We next find John Borrow in Ireland with his father, mother, and brother. George is still a child, but he is precocious enough to be learning the language, and thus laying the foundation of his interest in little-known tongues. John is now an ensign in his father’s regiment. “Ah! he was a sweet being, that boy soldier, a plant of early promise, bidding fair to become in after time all that is great, good, and admirable.” Ensign John tells his little brother how pleased he is to find himself, although not yet sixteen years old, “a person in authority with many Englishmen under me. Oh! these last six weeks have passed like hours in heaven.” That was in 1816, and we do not meet John again until five years later, when we hear of him rushing into the water to save a drowning man, while twenty others were bathing who might have rendered assistance. Borrow records once again his father’s satisfaction:
“My boy, my own boy, you are the very image of myself, the day I took off my coat in the park to fight Big Ben,” said my father, on meeting his son, wet and dripping, immediately after his bold feat. And who cannot excuse the honest pride of the old man—the stout old man?
In the interval the war had ended, and Napoleon had departed for St. Helena. Peace had led to the pensioning of militia officers, or reducing to half-pay of the juniors. The elder Borrow had settled in Norwich. George was set to study at the Grammar School there, while his brother worked in Old Crome’s studio, for here was a moment when Norwich had its interesting Renaissance, and John Borrow was bent on being an artist. He had worked with Crome once before—during the brief interval that Napoleon was at Elba—but now he set to in real earnest, and we have evidence of a score of pictures by him that were catalogued in the exhibitions of the Norwich Society of Artists between the years 1817 and 1824. They include one portrait of the artist’s father, and two of his brother George. Old Crome died in 1821, and then John went to London to study under Haydon. Borrow declares that his brother had real taste for painting, and that “if circumstances had not eventually diverted his mind from the pursuit, he would have attained excellence, and left behind him some enduring monument of his powers.” “He lacked, however,” he tells us, “one thing, the want of which is but too often fatal to the sons of genius, and without which genius is little more than a splendid toy in the hands of the possessor—perseverance, dogged perseverance.” It is when he is thus commenting on his brother’s characteristics that Borrow gives his own fine if narrow eulogy of Old Crome. John Borrow seems to have continued his studies in London under Haydon for a year, and then to have gone to Paris to copy pictures at the Louvre. He mentions a particular copy that he made of a celebrated picture by one of the Italian masters, for which a Hungarian nobleman paid him well. His three years’ absence was brought to an abrupt termination by news of his father’s illness. He returned to Norwich in time to stand by that father’s bedside when he died. The elder Borrow died, as we have seen, in February, 1824. The little home in King’s Court was kept on for the mother, and as John was making money by his pictures it was understood that he should stay with her. On the 1st April, however, George started for London, carrying the manuscript of Romantic Ballads from the Danish to Sir Richard Phillips, the publisher. On the 29th of the same month he was joined by his brother John. John had come to London at his own expense, but in the interests of the Norwich Town Council. The council wanted a portrait of one of its mayors for St. Andrew’s Hall—that Valhalla of Norwich municipal worthies which still strikes the stranger as well-nigh unique in the city life of England. The municipality would fain have encouraged a fellow-citizen, and John Borrow had been invited to paint the portrait. “Why,” it was asked, “should the money go into a stranger’s pocket and be spent in London?” John, however, felt diffident of his ability and declined, and this in spite of the fact that the £100 offered for the portrait must have been very tempting. “What a pity it was,” he said, “that Crome was dead.” “Crome,” said the orator of the deputation that had called on John Borrow,
“Crome; yes, he was a clever man, a very clever man, in his way; he was good at painting landscapes and farm-houses, but he would not do in the present instance, were he alive. He had no conception of the heroic, sir. We want some person capable of representing our mayor standing under the Norman arch of the cathedral.” [20]
At the mention of the heroic John bethought himself of Haydon, and suggested his name; hence his visit to London, and his proposed interview with Haydon. The two brothers went together to call upon the “painter of the heroic” at his studio in Connaught Terrace, Hyde Park. There was some difficulty about their admission, and it turned out afterwards that Haydon thought they might be duns, as he was very hard up at the time. His eyes glistened at the mention of the £100. “I am not very fond of painting portraits,” he said, “but a mayor is a mayor, and there is something grand in that idea of the Norman arch.” And thus Mayor Hawkes came to be painted by Benjamin Haydon, and his portrait may be found, not without diligent search, among the many municipal worthies that figure on the walls of that most picturesque old Hall in Norwich. Here is Borrow’s description of the painting:
The original mayor was a mighty, portly man, with a bull’s head, black hair, body like that of a dray horse, and legs and thighs corresponding; a man six foot high at the least. To his bull’s head, black hair, and body the painter had done justice; there was one point, however, in which the portrait did not correspond with the original—the legs were disproportionably short, the painter having substituted his own legs for those of the mayor.
John Borrow described Robert Hawkes to his brother as a person of many qualifications:
—big and portly, with a voice like Boanerges; a religious man, the possessor of an immense pew; loyal, so much so that I once heard him say that he would at any time go three miles to hear any one sing God save the King; moreover, a giver of excellent dinners. Such is our present mayor, who, owing to his loyalty, his religion, and a little, perhaps, to his dinners, is a mighty favourite.
Haydon, who makes no mention of the Borrows in his Correspondence or Autobiography, although there is one letter of George Borrow’s to him in the former work, had been in jail for debt three years prior to the visit of the Borrows. He was then at work on his greatest success in “the heroic”—The Raising of Lazarus, a canvas nineteen feet long by fifteen high. The debt was one to house decorators, for the artist had ever large ideas. The bailiff, he tells us, [21] was so agitated at the sight of the painting of Lazarus in the studio that he cried out, “Oh, my God! Sir, I won’t arrest you. Give me your word to meet me at twelve at the attorney’s, and I’ll take it.” In 1821 Haydon married, and a little later we find him again “without a single shilling in the world—with a large picture before me not half done.” In April, 1822, he is arrested at the instance of his colourman, “with whom I had dealt for fifteen years,” and in November of the same year he is arrested again at the instance of “a miserable apothecary.” In April, 1823, we find him in the King’s Bench Prison, from which he was released in July. The Raising of Lazarus meanwhile had gone to pay his upholsterer £300, and his Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem had been sold for £240, although it had brought him £3000 in receipts at exhibitions. Clearly heroic pictures did not pay, and Haydon here took up “the torment of portrait-painting” as he called it.
“Can you wonder,” he wrote in July, 1825, “that I nauseate portraits, except portraits of clever people. I feel quite convinced that every portrait-painter, if there be purgatory, will leap at once to heaven, without this previous