George Borrow and His Circle Part 35

My old Parson Crabbe is bowing down under epileptic fits, or something like, and I believe his brave old white head will soon sink into the village church sward. Why, _our_ time seems coming. Make way, gentlemen!

Borrow comes more than once into the story of FitzGerald's great translation of _Omar Khayyam_, which in our day has caused so great a sensation, and deserves all the enthusiasm that it has excited as the

'... golden Eastern lay, Than which I know no version done In English more divinely well,'

to quote Tennyson's famous eulogy. Cowell, to his after regret, for he had none of FitzGerald's _dolce far niente_ paganism, had sent FitzGerald from Calcutta, where he was, the ma.n.u.script of Omar Khayyam's _Rubaiyat_ in Persian, and FitzGerald was captured by it. Two years later, as we know, he produced the translation, which was so much more than a translation. 'Omar breathes a sort of consolation to me,' he wrote to Cowell. 'Borrow is greatly delighted with your MS. of Omar which I showed him,' he says in another letter to Cowell (June 23, 1857), 'delighted at the terseness so unusual in Oriental verse.'[216]

The next two letters by FitzGerald from my Borrow Papers are of the year 1859, the year of the first publication of the _Rubaiyat_:

To George Borrow, Esq.

10 MARINE PARADE, LOWESTOFT.

MY DEAR BORROW,--I have come here with three nieces to give them sea air and change. They are all perfectly quiet, sensible, and unpretentious girls; so as, if you will come over here any day or days, we will find you board and bed too, for a week longer at any rate. There is a good room below, which we now only use for meals, but which you and I can be quite at our sole ease in. Won't you come?

I purpose (and indeed have been some while intentioning) to go over to Yarmouth to look for you. But I write this note in hope it may bring you hither also.

Donne has got his soldier boy home from India--Freddy--I always thought him a very nice fellow indeed. No doubt life is happy enough to all of them just now. Donne has been on a visit to the Highlands--which seems to have pleased him--I have got an MS. of Bahram and his Seven Castles (Persian), which I have not yet cared to look far into. Will you? It is short, fairly transcribed, and of some repute in its own country, I hear. Cowell sent it me from Calcutta; but it almost requires _his_ company to make one devote one's time to Persian, when, with what remains of one's old English eyes, one can read the Odyssey and Shakespeare.

With compliments to the ladies, believe me, Yours very truly,

EDWARD FITZGERALD.

I didn't know you were back from your usual summer tour till Mr. Cobb told my sister lately of having seen you.

To George Borrow, Esq.

BATH HOUSE, LOWESTOFT, _October 10/59._

DEAR BORROW,--This time last year I was here and wrote to ask about you. You were gone to Scotland. Well, where are you now?

As I also said last year: 'If you be in Yarmouth and have any mind to see me I will go over some day; or here I am if you will come here. And I am quite alone. As it is I would bus it to Yarmouth but I don't know if you and yours be there at all, nor if there, whereabout. If I don't hear at all I shall suppose you are not there, on one of your excursions, or not wanting to be rooted out; a condition I too well understand. I was at Gorleston some months ago for some while; just after losing my greatest friend, the Bedfords.h.i.+re lad who was crushed to death, coming home from hunting, his horse falling on him.

He survived indeed two months, and I had been to bid him eternal adieu, so had no appet.i.te for anything but rest--rest--rest. I have just seen his widow off from here.

With kind regards to the ladies, Yours very truly,

EDWARD FITZGERALD.

In a letter to George Crabbe the third, and the grandson of the poet, in 1862, FitzGerald tells him that he has just been reading Borrow's _Wild Wales_, 'which _I_ like well because I can hear him talking it. But I don't know if others will like it.' 'No one writes better English than Borrow in general,' he says. But FitzGerald, as a lover of style, is vexed with some of Borrow's phrases, and instances one: '"The scenery was beautiful _to a degree_," _What_ degree? When did this vile phrase arise?' The criticism is just, but Borrow, in common with many other great English authors whose work will live was not uniformly a good stylist. He has many lamentable fallings away from the ideals of the stylist. But he will, by virtue of a wonderful individuality, outlive many a good stylist. His four great books are immortal, and one of them is _Wild Wales_.

We have a glimpse of FitzGerald in the following letter in my possession, by the friend who had introduced him to Borrow, William Bodham Donne:[217]

To George Borrow, Esq.

40 WEYMOUTH STREET, PORTLAND PLACE, W., _November 28/62._

MY DEAR BORROW,--Many thanks for the copy of _Wild Wales_ reserved for and sent to me by Mr. R. Cooke.[218] Before this copy arrived I had obtained one from the London Library and read it through, not exactly _stans pede in uno_, but certainly almost at a stretch. I could not indeed lay it down, it interested me so much. It is one of the very best records of home travel, if indeed so strange a country as Wales is can properly be called _home_, I have ever met with.

