Transcribed from the 1896 David Nutt edition by David Price, email [email protected]

NOTE

A few passages in this monograph are taken from a short article on “George Borrow” which appeared in “Good Words.”

W. A. D.

GEORGE BORROW IN
EAST ANGLIA

by
WILLIAM A. DUTT

“The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes.  Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? . . . The sun shines to-day also.  There is more wool and flax in the fields.  Let us demand our own works, and laws, and worship.”—Emerson.

london
DAVID NUTT, 270–271, STRAND
1896

CONTENTS

“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 picture 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 that 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.”

Theodore Watts.

CHAPTER I: EAST ANGLIA

It is a trite saying, the truth of which is so universally admitted that it is hardly worth repeating, that a man’s memory, above all things, retains most vividly recollections of the scenes amidst which he passed his early days.  Amidst the loneliness of the African veldt or American prairie solitudes, the West-countryman dreams of Devon’s grassy tors and honeysuckle lanes, and Cornish headlands, fretted by the foaming waves of the grey Atlantic; in teaming cities, where the pulse of life beats loud and strong, the Scotsman ever cherishes sweet, sad thoughts of the braes and burns about his Highland home; between the close-packed roofs of a London alley, the Italian immigrant sees the sunny skies and deep blue seas of his native land, the German pictures to himself the loveliness of the legend-haunted Rhineland, and the Scandinavian, closing his eyes and ears to the squalor and misery,

wonders whether the sea-birds still circle above the stone-built cottage in the Nordland cleft, and cry weirdly from the darkness as they sweep landward in the night.  Many a wanderer, whatever else he may let go, holds in his heart the hope that one day he may go back to the place where his boyhood’s days were spent, even though it be but to dwell alone amidst the phantoms of long dead dreams and long lost loves.

East Anglia may well be compared to a sad-faced mother, who sees her children, whom she would fain keep with her, one by one go out into the wide world to seek those things that cannot be found in her humble home.  For years the youths of Eastern England have had to leave the hamlet hall, the village rectory, the marshland farmstead, and the cottage home, and wander far and wide to gain their daily bread.  Toil as they might, farm and field could give them little for their labour, the mother-country’s breast was dry.  And yet they loved her—loved her dearly.  Deeply and firmly rooted in his heart is the love of the East Anglian for East Anglia.  The outside world has but recently discovered the charm of the Broadland: by the dweller there it has been felt since the day when he first gazed with seeing eyes across its dreamy, silent solitudes.  The secrets of the marshland wastes have been whispered in his ears by the wind in the willows, and have been sung to him by the sighing sedge.  He knows the bird voices of reed rond and

hover, and has read the lesson of the day’s venture in the brightening sunrise and sunset glow.  Amidst scenes that have little changed since the Iceni hid in the marshland-bordering woods, and crept out in their coracles on the rush-fringed meres, he is at home with Nature, and becomes her friend, her lover.  She holds back no secret from him if he wills that he should learn it; she charms him with her many moods.  Her laughter is the sunlight, and ere it has died away she has hidden