LAVENGRO
_The Bible in Spain_ bears on its title-page the date 1843. In the
intervening eight or nine years he had travelled much—suffered much.
During all these years he had been thinking about, talking about, his
next book, making no secret of the fact that it was to be an
Autobiography. Even before _The Bible in Spain_ was issued he had
written to Mr. John Murray foreshadowing a book in which his father,
William Taylor, and others were to put in an appearance. In the
“Advertisement” to _The Romany Rye_ he tells us that “the principal part
of _Lavengro_ was written in the year ’43, that the whole of it was
completed before the termination of the year ’46, and that it was in the
hands of the publisher in the year ’48.” As the idea grew in his mind,
his friend, Richard Ford, gave him much sound advice:
Never mind nimminy-pimminy people thinking subjects _low_. Things
are low in manner of handling. Draw Nature in rags and poverty, yet
draw her truly, and how picturesque! I hate your silver fork, kid
glove, curly-haired school.
And so in the following years, now to Ford, now to Murray, he traces his
progress, while in 1844 he tells Dawson Turner that he is “at present
engaged in a kind of Biography in the Robinson Crusoe style.” But in the
same year he went to Buda-Pesth, Venice, and Constantinople. The first
advertisement of the book appeared in _The Quarterly Review_ in July,
1848, when _Lavengro_, _An Autobiography_, was announced. Later in the
same year Mr. Murray advertised the book as _Life_, _A Drama_, and Dr.
Knapp, who had in his collection the original proof-sheets of _Lavengro_,
reproduced the title-page of the book which then stood as _Life_, _A
Drama_, and bore the date 1849. Borrow’s procrastination in delivering
the complete book worried John Murray exceedingly. Not unnaturally, for
in 1848 he had offered the book at his annual sale dinner to the
booksellers who had subscribed to it liberally. Eighteen months later
Murray was still worrying Borrow for the return of the proof-sheets of
the third and last volume. Not until January, 1850, do we hear of it as
_Lavengro_, _An Autobiography_, and under this title it was advertised in
_The Quarterly Review_ for that month as “nearly ready for publication.”
In April, 1850, we find Woodfall, John Murray’s printer, writing letter
after letter urging celerity, to which Mrs. Borrow replies, excusing the
delay on account of her husband’s indifferent health. They have been
together in lodgings at Yarmouth. “He had many plunges into the briny
Ocean, which seemed to do him good.” Murray continued to exhort, but the
final chapter did not reach him. “My sale is fixed for December 12th,”
he writes in November, “and if I cannot show the book then I must throw
it up.” This threat had little effect, for on 13th December we find
Murray still coaxing his dilatory author, telling him with justice that
there were passages in his book “equal to Defoe.” The very printer, Mr.
Woodfall, joined in the chase. “The public is quite prepared to devour
your book,” he wrote, which was unhappily not the case. Nor was Ford a
happier prophet, although a true friend when he wrote—“I am sure it will
be _the_ book of the year when it is brought forth.” The activity of
Mrs. Borrow in this matter of the publication of _Lavengro_ is
interesting. “My husband . . . is, I assure you, doing all he can as
regards the completion of the book,” she writes to Mr. Murray in
December, 1849, and in November of the following year Murray writes to
her to say that he is engraving Phillips’s portrait of Borrow for the
book. “I think a cheering letter from you will do Mr. Borrow good,” she
writes later. Throughout the whole correspondence between publisher and
printer we are impressed by Mrs. Borrow’s keen interest in her husband’s
book, her anxiety that he should be humoured. Sadly did Borrow need to
be humoured, for if he had cherished the illusion that his book would
really be the “Book of the Year” he was to suffer a cruel disillusion.
