Lavengro: the Scholar - the Gypsy - the Priest

Transcribed from the 1893 Ward, Lock, Bowden, and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
by GEORGE BORROW, author of “THE BIBLE IN SPAIN,” etc.
with an introduction by THEODORE WATTS.
WARD, LOCK, BOWDEN, AND CO. london: warwick house, salisbury square, e.c. new york: east 12th street. melbourne: st. james’s street. sydney: york street.
1893.
There are some writers who cannot be adequately criticised—who cannot, indeed, be adequately written about at all—save by those to whom they are personally known. I allude to those writers of genius who, having only partially mastered the art of importing their own individual characteristics into literary forms, end their life-work as they began it, remaining to the last amateurs in literary art. Of this class of writers George Borrow is generally taken to be the very type. Was he really so?
There are 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. Is “Lavengro” the work of a literary amateur who, yielding at will to every kind of authorial self-indulgence, fails to find artistic expression for the life moving within him—fails to project an individuality that his friends knew to have been unique? Of other writers of genius, admirable criticism may be made by those who have never known them in the flesh. Is this because each of those others, having passed from the stage of the literary amateur to that of the literary artist, is able to pour the stream of his personality into the literary mould and give to the world a true image of himself? It has been my chance of life to be brought into personal relations with many men of genius, but I feel that there are others who could write about them more adequately than I. Does Borrow stand alone? The admirers of his writings seem generally to think he does, for ever since I wrote my brief and hasty obituary notice of him in 1881, I have been urged to enlarge my reminiscences of him—urged