Borrow thus added one which we are inclined to regard as the greatest of all—that of being a great nineteenth-century prose-writer without a style.
Though he did not elaborate, or strive to attain to the cultism or polite style of contemporary genius, Borrow seems to have written with some difficulty (or at any rate a lack of facility), and, impervious as he was to criticism, he retained in his prose a number of small faults that he might easily have got rid of. His manner of introducing his generalities and conclusions is often either superfluous, or lame and clumsy. Despite his natural eloquence, his fondness for the apostrophe is excessive; he preserved an irritating habit of parading such words as éclat, penchant and monticle, and persisted in saying “of a verity,” and using the word “individual” in the sense of person. Such blemishes are microscopic enough. It was not such trifles as these that proved stumbling-blocks to the “men of blood and foam,” as he called his critics.
Of the generality of the critics of that day it would probably be well within the mark to aver that their equipment was more solid, and their competence more assured than that of their successors; [{30}] it would be
safe to assert that their self-sufficiency was also decidedly more pronounced. Now for reasons which we have endeavoured to explain, the equanimity of the critical reviewers was considerably ruffled by Lavengro. Perplexed by its calling itself an autobiography, they were at the same time discontented both with its subject-matter and its style. To a not altogether misplaced curiosity on the part of the public as to Borrow’s antecedents, the author of the Bible in Spain had responded by Lavengro, which he fully meant to be (what it indeed was) a masterpiece. Yet public and critics were agreed in failing to see the matter in this light. As the reader will probably have deduced from the foregoing pages, the trouble was mainly due to the following causes. First, baffled curiosity. Secondly, a dislike for Borrow’s prejudices. Thirdly,
a disgust at his philistinism in refusing to bow down and worship the regnant idols of ‘taste.’ Fourthly, the total absence in Borrow of the sentimentality for which the soul of the normal Englishman yearns. Fifthly, disappointment at not finding the critic’s due from an accepted author in quotable passages of picturesque prose.
These views are appropriately summed up through the medium of the pure and scentless taste of the Athenæum. The varied contents of Lavengro are here easily reduced to one denomination—’balderdash,’ for the emission of which the Athenæum critic proceeds (in the interests, of course, of the highest gentility), to give George Borrow a good scolding.
How sadly removed was such procedure from Borrow’s own ideal of reviewing, as set forth in the very volume under consideration! Such operations should always, he held, be conducted in a spirit worthy of an editor of Quintilian, in a gentlemanly, Oxford-like manner. No vituperation! No insinuations! Occasionally a word of admonition, but gently expressed as an Oxford M.A. might have expressed it. Some one had ventured to call the Bible in Spain a grotesque book, but the utterance had been drowned in the chorus of acclamation. Now Borrow complained that he had had the honour of being rancorously abused by every unmanly scoundrel, every sycophantic lacquey, and every political and religious renegade in the kingdom. His fury was that of an angry bull tormented by a swarm of gnats. His worst passions were aroused;
his most violent prejudices confirmed. His literary zeal, never extremely alert, was sensibly diminished.
This last result at least was a calamity. Nevertheless the great end had, in the main, already been accomplished. Borrow had broken through the tameness of the regulation literary memoir, and had shown the naked footprint on the sand. The ‘great unknown’ had gone down beneath his associations, his acquirements and his adventures, and had to a large extent revealed himself—a primitive man, with his breast by no means wholly rid of the instincts of the wild beast, grappling with the problem of a complex humanity: an epitome of the eternal struggle which alone gives savour to the wearisome process of “civilisation.” For the conventional man of the lapidary phrase and the pious memoir (corrected by the maiden sister and the family divine), Borrow dared to substitute the genus homo of natural history. Perhaps it was only to be expected that, like the discoveries of another Du Chaillu, his revelations should be received with a howl of incredulity.
Almost alone, as far as we can discover, among the critics of the day Émile Montégut realised to the full the true greatness, the originality, the abiding quality and interest of Borrow’s work. Writing in September 1857 upon “Le Gentilhomme Bohémien” (an essay which appears in his Ecrivains Modernes de l’Angleterre, between studies on “Mistress Browning” and Alfred Tennyson), Montégut remarks of Borrow’s “humoristic Odyssey”:—