CHAPTER III

PUBLISHER’S HACK AND HEDGESMITH

BORROW’S “literary” life in London—where he lodged at 16, Millman Street, Bedford Row, with his friend Kerrison—was a period of the deadliest and most miserable drudgery. No author is a man of genius to his publisher, as Heine tells us. Borrow was certainly not a man of genius to Sir Richard Phillips, and their association for about ten months was a time of strain and irritation to both. Consequently, in Borrow’s opinion, Barabbas was Sir Richard Phillips. He lives only as “the publisher” in “Lavengro,” in which he is pictured as a subject fit merely for the odium and execration of the human race. Discount from this estimate of Sir Richard is highly necessary. He appears to have been a moderately inoffensive person, whose chief weakness was metaphysics, and a worse-assorted pair than he and Borrow it would be hard to imagine.

What was the literary ammunition with which Borrow expected to bring the publisher of _The Monthly Magazine_ to his feet? It consisted wholly of translations and versifications. Their intrinsic merit was very slight, and there was no market for them. Some might be useful to fill up an odd corner, but they were certainly no staple commodity for a person intending to get a living by literature. Under the combined disadvantage of unmarketable wares and an uncongenial temperament, Borrow might well have considered himself lucky to be taken on by Phillips as a factotum to do the scavenging of his business. But while they were together the youth tasted the bitterest cup and fed on the hardest crust that Grub Street had to offer to the worshippers of the Muses. It had been more humane if Phillips had repeated to Borrow the advice which Mr. Wilcox, the bookseller, offered to Dr. Johnson when he proposed to live as an author: “You had better buy a porter’s knot.” Hard physical exertion would have served him better than the labour he endured, this child of The Wild, cooped up in London compiling criminal records or translating philosophical treatises into the German language.

Phillips had just retired from the business of pure publishing, which was a gloomy fact in the prospect of Borrow’s cargo of ballads. He retained _The Monthly Magazine_, it was true, and had started a pretentious periodical under the resounding title of _The Universal Review or Chronicle of the Literature of all Nations_, apparently in the hope—which proved vain—that it would provide a career for his son. This was the _Oxford Review_ which figures in the pages of “Lavengro.” The actual editor was the redoubtable William Gifford, and the work of which superfluous copies lay about on the floor in such prodigal profusion was his translation of Juvenal. The incongruity of such an atmosphere for the kind of genius that possessed young Borrow! With a pathetic belief in the potency of Danish ballads to move the stoniest heart and draw guineas from the tightest purse, he introduced the subject. Phillips would have none of it, and when his visitor began to declaim of

“Buckshank bold and Elphinstone, And more than I can mention here,”

he stopped him, saying that “it was very pretty indeed, and beat Scott hollow, and Percy too”—but nobody then cared for Percy, nor for Scott either, save as a novelist. If Borrow could produce something which should rival the merits of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” by Legh Richmond, there might be a chance of doing business. The young aspirant for literary fame searched London for a copy of the book which he was recommended to imitate, and, when he found it, discovered that he could by no possibility do anything like it, for it was a religious book, “written from the heart,” and Borrow had to confess to the publisher that he did not know much about religion in an intimate way. The only thing to do was to accept that which the publisher was prepared to offer him, the task of reviewing books for the new periodical, and of collating records of “Celebrated Trials.”

