CHAPTER XVI

BORROW’S BOOKS

STRONG was the appeal made to a very wide public by “The Bible in Spain.” What was the nature of the appeal? It was unique; but it was not inherently surprising. “I woke one morning and found myself famous,” said Byron of the reception of “Childe Harold.” Borrow’s gigantic leap from the shades of chilly neglect into the sunshine of popularity was equally sudden and less obviously explicable. He had none of the social advantages that helped to spread the notoriety of Byron’s achievement. Comparatively few people knew anything about the obscure son of the adjutant of the Norfolk Militia; and we have already seen that his special type of genius made no special impression on that generation. Yet “The Bible in Spain” went forth from Albemarle Street into “the reading world” to make a triumphal progress amidst storms of applause.

This furore was created not entirely by the real merits of the book, but largely by adventitious circumstances. It has great merits. But there is more work, there is better work, in “Lavengro”; the latter is a far more representative Borrow book than its forerunner. It has more of Borrow’s humour, more of his subtility; it is far more fascinating as a human document. Yet “Lavengro” was still-born. It was received with no applause. The critics disapproved of it, and the public did not buy it. Whereas thirty-five thousand copies of “The Bible in Spain” were sold in a year, it took the same time to get rid of a thousand copies of “Lavengro.” Thus, the real reasons of the success of 1843 did not reside primarily in the qualities for which we admire the book to-day. The attributes that make it something more than a mere record of a colporteur’s labours, its picaresque liveliness, its saturnine humour, its vivid sketches of romantic rascality, keep it alive. The narrator moves, like some new Gil Blas, through a series of scenes which give the reader a savour of the atmosphere of Spain hardly excelled in English literature. It is evident from the experience of “Lavengro” that these were not the attributes that caused the book to sell in its thousands when it was published. The cause of its huge circulation was that it appealed to a public which would buy in large quantities a record of missionary enterprise and religious adventure, and would not have bought any book that Borrow could write if the religious interest had been absent. No doubt, when they had bought and read, the quality of the work as literature produced in them unaccustomed and pleasing sensations not to be obtained from most books purchased for similar reasons. Borrow’s evangelism attracted them and his art retained them.

The bulk of “The Bible in Spain” consists of transcripts of letters written to the Bible Society reporting upon his proceedings in the Peninsula. Suppose the letters had never been written. Suppose Borrow had merely described his travels and adventures in Spain in a secular-fashion, is it possible to question that the book would have shared the same fate, as “Lavengro”? Partly by design, partly by accident, the contents were skilfully mixed and flavoured to a nicety. True, it contained more than a _soupçon_ of gypsyism and scoundrelism. True, its finest passages are devoted to gypsies and vagabonds and their haunts and habits. Yet, the dominant elements are religious. It is not proposed to suggest that any hypocrisy is involved. Borrow was, in his peculiar fashion, a deeply religious man. His passionate Protestantism was thoroughly sincere. When he declaimed against Romish superstitions, and laid his vigorous flail upon Batuscha, “the paralytic,” he meant every word he said. When, describing the ravishing scenery at Monte Moro, he declares, “I sat down on a broken wall and remained gazing, and listening, and shedding tears of rapture; for of all the pleasures which a bountiful God permitteth His children to enjoy, none are so dear to some hearts as the music of forests and streams . . . ” he is not canting for the benefit of Earl Street, though in other circumstances the sentiment might have been differently expressed. And the majority of his readers perused this with the Bible Society in their minds. One remembers having “The Bible in Spain” placed in one’s youthful hands, with stress laid on the fact that this was the work of a man who had encountered infinite perils and suffered amazing hardships in a pious cause, and with injunctions to observe not the remarkable beauties of the book but the benighted condition of the priest-ridden children of Spain, to compare it with the blessings of unlimited Bible-reading which oneself enjoyed.

There is no need to labour this point. The perspective has cleared with the passage of years. There is no less admiration for the fine work which the Bible Society did and is doing, and a great deal more perspicuous admiration of Borrow’s book. Literature owes much to the Bible Society in many ways, and one of its debts lies here—that it found Borrow employment at a time when he was in sore straits, and provided him with the means of introducing to the public the fruits of his literary labour.

It has already been suggested that, in point of art, “The Bible in Spain” does not bear comparison with “Lavengro.” For what it is worth, that is a deliberate judgment. But it should be said that no such comparison ought to be instituted. The two books are widely different in inspiration, in purpose, in execution. The record of the Spanish journeys has an interest of its own, and may stand on its own merits. As a descriptive and narrative writer Borrow had few superiors in his time. His style smacks of Defoe, smacks of the Bible, smacks of the archaic poets and romancers he loved so well. But it is his own style—at once a noble and spacious style and no style at all. There is no preciosity and there is little elegance in it; but there is naturalism, virility, grandeur. Only when he becomes didactic does his power decline. Then, in spite of his tremendous vigour of invective, he rarely rises above the level of the leader-writer, with his eye on the thing nearest to his fond prejudices, searching for the most offensive word that happens to be handy.

There is probably less sermonising in “The Bible in Spain” than in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.” Borrow is in love with Spain as Spain. He abounds in admiration of the country and its climate, the nobility of its people and their “stern, heroic virtue.” He does not gloss over the savagery and crime to be found among them, but he observes that there is very little of low, vulgar vice in the great body of the Spanish nation. His fulminations are reserved for the politicians and the warring factions that distressed the land, and for the “atrocious projects of malignant Rome.” He is generous in his approval of the valour and the probity of the people as a whole. He moves among them with a freedom that can only be attained by the man who knows the language—and not by all men who know it. For Spaniards are sensitive about their noble tongue, and do not like to hear it mutilated by those who are not to the manner born. Borrow had no nervousness about his linguistic powers. He gives some entertaining instructions to Englishmen who want to make themselves understood in a foreign language: they should speak with much noise and vociferation, opening their mouths wide. “Is it surprising,” he asks, “that the English are in general the worst linguists in the world, seeing that they pursue a system diametrically opposite? For example, when they attempt to speak Spanish, the most sonorous tongue in existence, they scarcely open their lips, and, putting their hands in their pockets, fumble lazily instead of applying them to the indispensable office of gesticulation.” He, at any, rate, succeeded in vociferating and gesticulating his way through Spain to good purpose, and his picture of the country is enriched by a wealth of intimacy that would have been beyond the power of almost any other Englishman.

