necessarily consist of fervent devotees on the one hand, and of complete
infidels, or at least complete know-nothings, on the other. To any one
who, having the faculty to understand either, has read _Lavengro_ or
_The Bible in Spain_, or even _Wild Wales_, praise bestowed on Borrow is
apt to seem impertinence. To anybody else (and unfortunately the anybody
else is in a large majority) praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to look
like that very dubious kind of praise which is bestowed on somebody of
whom no one but the praiser has ever heard. I cannot think of any single
writer (Peacock himself is not an exception) who is in quite parallel
case. And, as usual, there is a certain excuse for the general public.
Borrow kept himself, during not the least exciting period of English
history, quite aloof from English politics, and from the life of great
English cities. But he did more than this. He is the only really
considerable writer of his time in any modern European nation who seems
to have taken absolutely no interest in current events, literary and
other. Putting a very few allusions aside, he might have belonged to
almost any period. His political idiosyncrasy will be noticed presently;
but he, who lived through the whole period from Waterloo to Maiwand, has
not, as far as I remember, mentioned a single English writer later than
Scott and Byron. He saw the rise, and, in some instances, the death, of
Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens. There is not a
reference to any one of them in his works. He saw political changes such
as no man for two centuries had seen, and (except the Corn Laws, to
which he has some half-ironical allusions, and the Ecclesiastical Titles
Bill, which stirred his one active sentiment) he has referred to never a
one. He seems in some singular fashion to have stood outside of all
these things. His Spanish travels are dated for us by references to Doña
Isabel and Don Carlos, to Mr. Villiers and Lord Palmerston. But cut
these dates out, and they might be travels of the last century. His
Welsh book proclaims itself as written in the full course of the
Crimean War; but excise a few passages which bear directly on that
event, and the most ingenious critic would be puzzled to "place" the
composition. Shakespeare, we know, was for all time, not of one age
only; but I think we may say of Borrow, without too severely or
conceitedly marking the difference, that he was not of or for any
particular age or time at all. If the celebrated query in Longfellow's
_Hyperion_, "What is time?" had been addressed to him, his most
appropriate answer, and one which he was quite capable of giving, would
have been, "I really don't know."
To this singular historical vagueness has to be added a critical
vagueness even greater. I am sorry that I am unable to confirm or to
gainsay at first hand Borrow's wonderfully high estimate of certain
Welsh poets. But if the originals are anything like his translations of
them, I do not think that Ab Gwilym and Lewis Glyn Cothi, Gronwy Owen
and Huw Morris can have been quite such mighty bards as he makes out.
Fortunately, however, a better test presents itself. In one book of his,
_Wild Wales_, there are two estimates of Scott's works. Borrow finds in
an inn a copy of _Woodstock_ (which he calls by its less known title of
_The Cavalier_), and decides that it is "trashy": chiefly, it would
appear, because the portrait therein contained of Harrison, for whom
Borrow seems, on one of his inscrutable principles of prejudice, to
have had a liking, is not wholly favourable. He afterwards informs us
that Scott's "Norman Horseshoe" (no very exquisite song at the best, and
among Scott's somewhat less than exquisite) is "one of the most stirring
lyrics of modern times," and that he sang it for a whole evening;
evidently because it recounts a defeat of the Normans, whom Borrow, as
he elsewhere tells us in sundry places, disliked for reasons more or
less similar to those which made him like Harrison, the butcher. In
other words, he could not judge a work of literature as literature at
all. If it expressed sentiments with which he agreed, or called up
associations which were pleasant to him, good luck to it; if it
expressed sentiments with which he did not agree, and called up no
pleasant associations, bad luck.
In politics and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is
still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not
call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a
hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a
certain amount of regret, and his general attitude is quite Eldonian.
