The Romany Rye | Page 2

foils to the pleasant ones--save Borrow. His weaknesses no one ever condones. During his lifetime his faults were for ever chafing and irritating his acquaintances, and now that he and they are all dead these faults of his seem to be chafing and irritating people of another generation. A fantastic fate, I say, for him who was so interesting to some of us!
One writer assails him on account of his own ill-judged and unwarrantable attacks upon a far greater man than himself--Sir Walter Scott; another on account of his "no-popery" diatribes; another on account of his amusing anger over "Charley o'er the Waterism."
When Mr. Murray's new and admirable edition of "The Romany Rye" came out this year, a review of the book appeared in the Daily Chronicle, in which vitality was given--given by one of the most genial as well as brilliant and picturesque writers of our time--to all the old misrepresentations of Borrow and also to a good many new ones. The fact that this review came from so distinguished a writer as Dr. Jessopp lends it an importance and a permanency that cannot be ignored. To me it gave a twofold pain to read that review, for it was written by a man for whom I have a very special regard. I cannot claim Dr. Jessopp as a personal friend, but I have once or twice met him; and, assuredly, to spend any time in his society without being greatly attracted by him is impossible. I must say that I consider it quite lamentable that he who can hardly himself have seen much if anything of Borrow should have breathed the anti-Borrovian atmosphere of Norwich--should have been brought into contact with people there and in Norfolk generally who did know Borrow and who disliked, because they did not understand, him.
Lest it should be supposed that in writing with such warmth I am unduly biassed in favour of Borrow I print here a letter I received concerning that same review of Dr. Jessopp's. It is written by one who has with me enjoyed many a delightful walk with Borrow in Richmond Park--one who knew Borrow many years ago--long before I did--Dr. Gordon Hake's son--Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, the author of "Within Sound of the Weir," and other successful novels, and a well-known writer in Chambers's Journal.
CRAIGMORE, BULSTRODE ROAD, HOUNSLOW, W. May 15, 1900.
My Dear Watts-Dunton,--You will remember that when I congratulated you upon the success of your two gypsy books I prophesied that now there would be a boom of the gypsies: and I was right it seems. For you will see by the enclosed newspaper cutting that in Surrey a regular trade is going on in caravans for gypsy gentlemen. And "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" are going, I see, into lots of new editions. I know how this must gratify you. But I write to ask you whether you have seen the extremely bitter attack upon Borrow's memory which has appeared in the Daily Chronicle. The writer is a man I must surely have heard you mention with esteem--Dr. Jessopp. It is a review of Murray's new edition of "The Romany Rye." In case you have not seen it I send you a cutting from it for you to judge for yourself. {0a}
Was there ever anything so unjust as this? As to what he says about Borrow's being without animal passion, I fancy that the writer must have misread certain printed words of yours in which you say, "Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn towards any woman, could she possibly have been a Romany? would she not rather have been of the Scandinavian type?" But I am quite sure that, when you said this, you did not intend to suggest that he was "the Narses of Literature." As to his dislike of children, I have heard you say how interested he used to seem in the presence of gypsy children, and I especially remember one anecdote of yours about the interest he took in a child that he thought was being injured by the mother's smoking. And did you not get that lovely anecdote about the gypsy child weeping in the churchyard because the poor dead gorgios could not hear the church chimes from something he told you? But I can speak from personal experience about his feeling towards children that were not gypsies. When our family lived at Bury St. Edmunds, in the fifties, my father, as you know, was one of Borrow's most intimate friends, and he was frequently at our house, and Borrow and my father were a good deal in correspondence (as Dr. Knapp's book shows) and my impression of Borrow is exactly the contrary of that which it would be if he in the least resembled Dr. Jessopp's description of