George Borrow and His Circle Part 12

FOOTNOTES:

[76] _The New Monthly Magazine_, February 1822, 'The Fight.' Reprinted among William Hazlitt's _Fugitive Writings_ in vol. xii. of his Collected Works (Dent, 1904).

[77] _Lavengro_ ch. xxvi. 'It is as good as Homer,' says Mr. Augustine Birrell, quoting the whole pa.s.sage in his _Res Judicatae_. Mr. Birrell tells a delightful story of an old Quaker lady who was heard to say at a dinner-table, when the subject of momentary conversation was a late prize-fight: 'Oh, pity it was that ever corruption should have crept in amongst them'--she had just been reading _Lavengro_.

[78] _Pugilistica_, vol. i. 69.

[79] _Lavengro_, ch. i.

CHAPTER XIII

EIGHT YEARS OF VAGABONDAGE

There has been much nonsense written concerning what has been called the 'veiled period' of George Borrow's life. This has arisen from a letter which Richard Ford of the _Handbook for Travellers in Spain_ wrote to Borrow after a visit to him at Oulton in 1844. Borrow was full of his projected _Lavengro_, the idea of which he outlined to his friends. He was a genial man in those days, on the wave of a popular success.

Was not _The Bible in Spain_ pa.s.sing merrily from edition to edition! Borrow, it is clear, told Ford that he was writing his 'Autobiography'--he had no misgiving then as to what he should call it--and he evidently proposed to end it in 1825 and not in 1833, when the Bible Society gave him his real chance in life. Ford begged him, in letters that came into Dr. Knapp's possession, and from which he quotes all too meagrely, not to 'drop a curtain' over the eight years succeeding 1825. 'No doubt,' says Ford, 'it will excite a mysterious interest,' but then he adds in effect it will lead to a wrong construction being put upon the omission. Well, there can be but one interpretation, and that not an unnatural one. Borrow had a very rough time during these eight years. His vanity was hurt, and no wonder. It seems a small matter to us now that Charles d.i.c.kens should have been ashamed of the blacking-bottle episode of his boyhood. Genius has a right to a penurious, and even to a sordid, boyhood. But genius has no right to a sordid manhood, and here was George 'Olaus' Borrow, who was able to claim the friends.h.i.+p of William Taylor, the German scholar; who was able to boast of his a.s.sociation with sound scholastic foundations, with the High School at Edinburgh and the Grammar School at Norwich; who was a great linguist and had made rare translations from the poetry of many nations, starving in the byways of England and of France. What a fate for such a man that he should have been so unhappy for eight years; should have led the most penurious of roving lives, and almost certainly have been in prison as a common tramp.[80] It was all very well to romance about a poverty-stricken youth. But when youth had fled there ceased to be romance, and only sordidness was forthcoming. From his twenty-third to his thirty-first year George Borrow was engaged in a hopeless quest for the means of making a living. There is, however, very little mystery. Many incidents of each of these years are revealed at one or other point. His home, to which he returned from time to time, was with his mother at the cottage in Willow Lane, Norwich. Whether he made sufficient profit out of a horse, as in _The Romany Rye_, to enable him to travel upon the proceeds, as Dr. Knapp thinks, we cannot say. Dr.

Knapp is doubtless right in a.s.suming that during this period he led 'a life of roving adventure,' his own authorised version of his career at the time, as we have quoted from the biography in his handwriting from _Men of the Time_. But how far this roving was confined to England, how far it extended to other lands, we do not know. We are, however, satisfied that he starved through it all, that he rarely had a penny in his pocket. At a later date he gave it to be understood at times that he had visited the East, and that India had revealed her glories to him. We do not believe it. Defoe was Borrow's master in literature, and he shared Defoe's right to lie magnificently on occasion. Dr. Knapp has collected the various occasions upon which Borrow referred to his supposed earlier travels abroad prior to his visit to St. Petersburg in 1833. The only quotation that carries conviction is an extract from a letter to his mother from St. Petersburg, where he writes of 'London, Paris, Madrid, and other capitals which I have visited.' I am not, however, disinclined to accept Dr. Knapp's theory that in 1826-7 Borrow did travel to Paris and through certain parts of Southern Europe. It is strange, all the same, that adventures which, had they taken place, would have provoked a thousand observations, provoked but two or three pa.s.sing references. Yet there is no getting over that letter to his mother, nor that reference in _The Gypsies of Spain_, where he says--'Once in the south of France, when I was weary, hungry, and penniless....' Borrow certainly did some travel in these years, but it was sordid, lacking in all dignity--never afterwards to be recalled. For the most part, however, he was in England. We know that Borrow was in Norwich in 1826, for we have seen him superintending the publication of the _Romantic Ballads_ by subscription in that year. In that year also he wrote the letter to Haydon, the painter, to say that he was ready to sit for him, but that he was 'going to the south of France in a little better than a fortnight.'[81] We know also that he was in Norwich in 1827, because it was then, and not in 1818 as described in _Lavengro_, that he 'doffed his hat' to the famous trotting stallion Marshland Shales, when that famous old horse was exhibited at Tombland Fair on the Castle Hill. We meet him next as the friend of Dr. Bowring. The letters to Bowring we must leave to another chapter, but they commence in 1829 and continue through 1830 and 1831. Through them all Borrow shows himself alive to the necessity of obtaining an appointment of some kind, and meanwhile he is hard at work upon his translations from various languages, which, in conjunction with Dr. Bowring, he is to issue as _Songs of Scandinavia_. Dr. Knapp thinks that in 1829 he made the translation of the _Memoirs of Vidocq_, which appeared in that year with a short preface by the translator.[82] But these little volumes bear no internal evidence of Borrow's style, and there is no external evidence to support the a.s.sumption that he had a hand in their publication. His occasional references to Vidocq are probably due to the fact that he had read this little book.

