CHAPTER IV

BORROW AND BOWRING

WE now have Borrow a youth of twenty-two. His life has been full of weird adventure, but to all appearances quite unprofitable in any worldly sense. His future is nebulous. Dreams are dreamed; visions are vanished. He seems to be farther from fame and fortune than when he set off in the coach for London, with the green box in the boot carrying his Danish ballads and his “Ab Gwilym.” His castles in the clouds have come crashing to earth in irremediable ruin.

Borrow was indignant with a scurvy world which had treated him harshly. The plain truth was that the world had no feeling about him at all, one way or the other. He had nothing to sell that anybody wanted to buy, and no means of making a living. He had a long road to travel before he found himself. In 1825 he went home to Norwich a failure, with the sense of defeat very strong upon him. The mother who was at once his best adviser and sincerest worshipper was not likely to chide his folly as the father had done. She was ready to receive him with demonstrations of love, and to share her little with him. This was part of the ignominy which he hated—that he was obliged to impose himself upon the household in Willow Lane. In a world out of joint, the cursed spite was that he could do nothing to set it right.

Long time he struggled hard to lift himself out of this rut. He continued to fail. When at last he did succeed, these years became to him a horrible nightmare. He would not speak of them; he tried not to think of them. He resolutely refused to permit the public a glimpse into the sordid secrets they contained. From 1825 to 1832 he lived a life of which he wished nobody to know anything. Out of some correspondence between him and Richard Ford arose the phrase, “the Veiled Period.” Ford implored him to lift the veil a little and allow his admirers to know what he was doing. There were many reasons why he declined to do so. He endeavoured to puzzle the public about it, and perhaps succeeded partly in mystifying himself. He suggested a kind of vague romance of wanderings in remote parts of Europe. Some of the suggestions were founded on a slight basis of fact; that is all that can be said for them.

As to the facts: there is no doubt that he did buy a horse with money lent to him by Ambrose Smith, and sell it at a profit. As in the case of Isopel, it may not be unwise to allow some discount off the published accounts of the transaction. Very possibly the horse was not such a fine horse as that noble animal with whose assistance Lavengro electrified the jockeys at Horncastle Fair; perhaps the profit on the sale was not so great as it was made to appear in “The Romany Rye.” But there was such a transaction. Ambrose Smith reminded him of it, long years afterwards, when he visited the great author at Oulton.

Soon after his return to Norwich, he was busy again about his literary schemes. He tried to sell copies of his translation of Klinger, which he took from the publisher in lieu of payment for the work. While with Phillips in London, he had projected a volume of poetical translations of Danish ballads. The plan then came to naught. Now he printed the book in Norwich by subscription, after a correspondence with Allan Cunningham about it. Cunningham was full of admiration for the old songs drawn from the “Kjaempe Viser.” “Swayne Vonved” was his favourite, and it remained Borrow’s own pet throughout life. Five hundred copies of the “Romantic Ballads” were printed, of which 200 were subscribed for. These, at ten and sixpence a copy, paid all the expenses of the issue. There was an arrangement under which the London publisher, John Taylor, took the rest and placed his imprint on the title-page. Cunningham gave the young poet a great deal of good advice about promoting the interests of the book. He neglected it, with characteristic self-sufficiency. He had published ballads, and if the great public did not share Mopsa’s affection for ballads in print, the nineteenth-century Autolycus could not help it, and would be content with what he could get out of the local subscribers in Norwich.

In 1826 he was in London, and in correspondence with Benjamin Haydon about sitting for a figure in one of his pictures—possibly the “Mock Election.” In the course of the correspondence Borrow speaks of proceeding presently to the South of France. This is the first hint of those brief travels on the Continent which became magnified by the pervading haze into world-wide wanderings. “Were you ever at Kiachta?” Bowring asked him in a letter some years later. He was never within some thousands of miles of Kiachta. In 1826 he probably did go tramping through part of Europe, but he did not reach the East, as some confused references in the books suggest. The tale of Murtagh in “The Romany Rye” may incorporate some of his adventures. At any rate, that alluring narrative was certainly not given to Borrow in the year 1825 at Horncastle Fair. There is clear evidence of that in the fact that a portion of it was picked up nearly thirty years later in very different circumstances.

