Chapter 25

We must observe, therefore, that this sensible world, which is called the macrocosm--that is, the long world--enters into our soul, which is called the microcosm--that is, the little world--through the gates of the five senses, as regards the apprehension, delectation, and distinction of these sensible things; which is manifest in this way:--In the sensible world some things are generant, others are generated, and others direct both these. Generant are the simple bodies; that is, the celestial bodies and the four elements. For out of the elements, through the power of light, reconciling the contrariety of elements in things mixed, are generated and produced whatever things are generated and produced by the operation of natural power. Generated are the bodies composed of the elements, as minerals, vegetables, sensible things, and human bodies. Directing both these and those are the spiritual substances: whether altogether conjunct, like the souls of the brutes; or separably conjunct, like rational souls; or altogether separate, like the celestial spirits; which the philosophers call Intelligences, we Angels. On these, according to the philosophers, it devolves to move the heavenly bodies; and for this reason the administration of the universe is ascribed to them, as receiving from the First Cause--that is, God--that inflow of virtue which they pour forth again in relation to the work of government, which has reference to the natural consistence of things. But according to the theologians the direction of the universe is ascribed to these same beings, as regards the works of redemption, with respect to which they are called "ministering spirits, sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation."

Man, therefore, who is called the lesser world, has five senses, like five gates, through which the knowledge of all the things that are in the sensible world enters into his soul. For through sight there enter the sublime and luminous bodies and all other colored things; through touch, solid and terrestrial bodies; through the three intermediate senses, the intermediate bodies; through taste, the aqueous; through hearing, the aërial; through smell, the vaporable, which have something of the humid, something of the aërial, and something of the fiery or hot, as is clear from the fumes that are liberated from spices. There enter, therefore, through these doors not only the simple bodies, but also the mixed bodies compounded of these. Seeing then that with sense we perceive not only these particular sensibles--light, sound, odor, savor, and the four primary qualities which touch apprehends--but also the common sensibles--number, magnitude, figure, rest, and motion; and seeing that everything which moves is moved by something else, and certain things move and rest of themselves, as do the animals; in apprehending through these five senses the motions of bodies, we are guided to the knowledge of spiritual motions, as by an effect to the knowledge of causes.

In the three classes of things, therefore, the whole of this sensible world enters the human soul through apprehension. These external sensible things are those which first enter into the soul through the gates of the five senses. They enter, I say, not through their substances, but through their similitudes, generated first in the medium, and from the medium in the external organ, and from the external organ in the internal organ, and from this in the apprehensive power; and thus generation in the medium, and from the medium in the organ, and the direction of the apprehensive power upon it, produce the apprehension of all those things which the soul apprehends externally.

This apprehension, if it is directed to a proper object, is followed by delight. The sense delights in the object perceived through its abstract similitude, either by reason of its beauty, as in vision, or by reason of its sweetness, as in smell and hearing, or by reason of its healthfulness, as in taste and touch, properly speaking. But all delight is by reason of proportion. But since species is the ground of form, power, and action, according as it has reference to the principle from which it emanates, the medium into which it passes, or the term upon which it acts, therefore proportion is observed in three things. It is observed in similitude, inasmuch as it forms the ground of species or form, and so is called speciosity, because beauty is nothing but numerical equality, or a certain disposition of parts accompanied with sweetness of color. It is observed in so far as it forms the ground of power or virtue, and thus is called sweetness, when the active virtue does not disproportionally exceed the recipient virtue, because the sense is depressed by extremes, and delighted by means. It is observed in so far as it forms the ground of efficacy and impression, which is proportional when the agent, in impressing, satisfies the need of the patient, and this is to preserve and nourish it, as appears chiefly in taste and touch. And thus we see how, by pleasure, external delightful things enter through similitude into the soul, according to the threefold method of delectation.

After this apprehension and delight there comes discernment, by which we not only discern whether this thing be white or black (because this alone belongs to the outer sense), and whether this thing be wholesome or hurtful (because this belongs to the inner sense), but also discern why this delights and give a reason therefor. And in this act we inquire into the reason of the delight which is derived by the sense from the object. This happens when we inquire into the reason of the beautiful, the sweet, and the wholesome, and discover that it is a proportion of equality. But a ratio of equality is the same in great things and in small. It is not extended by dimensions; it does not enter into succession, or pass with passing things; it is not altered by motions. It abstracts therefore from place, time, and motion; and for this reason it is immutable, uncircumscribable, interminable, and altogether spiritual. Discernment, then, is an action which, by purifying and abstracting, makes the sensible species, sensibly received through the senses, enter into the intellective power. And thus the whole of this world enters into the human soul by the gates of the five senses, according to the three aforesaid activities.

