The Life of George Borrow [29]
to the career of his old school-fellow, Rajah Brooke of Sarawak. {69b} He was now, by his own confession, "a moody man, bearing on my face, as I well knew, the marks of my strivings and my strugglings, of what I had learnt and unlearnt." {69c} He recognised the possibilities that lay in every man, only awaiting the hour when they should be called forth. He believed implicitly in the power of the will. {69d} He possessed ambition and a fine workable theory of how success was to be obtained; but he lacked initiative. He expected fortune to wait for him on the high-road, just as he knew adventures awaited him. He would not go "across the country," to use a phrase of the time common to postilions. He was too independent, perhaps too sensitive of being patronised, to seek employment. That he cared "for nothing in this world but old words and strange stories," was an error into which his friend Mr Petulengro might well fall. The mightiness of the man's pride could be covered only by a cloak of assumed indifference. He must be independent of the world, not only in material things, but in those intangible qualities of the spirit. It was this that lost him Isopel Berners, whose love he awakened by a strong right arm and quenched with an Armenian noun. Again, his independence stood in the way of his happiness. A man is a king, he seemed to think, and the attribute of kings is their splendid isolation, their godlike solitude. If his Ego were lonely and crying out for sympathy, Borrow thought it a moment for solitude, in which to discipline his insurgent spirit. The "Horrors" were the result of this self-repression. When they became unbearable, his spirit broke down, the yearning for sympathy and affection overmastered him, and he stumbled to his little horse in the desolate dingle, and found comfort in the faithful creature's whinny of sympathy and its affectionate licking of his hand. The strong man clung to his dumb brute friend as a protection against the unknown horror--the screaming horror that had gripped him.
One quality Borrow possessed in common with many other men of strange and taciturn personality. He could always make friends when he chose. Ostlers, scholars, farmers, gypsies; it mattered not one jot to him what, or who they were. He could earn their respect and obtain their good-will, if he wished to do so. He demanded of men that they should have done things, or be capable of doing things. They must know everything there was to be known about some one thing; and the ostler, than whom none could groom a horse better, was worthy of being ranked with the best man in the land. He demanded of every man that he should justify his existence, and was logical in his attitude, save in the insignificant particular that he applied the same rule to himself only in theory.
He was shrewd and a good judge of character, provided it were Protestant character, and could hold his own with a Jew or a Gypsy. He was fully justified in his boast of being able to take "precious good care of" himself, and "drive a precious hard bargain"; yet these qualities were not to find a market until he was thirty years of age.
Sometime during the autumn (1825) Borrow returned to Norwich, where he busied himself with literary affairs, among other things writing to the publishers of Faustus about the bill that was shortly to fall due. The fact of the book having been destroyed at both the Norwich libraries, gave him the idea that he might make some profit by selling copies of the suppressed volume. Hence his offer to Simpkin & Marshall to take copies in lieu of money.
CHAPTER V: SEPTEMBER 1825-DECEMBER 1832
From the autumn of 1825 until the winter of 1832, when he obtained an introduction to the British & Foreign Bible Society, only fragmentary details of Borrow's life exist. He decided to keep sacred to himself the "Veiled Period," as it came to be called. In all probability it was a time of great hardship and mortification, and he wished it to be thought that the whole period was devoted to "a grand philological
One quality Borrow possessed in common with many other men of strange and taciturn personality. He could always make friends when he chose. Ostlers, scholars, farmers, gypsies; it mattered not one jot to him what, or who they were. He could earn their respect and obtain their good-will, if he wished to do so. He demanded of men that they should have done things, or be capable of doing things. They must know everything there was to be known about some one thing; and the ostler, than whom none could groom a horse better, was worthy of being ranked with the best man in the land. He demanded of every man that he should justify his existence, and was logical in his attitude, save in the insignificant particular that he applied the same rule to himself only in theory.
He was shrewd and a good judge of character, provided it were Protestant character, and could hold his own with a Jew or a Gypsy. He was fully justified in his boast of being able to take "precious good care of" himself, and "drive a precious hard bargain"; yet these qualities were not to find a market until he was thirty years of age.
Sometime during the autumn (1825) Borrow returned to Norwich, where he busied himself with literary affairs, among other things writing to the publishers of Faustus about the bill that was shortly to fall due. The fact of the book having been destroyed at both the Norwich libraries, gave him the idea that he might make some profit by selling copies of the suppressed volume. Hence his offer to Simpkin & Marshall to take copies in lieu of money.
CHAPTER V: SEPTEMBER 1825-DECEMBER 1832
From the autumn of 1825 until the winter of 1832, when he obtained an introduction to the British & Foreign Bible Society, only fragmentary details of Borrow's life exist. He decided to keep sacred to himself the "Veiled Period," as it came to be called. In all probability it was a time of great hardship and mortification, and he wished it to be thought that the whole period was devoted to "a grand philological