Another enterprise was undertaken by Borrow, which in itself was sufficient to prove his undoing even if the life had been congenial to him. Phillips was the author of a work of philosophy entitled “The Proximate Causes of the Material Phenomena of the Universe.” In an ill moment the new recruit engaged to translate this portentous tome into German for publication. Shades of Olaus Wormius and Ab Gwilym! Borrow’s German was the first stumbling-block. It was good enough to enable him to read German works and to turn German into English, but to work with it as a colloquial tongue was quite a different matter. In this respect he had contracted to do the impossible. But even if his German had been perfect he would have been a fish out of water, for he knew nothing of metaphysics. This is not the place to discuss the value of Sir Richard Phillips’s book, which has doubtless taken up some dusty nook on a library shelf for its permanent and undisturbed place of residence. But it was enough for Borrow to be told that nobody could understand his German version: in his opinion the cause of that did not reside so much in his imperfect acquaintance with the language as in the folly of the author. Borrow did not understand him and his terminology; consequently, the theories and the language of Sir Richard Phillips were equally absurd. The contumely poured upon the publisher in “Lavengro” was probably not fully deserved. A German edition of the Philosophy, translated by Theobald and Lebret, appeared at Stuttgart in 1826, and, for what it was worth, the Germans succeeded in understanding this. But, for the rest, if Borrow was treated no worse than other publishers’ hacks were treated, his lot was no more pleasant. Phillips was exigent about the work for which he paid so meanly, and none too kindly in his manner. Even about the “Celebrated Trials,” which was the enterprise George liked best of them all, Borrow was worried in an unconscionable fashion.

Of course, there was another life than this: his own private life, his intercourse with such friends as he had already in London and with the new acquaintances he made during his unconventional wanderings about the city. His brother John, the artist, reached London on April 29th, commissioned to induce Benjamin Haydon to paint the portrait of a Mr. Robert Hawkes, who was Mayor of Norwich in 1822. John had been asked to do the portrait himself, but distrusted his powers and preferred that the commission should go to Haydon. George went with his brother to interview “the painter of the Heroic,” who was not by way of painting provincial mayors as a matter of preference, but was in the chronic state of impecuniosity which made the fee of a hundred pounds an irresistible bait. The mission was successful. Haydon went down to Norwich, and executed a portrait of the worthy Mr. Hawkes “striding under a Norman arch out of the cathedral.” The Norman arch seems to have been suggested locally, and it appealed strongly to Haydon’s sense of the grandiose, though many people may be inclined to agree with George that the mayors of the day, as a rule, would have been better painted issuing from The Chequers or The Brewers Three.

Whatever distractions he could discover or invent, Borrow’s life was miserable, and brought on severe attacks of melancholia, which he first described as “the Horrors” and afterwards as “the Fear.” “What a life! What a dog’s life!” he tells us he would exclaim after “escaping” from the presence of the publisher. His woes, real and imaginary—and a great many of them were the effect of his morbid imaginings—drove him to desperate thoughts. After his brother’s visit, Knapp tells us, he wrote to Kerrison: “Dear Roger,—Come to me immediately. I believe I am dying.” He was probably very far from dying, but Kerrison had an idea that George was liable to suicidal impulses, did not like assuming the responsibility for such an irresponsible person, and shifted his lodgings. The mood passed, and Borrow went on hawking his ballads among the publishers of London with no more success than before. He relates how he called on “glorious John” twenty times without success. We are not to place too much reliance upon the exactitude of this statement. Meanwhile, the “Celebrated Trials” was going on. It was a tremendous compilation, with little of Borrow’s own work in it. Its 3,600 pages represented nearly a year’s adventures among the bookstalls and the files of old newspapers and fly-sheets. One piece of characteristic literary work with which he endowed the world was his translation of Klinger’s “Faustus,” which shortly appeared. This had been done at Norwich in the Simpson & Rackham days. Finally, the book of “Trials” was completed, and the _Universal Review_ died of inanition. “I did not like reviewing at all . . . I never could understand why reviews were instituted,” says Lavengro. And he continued to detest reviewers and reviewing to the end of his days. In 1853, when Whitwell Elwin was deputising for Lockhart as editor of the _Quarterly_, he met Borrow. Their interview, Elwin’s son tells us, was characteristic of both: “Borrow was just then very sore with his slashing critics, and, on someone mentioning that Elwin was a _quartering_ reviewer, he said, ‘Sir, I wish you a better employment!’”

