Lavengro

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LAVENGRO
THE SCHOLAR, THE GYPSY, THE PRIEST


BY
GEORGE BORROW

ILLUSTRATED BY E. J. SULLIVAN

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BUY AUGUSTINE
BIRRELL, Q.C., M.P.

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1900

_All rights reserved_

_First published in_ "_Macmillan's Illustrated Standard Novel_," 1896
_Reprinted_ 1900

{picture:George Borrow: page0.jpg}




INTRODUCTION


The author of _Lavengro_, _the Scholar_, _the Gypsy_, _and the Priest_
has after his fitful hour come into his own, and there abides securely.
Borrow's books,--carelessly written, impatient, petulant, in parts
repellant,--have been found so full of the elixir of life, of the charm
of existence, of the glory of motion, so instinct with character, and
mood, and wayward fancy, that their very names are sounds of enchantment,
whilst the fleeting scenes they depict and the deeds they describe have
become the properties and the pastimes for all the years that are still
to be of a considerable fraction of the English-speaking race.

And yet I suppose it would be considered ridiculous in these fine days to
call Borrow a great artist. His fascination, his hold upon his reader,
is not the fascination or the hold of the lords of human smiles and
tears. They enthrall us; Borrow only bewitches. Isopel Berners, hastily
limned though she be, need fear comparison with no damsel that ever lent
sweetness to the stage, relish to rhyme, or life to novel. She can hold
up her head and take her own part amidst all the Rosalinds, Beatrices,
and Lucys that genius has created and memory can muster. But how she
came into existence puzzles us not a little. Was she summoned out of
nothingness by the creative fancy of Lavengro, or did he really first set
eyes upon her in the dingle whither she came with the Flaming Tinman,
whose look Lavengro did not like at all? Reality and romance, though
Borrow made them wear double harness, are not meant to be driven
together. It is hard to weep aright over Isopel Berners. The reader is
tortured by a sense of duty towards her. This distraction prevents our
giving ourselves away to Borrow. Perhaps after all he did meet the tall
girl in the dingle, in which case he was a fool for all his pains, losing
a gift the gods could not restore.

Quite apart from this particular doubt, the reader of Borrow feels that
good luck, happy chance, plays a larger part in the charm of the
composition than is quite befitting were Borrow to be reckoned an artist.
But nobody surely will quarrel with this ingredient. It can turn no
stomach. Happy are the lucky writers! Write as they will, they are
almost certain to please. There is such a thing as 'sweet
unreasonableness.'

But no sooner is this said than the necessity for instant and substantial
qualification becomes urgent, for though Borrow's personal vanity would
have been wounded had he been ranked with the literary gentlemen who do
business in words, his anger would have been justly aroused had he been
told he did not know how to write. He did know how to write, and he
acquired the art in the usual way, by taking pains. He might with
advantage have taken more pains, and then he would have done better; but
take pains he did. In all his books he aims at producing a certain
impression on the minds of his readers, and in order to produce that
impression he was content to make sacrifices; hence his whimsicality, his
out-of-the-wayness, at once his charm and his snare, never grows into
wantonness and seldom into gross improbability. He studied effects, as
his frequent and impressive liturgical repetitions pleasingly
demonstrate. He had theories about most things, and may, for all I know,
have had a theory of cadences. For words he had no great feeling except
as a philologist, and is capable of strange abominations. 'Individual'
pursues one through all his pages, where too are 'equine species,' 'finny
tribe'; but finding them where we do even these vile phrases, and others
nearly as bad, have a certain humour.

This chance remark brings me to the real point. Borrow's charm is that
he has behind his books a character of his own, which belongs to his
books as much as to himself; something which bears you up and along as
does the mystery of the salt sea the swimmer. And this something lives
and stirs in almost every page of Borrow, whose restless, puzzling,
teasing personality pervades and animates the whole.

He is the true adventurer who leads his life, not on the Stock Exchange
amidst the bulls and bears, or in the House of Commons waiting to clutch
the golden keys, or in South Africa with the pioneers and promoters, but
with himself and his own vagrant moods and fancies. There was no need
for Borrow to travel far afield in search of adventures. Mumpers' Dell
was for him as good an environment as Mexico; a village in Spain or
Portugal served his turn as well as both the Indies; he was as likely to
meet adventures in Pall Mall as in the far Soudan. Strange things happen
to him wherever he goes; odd figures step from out the hedgerow and
engage him in wild converse; beggar-women read _Moll Flanders_ on London
Bridge; Armenian merchants cuff deaf and dumb clerks in London counting-
houses; prize-fighters, dog-fanciers, Methodist preachers, Romany ryes
and their rawnees move on and off. Why should not strange things happen
to Lavengro? Why should not strange folk suddenly make their appearance
before him and as suddenly take their departure? Is he not strange
himself? Did he not puzzle Mr. Petulengro, excite the admiration of Mrs.
Petulengro, the murderous hate of Mrs. Herne, and drive Isopel Berners
half distracted?

