Lavengro

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With regard to newspaper critiques of books his axiom was that "whatever
is praised by the press is of necessity bad," and he refused to read
anything that was so praised.

After the "fairy tale" mentioned by Dr. Hake was over, we went, at
Borrow's suggestion, for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the
way at the "Bald-Faced Stag" in Kingston Vale, in order that Borrow
should introduce me to Jerry Abershaw's sword, which was one of the
special glories of that once famous hostelry. A divine summer day it was
I remember--a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been
tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from an
occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at the
edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.

These showers, however, seemed, as Borrow remarked, merely to give a rich
colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the meadows on
the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of those uncertain
summer days whose peculiarly English charm was Borrow's special delight.
He liked rain, but he liked it falling on the green umbrella (enormous,
shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a summer storm) he generally carried. As
we entered the Robin Hood Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird
yellow radiance, magical and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that
in the sky behind us there was gleaming over the fields and over
Wimbledon Common a rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops
sparkling on the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far
away. Borrow told us some interesting stories of Romany superstitions in
connection with the rainbow--how, by making a "trus'hul" (cross) of two
sticks, the Romany chi who "pens the dukkerin can wipe the rainbow out of
the sky," etc. Whereupon Hake, quite as original a man as Borrow, and a
humourist of a still rarer temper, launched out into a strain of wit and
whim, which it is not my business here to record, upon the subject of the
"Spirit of the Rainbow" which a certain child went out to find.

Borrow loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I found
also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar with
every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to
shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him closely, and I
began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant
striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true "Child of
the Open Air."

"Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella
that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?" I murmured to Hake, while
Borrow lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said, in a
dreamy way, "Old England! Old England!"

VIII. A CHILD OF THE OPEN AIR UNDER A GREEN UMBRELLA.

Perhaps, however, I had better define what Hake and I meant by this
phrase, and to do this I cannot do better than quote the definition of
Nature-worship, by H. A. the "Swimming Rye," which we had both been just
discussing, and which I quoted not long after this memorable walk in a
literary journal:--

"With all the recent cultivation of the picturesque by means of water-
colour landscape, descriptive novels, 'Cook's excursions,' etc., the
real passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was,--perhaps rarer. It
is quite an affair of individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it
cannot be lost. That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how
little it is known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little
with science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest;
the man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it:--in human
souls--in one, perhaps, as much as in another--there is always that
instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is
always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as
close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals
this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some
few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the
blessing, not the bane, that, owing to some exceptional power, or to
some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to '_Natura Benigna_'
herself, closer to her whom we now call 'Inanimate Nature,' than to
the human mother who bore them--far closer than to father, brother,
sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English _savants_, and Emily
Bronte among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English gypsies,
showed a good deal of the characteristics of the 'Children of the Open
Air.' But in the case of the first of these, besides the strength of
his family ties the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodising pedantry
of the man of science; in the second, the sensitivity to human
contact; and in the third, subjection to the love passion--disturbed,
and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct with which they were
undoubtedly endowed.

"Between the true 'Children of the Open Air' and their fellows there
are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other
barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to
overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the attempt
is not found to be worth the making. For, what the Nature-worshipper
finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not the unegoistic
frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to touch her close,
soul to soul--but another _ego_ enisled like his own--sensitive,
shrinking, like his own--a soul which, love him as it may, is,
nevertheless, and for all its love, the central _ego_ of the universe
to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other Nature-worshippers
revolve like the rest of the human constellations. But between these
and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon Nature they lavish their
love--'a most equal love,' that varies no more with her change of mood
than does the love of a man for a beautiful woman, whether she smiles,
or weeps, or frowns. To them a Highland glen is most beautiful; so is
a green meadow; so is a mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South
American savannah. A balmy summer is beautiful, but not more
beautiful than a winter's sleet beating about the face, and stinging
every nerve into delicious life.

"To the 'Child of the Open Air' life has but few ills; poverty cannot
touch him. Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his Turkish bonds, and
he will go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to
see a dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the
sky, the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep. And as life goes on,
love of Nature grows both as a cultus and a passion, and in time
Nature seems 'to know him and love him' in her turn."

It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Borrow's arm,
that made me ask Dr. Hake, as Borrow walked along beneath the trees, "Is
he a genuine Child of the Open Air"? And then, calling to mind
"Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye," I said, "He went into the Dingle, and
lived alone--went there not as an experiment in self-education, as
Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone, for
the 'horrors' to which he was occasionally subject did not spring from
solitary living. He was never disturbed by passion as was the nature-
worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi Lovell, and as
Emily Bronte would certainly have been had she been placed in such
circumstances as Charlotte Bronte placed Shirley."

