George Borrow and His Circle Part 1

George Borrow and His Circle.

by Clement King Shorter.

PREFACE

I have to express my indebtedness first of all to the executors of Henrietta MacOubrey, George Borrow's stepdaughter, who kindly placed Borrow's letters and ma.n.u.scripts at my disposal. To the survivor of these executors, a lady who resides in an English provincial town, I would particularly wish to render fullest acknowledgment did she not desire to escape all publicity and forbid me to give her name in print.

I am indebted to Sir William Robertson Nicoll without whose kindly and active intervention I should never have taken active steps to obtain the material to which this biography owes its princ.i.p.al value. I am under great obligations to Mr. Herbert Jenkins, the publisher, in that, although the author of a successful biography of Borrow, he has, with rare kindliness, brought me into communication with Mr. Wilfrid J.

Bowring, the grandson of Sir John Bowring. To Mr. Wilfrid Bowring I am indebted in that he has handed to me the whole of Borrow's letters to his grandfather. I have to thank Mr. James Hooper of Norwich for the untiring zeal with which he has unearthed for me a valuable series of notes including certain interesting letters concerning Borrow. Mr.

Hooper has generously placed his collection, with which he at one time contemplated writing a biography of Borrow, in my hands. I thank Dr.

Aldis Wright for reading my chapter on Edward FitzGerald; also Mr. W.H.

Peet, Mr. Aleck Abrahams, and Mr. Joseph Shaylor for a.s.sistance in the little known field of Sir Richard Phillips's life. I have further to thank my friends, Edward Clodd and Thomas J. Wise, for reading my proof-sheets. To Theodore Watts-Dunton, an untiring friend of thirty years, I have also to acknowledge abundant obligations.

C. K. S.

INTRODUCTION

It is now exactly seventeen years ago since I published a volume not dissimilar in form to this under the t.i.tle of _Charlotte Bronte and her Circle_. The t.i.tle had then an element of novelty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's _Dante and his Circle_, at the time the only book of this particular character, having quite another aim. There are now some twenty or more biographies based upon a similar plan.[1] The method has its convenience where there are earlier lives of a given writer, as one can in this way differentiate the book from previous efforts by making one's hero stand out among his friends. Some such apology, I feel, is necessary, because, in these days of the multiplication of books, every book, at least other than a work of imagination, requires ample apology.

In _Charlotte Bronte and her Circle_ I was able to claim that, even though following in the footsteps of Mrs. Gaskell, I had added some four hundred new letters by Charlotte Bronte to the world's knowledge of that interesting woman, and still more considerably enlarged our knowledge of her sister Emily. This achievement has been generously acknowledged, and I am most proud of the testimony of the most accomplished of living biographers, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, who once rendered me the following quite spontaneous tribute:

We have lately read _aloud_ for the second time your Bronte book; let alone private readings. It is unique in plan and excellence, and I am greatly obliged to you for it. Apart from the pleasure of the book, the form of it has always interested me as a professional biographer. It certainly is novel; and in this case I am pretty sure that it is right.

With such a testimony before me I cannot hesitate to present my second biography in similar form. In the case of George Borrow, however, I am not in a position to supplement one transcendent biography, as in the case of Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell. I have before me no less than four biographies of Borrow, every one of them of distinctive merit.

These are:

_Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow._ Derived from Official and other Authentic Sources. By William I. Knapp, Ph.D., LL.D. 2 vols. John Murray, 1899.

_George Borrow: The Man and his Work._ By R. A. J. Walling.

Ca.s.sell, 1908.

_The Life of George Borrow._ Compiled from Unpublished Official Doc.u.ments. His Works, Correspondence, etc. By Herbert Jenkins.

John Murray, 1912.

_George Borrow: The Man and his Books._ By Edward Thomas.

Chapman and Hall, 1912.

All of these books have contributed something of value and importance to the subject. Dr. Knapp's work it is easiest to praise because he is dead.[2] His biography of Borrow was the effort of a lifetime. A scholar with great linguistic qualifications for writing the biography of an author whose knowledge of languages was one of his t.i.tles to fame, Dr.

Knapp spared neither time nor money to achieve his purpose. Starting with an article in _The Chautauquan Magazine_ in 1887, which was reprinted in pamphlet form, Dr. Knapp came to England--to Norwich--and there settled down to write a _Life_ of Borrow, which promised at one time to develop into several volumes. As well it might, for Dr. Knapp reached Norfolk at a happy moment for his purpose. Mrs. MacOubrey, Borrow's stepdaughter, was in the humour to sell her father's ma.n.u.scripts and books. They were offered to the city of Norwich; there was some talk of Mr. Jeremiah Coleman, M.P., whose influence and wealth were overpowering in Norwich at the time, buying them. Finally, a very considerable portion of the collection came into the hands of Mr.