Nobody has, so far, attempted to write the life of George Borrow. Nor
can we wonder. How could any one dare to follow in the phosphorescent
track of _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_, or add a line or a hue to the
portraits there contained of Borrow's father and mother--the gallant
soldier who had no chance, and whose most famous engagement took place,
not in Flanders, or in Egypt, or on the banks of the Indus or Oxus, but
in Hyde Park, his foe being Big Ben Brain; and the dame of the oval face,
olive complexion, and Grecian forehead, sitting in the dusky parlour in
the solitary house at the end of the retired court shaded by lofty
poplars? I pity 'the individual' whose task it should be to travel along
the enchanted wake either of Lavengro in England or Don Jorge in Spain.
Poor would be his part; no better than that of Arthur in 'The Bothie':--

And it was told, the Piper narrating and Arthur correcting,
Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture,
He to a matter-of-fact still softening, paring, abating,
He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal,
He to the merest it-was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing,
River to streamlet reducing, and fall to slope subduing:
So it was told, the Piper narrating, corrected of Arthur.

George Borrow, like many another great man, was born in Norfolk, at East
Dereham, in 1803, and at an early age began those rambles he has made
famous, being carried about by his father, Captain Borrow, who was
chiefly employed as a recruiting officer. The reader of _Lavengro_ may
safely be left to make out his own itinerary. Whilst in Edinburgh Borrow
attended the High School, and acquired the Scottish accent. It is not
too much to say that he has managed to make even Edinburgh more romantic
simply by abiding there for a season. From Scotland he went to Ireland,
and learnt to ride, as well as to talk the Irish tongue, and to seek
etymologies wherever they were or were not to be found. But for a famous
Irish cob, whose hoofs still sound in our ears, Borrow, so he says, might
have become a mere philologist. From Ireland he returned with his
parents to Norwich, and resumed studies, which must have been, from a
schoolmaster's point of view, grievously interrupted, under the Rev.
Edward Valpy at King Edward's School. Here he seems to have been for two
or three years. Dr. Jessopp has told us the story of Borrow's dyeing his
face with walnut juice, and Valpy gravely inquiring of him, 'Borrow, are
you suffering from jaundice, or is it only dirt?' The Rajah of Sarawak,
Sir Archdale Wilson, and the Rev. James Martineau were at school with
'Lavengro.' Dr. Jessopp, who in 1859 became headmaster of King Edward's
School, and who has been a Borrovian from the beginning, found the school
tradition to be that Borrow, who never reached the sixth form, was
indolent and even stupid. In 1819,--the reader will be glad of a
date,--Borrow left school, and was articled to a solicitor in Norwich,
and sat for some eight hours every day behind a lofty deal desk copying
deeds and, it may be presumed, making abstracts of title,--a harmless
pursuit which a year or two later entirely failed to engage the attention
of young Mr. Benjamin Disraeli in Montague Place. Neither of these
distinguished men can honestly be said ever to have acquired what is
called the legal mind, a mental equipment which the younger of them had
once the effrontery to define as a talent for explaining the
self-evident, illustrating the obvious and expatiating on the
commonplace. 'By adopting the law,' says Borrow, 'I had not ceased to be
Lavengro.' He learnt Welsh when he should have been reading Blackstone.
He studied German under the direction of the once famous William Taylor
of Norwich, who in 1821 wrote to Southey: 'A Norwich young man is
construing with me Schiller's _William Tell_, with a view of translating
it for the press. His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt
German with extraordinary rapidity. Indeed, he has the gift of tongues,
and though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages--English,
Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian,
Spanish, and Portuguese. He would like to get into the office for
Foreign Affairs, but does not know how.'

