“’Tis a treat to see thee, Tom of Bedford, in thy ‘public’ in Holborn way, whither thou hast retired with thy well-earned bays. ’Tis Friday night, and nine by Holborn clock. There sits the yeoman at the end of his long room, surrounded by his friends: glasses are filled, and a song is the cry, and a song is sung well suited to the place; it finds an echo in every heart—fists are clenched, arms are waved, and the portraits of the mightly fighting men of yore, Broughton, and Slack, and Ben, which adorn the walls, appear to smile grim approbation, whilst many a manly voice joins in the bold chorus:
‘Here’s a health to old honest John Bull,
When he’s gone we shan’t find such another,
And with hearts and with glasses brim full,
We will drink to old England, his mother.’”
There is little doubt of the immortality of this good old style, and it testifies to the full heart and perhaps the full glass also of George Borrow; but it was not this passage in particular that made Whitwell Elwin call his writing “almost affectedly simple.”
CHAPTER XXVII—BORROW AND LOW LIFE
“Lavengro” in 1851 and “The Romany Rye” in 1857 failed to impress the critics or the public. Men were disappointed because “Lavengro” was “not an autobiography.” They said that the adventures did not bear “the impress of truth.” They suggested that the anti-Papistry was “added and interpolated to suit the occasion of the recent Papal aggression.” They laughed at its mystery-making. They said that it gave “a false dream in the place of reality.” Ford regretted that Borrow had “told so little about himself.” Two friends praised it and foretold long life for it. Whitwell Elwin in 1857 said that “the truth and vividness of the descriptions both of scenes and persons, coupled with the purity, force and simplicity of the language, should confer immortality upon many of its pages.” “The Saturday Review” found that he had humour and romance, and that his writing left “a general impression of the scenery and persons introduced so strongly vivid and life-like,” that it reminded them of Defoe rather than of any contemporary author; they called the books a “strange cross between a novel and an autobiography.” In 1857 also, Émile Montégut wrote a study of “The Gypsy Gentleman,” which he published in his “Ecrivains Modernes de l’Angleterre.” He said that Borrow had revived a neglected literary form, not artificially, but as being the natural frame for the scenes of his wandering life: he even went so far as to say that the form and manner of the picaresque or rogue novel, like “Gil Blas,” is the inevitable one for pictures of the low and
vagabond life. This form, said he, Borrow adopted not deliberately but intuitively, because he had a certain attitude to express: he rediscovered it, as Cervantes and Mendoza invented it, because it was the most appropriate clothing for his conceptions. Borrow had, without any such ambition, become the Quevedo and the Mendoza of modern England.
The autobiography resembles the rogue novel in that it is well peppered with various isolated narratives strung upon the thread of the hero’s experience. It differs chiefly in that the study of the hero is serious and without roguery. The conscious attempt to make it as good as a rogue novel on its own ground caused some of the chief faults of the book, the excess of recognitions and re-appearances, the postillion’s story, and the visits of the Man in Black.
When Borrow came to answer his critics in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye,” he assumed that they thought him vulgar for dealing in Gypsies and the like. He retorted:
“Rank, wealth, fine clothes and dignified employments, are no doubt very fine things, but they are merely externals, they do not make a gentleman, they add external grace and dignity to the gentleman and scholar, but they make neither; and is it not better to be a gentleman without them than not a gentleman with them? Is not Lavengro, when he leaves London on foot with twenty pounds in his pocket, entitled to more respect than Mr. Flamson flaming in his coach with a million? And is not even the honest jockey at Horncastle, who offers a fair price to Lavengro for his horse, entitled to more than the scroundrel lord, who attempts to cheat him of one-fourth of its value. . . .”