LAVENGRO—1843–1851
DURING all these years _Lavengro_ had been making progress towards
completion, irregular and spasmodic it would appear; but still each year
brought it nearer to the printer. “I cannot get out of my old habits,”
Borrow wrote to Dawson Turner (15th January 1844), “I find I am writing
the work . . . in precisely the same manner as _The Bible in Spain_,
viz., on blank sheets of old account books, backs of letters, etc. In
slovenliness of manuscript I almost rival Mahomet, who, it is said, wrote
his _Coran_ on mutton spade bones.” “His [Borrow’s] biography will be
passing strange if he tells the _whole_ truth,” Ford writes to a friend
(27th February 1843). “He is now writing it by my advice. I go on . . .
scribbling away, though with a palpitating heart,” Borrow informs John
Murray (5th February 1844), “and have already plenty of scenes and
dialogues connected with my life, quite equal to anything in _The Bible
in Spain_. The great difficulty, however, is to blend them all into a
symmetrical whole.” On 17th September 1846 he writes again to his
publisher:
“I have of late been very lazy, and am become more addicted to sleep
than usual, am seriously afraid of apoplexy. To rouse myself, I rode
a little time ago to Newmarket. I felt all the better for it for a
few days. I have at present a first rate trotting horse who affords
me plenty of exercise. On my return from Newmarket, I rode him
nineteen miles before breakfast.”
Another cause of delay was the “shadows” that were constantly descending
upon him. His determination to give only the best of which he was
capable, is almost tragic in the light of later events. To his wife, he
wrote from London (February 1847): “Saw M[urray] who is in a hurry for me
to begin [the printing]. I will not be hurried though for anyone.”
In the _Quarterly Review_, July 1848, under the heading of Mr Murray’s
List of New Works in Preparation, there appeared the first announcement
of _Lavengro_, _an Autobiography_, by George Borrow, Author of _The Bible
in Spain_, etc., 4 vols. post 8vo. This was repeated in October. During
the next two months the book was advertised as _Life_; _A Drama_, in _The
Athenæum_ and _The Quarterly Review_, and the first title-page (1849) was
so printed. On 7th October John Murray wrote asking Borrow to send the
manuscript to the printer. This was accordingly done, and about
two-thirds of it composed. Then Borrow appears to have fallen ill. On
5th January 1849 John Murray wrote to Mrs Borrow:
“I trust Mr Borrow is now restored to health and tranquillity of
mind, and that he will soon be able to resume his pen. I desire this
on his own account and for the sake of poor Woodfall [the printer],
who is of course inconvenienced by having his press arrested after
the commencement of the printing.”
Writing on 27th November 1849, John Murray refers to the work having been
“first sent to press—now nearly eighteen months.” This is clearly a
mistake, as on 7th October 1848, thirteen and a half months previously,
he asks Borrow to send the manuscript to the printer that he may begin
the composition. John Murray was getting anxious and urges Borrow to
complete the work, which a year ago had been offered to the booksellers
at the annual trade-dinner.
“I know that you are fastidious, and that you desire to produce a work of
distinguished excellence. I see the result of this labour in the sheets
as they come from the press, and I think when it does appear it will make
a sensation,” wrote the tactful publisher. “Think not, my dear friend,”
replied Borrow, “that I am idle. I am finishing up the concluding part.
I should be sorry to hurry the work towards the last. I dare say it will
be ready by the middle of February.” The correspondence grew more and
more tense. Mrs Borrow wrote to the printer urging him to send to her
husband, who has been overworked to the point of complaint, “one of your
kind encouraging notes.” Later Borrow went to Yarmouth, where
sea-bathing produced a good effect upon his health; but still the
manuscript was not sent to the despairing printer. “I do not, God knows!
wish you to overtask yourself,” wrote the unhappy Woodfall; “but after
what you last said, I thought I might fully calculate on your taking up,
without further delay, the fragmentary portions of your 1st and 2nd
volumes and let us get them out of hand.”
Letters continued to pass to and fro, but the balance of manuscript was
not forthcoming until November 1850, when Mrs Borrow herself took it to
London. Another trade-dinner was at hand, and John Murray had written to
Mrs Borrow, “If I cannot show the book then—I must throw it up.” To Mrs
Borrow this meant tragedy. The poor woman was distracted, and from time
to time she begs for encouraging letters. In response to one of these
appeals, John Murray wrote with rare insight into Borrow’s character, and
knowledge of what is most likely to please him: “There are passages in
your book equal to De Foe.”
The preface when eventually submitted to John Murray disturbed him
somewhat. “It is quaint,” he writes to Mrs Borrow, “but so is everything
that Mr Borrow writes.” He goes on to suggest that the latter portion
looks too much as if it had been got up in the interests of “Papal
aggression,” and he calls attention to the oft-repeated “Damnation cry”.
There appears to have been some modification, a few “Damnation Cries”
omitted, the last sheet passed for press, and on 7th February 1851
_Lavengro_ was published in an edition of three thousand copies, which
lasted for twenty-one years.
The appearance of _Lavengro_ was indeed sensational: but not quite in the
way its publisher had anticipated. Almost without exception the verdict
was unfavourable. The book was attacked vigorously. The keynote of the
critics was disappointment. Some reviews were purely critical, others
personal and abusive, but nearly all were disapproving. “Great is our
disappointment” said the _Athenæum_. “We are disappointed,” echoed
_Blackwood_. Among the few friendly notices was that of Dr Hake, in
which he prophesied that “_Lavengro’s_ roots will strike deep into the
soil of English letters.” Even Ford wrote (8th March):
“I frankly own that I am somewhat disappointed with the very _little_
you have told us about _yourself_. I was in hopes to have a full,
true, and particular account of your marvellously varied and
interesting biography. I do hope that some day you will give it to
us.”
In this chorus of dispraise Borrow saw a conspiracy. “If ever a book
experienced infamous and undeserved treatment,” he wrote, {390} “it was
that book. I was attacked in every form that envy and malice could
suggest.” In _The Romany Rye_ he has done full justice to the subject,
exhibiting the critics with blood and foam streaming from their jaws. In
the original draft of the Advertisement to the same work he expresses
himself as “proud of a book which has had the honour of being rancorously
abused and execrated by every unmanly scoundrel, every sycophantic
lacquey, and _every political and religious renegade_ in Britain.” A few
years previously, Borrow had written to John Murray, “I have always
myself. If you wish to please the public leave the matter [the revision
of _The Zincali_] to me.” {391a} From this it is evident that Borrow was
unprepared for anything but commendation from critics and readers.
Dr Bowring had some time previously requested the editor of _The
Edinburgh Review_ to allow him to review _Lavengro_; but no notice ever
appeared. In all probability he realised the impossibility of writing
about a book in which he and his family appeared in such an unpleasant
light. It is unlikely that he asked for the book in order to prevent a
review appearing in _The Edinburgh_, as has been suggested.
In the Preface, _Lavengro_ is described as a dream; yet there can be not
a vestage of doubt that Borrow’s original intention had been to
acknowledge it as an autobiography. This work is a kind of biography in
the Robinson Crusoe style, he had written in 1844. This he contradicted
in the Appendix to _The Romany Rye_; yet in his manuscript autobiography
{391b} (13th Oct. 1862) he says: “In 1851 he published _Lavengro_, a work
in which he gives an account of his early life.” Why had Borrow changed
his mind?
When _Lavengro_ was begun, as a result of Ford’s persistent appeals,
Borrow was on the crest of the wave of success. He saw himself the
literary hero of the hour. _The Bible in Spain_ was selling in its
thousands. The press had proclaimed it a masterpiece. He had seen
himself a great man. The writer of a great book, however, does not
occupy a position so kinglike in its loneliness as does gentleman a
gypsy, round whom flock the _gitanos_ to kiss his hand and garments as if
he were a god or a hero. The literary and social worlds that _The Bible
in Spain_ opened to Borrow were not to be awed by his mystery, or,
disciplined into abject hero-worship by one of those steady penetrating
gazes, which cowed jockeys and _alguacils_. They claimed intellectual
kinship and equality, the very things that Borrow had no intention of
conceding them. He would have tolerated their “gentility nonsense” if
they would have acknowledged his paramountcy. He found that to be a
social or a literary lion was to be a tame lion, and he was too big for
that. His conception of genius was that it had its moods, and mediocrity
must suffer them.
Borrow would rush precipitately from the house where he was a guest; he
would be unpardonably rude to some inoffensive and well-meaning woman who
thought to please him by admiring his books; he would magnify a fight
between their respective dogs into a deadly feud between himself and the
rector of his parish: thus he made enemies by the dozen and,
incidentally, earned for himself an extremely unenviable reputation. A
hero with a lovable nature is twice a hero, because he is possessed of
those qualities that commend themselves to the greater number.
Wellington could never be a serious rival in a nation’s heart to dear,
weak, sensitive, noble Nelson, who lived for praise and frankly owned to
it.
Borrow’s lovable qualities were never permitted to show themselves in
public, they were kept for the dingle, the fireside, or the inn-parlour.
That he had a sweeter side to his nature there can be no doubt, and those
who saw it were his wife, his step-daughter, and his friends, in
particular those who, like Mr Watts-Dunton and Mr A. Egmont Hake, have
striven for years to emphasise the more attractive part of his strange
nature.
Borrow’s attitude towards literature in itself was not calculated to gain
friends for him. He was uncompromisingly and caustically severe upon
some of the literary idols of his day, men who have survived that
terrible handicap, contemporary recognition and appreciation.
He was not a deep reader, hardly a reader at all in the accepted meaning
of the word. He frankly confessed that books were to him of secondary
importance to man as a subject for study. In his criticisms of
literature, he was apt to confuse the man with his works. His hatred of
Scott is notorious; it was not the artist he so cordially disliked, but
the politician; he admitted that Scott “wrote splendid novels about the
Stuarts.” {393a} He hailed him as “greater than Homer;” {393b} but the
House of Stuart he held in utter detestation, and when writing or
speaking of Scott he forgot to make a rather necessary distinction. He
wrote:
“He admires his talents both as a prose writer and a poet; as a poet
especially. {393c} . . . As a prose writer he admires him less, it
is true, but his admiration for him in that capacity is very high,
and he only laments that he prostituted his talents to the cause of
the Stuarts and gentility . . . in conclusion, he will say, in order
to show the opinion which he entertains of the power of Scott as a
writer, that he did for the spectre of the wretched Pretender what
all the kings of Europe could not do for his body—placed it on the
throne of these realms.” {393d}
In later years Borrow paid a graceful tribute to Scott’s memory. When at
Kelso, in spite of the rain and mist, he “trudged away to Dryburgh to pay
my respects to the tomb of Walter Scott, a man with whose principles I
have no sympathy, but for whose genius I have always entertained the most
intense admiration.” {393e} It was just the same with Byron, “for whose
writings I really entertained considerable admiration, though I had no
particular esteem for the man himself.” {393f}
With Wordsworth it was different, and it was his cordial dislike of his
poetry that prompted Borrow to introduce into _The Romany Rye_ that
ineffectual episode of the man who was sent to sleep by reading him.
Tennyson he dismissed as a writer of “duncie books.”
For Dickens he had an enthusiastic admiration as “a second Fielding, a
young writer who . . . has evinced such talent, such humour, variety and
profound knowledge of character, that he charms his readers, at least
those who have the capacity to comprehend him.” {394a} He was delighted
with _The Pickwick Papers_ and _Oliver Twist_.
