The Life of George Borrow Part 40

This notice, if Borrow read it, must have been very bitter to him.

All the loyalty to, and enthusiasm for, Borrow cannot disguise the fact that his work, as far as the Gypsies were concerned, was finished. He had first explored the path, but others had followed and levelled it into a thoroughfare, and Borrow found his facts and theories obsolete--a humiliating discovery to a man so shy, so proud, and so sensitive.

The Romano Lavo-Lil was Borrow's swan song. He lived for another seven years; but as far as the world was concerned he was dead. In an obituary notice of Robert Latham, Mr Watts-Dunton tells a story that emphasizes how thoroughly his existence had been forgotten. At one of Mrs Procter's "at homes" he was talking of Latham and Borrow, but when he happened to mention that both men were still alive, that is in the early Seventies, and that quite recently he had been in the company of each on separate occasions, he found that he had lost caste in the eyes of his hearers for talking about men as alive "who were well known to have been dead years ago." {464a}

There is an interesting picture of Borrow as he appeared in the Seventies, given by F. H. Groome, who writes:

"The first time I ever saw him was at Ascot, the Wednesday evening of the Cup week in, I think, the year 1872. I was stopping at a wayside inn, half-a-mile on the Windsor road, just opposite which inn there was a great encampment of Gypsies. One of their lads had on the Tuesday affronted a soldier; so two or three hundred redcoats came over from Windsor, intending to wreck the camp. There was a babel of cursing and screaming, much brandis.h.i.+ng of belts and tent-rods, when suddenly an arbiter appeared, a white-haired, brown-eyed, calm Colossus, speaking Romany fluently, and drinking deep draughts of ale--in a quarter of an hour Tommy Atkins and Anselo Stanley were sworn friends over a loving-quart. "Mr Burroughs," said one of the Gypsies (it is the name by which Gypsies still speak of him), and I knew that at last I had met him whom of all men I most wished to meet. Matty Cooper, the 'celebrated Windsor Frog' (vide Leland), presented me as 'a young gentleman, Rya, a scholard from Oxford'; and 'H'm,' quoth Colossus, 'a good many fools come from Oxford.' It was a bad beginning, but it ended well, by his asking me to walk with him to the station, and on the way inviting me to call on him in London.

I did so, but not until nearly a twelve-month afterwards, when I found him in Hereford Square, and when he set strong ale before me, as again on the occasion of my third and last meeting with him in the tent of our common acquaintance, Shadrach Herne, at the Potteries, Notting Hill. Both these times we had much talk together, but I remember only that it was partly about East Anglia, and more about 'things of Egypt.' Conversations twenty years old are easy to imagine, hard to reproduce . . . Probably Borrow asked me the Romany for 'frying-pan,' and I modestly answered, 'Either maasalli or ta.s.seromengri' (this is pa.s.sword No. 1), and then I may have asked him the Romany for 'brick,' to which he will have answered, that 'there is no such word' (this is No. 2). But one thing I do remember, that he was frank and kindly, interesting and interested; I was only a lad, and he was verging on seventy. I could tell him about a few 'travellers' whom he had not recently seen--Charlie Pinfold, the h.o.a.ry polygamist, Plato and Mantis Buckland, Cinderella Petulengro, and Old Tom Oliver ('Ha! so he has seen Tom Oliver,' I seem to remember that)." {466a}

There was nothing now to keep Borrow in London. n.o.body wanted to read his books, other stars had risen in the East. His publisher had exclaimed with energy, as Borrow himself would relate, "I want to meet with good writers, but there are none to be had: I want a man who can write like Ecclesiastes." There is something tragic in the account that Mr Watts-Dunton gives of his last encounter with Borrow:

"The last time I ever saw him," he writes, "was shortly before he left London to live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and boiling over the West-End. Borrow came up and stood leaning over the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be. Like most people born in flat districts, he had a pa.s.sion for sunsets. Turner could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could not describe it . . . I never saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and from its a.s.sociation with 'the last of Borrow,' I shall never forget it."

{466b}

In 1874 Borrow withdrew to Oulton, there to end his lonely life, his spirit seeming to enjoy the dreary solitude of the Cottage, with its mournful surroundings. His stepdaughter, the Henrietta of old, remained in London with her husband, and Borrow's loneliness was complete. Sometimes he was to be seen stalking along the highways at a great pace, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a Spanish cloak, a tragic figure of solitude and despair, speaking to no one, no one daring to speak to him, who locally was considered as "a funny tempered man."

In a fragment of a letter from Edward FitzGerald to W. B. Donne (June 1874), there is an interesting reference to Borrow:-

"Wait!" he writes. "I have one little thing to tell you, which, little as it is, is worth all the rest, if you don't know already.

"Borrow--has got back to his own Oulton Lodge. My Nephew, Edmund Kerrich, now Adjutant to some Volunteer Battalion, wants a house NEAR, not IN, Lowestoft: and got some Agent to apply for Borrow's-- who sent word that he is himself there--an old Man--wanting Retirement, etc. This was the account Edmund got.