"But the most damning thing of all," said Hake, "is that umbrella,
gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me."

"Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship," said I. "So
devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is quite beyond
his powers. Picturesque he always is, powerful never. No one reading an
account of the privations of Lavengro during the 'Joseph Sell' period
finds himself able to realise from Borrow's description the misery of a
young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East Anglian
gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with starvation staring
him in the face. It is not passion," I said to Hake, "that prevents
Borrow from enjoying the peace of the nature-worshipper. It is Ambition!
His books show that he could never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the
perilous stuff of ambition. To become renowned, judging from many a
peroration in 'Lavengro,' was as great an incentive to Borrow to learn
languages as to Alexander Smith's poet-hero it was an incentive to write
poetry."

"Ambition and the green gamp," said Hake. "But, look, the rainbow is
fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries, and see
how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the light."

But I soon found that if Borrow was not a perfect Child of the Open Air,
he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human kind,
which the "Child of the Open Air" must needs lack.

IX. THE GYPSIES OF NORMAN CROSS.

Knowing Borrow's extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of meeting
strangers, Dr. Hake, while Borrow was trying to get as close to the deer
as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the terms of cordial
friendship that sprang up between us during that walk. But I was not
surprised: there were several reasons why Borrow should at once take to
me--reasons that had nothing whatever to do with any inherent
attractiveness of my own.

By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon
Borrow's character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.

Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably had
their nests. By the expression on Borrow's face as he stood and gazed at
them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.

"Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was drained?" I
said.

"I should think so," said he, dreamily, "and every kind of water bird."

Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, "But how do
you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?"

"You say in 'Lavengro' that you played among the reeds of Whittlesea Mere
when you were a child."

"I don't mention Whittlesea Mere in 'Lavengro,'" he said.

"No," said I, "but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at
Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere."

"Then you know Whittlesea Mere?" said Borrow, much interested.

"I know the place that _was_ Whittlesea Mere before it was drained," I
said, "and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know the
lane where you first met Jasper Petulengro. He was a generation before
my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much across the Petulengroes in the
Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the Hernes and the Lees and the
Lovells."

I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave him
Marcianus's story about the Moors being invulnerable to the viper's bite,
and about their putting the true breed of a suspected child to the test
by setting it to grasp a viper--as he, Borrow, when a child, grasped one
of the vipers of Norman Cross.

"The gypsies," said Borrow, "always believed me to be a Romany. But
surely you are not a Romany Rye?"

"No," I said, "but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it has
been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and low, I
could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?"

"I should think not," said Borrow, indignantly. "But I hope you don't
know the literary class among the rest."

"Hake is my only link to _that_ dark world," I said; "and even you don't
object to Hake. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of
printers' ink."

He laughed. "Who are you?"

"The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child in
short frocks," I said, "and have never yet found an answer. But Hake
agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any
such troublesome query." This gave a chance to Hake, who in such local
reminiscences as these had been able to take no part. The humorous
mystery of Man's personality had often been a subject of joke between him
and me in many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw
himself into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and
partly vexed Borrow, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the
gypsies and East Anglia.

"You are an Englishman?" said Borrow.

"Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman," I said, using a phrase
of his own in "Lavengro"--"if not a thorough East Anglian an East
Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good."

"Nearly," said Borrow.

And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine
"Shales mare," a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who could
trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk farmers raised
his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair, and when I promised to
show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her
in a dogcart--an East Anglian dogcart--when I praised the stinging
saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Cromer, the
quality which makes it the best, the most buoyant, the most delightful of
all sea water to swim in--when I told him that the only English river in
which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was "the glassy Ouse"
of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it
reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast, and when I told him a
good many things showing that I was in very truth not only an Englishman,
but an East Englishman, my conquest of the "Walking Lord of Gypsy Lore"
was complete, and from that moment we became friends.

Hake meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned
and asked Borrow whether he had never noticed a similarity between the
kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea-waves upon a distant pebbly
beach and the sound of a large rookery in the distance.

"It is on _sand_ alone," said Borrow, "that the sea strikes its true
music--Norfolk sand: a rattle is not music."

"The best of the sea's lutes," I said, "is made by the sands of Cromer."

