'We are all Borrovians now.'—Augustine Birrell.
It is a curious fact that of only two men of distinction in English letters in these later years can it be said that they lived to a good old age and yet failed of recognition for work that is imperishable. Many poets have died young—Shelley and Keats for example—to whom this public recognition was refused in their lifetime. But given the happiness of reaching middle age, this recognition has never failed. It came, for example, to Wordsworth and Coleridge long after their best work was done. It came with more promptness to all the great Victorian novelists. This recognition did not come in their lifetime to two Suffolk friends, Edward FitzGerald with Omar Khayyám and George Borrow with Lavengro. In the case of FitzGerald there was probably no consciousness that he had produced a great poem. In any case his sunny Irish temperament could easily have surmounted disappointment if he had expected anything from the world in the way of literary fame. Borrow was quite differently made. He was as intense an egoist as Rousseau, whose work he had probably never read, and would not have appreciated if he had read. He longed for the recognition of the multitude through his books, and thoroughly enjoyed it when it was given to him for a moment—for his Bible in Spain. Such appreciation as he received in his lifetime was given to him for that book and for no other. There were here and there enthusiasts for his Lavengro and Romany Rye. Dr. Jessopp has told us that he was one. But it was not until long after his death that the word 'Borrovian'[261] came into the language. Not a single great author among his contemporaries praised him for his Lavengro, the book for which we most esteem him to-day. His name is not mentioned by Carlyle or Tennyson or Ruskin in all their voluminous works. Among the novelists also he is of no account. Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot knew him not. Charlotte Brontë does indeed write of him with enthusiasm,[262] but she is alone among the great Victorian authors in this particular. Borrow's Lavengro received no commendation from contemporary writers of the first rank. He died in his seventy-eighth year an obscure recluse whose works were all but forgotten. Since that year, 1881, his fame has been continually growing. His greatest work, Lavengro, has been reprinted with introductions by many able critics;[263] notable essayists have proclaimed his worth. Of these Mr. Watts-Dunton and Mr. Augustine Birrell have been the most assiduous. The efforts of the former have already been noted. Mr. Birrell has expressed his devotion in more than one essay.[264] Referring to a casual reference by Robert Louis Stevenson to The Bible in Spain,[265] in which R. L. S. speaks well of that book, Mr. Birrell, not without irony, says:
It is interesting to know this, interesting, that is, to the great Clan Stevenson, who owe suit and service to their liege lord; but so far as Borrow is concerned, it does not matter, to speak frankly, two straws. The author of Lavengro, The Romany Rye, The Bible in Spain, and Wild Wales is one of those kings of literature who never need to number their tribe. His personality will always secure him an attendant company, who, when he pipes, must dance.
This is to sum up the situation to perfection. You cannot force people to become readers of Borrow by argument, by criticism, or by the force of authority. You reach the stage of admiration and even love by effects which rise remote from all questions of style or taste. To say, as does a recent critic, that 'there is something in Borrow after all; not so much as most people suppose, but still a great deal,'[266] is to miss the compelling power of his best books as they strike those with whom they are among the finest things in literature.[267] In attempting to interest new readers in the man—and this book is not for the sect called Borrovians, to whom I recommend the earlier biographies, but for a wider public which knows not Borrow—I hope I shall succeed in sending many to those incomparable works, which have given me so many pleasant hours.
FOOTNOTES:
[261] A word that is very misleading, as no writer was ever so little the founder of a school.
[262] Although this fact was not known until 1908 when I published The Brontës: Life and Letters. See vol. ii. p. 24, where Charlotte Brontë writes: 'In George Borrow's works I found a wild fascination, a vivid graphic power of description, a fresh originality, an athletic simplicity, which give them a stamp of their own.'
[263] Theodore Watts-Dunton, Augustine Birrell, Francis Hindes Groome, and Thomas Seccombe. Lionel Johnson's essay on Borrow is the more valuable in its enthusiasm in that it was written by a Roman Catholic. Writing in the Outlook (April 1, 1899) he said:
'What the four books mean and are to their lovers is upon this sort. Written by a man of intense personality, irresistible in his hold upon your attention, they take you far afield from weary cares and business into the enamouring airs of the open world, and into days when the countryside was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form the worst side of "civilised" life in cities. They give you the sense of emancipation, of manumission into the liberty of the winding road and fragrant forest, into the freshness of an ancient country-life, into a milieu where men are not copies of each other. And you fall in with strange scenes of adventure, great or small, of which a strange man is the centre as he is the scribe; and from a description of a lonely glen you are plunged into a dissertation upon difficult old tongues, and from dejection into laughter, and from gypsydom into journalism, and everything is equally delightful, and nothing that the strange man shows you can come amiss. And you will hardly make up your mind whether he is most Don Quixote, or Rousseau, or Luther, or Defoe; but you will always love these books by a brave man who travelled in far lands, travelled far in his own land, travelled the way of life for close upon eighty years, and died in perfect solitude. And this will be the least you can say, though he would not have you say it—Requiescat in pace Viator.'