It is because to most of us the world of imagination is the world that matters. We live in the “might be’s” and “peradventures.” Fate may have cast our lot in prosaic places; have predetermined our lives on humdrum lines; but it cannot touch our dreams. There we are princes, princesses—possessed of illimitable wealth, wielding immeasurable power. Our bodies may traverse the same dismal streets day after day; but our minds rove luxuriantly through all the kingdoms of the earth.
Those wonderful eastern stories of the “Flying Horse” and the “Magic Carpet,” symbolize for us the matter-of-fact world and the matter-of-dream world. Nay, is there any sound distinction between facts and dreams? After all—
“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
But there are dreams and dreams—dreams by moonlight and dreams by sunlight. Literature can boast of many fascinating moonlight dreams—Ancient Mariners and Christabels, Wonder Books and Tanglewood Tales. And the fairies and goblins, the witches and wizards, were they not born by moonlight and nurtured under the glimmer of the stars?
But there are dreams by sunlight and visions at noonday also. Such dreams thrill us in another but no less unmistakable way, especially when the dreamer is a Scott, a William Morris, a Borrow.
And dreamers like Borrow are not content to see visions and dream dreams, their bodies must participate no less than their minds. They must needs set forth in quest of the unknown. Hardships and privations deter them not. Change, variety, the unexpected, these things are to them the very salt of life.
This untiring restlessness keeps a Richard Burton rambling over Eastern lands, turns a Borrow into the high-road and dingle. This bright-eyed Norfolk giant took more kindly to the roughnesses of life than did Hazlitt and De Quincey. Quite as neurotic in his way, his splendid physique makes us think of him as the embodiment of fine health. Illness and Borrow do not agree. We think of him swinging along the road like one of Dumas’ lusty adventurers, exhibiting his powers of horsemanship, holding his own with well-seasoned drinkers—especially if the drink be Norfolk ale—conversing with any picturesque rag-tag and bob-tail he might happen upon. There is plenty of fresh air in his pages. No thinker like Hazlitt, no dreamer like De
Quincey; but a shrewd observer with the most amazing knack of ingratiating himself with strangers.
No need for this romancer to seek distant lands for inspiration. Not even the villages of Spain and Portugal supplied him with such fine stuff for romance as Mumper’s Dingle. He would get as strange a story out of a London counting-house or an old apple-woman on London Bridge as did many a teller of tales out of lonely heaths and stormy seas.
Lavengro and The Romany Rye are fine specimens of romantic autobiography. His life was varied enough, abounding in colour; but the Vagabond is never satisfied with things that merely happen. He is equally concerned with the things that might happen, with the things that ought to happen. And so Borrow added to his own personal record from the storehouse of dreams. Some have blamed him for not adhering to the actual facts. But does any autobiographer adhere to actual facts? Can any man, even with the most sensitive feeling for accuracy, confine himself to a record of what happened?