (of Quaker memory), and our united ages amount to 96!—a dangerous experiment on both sides. She at least brings a fine head and heart to the bargain—worthy of a better market. But it is to be, and I dare say you will honestly wish we may do well.”

The “dangerous experiment” turned out as we know. FitzGerald’s letter is hardly that of a man who found Borrow “uncongenial.” He liked the Borrow ménage, they had much in common in their literary tastes, and some few common friends—Donne for one, and for another Kerrich, of Geldeston Hall, FitzGerald’s brother-in-law. He liked Borrow’s books, too. They were among the few modern works he read, though his fastidious palate was offended by some of Borrow’s lapses in style. In addition to the meetings at Oulton and Yarmouth, there were foregatherings at Donne’s house in London, at FitzGerald’s own house in Great Portland Street, and at Gorleston.

But this was all twenty years old now; the FitzGerald who received Borrow’s letter at Woodbridge was sixty-six and a close recluse, unable to understand why any man who had reached his age or gone beyond it should want any company but his own. His response is a curious illustration of the hermit way of thought into which he had fallen. He told Borrow that for the last fifteen years he had not visited any of his oldest friends, except the daughters of George Crabbe—“my old parson Crabbe,” vicar of Bredfield, whose “brave old white head” had “sunk into the village churchsward” in 1857—and Donne, to whom he had given a half-day. To have told why he had thus fallen from his company would have been a tedious thing, he said, and all about himself, too—“whom, Montaigne says, one never talks about without detriment to the person talked about.”

“One’s friends, however kind and ‘loyal’ (as the phrase goes), do manage to exist and enjoy themselves pretty reasonably without one.

“So with me. And is it not much the same with you also? Are you not glad now to be mainly alone, and find company a heavier burden than the grasshopper? . . . I like to think over my old friends. They are there, lingering as ineffaceable portraits—done in the prime of life—in my memory. Perhaps we should not like one another so well after a fifteen years’ separation, when all of us change and most of us for the worse. . . .

“So shall things rest? I could not go to you, after refusing all this while to go to older—if not better—friends. . . .”

This letter, dated January 10th, 1875, is almost the final literary relic of Borrow. It sings in a minor key, but with a fitting sombre melody, the requiem of his career in the world of letters. Borrow himself, however, did not renounce and abhor society in FitzGerald’s fashion. Desolate Oulton, the haunt of so many wraiths of past joys and sorrows, saddened the lonely old man, and in the late ’seventies he lived a good deal in Norwich, where he had apartments in Lady Lane, seeking the company of those who knew and liked him. His favourite resort was the old Norfolk Hotel. There he had his special chair, whence he issued his pronouncements ex cathedra on ale and men and things. But to Oulton he turned at the last, dismal as it was. The estate had been pitifully neglected during his residence in London. The Nemesis that dogged his steps as a landed proprietor had always been the litigious tenant. There was one in possession of the Hall Farm in 1878, when Dr. and Mrs. MacOubrey had left London to live at Oulton, in order to bear Borrow company in his declining days. This tenant, calling at the Cottage to deliver an ultimatum about the need for repairs, became rude to Borrow, who fired up quite in his best style, and declared, “Sir, you came in by that door; you can go out by it!”

Borrow’s predilection for the alehouse is beyond question, whether it was in Norwich, or in London, or in Wales. But it was probably not so overpowering as sometimes has been represented. The misrepresentation is doubtless his own fault in great measure, because of the literary emphasis he laid upon the virtue of inns and their staple commodity. We have observed how this affected one of the reviewers of “Wild Wales.” Legends grew up around a certain inn at Oulton Broad, the Wherry Hotel. They were inevitable. Because it was an inn and was near Borrow’s house, gossip assumed that he was a frequent visitor and a bibulous. A sort of myth arose that it was the scene of drinking bouts, where Borrow not only gratified his own passion for quarrelling and fighting, but egged on others to quarrel and fight. It has already been shown on good evidence that he was personally temperate, if not abstemious, and the known facts dispose of the idea that there was any excessive drinking. [259] But the stories gave occasion for a correspondence in one of the London papers a few years ago, when Mr. William Mackay was able to dismiss them by proving that the Wherry Hotel was kept by one Mason during this period, and that Mr. Mason averred that Borrow did not visit the house more than twice, and that he had no recollection of the incidents so vividly described.

Mr. William A. Dutt has given us a graphic little picture [260] of Borrow in the last years of his life in the country of the Broads, and of the impression he made on his neighbours: