also related that when a favourite old cat crawled out to die in the hedge he brought it into the house, where he “laid it down in a comfortable spot and watched it till it was dead.” His horse, Sidi Habismilk, the Arab, seems to have returned his admiration and esteem. He said himself, in “Wild Wales,” after expressing his relief that a boy and dog had not seen a weazel that ran across his path:
“I hate to see poor wild animals persecuted and murdered, lose my appetite for dinner at hearing the screams of a hare pursued by greyhounds, and am silly enough to feel disgust and horror at the squeals of a rat in the fangs of a terrier, which one of the sporting tribe once told me were the sweetest sounds in ‘natur.’”
CHAPTER XXIV—“LAVENGRO” AND “THE ROMANY RYE”
Instead of travelling over the world Borrow wrote his autobiography and spent so many years on it that his contempt for the pen had some excuse. I have already said almost all there is to say about these labours. [{212}] Knapp has shown that they were protracted to include matters relating to Bowring and long posterior to the period covered by the autobiography, and that the magnitude of these additions compelled him to divide the book in two. The first part was “Lavengro,” published in 1851, with an ending that is now, and perhaps was then, obviously due to the knife. The sceptical and hostile criticism of “Lavengro” delayed the appearance of the remainder of the autobiography, “The Romany Rye.”
Borrow had to reply to his critics and explain himself. This he did in the Appendix, and thus changed, the book was finished in 1853 or 1854. Something in Murray’s attitude while they were discussing publication mounted Borrow on the high horse, and yet again he fumed because Murray had expressed a private opinion and had revealed his feeling that the book was not likely to make money for anyone.
“Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” describe the author’s early adventures and, at the same time, his later opinions and mature character. In some places he turns openly aside to express his feeling or opinion at the time of writing, as, for example, in his praise of the Orangemen,
or, on the very first page, where he claims to spring from a family of gentlemen, though “not very wealthy,” that the reader may see at once he is “not altogether of low and plebeian origin.” But by far more important is the indirect self-revelation when he is recalling that other distant self, the child of three or of ten, the youth of twenty.
Ford had asked Borrow for a book of his adventures and travels, something “thick and slab,” to follow “The Bible in Spain.” The result shows that Borrow had almost done with outward adventure. “The Bible in Spain” had an atmosphere composed at best of as much Spain as Borrow. But the autobiography is pure inward Borrow: except a few detachable incidents there is nothing in it which is not Borrow’s creation, nothing which would have any value apart from his own treatment of it. A man might have used “The Bible in Spain” as a kind of guide to men and places in 1843, and it is possible he would not have been wholly disappointed. The autobiography does not depend on anything outside itself, but creates its own atmosphere and dwells in it without admitting that of the outer world—no: not even by references to events like the campaign of Waterloo or the funeral of Byron; and, as if conscious that this other atmosphere must be excluded, Borrow has hardly mentioned a name which could act upon the reader as a temporary check to the charm. When he does recall contemporary events, and speaks as a Briton to Britons, the rant is of a brave degree that is almost as much his own, and it makes more intense than ever the solitude and inwardness of the individual life going on side by side with war and with politics.
“Pleasant were those days of my early boyhood; and a melancholy pleasure steals over me as I recall them. Those were stirring times of which I am speaking, and there was much passing around me calculated to captivate the imagination. The dreadful struggle which so long