It is astonishing that a man with so many insular prejudices as Borrow, a person so dogmatic, and so utterly scornful of the religion that pervades the very soil of Spain, should have been able to ingratiate himself with its people as he did, while on an errand which most of them must have considered damnably heretical. The secret is to be sought in his love of the romantic and the quality of _simpatia_, which, in spite of all his idiosyncrasies, he possessed in very high degree.

“The Bible in Spain” is a piece of Borrow. That provides its principal charm. It is not peppered with “dots and asterisks” in the same way as “Lavengro,” and does not depend for any great part of its effect on ellipsis. But it is still delightfully irresponsible and inconsequential, full of quaint snatches of character, of rough sketches of picturesque figures, of bits of adventure which lead nowhere, yet carry the reader on from incident to incident with a fascination as irresistible as the elusive attractions of Tristram Shandy. There are solid values as well. There are the rugged, unpremeditated eloquence of its descriptions, the vivid colouring of its persons in the piece, and, the never-flagging gallop of its action. One would be hard pressed to name a book of its kind in which stir and progression are more constant.

On every page peep realistic portraits at which the reader has just time to glance before he is hurried on. Who can ever forget the goatherd on the mountain between Monte Moro and Elvas, who recalled to Borrow’s mind Brute Carle in the ballad of Swayne Vonved?

“A wild swine on his shoulders he kept, And upon his bosom a black bear slept; And about his fingers, with hair o’erhung, The squirrel sported and weasel clung,—”

that weird figure of a man, with the otter slung around his neck, who could not read, but, when he was asked whether he knew aught of God or Christ, “turned his countenance towards the sun, which was beginning to sink in the west, nodded to it, and then again looked fixedly upon me. I believe that I understood the mute reply, which probably was that it was God who made that glorious light which illumes and gladdens all creation; and gratified with that belief I left him. . . .” Who does not treasure the cameo of the drunken driver of Evora, who, having wrecked his carriage and killed his mule, exclaimed, “Paciencia! . . . It was God’s will that she should die. What more can be said?” Or the portrait of the Manchegan prophetess that aroused the wrath of Mr. Brandram; or of the pig-merchant who sang the “Marseillaise” and brandished his snick-and-snee in the inn at Badajoz? Or, in a different medium, the picture of Mendizabal, the Jewish Prime Minister, who told Borrow it was not Bibles they wanted in Spain, but guns and gunpowder with which to put down the rebels? Or, on a different scale, the visions of the Jews of Lisbon and the “children of Egypt” who tried to tempt him to a horse deal at Duenas?

Borrow was in Spain during some of the most exciting years of its modern history. He tells us that he had no politics except those of the gypsies—promising success to both sides, and ultimately joining the one which won. That was perhaps a very proper attitude for a foreigner and a person who had to rely on official favour in order to get his work of Bible distribution done. Notwithstanding this, he does not conceal his contempt for the Carlist cause. His posadero at Cordova was “an egregious Carlist,” and though he expressly told his friend, the correspondent of the _Morning Chronicle_ in Madrid, that he was not a Liberal, his sympathies certainly lay away from the ultramontism of the insurgents. Borrow’s Spanish politics, of course, are of little importance; his sketches of political events, on the other hand, are not only interesting but valuable. His record of the circumstances which led up to the death of General Quesada is the account of an eye-witness, and is adopted by Major Martin Hume in his “Story of Spain,” though doubt is thrown upon the sensational tale of the Revolution of La Granja, where the Queen is made to succumb to the desires of the Constitutionalists by the threat of shooting her paramour, Muñoz, before her eyes. One of the most characteristic bits of Borrow’s work is his portrait of Baltasar, the “National,” and one of his unsurpassable touches of description is given to the celebration, in the Café of the Calle d’Alcala, of Quesada’s assassination, the huge bowl of coffee mixed for the blood-drunken soldiery, and _el panuelo_, the blue kerchief whose ghastly contents were used to stir the mixture. Those contents were the severed hand and fingers of Quesada, the mutilated bones celebrated in the refrain which resounded through the hall:

“Que es lo que abaja Por aquel cerro? Ta ra ra ra ra! Son los huesos de Quesada, Que los trae un perro. . . .”

Baltasar’s invitation to “Don Jorge” to drink of the cup on this “pleasant day for Spain” relieves with a touch of humour a scene which would otherwise be as revolting as the archaic ceremony of the vulpinised wine after a fox-hunt. The variety and rapid movement of the scene are remarkable, but not more so than those of fifty other scenes in the book; and the waggish little assassin Baltasar is no quainter than fifty other characters, from Borrow’s own Greek servant, Antonio, to Judah Lib, the Jew of Galatia, or Benedict Moll, the Swiss.

It is the essence of Spain that Borrow gives us in his inimitable, erratic way, its hot love and burning hate, its high chivalry and its profound roguery, the ineffable beauty of its women and the ugly rags of its mendicants, the solemn dignity of its people and their saline wit, contrasted with his own sententiousness and his peculiar, mordant humour. The vitality of the book, the continuing effect of its best scenes, and the never-failing interest of its adventures, are wonderful.

Yet there is hardly a Borrovian who does not prefer “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” regarding them as one book, to anything else that Borrow ever did. It is incomparably the finest and most fragrant efflorescence of his genius. The fascination exercised by “Lavengro” over a considerable part of the human race is difficult to explain: its secret is as elusive as a great deal else in Borrow. But its existence cannot be questioned. It has hypnotised men of vastly different temperaments, causing this one to devote his life to the delightful, if unprofitable, pursuit of the mysteries concealed behind Borrow’s “dots and asterisks” and the filling up of his ellipses, and that one to become a student of Romany and a “gypsiologist” who would otherwise have remained indifferent to the history and character of the chals and chis.

Many discussions have been held upon the nature of this secret. It still avoids capture; it cannot be precipitated into words. Some explanation of its effects may be offered, but even that can be but tentative. The book appeals to primal instincts. It quivers with life. It stirs the deepest emotions of those who have the sub-conscious love of Nature—the instinct for Nature which manifests itself not in petty eulogies of the fine things of the world, but in silent, ecstatic content with Earth. Gypsies have it strongly developed; indeed, it explains gypsyism. The book abounds in the unconventional strong man, in his joy of conflict, in his curiosity about human villainy, and his admiration of all heroic qualities. It is in the succession of Defoe, and in a less degree of Fielding, and again in a less degree of Smollett, and it awakes nearly all the sensations produced by them in turn, with the saving grace we have noted—that it is never in the least salacious or even obscene.