All these things are footprints, in which we may behold our God. For, since an apprehended species is a similitude generated in a medium and then impressed upon the organ, and through that impression leads to the knowledge of its principle,--that is, of its object,--it manifestly implies that that eternal light generates from itself a similitude or splendor co-equal, consubstantial, and co-eternal; and that He who is the image and similitude of the invisible God, and the splendor of the glory, and the figure of the substance which is everywhere, generates by his first generation of himself his own similitude in the form of an object in the entire medium, unites himself by the grace of union to the individual of rational nature, as a species to a bodily organ, so that by this union he may lead us back to the Father as the fontal principle and object. If therefore all cognizable things generate species of themselves, they clearly proclaim that in them, as in mirrors, may be seen the eternal generation of the Word, the Image, and the Son, eternally emanating from God the Father....

Since therefore all things are beautiful, and in a certain way delightful, and since beauty and delight are inseparable from proportion, and proportion is primarily in numbers, all things must of necessity be full of number. For this reason, number is the chief exemplar in the mind of the artificer, and in things the chief footprint leading to wisdom. Since this is most manifest to all and most close to God, it leads us most closely and by seven differences to God, and makes him known in all things, corporeal and sensible. And while we apprehend numerical things, we delight in numerical proportions, and judge irrefragably by the laws of these....

For every creature is by nature an effigy and similitude of that eternal Wisdom: but especially so is that creature which in the book of Scriptures was assumed by the spirit of prophecy for the prefiguration of spiritual things; more especially those creatures in whose effigy God was willing to appear for the angelic ministry; and most especially that creature which he was willing to set forth as a sign, and which plays the part not only of a sign, as that word is commonly used, but also of a sacrament.

GEORGE BORROW

(1803-1881)

BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE

George Borrow lived eight-and-seventy years and published ten books. In his veins was mingled the blood of Cornwall and of Normandy; but though proud of this strain, he valued still more that personal independence which, together with his love of strange tongues and his passion for outdoor life, molded his career. His nature was mystical and eccentric, and he sometimes approached--though he never crossed--the confines of insanity; yet his instincts were robust and plain, he was an apostle of English ale and a master of the art of self-defense, he was an uncompromising champion of the Church of England and the savage foe of Papistry, he despised "kid-glove gentility" in life and literature, and delighted to make his spear ring against the hollow shield of social convention. A nature so complicated and individual, so outspoken and aggressive, could not slip smoothly along the grooves of civilized existence; he was soundly loved and hated, but seldom, or never understood. And the obstinate pride which gave projection to most of his virtues was also at the bottom of his faults: he better liked to perplex than to open himself to his associates; he willfully repelled where he might have captivated, Some human element was wanting in him: he was strong, masculine, subtle, persistent; of a lofty and austere spirit; too proud even to be personally ambitious; gifted with humor and insight; fearless and faithful;--but no tenderness, no gentleness, no inviting human warmth ever appears in him; and though he could reverence women, and admire them, and appreciate them also from the standpoint of the senses, they had no determining sway over his life or thought. If there be any man in English history whom such a summary of traits as this recalls, it is Dean Swift. Nevertheless Borrow's differences from him are far greater than the resemblances between them. Giant force was in both of them; both were enigmas; but the deeper we penetrate into Borrow, the more we like him; not so with the blue-eyed Dean. Borrow's depths are dark and tortuous, but never miasmic; and as we grope our way through them, we may stumble upon treasures, but never upon rottenness.

A man who can be assigned to no recognized type--who flocks by himself, as the saying is--cannot easily be portrayed: we lose the main design in our struggle with the details. Indeed, no two portraits of such a man can be alike: they will vary according to the temperament and limitations of the painter. It is safe to assert, however, that insatiable curiosity was at the base both of his character and of his achievements. Instincts he doubtless had in plenty, but no intuitions; everything must be construed to him categorically. But his capacity keeps pace with his curiosity; he promptly assimilates all he learns, and he can forget nothing. Probably this investigating passion had its cause in his own unlikeness to the rest of us: he was as a visitor from another planet, pledged to send home reports of all he saw here. His success in finding strange things is prodigious: his strange eye detects oddities and beauties to which we to the manner born were strange. Adventures attend him everywhere, as the powers of earth and air on Prospero. Here comes the King of the Vipers, the dry stubble crackling beneath his outrageous belly; yonder the foredoomed sailor promptly fulfills his own prediction, falling from the yard-arm into the Bay of Biscay; anon the ghastly visage of Mrs. Herne, of the Hairy Ones, glares for a moment out of the midnight hedge; again, a mysterious infatuation drives the wealthy idler from his bed out into the inclement darkness, and up to the topmost bough of the tree, which he must "touch" ere he can rest; and now, in the gloom of the memorable dingle, the horror of fear falls upon the amateur tinker, the Evil One grapples terribly with his soul, blots of foam fly from his lips, and he is dashed against the trees and stones. An adventure, truly, fit to stand with any of mediæval legend, and compared with which the tremendous combat with Blazing Bosville, the Flaming Tinman, is almost a relief. But in what perilous Faery Land forlorn do all these and a thousand more strange and moving incidents take place?--Why, in the quiet lanes and byways of nineteenth-century England, or perchance in priest-ridden Spain, where the ordinary traveler can for the life of him discover nothing more startling than beef and beer, garlic and crucifixes. Adventures are in the adventurer.

