And how was it that a man whose pet weakness was his idolatry of the Anglo-Saxons, who joyed in thinking himself representative of what was best and manliest in a race whose aversion from the Romany is so pronounced, was the man of all others in England who seemed to get into closest touch with the gypsies, to understand them and to be understood of them? Perhaps a little because of his philological craze and the avidity with which he set himself to pick up their language. But the real explanation is that, in fact, Borrow was no Anglo-Saxon at all. His vainglorious boasts of Anglo-Saxon breeding were based on nothing more substantial than the fact that his father and mother happened to be living in Norfolk at the time when he came into the world. He was a Celt of Celts. His genius was truly Celtic. His father was a Cornishman whose family had resided in the West-country peninsula—Lord Courtney’s “emerald, set in a sapphire sea”—for many generations, and was a Cornish and therefore a Celtic family to the very tips of its numerous fingers. His mother was of French descent. Here was a pretty parentage for a bluff and hearty champion of optimistic and progressive Anglo-Saxondom!
Borrow was fond of Norfolk: the rest was affectation. He had all the Celtic characteristics—the quick and lively imagination, the poetic temperament, the intensely emotional nature, the tendency to melancholy. The only writer who, within my knowledge, has laid effective stress on this is Mr. Watts-Dunton. Borrow loved the wide level landscapes, the marshes and broads of East Anglia, just as FitzGerald did, a descendant of Irishmen who was born in the East. Various reasons conspired to produce this affection. Norfolk was the scene of his boyish exploits. In Norfolk lived the mother he worshipped. There he met the wife who was his truest friend and finest comrade. But the spirit of East Anglia, the Teutonic tradition, did not preside over Borrow’s destiny and direct his moral and intellectual fortunes. It was the spirit of Old Cornwall, its remote hills peeping out of vales of mystery towards an empyrean where every cloud breathed legend, the land of weird imaginings, of saintly lore, and chivalric romance. The bluff and blunt and downright John-Bullery that Borrow affected was but a pose; the heat of the fires of the Underworld creeps up into his work, and the pale light of the Overworld shines down upon it. He is constantly on the brink of moral tragedy and ever listening to the rumble of the spiritual upheaval. What stirs him most to eloquence and deep feeling is Celtic Ireland or Celtic Wales, the wild music of the speech of Murtagh the Papist gossoon, the “noble mountains, green fields, and majestic woods” of the Cymric land.
Many peculiarities of Borrow, on a superficial examination, seem to offer flat contradiction to this view. His “Poperyphobia” appears to be difficult to reconcile with his unquestionable sympathy with the Celtic spirit of Ireland. He affects the Orange hue; whenever he sees a Catholic head he hits it. We need not seek far for the explanation. His mother was of a Huguenot family which had been driven out of France by the persecutions of the Catholic Church: Borrow idolised his mother. Further, it never mattered to him whether an injury was two days or two centuries old; he hated the offender just the same. His father had quarrelled, long before George was born, with a gentleman named Hambly. To the end of his life Borrow swore that a person named Hambly could never be good. His adulation of violent sports and his pathetic belief in the immaculate supremacy of the English in all athletics are other facts which on the surface may seem to upset the theory of an obsessing Celtic mysticism. But even here his ancestry counts for much. The Cornish were ever devoted to athletic contests; their cousins the Welsh are in one of the realms of sport unparalleled and unapproachable. Borrow’s good-ale-of-old-England fetish surprised the decent and sober people of Wales, and his “wishy-washy tea” is the national beverage of Cornwall. But his devotion to malt liquor was a part of his protest against “gentility-nonsense” and “temperance-canting,” about which he raved with even more than usual violence and incoherence. In the mid-Victorian age in which he wrote, the glorification of beer-swilling was as un-“genteel” as even Borrow could have desired.
All these idiosyncrasies, however, count for little beside the deeper characteristics of Borrow’s life and work, over which the Celtic genius reigned. Racial traits were strongly marked in him, and he is a standing refutation of Mr. George Moore’s dictum that “the land makes the Celt,” and that it is not a question of race. In this heredity we must look for the beginnings of any proper view of Borrow.