Scarcely any one wanted it. All the critics abused it. In _The
Athenæum_ it was bluntly pronounced a failure. “The story of _Lavengro_
will content no one,” said Sir William Stirling-Maxwell in _Fraser’s
Magazine_. The book “will add but little to Mr. Borrow’s reputation,”
said _Blackwood_. The only real insight into the book’s significance was
provided by Thomas Gordon Hake in a letter to _The New Monthly Review_,
in which journal the editor, Harrison Ainsworth, had already pronounced a
not very favourable opinion. “_Lavengro’s_ roots will strike deep into
the soil of English letters,” wrote Dr. Hake, and he then pronounced a
verdict now universally accepted. George Henry Lewes once happily
remarked that he would make an appreciation of Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_ a test of friendship. Many of us would be almost equally
inclined to make such a test of Borrow’s _Lavengro_. Tennyson declared
that an enthusiasm for Milton’s _Lycidas_ was a touchstone of taste in
poetry. May we not say that an enthusiasm for Borrow’s _Lavengro_ is now
a touchstone of taste in English prose literature?
But the reception of _Lavengro_ by the critics, and also by the public,
may be said to have destroyed Borrow’s moral fibre. Henceforth, it was a
soured and disappointed man who went forth to meet the world. We hear
much in the gossip of contemporaries of Borrow’s eccentricities, it may
be of his rudeness and gruffness, in the last years of his life. Only
those who can realise the personality of a self-contained man, conscious,
as all genius has ever been, of its achievement, and conscious also of
the failure of the world to recognise, will understand—and will
sympathise.
Borrow, as we have seen, took many years to write _Lavengro_. “I am
writing the work,” he told Dawson Turner, “in precisely the same manner
as _The Bible in Spain_, viz., on blank sheets of old account-books,
backs of letters, etc.,” and he recalls Mahomet writing the Koran on
mutton bones as an analogy to his own “slovenliness of manuscript.” I
have had plenty of opportunity of testing this slovenliness in the
collection of manuscripts of portions of _Lavengro_ that have come into
my possession. These are written upon pieces of paper of all shapes and
sizes, although at least a third of the book in Borrow’s very neat
handwriting is contained in a leather notebook, of which I give examples
of the title-page and opening leaf in facsimile. The title-page
demonstrates the earliest form of Borrow’s conception. Not only did he
then contemplate an undisguised autobiography, but even described
himself, as he frequently did in his conversation, as “a Norfolk man.”
Before the book was finished, however, he repudiated the autobiographical
note, and by the time he sat down to write _The Romany Rye_ we find him
fiercely denouncing his critics for coming to such a conclusion. “The
writer,” he declares, “never said it was an autobiography; never
authorised any person to say it was one.” Which was doubtless true, in a
measure. Yet I find among my Borrow Papers the following letter from
Whitwell Elwin, who, writing from Booton Rectory on 21st October, 1853,
and addressing him as “My dear Mr. Borrow,” said:
I hoped to have been able to call upon you at Yarmouth, but a heavy
cold first, and now occupation, have interfered with my intentions.
I daresay you have seen the mention made of your _Lavengro_ in the
article on Haydon in the current number of _The Quarterly Review_,
and I thought you might like to know that every syllable, both
comment and extract, was inserted by the writer (a man little given
to praise) of his own _accord_. Murray sent him your book, and that
was all. No addition or modification was made by myself, and it is
therefore the unbiassed judgment of a _very critical_ reviewer.
Whenever you appear again before the public I shall endeavour to do
ample justice to your past and present merits, and there is one point
in which you could aid those who understand you and your books in
bringing over general readers to your side. I was myself acquainted
with many of the persons you have sketched in your _Lavengro_, and I
can testify to the extraordinary vividness and accuracy of the
portraits. What I have seen, again, of yourself tells me that
romantic adventures are your natural element, and I should _a priori_
expect that much of your history would be stranger than fiction. But
you must remember that the bulk of readers have no personal
acquaintance with you, or the characters you describe. The
consequence is that they fancy there is an immensity of romance mixed
up with the facts, and they are irritated by the inability to
distinguish between them. I am confident, from all I have heard,
that this was the source of the comparatively cold reception of
_Lavengro_. I should have partaken the feeling myself if I had not
had the means of testing the fidelity of many portions of the book,
from which I inferred the equal fidelity of the rest. I think you
have the remedy in your own hands, viz., by giving the utmost
possible matter-of-fact air to your sequel. I do not mean that you
are to tame down the truth, but some ways of narrating a story make
it seem more credible than others, and if you were so far to defer to
the ignorance of the public they would enter into the full spirit of
your rich and racy narrative. You naturally look at your life from
your own point of view, and this in itself is the best; but when you
publish a book you invite the reader to participate in the events of
your career, and it is necessary then to look a little at things from
_his_ point of view. As he has not your knowledge you must stoop to
him. I throw this out for your consideration. My sole wish is that
the public should have a right estimate of you, and surely you ought
to do what is in your power to help them to it. I know you will
excuse the liberty I take in offering this crude suggestion. Take it
for what it is worth, but anyhow . . .