Man and nature were Borrow's study, but England was his love. In him exalted patriotism touches its apogee. How nobly and uncompromisingly is he jealous of her honor, her glory, and her independence! In what eloquent apostrophes does he urge her to be true to her lofty traditions, to trample on base expediency and cleave to the brave and true! In what resounding jeremiads does he denounce woe upon her traitors and seducers! With what savage sarcasm and scorn does he dissect the soul of the "man in black"! No other writing more powerful, picturesque, and idiomatic has been done in this century. He will advocate no policy less austere than purity, courage, and truth. There is in his zeal a narrowness that augments its strength, yet lessens its effect so far as practical issues are concerned. He is an idealist: but surely no young man can read his stern, throbbing pages without a kindling of the soul, and a resolve to be high in deed and aim; and there is no gauging the final influence of such spiritual stimulus. England and mankind must be better for this lonely, indignant voice.

England, and England's religion, and the Bible in its integrity,--these are the controlling strings of Borrow's harp. Yet he had his youthful period of religious doubt and philosophic sophism: has he not told how walls and ceilings rang with the "Hey!" of the man with the face of a lion, when the gray-haired boy intimated his skepticism? But vicissitudes of soul and body, aided by the itinerant Welsh preacher, cleansed him of these errors, and he undertook and carried through the famous crusade recorded in 'The Bible in Spain'--a narrative of adventure and devotion which fascinated and astonished England, and sets its author abreast of the great writers of his time. It is as irresistible to-day as it was fifty years ago: it stands alone; only Trelawny's 'Adventures of a Younger Son' can be compared with it as narrative, and Trelawny's book lacks the grand central feature which gives dignity and unity to Borrow's. Being a story of fact, 'The Bible in Spain' lacks much of the literary art and felicity, as well as the imaginative charm, of 'Lavengro'; but within its own scope it is great, and nothing can supersede it.

Gipsydom in all its aspects, though logically a side-issue with Borrow, was nevertheless the most noticeable thing relating to him: it engaged and colored him on the side of his temperament; and in the picture we form of a man, temperament tells far more than intellect because it is more individual. Later pundits have called in question the academic accuracy of Borrow's researches in the Romany language: but such frettings are beside the mark; Borrow is the only genuine expounder of Gipsyness that ever lived. He laid hold of their vitals, and they of his; his act of brotherhood with Mr. Jasper Petulengro is but a symbol of his mystical alliance with the race. This is not to say that he fathomed the heart of their mystery; the gipsies themselves cannot do that: but he comprehended whatever in them is open to comprehension, and his undying interest in them is due not only to his sympathy with their way of life, but to the fact that his curiosity about them could never be quite satisfied. Other mysteries come and go, but the gipsy mystery stays with us, and was to Borrow a source of endless content. For after sharpening his wits on the ethnological riddle, he could refresh himself with the psychical aspect of the matter, discovering in them the incarnation of one essential human quality, incompletely present in all men. They are the perfect vagabonds; but the germ of vagabondage inheres in mankind at large, and is the source of the changes that have resulted in what we call civilization. Borrow's nature comprised the gipsy, but the gipsy by no means comprised him; he wandered like them, but the object of his wanderings was something more than to tell dukkeripens, poison pigs, mend kettles, or deal in horseflesh. Therefore he puzzled them more than they did him.

'The Gipsies of Spain' (1841) was his first book about them; 'Lavengro' came ten years later, and 'Romany Rye' six years after that. In 1874 he returns to the subject in 'Roman Lavo-lil,' a sort of dictionary and phrase-book of the language, but unlike any other dictionary and phrase-book ever conceived: it is well worth reading as a piece of entertaining literature. His other books are translations of Norse and Welsh poetry, and a book of travels in 'Wild Wales,' published in 1862. All these works are more than readable: the translations, though rugged and unmusical, have about them a frank sensuousness and a primitive force that are amusing and attractive. But after all, Borrow is never thoroughly himself in literature unless the gipsies are close at hand; and of all his gipsy books 'Lavengro' is by far the best. Indeed, it is so much the best and broadest thing that he produced, that the reader who would know Borrow need never go beyond these pages. In 'Lavengro' we get the culmination of both the author and the man; it is his book in the full sense, and may afford profitable study to any competent reader for a lifetime.

'Lavengro,' in fact, is like nothing else in either biography or fiction--and it is both fictitious and biographical. It is the gradual revelation of a strange, unique being. But the revelation does not proceed in an orderly and chronological fashion: it is not begun in the first chapter, and still less is it completed in the last. After a careful perusal of the book, you will admit that though it has fascinated and impressed you, you have quite failed to understand it. Why is the author so whimsical? Wherefore these hinted but unconfessed secrets? Why does he stop short on the brink of an important disclosure, and diverge under cover of a line of asterisks into another subject?--But Borrow in 'Lavengro' is not constructing a book, he is creating one. He has the reserves of a man who respects his own nature, yet he treats the reader fairly. If you are worthy to be his friend, by-and-by you will see his heart,--look again, and yet again! That passage in a former chapter was incomplete; but look ahead a hundred pages and consider a paragraph there: by itself it seems to say little; but gradually you recognize in it a part of the inwoven strand which disappears in one part of the knot and emerges in another. Though you cannot solve the genial riddle to-day, you may to-morrow. The only clue is sympathy. This man hides his heart for him who has the mate to it; and beneath the whimsical, indifferent, proud, and cold exterior, how it heaves and fears and loves and wonders! This is a wild, unprecedented, eloquent, mysterious, artistic yet artless book; it is alive; it tells of an existence apart, yet in contact with the deep things of all human experience. No other man ever lived as Borrow did, and yet his book is an epitome of life. The magic of his personal quality beguiles us on every page; but deeper still lie the large, immutable traits that make all men men, and avouch the unity of mankind.

'Romany Rye' is the continuation of 'Lavengro,' but scarcely repeats its charm; its most remarkable feature is an 'Appendix,' in which Borrow expounds his views upon things in general, including critics and politics. It is a marvelously trenchant piece of writing, and from the literary point of view delightful; but it must have hurt a good many people's feelings at the time it was published, and even now shows the author on his harsh side only. We may agree with all he says, and yet wish he had uttered it in a less rasping tone.

Like nearly all great writers, Borrow, in order to get his best effects, must have room for his imagination. Mere fact would not rouse him fully, and abstract argument still less. In 'Lavengro' he hit upon his right vein, and he worked it in the fresh maturity of his power. The style is Borrow's own, peculiar to him: eloquent, rugged, full of liturgical repetitions, shunning all soft assonances and refinements, and yet with remote sea-like cadences, and unhackneyed felicities that rejoice the jaded soul. Writing with him was spontaneous, but never heedless or unconsidered; it was always the outcome of deep thought and vehement feeling. Other writers and their books may be twain, but Borrow and his books are one. Perhaps they might be improved in art, or arrangement, or subject; but we should no longer care for them then, because they would cease to be Borrow. Borrow may not have been a beauty or a saint; but a man he was; and good or bad, we would not alter a hair of him.

Nothing like an adequate biography of Borrow has ever been published: a few dates, and some more or less intelligent opinions about his character and work, are the sum of what we know of him--outside his own books. Some of the dates are probably guess-work; most of the opinions are incompetent: it is time that some adequate mind assembled all available materials and digested them into a satisfactory book. It is hardly worth while to review the few meagre details. Borrow was born in 1803 and died in 1881; his father, a soldier, failed to make a solicitor of him, and the youth, at his father's death, came up to London to live or die by literature. After much hardship (of which the chapters in 'Lavengro' describing the production of 'Joseph Sell' convey a hint), he set out on a wandering pilgrimage over England, Europe, and the East. As agent for the British and Foreign Bible Society he traversed Spain and Portugal, sending to the Morning Herald letters descriptive of his adventures, which afterwards were made the substance of his books. He married at thirty-seven, and lived at Outton Broad nearly all his life after. His wife died a dozen years before him, in 1869. She left no children.

His first book, a translation of Klinger's 'Faust,' appeared in 1825; his last, 'The Gipsy Dictionary,' in 1874; a volume called 'Penquite and Pentyre,' on Cornwall, was announced in 1857, but seems never to have been published, 'Targum,' a collection of translations from thirty languages and dialects, was a _tour de force_ belonging to the year 1835. On the whole, Borrow was not a voluminous writer; but what he wrote tells.

AT THE HORSE-FAIR

From 'Lavengro'

"What horse is that?" said I to a very old fellow, the counterpart of the old man on the pony, save that the last wore a faded suit of velveteen, and this one was dressed in a white frock.