It only takes five years to make an attorney, and Borrow ought therefore,
had he served out his time, to have become a gentleman by Act of
Parliament in 1824 or 1825. He did not do so, though he appears to have
remained in Norwich until after 1826. In that year appeared his
_Romantic Ballads from the Danish_, printed by Simon Wilkins of Norwich
by subscription. Dr. Jessopp opines that the _Romantic Ballads_ must
have brought their translator 'a very respectable sum after paying all
the expenses of publication.' I hope it was so, but, as Dr. Johnson once
said about the immortality of the soul, I should like more evidence of
it. When Borrow left Norwich for London, it is hard to say. It was
after the death of his father, and was not likely to have been later than
1828. His only introduction appears to have been one from William Taylor
to Sir Richard Phillips, 'the publisher' known to all readers of
_Lavengro_. Sir Richard was one of the sheriffs of London and Middlesex,
and in addition to sundry treatises on the duties of juries, was the
author of two lucubrations, respectively entitled _The Phaenomena called
by the name of Gravitation proved to be Proximate Effects of the
Orbicular and Rotary Motions of the Earth and On the New Theory of the
System of the Universe_. In Watt's _Bibliotheca Britannica_, 1824, Sir
Richard is thus contemptuously referred to: 'This personage is the editor
of _The Monthly Magazine_, in which many of his effusions may be found
with the signature of "Common Sense."' It is not too much to say that
but for Borrow this nefarious man would be utterly forgotten; as it is,
he lives for ever in the pages of _Lavengro_, a hissing and a reproach.
Authors have an ugly trick of getting the better of their publishers in
the long run. After leaving London Borrow began the wanderings described
in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_. Those concluded, probably in 1829 or
1830, he crossed the British Channel, and like another Goldsmith,
wandered on foot over the Continent of Europe, visiting France, Italy,
Austria, and Russia. Of his adventures in these countries there is
unhappily no record. In St. Petersburg he must have made a long stay,
for there he superintended the translation of the Bible into Mandschu-
Tartar, and published in 1835 his _Targum_; _or Metrical Translations
from Thirty Languages and Dialects_. In 1835 Borrow returned to London,
and being already known to the Bible Society for his biblical labours in
Russia, was offered, and accepted, the task of circulating the Scriptures
in the Spanish Peninsula. As for his labours in this field, which
occupied him so agreeably for four or five years, are they not narrated
in _The Bible in Spain_, a book first published by 'Glorious John Murray'
in three volumes in 1843? This is the book which made Borrow famous,
though his earlier work, _The Zincali_; _or an Account of the Gypsies of
Spain_ (two vols. 1841), had attracted a good deal of notice. But _The
Bible in Spain_ took readers by storm, and no wonder! Sir Robert Peel
named it in the House of Commons; its perusal imparted a new sensation,
the sensation of literature, to many a pious subscriber to the Bible
Society. The book, wherever it went,--and it went where such like books
do not often go,--carried joy and rapture with it. Young people hailed
it tumultuously and cherished it tenderly. There were four editions in
three volumes in the year of publication. What was thought of the book
by the Bible Society I do not know. Perhaps 'he of the countenance of a
lion,' of whom we read in the forty-fifth chapter of _Lavengro_, scarcely
knew what to say about it; but the precise-looking man with the
ill-natured countenance, no doubt, forbade his family to read _The Bible
in Spain_.

In 1840 Borrow married the widow of a naval officer and settled in
Norfolk, where his aged mother was still living. His house was in Oulton
Broad; and here he became a notable, the hero of many stories, and the
friend of man, provided he was neither literary nor genteel. Here also
he finished _Lavengro_ (1851), and wrote _The Romany Rye_ (1857), _Wild
Wales_ (1862), and _Romano Lavo-Lil_: _the Word-Book of the Romany_
(1874). For a time Borrow had a house in London in Hereford Square,
where his wife died in 1869. He died himself at Oulton in August 1881,
leaving behind him, so it is frequently asserted, many manuscript
volumes, including treatises on Celtic poetry, on Welsh and Cornish and
Manx literature, as well as translations from the Norse and Russ and the
jest-books of Turkey. Some, at all events, of these works were
advertised as 'ready for the press' in 1858.

_The Bible in Spain_ was a popular book, and in 1843, the year of its
publication, its author, a man of striking appearance, was much feted and
regarded by the lion-hunters of the period. Borrow did not take kindly
to the den. He was full of inbred suspicions and, perhaps, of
unreasonable demands. He resented the confinement of the dinner-table,
the impalement of the ball-room, the imprisonment of the pew. Like the
lion in Browning's poem, 'The Glove'--

You saw by the flash on his forehead,
By the hope in those eyes wide and steady,
He was leagues in the desert already,
Driving the flocks up the mountain.

He began to write _Lavengro_ in London in 1843. His thoughts went back
to his old friend Petulengro, who pronounced life to be sweet: 'There's
night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother,
all sweet things. There's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very
sweet, brother; who would wish to die?' Yes, or to live cribbed,
cabined, and confined in a London square! No wonder 'Lavengro' felt
cross and uncomfortable. Nor did he take much pleasure in the society of
the other lions of the hour, least of all of such a lion as Sir John
Bowring, M.P. Was not Bowring 'Lavengro' as much as Borrow himself? Had
he not--for there was no end to his impudence--travelled in Spain, and
actually published a pamphlet in the vernacular? Was he not meditating
translations from a score of languages he said he knew? Was he not,
furthermore, an old Radical and Republican turned genteel? Were not his
wife and daughters more than half suspected of being Jacobites, followers
of the Reverend Mr. Platitude, and addicted to 'Charley o'er the
Waterism'? Borrow did not get on with Bowring.

When Borrow shook the dust of London off his feet, and returned into
Norfolk with _Lavengro_ barely begun on his hands, he carried away with
him into his retreat the antipathies and prejudices, the whimsical
dislikes and the half-real, half-sham disappointments and chagrins which
London, that fertile mother of megrims, had bred in him, and dropped them
all into the ink with which he wrote his famous book. Gentility he
forswore. Whatever else Lavengro might turn out, genteel he was not to
be; and sure enough, when Lavengro made his appearance in 1851 genteel he
most certainly was not.

There was not the same public to welcome the Gypsy as had hailed the
Colporteur. The pious phrases which had garnished so plentifully the
earlier book had now almost wholly disappeared. There is no evidence
that Lavengro ever offered Petulengro a Bible. Even the denunciations of
Popery have a dubious sound. What is sometimes called 'the religious
world' were no longer buyers of Borrow. Nor was 'the polite world' much
better pleased. The polite reader was both puzzled and annoyed. First
of all: Was the book true--autobiography or romance? A polite reader
objects to be made a fool of. One De Foe in a couple of centuries is
enough for a polite reader. Then the glorification of ale and of gypsies
and prize-fighters--would it not be better at once to dub the book
vulgar, and so have done with it for ever? An ill-regulated book, a
strange book, a mad book, a book which condemns the world's way. If I
may judge from the reviews, this is how _Lavengro_ struck many, but by no
means all. The book had its passionate admirers, its lovers from the
first. Men, women, and boys took it to their hearts. Happy day when
_Lavengro_ first fell into boyish hands. It brought adventure and the
spirit of adventure to your doorstep. No need painfully to walk to Hull,
and there take shipping with Robinson Crusoe; no need to sail round the
world with Captain Cook, or even to shoot lions in Bechuanaland with that
prince of missionaries, Mr. Robert Moffat; for were there not gypsies on
the common half a mile from one's homestead, and a dingle at the end of
the lane? But the general verdict was, '"Lavengro" has gone too far.'

Borrow was not the man to whistle and let the world go by. His advice to
his country men and women was: 'To be courteous to everybody as Lavengro
was, but always independent like him, and if people meddle with them, to
give them as good as they bring, even as he and Isopel Berners were in
the habit of doing; and it will be as well for him to observe that he by
no means advises women to be too womanly, but, bearing the conduct of
Isopel Berners in mind, to take their own parts, and if anybody strikes
them to strike again.'

This is not the spirit which is patient under reproof. Borrow was not
going to be sentenced by the gentility party. He would fulfil his
dukkeripen. _Lavengro_ having ended abruptly enough, Borrow took .up the
tale where he had left it off; and though he kept his admirers on the
tenter-hooks for six years, did at last in 1857 give to the world _The
Romany Rye_, to which he added an Appendix. Ah! that Appendix! It is
Borrow's Apologia, and therefore must be read. It is interesting and
amusing, and is therefore easily read. But it is a cruel and outrageous
bit of writing all the same, proving, were proof needed, that it is every
whit as easy to be spiteful and envious in dells as in drawing-rooms, and
as vain and egotistical on a Norfolk Broad as in Grosvenor Square. In
this Appendix Borrow defends 'Lavengro,' both the book and the man, at
some length, and with enormous spirit. At gentility in all its
manifestations he runs amuck. The Stuarts have a chapter to themselves.
Jacobites, old and new; Papists, old and new; and, alas! Sir Walter Scott
as the father of 'Charley o'er the Waterism,' all fall by turn under the
lash of Lavengro. The attack on the memory of Sir Walter is brutal. Not
so, we may be sure, did Pearce, and Cribb, and Spring, and Big Ben Brain,
and Broughton, heroes of renown, win name and fame in the brave days of
old. They never struck a man when he was down, or gloated over a rival's
fall. However, it will not do to get angry with George Borrow. One
could never keep it up. Still, the Appendix is a pity.