At the death of the _Universal Review_, his relations with Phillips came to an end. He had little money and no resources. Once more he resumed the weary round, tramping in search of purchasers for his translations, and gradually approaching a condition of penury, but maintaining his attitude of aggression and independence. It is into this brief period that he has worked some of the most effective scenes of “Lavengro,” the friendship with the old apple-woman who had a stall on London Bridge, and with the Armenian merchant to whom he suggested that his wealth should be devoted to the liberation and aggrandisement of Armenia. Languages and poetry still obsessed his dreams. But audacious poverty at last bit a deeper wound than could be salved by poetry, and he resolved, only just too late, to accept an engagement the Armenian had offered him. It was sharp upon his disappointment at finding that the Armenian had taken him at his word, and gone away bent upon the conquest of Persia, that, returning from an excursion to Greenwich, Blackheath, and Shooter’s Hill, in the course of which he came upon the “Petulengros” in camp, he saw a notice in a bookseller’s window, “Wanted, a Novel or Tale.” “Lavengro” relates how he shut himself up from the 13th to the 18th of May, and wrote “The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell,” which he sold to the bookseller for twenty pounds.

How much of all this is truth and how much is fiction it is difficult to determine. There is probably a basis of fact for it. Borrow, with all his imagination and all his romance, was not an inventive writer, and though the idea of “Joseph Sell” may have been suggested by the history of “Rasselas,” it is more probable that by some stroke of luck of this kind he did obtain the money with which to set out on his tour of the English roads. The circumstance that no “Life of Joseph Sell” has ever been discovered is nothing to set against this probability, and against the feeling with which Lavengro narrates its inception and accomplishment. Borrow’s love of mystification entirely accounts for it. There was a choice between saying exactly what he did, what his tale or history was entitled, and obscuring the whole matter by a fictitious name; and it would not have been Borrow if he had not chosen the latter course. By whatever work, he did obtain money enough to allow him to shake the dust of London off his shoes and begin those wanderings through English rural districts which provided the adventures described in the second and better half of “Lavengro.”

Borrow was big and strong and a magnificent walker; never before, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, had there appeared on English roads so majestic-looking a tramp, with bundle and stick. He went south-west to Salisbury Plain, and there is a powerful account in “Lavengro” of sunrise at Stonehenge. The only thing to compare with it is Thomas Hardy’s prose-poem of the same magical place by moonlight. One cannot read without a thrill the passage where, “taking off my hat I advanced slowly, and cast myself with my face upon the dewy earth in the middle of the portal of giants. The spirit of Stonehenge was strong upon me.”

There is little, of importance to Borrow’s own life, to decipher in the story of his wayfaring which is not incorporated in the book itself. Perhaps one of the most weird of his adventures was the encounter with the scholar and gentleman afflicted by the “touching” mania; one of the most sensational the attempt made by Mrs. Herne, the gypsy crone, to poison him with a doctored cake; one of the most impressive his meeting with the Welsh Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife, Winifred—Peter Williams who suffered tortures untold because he imagined that in his boyhood he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. He met Romanist missionaries, who at that time were very active on the highways and byways of England; dog-fighters and prize-fighters; everywhere out-of-the-way adventures occurred to him. He bought the stock-in-trade of Jack Slingsby, a hedgesmith and tinker, who was afraid to remain on the roads because of the enmity of the terrible bully, Blazing Bosvile, alias the Flaming Tinman; and in the course of his wanderings in search of business, he pulled up in Mumper’s Dingle, where was enacted the romance of Isopel Berners. The scene is said to have been identified as Mumber Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire.

In all the writings of Borrow there is but one episode of love. This romantic wanderer, so far as he informs us or we can ascertain, had been only once in love in nearly forty years, and that for a few weeks; nor was he then so deeply immersed that he took any particular pains to bring the lady to his own way of thinking. But this one episode has endowed English literature with a figure which takes a proud place in the gallery of fair women, the figure of Isopel Berners. Like everything else in Lavengro’s life, his sweetheart must be remarkable, his courtship must be unconventional, the adventure must have a vague and misty ending.

Watch Isopel as she descends, with her donkey and cart, behind the Flaming Tinman and Moll, his mort, into Mumper’s Dingle, where Lavengro has camped.

