His Vocation.
Three hundred years since Borrow would have been a gentleman adventurer:
he would have dropped quietly down the river, and steered for the Spanish
Main, bent upon making carbonadoes of your Don. But he came too late for
that, and falling upon no sword and buckler age but one that was
interested in Randal and Spring, he accepted that he found, and did his
best to turn its conditions, into literature. As he had that admirable
instinct of making the best of things which marks the true adventurer, he
was on the whole exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing for
Javan and Gadire; but at home there were highways in abundance, and what
is your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted of
everything but sordidness; but under that round-shouldered little tent at
the bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath that
kettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at graze
hard by, are men and women more mysterious and more alluring to the
romantic mind than any Mingo or Comanch that ever traded a scalp. While
as for your tricks of fence--your immortal _passado_, your _punto
reverso_--if that be no longer the right use for a gentleman, have not
Spring and Langan fought their great battle on Worcester racecourse? and
has not Cribb of Gloucestershire--that renowned, heroic, irresistible
Thomas--beaten Molyneux the negro artist in the presence of twenty
thousand roaring Britons? and shall the practice of an art which has
rejoiced in such a master as the illustrious Game Chicken, Hannibal of
the Ring, be held degrading by an Englishman of sufficient inches who,
albeit a Tory and a High Churchman, is at bottom as thoroughgoing a
Republican as ever took the word of command from Colonel Cromwell? And
if all this fail, if he get nobody to put on the gloves with him, if the
tents of the Romany prove barren of interest, if the king's highway be
vacant of adventure as Mayfair, he has still philology to fall back upon,
he can still console himself with the study of strange tongues, he can
still exult in a peculiar superiority by quoting the great Ab Gwylim
where the baser sort of persons is content with Shakespeare. So that
what with these and some kindred diversions--a little horse-whispering
and ale-drinking, the damnation of Popery, the study of the Bible--he can
manage not merely to live but to live so fully and richly as to be the
envy of some and the amazement of all. That, as life goes and as the
world wags, is given to few. Add to it the credit of having written as
good a book about Spain as ever was written in any language, the
happiness of having dreamed and partly lived that book ere it was
written, the perfect joy of being roundly abused by everybody, and the
consciousness of being different from everybody and of giving at least as
good as ever you got at several things the world is silly enough to hold
in worship--as the Toryism of Sir Walter, or the niceness of Popery, or
the pleasures of Society: and is it not plain that Borrow was a man
uncommon fortunate, and that he enjoyed life as greatly as most men not
savages who have possessed the fruition of this terrestrial sphere?
Ideals and Achievements.
He prepared his effects as studiously and almost as dexterously as Dumas
himself. His instinct of the picturesque was rarely indeed at fault; he
marshalled his personages and arranged his scene with something of that
passion for effect which entered so largely into the theory of M. le
Comte de Monte-Cristo. However closely disguised, himself is always the
heroic figure, and he is ever busy in arranging discovery and triumph. To
his chance-mates he is but an eccentric person, an amateur tinker, a
slack-baked gipsy, an unlettered hack; to his audience he is his own,
strong, indifferent self: presently the rest will recognise him and he
will be disdainfully content. And recognise him they do. He throws off
his disguise; there is a gape, a stare, a general conviction that
Lavengro is the greatest man in the world; and then--as the manner of
Lesage commands--the adventure ends, the stars resume their wonted
courses, and the self-conscious Tinker-Quixote takes the road once more
and passes on to other achievements: a mad preacher to succour, a priest
to baffle, some tramp to pound into a jelly of humility, an applewoman to
mystify, a horse-chaunter to swindle, a pugilist to study and help and
portray. But whatever it be, Lavengro emerges from the ordeal modestly,
unobtrusively, quietly, most consciously magnificent. Circumstantial as
Defoe, rich in combinations as Lesage, and with such an instinct of the
picturesque, both personal and local, as none of these possessed, this
strange wild man holds on his strange wild way, and leads you captive to
the end. His dialogue is copious and appropriate: you feel that like Ben
Jonson he is dictating rather than reporting, that he is less faithful
and exact than imaginative and determined; but you are none the less
pleased with it, and suspicious though you be that the voice is
Lavengro's and the hands are the hands of some one else, you are glad to
surrender to the illusion, and you regret when it is dispelled. Moreover,
that all of it should be set down in racy, nervous, idiomatic English,
with a kind of eloquence at once primitive and scholarly, precious but
homely--the speech of an artist in sods and turfs--if at first it
surprise and charm yet ends by seeming so natural and just that you go on
to forget all about it and accept the whole thing as the genuine outcome
of a man's experience which it purports to be. Add that it is all
entirely unsexual; that there is none with so poor an intelligence of the
heart as woman moves it; that the book does not exist in which the
relations between boy and girl are more miserably misrepresented than in
_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_; that that picaresque ideal of romance
which, finding utterance in Hurtado de Mendoza, was presently to appeal
to such artists as Cervantes, Quevedo, Lesage, Smollett, the Dickens of
_Pickwick_, finds such expression in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ as
nowhere else; and the tale of Borrow is complete enough.
Himself.
Despite or because of a habit of mystification which obliged him to
jumble together the homely Real and a not less homely Ideal, Lavengro
will always, I think, be found worthy of companionship, if only as the
one exemplary artist-tramp the race has yet achieved. The artist-tramp,
the tinker who can write, the horse-coper with a twang of Hamlet and a
habit of Monte-Cristo--that is George Borrow. For them that love these
differences there is none in whom they are so cunningly and quaintly
blended as George Borrow; and they that love them not may keep the other
side of the road and fare in peace elsewhither.