I have read over to my beloved old friend Dr. Hake, the above meagre
account of that my first delightful ramble with Borrow. He whose memory
lets nothing escape, has reminded me of a score of interesting things
said and done on that memorable occasion. But in putting into print any
record of one's intercourse with a famous man, there is always an
unpleasant sense of lapsing into egotism. And besides, the reader has
very likely had enough now of talk between Borrow and me.

X. THE FUTURE OF BORROW'S WORKS.

He whom London once tried hard, but in vain, to lionise, lived during
some of the last years of his life in Hereford Square, unknown to any
save about a dozen friends. At the head of them stood Mr. John Murray,
whose virtues, both as publisher and as English gentleman, he was never
tired of extolling.

Afterwards he went down to East Anglia--that East Anglia he loved so
well--went there, as he told me, to die.

But it was not till one day in 1881 that Borrow achieved, in the Cottage
by the Oulton Broads which his genius once made famous, and where so much
of his best work had been written, the soul's great conquest over its
fleshly trammels, the conquest we call death, but which he believed to be
life. His body was laid by the side of that of his wife at Brompton.

When I wrote his obituary notice in the _Athenaeum_ no little wonder was
expressed in various quarters that the "Walking Lord of Gypsy Lore" had
been walking so lately the earth.

And yet his "Bible in Spain" had still a regular sale. His "Lavengro"
and "Romany Rye" were still allowed by all competent critics to be among
the most delightful books in the language. Indeed, at his death, Borrow
was what he now is, and what he will continue to be long after Time has
played havoc with nine-tenths of the writers whose names are week by
week, and day by day, "paragraphed" in the papers as "literary
celebrities"--an English classic.

Apart from Borrow's undoubted genius as a writer the subject-matter of
his writings has an interest that will not wane but will go on growing.
The more the features of our "Beautiful England," to use his own phrase,
are changed by the multitudinous effects of the railway system, the more
attraction will readers find in books which depict her before her beauty
was marred--books which depict her in those antediluvian days when there
was such a thing as space in the island--when in England there was a
sense of distance, that sense without which there can be no romance--when
the stage-coach was in its glory--when the only magician who could convey
man and his belongings at any rate of speed beyond man's own walking rate
was the horse--the beloved horse whose praises Borrow loved to sing, and
whose ideal was reached in the mighty "Shales"--when the great high roads
were alive, not merely with the bustle of business, but with real
adventure for the traveller--days and scenes which Borrow better than any
one else could paint. A time will come, I say, when not only books full
of descriptive genius, like "Lavengro," but even such comparatively tame
descriptions of England as the "Gleanings in England and Wales" of the
now forgotten East Midlander, Samuel Jackson Pratt, will be read with a
new interest. But why was Borrow so entirely forgotten at the moment of
his death? Simply because, like many another man of genius and many a
scholar, he refused to figure in the literary arena--went on his way
quietly influencing the world, but mixing only with his private friends.

THEODORE WATTS.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe a dream, partly of
study, partly of adventure, in which will be found copious notices of
books, and many descriptions of life and manners, some in a very unusual
form.

The scenes of action lie in the British Islands;--pray be not displeased,
gentle reader, if perchance thou hast imagined that I was about to
conduct thee to distant lands, and didst promise thyself much instruction
and entertainment from what I might tell thee of them. I do assure thee
that thou hast no reason to be displeased, inasmuch as there are no
countries in the world less known by the British than these selfsame
British Islands, or where more strange things are every day occurring,
whether in road or street, house or dingle.

The time embraces nearly the first quarter of the present century: this
information again may, perhaps, be anything but agreeable to thee; it is
a long time to revert to, but fret not thyself, many matters which at
present much occupy the public mind originated in some degree towards the
latter end of that period, and some of them will be treated of.

The principal actors in this dream, or drama, are, as you will have
gathered from the title-page, a Scholar, a Gypsy, and a Priest. Should
you imagine that these three form one, permit me to assure you that you
are very much mistaken. Should there be something of the Gypsy manifest
in the Scholar, there is certainly nothing of the Priest. With respect
to the Gypsy--decidedly the most entertaining character of the
three--there is certainly nothing of the Scholar or the Priest in him;
and as for the Priest, though there may be something in him both of
scholarship and gypsyism, neither the Scholar nor the Gypsy would feel at
all flattered by being confounded with him.

Many characters which may be called subordinate will be found, and it is
probable that some of these characters will afford much more interest to
the reader than those styled the principal. The favourites with the
writer are a brave old soldier and his helpmate, an ancient gentlewoman
who sold apples, and a strange kind of wandering man and his wife.

