IN DEFENCE OF BORROW.

When the publishers of “The Minerva Library” invited me to write a few introductory words to this edition of Borrow’s “Romany Rye,” I hesitated at first about undertaking the task. For, notwithstanding the kind reception that my “Notes upon George Borrow” prefixed to their edition of “Lavengro” met with from the public and the Press, I shrank from associating again my own name with the name of a friend who is now an English classic. But no sooner had I determined not to say any more about my relations with Borrow than circumstances arose that impelled me, as a matter of duty, to do so. Ever since the publication of Dr. Knapp’s memoirs of Borrow attacks upon his memory have been appearing—attacks which only those who knew him can repel.

His has indeed been a fantastic fate! When the shortcomings of any illustrious man save Borrow are under discussion, “les défauts de ses qualités” is the criticism—wise as charitable—which they evoke. Yes, each one is allowed to have his angularities save Borrow. Each one is allowed to show his own pet unpleasant facets of character now and then—allowed to show them as inevitable foils to the pleasant ones—save Borrow. His weaknesses no one ever condones. During his lifetime his faults were for ever chafing and irritating his acquaintances, and now that he and they are all dead these faults of his seem to be chafing and irritating people of another generation. A fantastic fate, I say, for him who was so interesting to some of us!

One writer assails him on account of his own ill-judged and unwarrantable attacks upon a far greater man than himself—Sir Walter Scott; another on account of his “no-popery” diatribes; another on account of his amusing anger over “Charley o’er the Waterism.”

When Mr. Murray’s new and admirable edition of “The Romany Rye” came out this year, a review of the book appeared in the Daily Chronicle, in which vitality was given—given by one of the most genial as well as brilliant and picturesque writers of our time—to all the old misrepresentations of Borrow and also to a good many new ones. The fact that this review came from so distinguished a writer as Dr. Jessopp lends it an importance and a permanency that cannot be ignored. To me it gave a twofold pain to read that review, for it was written by a man for whom I have a very special regard. I cannot claim Dr. Jessopp as a personal friend, but I have once or twice met him; and, assuredly, to spend any time in his society without being greatly attracted by him is impossible. I must say that I consider it quite lamentable that he who can hardly himself have seen much if anything of Borrow should have breathed the anti-Borrovian atmosphere of Norwich—should have been brought into contact with people there and in Norfolk generally who did know Borrow and who disliked, because they did not understand, him.

Lest it should be supposed that in writing with such warmth I am unduly biassed in favour of Borrow I print here a letter I received concerning that same review of Dr. Jessopp’s. It is written by one who has with me enjoyed many a delightful walk with Borrow in Richmond Park—one who knew Borrow many years ago—long before I did—Dr. Gordon Hake’s son—Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, the author of “Within Sound of the Weir,” and other successful novels, and a well-known writer in Chambers’s Journal.

Craigmore, Bulstrode Road, Hounslow, W. May 15, 1900.

My Dear Watts-Dunton,—You will remember that when I congratulated you upon the success of your two gypsy books I prophesied that now there would be a boom of the gypsies: and I was right it seems. For you will see by the enclosed newspaper cutting that in Surrey a regular trade is going on in caravans for gypsy gentlemen. And “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” are going, I see, into lots of new editions. I know how this must gratify you. But I write to ask you whether you have seen the extremely bitter attack upon Borrow’s memory which has appeared in the Daily Chronicle. The writer is a man I must surely have heard you mention with esteem—Dr. Jessopp. It is a review of Murray’s new edition of “The Romany Rye.” In case you have not seen it I send you a cutting from it for you to judge for yourself. [0a]

Was there ever anything so unjust as this? As to what he says about Borrow’s being without animal passion, I fancy that the writer must have misread certain printed words of yours in which you say, “Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn towards any woman, could she possibly have been a Romany? would she not rather have been of the Scandinavian type?” But I am quite sure that, when you said this, you did not intend to suggest that he was “the Narses of Literature.” As to his dislike of children, I have heard you say how interested he used to seem in the presence of gypsy children, and I especially remember one anecdote of yours about the interest he took in a child that he thought was being injured by the mother’s smoking. And did you not get that lovely anecdote about the gypsy child weeping in the churchyard because the poor dead gorgios could not hear the church chimes from something he told you? But I can speak from personal experience about his feeling towards children that were not gypsies. When our family lived at Bury St. Edmunds, in the fifties, my father, as you know, was one of Borrow’s most intimate friends, and he was frequently at our house, and Borrow and my father were a good deal in correspondence (as Dr. Knapp’s book shows) and my impression of Borrow is exactly the contrary of that which it would be if he in the least resembled Dr. Jessopp’s description of him. At that time George was in the nursery and I was a child. He took a wonderfully kind interest in us all; * * * * * * * * but the one he took most notice of was George, chiefly because he was a very big, massive child. It was then that he playfully christened him “Hales,” because he said that the child would develop into a second “Norfolk giant.” You will remember that he always addressed George by that pet name. But what do you think of Dr. Jessopp’s saying that Borrow’s voice was not that of a man? You yourself have spoken in some of your writings—I don’t exactly remember where and when—of the “trumpet-like clearness” of Borrow’s voice. As to his being beardless and therefore the “Narses of Literature” it is difficult to imagine that a man of intelligence, as I suppose Dr. Jessopp is, can really think virility depends upon the growth of a man’s whiskers, as no doubt ignorant people often do. I should have thought that a man who knew Norfolk well would know that it is notable for its beardless giants of great power. I really think that, as Borrow’s most intimate friend in his latest years (I mean after my father left Roehampton for Germany), it is your duty to write something and stand up for the dear old boy, and you are the one man now who can defend him and do him justice. I assure you that the last time that I ever saw him his talk was a good deal about yourself. I remember the occasion very well; it was just outside the Bank of England, when he was returning from one of those mysterious East-end expeditions that you wot of: he was just partially recovering from that sad accident which you have somewhere alluded to. As to Dr. Jessopp, it is clear from his remarks upon a friend of Borrow’s—the Rev. Mr. John Gunn, of Norwich, that he never saw Borrow. Gunn, he says, was of colossal frame and must have been in his youth quite an inch taller than Borrow. And then he goes on to say that Gunn’s arm was as big as an ordinary man’s thigh. Now you and I and George, are specially competent to speak of Borrow’s physical development, for we have been with Borrow when at seventy years of age he would bathe in a pond covered with thin ice. He then stood six feet four and his muscles were as fully developed as those of a young man in training. If Gunn was a more colossal man than Borrow he certainly ought to have been put into a show. But you should read the entire article, and I wish I had preserved it.

Yours ever affectionately, Thomas St. E. Hake.

I consider this an interesting document to all Borrovians. There are only two things in it which I have to challenge. I infer that Mr. Hake shares the common mistake of supposing Borrow to have been an East Anglian. Not that this is surprising, seeing that Borrow himself shared the same mistake—a mistake upon which I have on a previous occasion remarked. I have said elsewhere that one might as well call Charlotte Brontë a Yorkshire woman as call Borrow an East Anglian. He was, of course, no more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman. He had at bottom no East Anglian characteristics, and this explains the Norfolk prejudice against him. He inherited nothing from Norfolk save his accent—unless it were that love of “leg of mutton and turnips” which Mr. Hake and I have so often seen exemplified. The reason why Borrow was so misjudged in Norfolk was, as I have hinted above, that the racial characteristics of the Celt and the East Anglian clashed too severely. Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the locality that has given birth to a man influences his imagination throughout his life. His father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his native place and enlist as a common soldier. Afterwards he became a recruiting officer, and moved about from one part of Great Britain and Ireland to another. It so chanced that while staying at East Dereham, in Norfolk, he met and fell in love with a lady of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow’s father, and very little in the veins of his mother. Borrow’s ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French. But such was the egotism of Borrow—perhaps I should have said, such is the egotism of human nature—that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe. East Anglia, however, seems to have cherished a very different feeling towards Borrow. Another mistake of Mr. Hake’s is in supposing that Borrow gave me the lovely incident of the gypsy child weeping in the churchyard because “the poor dead gorgios could not hear the church bells.” As this mistake has been shared by others, and has appeared in print, I may as well say that it was a real incident in the life of a well-known Romany chi, from whom I have this very morning received a charming letter dated from “the van in the field,” where she has settled for the winter.

