George Borrow The Man and His Books

Excerpt

CHAPTER I—BORROW’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The subject of this book was a man who was continually writing about himself, whether openly or in disguise.  He was by nature inclined to thinking about himself and when he came to write he naturally wrote about himself; and his inclination was fortified by the obvious impression made upon other men by himself and by his writings.  He has been dead thirty years; much has been written about him by those who knew him or knew those that did: yet the impression still made by him, and it is one of the most powerful, is due mainly to his own books.  Nor has anything lately come to light to provide another writer on Borrow with an excuse.  The impertinence of the task can be tempered only by its apparent hopelessness and by that necessity which Voltaire did not see.

I shall attempt only a re-arrangement of the myriad details accessible to all in the writings of Borrow and about Borrow.  Such re-arrangement will sometimes heighten the old effects and sometimes modify them.  The total impression will, I hope, not be a smaller one, though it must inevitably be softer, less clear, less isolated, less gigantic.  I do not wish, and I shall not try, to deface Borrow’s portrait of himself; I can only hope that I shall not do it by accident.  There may be a sense in which that portrait can be called inaccurate.  It may even be true that “lies—damned lies” helped to make it.  But nobody else knows anything like as much about the truth, and a peddling biographer’s mouldy fragment of plain fact may be far more dangerous than the manly lying of one who was in possession of all the facts.  In most cases the fact—to use an equivocal term—is dead and blown away in dust while Borrow’s impression is as green as grass.  His “lies” are lies only in the same sense as all clothing is a lie.

For example, he knew a Gypsy named Ambrose Smith, and had sworn brotherhood with him as a boy.  He wrote about this Gypsy, man and boy, and at first called him, as the manuscripts bear witness, by his real name, though Borrow thought of him in 1842 as Petulengro.  In print he was given the name Jasper Petulengro—Petulengro being Gypsy for shoesmith—and as Jasper Petulengro he is now one of the most unforgetable of heroes; the name is the man, and for many Englishmen his form and character have probably created quite a new value for the name of Jasper.  Well, Jasper Petulengro lives.  Ambrose Smith died in 1878, at the age of seventy-four, after being visited by the late Queen Victoria at Knockenhair Park: he was buried in Dunbar Cemetery.

In the matter of his own name Borrow made another creative change of a significant kind.  He was christened George Henry Borrow on July 17th (having been born on the 5th), 1803, at East Dereham, in Norfolk.  As a boy he signed his name, George Henry Borrow.  As a young man of the Byronic age and a translator of Scandinavian literature, he called himself in print, George Olaus Borrow.  His biographer, Dr. William Ireland Knapp, says that Borrow’s first name “expressed the father’s admiration for the reigning monarch,” George III.; but there is no reason to believe this, and certainly Borrow himself made of the combination which he finally adopted—George Borrow—something that retains not the slightest flavour of any other George.  Such changes are common enough.  John Richard Jefferies becomes Richard Jefferies; Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson becomes Robert Louis Stevenson.  But Borrow could touch nothing without transmuting it.  For example, in his Byronic period, when he was about twenty years of age, he was translating “romantic ballads” from the Danish.  In the last verse of one of these, called “Elvir Hill,” he takes the liberty of using the Byronic “lay”:

’Tis therefore I counsel each young Danish swain who may ride in the forest so dreary,
Ne’er to lay down upon lone Elvir Hill though he chance to be ever so weary.

Twenty years later he used this ballad romantically in writing about his early childhood.  He was travelling with his father’s regiment from town to town and from school to school, and they came to Berwick-upon-Tweed:

“And it came to pass that, one morning, I found myself extended on the bank of a river.  It was a beautiful morning of early spring; small white clouds were floating in the heaven, occasionally veiling the countenance of the sun, whose light, as they retired, would again burst forth, coursing like a racehorse over the scene—and a goodly scene it was!  Before me, across the water, on an eminence, stood a white old city, surrounded with lofty walls, above which rose the tops of tall houses, with here and there a church or steeple.  To my right hand was a long and massive bridge, with many arches and of antique architecture, which traversed the river.  The river was a noble one; the broadest that I had hitherto seen.  Its waters, of a greenish tinge, poured with impetuosity beneath the narrow arches to meet the sea, close at hand, as the boom of the billows breaking distinctly upon a beach declared.  There were songs upon the river from the fisher-barks; and occasionally a chorus, plaintive and wild, such as I had never heard before, the words of which I did not understand, but which at the present time, down the long avenue of years, seem in memory’s ear to sound like ‘Horam, coram, dago.’  Several robust fellows were near me, some knee-deep in water, employed in hauling the seine upon the strand.  Huge fish were struggling amidst the meshes—princely salmon—their brilliant mail of blue and silver flashing in the morning beam; so goodly and gay a scene, in truth, had never greeted my boyish eye....