His reading was anything but thorough, in fact he occasionally showed a
remarkable ignorance of contemporary writers. Mr A. Egmont Hake tells
how:
“His conversation would sometimes turn on modern literature, with
which his acquaintance was very slight. He seemed to avoid reading
the products of modern thought lest his own strong opinions should
undergo dilution. We were once talking of Keats whose fame had been
constantly increasing, but of whose poetry Borrow’s knowledge was of
a shadowy kind, when suddenly he put a stop to the conversation by
ludicrously asking, in his strong voice, ‘Have they not been trying
to resuscitate him?’” {394b}
By the time that _Lavengro_ appeared, Borrow was estranged from his
generation. The years that intervened between the success of _The Bible
in Spain_ and the publication of _Lavengro_ had been spent by him in war;
he had come to hate his contemporaries with a wholesome, vigorous hatred.
He would give them his book; but they should have it as a stray cur has a
bone—thrown at them. Above all, they should not for a moment be allowed
to think that it contained an intimate account of the life of the supreme
hater who had written it. When there had been sympathy between them,
Borrow was prepared to allow his public to peer into the sacred recesses
of his early life. Now that there was none, he denied that _Lavengro_
was more than “a dream”, forgetting that he had so often written of it as
an autobiography, had even seen it advertised as such, and insisted that
it was fiction.
When _Lavengro_ was published Borrow was an unhappy and disappointed man.
He had found what many other travellers have found when they come home,
that in the wilds he had left his taste and toleration for conventional
life and ideas. The life in the Peninsula had been thoroughly congenial
to a man of Borrow’s temperament: hardships, dangers, imprisonments,—they
were his common food. He who had defied the whole power of Spain, found
himself powerless to prevent his Rector from keeping a dog, or a railway
line from being cut through his own estate and his peace of mind
disturbed by the rumble of trains and the shriek of locomotive-whistles.
He had beaten the Flaming Tinman and Count Ofalia, but Samuel Morton Peto
had vanquished and put him to flight by virtue of an Act of Parliament,
in all probability without being conscious of having achieved a signal
victory. Borrow’s life had been built up upon a wrong hypothesis: he
strove to adapt, not himself to the Universe; but the Universe to
himself.
It is easy to see that a man with this attitude of mind would regard as
sheer vindictiveness the adverse criticism of a book that he had written
with such care, and so earnest an endeavour to maintain if not improve
upon the standard created in a former work. It never for a moment struck
him that the men who had once hailed him “great”, should now admonish him
as a result of the honest exercise of their critical faculties. No;
there was conspiracy against him, and he tortured himself into a pitiable
state of wrath and melancholy. A later generation has been less harsh in
its judgment. The controversial parts of _Lavengro_ have become less
controversial and the magnificent parts have become more magnificent, and
it has taken its place as a star of the second magnitude.
The question of what is actual autobiography and what is so coloured as
to become practically fiction, must always be a matter of opinion. The
early portion seems convincing, even the first meeting with the gypsies
in the lane at Norman Cross. It has been asked by an eminent gypsy
scholar how Borrow knew the meaning of the word “sap”, or why he
addressed the gypsy woman as “my mother”. When the Gypsy refers to the
“Sap there”, the child replies, “what, the snake”? The employment of the
other phrase is obviously an inadvertent use of knowledge he gained
later.
In writing to Mrs George Borrow (24th March 1851) to tell her that W. B.
Donne had been unable to obtain _Lavengro_ for _The Edinburgh Review_ as
it had been bespoken a year previously by Dr Bowring, Dr Hake adds that
Donne had written “putting the editor in possession of his view of
_Lavengro_, as regards verisimilitude, vouching for the
Daguerreotype-like fidelity of the picture in the first volume, etc.,
etc., in order to prevent him from being _taken in by_ a spiteful
article.” This passage is very significant as being written by one of
Borrow’s most intimate friends, with the sure knowledge that its contents
would reach him. It leaves no room for doubt that, although Borrow
denied publicly the autobiographical nature of _Lavengro_, in his own
circle it was freely admitted and referred to as a life.
“What is an autobiography?” Borrow once asked Mr Theodore Watts-Dunton
(who had called his attention to several bold coincidences in
_Lavengro_). “Is it the mere record of the incidents of a man’s life? or
is it a picture of the man himself—his character, his soul?” {396} Mr
Watts-Dunton confirms Borrow’s letters when he says “That he [Borrow] sat
down to write his own life in _Lavengro_ I know. He had no idea then of
departing from the strict line of fact.”
At times Borrow seemed to find his pictures flat, and heightened the
colour in places, as a painter might heighten the tone of a drapery, a
roof or some other object, not because the individual spot required it,
but rather because the general effect he was aiming at rendered it
necessary. He did this just as an actor rouges his face, darkens his
eyebrows and round his eyes, that he may appear to his audience a living
man and not an animated corpse.
Borrow was drawing himself, striving to be as faithful to the original as
Boswell to Johnson. Incidents! what were they? the straw with which the
bricks of personality are made. A comparison of _Lavengro_ with Borrow’s
letters to the Bible Society is instructive; it is the same Borrow that
appears in both, with the sole difference that in the Letters he is less
mysterious, less in the limelight than in _Lavengro_.
Mr Watts-Dunton, with inspiration, has asked whether or not _Lavengro_
and _The Romany Rye_ form a spiritual autobiography; and if they do,
whether that autobiography does or does not surpass every other for
absolute truth of spiritual representation. Borrow certainly did colour
his narrative in places. Who could write the story of his early life
with absolute accuracy? without dwelling on and elaborating certain
episodes, perhaps even adjusting them somewhat? That would not
necessarily prove them untrue.
There are, unquestionably, inconsistencies in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany
Rye_—they are admitted, they have been pointed out. There are many
inaccuracies, it must be confessed; but because a man makes a mistake in
the date of his birth or even the year, it does not prove that he was not
born at all. Borrow was for ever making the most inaccurate statements
about his age.
In the main _Lavengro_ would appear to be autobiographical up to the
period of Borrow’s coming to London. After this he begins to indulge
somewhat in the dramatic. The meeting with the pickpocket as a
thimble-rigger at Greenwich might pass muster were it not for the
_rencontre_ with the apple-woman’s son near Salisbury. The Dingle
episode may be accepted, for Mr John Sampson has verified even the famous
thunder-storm by means of the local press. Isopel Berners is not so easy
to settle; yet the picture of her is so convincing, and Borrow was unable
to do more than colour his narrative, that she too must have existed.
The failure of _Lavengro_ is easily accounted for. Borrow wrote of
vagabonds and vagabondage; it did not mitigate his offence in the eyes of
the critics or the public that he wrote well about them. His crime lay
in his subject. To Borrow, a man must be ready and able to knock another
man down if necessity arise. When nearing sixty he lamented his
childless state and said very mournfully: “I shall soon not be able to
knock a man down, and I have no son to do it for me.” {398} He glorified
the bruisers of England, in the face of horrified public opinion.
England had become ashamed of its bruisers long before _Lavengro_ was
written, and this flaunting in its face of creatures that it considered
too low to be mentioned, gave mortal offence. That in _Lavengro_ was the
best descriptions of a fight in the language, only made the matter worse.
Borrow’s was an age of gentility and refinement, and he outraged it,
first by glorifying vagabondage, secondly by decrying and sneering at
gentility.
“Qui n’ a pas l’esprit de son âge,
De son âge a tout le malheur.”
And Borrow proved Voltaire’s words.
It is not difficult to understand that an age in which prize-fighting is
anathema should not tolerate a book glorifying the ring; but it is
strange that Borrow’s simple paganism and nature-worship should not have
aroused sympathetic recognition. Poetry is ageless, and such passages as
the description of the sunrise over Stonehenge should have found some, at
least, to welcome them, even when found in juxtaposition with bruisers
and gypsies.
Borrow loved to mystify, but in _Lavengro_ he had overreached himself.
