Part 31 (1/2)
”For he fled o'er to t'other side, And so they could not find him; He swam across the flowing tide, And never looked behind him.”
About this time (1826?) George Borrow published a small book of poems which is now extremely rare. I have a copy of it. In it there is a lyric in which, with his usual effrontery, he describes a very clever, tall, handsome, accomplished man, who knows many languages and who can drink a pint of rum, ending with the remark that he himself was this admirable person. As Heine was in England at this time, it is not improbable that he met with this poem; but in any case, there is a resemblance between it and one of his own in the _Buch der Lieder_, which runs thus:--
”Brave man, he got me the food I ate, His kindness and care I can never forget, Yet I cannot kiss him, though other folk can, For I myself am this excellent man!”
It came to pa.s.s that after a while I wrote my book on ”The English Gypsies and their Language,” and sent a note to Mr. Borrow in which I asked permission to dedicate it to him. I sent it to the care of Mr.
Murray, who subsequently a.s.sured me that Mr. Borrow had actually received it. Now Mr. Borrow had written thirty years before some sketches and fragments on the same subject, which would, I am very certain, have remained unpublished to this day but for me. He received my note on Sat.u.r.day--never answered it--and on Monday morning advertised in all the journals his own forthcoming work on the same subject.
Now, what is sincere truth is, that when I learned this I laughed. I thought very little of my own work, and if Mr. Borrow had only told me that it was in the way of his I would have withdrawn it at once, and that with right goodwill, for I had so great a respect for the Nestor of gypsyism that I would have been very glad to have gratified him with such a small sacrifice. But it was not in him to suspect or imagine so much common decency in any human heart, and so he craftily, and to my great delight and satisfaction, ”got ahead” of me. For, to tell the truth of truth, I was pleased to my soul that I had caused him to make and publish the work.
I have said too hastily that it was written thirty years before. What I believe is, that Mr. Borrow had by him a vocabulary, and a few loose sketches, which he pitchforked together, but that the book itself was made and cemented into one with additions for the first time after he received my note. He was not, take him altogether, over-scrupulous. Sir Patrick Colquhoun told me that once when he was at Constantinople, Mr.
Borrow came there, and gave it out that he was a marvellous Oriental scholar. But there was great scepticism on this subject at the Legation, and one day at the _table-d'hote_, where the great writer and divers young diplomatists dined, two who were seated on either side of Borrow began to talk in Arabic, speaking to him, the result being that he was obliged to confess that he not only did not understand what they were saying, but did not even know what the language was. Then he was tried in Modern Greek, with the same result. The truth was that he knew a great deal, but did all in his power to make the world believe it was far more--like the African king, or the English prime minister, who, the longer his s.h.i.+rts were made, insisted on having the higher collars, until the former trailed on the ground and the latter rose above the top of his head--”when they came home from the was.h.!.+”
What I admire in Borrow to such a degree that before it his faults or failings seem very trifling, is his absolutely vigorous, marvellously varied originality, based on direct familiarity with Nature, but guided and cultured by the study of natural, simple writers, such as Defoe and Smollett. I think that the ”interest” in or rather sympathy for gypsies, in his case as in mine, came not from their being curious or dramatic beings, but because they are so much a part of free life, of out-of-doors Nature; so a.s.sociated with sheltered nooks among rocks and trees, the hedgerow and birds, river-sides, and wild roads. Borrow's heart was large and true as regarded English rural life; there was a place in it for everything which was of the open air and freshly beautiful. He was not a view-hunter of ”bits,” trained according to Ruskin and the _deliberate_ word-painting of a thousand novels and Victorian picturesque poems; but he often brings us nearer to Nature than they do, not by photography, but by casually letting fall a word or trait, by which we realise not only her form but her soul. Herein he was like Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, who gives us the impression of a writer who was deeply inspired with calm sweet sunny views of Nature, yet in whose writings literal description is so rarely introduced, that it is a marvel how much the single b.u.t.tercup lights up the landscape for a quarter of a mile, when a thousand would produce no effect whatever. This may have possibly been art in Irving--art of the most subtle kind--but in Borrow it was instinct, and hardly intentional. In this respect he was superior even to Whitman.
And here I would say, apropos of Carlyle, Tennyson, Irving, Borrow, Whitman, and some others whom I have met, that with such men in only one or two interviews, one covers more ground and establishes more intimacy than with the great majority of folk whom we meet and converse with hundreds of times. Which fact has been set forth by Wieland in his work on Democritus or the Abderites so ingeniously, as people expressed it a century ago, or so cleverly, as we now say, or so sympathetically, as an Italian would say, that my pen fails to utter the thoughts which arise in me compared to what he has written.
When the summer came, or on the 1st of August, we started on a grand tour about England. First we went to Salisbury. I was deeply interested in the Cathedral there, because it is possibly the only great Gothic structure of the kind in Europe which was completed in a single style during a single reign. Stonehenge was to me even more remarkable, because it is more mysterious. Its stupendous barbarism or archaic character, involving a whole lost cycle of ideas, contrasts so strangely with the advanced architectural skill displayed in the cutting and fitting of the vast blocks, that the whole seems to be a mighty paradox.