Webber, a bookseller of Ipswich, who later became a.s.sociated with the firm of Jarrold of Norwich. From Webber Dr. Knapp purchased the larger portion, and, as his bibliography indicates (_Life_, vol. ii. pp.

355-88), he became possessed of sundry notebooks which furnish a record of certain of Borrow's holiday tours, about a hundred letters from and to Borrow, and a considerable number of other doc.u.ments. The result, as I have indicated, was a book that abounded in new facts and is rich in new material. It was not, however, a book for popular reading. You must love the subject before you turn to this book with any zest. It is a book for your true Borrovian, who is thankful for any information about the word-master, not for the casual reader, who might indeed be alienated from the subject by this copious memoir. The result was somewhat discouraging. There were not enough of true Borrovians in those years, and the book was not received too generously. The two volumes have gone out of print and have not reached a second edition. Time however, will do them justice. As it is, your good Borrow lover has always appreciated their merits. Take Lionel Johnson for example, a good critic and a master of style. After saying that these 'lengthy and rich volumes are a monument of love's labour, but not of literary art or biographical skill,' he adds: 'Of his over eight hundred pages there is not one for which I am not grateful' and every new biographer of Borrow is bound to re-echo that sentiment. Dr. Knapp did the spade work and other biographers have but entered into his inheritance. Dr. Knapp's fine collection of Borrow books and ma.n.u.scripts was handed over by his widow to the American nation--to the Hispanic Society of New York. Dr.

Knapp's biography was followed nine years later by a small volume by Mr.

R. A. J. Walling, whose little book adds considerably to our knowledge of Borrow's Cornish relatives, and is in every way a valuable monograph on the author of _Lavengro_. Mr. Herbert Jenkins's book is more ambitious. Within four hundred closely printed pages he has compressed every incident in Borrow's career, and we would not quarrel with him nor his publisher for calling his life a 'definitive biography' if one did not know that there is not and cannot be anything 'definitive' about a biography except in the case of a Master. Boswell, Lockhart, Mrs.

Gaskell are authors who had the advantage of knowing personally the subjects of their biographies. Any biographer who has not met his hero face to face and is dependent solely on doc.u.ments is crippled in his undertaking. Moreover, such a biographer is always liable to be in a manner superseded or at least supplemented by the appearance of still more doc.u.ments. However, Mr. Jenkins's excellent biography has the advantage of many new doc.u.ments from Mr. John Murray's archives and from the Record Office Ma.n.u.scripts. His work was the first to make use of the letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society, which the Rev. T. H.

Darlow has published as a book under that t.i.tle, a book to which I owe him an acknowledgment for such use of it as I have made, as also for permission to reproduce the t.i.tle-page of Borrow's Basque version of St.

Luke's gospel. There only remains for me to say a word in praise of Mr.

Edward Thomas's fine critical study of Borrow which was published under the t.i.tle of _George Borrow: The Man and his Books_. Mr. Thomas makes no claim to the possession of new doc.u.ments. This brings me to such excuse as I can make for perpetrating a fifth biography. When Mrs. MacOubrey, Borrow's stepdaughter, the 'Hen.' of _Wild Wales_ and the affectionate companion of his later years, sold her father's books and ma.n.u.scripts--and she always to her dying day declared that she had no intention of parting with the ma.n.u.scripts, which were, she said, taken away under a misapprehension--she did not, of course, part with any of his more private doc.u.ments. All the more intimate letters of Borrow were retained. At her death these pa.s.sed to her executors, from whom I have purchased all legal rights in the publication of Borrow's. .h.i.therto unpublished ma.n.u.scripts and letters. I trust that even to those who may disapprove of the discursive method with which--solely for my own pleasure--I have written this book, will at least find a certain biographical value in the many new letters by and to George Borrow that are to be found in its pages. The book has taken me ten years to write, and has been a labour of love.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] As for example, _Garrick and his Circle_; _Johnson and his Circle_; _Reynolds and his Circle_; and even _The Empress Eugenie and her Circle_.

[2] William Ireland Knapp died in Paris in June 1908, aged seventy-four.

He was an American, and had held for many years the Chair of Modern Languages at Va.s.sar College. After eleven years in Spain he returned to occupy the Chair of Modern Languages at Yale, and later held a Professors.h.i.+p at Chicago. After his _Life of Borrow_ was published he resided in Paris until his death.

