We can frequently study an author with good effect through the medium of his literary admirations; we have already noticed a few of Borrow’s predilections in real life. With regard to literature, his predilections (or more particularly what Zola would call his haines) were fully as protestant and as thorough. His indifference to the literature of his own time might be termed brutal; his intellectual self-sufficiency was worthy of a Macaulay or of a Donne. A fellow-denouncer of snobs, he made
Thackeray very uncomfortable by his contemptuous ignorance of The Snob Papers, and even of the name of the periodical in which they were appearing. Concerning Keats he once asked, “Have they not been trying to resuscitate him?” When Miss Strickland wanted to send him her Lives, he broke out: “For God’s sake don’t, madam; I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.” Scott’s Woodstock he picked up more than once and incontinently threw down as “trashy.” As a general rule he judged a modern author by his prejudices. If these differed by a hair’s breadth from his own he damned the whole of his work. He had to his credit a vast fund of quaint out-of-the-way reading; not to be acquainted with this was dense unpardonable ignorance: what he had not read was scarcely knowledge. He was not what one could fairly call unread in the classical authors, for in a survey of his reviewers he compared himself complacently enough with Cervantes, Bunyan and Le Sage. He had the utmost suspicion of literary models; to try to be like somebody else was the too popular literary precept that he held in the greatest abhorrence. The gravity of his prescription of Wordsworth as a specific in cases of chronic insomnia is probably due rather to the thorough sincerity of his view than to any conscious subtlety of humour. He disliked Scott especially for his easy tolerance of Jacobites and Papists, [{25}] while he
distrusted his portraits, those portraits of the rougher people which may have frequently been over-praised by Scott’s admirers. We most of us love Scott, it is a fact, beyond the power of nice discrimination. As to the verisimilitude of a portrait such as that of Meg Merrilies we must allow Borrow to be a most competent critic, but we are at a loss to sympathise with his failure to appreciate studies of such lifelike fidelity as Edie Ochiltree and Andrew Fairservice, whose views anent “the muckle hure that sitteth on seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for her auld hinder end,” had so much that was in sympathy with Borrow’s own.
Of all such prejudices and peculiarities, no less than of his gifts, Borrow was ridiculously proud. In certain respects he was as vainly, querulously, and childishly assertive as Goldsmith himself; while in the haughty self-isolation with which he eschewed the society of
people with endowments as great or even greater than his own, he was quite the opposite of “poor Goldy.” If the latter had regarded his interlocutors straight in the eyes with a look that told them he was prepared to knock them down at a moment’s notice upon the least provocation, we should probably have heard less of his absurdities. A man who even in his old age could walk off with E. J. Trelawny [{27a}] under his arm (as Mr. Watts-Dunton assures us Borrow could) was certainly not one to be trifled with.
Borrow’s absolute unconventionality was of course an offence to many; to Englishmen, who were dreaming in the fifties of a kind of industrial millennium, with Cobden as the prophet and Macaulay as the preacher of a new gospel of commercial prosperity and universal peace and progress, Borrow’s pre-railroad prejudices and low tastes appeared obscurantist, dark, squalid, unintelligible. [{27b}] He ran out his books upon a line directly
counter to the literary current of the day, and, naturally enough, the critical billow broke over him.
Hazlitt’s proposition—so readily accepted by the smug generation of his day—that London was the only place in which the child could grow up completely into the man—would have appeared the most perverse kind of nonsense to Borrow. The complexity of a modern type, such as that of a big organiser of industrial labour, did not impress him. He esteemed the primitive above the economic man, and was apt to judge a human being rather as Robinson Crusoe might have done than in the spirit of a juryman at an Industrial Exhibition. Again, his feeling for nature was intimate rather than enthusiastic, at a time when people still looked for a good deal of pretty Glover-like composition in their landscapes.
One of the most original traits of Borrow’s genius was the care and obstinacy with which he defended his practical, vigorous and alert personality against the allurements of word-painting, of Nature and of Reverie.
He could respond to the thrill of natural beauty, he could enjoy his mood when it veritably came upon him, just as he could enjoy a tankard of old ale or linger to gaze upon a sympathetic face; but he refused to pamper such feelings, still more to simulate them; he refused to allow himself to become the creature of literary or poetic ecstasy; he refused to indulge in the fashionable debauch of dilettante melancholy. He wrote about his life quite naturally, “as if there were nothing in it.” Another and closely allied cause of perplexity and discontent to the literary connoisseurs was Borrow’s lack of style. By style, in the generation of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Dickens and George Eliot, was implied something recondite—a wealth of metaphor, imagery, allusion, colour and perfume—a palette, a pounce-box, an optical instrument, a sounding-board, a musical box, anything rather than a living tongue. To a later race of stylists, who have gone as far as Samoa and beyond in the quest of exotic perfumery, Borrow would have said simply, in the words of old Montaigne, “To smell, though well, is to stink,”—“Malo, quam bene olere, nil olere.” Borrow, in fact, by a right instinct went back to the straightforward manner of Swift and Defoe, Smollett and Cobbett, whose vigorous prose he specially admired; and he found his choice ill appreciated by critics whose sense of style demanded that a clear glass window should be studded with bull’s-eyes. To his distinctions of being a poet well-nigh incapable of verse, and a humourist with marvellously little pathos,