the boy Borrow or Lavengro for angling. “From that day,” he says, “I became less and less a practitioner of that cruel fishing.” In Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, which enjoyed its hour of fame when it was published twenty-six years ago, there is a contemptuous reference to the disciple of William Taylor, “this polyglot gentleman, who went through Spain disseminating Bibles.” If Miss Martineau were alive now she would hear the works of “this polyglot gentleman” praised on every hand, and would find that a cult had arisen which to her would certainly be quite incomprehensible. In that large, dismal book—the Life of James Martineau, again, there is but one mention of Dr. Martineau’s famous schoolfellow whose name has been linked with him only by a silly story. Do not let it be thought that I am complaining of this neglect; the world will always treat its greatest writers in precisely this fashion. Borrow did not lack for fame of a kind, but he was, as I desire to show, praised in his lifetime for the wrong thing, where he was praised at all. Everyone in the fifties and sixties read The Bible in Spain, as they read a hundred other books of
that period, now forgotten. Many read it who were deceived by its title. They expected a tract. Many read it as we to-day read the latest novel or biography of the hour. Then a new book arises and the momentary favourite is forgotten. We think for a whole week that we are in contact with a well-nigh immortal work. A little later we concern ourselves not at all whether the book is immortal or not. We go on to something else. The critic is as much to blame as the reader. Not one man in a hundred whose profession it is to come between the author and the public, and to guide the reader to the best in literature, has the least perception of what is good literature. It is easy when a writer has captured the suffrages of the crowd for the critic to tell the world that he is great. That happened to Carlyle, to Tennyson, to many a popular author whose earliest books commanded little attention: but, happily, these writers did not lose heart. They kept on writing. Borrow was otherwise made. He wrote The Bible in Spain—a book of travel of surprising merit. It sold largely on its title. Mr. Augustine Birrell has told us that he knew a boy in a very
strict household who devoured the narrative on Sunday afternoons, the title being thought to cover a conventional missionary journey. Well, when I was a boy The Bible in Spain had gone out of fashion and the public had not taken up with the author’s greater work, Lavengro. Borrow was naturally disappointed. He abused the critics and the public. Perhaps he grew somewhat soured. He did not hesitate in The Romany Rye to talk candidly about those “ill-favoured dogs . . . the newspaper editors,” and he made the gentleman’s gentleman of Lavengro describe how he was excluded from the Servants’ Club in Park Lane because his master followed a profession “so mean as literature.” In fact as a reaction from the unfriendly reception accorded to the Romany Rye—now one of the most costly of his books in a first edition—he lost heart, and he grew to despise the whole literary and writing class. Hence the various stories presenting him in not very sympathetic guise, the story of Thackeray being snubbed on asking Borrow if he had read the Snob Papers, of Miss Agnes Strickland receiving an even more forcible rebuff when she offered to send him her Queens of England.
“For God’s sake don’t Madame; I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.” These stories are in Gordon Hake’s Memoirs of Eighty Years, but Mr. Francis Hindes Groome has shown us the other side of the picture, and others also to whom I shall refer a little later have done the same. Perhaps the literary class is never the worse for a little plain speaking. The real secret of Borrow is this—that he was a man of action turned into a writer by force of circumstances.
The life of Borrow, unlike that of most famous men of letters, has not been overwritten. His death in 1881 caused little emotion and attracted but small attention in the newspapers. The Times, then as now so excellent in its biographies as a rule, devoted but twenty lines to him. Here I may be pardoned for being autobiographical. I was last in Norwich in the early eighties. I had a wild enthusiasm for literature so far as my taste had been directed—that is to say I read every book I came across and had been doing so from my earliest boyhood. But I had never heard of George Borrow or of his works. In my then not infrequent
visits to Norwich I cannot recall that his name was ever mentioned, and in my life in London, among men who were, many of them, great readers, I never heard of Borrow or of his achievement. He died in 1881, and as I do not recall hearing his name at the time of his death or until long afterwards, I must have missed certain articles in the Athenaeum—two of them admirable “appreciations” by Mr. Watts-Dunton—and so my state of benightedness was as I have described. It may be that those who are a year or two older than I am and those who are younger may find this extraordinary. You have always heard of Borrow and of his works, but I think I am entitled to insist that when Borrow sank into his grave, an old, and to many an eccentric and bitter man, he had fallen into the most curious oblivion with the public that has ever come to a man, I will not say of equal distinction, but of any distinction whatever. Mr. Egmont Hake told the readers of the Athenaeum in a biography that appeared at the time of Borrow’s death that Borrow’s works were “forgotten in England” and I find in turning to the biography of Borrow in The
Norvicensian, for 1882—the organ of the Norwich Grammar School—that the writer of this obituary notice confessed that there were none of Borrow’s works in the library of the school of which Borrow had been the most distinguished pupil.
From that time—in 1881—until 1899, a period of eighteen years, Borrow had but little biographical recognition. A few introductions to his books, sundry encyclopaedia articles, and one or two magazine essays made up the sum total of information concerning the author of Lavengro until Dr. Knapp’s Life appeared in 1899. That Life has been severely handled by some lovers of Borrow, and lovers of Borrow are now plentiful enough. Dr. Knapp had not the cunning of the really successful biographer. His book still remains in the huge two-volumed form in which it was first issued four years ago, and I do not anticipate that it will ever be a popular book. There is no literary art in it. There is a capacity for amassing facts, but no power of co-ordinating these facts. Moreover Dr. Knapp did a great deal of mischief by very over-zeal. He made too great a research into all the current gossip in Norfolk and Suffolk concerning Borrow.
If you were to make special research into the life of any friend or acquaintance of the past you would hear much foolish gossip and a great many wrong motives imputed, and possibly you would not have an opportunity of checking the various statements. The whole of Dr. Knapp’s book seems to be written upon the principle of “I would if I could” say a good many things, and, indeed, every few months there appears in the Eastern Daily Press, a journal of your city that I have read every day regularly since boyhood, a letter from some one explaining that the less inquiry about this or that point in Borrow’s career the better for Borrow. Take, for example, last Saturday’s issue of the journal I have named, where I find the following from a correspondent:—
Dr. Knapp, from dictates of courtesy, left it unrevealed, and as he could say nothing to Borrow’s credit, passed the affair over in silence, and on this point all well-wishers of Borrow’s reputation would be wise to take their cue from this biographer’s example.