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.[175] 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,[176] 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[177] 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: