LAVENGRO THE SCHOLAR, THE GYPSY, THE PRIEST

BY GEORGE BORROW

ILLUSTRATED BY E. J. SULLIVAN

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, Q.C., M.P.

London MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited new york: the macmillan company 1900

All rights reserved

First published in “Macmillan’s Illustrated Standard Novel,” 1896 Reprinted 1900

INTRODUCTION

The author of Lavengro, the Scholar, the Gypsy, and the Priest has after his fitful hour come into his own, and there abides securely. Borrow’s books,—carelessly written, impatient, petulant, in parts repellant,—have been found so full of the elixir of life, of the charm of existence, of the glory of motion, so instinct with character, and mood, and wayward fancy, that their very names are sounds of enchantment, whilst the fleeting scenes they depict and the deeds they describe have become the properties and the pastimes for all the years that are still to be of a considerable fraction of the English-speaking race.

And yet I suppose it would be considered ridiculous in these fine days to call Borrow a great artist. His fascination, his hold upon his reader, is not the fascination or the hold of the lords of human smiles and tears. They enthrall us; Borrow only bewitches. Isopel Berners, hastily limned though she be, need fear comparison with no damsel that ever lent sweetness to the stage, relish to rhyme, or life to novel. She can hold up her head and take her own part amidst all the Rosalinds, Beatrices, and Lucys that genius has created and memory can muster. But how she came into existence puzzles us not a little. Was she summoned out of nothingness by the creative fancy of Lavengro, or did he really first set eyes upon her in the dingle whither she came with the Flaming Tinman, whose look Lavengro did not like at all? Reality and romance, though Borrow made them wear double harness, are not meant to be driven together. It is hard to weep aright over Isopel Berners. The reader is tortured by a sense of duty towards her. This distraction prevents our giving

ourselves away to Borrow. Perhaps after all he did meet the tall girl in the dingle, in which case he was a fool for all his pains, losing a gift the gods could not restore.

Quite apart from this particular doubt, the reader of Borrow feels that good luck, happy chance, plays a larger part in the charm of the composition than is quite befitting were Borrow to be reckoned an artist. But nobody surely will quarrel with this ingredient. It can turn no stomach. Happy are the lucky writers! Write as they will, they are almost certain to please. There is such a thing as ‘sweet unreasonableness.’

But no sooner is this said than the necessity for instant and substantial qualification becomes urgent, for though Borrow’s personal vanity would have been wounded had he been ranked with the literary gentlemen who do business in words, his anger would have been justly aroused had he been told he did not know how to write. He did know how to write, and he acquired the art in the usual way, by taking pains. He might with advantage have taken more pains, and then he would have done better; but take pains he did. In all his books he aims at producing a certain impression on the minds of his readers, and in order to produce that impression he was content to make sacrifices; hence his whimsicality, his out-of-the-wayness, at once his charm and his snare, never grows into wantonness and seldom into gross improbability. He studied effects, as his frequent and impressive liturgical repetitions pleasingly demonstrate. He had theories about most things, and may, for all I know, have had a theory of cadences. For words he had no great feeling except as a philologist, and is capable of strange

abominations. ‘Individual’ pursues one through all his pages, where too are ‘equine species,’ ‘finny tribe’; but finding them where we do even these vile phrases, and others nearly as bad, have a certain humour.

This chance remark brings me to the real point. Borrow’s charm is that he has behind his books a character of his own, which belongs to his books as much as to himself; something which bears you up and along as does the mystery of the salt sea the swimmer. And this something lives and stirs in almost every page of Borrow, whose restless, puzzling, teasing personality pervades and animates the whole.