Another favourite theme of debate has been the autobiographical problem. We have traced the history of the composition of “Lavengro,” and seen that the book is truly an autobiography, though not a chronology. Borrow invented little and recorded much. Most of the things that happen in “Lavengro” happened in its author’s life, as Elwin said. He unquestionably grouped figures and events for the sake of effect. Such a concatenation as Borrow himself, Isopel Berners, the Petulengros, Tawno Chikno, the Man in Black, and the Innkeeper in the immediate neighbourhood of one Staffordshire dingle at the same time was, of course, never known to history. Such dramatis personæ are far too striking to have been collected by coincidence. The meeting of the queenly Isopel, princess of roadside heroines, and Lavengro, crallis (chief) of hedge philologists, and their method of intellectual commerce, tax the credulity of the reader sufficiently. But the residuum of fact is considerable; there is more essential truth than concrete fiction in “Lavengro,” and it complies with the terms of Borrow’s own conception of an autobiography.

It has been shown that the world was unready for such a book. It was busy about diverse affairs. It had passed out of the Byronic phase in which Borrow attempted to detain it. The men of 1850 were unable to appreciate his manner, and cared nothing about his matter. Now that he made no definite appeal to the Bible Society public, and had removed himself out of the atmosphere of Old Spain, shimmering with romance, he found that there was no public left for him. What use had the world in the climacterical year of the great, progressive nineteenth century for the petty philosophy and the infinitesimal adventures of a tinker who was not “inspired” in any sense of which it was cognisant? It was just about to appoint Matthew Arnold as Inspector of Schools: that was more to the purpose. It had crowned Alfred Tennyson as Poet Laureate; it was weeping and roaring over “David Copperfield”; it was preparing to admit Thackeray among the Immortals, for he was on the point of publishing “The History of Henry Esmond, Esq.” If it wanted fierce controversy, was not Carlyle thundering out his “Latter-day Pamphlets”? If it wanted picturesque history, was not Macaulay sufficient—were not working men’s clubs in Lancashire passing him votes of thanks for having made history intelligible to the masses? If it wanted politics or economics, did it not possess its John Bright and its Richard Cobden, and was there not Mill’s “Principles of Political Economy,” fresh from the press, to be read? It wanted Free Libraries, not free manners. Ruskin could satisfy all its taste for archaism. It had rid itself of Chartism, and was coquetting with Christian Socialism; “Alton Locke” was far more likely to appeal to its sympathies than the innkeeper at Willenhall.

One perceives how inevitable was the dismal fate of “Lavengro,” launched at the head of a society fermenting, effervescing, seething with progressive optimism, feverish in its eager industrial advance, filled with sentiment, vibrating with hopeful emotions, its literary affections fastened partly upon Macaulay, partly upon Carlyle, partly upon Tennyson. The apparition of a book like “Lavengro” was ludicrous in its eyes, dressed in the style of a dead century, and concerned with subjects as dead as its habiliments. What had all this farrago of gypsies, horse-witches, apple-women, green lanes, breezy heaths, and road-girls (however magnificent) to do with any soul in 1850, with Manchesterism or with Kingsleyism, with the buzz of commercial prosperity, or the growth of social idealism or the development of political liberties, or with current culture, or with the sentiment of the age? Nothing at all. The frantically busy world went on building schools and inspecting them, planning railways and running trains on them, raising mills and factories and grinding and making, discussing problems and settling them; and it passed Borrow by. It did not want a Romany Defoe, a modern Smollett, a new and more truculent Bunyan, and it barely nodded to him as he attempted to arrest its steps. It cared not a brass farthing about his opinions, which did not matter at all; unfortunately, it cared as little about his naturalism, which mattered a great deal.

The only point of approach between Borrow and the public was the point of anti-Popery. Borrow anticipated the storm of 1850, for the bulk of his work had been written before that storm broke. His Man in Black was modelled upon what he knew of the Catholic propagandists in England, but the model was highly coloured; it was impossible for Borrow to view a priest or a Catholic of any degree except through the medium of his own ultra-Protestant spectacles. Further, the portrait is probably more malicious than it would have been but for the state of public opinion on the “Papal aggression” which was then being foreshadowed. The Man in Black is a very complete picture of the Jesuitical sneak who probably existed only in the imagination of ardent Evangelicals. But even this accidentally topical character did not save from disaster a work which was utterly out of tune with the times. Imagine Macaulay, or Kingsley, or Ruskin falling on their readers in the manner of Borrow’s preface:

“Pray, be not displeased, gentle reader, if perchance thou hast imagined that I was about to conduct thee to distant lands, and hadst promised thyself much instruction and entertainment from what I might tell thee of them. I do assure thee that thou hast no reason to be displeased, inasmuch as there are no countries in the world less known by the British than these selfsame British islands, or where more strange things are everyday occurring, whether in road or street, house or dingle.”

It was all very true, but the “gentle reader” did not want to hear about those strange things, and his ear found Borrow’s “thees” and “thous” and “hadsts” uncouth. “Charity and free and genial manners” in the Borrovian sense were foreign to his desires.

Borrow’s own favourite characters in “Lavengro,” he tells us, were the brave old soldier and his wife (his parents), the ancient gentlewoman who sold apples on London Bridge and conned the history of blessed Mary Flanders, and the wandering Methodist and his wife Winifred. Filial affection accounts for his first choice. The others are certainly delightful vignettes; but it is strange that Borrow did not bring Jasper Petulengro into his category of favourites, or Isopel Berners. Those two are immortal, and it is to them that the mind flies when “Lavengro” is mentioned.

The book—still regarding “The Romany Rye” as part of it—divides itself into two sections. The first and shorter section covers a period of some twenty years; the other, his idyll of the roads, extending from the fifty-eighth chapter of “Lavengro” to the end, deals with about a year of his life. The subject of his rural wanderings grew upon him as he wrote, and the episode of Belle Berners naturally required a spacious canvas; the reasons why he introduced the postilion’s tale have already been related. This amazing book defies analysis or classification. It is “a thing of shreds and patches,” a hotch-potch of odds and ends of learning and speculation, an uneven jumble of incidents; doubtless it is all the critics of 1851 said it was. Yet it is a great book, a treasured book, a book to read five times as Leland read it, to dip into and be tempted on and on, chapter by chapter. It has all the faults that the purists allot to it—much tiresome iteration, many split infinitives, gross errors of taste, much fuliginous and turgid writing. Yet it is a great work of literature, compelling, overpowering in many ways. It often rises in eloquence to remarkable heights and glows with all the hues of poetry: mark the dialogue on death, the midnight vigil in the Dingle. The force of sheer description in the poison scene and in the fight with the Flaming Tinman can hardly be surpassed. There are racy humour and genuine humanity in the incident of the inn where he met Jack Slingsby and his family depressed from the encounter with the Flaming Tinman, and proved to them the “genial, gladdening power” of good ale, “the true and proper drink of Englishmen.” All Borrow’s affectation of learning, all his word-chasing, all his preaching, are forgiven in the intense joy of such scenes as these. When Jack Slingsby said to him, “It’s a fine thing to be a scholar,” he retorted, “Not half so fine as to be a tinker.” It is the hedgesmith in Lavengro that gives his book its ineffable charm. “There is something highly poetical about a forge,” and Borrow has caught and transmitted its poetry to us.

