George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

There is but one authentic portrait of Borrow, it is the painting in the possession of Mr. John Murray, by whose kind permission it has been reproduced for this work. An engraving from it was used as the frontispiece to the first edition of “Lavengro,” and it has always been known as “the ‘Lavengro’ portrait.” If there is anything in the theory that a man reaches a certain climacteric when Nature, having done all she can for him, designs that he shall sit for his portrait, Borrow seems to have sat at the identical moment. It would be impossible to wish for a better view of Don Jorge than this.

The white hair, the swart complexion, the brilliant eyes, the almost affectedly unconventional dress, give an impression of the man which irresistibly recalls the romance of his youthful exploits and the weird poetry of the most poetical part of his career. It was this striking appearance of his, and his commanding height, combined with his unorthodox outlook, which gave him his unquestionable influence with the gypsies. It helped to make him, during the one blazing season of his social celebrity, the lion of the London drawing-rooms. If he failed to maintain his popularity, it was in spite of his appearance, which had wonderful distinction.

No Borrovian regrets that Borrow failed, that he did not remain the pet of society, and that he was only for a brief space encouraged to Byronic affectations and ambitions. In following his wayward sprites into all the bêtises he committed, in alienating himself from the fashionable world and getting himself infinitely disliked by people who were ready to idolise him if he would have subscribed to all their conventions, Borrow wrought better than he knew. He would not have been Borrow, in fact, if, after the publication of “The Bible in Spain,” he had submitted to the influences of the great world and become a manufacturer of popular books. He would have written a great deal more and a great deal worse; he would have lost his piquancy to acquire gentility; he would have become suave, smooth, complacent, and pious, instead of being rugged, rebellious, boorish—and Borrow.

Such speculations are needless. It was impossible for Borrow to be other than Borrow was. The rudeness of his manner was no pose: this was an elemental spirit that could not avoid being itself, whatever veneer it eroded, whatever polish it dulled. The angularity, the abruptness, the most fascinating and most irritating qualities of his work—these also were no affectation. They arose naturally out of the qualities of the man himself. There is no writer who has put more of his ego into his work than Borrow. One looks at his portrait, contemplates his ancestry and his training, and admits that if this man were to become a writer there was no other kind of writer he could have become than the author of “Lavengro.” It is possible to lay too much stress on Borrow’s boorishness, and this is the very last place in which it should be done. His strain of melancholia often verged upon madness: any measured judgment of his life must take account of that fact, and it will explain much that is otherwise difficult to understand. I have been informed that he suffered in his youth from the “touching” mania, and that even if on his travels described in “Lavengro” he did meet a gentleman who was thus afflicted, the extraordinary vigour and vividness of the scenes in which the malady is depicted are due to his own painful acquaintance with it. Again, I have been told that the incident in “The Romany Rye,” where the old man studies the Chinese language through the medium of the legends inscribed on teapots, is drawn from his own experience, and that he turned to pursuits of this kind in order to stave off the horrors of melancholy which afflicted him in his moods of self-concentration. A man of this extraordinary sensibility, passing his youth at the eye-piece of a kaleidoscope, so to speak, afflated with poetry in boyhood, in narrow circumstances, buffeted by ill-fortune for many years, chasing many a Will-o’-the-wisp, could not help being “a queer chap,” as Ford said. He was soured by circumstance in his early days. In middle life, when the sunshine of success burst upon him for a time, he became more genial. The picture of him one gets in his Cornish and Welsh tours is very pleasant. But he became cold again in later years, and was a bitter man after the death of his wife had broken the strongest link between him and his fellows.

His personal and his literary characteristics were, of course, deeply intermingled. The impatience of pusillanimity which appears in many a passage of his life was reflected in his works. He had an overpowering admiration of courage and strength, either mental or physical. There is a sentence or two in “The Bible in Spain,” describing the last day of Quesada, which gives light upon Borrow’s idols:

“No action of any conqueror or hero on record is to be compared with this closing scene in the life of Quesada, for who, by his single desperate courage and impetuosity, ever stopped a revolution in full course? Quesada did; he stopped the revolution at Madrid for one entire day, and brought back the uproarious and hostile mob of a huge city to perfect order and quiet. His burst into the Puerta del Sol was the most tremendous and successful piece of daring ever witnessed. I admired so much the spirit of the brute bull that I frequently during his wild onset shouted ‘Vive Quesada!’”

And the same note of admiration is struck with reference to many a pugilist and criminal in whose career it is difficult to find anything to approve.

Herein is to be found the secret of much of the power of what I have called Borrow’s naturalism. The characters he depicts are all intensely alive, and act without reference to any theory of action. When he was compiling the “Celebrated Trials” he had an education in naturalism which merely developed his own tendencies. When he introduced into “Lavengro” David Haggart, the friend of his youth at Edinburgh, it was as a real person, and not as a biographical lay-figure upon which to hang moral speculations. Not one writer in a hundred would have treated the Haggart incident as Borrow did, for, courageous as he was, David was an ingrained rascal, whose villainies would probably have continued for another half-century if the hangman had not got hold of him. Borrow did not speculate on criminology, as the fashion is, and discuss the extent to which environment was responsible for the career of his blackguards. He just accepted them in their environment, and, with glowing admiration for their bravery—Haggart was brave enough to run mortal risks for the crimes of his associates—transferred them to his pages in their habit as they lived. Professor Chandler, an American critic, has accomplished a luminous comparison when he says that Borrow’s realism is of a different quality from Thackeray’s—the former sympathetic and the latter satiric. A hundred instances of the truth of this observation will occur to those who review the regiments of rascals which march through the pages of the two authors.

It was the same influence which made Borrow’s gypsies so real that, in spite of all the errors into which imperfect knowledge of the subject led him, his pictures of the Romany race remain unapproached for truth of line and naturalness of colour. Ainsworth drew gypsies; they were stage figures; they are forgotten. Borrow’s gypsies are immortal. Other authors of his own time visualised rascality in many forms; Dickens especially created a marvellous gallery of rogues. But Dickens set up his villains either in order to punish them in the interests of altruism or to reform them in the interests of propaganda. Borrow regarded them from a widely different point of view. They were studies in real life, and not material for the administration of poetic justice. It is interesting to contrast his view of a very popular book with that of a contemporary writer. Charles Reade was an unequivocal admirer of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which he said was “great by theme and great by skill.” We have seen what Borrow said about a lot of “Uncle Toms and Uncle Tom-fools.” It is idle, perhaps, but not without charm, to guess what he would have made of a character like Legree if he had been able to persuade Isopel Berners to take him with her to America and had met with a slave-driver in that continent. Parallel with this worship of strength and courage may be placed his taste in literature. He had little sense of the verbal niceties of style; his affection was reserved for the robust and vigorous writing of authors like Defoe, and for the hefty, rousing force of the narratives which he discovered among the biographies and autobiographies of criminals in many an aged pamphlet and forgotten broadsheet. It would, however, be easy to exaggerate this side of Borrow’s character. He was not merely a non-moral literary berserker. There was a softer, a more imaginative side to his nature—not irreconcilable with the other, because it arose out of the same quality of sympathy and the same acuteness of vision. This was manifested most strongly, perhaps, in his later and more settled years, and perhaps more plainly in his relations with children than in any others.

Apart from those episodes of his life which form the staple of his books, the most pleasant picture of the man is to be found in his days of comparative leisure in East Anglia, when he divided his time between study, literary work, visits to friends, the entertainment of friends, and rambles about rural Norfolk and Suffolk. It was a red-letter day when a gypsy tribe arrived in the neighbourhood of Oulton. His Romany friends would be invited to camp in his grounds, to receive him and his people by their camp-fires, to rokker (talk) Romany with him, and to listen to his gypsy songs. When there were no gypsies, he would make explorations into the character and the dialect of the Norfolk or Suffolk natives, picking up any chance companion of the road. He generally succeeded in eliciting a life history and in pursuing, as far as the duration of the companionship would allow, a psychological study. Some of his philological adventures on the country roads have been amusingly related by Miss Harvey: