Lavengro

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LAVENGRO:
THE SCHOLAR--THE GYPSY--THE PRIEST.

BY
GEORGE BORROW,
AUTHOR OF
"THE BIBLE IN SPAIN," ETC.

_WITH AN INTRODUCTION_
BY
THEODORE WATTS.

WARD, LOCK, BOWDEN, AND CO.
LONDON: WARWICK HOUSE, SALISBURY SQUARE, E.C.
NEW YORK: EAST 12TH STREET.
MELBOURNE: ST. JAMES'S STREET. SYDNEY: YORK STREET.

1893.

{Borrow's home at Oulton (now pulled down), showing the summer house
where much of his work was written. (_From a Photograph kindly lent by
Mr. Welchman_, _of Lowestoft_, _and taken by Mr. F. G. Mayhew_, _of the
same place_.): p0.jpg}

NOTES UPON GEORGE BORROW.

I. BORROW AS A SPLENDID LITERARY AMATEUR.

There are some writers who cannot be adequately criticised--who cannot,
indeed, be adequately written about at all--save by those to whom they
are personally known. I allude to those writers of genius who, having
only partially mastered the art of importing their own individual
characteristics into literary forms, end their life-work as they began
it, remaining to the last amateurs in literary art. Of this class of
writers George Borrow is generally taken to be the very type. Was he
really so?

There are passages in "Lavengro" which are unsurpassed in the prose
literature of England--unsurpassed, I mean, for mere perfection of
style--for blending of strength and graphic power with limpidity and
music of flow. Is "Lavengro" the work of a literary amateur who,
yielding at will to every kind of authorial self-indulgence, fails to
find artistic expression for the life moving within him--fails to project
an individuality that his friends knew to have been unique? Of other
writers of genius, admirable criticism may be made by those who have
never known them in the flesh. Is this because each of those others,
having passed from the stage of the literary amateur to that of the
literary artist, is able to pour the stream of his personality into the
literary mould and give to the world a true image of himself? It has
been my chance of life to be brought into personal relations with many
men of genius, but I feel that there are others who could write about
them more adequately than I. Does Borrow stand alone? The admirers of
his writings seem generally to think he does, for ever since I wrote my
brief and hasty obituary notice of him in 1881, I have been urged to
enlarge my reminiscences of him--urged not only by philologers and
gypsologists, but by many others in England, America, and Germany. But I
on my part have been for years urging upon the friend who introduced me
to him, and who knew him years ago,--knew him when he was the
comparatively young literary lion of East Anglia,--Dr. Gordon Hake, to do
what others are urging me to do. Not only has the author of "Parables
and Tales" more knowledge of the subject than any one else, but having a
greater reputation than I, he can speak with more authority, and having a
more brilliant pen than I, he can give a more vital picture than I can
hope to give of our common friend. If he is, as he seems to be, fully
determined not to depict Borrow in prose, let me urge him to continue in
verse that admirable description of him contained in one of the
well-known sonnets addressed to myself in "The New Day":--

"And he, the walking lord of gipsy lore!
How often 'mid the deer that grazed the Park,
Or in the fields and heath and windy moor,
Made musical with many a soaring lark,
Have we not held brisk commune with him there,
While Lavengro, then towering by your side,
With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,
Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride
To tell the legends of the fading race--
As at the summons of his piercing glance,
Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,
While you called up that pendant of romance
To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
Your Amazonian Sinfi's noble story!"

II. IS THERE A KEY TO "LAVENGRO"?

Dr. Hake, however, and those others among Borrow's friends who are apt to
smile at the way in which critics of the highest intelligence will stand
baffled and bewildered before the eccentricities of "Lavengro" and "The
Romany Rye"--some critics treating the work as autobiography spoilt, and
some as spoilt fiction--forget that while it is easy to open a locked
door with a key, to open a locked door without a key is a very different
undertaking. On the subject of autobiographies and the autobiographic
method, I had several interesting talks with Borrow. I remember an
especial one that took place on Wimbledon Common, on a certain autumn
morning when I was pointing out to him the spot called Gypsy Ring. He
was in a very communicative mood that day, and more amenable to criticism
than he generally was. I had been speaking of certain bold coincidences
in "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye"--especially that of Lavengro's meeting
by accident in the neighbourhood of Salisbury Plain the son of the very
apple-woman of London Bridge with whom he had made friends, and also of
such apparently manufactured situations as that of Lavengro's coming upon
the man whom Wordsworth's poetry had sent into a deep slumber in a
meadow.

"What is an autobiography?" he asked. "Is it a mere record of the
incidents of a man's life? or is it a picture of the man himself--his
character, his soul?"

Now this I think a very suggestive question of Borrow's with regard to
himself and his own work. That he sat down to write his own life in
"Lavengro" I know. He had no idea then of departing from the strict line
of fact. Indeed, his letters to his friend Mr. John Murray would alone
be sufficient to establish this in spite of his calling "Lavengro" a
dream. In the first volume he did almost confine himself to matters of
fact. But as he went on he clearly found that the ordinary tapestry into
which Destiny had woven the incidents of his life were not tinged with
sufficient depth of colour to satisfy his sense of wonder; for, let it be
remembered, that of love as a strong passion he had almost none. Surely
no one but Lavengro could have lived in a dingle with a girl like Belle
Berners, and passed the time in trying to teach her Armenian. Without
strong passion no very deeply coloured life-tapestry can, in these
unadventurous days, be woven. The manufactured incidents of which there
are so many in "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye," are introduced to give
colour to a web of life that strong Passion had left untinged. But why?
In order to flash upon the personality of Lavengro, and upon Lavengro's
attitude towards the universe unseen as well as seen, a light more
searching, as Borrow considered, than any picture of actual experience
could have done. In other words, to build up the truth of the character
of Lavengro, Borrow does not shrink from manipulating certain incidents
and inventing others. And when he wishes to dive very boldly into the
"abysmal deeps of personality," he speaks and moves partly behind the
mask of some fictitious character, such as the man who touched for the
evil chance, and such as the hypochondriac who taught himself Chinese to
ward off despair, but could not tell the time of day by looking at the
clock. This is not the place for me to enter more fully into this
matter, but I am looking forward to a fitting occasion of showing whether
or not "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" form a spiritual autobiography;
and if they do, whether that autobiography does or does not surpass every
other for absolute truth of spiritual representation. Meantime, let it
be remembered by those who object to Borrow's method that, as I have just
hinted, at the basis of his character was a deep sense of wonder. Let it
be remembered that he was led to study the first of the many languages he
taught himself--Irish--because there was, as he said, "something
mysterious and uncommon in its use." Let it be remembered that it was
this instinct of wonder, not the impulse of the mere _poseur_, that
impelled him to make certain exaggerated statements about the characters
themselves who are introduced into his books.

III. ISOPEL BERNERS.

For instance, the tall girl, Isopel Berners--the most vigorous sketch he
has given us--is perfect as she is adorable. Among heroines she stands
quite alone; there is none other that is in the least like her. Yet she
is in many of her qualities typical of a class. Among the very bravest
of all human beings in the British Islands are, or were, the nomadic
girls of the high road and the dingle. Their bravery is not only an
inherited quality: it is in every way fostered by their mode of life. No
tenderness from the men with whom they travel, either as wives or as
mistresses, do they get--none of the chivalry which girls in most other
grades of life experience--and none do they expect. In all disputes
between themselves and the men, their associates, they know that the
final argument is the knock-down blow. With the Romany girl, too, this
is the case, to be sure; but then, while the Romany girl, as a rule,
owing to tribal customs, receives the blow in patience, the English girl
is apt to return it, and with vigour. This condition of things gives the
English road-girl a frank independence of bearing which distinguishes her
from girls of all other classes. There is something of the charm of the
savage about her, even to her odd passion for tattoo. No doubt Isopel is
an idealisation of the class; but the class, with all its drawbacks, has
a certain winsomeness for men of Borrow's temperament.

But, unfortunately, his love of the wonderful, his instinct for
exaggeration, asserts itself even here. I need give only one instance of
what I mean. He makes Isopel Berners speak of herself as being taller
than Lavengro. Now, as Borrow gives Lavengro his own character and
physique in every detail, even to the silvery hair and even to the
somewhat peculiar method of sparring, and as he himself stood six feet
two inches, Isopel must have been better adapted to shine as a giantess
in a show than as a fighting woman capable of cowing the "Flaming Tinman"
himself.

It is a very exceptional woman that can really stand up against a trained
boxer, and it is, I believe, or used to be, an axiom among the nomads
that no fighting woman ought to stand more than about five feet ten
inches at the outside. A handsome young woman never looks so superb as
when boxing; but it is under peculiar disadvantages that she spars with a
man, inasmuch as she has, even when properly padded (as assuredly every
woman ought to be) to guard her chest with even more care than she guards
her face. The truth is, as Borrow must have known, that women, in order
to stand a chance against men, must rely upon some special and surprising
method of attack--such, for instance, as that of the sudden "left-hand
body blow" of the magnificent gypsy girl of whose exploits I told him
that day at "Gypsy Ring"--who, when travelling in England, was attached
to Boswell's boxing-booth, and was always accompanied by a favourite
bantam cock, ornamented with a gold ring in each wattle, and trained to
clap his wings and crow whenever he saw his mistress putting on the
gloves--the most beautiful girl, gypsy or other, that ever went into East
Anglia. This "left-hand body blow" of hers she delivered so
unexpectedly, and with such an engine-like velocity, that but few boxers
could "stop it."

But, with regard to Isopel Berners, neither Lavengro, nor the man she
thrashed when he stole one of her flaxen hairs to conjure with, gives the
reader the faintest idea of Isopel's method of attack or defence, and we
have to take her prowess on trust.

In a word, Borrow was content to give us the Wonderful, without taking
that trouble to find for it a logical basis which a literary master would
have taken. And instances might easily be multiplied of this
exaggeration of Borrow's, which is apt to lend a sense of unreality to
some of the most picturesque pages of "Lavengro."

IV. BORROW'S USE OF PATOIS.

Nor does Borrow take much trouble to give organic life to a dramatic
picture by the aid of _patois_ in dialogue. In every conversation
between Borrow's gypsies, and between them and Lavengro, the illusion is
constantly being disturbed by the vocabulary of the speakers. It is hard
for the reader to believe that characters such as Jasper Petulengro, his
wife, and sister Ursula, between whom so much of the dialogue is
distributed, should make use of the complex sentences and book-words
which Borrow, on occasion, puts into their mouths.

I remember once remarking to him upon the value of _patois_ within
certain limits--not only in imaginative but in biographic art.

His answer came in substance to this, that if the matter of the dialogue
be true to nature, the entire verisimilitude of the form is a secondary
consideration.

"Walter Scott," said he, "has run to death the method of _patois_
dialogue."

He urged, moreover, that the gypsies really are extremely fond of
uncommon and fine words. And this, no doubt, is true, especially in
regard to the women. There is nothing in which the native superiority of
the illiterate Romany woman over the illiterate English woman of the road
is more clearly seen than in the love of long "book-words" (often
mispronounced) displayed by the former. Strong, however, as is the
Romany chi's passion for fine words, her sentences are rarely complex
like some of the sentences Borrow puts into her mouth.

With regard, however, to the charge of idealising gypsy life--a charge
which has often been brought against Borrow--it must be remembered that
the gypsies to whom he introduces us are the better kind of gryengroes
(horse-dealers), by far the most prosperous of all gypsies. Borrow's
"gryengroes" are not in any way more prosperous than those he knew.

These nomads have an instinctive knowledge of horseflesh--will tell the
amount of "blood" in any horse by a lightning glance at his quarters--and
will sometimes make large sums before the fair is over.

Yet, on the whole, I will not deny that Borrow was as successful in
giving us vital portraits of English and Irish characters as of Romany
characters, perhaps more so.

That hypochondriacal strain in Borrow's nature, which Dr. Hake alludes
to, perhaps prevented him from sympathising fully with the joyous Romany
temper. But over and above this, and charming as the Petulengro family
are, they do not live as do the characters of Mr. Groome in his
delightful book "In Gypsy Tents"--a writer whose treatises on the gypsies
in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," and in "Chambers' Encyclopedia," are
as full of the fruits of actual personal contact with the gypsies as of
the learning to be derived from books.

V. THE SAVING GRACE OF PUGILISM.

Borrow's "Flaming Tinman" is, of course, a brilliant success, but then
he, though named Bosville, is not a pure gypsy. He is what is called on
the roads, I believe, a "half and half"; and in nothing is more clearly
seen that "prepotency of transmission," which I have elsewhere attributed
to the Anglo-Saxon in the racial struggle, than in hybrids of this kind.
A thorough-bred Romany chal can be brutal enough, but the "Flaming
Tinman's" peculiar shade of brutality is Anglo-Saxon, not Romany. The
Tinman's ironical muttering while unharnessing his horse, "Afraid. H'm!
Afraid; that was the word, I think," is worthy of Dickens at his very
best--worthy of Dickens when he created Rogue Riderhood--but it is hardly
Romany, I think.

The battle in the dingle is superb.

Borrow is always at his strongest when describing a pugilistic encounter:
for in the saving grace of pugilism as an English accomplishment, he
believed as devoutly almost as he believed in East Anglia and the Bible.
It was this more than anything else that aroused the ire of the critics
of "Lavengro" when it first appeared. One critical journal characterised
the book as the work of a "barbarian."

This was in 1851, when Clio seemed set upon substituting Harlequin's wand
for Britannia's trident, seemed set upon crowning her with the cap and
bells of Folly in her maudlin mood,--the marvellous and memorable year
when England--while every forge in Europe was glowing with expectance,
ready to beat every ploughshare into a sword--uttered her famous
prophecy, that from the day of the opening of the Prince Consort's glass
show in Hyde Park, bullets, bayonets, and fists were to be institutions
of a benighted past.

Very different was the prophecy of this "eccentric barbarian," Borrow,
especially as regards the abolition of the British fist. His prophecy
was that the decay of pugilism would be followed by a flourishing time in
England for the revolver and the assassin's knife,--a prophecy which I
can now recommend to those two converts to the virtues of Pugilism, Mr.
Justice Grantham and the present Editor of the _Daily News_, the former
of whom in passing sentence of death (at the Central Criminal Court, on
Wednesday, January 11th, 1893) upon a labourer named Hosler, for stabbing
one Dennis Finnessey to death in a quarrel about a pot of beer, borrowed
in the most impudent manner from the "eccentric barbarian," when he said,
"If men would only use their fists instead of knives when tempted to
violence, so many people would not be hanged"; while the latter remarked
that "the same thing has been said from the bench before, _and cannot be
said too often_." When the "eccentric barbarian" argued that pugnacity
is one of the primary instincts of man--when he argued that no
civilisation can ever eradicate this instinct without emasculating
itself--when he argued that to clench one's fist and "strike out" is the
irresistible impulse of every one who has been assaulted, and that to
make it illegal to "strike out," to make it illegal to learn the art to
"strike out" with the best effect, is not to quell the instinct, but
simply to force it to express itself in other and more dangerous and
dastardly ways--when he argued thus more than forty years ago, he saw
more clearly than did his critics into the future--a future which held
within its womb not only the American civil war and the gigantic
Continental struggles whose bloody reek still "smells to heaven," but
also the present carnival of dynamite, the revolver, and the assassin's
knife.

VI. BORROW'S GYPSIES.

To those who knew Borrow, the striking thing about "Lavengro" and "The
Romany Rye" is not that there is so much about the gypsies, but that
there is comparatively so little, and that he only introduces one family
group. Judged from these two books the reader would conclude that he
knew nothing whatever of the Lees, the Stanleys, and the most noticeable
of all, the Lovells, and yet those who knew him are aware that he was
thrown into contact with most of these. But here, as in everything else,
Borrow's eccentric methods can never be foreseen. The most interesting
of all the gypsies are the Welsh gypsies. The Welsh variety of the
Romany tongue is quite peculiar, and the Romanies of the Principality are
superior to all others in these islands in intelligence and in their
passion for gorgio respectability. Borrow in "Lavengro" takes the reader
to the Welsh border itself, and then turns back, leaving the Welsh Romany
undescribed. And in the only part of "Wild Wales" where gypsy life is
afterwards glanced at, the gypsies introduced are not Welsh, but English.

The two great successes amongst Borrow's Romany characters are
undoubtedly Mrs. Petulengro's mother (old Mrs. Herne) and her grandchild
Leonora, but these are the two wicked characters of the group. It is
impossible to imagine anything better told than the attempt of these two
to poison Lavengro: it is drama of the rarest kind. The terrible
ironical dialogue over the prostrate and semi-conscious Lavengro, between
the child-murderess and the hag-murderess who have poisoned him, is like
nothing else in literature. This scene alone should make "Lavengro"
immortal. In no other race than the Romany would a child of the elf-like
intelligence and unconscious wickedness of Leonora be possible; but also
it must be said that in no other race than the Romany would be possible a
child like her who is made the subject of my sonnet, "A Gypsy Child's
Christmas," printed in the "Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society"--a sonnet
which renders in verse a real incident recorded by my friend before
alluded to:--

Dear Sinfi rose and danced along "The Dells,"
Drawn by the Christmas chimes, and soon she sate
Where, 'neath the snow around the churchyard gate,
The ploughmen slept in bramble-banded cells:
The gorgios passed, half fearing gipsy spells,
While Sinfi, gazing, seemed to meditate;
She laughed for joy, then wept disconsolate:
"De poor dead gorgios cannot hear de bells."

Within the church the clouds of gorgio-breath
Arose, a steam of lazy praise and prayer,
To Him who weaves the loving Christmas-stair
O'er sorrow and sin and wintry deeps of Death;
But where stood He? Beside our Sinfi there,
Remembering childish tears in Nazareth.

Perhaps Borrow's pictures of the gypsies, by omitting to depict the
Romany woman on her loftier, her tragic side, fail to demonstrate what he
well knew to be the Romany's great racial mark of distinction all over
Europe, the enormous superiority of the gypsy women over the gypsy men,
not in intelligence merely, but in all the higher human qualities. While
it is next to impossible to imagine a gypsy hero, gypsy heroines--women
capable of the noblest things--are far from uncommon.

The "Amazonian Sinfi," alluded to in Dr. Hake's sonnet, was a heroine of
this noble strain, and yet perhaps she was but a type of a certain kind
of Romany chi.

It was she of the bantam cock and "the left-hand body blow" alluded to
above.

This same gypsy girl also illustrated another side of the variously
endowed character of the Romany women, ignored, or almost ignored by
Borrow--their passion for music. The daughter of an extremely well-to-do
"gryengro," or dealer in horses, this gypsy girl had travelled over
nearly all England, and was familiar with London, where, in the studio of
a certain romantic artist, she was in great request as a face-model. But
having been brought into close contact with a travelling band of
Hungarian gypsy musicians who visited England some years ago, she
developed a passion for music that showed her to be a musical genius. The
gypsy musicians of Hungary, who are darker than the tented gypsies, are
the most intelligent and most widely-travelled of even Hungarian
gypsies--indeed, of all the Romany race, and with them Sinfi soon
developed into the "Fiddling Sinfi," who was famous in Wales and also in
East Anglia, and the East Midlands. After a while she widened her
reputation in a curious way as the only performer on the old Welsh
stringed instrument called the "crwth," or cruth. I told Borrow her
story at Gypsy Ring. Having become, through the good nature of an
eminent Welsh antiquary, the possessor of a crwth, and having discovered
the unique capabilities of that rarely-seen instrument, she soon taught
herself to play upon it with extraordinary effect, fascinating her Welsh
patrons by the ravishing strains she could draw from it. This obsolete
instrument is six-stringed, with two of the strings reaching beyond the
key-board, and a bridge placed, not at right angles to the sides of the
instrument, but in an oblique direction. Though in some respects
inferior to the violin, it is in other respects superior to it. Sinfi's
performances on this remarkable instrument showed her to be a musical
genius of a high order.

VII. MY FIRST MEETING WITH BORROW.

But I am not leaving myself much room for personal reminiscences of
Borrow after all--though these are what I sat down to write.

Dr. Hake, in his memoirs of "Eighty Years," records thus the first
meeting between Borrow and myself at Roehampton, at the doctor's own
delightful house, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park,
and in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common.

"Later on, George Borrow turned up while Watts was there, and we went
through a pleasant trio, in which Borrow, as was his wont, took the
first fiddle. The reader must not here take metaphor for music.
Borrow made himself very agreeable to Watts, recited a fairy tale in
the best style to him, and liked him."

There is, however, no doubt that Borrow would have run away from me had I
been associated in his mind with the literary calling. But at that time
I had written nothing at all save poems, and a prose story or two of a
romantic kind, and even these, though some of the poems have since
appeared, were then known only through private circulation.

About me there was nothing of the literary flavour: no need to flee away
from me as he fled from the writing fraternity. He had not long before
this refused to allow Dr. Hake to introduce the late W. R. S. Ralston to
him, simply because the Russian scholar moved in the literary world.