He is the true adventurer who leads his life, not on the Stock Exchange amidst the bulls and bears, or in the House of Commons waiting to clutch the golden keys, or in South Africa with the pioneers and promoters, but with himself and his own vagrant moods and fancies. There was no need for Borrow to travel far afield in search of adventures. Mumpers’ Dell was for him as good an environment as Mexico; a village in Spain or Portugal served his turn as well as both the Indies; he was as likely to meet adventures in Pall Mall as in the far Soudan. Strange things happen to him wherever he goes; odd figures step from out the hedgerow and engage him in wild converse; beggar-women read Moll Flanders on London Bridge; Armenian merchants cuff deaf and dumb clerks in London counting-houses; prize-fighters, dog-fanciers, Methodist preachers, Romany ryes and their rawnees move on and off. Why should not strange things happen to Lavengro? Why should not strange folk suddenly make their appearance before him and as suddenly take their departure? Is he not strange himself? Did he

not puzzle Mr. Petulengro, excite the admiration of Mrs. Petulengro, the murderous hate of Mrs. Herne, and drive Isopel Berners half distracted?

Nobody has, so far, attempted to write the life of George Borrow. Nor can we wonder. How could any one dare to follow in the phosphorescent track of Lavengro and The Romany Rye, or add a line or a hue to the portraits there contained of Borrow’s father and mother—the gallant soldier who had no chance, and whose most famous engagement took place, not in Flanders, or in Egypt, or on the banks of the Indus or Oxus, but in Hyde Park, his foe being Big Ben Brain; and the dame of the oval face, olive complexion, and Grecian forehead, sitting in the dusky parlour in the solitary house at the end of the retired court shaded by lofty poplars? I pity ‘the individual’ whose task it should be to travel along the enchanted wake either of Lavengro in England or Don Jorge in Spain. Poor would be his part; no better than that of Arthur in ‘The Bothie’:—

And it was told, the Piper narrating and Arthur correcting, Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture, He to a matter-of-fact still softening, paring, abating, He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal, He to the merest it-was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing, River to streamlet reducing, and fall to slope subduing: So it was told, the Piper narrating, corrected of Arthur.

George Borrow, like many another great man, was born in Norfolk, at East Dereham, in 1803, and at an early age began those rambles he has made famous, being carried about by his father, Captain Borrow, who was chiefly employed as a recruiting officer. The reader of Lavengro may safely be left to make out his own itinerary. Whilst in Edinburgh Borrow attended the High School, and acquired the Scottish accent. It is not too much to say that he has managed to make even Edinburgh more romantic simply by abiding there for a season. From Scotland he went to Ireland, and learnt to ride, as well as to talk the Irish tongue, and to seek etymologies wherever they were or were not to be found. But for a famous Irish cob, whose hoofs still sound in our ears, Borrow, so he says, might have become a mere philologist. From Ireland he returned with his parents to Norwich, and resumed studies, which must have been, from a schoolmaster’s point of view, grievously interrupted, under the Rev. Edward Valpy at King Edward’s School. Here he seems to have been for two

or three years. Dr. Jessopp has told us the story of Borrow’s dyeing his face with walnut juice, and Valpy gravely inquiring of him, ‘Borrow, are you suffering from jaundice, or is it only dirt?’ The Rajah of Sarawak, Sir Archdale Wilson, and the Rev. James Martineau were at school with ‘Lavengro.’ Dr. Jessopp, who in 1859 became headmaster of King Edward’s School, and who has been a Borrovian from the beginning, found the school tradition to be that Borrow, who never reached the sixth form, was indolent and even stupid. In 1819,—the reader will be glad of a date,—Borrow left school, and was articled to a solicitor in Norwich, and sat for some eight hours every day behind a lofty deal desk copying deeds and, it may be presumed, making abstracts of title,—a harmless pursuit which a year or two later entirely failed to engage the attention of young Mr. Benjamin Disraeli in Montague Place. Neither of these distinguished men can honestly be said ever to have acquired what is called the legal mind, a mental equipment which the younger of them

had once the effrontery to define as a talent for explaining the self-evident, illustrating the obvious and expatiating on the commonplace. ‘By adopting the law,’ says Borrow, ‘I had not ceased to be Lavengro.’ He learnt Welsh when he should have been reading Blackstone. He studied German under the direction of the once famous William Taylor of Norwich, who in 1821 wrote to Southey: ‘A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s William 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. He would like to get into the office for Foreign Affairs, but does not know how.’

