No one, indeed, who had read only _The Zincali_ among Borrow's works could see in it any suspicion of the writer who was for all time to throw a glamour over the gypsy, to make the 'children of the open air' a veritable cult, to earn for him the title of 'the walking lord of gypsy lore,' and to lay the foundations of an admirable succession of books both in fact and fiction--but not one as great as his own. The city of Seville, it is clear, with sarcastic letters from Bible Society secretaries on one side, and some manner of love romance on the other, was not so good a place for an author to produce a real book as Oulton was to become. Richard Ford hit the nail on the head when he said with quite wonderful prescience:
How I wish you had given us more about yourself, instead of the extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing about gypsies! I shall give you the _rap_, on that, and a hint to publish your whole adventures for the last twenty years.[146]
Henceforth Borrow was to write about himself and to become a great author in consequence. For in writing about himself as in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ he was to write exactly as he felt about the gypsies, and to throw over them the glamour of his own point of view, the view of a man who loved the broad highway and those who sojourned upon it. In _The Gypsies of Spain_ we have a conventional estimate of the gypsies. 'There can be no doubt that they are human beings and have immortal souls,' he says, even as if he were writing a letter to the Bible Society. All his anecdotes about the gypsies are unfavourable to them, suggestive only of them as knaves and cheats. From these pictures it is a far cry to the creation of Jasper Petulengro and Isopel Berners. The most noteworthy figure in _The Zincali_ is the gypsy soldier of Valdepeñas, an unholy rascal. 'To lie, to steal, to shed human blood'--these are the most marked characteristics with which Borrow endows the gypsies of Spain. 'Abject and vile as they have ever been, the gitános have nevertheless found admirers in Spain,' says the author who came to be popularly recognised as the most enthusiastic admirer of the gypsies in Spain and elsewhere. Read to-day by the lover of Borrow's other books _The Zincali_ will be pronounced a readable collection of anecdotes, interspersed with much dull matter, with here and there a piece of admirable writing. But the book would scarcely have lived had it not been followed by four works of so fine an individuality. Well might Ford ask Borrow for more about himself and less of the extracts from 'blunder-headed old Spaniards.' When Borrow came to write about himself he revealed his real kindness for the gypsy folk. He gave us Jasper Petulengro and the incomparable description of 'the wind on the heath.' He kindled the imagination of men, proclaimed the joys of vagabondage in a manner that thrilled many hearts. He had some predecessors and many successors, but 'none could then, or can ever again,' says the biographer of a later Rye, 'see or hear of Romanies without thinking of Borrow.'[147] In her biography of one of these successors in gypsy lore, Charles Godfrey Leland, Mrs. Pennell discusses the probability that Borrow and Leland met in the British Museum. That is admitted in a letter from Leland to Borrow in my possession. To this letter Borrow made no reply. It was wrong of him. But he was then--in 1873--a prematurely old man, worn out and saddened by neglect and a sense of literary failure. For this and for the other vagaries of those latter years Borrow will not be judged harshly by those who read his story here. Nothing could be more courteous than Borrow's one letter to Leland, written in the failing handwriting--once so excellent--of the last sad decade of his life:
