George Borrow and His Circle Part 21

I have not been particularly well since I wrote last; indeed, the weather has been so horrible that it is enough to depress anybody's spirits, and, of course, mine. I did very wrong not to bring you when I came, for without you I cannot get on at all. Left to myself a gloom comes upon me which I cannot describe.[143]

a.s.suredly no reader can peruse the following pages without recognising the true affection for his wife that is transparent in his letters to her. Arthur Dalrymple's remark that he had frequently seen Borrow and his wife travelling:

He stalking along with a huge cloak wrapped round him in all weathers, and she trudging behind him like an Indian squaw, with a carpet bag, or bundle, or small portmanteau in her arms, and endeavouring under difficulty to keep up with his enormous strides,

is clearly a travesty. 'Mrs. Borrow was devoted to her husband, and looked after business matters; and he always treated her with exceeding kindness,' is the verdict of Miss Elizabeth Jay, who was frequently privileged to visit the husband and wife at Oulton.

FOOTNOTES:

[136] All I know of Henry Clarke is contained in two little doc.u.ments in my Borrow Papers which run as follows:

'These are to Certify the Princ.i.p.al Officers and Commissioners of H.M.

Navy that Mr. Henry Clarke has Served as Mids.h.i.+pman on board H.M. s.h.i.+p _Salvador del Mundo_ under my Command from the 23 September 1810 to the date hereof, during which time he behaved with Diligence, Sobriety, and Attention, and was always obedient to Command.

Given under my Hand on board the _Salvador del Mundo_ the 4 April 1811.

JAMES NASH, _Captain_.'

'These are to Certify the Princ.i.p.al Officers and Commissioners of H.M.

Navy that Mr. Henry Clarke has Served as Mids.h.i.+pman on board H.M. s.h.i.+p _Tisiphone_ under my Command from the 20th of June 1813 to the date hereof, during which time he behaved with Diligence, Sobriety, and Attention, and was always obedient to Command.

Given under my Hand on board the _Tisiphone_ in the Needles pa.s.sage this 30th day of November 1813.

E. HODDER, _Captain_.'

[137] _Vide supra_, p. 158.

[138] Knapp's _Life_, vol. i. 189.

[139] The tombs in Oulton Churchyard bear the following inscriptions:

(1) Beneath this stone are interred in the same grave the Mortal Remains of Edmund Skepper, who died Febry. 5th, 1836, aged 69. Also Ann Skepper, his wife, who died Sept. 15th, 1835, aged 62.

(2) Beneath this stone are interred the Mortal Remains of Breame Skepper, who died May 22nd, 1837, aged 42, leaving a wife and six children to lament his severe loss.

(3) Sacred to the Memory of Lieut. Henry Clarke of His Maj.'s Royal Navy, who departed this life on the 21st of March 1818, aged 25 years, leaving a firmly attached widow and an infant daughter to lament his irreparable loss.

A further tomb commemorates the mother of George Borrow, whose epitaph is given elsewhere.

[140] The following doc.u.ment in Henrietta's handwriting is among my Borrow Papers:

'When my Grandfather died he owed a mortgage of 5000 on the Oulton Hall estate--to a Mrs. Purdy.

'At my Grandfather's death my Mother applied to her Brother for the money left to her and also the money left--beside the money owed to her daughter which is also mentioned in the Will. She was refused both, and told moreover that neither the money nor the interest would be paid to her.

'My Mother and I were living at the Cottage since the funeral of my Grandfather--the Skeppers removed to the Hall. The Estate was to be sold--and my Mother and myself were to be paid. 'My Mother mentioned this to her solicitor, who hastened back to Norwich and got 5000--which he carried to the old lady, Mrs. Purdy, next day and paid off the mortgage. My Mother then was mortgagee in possession--after which she let the place for what she could get--this accounts for the whole affair and the whole confusion.

'My Mother was a Widow at this time and remained so for some time after--consequently all transactions took place with her and not with Mr. Borrow--she being afterwards married to Mr. Borrow without a settlement.

'After this, in 1844, the place was again put up by public auction and bought in by Mr. Borrow and my Mother.'

[141] Knapp's _Life_, vol. i. pp. 330, 331.

[142] The following suggestion has, however, been made to me by a friend of Henrietta MacOubrey _nee_ Clarke:

'I think Borrow intended "Carreta" for "dearest," It is impossible to think that he would call his wife a "cart." Perhaps he intended "Carreta" for "Querida." Probably their p.r.o.nunciation was not Castillian, and they spelled the word as they p.r.o.nounced it. In speaking of her to "Hen." Borrow always called her "Mamma." Mrs. MacOubrey took a great fancy to me because she said I was like "Mamma." She meant in character, not in person.'

[143] Dr. Knapp: _Life_, vol. ii p. 39.

CHAPTER XXI

'THE CHILDREN OF THE OPEN AIR'

Behold George Borrow, then, in a comfortable home on the banks of Oulton Broad--a family man. His mother--sensible woman--declines her son's invitation to live with the newly-married pair. She remains in the cottage at Norwich where her husband died. The Borrows were married in April 1840, by May they had settled at Oulton. It was a pleasantly secluded estate, and Borrow's wife had 450 a year. He had, a month before his marriage, written to Mr. Brandram to say that he had a work nearly ready for publication, and 'two others in a state of forwardness.' The t.i.tle of the first of these books he enclosed in his letter. It was _The Zincali: Or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain_. Mr.

Samuel Smiles, in his history of the House of Murray--_A Publisher and his Friends_--thus relates the circ.u.mstances of its publication:--

In November 1840 a tall, athletic gentleman in black called upon Mr. Murray offering a MS. for perusal and publication....

