Chapter I

Why is it that almost as soon as we can toddle we eagerly demand a story of our elders? Why is it that the most excitable little girl, the most incorrigible little boy can be quieted by a teaspoonful of the jam of fiction? Why is it that "once upon a time" can achieve what moral strictures are powerless to effect?

It is because to most of us the world of imagination is the world that matters. We live in the "might be's" and "peradventures." Fate may have cast our lot in prosaic places; have predetermined our lives on humdrum lines; but it cannot touch our dreams. There we are princes, princesses--possessed of illimitable wealth, wielding immeasurable power. Our bodies may traverse the same dismal streets day after day; but our minds rove luxuriantly through all the kingdoms of the earth.

Those wonderful eastern stories of the "Flying Horse" and the "Magic Carpet," symbolize for us the matter-of-fact world and the matter-of-dream world. Nay, is there any sound distinction between facts and dreams? After all--

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

But there are dreams and dreams--dreams by moonlight and dreams by sunlight. Literature can boast of many fascinating moonlight dreams--Ancient Mariners and Christabels, Wonder Books and Tanglewood Tales. And the fairies and goblins, the witches and wizards, were they not born by moonlight and nurtured under the glimmer of the stars?

But there are dreams by sunlight and visions at noonday also. Such dreams thrill us in another but no less unmistakable way, especially when the dreamer is a Scott, a William Morris, a Borrow.

And dreamers like Borrow are not content to see visions and dream dreams, their bodies must participate no less than their minds. They must needs set forth in quest of the unknown. Hardships and privations deter them not. Change, variety, the unexpected, these things are to them the very salt of life.

This untiring restlessness keeps a Richard Burton rambling over Eastern lands, turns a Borrow into the high-road and dingle. This bright-eyed Norfolk giant took more kindly to the roughnesses of life than did Hazlitt and De Quincey. Quite as neurotic in his way, his splendid physique makes us think of him as the embodiment of fine health. Illness and Borrow do not agree. We think of him swinging along the road like one of Dumas' lusty adventurers, exhibiting his powers of horsemanship, holding his own with well-seasoned drinkers--especially if the drink be Norfolk ale--conversing with any picturesque rag-tag and bob-tail he might happen upon. There is plenty of fresh air in his pages. No thinker like Hazlitt, no dreamer like De Quincey; but a shrewd observer with the most amazing knack of ingratiating himself with strangers.

No need for this romancer to seek distant lands for inspiration. Not even the villages of Spain and Portugal supplied him with such fine stuff for romance as Mumper's Dingle. He would get as strange a story out of a London counting-house or an old apple-woman on London Bridge as did many a teller of tales out of lonely heaths and stormy seas.

_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ are fine specimens of romantic autobiography. His life was varied enough, abounding in colour; but the Vagabond is never satisfied with things that merely happen. He is equally concerned with the things that might happen, with the things that ought to happen. And so Borrow added to his own personal record from the storehouse of dreams. Some have blamed him for not adhering to the actual facts. But does any autobiographer adhere to actual facts? Can any man, even with the most sensitive feeling for accuracy, confine himself to a record of what happened?

Of course not. The moment a man begins to write about himself, to delve in the past, to ransack the storehouse of his memory; then--if he has anything of the literary artist about him, and otherwise his book will not be worth the paper it is written on--he will take in a partner to assist him. That partner's name is Romance.

As a revelation of temperament, the _Confessions_ of Rousseau and the _Memoires_ of Casanova are, one feels, delightfully trustworthy. But no sane reader ever imagines that he is reading an accurate transcript from the life of these adventurous gentlemen. The difference between the editions of De Quincey's _Opium Eater_ is sufficient to show how the dreams have expanded under popular approbation.

Borrow himself suggests this romantic method when he says, "What is an autobiography? Is it a mere record of a man's life, or is it a picture of the man himself?" Certainly, no one carried the romantic colouring further than he did. When he started to write his own life in _Lavengro_ he had no notion of diverging from the strict line of fact. But the adventurer Vagabond moved uneasily in the guise of the chronicler. He wanted more elbow-room. He remembered all that he hoped to encounter, and from hopes it was no far cry to actualities.

Things might have happened so! Ye gods, they _did_ happen so! And after all it matters little to us the exact proportion of fact and fiction. What does matter is that the superstructure he has raised upon the foundation of fact is as strange and unique as the palace of Aladdin.

However much he suggested the typical Anglo-Saxon in real life, there was the true Celt whenever he took pen in hand.

A stranger blend of the Celt and the Saxon indeed it would be hard to find. The Celtic side is not uppermost in his temperament--this strong, assertive, prize-fighting, beer-loving man (a good drinker, but never a drunkard) seems far more Saxon than anything else. De Quincey had no small measure of the John Bull in [Picture: George Borrow] his temperament, and Borrow had a great deal more. The John Bull side was very obvious. Yet a Celt he was by parentage, and the Celtic part was unmistakable, though below the surface. If the East Anglian in him had a weakness for athleticism, boiled mutton and caper sauce, the Celt in him responded quickly to the romantic associates of Wales.

Readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton's charming romance _Aylwin_ will recall the emphasis laid on the passionate love of the Welsh for a tiny strip of Welsh soil. Borrow understood all this; he had a rare sympathy with the Cymric Celt. You can trace the Celt in his scenic descriptions, in his feeling for the spell of antiquity, his restlessness of spirit. And yet in his appearance there was little to suggest the Celt. Small wonder that many of his friends spoke of this white-haired giant of six foot three as if he was first and foremost an excellent athlete.

Certainly he had in full measure an Englishman's delight and proficiency in athletics--few better at running, jumping, wrestling, sparring, and swimming.

In many respects indeed Borrow will not have realized the fancy picture of the Englishman as limned by Hawthorne's fancy--the big, hearty, self-opiniated, beef-eating, ale-drinking John Bull. Save to a few intimates like Mr. Watts-Dunton and Dr. Hake he seems to have concealed very effectually the Celtic sympathies in his nature. But no reader of his books can be blind to this side of his character; and then again, as in all the literary Vagabonds, it is the complexity of the man's temperament that attracts and fascinates.

The man who can delight in the garrulous talk of a country inn, understand the magic of big solitudes; who can keenly appraise the points of a horse and feel the impalpable glamour of an old ruin; who will present an impenetrable reserve to the ordinary stranger and take the fierce, moody gypsy to his heart; who will break almost every convention of civilization, yet in the most unexpected way show a sturdy element of conventionality; a man, in short, of so many bewildering contradictions and strangely assorted qualities as Borrow cannot but compel interest.

Many of the contradictory traits were not, as they seemed, the inconsequential moods of an irresponsible nature, but may be traced to the fierce egotism of the man. The Vagabond is always an egotist; the egotism may be often amusing, and is rarely uninteresting. But the personal point of view, the personal impression, has for him the most tremendous importance. It makes its possessor abnormally sensitive to any circumstances, any environment, that may restrict his independence or prevent the full expression of his personal tastes and whims. Among our Vagabonds the two most pronounced egotists are Borrow and Whitman. The secret of their influence, their merits, and their deficiencies lies in this intense concentration of self. An appreciation of this quality leads us to comprehend a good deal of Borrow's attitude towards men and women. Reading _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ the reader is no less struck by the remarkable interest that Borrow takes in the people--especially the rough, uncultured people--whom he comes across, as in the cheerful indifference with which he loses sight of them and passes on to fresh characters. There is very little objective feeling in his friendships; as flesh and blood personages with individualities of their own--loves, hopes, faiths of their own--he seems to regard them scarcely at all. They exist chiefly as material for his curiosity and inquisitiveness. Hence there is a curious selfishness about him--not the selfishness of a passionate, capricious nature, but the selfishness of a self-absorbed and self-contained nature. Perhaps there was hidden away somewhere in his nature a strain of tenderness, of altruistic affection, which was reserved for a few chosen souls. But the warm human touch is markedly absent from his writings, despite their undeniable charm.

Take the Isopel Berners episode. Whether Isopel Berners was a fiction of the imagination or a character in real life matters not for my purpose. At any rate the episode, his friendship with this Anglo-Saxon girl of the road, is one of the distinctive features of both _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_. The attitude of Borrow towards her may safely be regarded as a clear indication of the man's character.

A girl of fine physical presence and many engaging qualities such as were bound to attract a man of Borrow's type, who had forsaken her friends to throw in her lot with this fellow-wanderer on the road. Here were the ready elements of a romance--of a friendship that should burn up with the consuming power of love the baser elements of self in the man's disposition, and transform his nature.

And what does he do?

He accepts her companionship, just as he might have accepted the companionship of one of his landlords or ostlers; spends the time he lived with her in the Dingle in teaching her Armenian, and when at last, driven to desperation by his calculating coldness, she comes to take farewell of him, he makes her a perfunctory offer of marriage, which she, being a girl of fine mettle as well as of strong affection, naturally declines. She leaves him, and after a few passages of philosophic regret, he passes on to the next adventure.

Now Borrow, as we know, was not physically drawn towards the ordinary gypsy type--the dark, beautiful Celtic women; and it was in girls of the fair Saxon order such as Isopel Berners that he sought a natural mate.

Certainly, if any woman was calculated by physique and by disposition to attract Borrow, Isopel Berners was that woman. And when we find that the utmost extent of his passion is to make tea for her and instruct her in Armenian, it is impossible not to be disagreeably impressed by the unnatural chilliness of such a disposition. Not even Isopel could break down the barrier of intense egoism that fenced him off from any profound intimacy with his fellow-creatures.

Perhaps Dr. Jessop's attack upon him errs in severity, and is to an extent, as Mr. Watts-Dunton says, "unjust"; but there is surely an element of truth in his remarks when he says: "Of anything like animal passion there is not a trace in all his many volumes. Not a hint that he ever kissed a woman or even took a little child upon his knee." Nor do I think that the anecdote which Mr. Watts-Dunton relates about the beautiful gypsy, to whom Borrow read Arnold's poem, goes far to dissipate the impression of Borrow's insensibility to a woman's charm.

A passing tribute to the looks of an extraordinarily beautiful girl is quite compatible with a comparative insensibility to feminine beauty and feminine graces. That Borrow was devoid of animal passion I do not believe--nor indeed do his books convey that impression; that he had no feeling for beauty either would be scarcely compatible with the Celtic element in his nature. I think it less a case--as Dr. Jessop seems to think--of want of passion as of a tyrannous egotism that excluded any element likely to prove troublesome. He would not admit a disturbing factor--such as the presence of the self-reliant Isopel--into his life.

No doubt he liked Isopel well enough in his fashion. Otherwise certainly he would not have made up his mind to marry her. But his own feelings, his own tastes, his own fancies, came first. He would marry her--oh yes!--there was plenty of time later on. For the present he could study her character, amuse himself with her idiosyncrasies, and as a return for her devotion and faithful affection teach her Armenian. Extremely touching!

But the episode of Isopel Berners is only one illustration, albeit a very significant one, of Borrow's calculating selfishness. No man could prove a more interesting companion than he; but one cannot help feeling that he was a sorry kind of friend.

It may seem strange at first sight, finding this wanderer of the road in the pay of the Bible Society, and a zealous servant in the cause of militant Protestantism. But the violent "anti-Popery" side of Borrow is only another instance of his love of independence. The brooding egotism that chafed at the least control was not likely to show any sympathy with sacerdotalism.

There was no trace of philosophy in Borrow's frankly expressed views on religious subjects. They were honest and straightforward enough, with all the vigorous unreflective narrowness of ultra-Protestantism.

It says much for the amazing charm of Borrow's writing that _The Bible in Spain_ is very much better than a glorified tract. It must have come as a surprise to many a grave, pious reader of the Bible Society's publications.

And the Bible Society made the Vagabond from the literary point of view. Borrow's book--_The Zincali_--or an account of the gypsies of Spain, published in 1841, had brought his name before the public. But _The Bible in Spain_ (1843) made him famous--doubtless to the relief of "glorious John Murray," the publisher, who was doubtful about the book's reception.

It is a fascinating book, and if lacking the unique flavour of the romantic autobiographies, _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_, has none the less many of the characteristics that give all his writings their distinctive attraction.