I have before me one very lengthy ma.n.u.script of Borrow's of this period.

It is dated December 1829, and is addressed, 'To the Committee of the Honourable and Praiseworthy a.s.sociation, known by the name of the Highland Society.'[83] It is a proposal that they should publish in two thick octavo volumes a series of translations of the best and most approved poetry of the ancient and modern Scots-Gaelic bards. Borrow was willing to give two years to the project, for which he pleads 'with no sordid motive.' It is a dignified letter, which will be found in one of Dr. Knapp's appendices--so presumably Borrow made two copies of it. The offer was in any case declined, and so Borrow pa.s.sed from disappointment to disappointment during these eight years, which no wonder he desired, in the coming years of fame and prosperity, to veil as much as possible.

The lean years in the lives of any of us are not those upon which we delight to dwell, or upon which we most cheerfully look back.[84]

FOOTNOTES:

[80] Only thus can we explain Borrow's later declaration that he had _four_ times been in prison.

[81] I quote this letter in another chapter. Mr. Herbert Jenkins thinks (_Life_, ch. v. p. 88) that Borrow was in Paris during the revolution of 1830, because of a picturesque reference to the war correspondents there in _The Bible in Spain_. But Borrow never hesitated to weave little touches of romance from extraneous writers into his narratives, and may have done so here. I have visited most of the princ.i.p.al capitals of the world, he says in _The Bible in Spain_. This we would call a palpable lie were not so much of _The Bible in Spain_ sheer invention.

[82] _Memoirs of Vidocq, Princ.i.p.al Agent of the French Police until 1827, and now proprietor of the paper manufactory at St. Mande_. Written by himself. Translated from the French. In Four Volumes. London: Whittaker, Treacher and Arnot, Ave Maria Lane, 1829.

[83] This with other doc.u.ments I am about to present to the Borrow Museum, Norwich.

[84] In 1830 Borrow had another disappointment. He translated _The Sleeping Bard_ from the Welsh. This also failed to find a publisher. It was issued in 1860, under which date we discuss it.

CHAPTER XIV

SIR JOHN BOWRING

'Poor George.... I wish he were making money. He works hard and remains poor'--thus wrote John Borrow to his mother in 1830 from Mexico, and it disposes in a measure of any suggestion of mystery with regard to five of those years that he wished to veil. They were not spent, it is clear, in rambling in the East, as he tried to persuade Colonel Napier many years later. They were spent for the most part in diligent attempt at the capture of words, in reading the poetry and the prose of many lands, and in making translations of unequal merit from these diverse tongues.

This is indisputably brought home to me by the ma.n.u.scripts in my possession, supplemented by those that fell to Dr. Knapp. These ma.n.u.scripts represent years of work. Borrow has been counted a considerable linguist, and he had a.s.suredly a reading and speaking acquaintance with a great many languages. But this knowledge was acquired, as all knowledge is, with infinite trouble and patience. I have before me hundreds of small sheets of paper upon which are written English words and their equivalents in some twenty or thirty languages.

These serve to show that Borrow learnt a language as a small boy in an old-fas.h.i.+oned system of education learns his Latin or French--by writing down simple words--'father,' 'mother,' 'horse,' 'dog,' and so on with the same word in Latin or French in front of them. Of course Borrow had a superb memory and abundant enthusiasm, and so he was enabled to add one language to another and to make his translations from such books as he could obtain, with varied success. I believe that nearly all the books that he handled came from the Norwich library, and when Mrs.