The real itinerary of the tour of 1826 is probably by way of Paris on foot to Bayonne; across the Pyrenees into Spain; Pamplona, the Riviera, Italy, Genoa, and thence home by ship. Slight traces can be found of such a journey. There is the lightly-touched meeting with Vidocq in Paris. That delectable rascal’s career always had a strong fascination for Borrow, whose appetite for picturesque blackguards was greedy. Vidocq at this time was fifty years of age. A quarter of a century of adventure as a showman, a soldier, a galley-slave, and a highwayman had terminated in 1812 with his appointment to the head of a detective office in Paris, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. By the year 1825 the authorities were persuaded that the principle was unworkable, and dismissal ended Vidocq’s career of corruption and swindling. If Borrow met him in Paris the next year, therefore, he found his hero a free lance. The _Mémoires_ of M. Vidocq, which appeared in 1828, and are probably at least as trustworthy as Baron Munchausen, were among Borrow’s favourite reading; his relish for literature, embloomed with the flowers of crime and perfumed by the breath of criminals, had been cultivated by the compilation of the “Celebrated Trials,” and it never left him. Vidocq and Peyrecourt loom large in passages of his works; whether they made so great a figure in his actual experiences in France is another question. He appears to have met Baron Taylor at Bayonne, and naturally found in the “picturesque and romantic” voyager a congenial companion. From these lofty associations the descent on the other side of the Pyrenees to Quesada {72} and his “Army of Faith,” the gang of frontiersmen who were helping themselves freely in the name of the Church, was sudden and severe. But Borrow seems to have fallen even further, for there is a dim suggestion of his imprisonment at Pamplona, of his emergence from gaol in a state of beggary, and his succour at the hands of a party of gypsies whose patteran he followed in the mountains. He tramped eastwards, ultimately brought up at Genoa, penniless, and was assisted by some person or persons unknown to get ship for England.

This is as far as Dr. Knapp has been able to trace the elusory course of the Wandering Jew of Literature. The theory that he acted as the travelling commissioner of a London newspaper finds no support. By 1827 he was back in Norwich, keeping his mother’s small household accounts, visiting the Tombland Fair to inspect “Marshland Shales,” the glorious chieftain of all the equine race, grubbing for booksellers, writing articles for newspapers. It was a mean and anxious way of life, abominable to Borrow, who hated poverty and was ashamed of it. Therein may be sought the real reason why he “veiled” these years of his life. His next appearance in the literary arena is in the distinguished company of Dr. John Bowring.

The Bowring episode in Borrow’s life is one of its most remarkable and least explicable features. Bowring seems to have been a good friend to Borrow for many years, to have engaged with him in literary collaboration, and to have exerted himself in various directions on his behalf. His reward, so far as Borrow’s works go, is a scurrilous sketch of himself in “Lavengro,” a long denunciation in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye,” and the bitter hatred of a man who knew how to hate as fiercely as he could love intensely. The whole story of their severance is obscure, but there can be little doubt that Borrow was entirely in the wrong, that the charges he made against Bowring of treachery and falsehood were baseless, and that of many people pilloried in Borrow’s books Bowring was among the least deserving such scurvy treatment. We have observed already the circumstances of the first meeting between Borrow and Bowring at Taylor’s house in Norwich. We shall see that Bowring came to his rescue when he was in the sorest straits, and was, in fact, doing much to help him during part of the “veiled period.”