CHAPTER II
A WANDERING YOUTH
The Borrows of Tredinnick, in the parish of St. Cleer, were proud Cornish yeomen. For centuries they had occupied the same house and farmed the same land. Now they have been scattered over the world, in true Cornish fashion, and there is not a Borrow left in the district.
Tredinnick is a little old house in a hollow, about a mile north-west of St. Cleer Church, near Liskeard, among the hills of Eastern Cornwall. It is a long, low, stone-fronted building of two storeys, backed by a row of tall elms standing at the roadside, with an apple orchard behind, and the ground at the side sloping away into a deep valley of orchards and meadows. The place is quite unpretentious; the farm is little more than fifty acres in extent, and the house has lost in the lapse of time the neatness that would have shown in the abode of Borrow’s gentillâtre. Still, for a farmhouse, it is commodious. It has walls two feet thick, and in the long, raftered, slate-floored kitchen are deep window-seats, and an open hearth and chimney-corner, the crock-hook depending in the midst. Lavengro would have rejoiced in such a place. The dining-room and sitting-room are on the other side of the entrance, and communicate—respectable but undistinguished rooms.
In this home was born, in December, 1758, Thomas, father of George Borrow. He was a posthumous child. We have a very fair picture of him in the opening chapters of “Lavengro.” We see him in youth, the favourite of his mother, whose special care of him was the cause of jealousy in his six brothers. We learn that shortly after he was eighteen his mother died, and he adopted “the profession of arms, which he followed during the remainder of his life.” But Lavengro, candidly stating that he knows little about the early life of his father, does not tell us the circumstances in which he left the homestead at Tredinnick, after bringing to a disastrous end his apprenticeship to one Edward Hambly, a maltster. He is described as “cool and collected, slow to anger, though perfectly fearless, patient of control, of great strength, and, to crown all, a proper man with his hands.” This may in some measure account for the adulation of prize-fighting which in “Lavengro,” as Mr. Birrell has pointed out, scandalised “the religious world” that had welcomed with such effusive joy “The Bible in Spain.” George Borrow inherited a love of adventure and a fondness for “the noble art,” and probably also the aversion from “gentility” apparent in the lines with which his autobiography opens. Yet it is strange that he was really proud of his gentle descent, proud of his Cornish father and his little-landed ancestry, and proud of the French extraction of his mother and the small and delicate hands he got from her.
The manner of departure of Lavengro’s father out of Cornwall had an intimate connection with that properness of his with his hands. He was at Menheniot Fair with a party of youths from Liskeard, three or four miles distant, when a row arose between young Menheniot and young Liskeard; probably some breeze of incident blew upon the embers of a village feud. Slow as he was to anger and patient of control, Borrow nevertheless entered with zest into the fray, for he headed the Liskeard party and brought the struggle to a climax by knocking down the constable. Thereafter, fearing the consequences of his adventure, he departed from the ancestral roof-tree, and began the wandering life which he was leading when he met the mother of Lavengro. And small wonder at his flight, for the constable he knocked down was none other than his own master, the head-borough, Edward Hambly. The date of the scrimmage was July 28th, 1783. He disappeared for five months. In December he turned up at Bodmin and enlisted in the Coldstream Guards, who had a recruiting party there under Captain William Morshead, later the celebrated general. The captain, knowing his antecedents, did all he could to prevent the enlistment, but without success.
Thomas Borrow may well have recalled the constable of Menheniot in later years when he did battle in Hyde Park with “big Ben Brain” (read Bryan), giving that celebrity a little useful practice for the contest in which he became “champion of England, having conquered the heroic Johnson,” and paving the way for the friendship to which all such encounters should lead. Bryan, wrote George in after years, “expired in the arms of my father, who read the Bible to him in his later moments.” What marvel that “Lavengro” is a medley of religion and beer-drinking, prize-fighting and philosophy?