Borrow turned up while Watts was there, and we went through a pleasant trio, in which Borrow, as was his wont, took the first fiddle. The reader must not here take metaphor for music. Borrow made himself very agreeable to Watts, recited a fairy tale in the best style to him, and liked him.”
There is, however, no doubt that Borrow would have run away from me had I been associated in his mind with the literary calling. But at that time I had written nothing at all save poems, and a prose story or two of a romantic kind, and even these, though some of the poems have since appeared, were then known only through private circulation.
About me there was nothing of the literary flavour: no need to flee away from me as he fled from the writing fraternity. He had not long before this refused to allow Dr. Hake to introduce the late W. R. S. Ralston to him, simply because the Russian scholar moved in the literary world.
With regard to newspaper critiques of books his axiom was that “whatever is praised by the press is of necessity bad,” and he refused to read anything that was so praised.
After the “fairy tale” mentioned by Dr. Hake was over, we went, at Borrow’s suggestion, for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the “Bald-Faced Stag” in Kingston Vale, in order that Borrow should introduce me to Jerry Abershaw’s sword, which was one of the special glories of that once famous hostelry. A divine summer day it was I remember—a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.
These showers, however, seemed, as Borrow remarked, merely to give a rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the meadows on the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was Borrow’s special delight. He liked rain, but he liked it falling on the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a summer storm) he generally carried. As we entered the Robin Hood Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away. Borrow told us some interesting stories of Romany superstitions in connection with the rainbow—how, by making a “trus’hul” (cross) of two sticks, the Romany chi who “pens the dukkerin can wipe the rainbow out of the sky,” etc. Whereupon Hake, quite as original a man as Borrow, and a humourist of a still rarer temper, launched out into a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record, upon the subject of the “Spirit of the Rainbow” which a certain child went out to find.
Borrow loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar with every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true “Child of the Open Air.”
“Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?” I murmured to Hake, while Borrow lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said, in a dreamy way, “Old England! Old England!”
VIII. A Child of the Open Air Under a Green Umbrella.
Perhaps, however, I had better define what Hake and I meant by this phrase, and to do this I cannot do better than quote the definition of Nature-worship, by H. A. the “Swimming Rye,” which we had both been just discussing, and which I quoted not long after this memorable walk in a literary journal:—
“With all the recent cultivation of the picturesque by means of water-colour landscape, descriptive novels, ‘Cook’s excursions,’ etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was—perhaps rarer. It is quite an affair of individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost. That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how little it is known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it:—in human souls—in one, perhaps, as much as in another—there is always that instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the blessing, not the bane, that, owing to some exceptional power, or to some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to ‘Natura Benigna’ herself, closer to her whom we now call ‘Inanimate Nature,’ than to the human mother who bore them—far closer than to father, brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English savants, and Emily Brontë among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the ‘Children of the Open Air.’ But in the case of the first of these, besides the strength of his family ties the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodising pedantry of the man of science; in the second, the sensitivity to human contact; and in the third, subjection to the love passion—disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct with which they were undoubtedly endowed.
“Between the true ‘Children of the Open Air’ and their fellows there are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the attempt is not found to be worth the making. For, what the Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to touch her close, soul to soul—but another ego enisled like his own—sensitive, shrinking, like his own—a soul which, love him as it may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations. But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon Nature they lavish their love—‘a most equal love,’ that varies no more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns. To them a Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah. A balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter’s sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious life.
“To the ‘Child of the Open Air’ life has but few ills; poverty cannot touch him. Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his Turkish bonds, and he will go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky, the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep. And as life goes on, love of Nature grows both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature seems ‘to know him and love him’ in her turn.”
It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Borrow’s arm, that made me ask Dr. Hake, as Borrow walked along beneath the trees, “Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air”? And then, calling to mind “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” I said, “He went into the Dingle, and lived alone—went there not as an experiment in self-education, as Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone, for the ‘horrors’ to which he was occasionally subject did not spring from solitary living. He was never disturbed by passion as was the nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi Lovell, and as Emily Brontë would certainly have been had she been placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Brontë placed Shirley.”
“But the most damning thing of all,” said