CHAPTER I

CAPTAIN BORROW OF THE WEST NORFOLK MILITIA

George Henry Borrow was born at Dumpling Green near East Dereham, Norfolk, on the 5th of July 1803. It pleased him to state on many an occasion that he was born at East Dereham.

On an evening of July, in the year 18--, at East D----, a beautiful little town in a certain district of East Anglia, I first saw the light,

he writes in the opening lines of _Lavengro_, using almost the identical phraseology that we find in the opening lines of Goethe's _Wahrheit und Dichtung_. Here is a later memory of Dereham from _Lavengro_:

What it is at present I know not, for thirty years and more have elapsed since I last trod its streets. It will scarcely have improved, for how could it be better than it was? I love to think on thee, pretty, quiet D----, thou pattern of an English country town, with thy clean but narrow streets branching out from thy modest market-place, with their old-fas.h.i.+oned houses, with here and there a roof of venerable thatch, with thy one half-aristocratic mansion, where resided the Lady Bountiful--she, the generous and kind, who loved to visit the sick, leaning on her golden-headed cane, while the sleek old footman walked at a respectful distance behind.

Pretty, quiet D----, with thy venerable church, in which moulder the mortal remains of England's sweetest and most pious bard.

Then follows an exquisite eulogy of the poet Cowper, which readers of _Lavengro_ know full well. Three years before Borrow was born William Cowper died in this very town, leaving behind him so rich a legacy of poetry and of prose, and moreover so fragrant a memory of a life in which humour and pathos played an equal part. It was no small thing for a youth who aspired to any kind of renown to be born in the neighbourhood of the last resting-place of the author of _The Task_.

Yet Borrow was not actually born in East Dereham, but a mile and a half away, at the little hamlet of Dumpling Green, in what was then a glorious wilderness of common and furze bush, but is now a quiet landscape of fields and hedges. You will find the home in which the author of _Lavengro_ first saw the light without much difficulty. It is a fair-sized farm-house, with a long low frontage separated from the road by a considerable strip of garden. It suggests a prosperous yeoman cla.s.s, and I have known farm-houses in East Anglia not one whit larger dignified by the name of 'hall.' Nearly opposite is a pond. The trim hedges are a delight to us to-day, but you must cast your mind back to a century ago when they were entirely absent. The house belonged to George Borrow's maternal grandfather, Samuel Perfrement, who farmed the adjacent land at this time. Samuel and Mary Perfrement had eight children, the third of whom, Ann, was born in 1772.

In February 1793 Ann Perfrement, aged twenty-one, married Thomas Borrow, aged thirty-five, in the Parish Church of East Dereham, and of the two children that were born to them George Henry Borrow was the younger.

Thomas Borrow was the son of one John Borrow of St. Cleer in Cornwall, who died before this child was born, and is described by his grandson[3] as the scion 'of an ancient but reduced Cornish family, tracing descent from the de Burghs, and ent.i.tled to carry their arms.'

This claim, of which I am thoroughly sceptical, is endorsed by Dr.

Knapp,[4] who, however, could find no trace of the family earlier than 1678, the old parish registers having been destroyed. When Thomas Borrow was born the family were in any case nothing more than small farmers, and Thomas Borrow and his brothers were working on the land in the intervals of attending the parish school. At the age of eighteen Thomas was apprenticed to a maltster at Liskeard, and about this time he joined the local Militia. Tradition has it that his career as a maltster was cut short by his knocking his master down in a scrimmage. The victor fled from the scene of his prowess, and enlisted as a private soldier in the Coldstream Guards. This was in 1783, and in 1792 he was transferred to the West Norfolk Militia; hence his appearance at East Dereham, where, now a serjeant, his occupations for many a year were recruiting and drilling.[5] It is recorded that at a theatrical performance at East Dereham he first saw, presumably on the stage of the county-hall, his future wife--Ann Perfrement. She was, it seems, engaged in a minor part in a travelling company, not, we may a.s.sume, altogether with the sanction of her father, who, in spite of his inheritance of French blood, doubtless shared the then very strong English prejudice against the stage. However, Ann was one of eight children, and had, as we shall find in after years, no inconsiderable strength of character, and so may well at twenty years of age have decided upon a career for herself. In any case we need not press too hard the Cornish and French origin of George Borrow to explain his wandering tendencies, nor need we wonder at the suggestion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that he was 'supposed to be of gypsy descent by the mother's side.' You have only to think of the father, whose work carried him from time to time to every corner of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of the mother with her reminiscence of life in a travelling theatrical company, to explain in no small measure the glorious vagabondage of George Borrow.