It has been the writer’s fortune to secure {73} a series of letters from Borrow to Bowring, which throw much light upon his schemes and modes of life in the last three of those mysterious years between his return from the Continent and his engagement by the Bible Society. He did not remain long in Norwich. In 1829 he was in London, residing at No. 17, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and deeply employed about certain translations of Scandinavian poetry which were to form the basis of a new book on more elaborate lines than those of the “Romantic Ballads.” Bowring and Borrow had a plan for issuing in collaboration a collection of English versions, with interpretations, of those Northern poets whom a purblind public, not yet obsessed by the Scandinavian spirit in poetry and music, resolutely disregarded and despised. This was the “literary project” of which the world heard so much in the Appendix. The arrangements went so far that a prospectus of the work was put out. The title proposed was “The Songs of Scandinavia,” and the collection was to be published in two volumes octavo. The project remained a project, and the niche left by expectant librarians for the two octavo volumes was never filled. But in connection with the negotiations and arrangements between Borrow and Bowring a correspondence occurred which is full of interest and contains one or two characteristic bits of Borrovian humour. Incidentally, the letters, if taken in sequence, and read together with another one of the year 1842, show that, up to a time not far ante-dating the publication of “The Romany Rye,” with its gross attack on Bowring, the two men were on the best possible terms. Indeed, in 1842 Borrow speaks of his old collaborator as “my oldest, I may say my only, friend.” {75}

It were greatly to be wished that the sordid dispute with Bowring might be numbered among the delenda of Borrow’s history, but some mention of it will be necessary. Unhappily, no satisfactory explanation can be given which is at all flattering to Borrow. For these letters prove conclusively that he introduced into “Lavengro” and its sequel opinions about Bowring which he certainly did not hold at the time of which he was writing.

In 1829 their Scandinavian scheme was in the tideway. They had written and they had met for the discussion of their plans; Borrow had done a great deal of translation. He was exceedingly anxious that at any rate the first volume should appear at once; for, as he said in a letter written on the last day of the year, he was “_terribly afraid of being forestalled in the Kiampe Viser by some of those Scotch blackguards_, who affect to translate from all languages, of which they are fully as ignorant as Lockhart is of Spanish.” The italicised passage is underlined in Borrow’s letter; it is a curious foretaste of some of the choicer invective which he afterwards bestowed on Scott and the Scots, and of his disagreement with Lockhart. The preparations were hurried on with a view to the appearance of the first part of the book in February. The drafting of the prospectus was left to Borrow, and on January 8th (1830) he sent a copy to Bowring for his inspection, inviting “the correction of your master-hand.” He had, he said, “endeavoured to frame a Danish style,” but was not sure whether he had succeeded. “Alter, I pray you,” he exclaimed, “whatever false logic has crept into it, find a remedy for its incoherencies, and render it fit for its intended purpose.” There follows a delightful touch of egotism. He has, he explains, had a rising headache for two days, which has “almost” prevented him from doing anything. But, he adds with fine nonchalance, “I sat down this morning and translated a hundred lines of the ‘May Day’”—as though a hundred lines of English verse were a trifle which he threw off without effort, _malgré_ his “rising headache.”

Bowring examined the prospectus, made what revisions he thought necessary, and sent it back.

“I approve of the prospectus in every respect,” wrote Borrow (January 14th). “It is businesslike, and there is nothing flashy in it. I do not wish to suggest one alteration.” He goes on to describe the energy with which he is working, and speaks of having rendered four hundred lines in one day! The last paragraph of this letter displays Borrow in a different attitude towards reviews and reviewing from that which he adopted in after years. “When you see the foreign editor,” he tells Bowring,

“I should feel much obliged if you would speak to him about my reviewing Tegnér, and inquire whether a _good_ article on Welsh poetry would be received. I have the advantage of not being a Welshman. I would speak the truth, and would give translations from some of the best Welsh poetry; and I really believe that my translations would not be the worst that have been made from the Welsh tongue.”