“Dashing past the other horse and cart, which by this time had reached the bottom of the pass, appeared an exceedingly tall woman—or rather girl, for she could scarcely have been above eighteen. She was dressed in a tight bodice and a blue stuff gown; hat, bonnet, or cap she had none, and her hair, which was flaxen, hung down on her shoulders unconfined; her complexion was fair, and her features handsome, with a determined but open expression.”

In conversation with the Flaming Tinman, who is working himself up to the proper pitch of a quarrel with the amateur tinker, the tall girl remarks that she would engage to thrash that weedy-looking youth with one hand. Forth bursts Lavengro, with his eternal Norse lore: “‘You might beat me with no hands at all,’ said I, ‘fair damsel, only by looking at me—I never saw such a face and figure—both regal—why, you look like Ingeborg, Queen of Norway; she had twelve brothers, and could lick them all, though they were heroes:

“‘On Dovrefeld, in Norway, Were once together seen The twelve heroic brothers Of Ingeborg, the queen!’”

A pretty invocation, indeed, to a hawker travelling with a donkey-cart!

“None of your chaffing, young fellow,” said the tall girl, “or I will give you what shall make you wipe your face; be civil, or you will rue it.”

Lavengro admitted that he was “perhaps a peg too high,” and offered her “something a bit lower.” It was a Romany couplet. The rage of the tall girl, whilom Queen Ingeborg, may be imagined when she found herself associated with the gypsies; there is no despite of gypsies quite so deep as that of the English of the “lower orders,” as they might say at Marlborough. And, after a little more of Lavengro’s solemn chaff: “Before I could put myself on guard, she struck me a blow on the face which had nearly brought me to the ground.”

Fit exordium to the love-story of travelling hawker and hedge-tinker, to be promoted later by lessons in Armenian given by the Knight of the Solder-iron to the Damsel of the Donkey-cart. And the scene that follows—Lavengro’s fight with the Flaming Tinman, who transferred his mortal enmity for Jack Slingsby to the temporary owner of Jack Slingsby’s stock-in-trade—is a fit sequel. The heroic combat was the real beginning of the courtship. “The tall girl” saw foul play on the part of the Tinman, and immediately became “the young man’s” champion and assumed the office of his second. It was by her advice, after he had been knocked off his legs several times by the Tinman’s flashing fist, that, instead of fighting with his left, he got in the blow with his “long right” that settled the hash of Blazing Bosvile. The Tinman and his mort took themselves off after this discomfiture, leaving Lavengro and Isopel Berners in undisputed possession of the Dingle.

We learn little about Isopel in details of fact, except that she was born in “Long Melford workhouse,” and put “out to service,” where she experienced all the joys that were usually stored up in service for workhouse girls in the early part of the nineteenth century. When her mistress attempted to knock her down with a besom, Belle knocked down the mistress with her fist. So she went back to the Great House, was put in a dark cell, and fed for a fortnight on bread and water. At her next essay to serve she was no more fortunate; this time she knocked down her master for being rude to her, and had to fly the house. A travelling hawkeress, going the roads with silk and linen, took a fancy to her, and carried her on many journeys. Belle protected her from insult and violence; in return the old woman, at her death, left the girl her stock. She was thus in business on her own account, and casually travelling with the Bosviles, when she fell in with Lavengro.

In his erratic way, Borrow paints a charming idyll of the few succeeding weeks during which they lived in the Dingle: an idyll of natural beauty, and a picture of such womanly modesty and strength of character as to make Isopel Berners one of the heroines the heart cherishes. The uneducated Amazon, the feminine pugilist, who can take her own part in any quarrel, is by nature a modest girl, a woman with the finest perceptions and the most delicate instincts; she has a vein of poetry in her composition which gives her a certain affinity with the wandering philologist, who has in turn a vein of chivalry in his. While she dwells in her tent and he in his, while she goes up and down the neighbourhood on her business, and Lavengro stays in the Dingle to make new shoes for her donkey, Isopel is all the time dreaming what might have been. For all his chivalry, the young man is strange and plain-spoken, rarely paying a compliment, never making an advance, boring her with philological disquisitions, talking of things indifferent to her, pestering her with Armenian declensions, or sitting dull and silent while he sips the tea she has made for him. Here is a characteristic passage:

“I took another cup; we were again silent. ‘It is rather uncomfortable,’ said I at last, ‘for people to sit together without having anything to say.’