The fashion in which Borrow pounced upon his critics, detractors, enemies, as he pictured them, clawed them and mangled them in the notorious Appendix has been indicated in snatches. Printed sermons and speeches can hardly be more deadly dull than a quarrel of this sort after the lapse of half a century: that is, as a rule. In this case there is a distinct survival of literary interest, for the Appendix is luminous (albeit with a lurid incandescence), and in it glow some of the gems of Borrow’s style. His critics inspired him to this _tour de force_, the “quartering reviewers,” those arbitrary persons who, in the sententious phrase of Hazlitt, “would be thought to have purchased a monopoly of wit, learning, and wisdom—

‘Assume the rod, affect the god, And seem to shake the spheres.’”

As we have seen, they cauterised Borrow because he had not written the book they expected him to write, just as their predecessors had “pulled Pope to pieces” for not being Shakespeare or Milton. Borrow was odd and singular, and had transgressed every canon of the taste of the time. But he was fully conscious that he had written a fine book. Their abuse, their satire, their indifference sent him into a fine frenzy, in which he pretended to despise the whole tribe. “By God! ’tis good, and if you lik’t you may.” But the affectation was ill-sustained by the performance; he set about to bludgeon them in very good earnest, and seized the opportunity of time, space, and inclination to wield his weapon across the heads of a great many other offenders besides the critics.

The bludgeon is the only possible figure to use. In this amazing display of whirling invective Borrow is like no other protagonist in literature. For many reasons it were possible to wish that he had never written it; for others it is precious. It neither pricks the enemy like Pope, nor incises him like Swift, nor burns him like Gifford, nor lashes him like Byron. It simply pounds him as the Flaming Tinman was pounded by Borrow’s long right. It begins, innocently enough, with an exposition of the principles on which “Lavengro” was written, the principles it upheld, the morals it inculcated, and the author’s reasons for supposing that it deserved well of the world. In this last particular the chapter is curious. According to Borrow, the book is worthy because it demonstrates how the hand of Providence constantly guides the destinies of the hero, preventing him in all his doings from falling a prey either to vice or to poverty. He admitted that Lavengro was not a remarkably religious person up to the point where the book took leave of him, but it was very likely that he would eventually become religious, though not precise or straight-laced. He would retain with his scholarship “something of his gypsyism, his predilection for the hammer and tongs, and perhaps some inclination to put on certain gloves—not white kid—with any friend who might be inclined for a little old-English diversion.” The absence of any straight-lacedness from his character was also to be predicated in the matter of ale. He did not believe that either fondness for invigorating exercise or willingness to partake of any of the good things provided by the Almighty (meaning especially ale with plenty of malt, not too much hops, and at least two years old) would be any bar to his entrance into heaven.

One would not for worlds suggest that Borrow laid this stress upon the moralities and the theology of his book what time his tongue was in his cheek. But he could hardly have failed to see that it was his gypsyism rather than his theology that would lend the work its permanent importance. The second chapter of the Appendix is an anti-Popery tirade which it would be tiresome to follow. He boasts of how in Spain he “hewed right and left, making the priests fly before him and run away squeaking that the Devil was after them.” Which is hardly an accurate account of the matter, and is only introduced apparently in order that he may belabour Bowring. The process is this: The Bible Society sent Borrow to Spain to perform these deeds of derringdo; the Bible Society was not supported by the Government, but rather frowned upon, so that any man wearing its colours was excluded from the chance of serving his country, while “a fellow who unites in himself the bankrupt trader, the broken author, or rather book-maker, and the laughed-down single-speech spouter of the House of Commons, may look forward, always supposing that he has been a foaming Radical, to the Government of an important colony.” It seems almost necessary to apologise, even at this distance of time, to the descendants of Sir John Bowring, so virulent and unjust is Borrow in his strictures.

Borrow is accused of bigotry in his anti-Papist campaign. Bigotry! There is no excuse for even a whisper of the word in anything that he has done. Bigots yourselves, messieurs! A person may speak and write against Rome without bigotry, but “it is impossible for anyone but a bigot or a bad man to write or speak in her praise.” Which clears the ground for an understanding of the outlook of our very paragon of all tolerance.

In the third chapter, “On Foreign Nonsense,” there speaks John Bull, the patriotic Briton, the Germanophobe in a time when Teutophilism was the fashion, who, in the heyday of the prophet Carlyle’s authority, declared that “of German literature”—but words failed him to characterise German literature, and he had to express himself by a note of exclamation and a dash, and grudgingly admitted that there was _one_ fine poem in the German language—“Oberon,” to wit. This from the disciple of William Taylor was a little strong; but Borrow on the rampage trampled even on Taylor, with a reservation of praise for his scholarship. The essay on “gentility-nonsense” is decidedly the best of them all. These two chapters are the most effective, the richest in the diction of wrath, and they touch the highest point he reaches in criticism. Here, if anywhere, is to be found the merit of the Appendix.

