George Borrow

I

FORTY years ago William I. Knapp was teaching Spanish at Yale. Like Borrow, he was a natural linguist rather than a precise philologist. Certainly he knew Spanish — in fact, he wrote a Spanish grammar; French, of course; Italian and German not so well; Gypsy enough for conversation, and Arabic perhaps not enough. The exact degree of Borrow’s knowledge of some fifteen languages, including Hebrew, Armenian, Manchu, and the chief European tongues, is also doubtful, but he must have spoken Spanish, Gypsy, Welsh, and Russian fluently. Like Borrow, Knapp went to Catholic Spain on a Protestant mission. He sedulously followed the trails of Borrow’s journeyings there some forty years after him. Like Borrow, he was a ‘character,’ but not of the same kind — a fleshy, sedentary man, social, volatile, and full of the milk of human kindness.

We were but three or four in his Spanish class. We learned to read Spanish easily enough, and have all, I presume, forgotten it as easily. The memory of that class throws a slant light on the obscure problem of education. Our interest was to keep him talking. ‘But, gentlemen, we must return to the lesson! ’ ‘But, professor, what do you think of . . .’ ‘Ah, well, now as to that . .

The Spanish language has faded from our casual memories; but there were other and curiously fruitful things: glimpses of the great world of men and affairs, old Spain and its byways and peoples, the background of history and romance, the emotional quality of Spanish words, odds and ends of anecdotes oddly remembered. George Borrow used to vex his father by taking no interest in law, but poring over queer Armenian words and being intimate with unkempt gypsies. One seems to get more education from the byways than the highways. One learns and recites a thousand lessons. Peace to their dust! But what one remembers are William Graham Sumner’s grinding snarl as he emptied the nothingness out of a popular fallacy, and Knapp’s globular chuckle over a compostscented proverb of Sancho Panza’s. It is the intonations, more than any argument, which linger and continue to convince that it is not necessary to be a fool, nor amiable to be a prig.

Knapp lived in Spain many years, became Madrid correspondent of the London Times, and brought home a notable collection of books, which ultimately formed the nucleus or starting point of the great Hispanic Society Museum in New York. He wrote the Life of George Borrow, connected his name permanently with an English classic, and died years ago in Paris. Incidentally he introduced me to Lavengro and The Bible in Spain.

II

Borrow is almost a cult. There are Borrovians, and there is the Gentile world that knows him not. The Bible in Spain was well received, but Lavengro was unsuccessful. The downright Englishman wanted to know if he was reading facts or fancies, and there was no answer at the time. There are two questions here. Is Lavengro and The Romany Rye (to use the singular, since they are really one book in two volumes) an autobiography, a truthful narrative from the memory, a genuine thing so far as conscientious endeavor could make it? Or is it, as Borrow called it, a drama whose principal characters are Lavengro, Petulengro, Mrs. Herne, the Flaming Tinman, the Applewoman, Peter and Winifred Williams, the Man in Black, and Isopel Berners?

The question is answered by Knapp, so far as its inherent difficulty can be met. The second question, wherein lies, for some of us, the fascination of Borrow, we must answer for ourselves.

He was born in 1803. His father was an army officer employed in drilling recruits for the Napoleonic Wars, and the family moved from place to place, until in 1816 it settled in Norwich on the elder Borrow’s retiring pension. From the age of thirteen to twentyone Borrow lived in Norwich. In 1824 his father died, and he set out for London, April 1, 1824. He left London on May 22 of the following year, with a suddenly and oddly acquired twenty pounds in his pocket, for that wandering episode which occupies three fourths of Lavengro-Romany Rye and of Borrow’s actual life covers about three months, from May 22 to about the middle of August. The disproportion is increased by the London episode, which absorbs about half the remaining fourth.

The disappointment of the public was therefore not unnatural in a ‘Life’ in which seven eighths were devoted to less than a year and a half, and largely to casual and extensive conversations. Was it a Life or a Story?

The last words of The Romany Rye are these: ‘“I should n’t wonder,” said I, as I proceeded rapidly along a broad causeway in the direction of the east, “if Mr. Petulengro and Tawno Chikno came originally from India. I think I’ll go there.”’ It was August

1825, after the Horncastle Fair. Thereafter follows the so-called ‘Veiled Period’ of seven years, lying between The Romany Rye and The Bible in Spain. Borrow was wont to hint mysteriously of Far Eastern travel, but it seems that he never got beyond Constantinople, and that was years after in no very adventurous style. He seems to have gone, sometime in

1826, to Spain, the South of France, and as far as Genoa, probably on the one hundred pounds profit from the sale of the horse at Horncastle Fair. But the Veiled Period was only veiled because it was painful to remember, a period of poverty, failure, and humiliation, hack work and translations, passed in Norwich and London.