"I saw in some Athenaeum a somewhat contemptuous notice of G. B.'s 'Rommany Lil' or whatever the name is. I can easily understand that B. should not meddle with SCIENCE of any sort; but some years ago he would not have liked to be told so, however Old Age may have cooled him now." {467a}

Borrow sent a message to FitzGerald through Edmund Kerrich of Geldeston, asking him to visit Oulton Cottage. The reply shows all the sweetness of the writer's nature:-

LITTLE GRANGE, WOODBRIDGE, Jan. 10/75.

Dear Borrow,--My nephew Kerrich told me of a very kind invitation that you sent to me, through him, some while ago. I think the more of it because I imagine, from what I have heard, that you have slunk away from human company as much--as I have! For the last fifteen years I have not visited any one of my very oldest friends, except the daughters of my old [?friend] George Crabbe, and Donne--once only, and for half a day, just to a.s.sure myself by--my own eyes how he was after the severe illness he had last year, and which he never will quite recover from, I think; though he looked and moved better than I expected.

Well--to tell you all about WHY I have thus fallen from my company would be a tedious thing, and all about one's self too--whom, Montaigne says, one never talks about without detriment to the person talked about. Suffice to say, 'so it is'; and one's friends, however kind and 'loyal' (as the phrase goes), do manage to exist and enjoy themselves pretty reasonably without one.

So with me. And is it not much the same with you also? Are you not glad now to be mainly alone, and find company a heavier burden than the gra.s.shopper? If one ever had this solitary habit, it is not likely to alter for the better as one grows older--as one grows OLD.

I like to think over my old friends. There they are, lingering as ineffaceable portraits--done in the prime of life--in my memory.

Perhaps we should not like one another so well after a fifteen-years separation, when all of us change and most of us for the worse. I do not say THAT would be your case; but you must, at any rate, be less inclined to disturb the settled repose into which you, I suppose, have fallen. I remember first seeing you at Oulton, some twenty-five years ago; then at Donne's in London; then at my own happy home in Regent's Park; then ditto at Gorleston--after which, I have seen n.o.body, except the nephews and nieces left me by my good sister Kerrich.

So shall things rest? I could not go to you, after refusing all this while to go to older--if not better--friends, fellow Collegians, fellow schoolfellows; and yet will you still believe me (as I hope THEY do)

Yours and theirs sincerely, EDWARD FITZGERALD.

Borrow was still a remarkably robust man. Mr Watts-Dunton tells how,

"At seventy years of age, after breakfasting at eight o'clock in Hereford Square, he would walk to Putney, meet one or more of us at Roehampton, roam about Wimbledon and Richmond Park with us, bathe in the Fen Ponds with a north-east wind cutting across the icy water like a razor, run about the gra.s.s afterwards like a boy to shake off some of the water-drops, stride about the park for hours, and then, after fasting for twelve hours, eat a dinner at Roehampton that would have done Sir Walter Scott's eyes good to see. Finally, he would walk back to Hereford Square, getting home late at night. And if the physique of the man was bracing, his conversation, unless he happened to be suffering from one of his occasional fits of depression, was still more so. Its freshness, raciness and eccentric whim no pen could describe. There is a kind of humour the delight of which is that while you smile at the pictures it draws, you smile quite as much or more to think that there is a mind so whimsical, crotchetty, and odd as to draw them. This was the humour of Borrow." {469a}

He was seventy years of age when, one March day during a bitterly- cold east wind, he stripped and plunged into one of the Fen Ponds in Richmond Park, which was covered with ice, and dived and swam under the water for a time, reappearing some distance from the spot where he had entered the water. {469b}

The remaining years of Borrow's life were spent in Suffolk. He would frequently go to Norwich, however; for the old city seemed to draw him irresistibly from his hermitage. He would take a lodging there, and spend much of his time occupying a certain chair in the Norfolk Hotel in St Giles. There were so many old a.s.sociations with Norwich that made it appear home to him. He was possessed of sentiment in plenty, it had caused his old mother to wish that "dear George would not have such fancies about THE OLD HOUSE" in Willow Lane.

Later, Dr and Mrs MacOubrey removed to Oulton (about 1878), and Borrow's life became less dismal and lonely; but he was nearing his end. Sometimes there would be a flash of that old unconquerable spirit. His stepdaughter relates how,

"on the 21st of November [1878], the place [the farm] having been going to decay for fourteen months, Mr Palmer [the tenant] called to demand that Mr Borrow should put it in repair; otherwise he would do it himself and send in the bills, saying, 'I don't care for the old farm or you either,' and several other insulting things; whereupon Mr Borrow remarked very calmly, 'Sir, you came in by that door, you can go out by it'--and so it ended." {470a}

It was on an occasion such as this that Borrow yearned for a son to knock the rascal down. He was an infirm man, his body feeling the wear and tear of the strenuous open-air life he had led. In 1879, according to Mrs MacOubrey, he was "unable to walk as far as the white gate," the boundary of his estate. He was obviously breaking- up very rapidly. The surroundings appear to have reflected the gloomy nature of the master of the estate. The house was dilapidated, "with everything about it more or less untidy," {470b} although at this period his income amounted to upwards of five hundred pounds a year.

