Isopel Berners | Page 3

his questionings on the subjects of
reality and truth, the Author was asking himself "What is death?" and
the query serves as a prelude to the first of the many breezy dialogues
with that gipsy cousin-german to Autolycus, Jasper Petulengro.
"What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?"
"My opinion of death, brother, is much the same as that in the old song
of Pharaoh . . . when a man dies he is cast into the earth and his wife
and child sorrow over him. If he has neither wife nor child, then his
father and mother, I suppose; and if he is quite alone in the world, why,
then he is cast into the earth and there is an end of the matter."
"And do you think that is the end of man?"
"There's an end of him, brother, more's the pity."
"Why do you say so?"
"Life is sweet, brother."
"Do you think so?"
"Think so! there's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon
and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath.
Life is very sweet, brother: who would wish to die?"
"I would wish to die."
"You talk like a gorgio--which is the same as talking like a fool; were
you a Romany chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed! a
Romany chal would wish to live for ever."

"In sickness, Jasper?"
"There's the sun and stars, brother."
"In blindness, Jasper?"
"There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that I would
gladly live for ever. Daeta, we'll now go to the tents and put on the
gloves, and I'll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive,
brother."
Leaving Norwich and his legal trammels, a few weeks after his father's
death, in 1824, Lavengro reaches London--the scene of Grub Street
struggles not greatly relaxed in severity since the days of Newbery,
Gardener and Christopher Smart. As the genius of Hawthorne was
cooped up and enslaved for the American "Peter Parley," so that of
Borrow was hag- ridden by a bookseller publisher of an even worse
type, the radical alderman and philanthropic sweater, Sir Richard
Phillipps. For this stony-hearted faddist he covered reams of paper with
printers' copy; and we are told that the kind of compilation that he liked
(and probably executed) best was that of Newgate Lives and Trials. He
had well-nigh reached the end of his tether when he had the
conversation with Phillipps's head factotum, Taggart, which we cite
below and recommend feelingly to the consideration of every literary
aspirant. Sordid and commonplace enough are the details; simple and
free from every kind of inflation the language in which they are
narrated. Yet how picturesque are these vignettes of London life! How
vivid and yet how strange are the figures that animate them! The harsh
literary impresario with his "drug in the market," who seems to have
stalked straight out of Smollett, {8} the gnarled old applewoman, with
every wrinkle shown, on her stall upon London Bridge, the grasping
Armenian merchant who softened at the sound of his native tongue, the
giddy young spendthrift Francis Ardry and the confiding young
creature who had permitted him to hire her a very handsome floor in
the West End, the gipsies and thimble-riggers in Greenwich Park--what
moving and lifelike figures are these, stippled in with a seeming
absence of art, yet as strange and as rare as a Night in Bagdad, a
chapter of Balzac, or the most fantastic scene in the _New Arabian

Nights_.
This brief recapitulation--in which it has been possible but just to touch
upon a few of the inner springs of Borrow's life as revealed in the
autobiographical Lavengro--brings us once again to that spring day in
1825--May 20th--when the author disposed of an unidentifiable
manuscript for the sumptuous equivalent of 20 pounds. On May 22nd,
after little more than a year's residence in London, he abandons the city.
From London he proceeds to Amesbury, in Wiltshire, which he reaches
on May 23rd; visits Stonehenge, the Roman Camp of Old Sarum and
Salisbury; on May 26th he leaves Salisbury, and (after an encounter
with the long-lost son of the old applewoman, returned from Botany
Bay), strikes north-west. On the 30th he has been walking four days in
a northerly direction, when he arrives at the inn where the maid Jenny
refreshes him at the pump, and he meets the author with whom he
passes the night. On the 31st he purchases the horse and cart of Jack
Slingsby, whom he had previously seen but once, at Tamworth, many
years ago when he was little more than a child. On June 1st he makes
the first practical experience of a vagrant's life, and passes the