In 1833 he entered the employ of the Bible Society as a linguist, and spent the next two years in Russia; a large part of five years thereafter in Spain; and the veil was lifted. For the Russian period there are numerous letters. He lived in St. Petersburg, translating and editing. He proposed to go to Manchuria, but the project failed. For the Spanish period there is The Bible in Spain. In 1840 he returned from Spain, married a well-to-do widow, and settled in the country.

The dates of his principal books are: The Gypsies in Spain, 1841; The Bible in Spain, 1843; Lavengro, 1851; The Romany Rye, 1857; Wild Wales, 1862; Romano Lavo-Lil, 1874. He died in 1881.

III

Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn, in the preface to his autobiographical Mid-Channel, declared the difference between fiction and autobiography to be superficial. ‘Both are forms of narrative in which experience is reëxpressed in an intelligible and timeless form. . . . The I that speaks in the autobiographical form is an inextricable blending of a person and a symbol, of a man and mankind, of the concrete and the universal. In brief, autobiography is not a method of reporting, but a form of Art.’ Mr. Lewisohn was not fortunate in his phrasing. Good fiction is not all experience reëxpressed. Why ‘timeless’? Is not a method of reporting itself a form of art? Personally I prefer art with a small a, and have a constitutional dislike for anyone who regards himself as a symbol. But with the general direction of the idea one may discreetly sympathize. An autobiography is generally the way a man’s life looks to him, looking back, and so looked at it does not look like the Saxon Chronicle. Dichtung und Wahrheit in biography that is not auto — the school of M. André Maurois — is to some of us irritating to the point of profanity, but autobiography seems to be another matter. Even the lies that a man tells about himself are documentary and reveal him.

Borrow had an extraordinary memory. It seemed to him that he could not forget anything, and wished he could. His ‘Note Books’ are packed with conversations. The Bible in Spain was nearly all of it in his letters to the Bible Society, written on the spot, conversations and all. It is quite possible that most of the Lavengro conversations as well as incidents are substantially accurate. But he had obsessions. He was a queer person, subject to melancholia, and possessed of prejudices as hard and twisted as oak knots.

Knapp became convinced of two things: first, that Borrow never invented a character; and second, that the more one delved in the obscurities of that period, the more one was impressed with the truth of the picture. ‘No truer books were ever penned. . . . Not in public documents, but in outof-the-way pamphlets, obscure handbooks, local almanacs, rural newspapers, and old magazines, that is where I met Lavengro and Romany Rye, and rejoiced to find them true.’

Borrow first called his autobiography a ‘Dream,’ and then a ‘Drama.’ There were both dream and drama in it, and the public raised the cry of ‘fiction.’ He was a creature of moods and manias. Lavengro is more moody than The Bible in Spain. But he was no Dickens, and the curious and vivid people who throng his books were not created but remembered. He did not look back through a glass darkly. The incidents of the past came up alive and blended with talk; and went down on the page in prose as sound as William Cobbett’s.

Why invent, if memory pours out an effortless flood? He remembers the shape of the buttons on the coat of a man seen once and forty years before. He never forgets a place or a name. His facts came easier than his fiction, and were better stuff. The fictional parts are usually perceptible. Names are altered, dates sometimes wrong. He often understates his age by several years. Whenever the dialogues run on his anti-popery obsession they become not only suspicious but tiresome. The Man in Black is not a character but a symbol, with little of human substance in him. Borrow’s anti-popery vendetta seems to date from his Spanish experience. There is no trace of it in his writings before TheBible in Spain. When he came to write Lavengro, he antedated the feeling.

IV

One afternoon in the summer of 1824 the funeral cortège of Byron was passing down Oxford Street in the brilliant sunlight, and Borrow met it. ‘A glittering, gorgeous lordling!’ Unhappy? A great poet? He would soon be out of fashion and forgotten. It might be better to have been a Milton in poverty and blindness, for fame after death is better than the top of fashion. Still, he wrote Childe Harold, and that ode. What had George Borrow to do with fame or fortune or fashion, toiling the long summer over Chronicles of Newgate, compiling criminal biographies for a grim-visaged publisher, and getting nowhere?