"During his latter years," writes Mr W. A. Dutt, "his tall, erect, somewhat mysterious figure was often seen in the early hours of summer mornings or late at night on the lonely pathways that wind in and out from the banks of Oulton Broad . . . the village children used to hush their voices and draw aside at his approach. They looked upon him with fear and awe. . . . In his heart, Borrow was fond of the little ones, though it amused him to watch the impression his strange personality made upon them. Older people he seldom spoke to when out on his solitary rambles; but sometimes he would flash out such a glance from beneath his broad-brimmed hat and s.h.a.ggy eyebrows as would make timid country folk hasten on their way filled with vague thoughts and fears of the evil eye." {470c}

Even to the last the old sensitiveness occasionally flashed out, as on the occasion of a visit from the Vicar of Lowestoft, who drove over with an acquaintance of Borrow's to make the hermit's acquaintance. The visitor was so incautious as to ask the age of his host, when, with Johnsonian emphasis, came the reply: "Sir, I tell my age to no man!" This occurred some time during the year 1880.

Immediately his discomfited guest had departed, Borrow withdrew to the summer-house, where he drew up the following apothegm on "People's Age": -

"Never talk to people about their age. Call a boy a boy, and he will fly into a pa.s.sion and say, 'Not quite so much of a boy either; I'm a young man.' Tell an elderly person that he's not so young as he was, and you will make him hate you for life. Compliment a man of eighty- five on the venerableness of his appearance, and he will shriek out: 'No more venerable than yourself,' and will perhaps. .h.i.t you with his crutch."

On 1st December 1880 Borrow sent for his solicitor from Lowestoft, and made his will, by which he bequeathed all his property, real and personal, to his stepdaughter Henrietta, devising that it should be held in trust for her by his friend Elizabeth Harvey. It was evidently Borrow's intention so to tie up the bequest that Dr MacOubrey could not in any way touch his wife's estate.

The end came suddenly. On the morning of 26th July 1881 Dr and Mrs MacOubrey drove into Lowestoft, leaving Borrow alone in the house.

When they returned he was dead. Throughout his life Borrow had been a solitary, and it seems fitting that he should die alone. It has been urged against his stepdaughter that she disregarded Borrow's appeals not to be left alone in the house, as he felt himself to be dying. He may have made similar requests on other occasions; still, whatever the facts, it was strange to leave so old and so infirm a man quite unattended.

On 4th August the body was brought to London, and buried beside that of Mrs George Borrow in Brompton Cemetery. On the stone, which is what is known as a saddle-back, is inscribed:

IN LOVING REMEMBRANCE OF GEORGE HENRY BORROW, ESQ., WHO DIED JULY 26TH, 1881 (AT HIS RESIDENCE "OULTON COTTAGE, SUFFOLK") IN HIS 79TH YEAR.

(AUTHOR OF THE BIBLE IN SPAIN, LAVENGRO--AND OTHER WORKS.) "IN HOPE OF A GLORIOUS RESURRECTION."

A fruitless effort was made by the late J. J. Colman of Carrow to purchase the whole of Borrow's ma.n.u.scripts, library, and papers for the Carrow Abbey Library; but the price asked, a thousand pounds, was considered too high, and they pa.s.sed into the possession of another.

Eventually they found their way into the reverent hands of the man who subsequently made Borrow his hero, and who devoted years of his life to the writing of his biography--Dr W. J. Knapp.

It was Borrow's fate, a tragic fate for a man so proud, to outlive the period of his fame. Not only were his books forgotten, but the world antic.i.p.ated his death by some seven or eight years. His was a curiously complex nature, one that seems specially to have been conceived by Providence to arouse enmity among the many, and to awaken in the hearts of the few a sterling, unwavering friends.h.i.+p.

It is impossible to reconcile the accounts of those who hated him with those whose love and respect he engaged.

He was in sympathy with vagrants and vagabonds--a taste that was perhaps emphasised by the months he spent in preparing Celebrated Trials. If those months of hack work taught him sympathy with pariahs, it also taught him to write strong, nervous English.

He was one of the most remarkable characters of his century-- whimsical, eccentric, lovable, inexplicable; possessed of an odd, dry humour that sometimes failed him when most he needed it. He lived and died a stranger to the cla.s.s to which he belonged, and was the intimate friend and a.s.sociate of that dark and mysterious personage, Mr Petulengro. He hated his social equals, and admired Tamerlane and Jerry Abershaw. It has been said that he was born three centuries too late, and that he belonged to the age when men dropped mysteriously down the river in s.h.i.+ps, later to return with strange stories and great treasure from the Spanish Main. Mr Watts-Dunton has said:-