George Borrow and His Circle Part 6

[34] See _The Gurneys of Earlham_ by Augustus J. C. Hare, 2 vols., 1895; _Memoirs of Joseph Gurney; with Selections from his Journal and Correspondence_, edited by Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, 2 vols., 1834.

CHAPTER VI

GEORGE BORROW'S NORWICH--THE TAYLORS

With the famous 'Taylors of Norwich' Borrow seems to have had no acquaintance, although he went to school with a connection of that family, James Martineau. These socially important Taylors were in no way related to William Taylor of that city, who knew German literature, and scandalised the more virtuous citizens by that, and perhaps more by his fondness for wine and also for good English beer--a drink over which his friend Borrow was to become lyrical. When people speak of the Norwich Taylors they refer to the family of Dr. John Taylor, who in 1783 was elected to the charge of the Presbyterian congregation in Norwich. His eldest son, Richard, married Margaret, the daughter of a mayor of Norwich of the name of Meadows; and Sarah, another daughter of that same wors.h.i.+pful mayor, married David Martineau, grandson of Gaston Martineau, who fled from France at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[35] Harriet and James Martineau were grandchildren of this David. The second son of Richard and Margaret Taylor was John, who married Susannah Cook. Susannah is the clever Mrs. John Taylor of this story, and her daughter of even greater ability was Sarah Austin, the wife of the famous jurist. Their daughter married Sir Alexander Duff-Gordon. She was the author of _Letters from Egypt_, a book to which George Meredith wrote an 'Introduction,' so much did he love the writer.

Lady Duff-Gordon's daughter, Janet Ross, wrote the biography of her mother, her grandmother, and Mrs. John Taylor, in _Three Generations of Englishwomen_. A niece, Lena Duff-Gordon (Mrs. Waterfield), has written pleasant books of travel, and so, for five generations, this family has produced clever women-folk. But here we are only concerned with Mrs.

John Taylor, called by her friends the 'Madame Roland of Norwich.' Lucy Aikin describes how she 'darned her boy's grey worsted stockings while holding her own with Southey, Brougham, or Mackintosh.' One of her daughters married Henry Reeve, and, as I have said, another married John Austin. Borrow was twenty years of age and living in Norwich when Mrs.

Taylor died. It is to be regretted that in the early impressionable years his position as a lawyer's clerk did not allow of his coming into a circle in which he might have gained certain qualities of _savoir faire_ and _joie de vivre_, which he was all his days to lack. Of the Taylor family the Duke of Suss.e.x said that they reversed the ordinary saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man. The witticism has been attributed to Sydney Smith, but Mrs. Ross gives evidence that it was the Duke's--the youngest son of George III. In his _Life of Sir James Mackintosh_ Basil Montagu, referring to Mrs. John Taylor, says:

Norwich was always a haven of rest to us, from the literary society with which that city abounded. Dr. Sayers we used to visit, and the high-minded and intelligent William Taylor; but our chief delight was in the society of Mrs. John Taylor, a most intelligent and excellent woman, mild and una.s.suming, quiet and meek, sitting amidst her large family, occupied with her needle and domestic occupations, but always a.s.sisting, by her great knowledge, the advancement of kind and dignified sentiment and conduct.

We note here the reference to 'the high-minded and intelligent William Taylor,' because William Taylor, whose influence upon Borrow's destiny was so p.r.o.nounced, has been revealed to many by the slanders of Harriet Martineau, that extraordinary compound of meanness and generosity, of poverty-stricken intelligence and rich endowment. In her _Autobiography_, published in 1877, thirty-four years after Robberds's _Memoir of William Taylor_, she dwells upon the drinking propensities of William Taylor, who was a schoolfellow of her father's. She admits, indeed, that Taylor was an ideal son, whose 'exemplary filial duty was a fine spectacle to the whole city,' and she continues:

His virtues as a son were before our eyes when we witnessed his endurance of his father's brutality of temper and manners, and his watchfulness in ministering to the old man's comfort in his infirmities. When we saw, on a Sunday morning, William Taylor guiding his blind mother to chapel ... we could forgive anything that had shocked or disgusted us at the dinner-table.