The anecdote about Borrow and the gypsy child who was, or seemed to be, suffering through the mother’s excessive love of her pipe can very appropriately be introduced here, and I am glad that Mr. Hake has recalled it to my mind. It shows not only Borrow’s relations to childhood, but also his susceptibility to those charms of womankind to which Dr. Jessopp thinks he was impervious. Borrow was fond of telling this story himself, in support of his anti-tobacco bias. Whenever he was told, as he sometimes was, that what brought on the “horrors” when he lived alone in the dingle, was the want of tobacco, this story was certain to come up.

One lovely morning in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with what is called “gypsy gold,” and the bright green of the foliage showed scarcely a touch of bronze—at that very moment, indeed, when the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the common and the hedgerow seem to come back for an hour and mingle their half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground-ivy, and pimpernel, he and a friend were walking towards a certain camp of gryengroes well known to them both. They were bound upon a quaint expedition. Will the reader “be surprised to learn” that it was connected with Matthew Arnold and a race in which he took a good deal of interest, the gypsies?

Borrow, whose attention had been only lately directed by his friend to “The Scholar Gypsy,” had declared that there was scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that whatever the merits of Matthew Arnold’s poem might be from any supposed artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of the Romany temper, and that no gypsy who ever lived could sympathise with it, or even understand its motive in the least degree. Borrow’s friend had challenged this, contending that howsoever Arnold’s classic language might soar above a gypsy’s intelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the most illiterate person could grasp it. This was why in company with Borrow he was now going (with a copy of Arnold’s poems in his pocket) to try “The Scholar Gypsy” upon the first intelligent gypsy woman they should meet at the camp: as to gypsy men, “they were,” said Borrow, “too prosaic to furnish a fair test.”

As they were walking along, Borrow’s eyes, which were as long-sighted as a gypsy’s, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn bush some distance off. He stopped and said: “At first I thought that white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it’s a magpie,” next to the water-wagtail the gypsies’ most famous bird. On going up to the bush they discovered a magpie crouched among the leaves. As it did not stir at their approach, Borrow’s friend said to him: “It is wounded—or else dying—or is it a tame bird escaped from a cage?”

“Hawk!” said Borrow, laconically, and turned up his face and gazed into the sky. “The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his quarry and made his meal. I fancy he has himself been ‘chivvied’ by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.”

And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that specked the dazzling blue a hawk—one of the kind which takes its prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands—was wheeling up and up, and trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to stoop at and devour it. That the magpie had seen the hawk and had been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident, for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and honest birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except the hawk. Man it looked upon as a protecting friend.

As Borrow and his friend were gazing at the bird a woman’s voice at their elbows said—

“It’s lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a magpie. I shall stop here till the hawk’s flew away.”

They turned round, and there stood a magnificent gypsy woman, carrying, gypsy fashion, a weakly child that, in spite of its sallow and wasted cheek, proclaimed itself to be hers. By her side stood a young gypsy girl of about seventeen years of age. She was beautiful—quite remarkably so—but her beauty was not of the typical Romany kind. It was, perhaps, more like the beauty of a Capri girl.

She was bareheaded—there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her head—her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a gypsy girl’s hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the back of her neck and upon her shoulders. In the tumbled tresses glittered certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels. They were small dead dragon-flies of the crimson kind called “sylphs.”

To Borrow and his friend these gypsies were well known. The woman with the child was one of the Boswells: I dare not say what was her connection, if any, with “Boswell the Great”—I mean Sylvester Boswell, the grammarian and “well-known and popalated gipsy of Codling Gap,” who, on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about the superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others “on the accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life.” But this I do remember—that it was the very same Perpinia Boswell whose remarkable Christian name has lately been made the subject of inquiry in The Guardian. The other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies, I prefer to leave nameless here.