“Are you really in existence?” wrote one correspondent who was unknown to
Borrow, “for I also have occasionally doubted whether things exist, as
you describe your own feelings in former days.”
John Murray wrote (8th Nov. 1851):—
“I was reminded of you the other day by an enquiry after _Lavengro_
and its author, made by the Right Honourable John Wilson Croker.
{399a} Knowing how fastidious and severe a critic he is, I was
particularly glad to find him expressing a favourable opinion of it;
and thinking well of it his curiosity was piqued about you. Like all
the rest of the world, he is mystified by it. He knew not whether to
regard it as truth or fiction. How can you remedy this defect? I
call it a defect, because it really impedes your popularity. People
say of a chapter or of a character: ‘This is very wonderful, _if
true_; but if fiction it is pointless.’—Will your new volumes explain
this and dissolve the mystery? If so, pray make haste and get on
with them. I hope you have employed the summer in giving them the
finishing touches.”
“There are,” says a distinguished critic, {399b} “passages in _Lavengro_
which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England—unsurpassed, I
mean, for mere perfection of style—for blending of strength and graphic
power with limpidity and music of flow.” Borrow’s own generation would
have laughed at such a value being put upon anything in _Lavengro_.
Another thing against the books success was its style. It lacked what
has been described as the poetic ecstacy or sentimental verdure of the
age. Trope, imagery, mawkishness, were all absent, for Borrow had gone
back to his masters, at whose head stood the glorious Defoe. Borrow’s
style was as individual as the man himself. By a curious contradiction,
the tendency is to overlook literary lapses in the very man towards whom
so little latitude was allowed in other directions. Many Borrovians have
groaned in anguish over his misuse of that wretched word “Individual.” A
distinguished man of letters {400a} has written:—“I would as lief read a
chapter of _The Bible in Spain_ as I would _Gil Blas_; nay, I positively
would give the preference to Señor Giorgio.” Another critic, and a
severe one, has written:—
“It is not as philologist, or traveller, or wild missionary, or
folk-lorist, or antiquary, that Borrow lives and will live. It is as
the master of splendid, strong, simple English, the prose Morland of
a vanished road-side life, the realist who, Defoe-like, could make
fiction seem truer than fact. To have written the finest fight in
the whole world’s literature, the fight with the Flaming Tinman, is
surely something of an achievement.” {400b}
It is Borrow’s personality that looms out from his pages. His mastery
over the imagination of his reader, his subtle instinct of how to throw
his own magnetism over everything he relates, although he may be standing
aside as regards the actual events with which he is dealing, is worthy of
Defoe himself. It is this magnetism that carries his readers safely over
the difficult places, where, but for the author’s grip upon them, they
would give up in despair; it is this magnetism that prompts them to pass
by only with a slight shudder, such references as the feathered tribe,
fast in the arms of Morpheus, and, above all, those terrible puns that
crop up from time to time. There is always the strong, masterful man
behind the words who, like a great general, can turn a reverse to his own
advantage.
In his style perhaps, after all, lay the secret of Borrow’s unsuccess.
He was writing for another generation; speaking in a voice too strong to
be heard other than as a strange noise by those near to him. It may be
urged that _The Bible in Spain_ disproves these conclusions; but _The
Bible in Spain_ was a peculiar book. It was a chronicle of Christian
enterprise served up with _sauce picaresque_. It pleased and astonished
everyone, especially those who had grown a little weary of godly
missioners. It had the advantage of being spontaneous, having been
largely written on the spot, whereas _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ were
worked on and laboured at for years. Above all, it had the inestimable
virtue of being known to be True. To the imaginative intellectual, Truth
or Fiction are matters of small importance, he judges by Art; but to the
general public of limited intellectual capacity, Truth is appreciated out
of all proportion to its artistic importance. If Borrow had published
_The Bible in Spain_ after the failure of _Lavengro_, it would in all
probability have been as successful as it was appearing before.