Well, Harriet Martineau is not much to be trusted as to Taylor's virtues or his vices, for her early recollections are frequently far from the mark. Thus she refers under the date 1833 to the fact that:

The great days of the Gurneys were not come yet. The remarkable family from which issued Mrs. Fry and Joseph John Gurney were then a set of das.h.i.+ng young people, dressed in gay riding habits and scarlet boots, and riding about the country to b.a.l.l.s and gaieties of all sorts.

As a matter of fact, in this year, 1833, Mrs. Fry was the mother of fifteen children, and had nine grandchildren, and Joseph John Gurney had been twice a widower. Both brother and sister were zealous philanthropists at this date. And so we may take with some measure of qualification Harriet Martineau's many strictures upon Taylor's drinking habits, which were, no doubt, those of his century and epoch; although perhaps beyond the acceptable standard of Norwich, where the Gurneys were strong teetotallers, and the Bishop once invited Father Mathew, then in the glory of his temperance crusade, to discourse in his diocese. Indeed, Robberds, his biographer, tells us explicitly that these charges of intemperance were 'grossly and unjustly exaggerated.'

William Taylor's life is pleasantly interlinked with Scott and Southey.

Lucy Aikin records that she heard Sir Walter Scott declare to Mrs.

Barbauld that Taylor had laid the foundations of his literary career--had started him upon the path of glory through romantic verse to romantic prose, from _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ to _Waverley_. It was the reading of Taylor's translation of Burger's _Lenore_ that did all this. 'This, madam,' said Scott, 'was what made me a poet. I had several times attempted the more regular kinds of poetry without success, but here was something that I thought I could do.' Southey a.s.suredly loved Taylor, and each threw at the feet of the other the abundant literary learning that both possessed. This we find in a correspondence which, reading more than a century after it was written, still has its charm.[36] The son of a wealthy manufacturer of Norwich, Taylor was born in that city in 1765. He was in early years a pupil of Mrs. Barbauld. At fourteen he was placed in his father's counting-house, and soon afterwards was sent abroad, in the company of one of the partners, to acquire languages. He learnt German thoroughly at a time when few Englishmen had acquaintance with its literature. To Goethe's genius he never did justice, having been offended by that great man's failure to acknowledge a book that Taylor sent to him, exactly as Carlyle and Borrow alike were afterwards offended by similar delinquencies on the part of Walter Scott. When he settled again in Norwich he commenced to write for the magazines, among others for Sir Richard Phillips's _Monthly Magazine_, and to correspond with Southey.

At the time Southey was a poor man, thinking of abandoning literature for the law, and hopeful of practising in Calcutta. The Norwich Liberals, however, aspired to a newspaper to be called _The Iris_.

Taylor asked Southey to come to Norwich and to become its editor.

Southey declined and Taylor took up the task. The _Norwich Iris_ lasted for two years. Southey never threw over his friends.h.i.+p for Taylor, although their views ultimately came to be far apart. Writing to Taylor in 1803 he says:

Your theology does nothing but mischief; it serves only to thin the miserable ranks of Unitarianism. The regular troops of infidelity do little harm; and their trumpeters, such as Voltaire and Paine, not much more. But it is such pioneers as Middleton, and you and your German friends, that work underground and sap the very citadel. That _Monthly Magazine_ is read by all the Dissenters--I call it the Dissenters'

Obituary--and here are you eternally mining, mining, under the shallow faith of their half-learned, half-witted, half-paid, half-starved pastors.

But the correspondence went on apace, indeed it occupies the larger part of Robberds's two substantial volumes. It is in the very last letter from Taylor to Southey that we find an oft-quoted reference to Borrow.

