CHAPTER XXV
LAVENGRO
The Bible in Spain bears on its title-page the date 1843, although my copy makes it clear in Borrow's handwriting that it was really ready for publication in the previous year.
Borrow's handwriting had changed its character somewhat when he inscribed to his wife a copy of his next book Lavengro in 1851.
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.[169]
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.'[170] 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, reproduces 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.'[171] 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.'[172] 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,[173] 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.