But this condition of things, in which the romantic ferment caused by Steffens and Oehlenschläger in Denmark was to be reproduced in England by Borrow’s translations, did not last long. Difficulties arose in connection with the publication of the proposed book, and the enthusiasm paled as the year progressed. The two volumes receded from view; the twin mountain in labour finally brought forth a review article of some forty pages. This was despatched in the summer to the _Foreign Quarterly Review_, was held back for twelve months, and appeared at last in the number for June, 1831. In this Bowring wrote in lively style on Danish and Norwegian literature, and Borrow supplied sixteen specimens of verse.

In the meantime, Bowring was doing what he could to assist his _protégé_ to some profitable employment. He sent him an ancient manuscript which Grundtvig, the Danish poet, wanted to have transcribed. Borrow said (June 7th) the task would not be overpaid at £49, but as he was “doing nothing particular” at the time, and might learn something from it, he would do it for £20. Bowring also exerted his influence to get him work in the magazines. During the summer of 1830, Borrow flitted from Great Russell Street to No. 7, Museum Street, and in the autumn, went to Norwich for a holiday. In the letter (September 14th) in which he tells Bowring of his proposal to leave London for Norwich, we get the first hint of a project which now and then flashed through his mind for a year or two—that of entering the military service: “I have thought of attempting to get into the French service, as I should like prodigiously to serve under Clausel in the next Bedouin campaign.” This remained a thought, though, as we shall see, other plans of the same character went a little further. In the same letter he complained that he was very unwell, but traced his malady to ennui and unsettled prospects, and hoped that cold bathing in October and November would prove of some service to him. There is no reference in this correspondence to one task which he himself asserts he achieved in 1830. That was the translation of Elis Wyn. At the instance of “a little bookseller of my acquaintance” in Smithfield, he rendered from the Welsh Wyn’s, “Visions of the Sleeping Bard.” This was the nearest approach he made to the promise of literary success; but even here his malign fate dogged him. When the little bookseller saw the translation, he begged off the bargain on the plea that “the terrible descriptions of vice and torment would frighten the genteel part of the English public out of their wits. . . . Myn Diawl! I had no idea till I read him in English that Elis Wyn had been such a terrible fellow!” The sly dig at the “genteel” public may be reasonably attributed to the bookmaker rather than to the bookseller.

Before he departed from London, Borrow, returning some books to Bowring, utters (September 17th) one of those ejaculations on public affairs which he subsequently inserted as tags to many of his letters: “More Revolutions, I see. The King of Saxony has run away, and the Kent peasantry are burning stacks and houses. _Where will all this end_?”

A dozen plans for carving a way to undying fame and modest fortune, all equally futile, were built up and fell down about this time. Apparently Borrow could not rid himself of the delusion that a hungry world was waiting to devour the beauties of the Gaelic Bards, if only they were served up in a suitable form for general consumption. He launched at the devoted heads of the Highland Society of London a scheme under which the Society was to employ (and pay) him for two years in translating the Gaelic Bards into English verse. The scheme left the Highland Society as cold as the Bards would have left the reading world. He turned his artillery upon the British Museum. The Codex Exoniensis was to be copied; he applied for the work, but without success. It was done in 1831 by one of the regular officials of the Museum. Discouraged but not dismayed, he sought other employment in Bloomsbury, and asked Bowring to put in a word for him. The Doctor pointed out that in his position it was necessary to go about such a matter with discretion. It would not do for him to originate an application, but if the authorities of the Museum could be induced to seek his opinion, he would give Borrow such a character as would “take you to the top of Hecla itself. You have claims, strong ones, and I should rejoice to see you niched in the British Museum.” But this design failed like the rest. In a letter to Bowring he described himself, with melancholy eloquence, as “drifting upon the sea of the world, and likely to be so.” To Borrow there was “no fiercer hell than failure”; but the inferno was of his own creation. His greatest failure was the failure to realise that there was no sort of demand for the work he insisted on doing, and that its intrinsic value was far below the standard at which he placed it.