Mr. Murray could not fail to be taken at first sight with this extraordinary man. He had a splendid physique, standing six feet two in his stockings, and he had brains as well as muscles, as his works sufficiently show. The book now submitted was of a very uncommon character, and neither the author nor the publisher were very sanguine about its success. Mr. Murray agreed, after perusal, to print and publish 750 copies of _The Gypsies of Spain_, and divide the profits with the author.

It was at the suggestion of Richard Ford, then the greatest living English authority on Spain, that Mr. Murray published the book. It did not really commence to sell until _The Bible in Spain_ came a year or so later to bring the author reputation.[144] From November 1840 to June 1841 only three hundred copies had been sold in spite of friendly reviews in some half dozen journals, including _The Athenaeum_ and _The Literary Gazette_. The first edition, it may be mentioned, contained on its t.i.tle-page a description of the author as 'late agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society in Spain.'[145] There is very marked compression in the edition now in circulation, and a perusal of the first edition reveals many interesting features that deserve to be restored for the benefit of the curious. But nothing can make _The Zincali_ a great piece of literature. It was summarised by the _Edinburgh Review_ at the time as 'a hotch-potch of the jockey, tramper, philologist, and missionary.' That description, which was not intended to be as flattering as it sounds to-day, appears more to apply to _The Bible in Spain_. But _The Zincali_ is too confused, too ill-arranged a book to rank with Borrow's four great works. There are pa.s.sages in it, indeed, so eloquent, so romantic, that no lover of Borrow's writings can afford to neglect them. But this was not the book that gypsy-loving Borrow, with the temperament of a Romany, should have written, or could have written had he not been obsessed by the 'science' of his subject.

His real work in gypsydom was to appear later in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_. For Borrow was not a man of science--a philologist, a folk-lorist of the first order.

No one, indeed, who had read only _The Zincali_ among Borrow's works could see in it any suspicion of the writer who was for all time to throw a glamour over the gypsy, to make the 'children of the open air' a veritable cult, to earn for him the t.i.tle of 'the walking lord of gypsy lore,' and to lay the foundations of an admirable succession of books both in fact and fiction--but not one as great as his own. The city of Seville, it is clear, with sarcastic letters from Bible Society secretaries on one side, and some manner of love romance on the other, was not so good a place for an author to produce a real book as Oulton was to become. Richard Ford hit the nail on the head when he said with quite wonderful prescience:

How I wish you had given us more about yourself, instead of the extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing about gypsies! I shall give you the _rap_, on that, and a hint to publish your whole adventures for the last twenty years.[146]

Henceforth Borrow was to write about himself and to become a great author in consequence. For in writing about himself as in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ he was to write exactly as he felt about the gypsies, and to throw over them the glamour of his own point of view, the view of a man who loved the broad highway and those who sojourned upon it. In _The Gypsies of Spain_ we have a conventional estimate of the gypsies.

'There can be no doubt that they are human beings and have immortal souls,' he says, even as if he were writing a letter to the Bible Society. All his anecdotes about the gypsies are unfavourable to them, suggestive only of them as knaves and cheats. From these pictures it is a far cry to the creation of Jasper Petulengro and Isopel Berners. The most noteworthy figure in _The Zincali_ is the gypsy soldier of Valdepenas, an unholy rascal. 'To lie, to steal, to shed human blood'--these are the most marked characteristics with which Borrow endows the gypsies of Spain. 'Abject and vile as they have ever been, the gitanos have nevertheless found admirers in Spain,' says the author who came to be popularly recognised as the most enthusiastic admirer of the gypsies in Spain and elsewhere. Read to-day by the lover of Borrow's other books _The Zincali_ will be p.r.o.nounced a readable collection of anecdotes, interspersed with much dull matter, with here and there a piece of admirable writing. But the book would scarcely have lived had it not been followed by four works of so fine an individuality. Well might Ford ask Borrow for more about himself and less of the extracts from 'blunder-headed old Spaniards.' When Borrow came to write about himself he revealed his real kindness for the gypsy folk. He gave us Jasper Petulengro and the incomparable description of 'the wind on the heath.' He kindled the imagination of men, proclaimed the joys of vagabondage in a manner that thrilled many hearts. He had some predecessors and many successors, but 'none could then, or can ever again,' says the biographer of a later Rye, 'see or hear of Romanies without thinking of Borrow.'[147] In her biography of one of these successors in gypsy lore, Charles G.o.dfrey Leland, Mrs. Pennell discusses the probability that Borrow and Leland met in the British Museum. That is admitted in a letter from Leland to Borrow in my possession. To this letter Borrow made no reply. It was wrong of him. But he was then--in 1873--a prematurely old man, worn out and saddened by neglect and a sense of literary failure. For this and for the other vagaries of those latter years Borrow will not be judged harshly by those who read his story here. Nothing could be more courteous than Borrow's one letter to Leland, written in the failing handwriting--once so excellent--of the last sad decade of his life:

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN APPLICATION FOR A BOOK IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, WITH BORROWS SIGNATURE]

22 HEREFORD SQUARE, BROMPTON, _Nov. 2, 1871._

SIR,--I have received your letter and am gratified by the desire you express to make my acquaintance. Whenever you please to come I shall be happy to see you.--Yours truly,

GEORGE BORROW.[148]

The meeting did not, through Leland's absence from London, then take place. Two years later it was another story. The failing powers were more noteworthy. Borrow was by this time dead to the world, as the doc.u.ments before me abundantly testify. It is not, therefore, necessary to a.s.sume, as Leland's friends have all done, that Borrow never replied because he was on the eve of publis.h.i.+ng a book of his own about the gypsies. There seems no reason to a.s.sume, as Dr. Knapp does and as Leland does, that this was the reason for the unanswered letter:

To George Borrow, Esq.

LANGHAM HOTEL, PORTLAND PLACE, _March 31st, 1873._