Borrow wrote to her elder son to say that George was working hard, as we may fairly a.s.sume, from the reply quoted, that she did, she was recalling this laborious work at translation that must have gone on for years. We have seen the first fruit in the translation from the German--or possibly from the French--of Klinger's _Faustus_; we have seen it in _Romantic Ballads_ from the Danish, the Irish, and the Swedish. Now there really seemed a chance of a more prosperous utilisation of his gift, for Borrow had found a zealous friend who was prepared to go forward with him in this work of giving to the English public translations from the literatures of the northern nations. This friend was Dr. John Bowring, who made a very substantial reputation in his day.

Bowring has told his own story in a volume of _Autobiographical Recollections_,[85] a singularly dull book for a man whose career was at once so varied and so full of interest. He was born at Exeter in 1792 of an old Devons.h.i.+re family, and entered a merchant's office in his native city on leaving school. He early acquired a taste for the study of languages, and learnt French from a refugee priest precisely in the way in which Borrow had done. He also acquired Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, continuing with a great variety of other languages. Indeed, only the very year after Borrow had published _Faustus_, he published his _Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain_, and the year after Borrow's _Romantic Ballads_ came Bowring's _Servian Popular Poetry_. With such interest in common it was natural that the two men should be brought together, but Bowring had the qualities which enabled him to make a career for himself and Borrow had not. In 1811, as a clerk in a London mercantile house, he was sent to Spain, and after this his travels were varied. He was in Russia in 1820, and in 1822 was arrested at Calais and thrown into prison, being suspected by the Bourbon Government of abetting the French Liberals. Canning as Foreign Minister took up his cause, and he was speedily released. He a.s.sisted Jeremy Bentham in founding _The Westminster Review_ in 1824. Meanwhile he was seeking official employment, and in conjunction with Mr. Villiers, afterwards Earl of Clarendon, and that amba.s.sador to Spain who befriended Borrow when he was in the Peninsula, became a commissioner to investigate the commercial relations between England and France. After the Reform Bill of 1832 Bowring was frequently a candidate for Parliament, and was finally elected for Bolton in 1841. In the meantime he a.s.sisted Cobden in the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838. Having suffered great monetary losses in the interval, he applied for the appointment of Consul at Canton, of which place he afterwards became Governor, being knighted in 1854. At one period of his career at Hong Kong his conduct was made the subject of a vote of censure in Parliament, Lord Palmerston, however, warmly defending him. Finally returning to England in 1862, he continued his literary work with unfailing zest. He died at Exeter, in a house very near that in which he was born, in 1872. His extraordinary energies cannot be too much praised, and there is no doubt but that in addition to being the possessor of great learning he was a man of high character. His literary efforts were surprisingly varied. There are at least thirty-six volumes with his name on the t.i.tle-page, most of them unreadable to-day; even such works, for example, as his _Visit to the Philippine Isles_ and _Siam and the Siamese_, which involved travel into then little-known lands. Perhaps the only book by him that to-day commands attention is his translation of Chamisso's _Peter Schlemihl_. The most readable of many books by him into which I have dipped is his _Servian Popular Poetry_ of 1827, in which we find interesting stories in verse that remind us of similar stories from the Danish in Borrow's _Romantic Ballads_ published only the year before. The extraordinary thing, indeed, is the many points of likeness between Borrow and Bowring. Both were remarkable linguists; both had spent some time in Spain and Russia; both had found themselves in foreign prisons. They were alike a.s.sociated in some measure with Norwich--Bowring through friends.h.i.+p with Taylor--and I might go on to many other points of likeness or of contrast. It is natural, therefore, that the penniless Borrow should have welcomed acquaintance with the more prosperous scholar. Thus it is that, some thirty years later, Borrow described the introduction by Taylor:

The writer had just entered into his eighteenth year, when he met at the table of a certain Anglo-Germanist an individual, apparently somewhat under thirty, of middle stature, a thin and weaselly figure, a sallow complexion, a certain obliquity of vision, and a large pair of spectacles. This person, who had lately come from abroad, and had published a volume of translations, had attracted some slight notice in the literary world, and was looked upon as a kind of lion in a small provincial capital. After dinner he argued a great deal, spoke vehemently against the Church, and uttered the most desperate Radicalism that was perhaps ever heard, saying, he hoped that in a short time there would not be a king or queen in Europe, and inveighing bitterly against the English aristocracy, and against the Duke of Wellington in particular, whom he said, if he himself was ever president of an English republic--an event which he seemed to think by no means improbable--he would hang for certain infamous acts of profligacy and bloodshed which he had perpetrated in Spain. Being informed that the writer was something of a philologist, to which character the individual in question laid great pretensions, he came and sat down by him, and talked about languages and literature. The writer, who was only a boy, was a little frightened at first.[86]

