George Borrow and His Circle Part 18

MY DEAR MOTHER,--I should have written to you before I left Madrid, but I had a long and dangerous journey to make, and I wished to get it over before saying anything to you. I am now safely arrived, by the blessing of G.o.d, in Seville, which, in my opinion, is the most delightful town in the world. If it were not a strange place with a strange language I know you would like to live in it, but it is rather too late in the day for you to learn Spanish and accommodate yourself to Spanish ways. Before I left Madrid I accomplished a great deal, having sold upwards of one thousand Testaments and nearly five hundred Bibles, so that at present very few remain; indeed, not a single Bible, and I was obliged to send away hundreds of people who wanted to purchase, but whom I could not supply. All this has been done without the slightest noise or disturbance or anything that could give cause of displeasure to the government, so that I am now on very good terms with the authorities, though they are perfectly aware of what I am about. Should the Society think proper to be guided by the experience which I have acquired, and my knowledge of the country and the people, they might if they choosed sell at least twelve thousand Bibles and Testaments yearly in Spain, but let them adopt or let any other people adopt any other principle than that on which I act and everything will miscarry. All the difficulties, as I told my friends the time I was in England, which I have had to encounter were owing to the faults and imprudencies of other people, and, I may say, still are owing. Two Methodist schoolmasters have lately settled at Cadiz, and some little time ago took it into their heads to speak and preach, as I am informed, against the Virgin Mary; information was instantly sent to Madrid, and the blame, or part of it, was as usual laid to me; however, I found means to clear myself, for I have powerful friends in Madrid, who are well acquainted with my views, and who interested themselves for me, otherwise I should have been sent out of the country, as I believe the two others have been or will be. I have said nothing on this point in my letters home, as people would perhaps say that I was lukewarm, whereas, on the contrary, I think of nothing but the means best adapted to promote the cause; but I am not one of those disposed to run a s.h.i.+p on a rock when only a little skill is necessary to keep her in the open sea.

I hope Mrs. Clarke will write shortly; tell her if she wishes for a retreat I have found one here for her and Henrietta. I have my eye on a beautiful one at fifteen pence a day. I call it a small house, though it is a paradise in its way, having a stable, court-yard, fountain, and twenty rooms. She has only to write to my address at Madrid and I shall receive the letter without fail. Henrietta had better bring with her a Spanish grammar and pocket dictionary, as not a word of English is spoken here. The house-dog--perhaps a real English bulldog would be better--likewise had better come, as it may be useful.

G.o.d bless you therefore for the present, my dearest mother.

GEORGE BORROW.

Borrow had need of friends more tolerant of his idiosyncrasies than the 'powerful friends' he describes to his mother, for the Secretary of the Bible Society was still in a critical mood:--

You narrate your perilous journey to Seville, and say at the beginning of the description, 'my usual wonderful good fortune accompanying us.' This is a mode of speaking to which we are not accustomed--it savours, some of our friends would say, a little of the profane.[124]

On 29th July 1839 Borrow was instructed by his Committee to return to England, but he was already on the way to Tangier, whence in September he wrote a long and interesting letter to Mr. Brandram, which was afterwards incorporated in _The Bible in Spain_. He had left Mrs. Clarke and her daughter in Seville, and they joined him at Gibraltar later. We find him _en route_ for Tangier, staying two days with Mr. John M.

Brackenbury, the British Consul in Cadiz, who found him a most fascinating man.

His Tangier life is fully described in _The Bible in Spain_. Here he picked up a Jewish youth, Hayim Ben Attar, who returned to Spain as his servant, and afterwards to England.

Borrow, at the end of September, was back again in Seville, in his house near the cathedral, in the Plazuela de la Pila Seca, which, when I visited Seville in the spring of this year (1913), I found had long been destroyed to make way for new buildings. Here he received the following letter from Mr. George Browne of the Bible Society:--

To Mr. Borrow

BIBLE HOUSE, _Oct. 7, 1839._

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Mr. Brandram and myself being both on the eve of a long journey, I have only time to inform you that yours of the 2d ult. from Tangier, and 21st from Cadiz came to hand this morning. Before this time you have doubtless received Mr.

Brandram's letter, accompanying the resolution of the Comee., of which I apprised you, but which was delayed a few days, for the purpose of reconsideration. We are not able to suggest precisely the course you should take in regard to the books left at Madrid and elsewhere, and how far it may be absolutely necessary or not for you to visit that city again before you return. The books you speak of, as at Seville, may be sent to Gibraltar rather than to England, as well as any books you may deem it expedient or find it necessary to bring out of the country. As soon as your arrangements are completed we shall look for the pleasure of seeing you in this country. The haste in which I am compelled to write allows me to say no more than that my best wishes attend you, and that I am, with sincere regard, yours truly,

G. BROWNE.

I thank you for your kind remembrance of Mrs. Browne. Did I thank you for your letter to her? She feels, I a.s.sure you, very much obliged. Your description of Tangier will be another interesting 'morceau' for her.