‘A great poet, sir,’ said a dapper, smirking man by his side, ‘but unhappy. Fate of genius, sir. I too am frequently unhappy.’

So, turning away, he met his friend Ardry, who had seen Byron in Venice with two fair ladies and not looking unhappy. ‘Come with me to Joey’s. Three dogs are to be launched at his bear. As they pin him, imagine him to be the publisher.’ ‘No (said I), I am good for nothing. I think I shall stroll to London Bridge.’

On London Bridge he thought of suicide, and had a notable conversation with the Old Applewoman, and read in her book, the Life of the Blessed Mary Flanders, until the twilight dimmed the page.

He did not think he was like Byron, and was not, very much. Nevertheless he was as romantic as he was realistic, and his romanticism was of the Byronic era. The self-hero of the Byronic dream was an aristocratic wanderer with a dark background of mysterious sin. The Borrovian self-hero is a wanderer too, somewhat insistently mysterious, a tall youth with white hair, eccentric, imperturbable, and surprising, possessed of strange knowledge and at home with all men in all places.

He was something like Byron, something like Cobbett, something like Trelawney or Doughty, rather more like Richard Burton; something like Defoe. ‘Hail to thee, Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee!’ He knew as much as Defoe did of criminal biography. He had fits of melancholia, and called them ‘the horrors.’ His prejudices were as bony and muscular as his forearm. His most lyrical admiration was for prize fighters. There were no ‘fair ladies’ in his story, except Isopel Berners, the Amazon of the dingle, tall, yellow-haired, aggressively virginal, and handy with her fists; a grand woman, who was born in a poorhouse, could not learn Armenian, and thought it unfair to marry him because he was mad.

As a silent brooding child, supposed to be weak-minded, he was sitting one day before a farmhouse, with a dog and an ape beside him, and drawing queer lines in the dust. A Jewish peddler, who knocked at the door, said that the child looked like a prophet’s child, and leaned to inspect the lines. ‘He started back and grew white as a sheet’; took off his hat, making strange gestures, cringing, chattering, showing his teeth, and departed muttering, ‘Holy letters!’

Was it a straight recollection, or a family anecdote become visualized, or a mixture of both? A direct impression of early childhood, and a family anecdote become visualized, look much the same to one’s backward gaze. To Borrow all incidents tended to look dramatic, and his writing instinct was to stop short and leave an overlap of mystery. The mysteries are more provocative than baffling. Where he had seen Hebrew letters he does not tell, but that ‘raging curiosity’ was already awake, and that brooding persistency. The terror of the Jew needs no explaining. The Borrovian mystery differs from the Byronic. It is highly specialized.

‘Petersburg has finer streets [than Madrid], Paris and Edinburgh more stately edifices, London far nobler squares, whilst Shiraz can boast more costly fountains, though not cooler waters. But the population! The population of Constantinople is extraordinary enough, but to form it twenty nations have contributed. But the population of Madrid, however strange and wild and composed of various elements, is strictly Spanish, and will remain so.’ He had never been in Shiraz except in daydreams, nor as yet in Constantinople.

I do not believe that he met the Old Applewoman’s long-lost son ten miles from Salisbury. I suspect he met a sailor ten miles from Salisbury and romanced the meeting into a dramatic coincidence. I believe with Knapp that Borrow’s autobiography is not only substantially but peculiarly true, not because he had any conscience in the matter, but because his phenomenal memory gave him all he needed in vivid detail. He could not create character, but he saw it. He did not invent incident, but he made it live again, and sometimes it suffered sea changes. His dialogues with gypsies and Spaniards are flavored with the language in which they occurred. The effort to reproduce what came back to him so distinctly, so audibly, gives here and there a curiously tinctured English that reminds one of the colored idioms of Maeterlinck and Synge. His genius was based on his memory, but it was also dramatic and mimetic. A burly, positive Englishman, a queer stick, and a great writer.

V

An autobiography is the way a man’s life looks to him looking back, and it does not look like a chronicle. It looks more like a dream than a drama. There are vast stretches of it in which the evidence that one lived at all is only inferential. It is not a continuous line, but disconnected, a matter of spurts and splashes. The memory jumps from picture to picture. Days are not equal to days, or years to years. There are moments that bulk larger than years, and flash out between featureless gray clouds. And through all the cloud and flash, the emerging and disappearing, the shifting panorama of memory, moves the portentous thing, one’s self. ‘In the universe I am nothing; for myself I am everything.’ Life repeats life, the common human story, but each to itself is unique. ‘We live and move in a world of shadows, in which there is one intense reality, the reality called you and I, which perhaps is the vaguest shadow of all,’ says Gamaliel Bradford.