Compelled thus to abandon his literary ambitions for the present, he turned his efforts in another direction. He began the pursuit of a shimmering phantom over which, in the course of his life, he contrived to waste a great deal of valuable time. Upon what he based the idea does not appear, but Borrow seems to have imagined that he had some claim to official employment abroad. It did not much matter whether the work was made for him by the British Government or by a foreign State, so long as he should be given the opportunity of displaying his philological prowess in foreign parts. After the appearance of the joint article in the _Foreign Quarterly_, as Bowring seemed to be able to do nothing for him at the British Museum, Borrow asked him to see what he could do towards getting him a post under the Belgian Government. Bowring made the application, but without success; the Belgians were not at the moment in need of any English assistance, however talented. Borrow keenly recognised his friend’s diligence in the matter, and turned his heaviest artillery on the Ministry at Brussels, who were so obstinately blind to the advantages of having Mr. George Borrow in their service. They did not seem, he said in a letter to Bowring written from Willow Lane, Norwich, and dated September 11th, 1831, either to know or to care for the opinion of the great Cyrus, whose advice to his captains he quoted from Xenophon: “Take no heed from what countries ye fill up your ranks, but seek recruits as ye do horses, not those particularly who are of your own country, but those of merit.” Belgium, having failed to appreciate the worth of George Borrow, at once became the most contemptible nation on earth:

“The Belgians will only have such recruits as are born in Belgium, and when we consider the _heroic_ manner in which the native Belgian army defended the person of their new sovereign in the last conflict with the Dutch, can we blame them for their determination? It is rather singular, however, that, resolved as they are to be served only by themselves, they should have sent for 50,000 Frenchmen to clear their country of a handful of Hollanders, who have generally been considered the most unwarlike people in Europe, and who, if they had had fair play given them, would long ere this time have replanted the Orange flag on the towers of Brussels and made the Belgians what they deserved to be—hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

This sardonic outburst is one of the earliest samples of the polemical style which Borrow was to develop so strongly in later years.

As he could neither go to fight Bedouins under Clausel nor enter the Belgian service in Europe, it appears to have occurred to his friend Bowring that he might care to follow in his father’s footsteps, and that the British service might suit him at a pinch. If Borrow would like to purchase a commission, Bowring offered to introduce his name to the War Secretary. Borrow replied that his name had been down for several years for the purchase of a commission, but he had never had sufficient interest to procure an appointment. He would not now mind serving in the militia if they were to be embodied for service in Ireland (“that unhappy country”), but he wished to leave the question open for a few months in order to see whether something more promising turned up. If he had not secured employment within two or three months, he would then ask Bowring to redeem his promise in the matter of the War Secretary, and to recommend him to a corps in one of the Eastern colonies on the plea that he was “well grounded in Arabic” and had some talent for languages:

“I flatter myself that I could do a great deal in the East, provided I could once get there, either in a civil or military capacity. There is much talk at present about translating European books in the two great languages, the Arabic and Persian. Now, I believe that with my enthusiasm for these tongues I could, if resident in the East, become in a year or two better acquainted with them than any European has been yet, and more capable of executing such a task. . . .”

This letter concluded with a postscript in which he requested that his best remembrances might be presented to Mrs. Bowring and to Edgar, their son; and, he added, “tell them they will both be starved.

“There is now a report in the street that twelve corn-stacks are blazing within twenty miles of this place. I have lately been wandering about Norfolk, and I am sorry to say that the minds of the peasantry are in a horrible state of excitement. I have repeatedly heard men and women in the harvest-field swear that not a grain of the corn they were cutting should be eaten, and that they would as lieve be hanged as live. I am afraid all this will end in a famine and a rustic war.”

Reform staved off the “rustic war,” and other things intervened to prevent Borrow from carrying out his half-formed intention of becoming a military man.