It is this revolt against the finnicking conventions, this hard-hitting at every self-sufficient snob’s head in a self-satisfied age, that gives the work its air of modernity, and places it _en rapport_ with the twentieth century. Once again there is no delicate satire, no fine irony, no touch of the “Snob Papers,” in the “gentility-nonsense” chapter. It is simply energetic quarter-staff play, with resounding thwacks upon the head of any unlucky wight who happens to have charged “vulgarity” upon Borrow because he had endeavoured to bring his tatterdemalion crew of gypsies, mumpers, and tinkers into the decent and respectable parlours of the English middle-classes. That was all very well on the operatic stage. The gypsy villains in _The Bohemian Girl_ were entertaining enough when they entered the marble halls and spoilt the furniture and pilfered the wine behind the footlights, as they had been doing any night for the last ten years; but this was serious literature and a very different matter. Borrow laid about him with a will, and defended smithery against jobbery, and tinkering against philandering, and the dingle against the drawing-room with almost lyrical eloquence. Was it not better for Lavengro to make the forge glow by the roadside, and manufacture donkey-shoes for Isopel, than to borrow another man’s money and go to Brighton, with the sister of Annette le Noir, though that would have been an exceedingly genteel thing to do? Was not the successor of Jack Slingsby more worthy of respect than Mr. Flamson, the railway contractor? Had not the jockey at Horncastle, who offered him a fair price for his horse, a better title to honour “than the scoundrelly lord who attempts to cheat him of one-fourth of its value?” There is great temptation to quote largely from these hectic chapters, but one sample must suffice. “Millions,” he says, seem to think otherwise on these questions,

“by their servile adoration of people whom, without rank, wealth, and fine clothes, they would consider infamous, but whom, possessed of rank, wealth, and glittering habiliments, they seem to admire all the more for their profligacy and crimes. Does not a blood-spot or a lust-spot on the clothes of a blooming emperor give a kind of zest to the genteel young god? Do not the pride, superciliousness, and selfishness of a certain aristocracy make it all the more regarded by its worshippers? and do not the clownish and gutter-blood admirers of Mr. Flamson like him all the more because they are conscious that he is a knave? If such is the case—and, alas! is it not the case?—they cannot be too frequently told that fine clothes, wealth, and titles adorn a person in proportion as he adorns them; that if worn by the magnanimous and good they are ornaments indeed, but if by the vile and profligate they are merely _san benitos_, and only serve to make their infamy doubly apparent; and that a person in seedy raiment and tattered hat, possessed of courage, kindness, and virtue, is entitled to more respect from those to whom his virtues are manifested than any cruel profligate emperor, selfish aristocrat, or knavish millionaire in the world.”

The appropriate sequel to this flaming fury against the worship of material wealth and the idolatry of worldly success is his protest against Sir Walter Scott’s Jacobitism, which he called “Scotch gentility-nonsense” and “Charlie-o’er-the-Waterism.” With a full brush and rapid strokes he paints a Hogarthian picture of the Stewarts, more remarkable for the piquancy of its epithets than the accuracy of its history. A disgraceful procession of abandoned reprobates hurries across his pages: the “dirty, cowardly miscreant,” James I.; the “cruel, revengeful tyrant,” Charles I.; the “lazy and sensual” Charles II.; the “poor creature,” James II.; and the miserable Pretenders, especially Charles Edward of that ilk, a “worthless, ignorant youth” and a “profligate, illiterate old man.” All these lamentable persons, these blotches on the face of history, according to Borrow, were dead and happily buried out of the sight of decent people until Scott gave them resurrection by his power of fine writing. It was Scott who summoned Jacobitism and Laudism out of their graves; the wave of Popery now passing so destructively over England came from Oxford, it was true; but Scott sent it to Oxford. And Scott, accordingly, is scarified. His secret is ruthlessly wrenched from him. Why did he revive Jacobitism? It was because he worshipped gentility and adored the born-great. Scott denounced Murat and heaped contumely upon him as the son of a pastrycook; but was not the pedigree of the pastrycook better than that of the Edinburgh pettifogger who was Scott’s progenitor?

Working himself up to a foaming frenzy, Borrow attributes all Scott’s mortal sufferings to the vengeance of an angry Deity for taking the part of the wicked Jacobites against the righteous Williamites, “for lauding up to the skies the miscreants and robbers, and calumniating the noble spirts of Britain, the salt of England, and his own country!” Scott became paralysed in body and mind, pitiable to others, and loathsome to himself. “Ah!” exclaims Borrow, “God knows perfectly well how to strike!” A modern audience gapes in amazement at the rodomontade, and wonders whether the man who pumps it out page after page can be quite sane, especially when he declares that he has been influenced “not by any feeling of malice or ill-will, but simply by a regard for the truth.” But Borrow saw red whenever he was out raiding the pastures of “Popery” or seeking a joust with gentility, and the verdict against him may be softened a little when the reader lights upon one or more of his fine tributes to the genius of Scott, who “did for the sceptre of the wretched Pretender what all the kings of Europe could not do for his body—placed it on the throne of these realms; and for Popery what Popes and Cardinals strove in vain to do for three centuries—brought back its mummeries and nonsense into the temples of the British Isles.”

The eighth chapter of the Appendix, “On Canting Nonsense,” need not detain us; his outbreak against the teetotalers and anti-pugilists has received sufficient notice. As for the “Pseudo-Critics,” every Borrow lover wishes it had never been written, picturesque as is the apologue of the eminent reviewers of the London Press in the character of vipers with their fangs drawn, held up by their tails. Still more is it to be regretted that Borrow’s temper in the dispute with Bowring led him to perpetrate the last two chapters, full of rancour and spleen as they are, their charges of perfidy against Sir John unsupported by any evidence, and contradicted by the probabilities of the case.

Borrow was clearly no competent critic of his own work. He concludes the Appendix with a pronouncement on the merits and the purpose of “Lavengro,” which, he says, was “written for the express purpose of inculcating virtue, love of country, learning, manly pursuits, and genuine religion—for example, that of the Church of England.” Not the morals of “Lavengro,” not its “patriotism” (which is of a peculiar brand), not its philology, not its theology, give the strange book life. Its value lies in its poetry, its portraits, its atmosphere, its self-revelation, its literary power, and, above all, in that ruling sense of the joy of living which, in spite of all its errant morbidity, is the inspiration of the book. “There’s a wind on the heath, brother. . . Who would wish to die?”

It is a difficult thing for one who is not a Welshman to approach such a book as “Wild Wales” in any useful temper save humility. To attack the subject in the spirit which animated Borrow when he invaded the country would be to court disaster, and the disgrace inevitably attending such an enterprise would be well merited. It is not given to many to carry a charmed life as Borrow did—going into Wales and compelling the admiration of those whom his prickly prejudices and his violent intolerance most offended.