This was the work of many thousands of men--of very well directed labour under the supervision of architects who could draw and measure skilfully with a grand sense of _proportion_ or symmetry, who had, however, not attained to ornament--a thing without parallel in humanity. This is absolutely bewildering, as is the utter want of all indication as to its real purpose. The old British tradition that the stones were brought by magic from Africa, coupled with what Sir John Lubbock and others declare as to similar remains on the North African coast, suggest something, but what that was remains to be discovered. Men have, however, developed great works of the ma.s.sive and simple order in poetry, as well as in architecture. The Nibelungen Lied is a Stonehenge. There are in it only one or two similes or decorations. ”Simplicity is its sole ornament.”
From Salisbury we went to Wells. The cathedrals of England form the pages of a vast work in which there is written the history of a paradox or enigma as marvellous as that of Stonehenge; and it is this--that the farther back we go, even into a really barbarous age, almost to the time when Roman culture had died and the mediaeval had not begun, the more exquisite are the proportions of buildings, the higher their tone, and, as in the case of Early and Decorated English, the more beautiful their ornament. That is to say, that exactly in the time when, according to all our modern teaching and ideas, there should have been _no_ architectural art, it was most admirably developed, while, on the contrary, in this end of the nineteenth century, when theory, criticism, learning, and science abound, it is in its lowest and most depraved state, its highest flights aiming at nothing better than cheap imitation of old examples. The age which produced the Romanesque architecture, whether in northern Italy, along the Rhine as the Lombard, or in France and England as Norman, was extremely barbarous, b.l.o.o.d.y, and illiterate; and yet in the n.o.blest and grandest conceptions of architectural art it surpa.s.sed all the genius of this our time as the sun surpa.s.ses a star.
While we _know_ that man has advanced, it still remains true that the history of architecture alone for the past thousand years indicates a steady retrogression and decay in art, and this const.i.tutes the stupendous paradox to which I have alluded. But Milton has fully explained to us that when the devils in h.e.l.l built the first great temple or palace--Pandemonium--they achieved the greatest work of architecture ever seen!
York Cathedral made on me a hundred times deeper and more sympathetic impression than St. Peter's of Rome. There is a grandeur of unity and a sense of a single cultus in it which the Renaissance never reached in anything. Even from the days of Orcagna there is an element of mixed motives and incoherence in the best of Italian architecture and sculpture. It requires colour to effect that which Norman or Gothic art could produce more grandly and impressively with _shade_ alone. It is the difference between a garden and a forest. This is shown in the glorious mediaeval _grisaille_ windows, in which such art proves its absolute perfection. While I was looking at these in rapt admiration, an American friend who did not lack a certain degree of culture asked me if I did not find in them a great want of colour!
I made in York the acquaintance of a youth named Carr, son of a former high sheriff, who, by the way, showed us very great hospitality whenever we visited the city. This young man had read Labarthe and other writers on archaeology, and was enthusiastic in finding relics of the olden time.
He took me into a great many private houses. I visited every church, and indeed saw far more than do the great majority of even the most inquiring visitors. The Shambles was then and is still perhaps one of the most curious specimens of a small mediaeval street in the world. I felt as if I could pa.s.s a life in the museum and churches, and I did, in fact, years after, remain there, very busy, for three weeks, sketching innumerable corbels, gargoyles, goblins, arches, weather-worn saints and sinners. And in the Cathedral I found the original of the maid in the garden a-hanging out the clothes. She is a fair sinner, and the blackbird is a demon volatile, who, having lighted on her shoulder, snaps her by the nose to get her soul. The motive often occurs in Gothic sculpture.
We may trace it back--_vide_ the ”Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers” of Amelia B. Edwards (whom I have also met at an Oriental Congress)--to Roman Harpies and the Egyptian _Ba_, depicted in the ”Book of the Dead”
or the ”Egyptian Bible.”
THE END.
Footnotes:
{1} As I was very desirous of learning more about this celebrated fireplace, I inserted a request in the _Public Ledger_ for information regarding it, which elicited the following from some one to me unknown, to whom I now return thanks:--
”MR. CITY-EDITOR OF THE _Public Ledger_,--In your edition of this date, I notice a communication headed 'To Local Antiquarians.' Without any well-founded pretensions to the designation 'Antiquarian,' as I get older I still take a great interest in the early history of our beloved city. I remember _distinctly_ the fact, but not the date, of reading a description of the 'mantelpiece.' It was of wood, handsomely carved on the pillars, and under the shelf, and on the centre between the pillars, was the following quaint and witty _hieroglyphic_ inscription:--
When the grate is M. T. put: When it is . putting:
which is a little puzzling at first sight, but readily translated by converting the punctuation points into written words.
SENIOR.
”_Frankford_, _May 24_, _1892_.”