Lavengro: the Scholar - the Gypsy - the Priest. Borrow George
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 Athenæum 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