The spell Wales casts over men’s minds, and the hold it has upon men’s hearts, are elusive things. Having no tangible substance, they are yet as real as a battleship. Many people feel them acutely, but are not content to endure and enjoy them. There is a desire, in these definitive days, to analyse, to dissect, to explain them, to label and classify them; but at the slightest touch of the scalpel, at the vision of the quill, they vanish. As with Cornwall, so with Wales—indeed, in many respects they are one,—the charm they wield is a charm of atmosphere, of vague overhanging mysteries and underdwelling romances. Those who feel it are under the magic influence of the Celtic spirit, and it has been well said that “to boast of the Celtic spirit is to confess you have it not.” {320}

I have endeavoured to show that Borrow, in spite of his pose of Anglo-Saxonism, was a true Celt, a very wisp of the Celtic spirit itself. The fact explains everything about his tour in Wales, his intercourse with Welshmen, and his success in achieving a book which they are quite willing to confess is one of the best books ever written about their country. The spell was upon him, and he was content to let it work without attempting to divide it, chemically or mechanically, into its component elements. It worked through the scenery which he described with his peculiar skill, whether of massive mountain and lonely lake, or of sweet vale and tinkling cascade. It worked through the language, which he admired for its wonderful soft music concealed under apparently fortuitous concourses of crabbed consonants. It worked through the character of the people for whom he had so strong an affinity hidden behind all his affectation of downrightishness, John-Bullish egotism and pride. He was completely successful in his tribute to Wales—one of the finest in English literature.

Perhaps this is the most amazing thing in all his amazing career. For Borrow trampled—or appeared to trample—remorselessly on some of the most delicate feelings of Welshmen. His hatred of Rome was hardly greater than his hatred of nonconformity with the Church of England. This peeps out of many a page of “Wild Wales.” Thousands of Welsh people must be aroused to a point just short of fury by his satirical or abusive allusions to Dissenters. But most of them are tempted past the danger-spot by Borrow’s love of Wales and his power to enchant the reader as he himself was enchanted.

A militant Welshman once said to me that Borrow “allowed his hatred of Nonconformity to colour all his descriptions of the people. His pictures of Welsh Nonconformists are terribly exaggerated, and he damaged his book by his want of sympathy with the then budding aspirations of Wales, which have bloomed into the present political and ecclesiastical conditions well known to you.” That may very likely be a true view of the work through Cymric spectacles; yet the same person confessed that he knew no book of the kind which he liked better than “Wild Wales.” The reason was that, in spite of his contempt for the budding aspirations of the Nationalists, Borrow contrived to do the Welsh nation a high literary service by demonstrating its individuality, its distinction, its difference from England, in every line he wrote about it. His border-line is sharp and clear; passing into Wales, he passes into a more ethereal air; passing through Wales he is in a land of enchantment—not vague and misty, consisting of reminders of a distant past, but actual and present, where, _pace_ Mr. Edward Thomas, “they talk of hero and poet as if they had met them on the hills; and, as the poet has said, ‘Folly would it be to say that Arthur has a grave.’”

Borrow’s Welsh, so far as it can be judged from the book, is exceedingly good, considering the circumstances in which it was acquired. His knowledge of “the spoken word” was comparatively slight. His intercourse had been far more intimate with Welsh books than with Welshmen. Indeed, we do not hear of many colloquies between this Welsh scholar and Welsh people until he arrives at the age of fifty. There are only two of any importance mentioned in his works. First in point of date was the episode of the Welsh groom whose acquaintance he gained when serving his articles in Took’s Court. Next was that of the Welsh Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife, described in “Lavengro.” For the rest, Ab Gwilym and the bards were his Welsh mentors. In these conditions, His knowledge of the language became quite remarkable. It was a working medium for him in those parts of the Principality where the phrase “Dim Saesneg” was most often heard. Welshmen tell me that a curious feature of “Wild Wales” is that the Welsh in the first part of the book is more correct than that in the second. As one remarks, it was “the romance of the language which captivated him. He was more familiar with its rugged mountains than with its tender parts. This it was that inspired his passionate regard for Ab Gwilym and Elis Wyn above other Welsh writers.”

Welsh estimates of the Welsh writers whom Borrow most affected are not quite the same as his own. It is said that in a general way his appreciations are just, but that he gives too high a place to Ab Gwilym, who was by no means the chief of the Welsh poets read about 1850. Ab Gwilym’s language is cumbrous, and his manner laborious. He had mastered his art with difficulty, and his work therefore betrays an almost complete lack of spontaneity. Yet his services to Welsh poetry were considerable, for he began a new revival of the bardic art when it had for a long time been under a cloud. He revelled, if with something of grandiosity, in the majestic in Nature, and his Ode to the Thunder is certainly impressive—the language producing a cumulative effect of elemental noise which is exceedingly remarkable. It is hardly surprising that Borrow was attracted to Ab Gwilym, whose satire and invective in the treatment of his rival, Bwa Bach, are echoed in much of Borrow’s own writing. Elis Wyn was a horse of a very different colour, and has a reputation in Welsh literature which even Borrow does not exaggerate. His mystic imaginings are daring in the extreme, and his style is vivid; others than Borrow adjudge the _Bardd Cwsg_ to be equal in many parts to Dante at his highest.

“The Sleeping Bard; or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell; by Elis Wyn, translated from the Cambrian British by George Borrow, author of,” etc., etc., is a rare book now. The copy before me, in its flimsy salmon-coloured paper cover, with its uncut edges and all its evidences of country, job-printing (in spite of John Murray’s imprint), is priced at two guineas. Somehow, its dress seems fitting, Borrovian. One would rather this informality for the weird imaginings and the sulphuric vaticinations of the Denbighshire mystic than any finer guise of print and binding. The gusto with which Borrow attacked a task of this kind is obvious from preface to epilogue. He traces the influence, of Quevedo’s “Visions or Discourses” upon the matter, and the style of Elis Wyn, especially with reference to the character of Rhywun, that symbolical “Somebody,” who complains in the Vision of Death that so much of the villainy and scandal in the world is attributed to him: Rhywun’s forerunner is the Juan de la Encina of Quevedo’s work. He considers, however, that the Welshman’s work is superior to that of the Spaniard.

There can be little doubt that Elis Wyn was acquainted with Quevedo’s “Visions,” either in the original or in the English translation published in London about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The resemblance between the Welsh “Vision of the World” and the Spanish “Interior of the World Disclosed” is too close for any other verdict, the similarity of Elis Wyn’s “Vision of Hell” to Quevedo’s “Sties of Pluto” too remarkable. But Borrow seems to have overlooked or rejected—at any rate, he does not mention—the much greater probability that the composition of this allegory in Welsh was suggested by “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” which was hardly half a century old when “The Sleeping Bard” appeared. A deeply religious minister like Elis Wyn may reasonably be conceived to have been fired with the desire to do for the Welsh people in the Welsh vernacular what the inspired tinker had done in English for the common people of his country.