After greeting the two, Borrow looked at the weakling child with the deepest interest, and said, “This chavo ought not to look like that—with such a mother as you, Perpinia.”

“And with such a daddy, too,” said she. “Mike’s stronger for a man nor even I am for a woman”—a glow of wifely pride passing over her face; “and as to good looks, it’s him as is got the good looks, not me. But none on us can’t make it out about the chavo. He’s so weak and sick he don’t look as if he belonged to Boswells’ breed at all.”

“How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?” said Borrow’s friend, looking at the great black cutty pipe protruding from Perpinia’s finely cut lips, and seeming strangely out of place there.

“Can’t say,” said she, laughing.

“About as many as she can afford to buy,” interrupted her companion—“that’s all. Mike don’t like her a-smokin’. He says it makes her look like a old Londra Irish woman in Common Garding Market.”

“You must not smoke another pipe,” said Borrow’s friend to the mother—“not another pipe till the child leaves the breast.”

“What?” said Perpinia defiantly. “As if I could live without my pipe!”

“Fancy Pep a-livin’ without her baccy,” laughed the girl of the dragon-flies.

“Your child can’t live with it,” said Borrow’s friend to Perpinia. “That pipe of yours is full of a poison called nicotine.”

“Nick what?” said the girl, laughing. “That’s a new kind o’ Nick. Why, you smoke yourself!”

“Nicotine,” said Borrow’s friend; “and the first part of Pep’s body that the poison gets into is her breast, and—”

“Gets into my burk?” said Perpinia; “get along wi’ ye.”

“Yes.”

“Do it pison Pep’s milk?” said the girl.

“Yes.”

“That ain’t true,” said Perpinia; “can’t be true.”

“It is true,” said Borrow’s friend. “If you don’t give up that pipe for a time the child will die, or else be a rickety thing all his life. If you do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a Romany chal as Mike himself.”

“Chavo agin pipe, Pep,” said the girl.

“Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,” said Borrow, in that hail-fellow-well-met tone of his which he reserved for the Romanies—a tone which no Romany could ever resist. And he took it gently from the woman’s lips. “Don’t smoke any more till I come to the camp and see the chavo again.”

The woman looked very angry at first.

“He be’s a good friend to the Romanies,” said the girl in an appeasing tone.

“That’s true,” said the woman, “but he’s no business to take my pipe out o’ my mouth for all that.”

She soon began to smile again, however, and let Borrow retain the pipe. Borrow and his friend then moved away towards the dusty high-road leading to the camp, and were joined by the young girl. Perpinia remained, keeping guard over the magpie that was to bring luck to the sinking child.

It was determined now that the young girl was the very person to be used as the test-critic of the Romany mind upon Arnold’s poem, for she was exceptionally intelligent. So instead of going to the camp the oddly assorted little party of three struck across the ferns, gorse, and heather towards “Kingfisher brook,” and when they reached it they sat down on a fallen tree.

Nothing delights a gypsy girl so much as to listen to a story either told or read to her, and when Borrow’s friend pulled his book from his pocket the gypsy girl began to clap her hands. Her anticipation of enjoyment sent over her face a warm glow, and I can assure Dr. Jessopp that Borrow (notwithstanding that his admiration of women was confined as a rule to blondes of the Isopel Berners type) seemed as much struck by her beauty as ever the Doctor could be himself. To say the truth, he frequently talked of it afterwards. Her complexion, though darker than an English girl’s, was rather lighter than any ordinary gypsy’s. Her eyes were of an indescribable hue, but an artist who has since then painted her portrait for Borrow’s friend described it as a mingling of pansy-purple and dark tawny. The pupils were so large that, being set in the somewhat almond-shaped and long-eyelashed lids of her race, they were partly curtained both above and below, and this had the peculiar effect of making the eyes seem always a little contracted and just about to smile. The great size and deep richness of the eyes made the straight little nose seem smaller than it really was, they also lessened the apparent size of the mouth, which, red as a rosebud, looked quite small until she laughed when the white teeth made quite a wide glitter.