Miguel de Unamuno was professor and rector in the University of Salamanca until he was exiled in 1924 by the late dictator, De Rivera. He lectured on Greek literature and the Castilian language. He wrote on many subjects, but the burden of his thought was the intense reality called you and I, and the stark individuality of Spanish character. The Tower of Monterey stands over Salamanca like a phrase in stone, the condensation of a thought, a vision of itself, and ‘To the soul that beholds you, Tower of Monterey, you say that he says the utmost that can be said who says himself, who strips his spirit naked in the icy clear light of the civil world. The greatest thing that men can see is another man.’

The importance of the single man dwindles toward nothing in the vast universe, and melts into a negligible item of one species in the biological flood. From the ruins of ancient dogma we seek consolation in impersonal prospects and oblivious activity. But that is not Spain, nor Unamuno. La vida es sueño. Life is dream, but it is dream that abides. ’It is the only thing that abides. Life without dream is but digestion and respiration. My Tower of Monterey, tower of the Spanish renaissance, of renascent Spanishness, tells me that life is not breath that passes away, but dream that abides and triumphs.’

Borrow was in Salamanca in the summer of 1837, noted its magnificent melancholy, but did not mention the Tower of Monterey. The stark individualism of the Spaniard he painted in a score of characters, met and remembered, their looks and their downright talk. He had no philosophic outlook, and his religion, where it was not perfunctory, was national. Like Byron, ‘when he thinks he is a child.’ His ideas were personal and concrete. He disliked priests and gentility. He liked gypsies, jockeys, prize fighters, and strong ale.

‘The truest books ever penned’? The superlative is unnecessary. But they are packed with reality. His eye and ear were devouring and his memory bottomless. He drew from life. Consciously and unconsciously he drew himself, as stark and individual as the Tower of Monterey, as singular and individual as Johnson or Byron or Thoreau. That Byron had a pose does not hide the reality of Byron. The pose was part of the reality. Borrow’s picture of himself is edged with daydreams and self-heroism. So is mine; so is yours. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, and a touch of mystery makes most of us kin. His romance does not blur his reality. It sets it off.

How far are these conversations genuine? No one knows. Did Borrow himself know? When he thought of Slingsby the tinker, or the Jew Abarbenel, or Benedict Mol and his Schatz, or Williams the exhorter, or Mrs. Herne, or the Armenian merchant, or Baltasar the Nacional, or David Haggart on the Castle cliffs of Edinburgh — the recollection came up in a flood of talk. The books are true, not because he strictly wished to make them so, but true with respect to himself because they reveal him, and with respect to the story he tells because his imagination was not the kind that creates things, but the kind that holds them.

VI

The true Borrovian has probably something of Borrow in him, a taste for inns, wayside adventures, and racy humanity; for hard facts with an aura of mystery; for daydreaming and selfheroism. He dreams of being a peculiar person, odd and masterful, traveling as Borrow traveled, seeing the world, as in his time, out of its beaten tracks, free of its smooth conventions. He fancies that he too would rather sit by a gypsy campfire and talk with Jasper Petulengro than in any of those drawing-rooms the excellence of whose conversation is said to be the test of civilization.

Charles Leland, of the Breitmann Ballads, was investigating gypsies at about the date of Borrow’s interest, and both were pioneers. Richard Ford at a near-by date had written his Handbook for Travelers in Spain, which is still an inspiration to go and do likewise, as well as a Baedeker of byways. Ford wrote to Borrow in 1841 urging him to publish his ‘whole adventures for the last twenty years.

. . . Avoid all fine writing, all description. . . . The world wants racy, real, genuine scenes. . . . Avoid words, stick to deeds. Be bold. Avoid rant and cant. Dialogues always tell. . . . Give a peep into Spanish prisons.’ The advice was admirable and may have been effective.

But Borrow’s magic is his own. He ought to have written a ‘Bible in Russia.’ Wild Wales, though readable, is relatively tame; he was elderly then, and the fires burned low. Even more than The Bible in Spain is Lavengro the great book to the Borrovian. It reaches back and stirs the instincts of his youth, or memories of them, when his thoughts were long; when the world was before him full of unexampled events and queer people, and all its prospects and horizons were haunted by that intense reality, himself.