'Where is Borrow?' asked the Bible Society meanwhile of the Consuls at Seville and Cadiz, but Borrow had ceased to care. He hoped to become a successful author with his _Gypsies_; he would at any rate secure independence by marriage, which must have been already mooted. In November he and Mrs. Clarke were formally betrothed, and would have been married in Spain, but a Protestant marriage was impossible there.

When preparing to leave Seville he had one of those fiery quarrels, with which his life was to be studded. This time it was with an official of the city over a pa.s.sport, and the official promptly locked him up, for thirty hours. Hence the following letter in response to his complaint.

The writer is Mr., afterwards Sir, George Jerningham, then Secretary of Legation at Madrid, who it may be mentioned came from Costessey, four miles from Norwich. It is written from the British Legation, and is dated 23rd December 1839:

I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your two letters, the one without date, the second dated the _19th November_ (which however ought to have been _December_), respecting the outrageous conduct pursued towards you at Seville by the Alcalde of the district in which you resided. I lost no time in addressing a strong representation thereon to the Spanish Minister, and I have to inform you that he has acquainted me with his having written to Seville for exact information upon the whole subject, and that he has promised a further answer to my representation as soon as his inquiries shall have been answered. In the meantime I shall not fail to follow up your case with proper activity.

Borrow was still in Seville, hard at work upon the _Gypsies_, all through the first three months of the year 1840. In April the three friends left Cadiz for London. A letter of this period from Mr.

Brackenbury, the British Consul at Cadiz, is made clear by these facts:

To George Borrow, Esq.

BRITISH CONSULATE, CADIZ, _January 27th, 1840._

MY DEAR SIR,--I received on the 19th your very acceptable letter without date, and am heartily rejoiced to find that you have received satisfaction for the insult, and that the Alcalde is likely to be punished for his unjustifiable conduct. If you come to Cadiz your baggage may be landed and deposited at the gates to be s.h.i.+pped with yourselves wherever the steamer may go, in which case the authorities would not examine it, if you bring it into Cadiz it would be examined at the gates--or, if you were to get it examined at the Custom House at Seville and there sealed with the seal of the Customs--it might then be trans.h.i.+pped into the steamer or into any other vessel without being subjected to any examination. If you take your horse, the agents of the steamer ought to be apprized of your intention, that they may be prepared, which I do not think they generally are, with a suitable box.

Consuls are not authorised to unite Protestant subjects in the bonds of Holy Matrimony in popish countries--which seems a peculiar hards.h.i.+p, because popish priests could not, if they would--hence in Spain no Protestants can be legally married.

Marriages solemnised abroad according to the law of that land wheresoever the parties may at the time be inhabitants are valid--but the law of Spain excludes their priests from performing these ceremonies where both parties are Protestants--and where one is a Papist, except a dispensation be obtained from the Pope. So you must either go to Gibraltar--or wait till you arrive in England. I have represented the hards.h.i.+p of such a case more than once or twice to Government. In my report upon the Consular Act, 6 Geo. IV.

cap. 87--eleven years ago--I suggested that provision should be made to legalise marriages solemnised by the Consul within the Consulate, and that such marriages should be registered in the Consular Office--and that duly certified copies thereof should be equivalent to certificates of marriages registered in any church in England. These suggestions not having been acted upon, I brought the matter under the consideration of Lord John Russell (I being then in England at the time of his altering the Marriage Act), and proposed that Consuls abroad should have the power of magistrates and civil authorities at home for receiving the declarations of British subjects who might wish to enter into the marriage state--but they feared lest the introduction of such a clause, simple and efficacious as it would have been, might have endangered the fate of the Bill; and so we are as Protestants deprived of all power of being legally married in Spain.

What sort of a horse is your hack?--What colour? What age?

Would he carry me?--What his action? What his price? Because if in all these points he would suit me, perhaps you would give me the refusal of him. You will of course enquire whether your Arab may be legally exported.

All my family beg to be kindly remembered to you.--I am, my dear sir, most faithfully yours,

J. M. BRACKENBURY.

There is a young gentleman here, who is in Spain partly on account of his health--partly for literary purposes. I will give him, with your leave, a line of introduction to you whenever he may go to Seville. He is the Honourable R. Dundas Murray, brother of Lord Elibank, a Scottish n.o.bleman.

FOOTNOTES:

[111] _Norfolk Chronicle_, 17th October 1835.

[112] Secretary Samuel Brandram, writing to Borrow from the office of the Bible Society in October 1835, gave clear indication that the Society was uncertain how next to utilise Borrow's linguistic and missionary talents. Should he go to Portugal or to China was the question. In November the committee had decided on Portugal, although they thought it probable that Borrow would 'eventually go to China,'

'With Portugal he is already acquainted,' said Mr. Brandram in a letter of introduction to the Rev. E. Whitely, the British chaplain in Oporto.

So that Borrow must really have wandered into Portugal in that earlier and more melancholy apprentices.h.i.+p to vagabondage concerning which there is so much surmise and so little knowledge. Had he lied about his acquaintance with Portugal he would certainly have been 'found out' by this Portuguese acquaintance, with whom he had much social intercourse.

[113] The reader who finds Borrow's _Bible in Spain_ insufficient for his account of that period, and I am not of the number, may turn to the _Letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society_, from which we have already quoted, or to Mr. Herbert Jenkins's _Life of George Borrow_. In the former book the greater part of 500 closely-printed pages is taken up with repet.i.tions of the story as told in _The Bible in Spain_, or with additions which Borrow deliberately cancelled in the work in question. In Mr. Jenkins's _Life_ he will find that out of a solid volume of 496 pages exactly 212 are occupied with Borrow's a.s.sociation with the Peninsula and his work therein. To the enthusiast who desires to supplement _The Bible in Spain_ with valuable annotation I cordially commend both these volumes.

[114] Who that has visited Spain can for a moment doubt but that, if Napoleon had really conquered the Peninsula and had been able to put his imprint upon it as he did upon Italy, the Spain of to-day would have become a much greater country than it is at present--than it will be in a few short years.

[115] _The Bible in Spain_, ch. xlii.

[116] The Old and New Testament, in ten volumes, were first issued in Spanish at Valencia in 1790-93. When in Madrid I picked up on a second-hand bookstall a copy of a cheap Spanish version of Scio's New Testament, which bears a much earlier date than the one Borrow carried.

It was published, it will be noted, two years before Borrow published his translation of Klinger's ribald book _Faustus_:--

'El Nuevo Testamento, Traducido al Espanol de la Vulgata Latina por el Rmo. P. Philipe Scio de S. Miguel. Paris: En la Imprenta de J. Smith, 1823,'

[117] This kind of interpretation is not restricted to the youthful Sunday School teacher. At a meeting of the Bible Society held at Norwich--Borrow's own city--on 29th May 1913, Mrs. Florence Barclay, the author of many popular novels, thus addressed the gathering. I quote from the _Eastern Daily Press_: 'She had heard sometimes a shallow form of criticism which said that it was impossible that in actual reality any man should have lived and breathed three days and three nights in the interior of a fish. Might she remind the meeting that the Lord Jesus Christ, who never made mistakes, said Himself, "As Jonah was three days and three nights in the interior of the sea monster." Please note that in the Greek the word was not "whale," but "sea monster." And then, let us remember, that we were told that the Lord G.o.d had prepared the great fish in order that it should swallow Jonah. She did suggest that if mere man nowadays could construct a submarine, which went down to the depths of the ocean and came up again when he pleased, it did not require very much faith to believe that Almighty G.o.d could specially prepare a great fish which should rescue His servant, to whom He meant to give another chance, from the depths of the sea, and land him in due course upon the sh.o.r.e. (Applause).' These crude views, which ignored the symbolism of Nineveh as a fish, now universally accepted by educated people, were not, however, endorsed by Dr. Beeching, the learned Dean of Norwich, who in the same gathering expressed the point of view of more scholarly Christians:--'He would not distinguish inspired writing from fiction. He would say there could be inspired fiction just as well as inspired facts, and he would point to the story of the prodigal son as a wonderful example from the Bible of inspired fiction. There were a good many other examples in the Old Testament, and he had not the faintest doubt that the story of Jonah was one. It was on the same level as the prodigal son. It was a story told to teach the people a distinct truth.'

[118] When in Madrid in May 1913 I called upon Mr. William Summers, the courteous Secretary of the Madrid Branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society in the Flor Alta. Mr. Summers informs me that the issues of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Bibles and Testaments, in Spain for the past three years are as follows:

Year. Bibles. Testaments. Portions. Total. 1910, 5,309 8,971 70,594 84,874 1911, 5,665 11,481 79,525 96,671 1912, 9,083 11,842 85,024 105,949

The Calle del Principe is now rapidly being pulled down and new buildings taking the place of those Borrow knew.

[119] _Embeo e Majaro Lucas. El Evangelio segun S. Lucas traducido al Romani o dialecto de los Gitanos de Espana_, 1857. Two later copies in my possession bear on their t.i.tle-pages 'Lundra, 1871' and 'Lundra, 1872.' But the Bible Society in Spain has long ceased to handle or to sell any gypsy version of St. Luke's Gospel.

[120] And in Darlow's _Letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society_, pp. 180-4.

[121] Darlow, _Letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society_.

[122] The story of all the negotiations concerning this imprisonment and release is told by Dr. Knapp (_Life_, vol. i, pp. 279-297), and is supplemented by Mr. Herbert Jenkins by valuable doc.u.ments from the Foreign Office Papers at the Record Office.

[123] Printed by Mr. Darlow in _Letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society_, pp. 359-379.

[124] Darlow, _George Borrow's Letters to the Bible Society_, p. 414.