Immediately on closing the third volume I secured a few pages in _Fraser's Magazine_ for _Wild Wales_, for though you do not stand in need of my aid, yet my notice will not do you a mischief, and some of the reviewers of _Lavengro_ were, I recollect, shocking blockheads, misinterpreting the letter and misconceiving the spirit of that work. I have, since we met in Burlington Arcade, been on a visit to FitzGerald. He is in better spirits by far than when I saw him about the same time in last year. He has his pictures and his chattels about him, and has picked up some acquaintance among the merchants and mariners of Woodbridge, who, although far below his level, are yet better company than the two old skippers he was consorting with in 1861. They--his present friends--came in of an evening, and sat and drank and talked, and I enjoyed their talk very much, since they discussed of what they understood, which is more than I can say generally of the fine folks I occasionally (very occasionally now) meet in London. I should have said more about your book, only I wish to keep it for print: and you don't need to be told by me that it is very good.--With best regards to Mrs. Borrow and Miss Clarke, I am, yours ever truly,

W. B. DONNE.

The last letter from FitzGerald to Borrow is dated many years after the correspondence I have here printed,[219] and from it we gather that there had been no correspondence in the interval.[220] FitzGerald writes from Little Grange, Woodbridge, in January 1875, to say that he had received a message from Borrow that he would be glad to see him at Oulton. 'I think the more of it,' says FitzGerald, 'because I imagine, from what I have heard, that you have slunk away from human company as much as I have.' He hints that they might not like one another so well after a fifteen years' separation. He declares with infinite pathos that he has now severed himself from all old ties, has refused the invitations of old college friends and old schoolfellows. To him there was no companions.h.i.+p possible for his declining days other than his reflections and verses. It is a fine letter, filled with that graciousness of spirit that was ever a trait in FitzGerald's n.o.ble nature. The two men never met again. When Borrow died, in 1881, FitzGerald, who followed him two years later, suggested to Dr. Aldis Wright, afterwards to be his (FitzGerald's) executor, who was staying with him at the time, that he should look over Borrow's books and ma.n.u.scripts if his stepdaughter so desired. If this had been arranged, and Dr. Aldis Wright had written Borrow's life, there would have been no second biographer.[221]

FOOTNOTES:

[205] This was said by FitzGerald to his friend Frederick Spalding.

[206] Edward FitzGerald to George Borrow, in Knapp's _Life_, vol. ii. p.

346.

[207] _The Works of Edward FitzGerald_, vol. ii. p. 59 (Macmillan).

[208] FitzGerald was staying with his friends Mr. and Mrs. W. K. Browne.

There is no letter other than this one to Borrow to recall that visit, which is, however, referred to in the _FitzGerald Correspondence_ (Works, vol. ii. p. 75) by the following sentence:--'When in Bedfords.h.i.+re I put away almost all Books except Omar Khayyam! which I could not help looking over in a Paddock covered with b.u.t.tercups and brushed by a delicious Breeze, while a dainty racing Filly of Browne's came startling up to wonder and to snuff about me.' The 'friend' of the letter was of course Mr. W. K. Browne, who was more of an open air man than a bookman.

[209] I am indebted to Mr. Edward Heron-Allen for the information that this is the original of the last verse but one in FitzGerald's first version of the _Rubaiyat_:

r 74. Ah Moon of my Delight, who knowest no wane, The Moon of Heaven is rising once again, How oft, hereafter rising, shall she look Through this same Garden after me--in vain.

The literal translation is:

[Persian]

Since no one will guarantee thee a to-morrow, [Persian]

Make thou happy now this lovesick heart; [Persian]

Drink wine in the moonlight, O Moon, for the Moon [Persian]

Shall seek us long and shall not find us.

[210] _The Works of Edward FitzGerald_, vol. ii. p. 74 (Macmillan).

[211] _Letters of Edward FitzGerald_, vol. ii. p. 15.

[212] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 85 (Macmillan).

[213] First published in _The Sphere_, October 31, 1903. The letter was written to Mr. James Hooper of Norwich.

[214] _Works of Edward FitzGerald_, vol. ii. p. 135 (Macmillan).

[215] Published by Dr. Knapp in _Borrow's Life_, vol. ii. p. 348 (Murray).

[216] We learn from FitzGerald that Borrow's eyesight gave way about this time, and his wife had to keep all books from him.

[217] There are two or three references to Borrow in _William Bodham Donne and his Friends_, edited by Catharine B. Johnson (Methuen). The most important of these is in a letter from Donne to Bernard Barton, dated from Bury St. Edmunds, September 12th, 1848:

'We have had a great man here, and I have been walking with him and aiding him to eat salmon and mutton and drink port--George Borrow; and what is more, we fell in with some gypsies and I heard the speech of Egypt, which sounded wonderously like a medley of broken Spanish and dog Latin. Borrow's face lighted by the red turf fire of the tent was worth looking at. He is ashy white now, but twenty years ago, when his hair was like a raven's wing, he must have been hard to discriminate from a born Bohemian. Borrow is best on the tramp, if you can walk four and a half miles per hour--as I can with ease and do by choice--and can walk fifteen of them at a stretch--which I can compa.s.s also--then he will talk Iliads of adventures even better than his printed ones. He cannot abide those amateur pedestrians who saunter, and in his chair he is given to groan and be contradictory. But on Newmarket Heath, in Rougham Woods, he is at home, and specially when he meets with a thorough vagabond like your present correspondent.'