The letter is dated 12th March 1821:

A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller's _Wilhelm Tell_ with the 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.

Although this was the last letter to Southey that is published in the memoir, Taylor visited Southey at Keswick in 1826. Taylor's three volumes of the _Historic Survey of German Poetry_ appeared in 1828, 1829, and 1830. Sir Walter Scott, in the last year of his life, wrote from Abbotsford on 23rd April 1832 to Taylor to protest against an allusion to 'William Scott of Edinburgh' being the author of a translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen_. Scott explained that he (Walter Scott) was that author, and also made allusion to the fact that he had borrowed with acknowledgment two lines from Taylor's _Lenore_ for his own--

Tramp, tramp along the land, Splash, splash across the sea.

adding that his recollection of the obligation was infinitely stronger than of the mistake. It would seem, however, that the name 'William' was actually on the t.i.tle-page of the London edition of 1799 of _Goetz von Berlichingen_. When Southey heard of the death of Taylor in 1836 he wrote:

I was not aware of my old friend's illness, or I should certainly have written to him, to express that unabated regard which I have felt for him eight-and-thirty years, and that hope which I shall ever feel, that we may meet in the higher state of existence. I have known very few who equalled him in talents--none who had a kinder heart; and there never lived a more dutiful son, or a sincerer friend.

Taylor's many books are now all forgotten. His translation of Burger's _Lenore_ one now only recalls by its effect upon Scott; his translation of Lessing's _Nathan the Wise_ has been superseded. His voluminous _Historic Survey of German Poetry_ only lives through Carlyle's severe review in the _Edinburgh Review_[37] against the many strictures in which Taylor's biographer attempts to defend him. Taylor had none of Carlyle's inspiration. Not a line of his work survives in print in our day, but it was no small thing to have been the friend and correspondent of Southey, whose figure in literary history looms larger now than it did when Emerson asked contemptuously, 'Who's Southey?'; and to have been the wise mentor of George Borrow is in itself to be no small thing in the record of letters. There is a considerable correspondence between Taylor and Sir Richard Phillips in Robberds's _Memoir_, and Phillips seemed always anxious to secure articles from Taylor for the _Monthly_, and even books for his publis.h.i.+ng-house. Hence the introduction from Taylor that Borrow carried to London might have been most effective if Phillips had had any use for poor and impracticable would-be authors.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] _Three Generations of Englishwomen_, by Janet Ross, vol. i, p. 3.

[36] _A Memoir of the Life and Writings of William Taylor of Norwich: Containing his Correspondence of many years with the late Robert Southey, Esquire, and Original Letters from Sir Walter Scott and other Eminent Literary Men_. Compiled and edited by J. W. Robberds of Norwich, 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1843.

[37] Reprinted in Carlyle's _Miscellanies_.

CHAPTER VII

GEORGE BORROW'S NORWICH--THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL

When George Borrow first entered Norwich after the long journey from Edinburgh, Joseph John Gurney, born 1788, was twenty-six years of age, and William Taylor, born 1765, was forty-nine. Borrow was eleven years of age. Captain Borrow took temporary lodgings at the Crown and Angel Inn in St. Stephen's Street, George was sent to the Grammar School, and his elder brother started to learn drawing and painting with John Crome ('Old Crome') of many a fine landscape. But the wanderings of the family were not yet over. Napoleon escaped from Elba, and the West Norfolk Militia were again put on the march. This time it was Ireland to which they were destined, and we have already shadowed forth, with the help of _Lavengro_, that momentous episode. The victory of Waterloo gave Europe peace, and in 1816 the Borrow family returned to Norwich, there to pa.s.s many quiet years. In 1819 Captain Borrow was pensioned--eight s.h.i.+llings a day. From 1816 till his father's death in 1824 Borrow lived in Norwich with his family. Their home was in King's Court, Willow Lane, a modest one-storey house in a _cul de sac_, which we have already described. In King's Court, Willow Lane, Borrow lived at intervals until his marriage in 1840, and his mother continued to live in the house until, in 1849, she agreed to join her son and daughter-in-law at Oulton. Yet the house comes little into the story of Borrow's life, as do the early houses of many great men of letters, nor do subsequent houses come into his story; the house at Oulton and the house at Hereford Square are equally barren of a.s.sociation; the broad highway and the windy heath were Borrow's natural home. He was never a 'civilised' being; he never shone in drawing-rooms. Let us, however, return to Borrow's schooldays, of which the records are all too scanty, and not in the least invigorating. The Norwich Grammar School has an interesting tradition. We pa.s.s to the cathedral through the beautiful Erpingham Gate built about 1420 by Sir Thomas Erpingham, and we find the school on the left. It was originally a chapel, and the porch is at least five hundred years old. The schoolroom is sufficiently old-world-looking for us to imagine the schoolboys of past generations sitting at the various desks. The school was founded in 1547, but the registers have been lost, and so we know little of its famous pupils of earlier days. Lord Nelson and Rajah Brooke are the two names of men of action that stand out most honourably in modern times among the scholars[38]. In literature Borrow had but one schoolfellow, who afterwards came to distinction--James Martineau.

Borrow's headmaster was the Reverend Edward Valpy, who held the office from 1810 to 1829, and to whom is credited the destruction of the school archives. Borrow's two years of the Grammar School were not happy ones. Borrow, as we have shown, was not of the stuff of which happy schoolboys are made. He had been a wanderer--Scotland, Ireland, and many parts of England had a.s.sisted in a fragmentary education; he was now thirteen years of age, and already a vagabond at heart. But let us hear Dr. Augustus Jessopp, who was headmaster of the same Grammar School from 1859 to 1879. Writing of a meeting of old Norvicensians to greet the Rajah, Sir James Brooke, in 1858, when there was a great 'whip' of the 'old boys,' Dr. Jessopp tells us that Borrow, then living at Yarmouth, did not put in an appearance among his schoolfellows:

My belief is that he never was popular among them, that he never attained a high place in the school, and he was a 'free boy.' In those days there were a certain number of day boys at Norwich school, who were nominated by members of the Corporation, and who paid no tuition fees; they had to submit to a certain amount of snubbing at the hands of the boarders, who for the most part were the sons of the county gentry. Of course, such a proud boy as George Borrow would resent this, and it seems to have rankled with him all through his life....

To talk of Borrow as a 'scholar' is absurd. 'A picker-up of learning's crumbs' he was, but he was absolutely without any of the training or the instincts of a scholar. He had had little education till he came to Norwich, and was at the Grammar School little more than two years. It is pretty certain that he knew no Greek when he entered there, and he never seems to have acquired more than the elements of that language.[39]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ERPINGHAM GATE AND THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL, NORWICH

We pa.s.s through the Erpingham Gate direct to the Cathedral, the Grammar School being on our left. Here it is on our right. Facing the school is a statue of Lord Nelson, who was at school here about 1768-70. Borrow was at school here 1816-18.]

Yet the only real influence that Borrow carried away from the Grammar School was concerned with foreign languages. He did take to the French master and exiled priest, Thomas d'Eterville, a native of Caen, who had emigrated to Norwich in 1793. D'Eterville taught French, Italian, and apparently, to Borrow, a little Spanish; and Borrow, with his wonderful memory, must have been his favourite pupil. In his edition of _Lavengro_ Dr. Knapp publishes a brief dialogue between master and pupil, which gives us an amusing glimpse of the worthy d'Eterville, whom the boys called 'poor old Detterville.' In the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of _Lavengro_ he is pleasantly described by his pupil, who adds, with characteristic 'bluff,' that d'Eterville said 'on our arrival at the conclusion of Dante's _h.e.l.l_, "vous serez un jour un grand philologue, mon cher."'

Borrow's biographers have dwelt at length upon one episode of his schooldays--the flogging he received from Valpy for playing truant with three other boys. One, by name John Dalrymple, faltered on the way, the two faithful followers of George in his escapade being two brothers named Theodosius and Francis Purland, whose father kept a chemist's shop in Norwich. The three boys wandered away as far as Acle, eleven miles from Norwich, whence they were ignomimously brought back and birched.

John Dalrymple's brother Arthur, son of a distinguished Norwich surgeon, who became Clerk of the Peace at Norwich in 1854, and died in 1868, has left a memorandum concerning Borrow, from which I take the following extract[40]:

'I was at school with Borrow at the Free School, Norwich, under the Rev. E. Valpy. He was an odd, wild boy, and always wanting to turn Robinson Crusoe or Buccaneer. My brother John was about Borrow's age, and on one occasion Borrow, John, and another, whose name I forget, determined to run away and turn pirates.

John carried an old horse pistol and some potatoes as his contribution to the general stock, but his zeal was soon exhausted, he turned back at Thorpe Lunatic Asylum; but Borrow went off to Yarmouth, and lived on the Caister Denes for a few days. I don't remember hearing of any exploits. He had a wonderful facility for learning languages, which, however, he never appears to have turned to account.

James Martineau, afterwards a popular preacher and a distinguished theologian of the Unitarian creed, here comes into the story. He was a contemporary with Borrow at the Norwich Grammar School as already stated, but the two boys had little in common. There was nothing of the vagabond about James Martineau, and concerning Borrow--if on no other subject--he would probably have agreed with his sister Harriet, whose views we shall quote in a later chapter. In Martineau's _Memoirs_, voluminous and dull, there is only one reference to Borrow;[41] but a correspondent once ventured to approach the eminent divine concerning the rumour as to Martineau's part in the birching of the author of _The Bible in Spain_, and received the following letter:

35 GORDON SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _December 6, 1895._

DEAR SIR,--Two or three years ago Mr. Egmont Hake (author, I think, of a life of Gordon) sought an interview with me, as reputed to be Borrow's sole surviving schoolfellow, in order to gather information or test traditions about his schooldays.

This was with a view to a memoir which he was compiling, he said, out of the literary remains which had been committed to him by his executors. I communicated to him such recollections as I could clearly depend upon and leave at his disposal for publication or for suppression as he might think fit. Under these circ.u.mstances I feel that they are rightfully his, and that I am restrained from placing them at disposal elsewhere unless and until he renounces his claim upon them. But though I cannot repeat them at length for public use, I am not precluded from correcting inaccuracies in stories already in circulation, and may therefore say that Mr. Arthur Dalrymple's version of the Yarmouth escapade is wrong in making his brother John a partner in the transaction. John had quite too much sense for that; the only victims of Borrow's romance were two or three silly boys--mere lackeys of Borrow's commanding will--who helped him to make up a kit for the common knapsack by pilferings out of their fathers' shops.

The Norwich gentleman who fell in with the boys lying in the hedgerow near the half-way inn knew one of them, and wormed out of him the drift of their enterprise, and engaging a postchaise packed them all into it, and in his gig saw them safe home.

It is true that I had to _hoist_ (not 'horse') Borrow for his flogging, but not that there was anything exceptional or capable of leaving permanent scars in the infliction. Mr. Valpy was not given to excess of that kind.

I have never read _Lavengro_, and cannot give any opinion about the correct spelling of the 'Exul sacerdos' name.

Borrow's romance and William Taylor's love of paradox would doubtless often run together, like a pair of well-matched steeds, and carry them away in the same direction. But there was a strong--almost wild--_religious_ sentiment in Borrow, of which only faint traces appear in W. T. In Borrow it had always a tendency to pa.s.s from a sympathetic to an antipathetic form.