“The beauty of that girl,” murmured Borrow, “is really quite—quite—”

I don’t know what the sentence would have been had it been finished.

Before three lines of the poem had been read she jumped up and cried, “Look at the Devil’s needles. They’re come to sew my eyes up for killing their brothers.”

And surely enough a gigantic dragon-fly, whose body-armour of sky-blue and jet black, and great lace-woven wings, shining like a rainbow gauze, caught the sun as he swept dazzling by, did really seem to be attracted either by the wings of his dead brothers or by the lights shed from the girl’s eyes.

“I dussn’t set here,” said she. “Us Romanies call this ‘Dragon-fly brook.’ And that’s the king o’ the dragon-flies: he lives here.”

As she rose she seemed to be surrounded by dragon-flies of about a dozen different species of all sizes, some crimson, some bronze, some green and gold, whirling and dancing round her as if they meant to justify their Romany name and sew up the girl’s eyes.

“The Romanies call them the Devil’s needles,” said Borrow; “their business is to sew up pretty girl’s eyes.”

In a second, however, they all vanished, and the girl after a while sat down again to listen to the “lil,” as she called the story.

Glanville’s prose story, upon which Arnold’s poem is based, was read first. In this the girl was much interested. She herself was in love with a Romany Rye. But when the reader went on to read to her Arnold’s poem, though her eyes flashed now and then at the lovely bits of description—for the country about Oxford is quite remarkably like the country in which she was born—she looked sadly bewildered, and then asked to have it all read again. After a second reading she said in a meditative way, “Can’t make out what the lil’s all about—seems all about nothink! Seems to me that the pretty sights what makes a Romany fit to jump out o’ her skin for joy makes this ’ere gorgio want to cry. What a rum lot gorgios is surely!”

And then she sprang up and ran off towards the camp with the agility of a greyhound, turning round every few moments, pirouetting and laughing aloud.

“The beauty of that girl,” Borrow again murmured, “is quite—quite—”

Again he did not finish his sentence, but after a while said—

“That was all true about the nicotine?”

“Partly, I think,” said his friend, “but not being a medical man I must not be too emphatic. If it is true it ought to be a criminal offence for any woman to smoke in excess while she is suckling a child.”

“Say it ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,” growled Borrow. “Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale tobacco—pheugh!”

Now, so far from forgetting this incident, Borrow took quite as much interest in the case as though the child had been his own. He went at short intervals to the camp to see Perpinia, who had abandoned her pipe, for the time being. And when after a fortnight the child, either from Perpinia’s temporary abstention from nicotine, or through the “good luck” sent by the magpie, or from some other cause began to recover from its illness, he reported progress with the greatest gusto to his friend.

“Is not Perpinia very grateful to you and to me?” said the friend.

“Yes,” said Borrow, with a twinkle in his eye. “She manages to feel grateful to you and me for making her give up the pipe, and also to believe at the same time that her child was saved by the good luck that came to her because she guarded the magpie.”

If it were needful to furnish other instances of Borrow’s interest in children, and also of his susceptibility to feminine charms, I could easily furnish them. As to the “rancorous hatred that smouldered in that sad heart of his,” in spite of all his oddities, all his “cantankerousness,” to use one of his own words, he was a singularly steadfast and loyal friend. Indeed, it was the very steadfastness of his friendship that drove him to perpetrate that outrage at Mr. Bevan’s house, recorded in Dr. Gordon Hake’s “Memoirs.” I need only recall the way in which he used to speak of those who had been kind to him (such as his publisher, Mr. John Murray for instance) to show that no one could be more loyal or more grateful than he who has been depicted as the incarnation of all that is spiteful, fussy, and mean. There is no need for the world to be told here that the author of “Lavengro” is a delightful writer, and one who is more sure than most authors of his time to win that little span of life which writing men call “immortality.” But if there is need for the world to be told further that George Borrow was a good man, that he was a most winsome and a most charming companion, that he was an English gentleman, straightforward, honest, and brave as the very best exemplars of that fine old type, the world is now told so—told so by two of the few living men who can speak of him with authority, the writer of the above letter and myself.

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON.