“Taffy was a Welshman,
Taffy was a thief.”
To Borrow, however, he was not a freak of nature, sent by a kindly Providence to lighten the laborious hours of Simpson & Rackham’s office, but a man who knew the Welsh language, and might assist him in learning it. In return for his help, George induced the other boys to cease their persecution, and declared that this had the effect of releasing the Welshman from the horns of a dilemma—for he was cogitating whether “to hang himself from the balk of the hayloft or to give his master warning.” So he won his way into the epic of “Dafydd ab Gwilym” and the songs of the Welsh bards.
Borrow’s adventures were now of a character different from those of his schoolboy days. He began to enter upon profound intellectual waters. His mania for languages grew upon him. We have already seen him acquiring Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and Erse. He now set about Welsh, Danish, and other tongues, and in pursuit of German he fell in with William Taylor. The meeting had an important influence upon his development. Taylor was a scholar of fine parts, a man deeply versed in German literature at a time when, as Professor Dowden has said, “German characters were as undecipherable to most Englishmen as Assyrian arrow-heads.” He was the friend of Southey, whom he entertained in Norwich at the house, No. 21, King Street, which was the resort of all the wit and learning that centred in the city. Taylor found young Borrow a man after his own heart, took to him readily, and offered to teach him German. It is hardly necessary to say that George accepted such an invitation, nor that he learnt a good deal more than German at the feet of Taylor, whose views on most questions were advanced and unrestricted. The scholar was an agnostic in matters of religion, and an iconoclast in many sorts. His great failing was drunkenness: he ultimately became a sot.
Miss Martineau wrote that:
“In Taylor’s old age . . . his habits of intemperance kept him out of sight of the ladies, and he got around him a set of ignorant and conceited young men, who thought they could set the world right by their destructive propensities. One of his chief favourites was George Borrow, as George Borrow himself has given us to understand. When this polyglot gentleman appeared before the public as a devout agent of the Bible Society in foreign parts, there was one burst of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days.”
Professor Dowden has pleasantly reminded us of the delight Harriet Martineau took in “pricking a literary windbag”; sometimes she pricked more substantial things, and her rapier broke. At any rate, she is hardly a good witness on the subject of Borrow, for no love was lost between the families.
And Taylor, at the time when he took up George, was a man of some consequence in the literary world, apart from “the little Academe” of Norwich. He knew his Kotzebue, his Goethe, his Schiller, his Klopstock; he was in himself a reference library of what was then outlandish knowledge. He raised a bright light above the intellectual circle of the city, in spite of the sarcasm of Harriet Martineau, who rallies his eccentricity, his “defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had rescued him from it, information, given as certain, that ‘God Save the King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon”—and so forth. But his solid claim to consideration is good; he lives as “the Anglo-Germanist” of Borrow’s books rather than as “godless Billy Taylor.”
I have taken leave to doubt that Borrow’s melancholy was the fruit of the theological opinions he acquired from Taylor. Effort has been made to trace all his sufferings to this association, and to the moral disintegration that is supposed to have set in as the result of his intercourse with an atheist. It seems to me an unfair and regrettable imputation. Borrow was destined to go through his Werterian period, and, child of the Celtic spirit that he was, it was bound to be a period of acute strain and stress. He felt all things intensely. If he had not encountered the mocking philosophy of “Billy Taylor” through personal contact, he would have met it elsewhere. It could no more be missed by the youth of 1820 than by the youth of a later century.
What we know with certainty of Taylor is that he was the earliest scholar and critic to divine what there was in George Borrow and to encourage his literary bent. We have to be grateful to him for that. He wrote to Southey:
“A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s ‘Wilhelm Tell,’ with a view of translating it for the Press. His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity; indeed, he has the gift of tongues and, though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.”