The Life of George Borrow

by Clement King Shorter

But the reception of Lavengro by the critics, and also by the public, 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.

Borrow, as we have seen, took many years to write Lavengro. “I am writing the work,” he told Dawson Turner, “in precisely the same manner as The Bible in Spain, viz., on blank sheets of old account-books, backs of letters, etc.,” and he recalls Mahomet writing the Koran on mutton bones as an analogy to his own “slovenliness of manuscript.” I have had plenty of opportunity of testing this slovenliness in the collection of manuscripts of portions of Lavengro that have come into my possession. These are written upon pieces of paper of all shapes and sizes, although at least a third of the book in Borrow’s very neat handwriting is contained in a leather notebook, of which I give examples of the title-page and opening leaf in facsimile. The title-page demonstrates the earliest form of Borrow’s conception. Not only did he then contemplate an undisguised autobiography, but even described himself, as he frequently did in his conversation, as “a Norfolk man.” Before the book was finished, however, he repudiated the autobiographical note, and by the time he sat down to write The Romany Rye we find him fiercely denouncing his critics for coming to such a conclusion. “The writer,” he declares, “never said it was an autobiography; never authorised any person to say it was one.” Which was doubtless true, in a measure. Yet I find among my Borrow Papers the following letter from Whitwell Elwin, who, writing from Booton Rectory on 21st October, 1853, and addressing him as “My dear Mr. Borrow,” said:

I hoped to have been able to call upon you at Yarmouth, but a heavy cold first, and now occupation, have interfered with my intentions. I daresay you have seen the mention made of your Lavengro in the article on Haydon in the current number of The Quarterly Review, and I thought you might like to know that every syllable, both comment and extract, was inserted by the writer (a man little given to praise) of his own accord. Murray sent him your book, and that was all. No addition or modification was made by myself, and it is therefore the unbiassed judgment of a very critical reviewer. Whenever you appear again before the public I shall endeavour to do ample justice to your past and present merits, and there is one point in which you could aid those who understand you and your books in bringing over general readers to your side. I was myself acquainted with many of the persons you have sketched in your Lavengro, and I can testify to the extraordinary vividness and accuracy of the portraits. What I have seen, again, of yourself tells me that romantic adventures are your natural element, and I should a priori expect that much of your history would be stranger than fiction. But you must remember that the bulk of readers have no personal acquaintance with you, or the characters you describe. The consequence is that they fancy there is an immensity of romance mixed up with the facts, and they are irritated by the inability to distinguish between them. I am confident, from all I have heard, that this was the source of the comparatively cold reception of Lavengro. I should have partaken the feeling myself if I had not had the means of testing the fidelity of many portions of the book, from which I inferred the equal fidelity of the rest. I think you have the remedy in your own hands, viz., by giving the utmost possible matter-of-fact air to your sequel. I do not mean that you are to tame down the truth, but some ways of narrating a story make it seem more credible than others, and if you were so far to defer to the ignorance of the public they would enter into the full spirit of your rich and racy narrative. You naturally look at your life from your own point of view, and this in itself is the best; but when you publish a book you invite the reader to participate in the events of your career, and it is necessary then to look a little at things from his point of view. As he has not your knowledge you must stoop to him. I throw this out for your consideration. My sole wish is that the public should have a right estimate of you, and surely you ought to do what is in your power to help them to it. I know you will excuse the liberty I take in offering this crude suggestion. Take it for what it is worth, but anyhow . . .

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. 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, 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 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:

To George Borrow, Esq.

Booton, Norwich, Oct. 26, 1853.

My dear Mr. Borrow,—I shall be rejoiced to see you here, and I hope you will fasten a little luggage to the bow of your saddle, and spend as much time under my roof as you can spare. I am always at home. Mrs. Elwin is sure to be in the house or garden, and I, at the worst, not further off than the extreme boundary of my parish. Pray come and that quickly. Your shortest road from Norwich is through Horsford, and from thence to the park wall of Haverland Hall, which you skirt. This will bring you out by a small wayside public house, well known in these parts, called “The Rat-catchers.” At this point you turn sharp to the left, and keep the straight road till you come to a church with a new red brick house adjoining, which is your journey’s end.

The conclusion of your note to me is so true in sentiment, and so admirable in expression, that I hope you will introduce it into your next work. I wish it had been said in the article on Haydon. Cannot you strew such criticisms through the sequel to Lavengro? They would give additional charm and value to the work. Believe me, very truly yours,

W. Elwin.

You are of course aware that if I had spoken of Lavengro in the Q. R. I should have said much more, but as I hoped for my turn hereafter, I preferred to let the passage go forth unadulterated.