“‘Were you thinking of your company?’ said Belle.

“‘What company?’ said I.

“‘The present company.’

“‘The present company? Oh, ah!—I remember that I said one only feels uncomfortable in being silent with a companion when one happens to be thinking of the companion. Well, I had been thinking of you the last two or three minutes, and had just come to the conclusion that, to prevent us both feeling occasionally uncomfortable towards each other, having nothing to say, it would be as well to have a standing subject on which to employ our tongues. Belle, I have determined to give you lessons in Armenian.’”

Which he proceeds forthwith to do. What was a girl to make of a man like that? When that Lavengro’s heart was sore thereafter for the lack of Belle Berners, he had to thank his moroseness and his Armenian nouns for it.

So proceeded, without passion, without even a symptom of philandering on either side, the Romance of Mumper’s Dell—dreadfully misunderstood by the postilion who sheltered there in the thunderstorm, and by Mrs. Chikno when the gypsies encamped near by—but never advancing, so far as the two chief actors were concerned. It is continued from the last volume of “Lavengro” into the first volume of the “Romany Rye.” In the latter, for a hundred pages we are waiting upon some development of it; but it is as elusive as a pixy. We continually tremble upon the brink of a declaration. Take this scene, powerful but inconclusive. Upon the departure of Mr. and Mrs. Petulengro, after their visit of ceremony:

“Then you are going?” said I, when Belle and I were left alone.

“Yes,” said Belle; “I am going on a journey; my affairs compel me.”

“But you will return again?” said I.

“Yes,” said Belle; “I shall return once more.”

“Once more,” said I. “What do you mean by once more? The Petulengros will soon be gone; and will you abandon me in this place?”

“You were alone here,” said Belle, “before I came, and I suppose you found it agreeable, or you would not have stayed in it.”

“Yes,” said I. “That was before I knew you; but having lived with you here, I should be very loth to live here without you.”

“Indeed,” said Belle. “I did not know that I was of so much consequence to you. Well—the day is wearing away—I must go and harness Traveller to the cart.”

He does some little service for her, as harnessing the donkey and putting the bundles into the cart. The narrative proceeds, and the chapter ends thus:

“I put the bundles into the cart, and then led Traveller and the cart up the winding path to the mouth of the dingle. Belle followed. At the top I delivered the reins into her hands, we looked at each other steadfastly for some time. Belle then departed, and I returned to the dingle, where, seating myself on my stone, I remained for upwards of an hour in thought.”

Great is ellipsis—but romance cannot live by ellipsis alone. The next chapter begins, “On the following morning,” and is a spirited account of a feast of roast sucking-pig in the gypsy encampment!

There is never room for a doubt that Lavengro was by this time fairly in love with Belle. But there is also no room for doubt that Belle had realised that he was not for her, nor was she for him. Their ways lay apart. Belle’s way was the broad road of the Atlantic to America, where she hoped to conduct her life free from the disadvantages that attended the career in England of a workhouse girl with a name which, as Lavengro had told her, belonged to the nomenclatures of the ancient aristocracy. His way was through many strange lands, through a life of adventure and turmoil, to an old age of mingled glory, hypochondria, and megrims. So that Belle had resolved to nip the romance in the bud, and her last journey from the Dingle was made with the purpose of selling her donkey and cart and her silks and linens, and going to Liverpool to take ship for the New World. She returned once more, as she had promised. It was late at night; Lavengro was asleep in his tent; but he had banked up the fire, and placed the kettle over it. The little noise of her arrival woke him, and he dressed so as to go out and unharness her donkey. Now that it was all impossible, and Belle had made her irrevocable decision, Lavengro, of course, came to the point. On their last day together, he set her conjugating the Armenian verb _siriel_, and when he had worried her through it, told her that the English equivalent of _siriel_ was “to love.” And, in his whimsical, moonshiny, teasing way, having driven Isopel to tears, he suddenly proposed to her that they should be off together to America, settle down in some forest, and conjugate the verb _siriel_ conjugally!