Next to Borrow's vagabondage, which, though I tremble to say it, has a
decidedly literary flavour, and his delightful _camaraderie_ or
willingness to hob-a-nob with everybody, I rank his eloquence. Great is
plot, though Borrow has but little, and that little mechanical;
delightful is incident, and Borrow is full of incident--e.g. the
poisoning scene in Chapter LXXI., where will you match it, unless it be
the very differently-treated scene of the robbers' cave in _The Heart of
Midlothian_? and glorious, too, is motion, and Borrow never stagnates,
never gathers moss or mould. But great also is eloquence. 'If a book be
eloquent,' says Mr. Stevenson, that most distinguished writer, 'its words
run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers.' Eloquence is
a little unfashionable just now. We are not allowed very much of it in
our romances and travels. What are called 'situations' grow stronger
every day, and language is strong too, but outbursts, apostrophes,
rhapsodies no longer abound. Perhaps they are forbidden by Art. Nobody
is ever eloquent in real life. A man's friends would not put up with it.
But a really eloquent book is a great possession. Plots explode, and
incidents, however varied and delightful, unless lit up by the occasional
lightning-flash of true eloquence, must after a while lose their
freshness. Borrow was not afraid to be eloquent, nor were other writers
of his time. The first Lord Lytton is now a somewhat disparaged author,
nor had Borrow any affection for him, considering him to belong to the
kid-glove school; but Lytton's eloquence, though often playing him shabby
tricks, now dashing his head against the rocks of bathos, now casting him
to sprawl unbecomingly amongst the oozy weeds of sentiment, will keep him
alive for many a long day. As I write, a passage in _The Caxtons_ comes
to my mind, and as it illustrates my meaning, I will take down _The
Caxtons_ and transcribe the passage, and let those laugh who may. I will
likewise christen it 'By the Fireside':--

O young reader, whoever thou art, or reader at least who has been
young, canst thou not remember some time when, with thy wild troubles
and sorrows as yet borne in secret, thou hast come back from that
hard, stern world, which opens on thee when thou puttest thy foot out
of the threshold of home, come back to the four quiet walls, wherein
thine elders sit in peace, and seen with a sort of sad amaze how calm
and undisturbed all is there? That generation which has gone before
thee in the path of passion, the generation of thy parents (not so
many years, perchance, remote from thine own), how immovably far off,
in its still repose, it seems from thy turbulent youth. It has in it
a stillness as of a classic age, antique as the statues of the Greeks,
that tranquil monotony of routine into which those lives that preceded
thee have merged, the occupations that they have found sufficing for
their happiness by the fireside--in the arm-chair and corner
appropriated to each--how strangely they contrast thy own feverish
excitement! And they make room for thee, and bid thee welcome, and
then resettle to their hushed pursuits as if nothing had happened!
Nothing had happened! while in thy heart, perhaps, the whole world
seems to have shot from its axis, all the elements to be at war! And
you sit down, crushed by that quiet happiness which you can share no
more, and smile mechanically, and look into the fire; and, ten to one,
you say nothing till the time comes for bed, and you take up your
candle, and creep miserably to your lonely room.

This is not the eloquence of Borrow, though the thought might have been
his; it may not be in that grand style of which we hear so much and read
so little, but--and this is the substance of the matter--it is
interesting, it is moving, and worth pages of choppy dialogue. You read
it, first of all, it may be in your youth, when your heart burnt within
you as you wondered what was going to happen, but you can return to it in
sober age and read it over again with a smile it has taken a lifetime to
manufacture. And then Miss Bronte's books! what rhetoric is there! And
_Eothen_! Why has not _Eothen_ gone the way of all other traces of
Eastern travel? It has humour--delightful humour, no doubt, but it is
its eloquence, that picture of the burning, beating sun following the
traveller by day, which keeps _Eothen_ alive.