Judged by Borrow’s translation, the literary merits of “The Sleeping Bard” come out very high. Whether they are as splendid as the plentiful comparisons with classical writers would suggest can only be estimated by those who are deeply versed in the Welsh literary medium. What more immediately concerns us is the quality of Borrow’s rendering. His style lent itself admirably to the interpretation of the ideas in the book, and whatever the excellences or defects of his work as a translator, the effect he produces, especially in the most lurid parts of the “Visions,” is often superb. There is magnificent prose in the last section, the “Vision of Hell”—notably in the dialogues between Lucifer and his hosts. Lucifer’s address to the “potentates of Hell! princes of the black abodes of Despair!” is a gigantic conception of the eternal warfare of Good and Evil, couched in language of extraordinary power. Take the speech, in which he urges his confederates to greater exertions against the Omnipotent:

“. . . although the Almighty Enemy sent his own son to die for the beings of that world; yet I, by my baubles, obtain ten souls for every one which he obtains by his crucified son. And although I have not been able to reach him who sits in the high places and discharges the invincible thunder-bolts, yet revenge of some kind is sweet. Let us complete the destruction of the remnant of human beings still in the favour of our destroyer. I remember the time when you caused them to be burnt by multitudes and cities, and even the whole race of the earth, by means of the flood, to be swept down to us in the fire. But at present, though your strength and your natural cruelty are not a whit diminished, yet you are become in some degree inactive; if that had not been the case we might long since have destroyed the few who are godly, and have caused the earth to be united with this our vast empire. But know, ye black ministers of my displeasure, that unless ye be more resolute and more diligent, and make the most of the short-time that remains to you for doing evil, ye shall experience the weight of my anger, in torments new and strange to the whole of you. This I swear, by the deepest Hell, and the vast eternal pit of darkness.”

Moloch arises to protest against the censure, to declare, how he has joyed in the sufferings of men, “the shrieks of infants perishing in the fire as of old, when thousands of sucklings were sacrificed to me outside of Jerusalem.” Lucifer laughs in the face of his “heartless legions,” and announces his intention to go to the Earth in his own kingly person: “Not one man, henceforth, shall be found on the earth to adore the Almighty.”

“Thereupon he gave a furious bound, attempting to set off in a firmament of living fire; but, behold! the fist above his head shook the terrific bolt till he trembled in the midst of his frenzy, and before he could move far an invisible hand lugged the old fox back by his chain in spite of his teeth. Whereupon he became seven times more frantic; his eyes were more terrible than lightnings, black, thick smoke burst from his nostrils, and dark green flames from his mouth and entrails; he gnawed his chain in agony, and hissed forth direful blasphemy and the most frightful curses.”

“Myn Diawl!” as the little bookseller of Smithfield ejaculated. No wonder he regarded Elis Wyn as a terrible fellow. While Borrow was engaged in transferring these scenes into English, contrasting the peaceful figure of the Bard asleep on the summit of Cader Idris with the appalling spectacles of his dreams, delighting in the process of heaping horror upon horror and crashing them against the “squeamish nonsense” of his age, he did not fail to be effective. It was when he took to verse that he failed: the metrical translations at the end of each section are the weakest things in the book. Elis Wyn had a salty humour, and used it well upon “the oddities and follies which men commit.” Several of Borrow’s own pet aversions are held up to ridicule—gentility, coquetry, tobacco, and so on. With what zest he relates the mockery in Hell of “two honourable gentlemen, newly arrived, who were insisting on being shown respect suitable to their gentility” may be imagined. The condemnation of tobacco is worthy of slobbering James himself: “For what is tobacco but one of my meanest instruments to carry bewilderment into the brain?” asks Beelzebub.

Borrow made good use of Elis Wyn, not only in this translation, but in “Wild Wales.” The intensely humorous conversation with Bos the drover at Pentraeth Coch will be remembered:

“Pray excuse me,” said I, “but is not droving rather a low-lifed occupation?”

“Not half so much as pig-jobbing,” said Bos, “and that that’s your trade, I’m certain, or you would never have gone to Llanfair.”

“I am no pig-jobber,” said I, “and when I asked you that question about droving, I merely did so because one Elis Wyn, in a book he wrote, gives the drovers a very bad character, and puts them in Hell for their malpractices.”

“Oh, he does,” said Mr. Bos, “well, the next time I meet him at Corwen I’ll crack his head for saying so. Malpractices—he had better look at his own, for he is a pig-jobber, too. Written a book, has he? Then I suppose he has been left a legacy, and gone to school after middle-age, for when I last saw him, which is four years ago, he could neither read nor write.”

I was about to tell Mr. Bos that the Elis Wyn I meant was no more a pig-jobber than myself, but a respectable clergyman who had been dead considerably upwards of a hundred years, and that also, notwithstanding my respect for Mr. Bos’s knowledge of history, I did not believe that Owen Tudor was buried at Penmynnydd, when I was prevented . . .

And he made equally good use of the other bards and heroes of Wales, both in his colloquies with comic persons like Mr. Bos or with the bard of Anglesey, “the greatest Prydydd in the whole world,” who kept an inn at L—, and believed “the awen or inspiration was quite as much at home in the bar as in the barn, perhaps more”; and in his outbursts of apostrophic eloquence—as when he stood on Holyhead: “‘Some king, giant, or man of old renown lies buried beneath this cairn,’ said I. ‘Whoever he may be I trust he will excuse me for mounting it, seeing that I do so with no disrespectful spirit.’” A glowing vision follows of the scenes which had passed beneath that grey promontory, from the times of the Druids, “long-bearded men with white vestments, toiling up the rocks, followed by fierce warriors with glittering helms and short, broad, two-edged swords,” as the army of Suetonius pursued them; “I thought I heard groans, cries of rage, and the dull, awful sound of bodies precipitated down the rocks . . .” Borrow may not have sympathised with the modern aspirations of Nationalist Wales, but he certainly succeeded in demonstrating its nationality, in understanding its poetry, and in visualising its romance.