Behold then Thomas Borrow and Ann Perfrement as man and wife, he being thirty-five years of age, she twenty-one. A roving, restless life was in front of the pair for many a day, the West Norfolk Militia being stationed in some eight or nine separate towns within the interval of ten years between Thomas Borrow's marriage and his second son's birth.

The first child, John Thomas Borrow, was born on the 15th April 1801.[6]

The second son, George Henry Borrow, the subject of this memoir, was born in his grandfather's house at Dumpling Green, East Dereham, his mother having found a natural refuge with her father while her husband was busily recruiting in Norfolk. The two children pa.s.sed with their parents from place to place, and in 1809 we find them once again in East Dereham. From his son's two books, _Lavengro_ and _Wild Wales_, we can trace the father's later wanderings until his final retirement to Norwich on a pension. In 1810 the family were at Norman Cross in Huntingdons.h.i.+re, when Captain Borrow had to a.s.sist in guarding the French prisoners of war; for it was the stirring epoch of the Napoleonic conflict, and within the temporary prison 'six thousand French and other foreigners, followers of the Grand Corsican, were now immured.'

What a strange appearance had those mighty casernes, with their blank blind walls, without windows or grating, and their slanting roofs, out of which, through orifices where the tiles had been removed, would be protruded dozens of grim heads, feasting their prison-sick eyes on the wide expanse of country unfolded from that airy height. Ah! there was much misery in those casernes; and from those roofs, doubtless, many a wistful look was turned in the direction of lovely France. Much had the poor inmates to endure, and much to complain of, to the disgrace of England be it said--of England, in general so kind and bountiful. Rations of carrion meat, and bread from which I have seen the very hounds occasionally turn away, were unworthy entertainment even for the most ruffian enemy, when helpless and a captive; and such, alas! was the fare in those casernes.

But here we have only to do with Thomas Borrow, of whom we get many a quaint glimpse in _Lavengro_, our first and our last being concerned with him in the one quality that his son seems to have inherited, as the a.s.sociate of a prize-fighter--Big Ben Brain. Borrow records in his opening chapter that Ben Brain and his father met in Hyde Park probably in 1790, and that after an hour's conflict 'the champions shook hands and retired, each having experienced quite enough of the other's prowess.' Borrow further relates that four months afterwards Brain 'died in the arms of my father, who read to him the Bible in his last moments.' Dr. Knapp finds Borrow in one of his many inaccuracies or rather 'imaginings' here, as Brain did not die until 1794. More than once in his after years the old soldier seems to have had a shy pride in that early conflict, although the piety which seems to have come to him with the responsibilities of wife and children led him to count any recalling of the episode as a 'temptation.' When Borrow was about thirteen years of age, he overheard his father and mother discussing their two boys, the elder being the father's favourite and George the mother's:

'I will hear nothing against my first-born,' said my father, 'even in the way of insinuation: he is my joy and pride; the very image of myself in my youthful days, long before I fought Big Ben, though perhaps not quite so tall or strong built. As for the other, G.o.d bless the child! I love him, I'm sure; but I must be blind not to see the difference between him and his brother. Why, he has neither my hair nor my eyes; and then his countenance! why, 'tis absolutely swarthy, G.o.d forgive me! I had almost said like that of a gypsy, but I have nothing to say against that; the boy is not to be blamed for the colour of his face, nor for his hair and eyes; but, then, his ways and manners!--I confess I do not like them, and that they give me no little uneasiness.'[7]

Borrow throughout his narrative refers to his father as 'a man of excellent common sense,' and he quotes the opinion of William Taylor, who had rather a bad reputation as a 'freethinker' with all the church-going citizens of Norwich, with no little pride. Borrow is of course the 'young man' of the dialogue. He was then eighteen years of age:

'Not so, not so,' said the young man eagerly; 'before I knew you I knew nothing, and am still very ignorant; but of late my father's health has been very much broken, and he requires attention; his spirits also have become low, which, to tell you the truth, he attributes to my misconduct. He says that I have imbibed all kinds of strange notions and doctrines, which will, in all probability, prove my ruin, both here and hereafter; which--which----'

'Ah! I understand,' said the elder, with another calm whiff. 'I have always had a kind of respect for your father, for there is something remarkable in his appearance, something heroic, and I would fain have cultivated his acquaintance; the feeling, however, has not been reciprocated. I met him the other day, up the road, with his cane and dog, and saluted him; he did not return my salutation.'

'He has certain opinions of his own,' said the youth, 'which are widely different from those which he has heard that you profess.'