It only takes five years to make an attorney, and Borrow ought therefore, had he served out his time, to have become a gentleman by Act of Parliament in 1824 or 1825. He did not do so, though he appears to have remained in Norwich until after 1826. In that year appeared his Romantic Ballads from the Danish, printed by Simon Wilkins of Norwich by subscription. Dr. Jessopp opines that the Romantic Ballads must have brought their translator ‘a very respectable sum after paying all the expenses of publication.’ I hope it was so, but, as Dr. Johnson once said about the immortality of the soul, I should like more evidence of it. When Borrow left Norwich for London, it is hard to say. It was after the death of his father, and was not likely to have been later than 1828. His only introduction appears to have been one from William Taylor to Sir Richard Phillips, ‘the publisher’ known to all readers of Lavengro. Sir Richard was one of the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, and in addition to sundry treatises on the duties of juries, was the author

of two lucubrations, respectively entitled The Phænomena called by the name of Gravitation proved to be Proximate Effects of the Orbicular and Rotary Motions of the Earth and On the New Theory of the System of the Universe. In Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica, 1824, Sir Richard is thus contemptuously referred to: ‘This personage is the editor of The Monthly Magazine, in which many of his effusions may be found with the signature of “Common Sense.”’ It is not too much to say that but for Borrow this nefarious man would be utterly forgotten; as it is, he lives for ever in the pages of Lavengro, a hissing and a reproach. Authors have an ugly trick of getting the better of their publishers in the long run. After leaving London Borrow began the wanderings described in Lavengro and The Romany Rye. Those concluded, probably in 1829 or 1830, he crossed the British Channel, and like another Goldsmith, wandered on foot over the Continent of Europe, visiting France, Italy, Austria, and Russia. Of his adventures in these countries there is unhappily

no record. In St. Petersburg he must have made a long stay, for there he superintended the translation of the Bible into Mandschu-Tartar, and published in 1835 his Targum; or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects. In 1835 Borrow returned to London, and being already known to the Bible Society for his biblical labours in Russia, was offered, and accepted, the task of circulating the Scriptures in the Spanish Peninsula. As for his labours in this field, which occupied him so agreeably for four or five years, are they not narrated in The Bible in Spain, a book first published by ‘Glorious John Murray’ in three volumes in 1843? This is the book which made Borrow famous, though his earlier work, The Zincali; or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain (two vols. 1841), had attracted a good deal of notice. But The Bible in Spain took readers by storm, and no wonder! Sir Robert Peel named it in the House of Commons; its perusal imparted a new sensation, the sensation of literature, to many a pious subscriber to the Bible

Society. The book, wherever it went,—and it went where such like books do not often go,—carried joy and rapture with it. Young people hailed it tumultuously and cherished it tenderly. There were four editions in three volumes in the year of publication. What was thought of the book by the Bible Society I do not know. Perhaps ‘he of the countenance of a lion,’ of whom we read in the forty-fifth chapter of Lavengro, scarcely knew what to say about it; but the precise-looking man with the ill-natured countenance, no doubt, forbade his family to read The Bible in Spain.

In 1840 Borrow married the widow of a naval officer and settled in Norfolk, where his aged mother was still living. His house was in Oulton Broad; and here he became a notable, the hero of many stories, and the friend of man, provided he was neither literary nor genteel. Here also he finished Lavengro (1851), and wrote The Romany Rye (1857), Wild Wales (1862), and Romano Lavo-Lil: the Word-Book of the Romany (1874). For a time Borrow had a house in London in Hereford Square, where his wife died in 1869. He died himself at Oulton in August 1881, leaving behind him, so it is frequently asserted, many manuscript volumes, including treatises on Celtic poetry, on Welsh and Cornish and Manx literature, as well as translations from the Norse and Russ and the jest-books of Turkey. Some, at all events, of these works were advertised as ‘ready for the press’ in 1858.

