George Borrow: The Man and His Books

by Edward Thomas

Just at first, as has been seen, a month after his Christmas wine with Mr Petulengro, Borrow saw his life as a drama, perhaps as a melodrama, full of Gypsies, jockeys and horses, wild men of many lands and several murderers. “Capital subject,” he repeated. That was when he saw himself as an adventurer and Europe craning its neck to keep him in sight. But he knew well, and after the first flush he remembered, that he was not merely a robust walker, rider and philologist. When he was only eighteen he was continually asking himself “What is truth?” “I had,” he says, “involved myself imperceptibly in a dreary labyrinth of doubt, and, whichever way I turned, no reasonable prospect of extricating myself appeared. The means

by which I had brought myself into this situation may be very briefly told; I had inquired into many matters, in order that I might become wise, and I had read and pondered over the words of the wise, so called, till I had made myself master of the sum of human wisdom; namely, that everything is enigmatical and that man is an enigma to himself; thence the cry of ‘What is truth?’ I had ceased to believe in the truth of that in which I had hitherto trusted, and yet could find nothing in which I could put any fixed or deliberate belief. I was, indeed, in a labyrinth! In what did I not doubt? With respect to crime and virtue I was in doubt; I doubted that the one was blameable and the other praiseworthy. Are not all things subjected to the law of necessity? Assuredly; time and chance govern all things: yet how can this be? alas!

“Then there was myself; for what was I born? Are not all things born to be forgotten? That’s incomprehensible: yet is it not so? Those butterflies fall and are forgotten. In what is man better than a butterfly? All then is born to be forgotten. Ah! that was a pang indeed; ’tis at such a moment that a man wishes to die. The wise king of Jerusalem, who sat in his shady arbours beside his sunny fishpools, saying so many fine things, wished to die, when he saw that not only all was vanity, but that he himself was vanity. Will a time come when all will be forgotten that now is beneath the sun? If so, of what profit is life? . . .

“‘Would I had never been born!’ I said to myself; and a thought would occasionally intrude. But was I ever born? Is not all that I see a lie—a deceitful phantom? Is there a world, and earth, and sky? . . .”

If he no longer articulated these doubts he was still not as sure of himself as Ford imagined. He was, by the way, seldom sure of his own age, and Dr. Knapp [{31}] gives

four instances of his underestimating it by two and even five years. Whatever may be the explanation of this, after three years’ work at “Lavengro” he “will not be hurried for anyone.” He was probably finding that, with no notebooks or letters to help, the work was very different from the writing of “The Bible in Spain,” which was pieced together out of long letters to the Bible Society, and, moreover, was written within a few years of the events described. The events of his childhood and youth had retired into a perspective that was beyond his control: he would often be tempted to change their perspective, to bring forward some things, to set back others. In any case these things were no longer mere solid material facts. They were living a silent life of spirits within his brain. He took to calling the book his “life” or “autobiography,” not “Life: a Drama.” It was advertised as such; but he would not have it. At the last moment he refused to label it an autobiography, because he knew that it was inadequate, and that in any case other men would not understand or would misunderstand it. He must have felt certain that the fair figure of “Don Jorge,” created in “The Bible of Spain,” had been poisoned for most readers by many a passage in “Lavengro,” like that where he doubted the existence of self and sky and stars, or where he told of the breakdown in his health when he was sixteen and of the gloom that followed:

“But how much more quickly does strength desert the human frame than return to it! I had become convalescent, it is true, but my state of feebleness was truly pitiable. I believe it is in that state that the most remarkable feature of human physiology frequently exhibits itself. Oh, how dare I mention the dark feeling of mysterious dread which comes over the mind, and which the lamp of reason, though burning bright the while, is unable to dispel! Art thou, as leeches say, the concomitant of disease—the result of

shattered nerves? Nay, rather the principle of woe itself, the fountain head of all sorrow co-existent with man, whose influence he feels when yet unborn, and whose workings he testifies with his earliest cries, when, ‘drowned in tears,’ he first beholds the light; for, as the sparks fly upward, so is man born to trouble, and woe doth he bring with him into the world, even thyself, dark one, terrible one, causeless, unbegotten, without a father. Oh, how frequently dost thou break down the barriers which divide thee from the poor soul of man, and overcast its sunshine with thy gloomy shadow. In the brightest days of prosperity—in the midst of health and wealth—how sentient is the poor human creature of thy neighbourhood! how instinctively aware that the floodgates of horror may be cast open, and the dark stream engulf him for ever and ever! Then is it not lawful for man to exclaim, ‘Better that I had never been born!’ Fool, for thyself thou wast not born, but to fulfil the inscrutable decrees of thy Creator; and how dost thou know that this dark principle is not, after all, thy best friend; that it is not that which tempers the whole mass of thy corruption? It may be, for what thou knowest, the mother of wisdom, and of the great works: it is the dread of the horror of the night that makes the pilgrim hasten on his way. When thou feelest it nigh, let thy safety word be ‘Onward’; if thou tarry, thou art overwhelmed. Courage! build great works—’tis urging thee—it is ever nearest the favourites of God—the fool knows little of it. Thou wouldst be joyous, wouldst thou? then be a fool. What great work was ever the result of joy, the puny one? Who have been the wise ones, the mighty ones, the conquering ones of this earth? the joyous? I believe not. The fool is happy, or comparatively so—certainly the least sorrowful, but he is still a fool; and whose notes are sweetest, those of the nightingale, or of the silly lark?

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