But he combined with his general Toryism very curious Radicalisms of
detail, such as are to be found in Cobbett (who, as appeared at last,
and as all reasonable men should have always known, was really a Tory of
a peculiar type), and in several other English persons. The Church, the
Monarchy, and the Constitution generally were dear to Borrow, but he
hated all the aristocracy (except those whom he knew personally) and
most of the gentry. Also, he had the odd Radical sympathy for anybody
who, as the vernacular has it, was "kept out of his rights." I do not
know, but I should think, that Borrow was a strong Tichbornite. In that
curious book _Wild Wales_, where almost more of his real character
appears than in any other, he has to do with the Crimean War. It was
going on during the whole time of his tour, and he once or twice reports
conversations in which, from his knowledge of Russia, he demonstrated
beforehand to Welsh inquirers how improbable, not to say impossible, it
was that the Russian should be beaten. But the thing that seems really
to have interested him most was the case of Lieutenant P---- or
Lieutenant Parry, whom he sometimes refers to in the fuller and
sometimes in the less explicit manner. My own memories of 1854 are
rather indistinct, and I confess that I have not taken the trouble to
look up this celebrated case. As far as I can remember, and as far as
Borrow's references here and elsewhere go, it was the doubtless
lamentable but not uncommon case of a man who is difficult to live with,
and who has to live with others. Such cases occur at intervals in every
mess, college, and other similar aggregation of humanity. The person
difficult to live with gets, to use an Oxford phrase, "drawn." If he is
reformable he takes the lesson, and very likely becomes excellent
friends with those who "drew" him. If he is not, he loses his temper,
and evil results of one kind or another follow. Borrow's Lieutenant
P---- seems unluckily to have been of the latter kind, and was, if I
mistake not, recommended by the authorities to withdraw from a situation
which, to him, was evidently a false and unsuitable one. With this
Borrow could not away. He gravely chronicles the fact of his reading an
"excellent article in a local paper on the case of Lieutenant P----";
and with no less gravity (though he was, in a certain way, one of the
first humorists of our day) he suggests that the complaints of the
martyred P---- to the Almighty were probably not unconnected with our
Crimean disasters. This curious parochialism pursues him into more
purely religious matters. I do not know any other really great man of
letters of the last three-quarters of a century of whose attitude
Carlyle's famous words, "regarding God's universe as a larger patrimony
of Saint Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt the Pope,"
are so literally true. It was not in Borrow's case a case of _sancta
simplicitas_. He has at times flashes of by no means orthodox sentiment,
and seems to have fought, and perhaps hardly won, many a battle against
the army of the doubters. But when it comes to the Pope, he is as
single-minded an enthusiast as John Bunyan himself, whom, by the way,
he resembles in more than one point. The attitude was, of course, common
enough among his contemporaries; indeed any man who has reached middle
life must remember numerous examples among his own friends and kindred.
But in literature, and such literature as Borrow's, it is rare.
Yet again, the curiously piecemeal, and the curiously arbitrary
character of Borrow's literary studies in languages other than his own,
is noteworthy in so great a linguist. The entire range of French
literature, old as well as new, he seems to have ignored altogether--I
should imagine out of pure John Bullishness. He has very few references
to German, though he was a good German scholar--a fact which I account
for by the other fact, that in his earlier literary period German was
fashionable, and that he never would have anything to do with anything
that fashion favoured. Italian, though he certainly knew it well, is
equally slighted. His education, if not his taste for languages, must
have made him a tolerable (he never could have been an exact) classical
scholar. But it is clear that insolent Greece and haughty Rome possessed
no attraction for him. I question whether even Spanish would not have
been too common a toy to attract him much, if it had not been for the
accidental circumstances which connected him with Spain.
Lastly (for I love to get my devil's advocate work over), in Borrow's
varied and strangely attractive gallery of portraits and characters,
most observers must perceive the absence of the note of passion. I have
sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and
the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a
mere wayward piece of irony--a kind of conscious ascetic myth. But I am
afraid the interpretation will not do. The subsequent conversation with
Ursula Petulengro under the hedge might be only a companion piece; even
the more wonderful, though much less interesting, dialogue with the
Irish girl in the last chapters of _Wild Wales_ might be so rendered by
a hardy exegete. But the negative evidence in all the books is too
strong. It may be taken as positively certain that Borrow never was "in
love," as the phrase is, and that he had hardly the remotest conception
of what being in love means. It is possible that he was a most cleanly
liver--it is possible that he was quite the reverse: I have not the
slightest information either way. But that he never in all his life
heard with understanding the refrain of the "Pervigilium,"
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet,
I take as certain.
The foregoing remarks have, I think, summed up all Borrow's defects, and
it will be observed that even these defects have for the most part the
attraction of a certain strangeness and oddity. If they had not been
accompanied by great and peculiar merits, he would not have emerged from
the category of the merely bizarre, where he might have been left
without further attention. But, as a matter of fact, all, or almost all,
of his defects are not only counterbalanced by merits, but are
themselves, in a great degree, exaggerations or perversions of what is
intrinsically meritorious. With less wilfulness, with more attention to
the literature, the events, the personages of his own time, with a more
critical and common-sense attitude towards his own crotchets, Borrow
could hardly have wrought out for himself (as he has to an extent hardly
paralleled by any other prose writer who has not deliberately chosen
supernatural or fantastic themes) the region of fantasy, neither too
real nor too historical, which Joubert thought proper to the poet.
Strong and vivid as Borrow's drawing of places and persons is, he always
contrives to throw in touches which somehow give the whole the air of
being rather a vision than a fact. Never was such a John-a-Dreams as
this solid, pugilistic John Bull. Part of this literary effect of his is
due to his quaint habit of avoiding, where he can, the mention of proper
names. The description, for instance, of Old Sarum and Salisbury itself
in _Lavengro_ is sufficient to identify them to the most careless
reader, even if the name of Stonehenge had not occurred on the page
before; but they are not named. The description of Bettws-y-Coed in
_Wild Wales_, though less poetical, is equally vivid. Yet here it would
be quite possible for a reader, who did not know the place and its
relation to other named places, to pass without any idea of the actual
spot. It is the same with his frequent references to his beloved city of
Norwich, and his less frequent references to his later home at Oulton. A
paraphrase, an innuendo, a word to the wise he delights in, but anything
perfectly clear and precise he abhors. And by this means and others,
which it might be tedious to trace out too closely, he succeeds in
throwing the same cloudy vagueness over times as well as places and
persons. A famous passage--perhaps the best known, and not far from the
best he ever wrote--about Byron's funeral, fixes, of course, the date of
the wondrous facts or fictions recorded in _Lavengro_ to a nicety. Yet
who, as he reads it and its sequel (for the separation of _Lavengro_ and
_The Romany Rye_ is merely arbitrary, though the second book is, as a
whole, less interesting than the former), ever thinks of what was
actually going on in the very positive and prosaic England of 1824-25?
The later chapters of _Lavengro_ are the only modern _Roman d'Aventures_
that I know. The hero goes "overthwart and endlong," just like the
figures whom all readers know in Malory, and some in his originals. I do
not know that it would be more surprising if Borrow had found Sir Ozana
dying at the chapel in Lyonesse, or had seen the full function of the
Grail, though I fear he would have protested against that as popish.
Without any apparent art, certainly without the elaborate apparatus
which most prose tellers of fantastic tales use, and generally fail in
using, Borrow spirits his readers at once away from mere reality. If his
events are frequently as odd as a dream, they are always as perfectly
commonplace and real for the moment as the events of a dream are--a
little fact which the above-mentioned tellers of the above-mentioned
fantastic stories are too apt to forget. It is in this natural romantic
gift that Borrow's greatest charm lies. But it is accompanied and nearly
equalled, both in quality and in degree, by a faculty for dialogue.
Except Defoe and Dumas, I cannot think of any novelists who contrive to
tell a story in dialogue and to keep up the ball of conversation so well
as Borrow; while he is considerably the superior of both in pure style
and in the literary quality of his talk. Borrow's humour, though it is
of the general class of the older English--that is to say, the
pre-Addisonian--humorists, is a species quite by itself. It is rather
narrow in range, a little garrulous, busied very often about curiously
small matters, but wonderfully observant and true, and possessing a
quaint dry savour as individual as that of some wines. A characteristic
of this kind probably accompanies the romantic _ethos_ more commonly
than superficial judges both of life and literature are apt to suppose;
but the conjunction is nowhere seen better than in Borrow. Whether
humour can or cannot exist without a disposition to satire co-existing,
is one of those abstract points of criticism for which the public of the
present day has little appetite. It is certain (and that is what chiefly
concerns us for the present) that the two were not dissociated in
Borrow. His purely satirical faculty was very strong indeed, and
probably if he had lived a less retired life it would have found fuller
exercise. At present the most remarkable instance of it which exists is
the inimitable portrait-caricature of the learned Unitarian, generally
known as "Taylor of Norwich." I have somewhere (I think it was in Miss
Martineau's _Autobiography_) seen this reflected on as a flagrant
instance of ingratitude and ill-nature. The good Harriet, among whose
numerous gifts nature had not included any great sense of humour,
naturally did not perceive the artistic justification of the sketch,
which I do not hesitate to call one of the most masterly things of the
kind in literature.