The quarrels of authors are frequently amusing but rarely edifying, and this hatred of Bowring that possessed the soul of poor Borrow in his later years is of the same texture as the rest. We shall never know the facts, but the position is comprehensible enough. Let us turn to the extant correspondence[87] which, as far as we know, opened when Borrow paid what was probably his third visit to London in 1829:

To Dr. John Bowring

17 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, BLOOMSBURY. [_Dec. 6, 1829._]

MY DEAR SIR,--Lest I should intrude upon you when you are busy, I write to inquire when you will be unoccupied. I wish to shew you my translation of _The Death of Balder_, Ewald's most celebrated production,[88] which, if you approve of, you will perhaps render me some a.s.sistance in bringing forth, for I don't know many publishers. I think this will be a proper time to introduce it to the British public, as your account of Danish literature will doubtless cause a sensation. My friend Mr. R. Taylor has my _Kaempe Viser_, which he has read and approves of; but he is so very deeply occupied, that I am apprehensive he neglects them: but I am unwilling to take them out of his hands, lest I offend him. Your letting me know when I may call will greatly oblige,--Dear Sir, your most obedient servant,

GEORGE BORROW.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, BLOOMSBURY. [_Dec. 28, 1829._][89]

MY DEAR SIR,--I trouble you with these lines for the purpose of submitting a little project of mine for your approbation. When I had last the pleasure of being at yours, you mentioned, that we might at some future period unite our strength in composing a kind of Danish Anthology. You know, as well as I, that by far the most remarkable portion of Danish poetry is comprised in those ancient popular productions termed _Kaempe Viser_, which I have translated. Suppose we bring forward at once the first volume of the Danish Anthology, which should contain the heroic and supernatural songs of the _K. V._, which are certainly the most interesting; they are quite ready for the press with the necessary notes, and with an introduction which I am not ashamed of. The second volume might consist of the Historic songs and the ballads and Romances, this and the third volume, which should consist of the modern Danish poetry, and should commence with the celebrated 'Ode to the Birds' by Morten Borup, might appear in company at the beginning of next season.

To olenslager should be allotted the princ.i.p.al part of the fourth volume; and it is my opinion that amongst his minor pieces should be given a good translation of his Aladdin, by which alone he has rendered his claim to the t.i.tle of a great poet indubitable. A proper Danish Anthology cannot be contained in less than 4 volumes, the literature being so copious. The first volume, as I said before, might appear instanter, with no further trouble to yourself than writing, if you should think fit, a page or two of introductory matter.--Yours most truly, my dear Sir,

GEORGE BORROW.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, _Decr. 31, 1829._

MY DEAR SIR,--I received your note, and as it appears that you will not be disengaged till next Friday evening (this day week) I will call then. You think that no more than two volumes can be ventured on. Well! be it so! The first volume can contain 70 choice _Kaempe Viser_; viz. all the heroic, all the supernatural ballads (which two cla.s.ses are by far the most interesting), and a few of the historic and romantic songs. The sooner the work is advertised the better, _for I am terribly afraid of being forestalled in the Kaempe Viser by some of those Scotch blackguards_ who affect to translate from all languages, of which they are fully as ignorant as Lockhart is of Spanish. I am quite ready with the first volume, which might appear by the middle of February (the best time in the whole season), and if we unite our strength in the second, I think we can produce something worthy of fame, for we shall have plenty of matter to employ talent upon.--Most truly yours,

GEORGE BORROW.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, BLOOMSBURY, _Jany. 14, 1830._

MY DEAR SIR,--I approve of the prospectus in every respect; it is business-like, and there is nothing flashy in it. I do not wish to suggest one alteration. I am not idle: I translated yesterday from your volume 3 longish _Kaempe Visers_, among which is the 'Death of King Hacon at Kirkwall in Orkney,' after his unsuccessful invasion of Scotland. To-day I translated 'The Duke's Daughter of Skage,' a n.o.ble ballad of 400 lines. When I call again I will, with your permission, retake Tullin and attack _The Surveyor_. Allow me, my dear Sir, to direct your attention to olenschlaeger's _St. Hems Aftenspil_, which is the last in his Digte of 1803. It contains his best lyrics, one or two of which I have translated. It might, I think, be contained within 70 pages, and I could translate it in 3 weeks. Were we to give the whole of it we should gratify olenschlaeger's wish expressed to you, that one of his larger pieces should appear.

But it is for you to decide entirely on what _is_ or what is _not_ to be done. When you see the _foreign_ editor I should feel much obliged if you would speak to him about my reviewing Tegner, and enquire whether a _good_ article on Welsh poetry would be received. I have the advantage of not being a Welshman. I would speak the truth, and would give translations of some of the best Welsh poetry; and I really believe that my translations would not be the worst that have been made from the Welsh tongue.--Most truly yours,

G. BORROW.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, BLOOMSBURY, _Jany. 7, 1830._