“His tall, erect, somewhat mysterious figure was often seen in the early hours of summer mornings or late at night on the lonely pathways that wind in and out from the banks of Oulton Broad. He loved to be mysterious, and the village children used to hush their voices and draw aside at his approach. They looked upon him with fear and awe—for had they not seen him stop and talk with the gypsies, who ran away with little children? But in his heart Borrow was fond of the little ones, though it amused him to watch the impression his strange personality made upon them. Older people he seldom spoke to when out on his solitary rambles; but sometimes he would flash out such a glance from beneath his broad-brimmed hat and shaggy eyebrows as would make timid country-folk hasten on their way filled with vague thoughts and fears of the evil eye. . . .

“Still, Borrow was not unpopular with the villagers, many of whom, long after his death, remembered little acts of kindness on his part by which they had benefited. To the sick and infirm he was always a good friend, though his almost invariable remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to were wine and ale. He was exceedingly fond of animals, and nothing aroused his wrath more than to see them badly treated. . . . A favourite old cat that was ill crawled out of his house to die in the garden hedge. Borrow no sooner missed the poor creature than he went in search of it, and brought it indoors in his arms. He then laid it down in a comfortable spot, and sat and watched it till it was dead.”

Most old people incline to exaggerate their age after they have passed the common span of life, and are offended if the achievement of longevity is not accounted a meritorious performance in them. Borrow was unconventional in this as in all things. He resented references to his age. The vicar of Lowestoft visited him at Oulton, and had a smooth and delightful experience till he transgressed by asking the veteran how old he was. “Sir,” said Borrow thunderously, “I tell my age to no man!” One of his last bits of writing, in a tremulous hand, was a little dissertation “On People’s Age,” beginning: “Never talk to people about their age. . . . Compliment a man of eighty-five on the venerableness of his appearance, and he will shriek out, ‘No more venerable than yourself,’ and will perhaps hit you with his crutch.” [262]

The forcible sentiment was that of a man whose mind was stronger than his physical frame. Within a few months the passing came. His death, by some strange fate, was as secret as much of his life had been: he passed to the hidden bourne unseen by any human eye; his last agony was even more closely veiled than those years of his youth around which he had diffused a mist as thick as the enchanted vapours raised by his favourite magicians, the Firbolgs.

On July 26th, 1881, Dr. and Mrs. MacOubrey drove to Lowestoft on business. Borrow was left alone in the house. When they returned he lay dead. Censure passed upon his step-daughter and her husband in connection with this incident is ungenerous. They had cared for him so tenderly that it is impossible to accuse them of any lack of affection. And who, viewing George Borrow’s life and character as a rounded whole, would regard the circumstances of his death with disapproval? So, seventy-eight years after the summer evening when, at the “beautiful little town in a certain district of East Anglia, I first saw the light,” he entered into the Life Everlasting, not many miles away, alone in his lonely house, with the fir trees whispering as his spirit departed, and the quiet water shimmering by the little summer-house where that spirit had communed with its choicest companions and accomplished its finest work. The body lay silent there for several days:

“That port which so majestic was and strong,
Loose, and deprived of vigour, stretched along:
All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan . . .”

On August 4th it was conveyed to London, and laid with the body of his wife in West Brompton Cemetery.

Borrow dead was Borrow forgotten until the afflation of a new time breathed upon him, and his resurrection came. The “strange pilgrim’s masterful manner and irritable temper” took their proper place in the background of the picture; the real value of his pilgrimage was seen. A finnicking age which emphasised his “vulgarity” had ended, and another age had opened which was competent to approve his realism and to appraise his art. Borrow took his rightful niche among the immortals who have illuminated the human comedy and sung the joys of earth. The inspiration of Jasper Petulengro is the inspiration of the New Day: “There’s a wind on the heath, brother. . . . Who would wish to die?”

CHAPTER XV
BORROW’S GYPSYISM

Borrow’s gypsyism was the most important part of his literary stock-in-trade. What it was worth, apart from its literary value, is a moot point.

Any writer who is not a deep gypsiologist must approach such a question with diffidence. The consensus of opinion is all that can be suggested. It is that Borrow was unscientific both as a Romany linguist and as a student of Romany history. His knowledge of this strange race, for whose origin we go to the Hindu Kush and beyond, was empirical; so was his acquaintance with the language they took with them all over the world and preserved for so many years almost as inviolably secret as the Etruscan mystery. He was an enthusiast, but not a learned enthusiast, and his method did not lend itself to thoroughness—like that of Mr. Sampson, for example, of whom a gypsy warned his friends that he would “cut the heart out of your breast if he thought he’d find a new word in it.” Borrow’s gypsy stories were not arranged on the elaborate plan of Mr. Sampson’s excursions into the gypsy lore of Wales. Though he knew the “tinkler” tribes intimately, it was left for Leland, long years afterwards, to discover that they had a language of their own, which was not Romany, but Shelta, subsequently identified with the secret medium of the ancient bards of Ireland. Leland’s discovery and the investigations of Professor Kuno Meyer and Mr. Sampson, which traced Shelta back to the Gaelic of ten centuries ago, surely form one of the great romances of philology. Leland himself was surprised that Borrow had not penetrated this mystery, because he had “specially cultivated tinkers.”