Another Taylor, the well-known French baron of that name, is much more
mildly treated, though with little less skill of portraiture. As for
"the publisher" of _Lavengro_, the portrait there, though very clever,
is spoilt by rather too much evidence of personal animus, and by the
absence of redeeming strokes; but it shows the same satiric power as
the sketch of the worthy student of German who has had the singular
ill-fortune to have his books quizzed by Carlyle, and himself quizzed by
Borrow. It is a strong evidence of Borrow's abstraction from general
society that with this satiric gift, and evidently with a total freedom
from scruple as to its application, he should have left hardly anything
else of the kind. It is indeed impossible to ascertain how much of the
abundant character-drawing in his four chief books (all of which, be it
remembered, are autobiographic and professedly historical) is fact and
how much fancy. It is almost impossible to open them anywhere without
coming upon personal sketches, more or less elaborate, in which the
satiric touch is rarely wanting. The official admirer of "the grand
Baintham" at remote Corcubion, the end of all the European world; the
treasure-seeker, Benedict Mol; the priest at Cordova, with his
revelations about the Holy Office; the Gibraltar Jew; are only a few
figures out of the abundant gallery of _The Bible in Spain_. _Lavengro_,
besides the capital and full-length portraits above referred to, is
crowded with others hardly inferior, among which only one failure, the
disguised priest with the mysterious name, is to be found. Not that even
he has not good strokes and plenty of them, but that Borrow's prejudices
prevented his hand from being free. But Jasper Petulengro, and Mrs.
Hearne, and the girl Leonora, and Isopel, that vigorous and slighted
maid, and dozens of minor figures, of whom more presently, atone for
him. _The Romany Rye_ adds only minor figures to the gallery, because
the major figures have appeared before; while the plan and subject of
_Wild Wales_ also exclude anything more than vignettes. But what
admirable vignettes they are, and how constantly bitten in with satiric
spirit, all lovers of Borrow know.
It is, however, perhaps time to give some more exact account of the
books thus familiarly and curiously referred to; for Borrow most
assuredly is not a popular writer. Not long before his death _Lavengro_,
_The Romany Rye_, and _Wild Wales_ were only in their third edition,
though the first was nearly thirty, and the last nearly twenty, years
old. _The Bible in Spain_ had, at any rate in its earlier days, a wider
sale, but I do not think that even that is very generally known. I
should doubt whether the total number sold, during some fifty years, of
volumes surpassed in interest of incident, style, character and
description by few books of the century, has equalled the sale, within
any one of the last few years, of a fairly popular book by any fairly
popular novelist of to-day. And there is not the obstacle to Borrow's
popularity that there is to that of some other writers, notably the
already-mentioned author of _Crotchet Castle_. No extensive literary
cultivation is necessary to read him. A good deal even of his peculiar
charm may be missed by a prosaic or inattentive reader, and yet enough
will remain. But he has probably paid the penalty of originality, which
allows itself to be mastered by quaintness, and which refuses to meet
public taste at least half-way. It is certainly difficult at times to
know what to make of Borrow. And the general public, perhaps excusably,
is apt not to like things or persons when it does not know what to make
of them.
Borrow's literary work, even putting aside the "mountains of manuscript"
which he speaks of as unpublished, was not inconsiderable. There were,
in the first place, his translations, which, though no doubt not without
value, do not much concern us here. There is, secondly, his early
hackwork, his _Chaines de l'Esclavage_, which also may be neglected.
Thirdly, there are his philological speculations or compilations, the
chief of which is, I believe, his _Romano-Lavo-Lil_, the latest
published of his works. But Borrow, though an extraordinary linguist,
was a somewhat unchastened philologer, and the results of his life-long
philological studies appear to much better advantage from the literary
than from the scientific point of view. Then there is _The Gypsies in
Spain_, a very interesting book of its kind, marked throughout with
Borrow's characteristics, but for literary purposes merged to a great
extent in _The Bible in Spain_. And, lastly, there are the four original
books, as they may be called, which, at great leisure, and writing
simply because he chose to write, Borrow produced during the twenty
years of his middle age. He was in his fortieth year when, in 1842, he
published _The Bible in Spain_. _Lavengro_ came nearly ten years later,
and coincided with (no doubt it was partially stimulated by) the ferment
over the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. Its second part, _The Romany Rye_,
did not appear till six afterwards, that is to say, in 1857, and its
resuscitation of quarrels, which the country had quite forgotten (and
when it remembered them was rather ashamed of), must be pronounced
unfortunate. Last, in 1862, came _Wild Wales_, the characteristically
belated record of a tour in the principality during the year of the
Crimean War. On these four books Borrow's literary fame rests. His other
works are interesting because they were written by the author of these,
or because of their subjects, or because of the effect they had on other
men of letters, notably Longfellow and Mérimée, on the latter of whom
Borrow had an especially remarkable influence. These four are
interesting of themselves.