To this letter, as we learn from Elwin’s _Life_, “instead of roaring like
a lion,” as Elwin had expected, he returned quite a “lamb-like note.”
Read by the light in which we all judge the book to-day, this estimate by
Elwin was about as fatuous as most contemporary criticisms of a
masterpiece. Which is only to say that it is rarely given to
contemporary critics to judge accurately of the great work that comes to
them amid a mass that is not great. That Elwin, although not a good
editor of Pope, was a sound critic of the literature of a period anterior
to his own is demonstrated by the admirable essays from his pen that have
been reprinted with an excellent memoir of him by his son. In this
memoir we have a capital glimpse of our hero:
Among the notables whom he had met was Borrow, whose _Lavengro_ and
_Romany Rye_ he afterwards reviewed in 1857 under the title of
“Roving Life in England.” Their interview was characteristic of
both. Borrow was just then very sore with his snarling critics, and
on some one mentioning that Elwin was a _quartering_ reviewer, he
said, “Sir, I wish you a better employment.” Then hastily changing
the subject he called out, “What party are _you_ in the
Church—Tractarian, Moderate, or Evangelical? I am happy to say I am
the old _High_.” “I am happy to say I am _not_,” was Elwin’s
emphatic reply. Borrow boasted of his proficiency in the Norfolk
dialect, which he endeavoured to speak as broadly as possible. “I
told him,” said Elwin, “that he had not cultivated it with his usual
success.” As the conversation proceeded it became less disputatious,
and the two ended by becoming so cordial that they promised to visit
each other. Borrow fulfilled his promise in the following October,
when he went to Booton, and was “full of anecdote and reminiscence,”
and delighted the rectory children by singing them songs in the gypsy
tongue. Elwin during this visit urged him to try his hand at an
article for the _Review_. “Never,” he said; “I have made a
resolution never to have anything to do with such a blackguard
trade.”
While writing of Whitwell Elwin and his association with Borrow, which
was sometimes rather strained as we shall see when _The Romany Rye_ comes
to be published, it is interesting to turn to Elwin’s final impression of
Borrow, as conveyed in a letter which the recipient has kindly placed at
my disposal. It was written from Booton Rectory, and is dated 27th
October, 1893:
I used occasionally to meet Borrow at the house of Mr. Murray, his
publisher, and he once stayed with me here for two or three days
about 1855. He always seemed to me quite at ease “among refined
people,” and I should not have ascribed his dogmatic tone, when he
adopted it, to his resentment at finding himself out of keeping with
his society. A spirit of self-assertion was engrained in him, and it
was supported by a combative temperament. As he was proud of his
bodily prowess, and rather given to parade it, so he took the same
view of an argument as of a battle with fists, and thought that
manliness required him to be determined and unflinching. But this,
in my experience of him, was not his ordinary manner, which was calm
and companionable, without rudeness of any kind, unless some
difference occurred to provoke his pugnacity. I have witnessed
instances of his care to avoid wounding feelings needlessly. He
never kept back his opinions which, on some points, were shallow and
even absurd; and when his antagonist was as persistently positive as
himself, he was apt to be over vehement in contradiction. I have
heard Mr. Murray say that once in a dispute with Dr. Whewell at a
dinner the language on both sides grew so fiery that Mrs. Whewell
fainted.
He told me that his composition cost him a vast amount of labour,
that his first draughts were diffuse and crude, and that he wrote his
productions several times before he had condensed and polished them
to his mind. There is nothing choicer in the English language than
some of his narratives, descriptions, and sketches of character, but
in his best books he did not always prune sufficiently, and in his
last work, _Wild Wales_, he seemed to me to have lost the faculty
altogether. Mr. Murray long refused to publish it unless it was
curtailed, and Borrow, with his usual self-will and self-confidence,
refused to retrench the trivialities. Either he got his own way in
the end, or he revised his manuscript to little purpose.