The Bible in Spain was a popular book, and in 1843, the year of its publication, its author, a man of striking appearance, was much fêted and regarded by the lion-hunters of the period. Borrow did not take kindly to the den. He was full of inbred suspicions and, perhaps, of unreasonable demands. He resented the confinement of the dinner-table, the impalement of the ball-room, the imprisonment of the pew. Like the lion in Browning’s poem, ‘The Glove’—

You saw by the flash on his forehead, By the hope in those eyes wide and steady, He was leagues in the desert already, Driving the flocks up the mountain.

He began to write Lavengro in London in 1843. His thoughts went back to his old friend Petulengro, who pronounced life to be sweet: ‘There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things. There’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?’ Yes, or to live cribbed, cabined, and confined in a London square! No wonder ‘Lavengro’ felt cross and uncomfortable. Nor did he take much pleasure in the society of the other lions of the hour, least of all of such a lion as Sir John Bowring, M.P. Was not Bowring ‘Lavengro’ as much as Borrow himself? Had he not—for there was no end to his impudence—travelled in Spain, and actually published a pamphlet in the vernacular? Was he not meditating translations from a score of languages he said he knew? Was he not, furthermore, an old Radical and Republican turned genteel? Were not his wife and daughters more than half suspected of being Jacobites, followers of the Reverend Mr. Platitude, and addicted to ‘Charley o’er the Waterism’?

Borrow did not get on with Bowring.

When Borrow shook the dust of London off his feet, and returned into Norfolk with Lavengro barely begun on his hands, he carried away with him into his retreat the antipathies and prejudices, the whimsical dislikes and the half-real, half-sham disappointments and chagrins which London, that fertile mother of megrims, had bred in him, and dropped them all into the ink with which he wrote his famous book. Gentility he forswore. Whatever else Lavengro might turn out, genteel he was not to be; and sure enough, when Lavengro made his appearance in 1851 genteel he most certainly was not.

There was not the same public to welcome the Gypsy as had hailed the Colporteur. The pious phrases which had garnished so plentifully the earlier book had now almost wholly disappeared. There is no evidence that Lavengro ever offered Petulengro a Bible. Even the denunciations of Popery have a dubious sound. What is sometimes called ‘the religious world’ were no longer buyers of Borrow. Nor was ‘the polite world’ much better pleased. The polite reader was both puzzled and annoyed. First of all: Was the book true—autobiography or romance? A polite reader objects to be made a fool of. One De Foe in a couple of centuries is enough for a polite reader. Then the glorification of ale and of gypsies and prize-fighters—would it not be better at once to dub the book vulgar, and so have done with it for ever? An ill-regulated book, a strange book, a mad book, a book which condemns the world’s way. If I may judge from the reviews, this is how Lavengro struck many, but by no means all. The book had its passionate admirers, its lovers from the first. Men, women, and boys took

it to their hearts. Happy day when Lavengro first fell into boyish hands. It brought adventure and the spirit of adventure to your doorstep. No need painfully to walk to Hull, and there take shipping with Robinson Crusoe; no need to sail round the world with Captain Cook, or even to shoot lions in Bechuanaland with that prince of missionaries, Mr. Robert Moffat; for were there not gypsies on the common half a mile from one’s homestead, and a dingle at the end of the lane? But the general verdict was, ‘“Lavengro” has gone too far.’

Borrow was not the man to whistle and let the world go by. His advice to his country men and women was: ‘To be courteous to everybody as Lavengro was, but always independent like him, and if people meddle with them, to give them as good as they bring, even as he and Isopel Berners were in the habit of doing; and it will be as well for him to observe that he by no means advises women to be too womanly, but, bearing the conduct of Isopel Berners in mind, to take their own parts, and if anybody strikes them to strike again.’