Lavengro | Page 4

of long "book-words"
(often mispronounced) displayed by the former. Strong, however, as is
the Romany chi's passion for fine words, her sentences are rarely
complex like some of the sentences Borrow puts into her mouth.
With regard, however, to the charge of idealising gypsy life--a charge
which has often been brought against Borrow--it must be remembered
that the gypsies to whom he introduces us are the better kind of
gryengroes (horse-dealers), by far the most prosperous of all gypsies.
Borrow's "gryengroes" are not in any way more prosperous than those
he knew.
These nomads have an instinctive knowledge of horseflesh--will tell
the amount of "blood" in any horse by a lightning glance at his
quarters--and will sometimes make large sums before the fair is over.
Yet, on the whole, I will not deny that Borrow was as successful in
giving us vital portraits of English and Irish characters as of Romany
characters, perhaps more so.
That hypochondriacal strain in Borrow's nature, which Dr. Hake
alludes to, perhaps prevented him from sympathising fully with the
joyous Romany temper. But over and above this, and charming as the
Petulengro family are, they do not live as do the characters of Mr.
Groome in his delightful book "In Gypsy Tents"--a writer whose

treatises on the gypsies in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," and in
"Chambers' Encyclopedia," are as full of the fruits of actual personal
contact with the gypsies as of the learning to be derived from books.

V. THE SAVING GRACE OF PUGILISM.
Borrow's "Flaming Tinman" is, of course, a brilliant success, but then
he, though named Bosville, is not a pure gypsy. He is what is called on
the roads, I believe, a "half and half"; and in nothing is more clearly
seen that "prepotency of transmission," which I have elsewhere
attributed to the Anglo-Saxon in the racial struggle, than in hybrids of
this kind. A thorough-bred Romany chal can be brutal enough, but the
"Flaming Tinman's" peculiar shade of brutality is Anglo-Saxon, not
Romany. The Tinman's ironical muttering while unharnessing his horse,
"Afraid. H'm! Afraid; that was the word, I think," is worthy of Dickens
at his very best--worthy of Dickens when he created Rogue
Riderhood--but it is hardly Romany, I think.
The battle in the dingle is superb.
Borrow is always at his strongest when describing a pugilistic
encounter: for in the saving grace of pugilism as an English
accomplishment, he believed as devoutly almost as he believed in East
Anglia and the Bible. It was this more than anything else that aroused
the ire of the critics of "Lavengro" when it first appeared. One critical
journal characterised the book as the work of a "barbarian."
This was in 1851, when Clio seemed set upon substituting Harlequin's
wand for Britannia's trident, seemed set upon crowning her with the cap
and bells of Folly in her maudlin mood,--the marvellous and
memorable year when England--while every forge in Europe was
glowing with expectance, ready to beat every ploughshare into a
sword--uttered her famous prophecy, that from the day of the opening
of the Prince Consort's glass show in Hyde Park, bullets, bayonets, and
fists were to be institutions of a benighted past.

Very different was the prophecy of this "eccentric barbarian," Borrow,
especially as regards the abolition of the British fist. His prophecy was
that the decay of pugilism would be followed by a flourishing time in
England for the revolver and the assassin's knife,--a prophecy which I
can now recommend to those two converts to the virtues of Pugilism,
Mr. Justice Grantham and the present Editor of the Daily News, the
former of whom in passing sentence of death (at the Central Criminal
Court, on Wednesday, January 11th, 1893) upon a labourer named
Hosler, for stabbing one Dennis Finnessey to death in a quarrel about a
pot of beer, borrowed in the most impudent manner from the "eccentric
barbarian," when he said, "If men would only use their fists instead of
knives when tempted to violence, so many people would not be
hanged"; while the latter remarked that "the same thing has been said
from the bench before, and cannot be said too often." When the
"eccentric barbarian" argued that pugnacity is one of the primary
instincts of man--when he argued that no civilisation can ever eradicate
this instinct without emasculating itself--when he argued that to clench
one's fist and "strike out" is the irresistible impulse of every one who
has been assaulted, and that to make it illegal to "strike out," to make it
illegal to learn the art to "strike out" with the best effect, is not to quell
the instinct, but simply to force it to express itself in other and more
dangerous and dastardly ways--when he argued thus more than forty
years ago, he saw more clearly than did