Probably most of what there was to tell of Borrow has been related by
himself. It is a disadvantage in _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_ that we
cannot with certainty separate fact from fiction, for he avowed in
talk that, like Goethe, he had assumed the right in the interests of
his autobiographical narrative to embellish it in places; but the
main outline, and larger part of the details, are the genuine record
of what he had seen and done, and I can testify that some of his
minor personages who were known to me in my boyhood are described
with perfect accuracy.
Two letters by Mr. Elwin to Borrow, from my Borrow Papers, both dated
1853—two years after _Lavengro_ was written—may well have place here:
TO GEORGE BORROW, ESQ.
BOOTON, NORWICH, _Oct._ 26, 1853.
MY DEAR MR. BORROW,—I shall be rejoiced to see you here, and I hope
you will fasten a little luggage to the bow of your saddle, and spend
as much time under my roof as you can spare. I am always at home.
Mrs. Elwin is sure to be in the house or garden, and I, at the worst,
not further off than the extreme boundary of my parish. Pray come
and that quickly. Your shortest road from Norwich is through
Horsford, and from thence to the park wall of Haverland Hall, which
you skirt. This will bring you out by a small wayside public house,
well known in these parts, called “The Rat-catchers.” At this point
you turn sharp to the left, and keep the straight road till you come
to a church with a new red brick house adjoining, which is your
journey’s end.
The conclusion of your note to me is so true in sentiment, and so
admirable in expression, that I hope you will introduce it into your
next work. I wish it had been said in the article on Haydon. Cannot
you strew such criticisms through the sequel to _Lavengro_? They
would give additional charm and value to the work. Believe me, very
truly yours,
W. ELWIN.
You are of course aware that if _I_ had spoken of _Lavengro_ in the
_Q. R._ I should have said much more, but as I hoped for my turn
hereafter, I preferred to let the passage go forth unadulterated.
* * * * *
TO GEORGE BORROW, ESQ.
BOOTON RECTORY, NORWICH, _Nov._ 5, 1853.
MY DEAR MR. BORROW,—You bore your mishap with a philosophic patience,
and started with an energy which gives the best earnest that you
would arrive safe and sound at Norwich.
I was happy to find yesterday morning, by the arrival of your kind
present, a sure notification that you were well home.
Many thanks for the tea, which we drink with great zest and
diligence. My legs are not as long as yours, nor my breath either.
You soon made me feel that I must either turn back or be left behind,
so I chose the former. Mrs. Elwin and my children desire their kind
regards. They one and all enjoyed your visit. Believe me, very
truly yours,
W. ELWIN.
I have said that I possess large portions of _Lavengro_ in manuscript.
Borrow’s always helpful wife, however, copied out the whole manuscript
for the publishers, and this “clean copy” came to Dr. Knapp, who found
even here a few pages of very valuable writing deleted, and these he has
very rightly restored in Mr. Murray’s edition of _Lavengro_. Why Borrow
took so much pains to explain that his wife had copied _Lavengro_, as the
following document implies, I cannot think. I find in his handwriting
this scrap of paper signed by Mary Borrow, and witnessed by her daughter:
_Janry._ 30, 1869,
This is to certify that I transcribed _The Bible in Spain_,
_Lavengro_, and some other works of my husband George Borrow, from
the original manuscripts. A considerable portion of the transcript
of _Lavengro_ was lost at the printing-office where the work was
printed.
MARY BORROW.
Witness: Henrietta M., daughter of Mary Borrow.
It only remains here to state the melancholy fact once again that
_Lavengro_, great work of literature as it is now universally
acknowledged to be, was not “the book of the year.” The three thousand
copies of the first issue took more than twenty years to sell, and it was
not until 1872 that Mr. Murray resolved to issue a cheaper edition. The
time was not ripe for the cult of the open road, the zest for “the wind
on the heath” that our age shares so keenly.