Amongst the many things attempted in this book is the encouragement of
charity, and free and genial manners, and the exposure of humbug, of
which there are various kinds, but of which the most perfidious, the most
debasing, and the most cruel, is the humbug of the Priest.

Yet let no one think that irreligion is advocated in this book. With
respect to religious tenets, I wish to observe that I am a member of the
Church of England, into whose communion I was baptized, and to which my
forefathers belonged. Its being the religion in which I was baptized,
and of my forefathers, would be a strong inducement to me to cling to it;
for I do not happen to be one of those choice spirits "who turn from
their banner when the battle bears strongly against it, and go over to
the enemy," and who receive at first a hug and a "viva," and in the
sequel contempt and spittle in the face; but my chief reason for
belonging to it is, because, of all Churches calling themselves Christian
ones, I believe there is none so good, so well founded upon Scripture, or
whose ministers are, upon the whole, so exemplary in their lives and
conversation, so well read in the book from which they preach, or so
versed in general learning, so useful in their immediate neighbourhoods,
or so unwilling to persecute people of other denominations for matters of
doctrine.

In the communion of this Church, and with the religious consolation of
its ministers, I wish and hope to live and die, and in its and their
defence will at all times be ready, if required, to speak, though humbly,
and to fight, though feebly, against enemies, whether carnal or
spiritual.

And is there no priestcraft in the Church of England? There is
certainly, or rather there was, a modicum of priestcraft in the Church of
England, but I have generally found that those who are most vehement
against the Church of England are chiefly dissatisfied with her, because
there is only a modicum of that article in her--were she stuffed to the
very cupola with it, like a certain other Church, they would have much
less to say against the Church of England.

By the other Church, I mean Rome. Its system was once prevalent in
England, and, during the period that it prevailed there, was more
prolific of debasement and crime than all other causes united. The
people and the government at last becoming enlightened by means of the
Scripture, spurned it from the island with disgust and horror, the land
instantly after its disappearance becoming a fair field, in which arts,
sciences, and all the amiable virtues flourished, instead of being a
pestilent marsh where swine-like ignorance wallowed, and artful
hypocrites, like so many Wills-o'-the-wisp, played antic gambols about,
around, and above debased humanity.

But Popery still wished to play her old part, to regain her lost
dominion, to reconvert the smiling land into the pestilential morass,
where she could play again her old antics. From the period of the
Reformation in England up to the present time, she has kept her
emissaries here, individuals contemptible in intellect, it is true, but
cat-like and gliding, who, at her bidding, have endeavoured, as much as
in their power has lain, to damp and stifle every genial, honest, loyal,
and independent thought, and to reduce minds to such a state of dotage as
would enable their old Popish mother to do what she pleased with them.

And in every country, however enlightened, there are always minds
inclined to grovelling superstition--minds fond of eating dust, and
swallowing clay--minds never at rest, save when prostrate before some
fellow in a surplice; and these Popish emissaries found always some weak
enough to bow down before them, astounded by their dreadful denunciations
of eternal woe and damnation to any who should refuse to believe their
Romania; but they played a poor game--the law protected the servants of
Scripture, and the priest with his beads seldom ventured to approach any
but the remnant of those of the eikonolatry--representatives of
worm-eaten houses, their debased dependants, and a few poor crazy
creatures amongst the middle classes--he played a poor game, and the
labour was about to prove almost entirely in vain, when the English
legislature, in compassion or contempt, or, yet more probably, influenced
by that spirit of toleration and kindness which is so mixed up with
Protestantism, removed almost entirely the disabilities under which
Popery laboured, and enabled it to raise its head, and to speak out
almost without fear.

And it did raise its head, and, though it spoke with some little fear at
first, soon discarded every relic of it; went about the land uttering its
damnation cry, gathering around it--and for doing so many thanks to
it--the favourers of priestcraft who lurked within the walls of the
Church of England; frightening with the loudness of its voice the weak,
the timid, and the ailing; perpetrating, whenever it had an opportunity,
that species of crime to which it has ever been most partial--_Deathbed
robbery_; for as it is cruel, so is it dastardly. Yes, it went on
enlisting, plundering, and uttering its terrible threats till--till it
became, as it always does when left to itself, a fool, a very fool. Its
plunderings might have been overlooked, and so might its insolence, had
it been common insolence, but it--, and then the roar of indignation
which arose from outraged England against the viper, the frozen viper
which it had permitted to warm itself upon its bosom.