Lavengro: the Scholar - the Gypsy - the Priest. Borrow George
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 Brontë 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 Brontë would certainly have been had she been placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Brontë 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