Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic. Douglas James
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 Dereham indignantly.
‘But I hope you don’t know the literary class among the rest.’
‘Gordon is my only link to that dark world,’ I said, ‘and even you don’t object to Gordon. 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 Gordon agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any such troublesome query.’
This gave a chance to Gordon, 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 Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the gypsies and East Anglia.
‘You are an Englishman?’ said Dereham.
‘Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,’ I said, using a phrase of his own in one of his books – ‘if not a thorough East Anglian, an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.’
‘Nearly,’ said Dereham.
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 Dereham was complete, and from that moment we became friends.
Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned and asked Dereham 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 Dereham, ‘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.’”
These famous walks with Borrow (or Dereham, as he is called in the above quotation) in Richmond Park and the neighbourhood, have been thus described by the ‘Gordon’ of the story in one of the sonnets 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, there 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!
In the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and in Chambers’ ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ and scattered through scores of articles in the ‘Athenæum,’ I find descriptions of Borrow and allusions to him without number. They afford absolutely the only portrait of that wonderful man that exists or is ever likely to exist. But, of course, it is quite impossible for me to fill my pages with Borrow when there are so many more important figures waiting to be introduced. Still, I must find room for the most brilliant little Borrow scene of all, for it will flush these pages with a colour which I feel they need. Mr. Watts-Dunton has been described as the most picturesque of all living writers, whether in verse or in prose, and it is not for me to gainsay that judgment; but never, I think, is he so picturesque as when he is writing about Borrow.
I am not quite clear as to where the following picture of gypsy life is to be localized; but the scenery seems to be that of the part of England where East Anglia and the Midlands join. It adds interest to the incident to know that the beautiful gypsy girl was the prototype of Rhona Boswell, and that Dereham is George Borrow. This also is a chapter from the unpublished story before mentioned, which was afterwards modified to be used in an introductory essay to another of Borrow’s books: —
“It was in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with what Dereham called ‘gypsy gold,’ and the bright green of the foliage showed scarcely a touch of bronze – at that very moment, indeed, when the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the commons and the hedgerows seem to come back for an hour and mingle their half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground ivy, and pimpernel. Dereham gave me as hearty a greeting as so shy a man could give. He told me that he was bound for a certain camp of gryengroes, old friends of his in his wandering days. In conversation I reminded him of our previous talk, and I told him I chanced at that very moment to have in my pocket a copy of the volume of Matthew Arnold in which appears ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’ Dereham said he well remembered my directing his attention to ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’ After listening attentively to it, Dereham declared that there was scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that, whatever the merits of Matthew Arnold’s poem might be, from any supposed artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of the Romany temper, and that no gypsy could sympathise with it, or even understand its motive in the least degree. I challenged this, contending that howsoever Arnold’s classic language might soar above a gypsy’s intelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the most illiterate person could grasp it.
‘I wish,’ said Dereham, ‘you would come with me to the camp and try the poem upon the first intelligent gypsy woman we meet at the camp. As to gypsy men,’ said he, ‘they are too prosaic to furnish a fair test.’
We agreed, and as we were walking across the country Dereham became very communicative, and talked very volubly upon gentility-nonsense, and many other pet subjects of his. I already knew that he was no lover of the aristocracy of England, or, as he called them, the ‘trumpery great,’ although in other regards he was such a John Bull. By this time we had proceeded a good way on our little expedition. As we were walking along, Dereham’s eyes, which were as longsighted as a gypsy’s, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn-bush some distance off. He stopped and said: ‘At first I thought that white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it’s a magpie,’ – next to the water-wagtail, the gypsies’ most famous bird. On going up to the bush we discovered a magpie couched among the leaves. As it did not stir at our approach, I said to him: ‘It is wounded – or else dying – or is it a tamed bird escaped from a cage?’ ‘Hawk!’ said Dereham laconically, and turned up his face and gazed into the sky. ‘The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his quarry and made his meal. I fancied he has himself been ‘chivvied’ by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.’
And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that speckled the dazzling blue, a hawk – one of the kind which takes its prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands – was wheeling up and up, trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to swoop at and devour it.