Borrow’s purely poetical works remain to be considered. The ballad literature of many lands had overpowering fascination for him. This was a perfectly natural affinity. In the ballads, if anywhere, is to be found the “homely, plain writing” which Borrow admired. In them, too, were enshrined the histories of the characters he loved or the heroes he adored. If the public had afforded him more encouragement, we should have had a series of transcripts and translations spreading over many years. Fortunately, sheer force of circumstances pushed Borrow into another literary channel and gave us his prose books. Borrow’s lyrical genius is hardly a matter for discussion; it simply does not exist, in spite of Allan Cunningham’s eulogies. Most of his verse is artificial, stilted, and in the most violent contrast with the vigorous naturalism of his prose. He seemed to have a lyrical sense, but no capacity for recording its impressions. The result is a mass of doggerel, here and there lightened and vivified by a stanza or two of real beauty, happening simply where a concourse of chances gave him subject, imaginative idea, and words which harmonised. These flashes of inspiration, however, are rare.

[Picture: Portion of page of Borrow’s MS. copy of the “Romantic Ballads” with his MS. revision]

The “Romantic Ballads” which he translated in his youth from the old Danish and from Œhlenschlaeger are exceedingly interesting because of their matter: the legends include some of the great ones of the Northern world. But Borrow’s verse would provide a deep disappointment for any reader who, having made acquaintance with his prose through “Lavengro,” for example, had conceived high expectations of his poetry. The copy which lies before me is an exceedingly interesting one. I am indebted for its use to Mr. Francis Edwards, the bookseller in Marylebone; whose property it is. The volume is in the original coloured boards as it was issued from the press of S. Wilkin at Norwich in 1826. It was Borrow’s own copy. In it he had erased many lines and stanzas, and written, either in ink or pencil, others to take their place. There is no record of the date at which this revision was undertaken—doubtless with a view to a second edition which was never called for,—but the evidence of the handwriting shows that it was done in his youth, during the “veiled period,” and probably before 1830. The finnicking calligraphy—plain to read, and full of character, but exceedingly fine and minute—is his early style, the style of the letters to Bowring, and not that of the later period when he rushed through his manuscripts in odd notebooks and on the backs of old accounts or envelopes.

The book illustrates the fact that at this time the Bowring influence was strong on him, and that he and Bowring were on cordial terms. The title-page is adorned by a quatrain of Bowring’s:

“Through gloomy paths unknown, Paths which untrodden be, From rock to rock I roam Along the dashing sea.”

The opening pages are occupied by a poetical address to Borrow from Allan Cunningham, whose encouragement and praise had prompted him to issue the work. Cunningham apostrophises him in numbers like these:

“Sing, sing, my friend! Breathe life again Through Norway’s song and Denmark’s strain.”

A few examples from among the many manuscript amendments made by Borrow—which Mr. Edwards has courteously permitted me to give—will let some light into the mental workshop of the versifier. In the ballad of “The Death Raven” Dame Sigrid is lying on the deck of the ship watching the setting of the sun:

ORIGINAL.

“Then all at once the smiling sky drew dark, The breaker’s raved, and sinking seemed the bark; The wild Death Raven, perched upon the mast, Screamed ’mid the tumult and awoke the blast.”

“The foam-clad billows to repose he brought, And tamed the tempest with the speed of thought.”

“Above her head its leaf the aspen shook, Moist as her cheek and pallid as her look.”

REVISION.

“Deformed with breakers then the ocean grew, The water spirted in the ship’s sides through; Perched on the mast the wild Death Raven yells, Whilst deep the vessel downward he impels.”

“The billows clad with foam he tames with ease, And at his glance the savage tempests cease.”

“Above her head its boughs the aspen spread, Like her it quaked, like her cold sweat it shed.”

This ballad is a translation from Œhlenschlaeger, and produces an eerie effect of magic forces acting in the natural world—the Death Raven as the spirit of Evil bargaining with its victim and wreaking hideous woe and bloody tragedy till it is finally overcome by the vengeance of a pure maiden who calls to her aid the supernal powers against the infernal. But Borrow is in literal difficulties all the time, and the story hitches and tears on the irregularities and ugly angles of his verse. In the ballad of “Aager and Eliza” (from the old Danish collection of Heroic Romances edited by Vegel in 1591), it is hard to choose between the banalities of his two versions:

ORIGINAL.

“Have ye heard of the bold Sir Aager, How he rode to yonder isle? There he saw the sweet Eliza Who upon him deigned to smile.”

REVISION.

“’Twas the valiant knight, Sir Aager, How he to the island hied. There he wedded . . . {334} Else, She of maidens was the pride.”

The best thing in the book is the ballad of “Swayne [or Svend] Vonved,” of which we have heard a good deal from Borrow, Leland, and others. This is also from Vegel’s collection. Borrow quotes as a preface to it Grimm’s account of the legend. Svend Vonved was a terrible fellow, minstrel and warrior, sent out to avenge the death of his father, and the poem relates his desperate deeds of valour and blood, his victories over “knights of pride,” his short way with the female magicians, and his last characteristic action—the destruction of the harp on which he had twanged accompaniment to his songs, so that “no sweet sound shall in future soothe his wild humour.” One manuscript alteration only in this ballad is of interest; it occurs in the episode of the fight with the Brute Carle:

ORIGINAL.

“They fought for a day, they fought for two, And so on the third they were fain to do; But, ere the fourth day reached the night, The Brute Carle fell, and was slain outright— Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”

REVISION.

“They fought for a day, they fought for two, And so on the third they were fain to do; But, ere the fourth day the night had reached, The Brute dead on the earth he stretched— Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”

In a lighter vein there is the ballad of “The Deceived Merman,” which had appeared with some of the other poems in the _Monthly Magazine_ while Borrow was engaged with Phillips. In the _Magazine_ it began:

“Fair Agnes left her mother’s door.”

The first revision occurred prior to the collection of the ballads in book-form, when it began:

“Fair Agnes lone on the sea-shore stood, Then rose a Merman from out the flood:

“‘Now, Agnes, hear what I say to thee— Wilt thou my leman consent to be?’

“‘O, freely that will I become If thou but take me beneath the foam.’”

The third couplet is altered in the manuscript revision to read thus:

“‘Oh, yes, forsooth that will I be If thou’lt take me to the bottom of the sea.’”

The merman did, and there was a family. But Agnes, having obtained permission to go back and visit her mother, came under religious influences, stayed overlong, and was finally deaf to all the requests of her amphibious spouse that she should return to her deserted family, proving unmaternal enough even to disregard an appeal _ad misericordiam_ on behalf of the youngest of the merbabies. {336}

The “Ballads” have some interest, but, with the exception of “Svend Vonved,” they have small merit, and it is not surprising that the public took so little notice of them that the second edition was never required. Borrow made much better play with his Danish legends and his heroes of the North in his later prose books, where they take their proper place as the material of soufflés or as flavouring in a tasty mélange.