And, as there was never a doubt that Lavengro had managed to get himself in love with Belle, so there was never a doubt that Belle was strongly tempted to acknowledge that she loved this strange fellow of six feet three with the black eyes and the white hair and the long right arm, who could beat Blazing Bosvile and make donkey shoes, and mend kettles and talk all the languages that were heard in the Tower of Babel. But well for Belle’s peace of mind that she resisted the temptation; for Lavengro, the constitutional wanderer, would have led her a pretty life when they had buried themselves in the depths of an American forest to conjugate Armenian verbs!

The next morning he set off with his friend Jasper for a horse fair, leaving Belle behind. “On arriving at the extremity of the plain, I looked towards the dingle. Isopel Berners stood at the mouth; the beams of the early morning sun shone full on her noble face and figure. I waved my hand towards her. She slowly lifted up her right arm. I turned away, and never saw Isopel Berners again.”

For while Lavengro was away Belle departed from the Dingle, and left never a trace behind her. Now that he had lost the treasure upon which he had set so small a price, Lavengro was very sore at heart, and would have given much to recall her and to consummate his day-dreams. But all that he ever heard of her again was in a letter addressed by her to “the young man in Mumper’s Dingle.” Herein she explained why she had refused his offer, which, if he had made it in the early part of their acquaintance, she would have accepted. She proffered him some very good advice about his manners, told him she thought he was a bit mad at bottom, gave him a lock of her glorious hair, and left this maxim with him: “Fear God, and take your own part.” Which was so much to Lavengro’s liking that he made it the motto of the second portion of his life-story, “The Romany Rye”; and there it is to this day under his name, and over the imprint of Mr. Murray.

Was Isopel Berners a reality, and did Borrow meet her in Mumper’s Dingle? Or is the whole of this history an invention? Dr. Knapp’s elaborate researches do not help us much, because there is no documentary evidence about the episode. He can merely tell us that Borrow did make such a journey, did buy a tinker’s stock-in-trade, and did live in Mumper’s Dingle. So that we must look for internal evidence.

I have no doubt that Isopel Berners was a reality, and a very substantial one; I have no doubt that she was extraordinarily tall, strong, and beautiful; and that her hair was wonderfully fine. I do not insist that she was either as tall, as strong, or as beautiful as she is painted in “Lavengro”; for Shorsha had a habit of exaggerating—it was one of the many constitutional defects of his character; he could not help it.

The reason is very simple for this faith about Isopel Berners, the prototype of Queen Ingeborg, who, as Mr. Birrell has said, need fear comparison with no damsel that ever lent sweetness to the stage, relish to rhyme, or life to novels. Borrow never created a character. He has left many portraits; but to imagine an Isopel Berners, to invent the incident, was as impossible for him as flying. The romance of Isopel Berners would never have been written if George Borrow, when he was travelling England on foot upon the money he earned by writing “Joseph Sell” and by mending kettles, had not met Isopel’s prototype in Mumper’s Dingle.

The adventures of the rest of this year of 1825 may be told very briefly. Borrow left the Dingle when it appeared certain that he would see no more of Isopel, and, with money borrowed from Jasper Petulengro—or rather forced by his gypsy friend upon an unwilling recipient—bought a fine horse and set off wandering again. His roadside encounters, with the bee-keeper and brewer of mead, with the gentleman who had learnt Chinese by the aid of the hieroglyphics on teapots, and all the rest of them, being more or less impersonal and extraneous to his own history, may be left for consideration in connection with “The Romany Rye.” He took a situation for a time as assistant in a stable-yard at a coaching inn—having abandoned the tinker’s craft and given the pony and stock-in-trade to his gypsy friends,—ultimately sold his horse at Horncastle Fair, and tramped back to Norwich, where his mother was living.