A novelist with whom Borrow has greater affinity is Charles Reade. There is the same quick, observant, unphilosophical spirit; the same preference for plain, simple folk, the same love of health and virility. And in The Cloister and the Hearth, one of the great romances of the world, one feels touches of the same Vagabond spirit as animates Lavengro and The Romany Rye. The incomparable Denys, with his favourite cry, “Le diable est mort,” is a splendid study in genial vagrancy.
Literary comparisons, though they discover affinities, but serve to emphasize in the long run the distinctive originality of Borrow’s writings.
He has himself admitted to the influence of Defoe and Lesage. But though his manner recalls at times the manner of Defoe, and though the form of his narrative reminds the reader of the Spanish rogue story, the psychological atmosphere is vastly different. He may have taken Defoe as his model just as Thackeray took Fielding; but Vanity Fair is not more unlike Tom Jones than is Lavengro unlike Robinson Crusoe.
It is idle to seek for the literary parentage of this Vagabond. Better far to accept him as he is, a wanderer, a rover, a curious taster of life, at once a mystic and a realist. He may have qualities that repel; but so full is he of contradictions that no sooner has the frown settled on the brow than it gives place to a smile. We may not always like him; never can we ignore him. Provocative, unsatisfying, fascinating—such is George Borrow. And most fascinating of all is his love of night, day, sun, moon, and stars, “all sweet things.” Cribbed in the close and dusty purlieus of the city,
wearied by the mechanical monotony of the latest fashionable novel, we respond gladly to the spacious freshness of Lavengro and The Romany Rye. Herein lies the spell of Borrow; for in his company there is always “a wind on the heath.”
IV
HENRY D. THOREAU
“Enter these enchanted woods
You who dare.”George Meredith.
I
Thoreau has suffered badly at the hands of the critics. By some he has been regarded as a poser, and the Walden episode has been spoken of as a mere theatrical trick. By others he has been derided as a cold-blooded hermit, who fled from civilization and the intercourse of his fellows. Even Mr. Watts-Dunton, the eloquent friend of the Children of the Open Air, quite recently in his introduction to an edition of Walden has impugned his sincerity, and leaves the impression that Thoreau was an uncomfortable kind of egotist. He has not lacked friends, but his friends have not always written discreetly about him, thus giving the enemy opportunity to blaspheme. And while not unmindful of Mr. H. S. Salt’s sympathetic biography, nor the admirable monograph by Mr. “H. A. Page,” there is no denying the fact that the trend of modern criticism has been against him. The sarcastic comments of J. R. Lowell, and the banter of R. L. Stevenson, however we may disagree with them, are not to be lightly ignored, coming from critics usually so sane and discerning.
Since it is the Walden episode, the two years’ sojourn in the woods near Concord, that has provoked the scornful