The Life of George Borrow

by Herbert George Jenkins

In later years Borrow paid a graceful tribute to Scott’s memory. When at Kelso, in spite of the rain and mist, he “trudged away to Dryburgh to pay my respects to the tomb of Walter Scott, a man with whose principles I have no sympathy, but for whose genius I have always entertained the most intense admiration.” [393e] It was just the same with Byron, “for whose writings I really entertained considerable admiration, though I had no particular esteem for the man himself.” [393f]

With Wordsworth it was different, and it was his cordial dislike of his poetry that prompted Borrow to introduce into The Romany Rye that ineffectual episode of the man who was sent to sleep by reading him. Tennyson he dismissed as a writer of “duncie books.”

For Dickens he had an enthusiastic admiration as “a second Fielding, a young writer who . . . has evinced such talent, such humour, variety and profound knowledge of character, that he charms his readers, at least those who have the capacity to comprehend him.” [394a] He was delighted with The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.

His reading was anything but thorough, in fact he occasionally showed a remarkable ignorance of contemporary writers. Mr A. Egmont Hake tells how:

“His conversation would sometimes turn on modern literature, with which his acquaintance was very slight. He seemed to avoid reading the products of modern thought lest his own strong opinions should undergo dilution. We were once talking of Keats whose fame had been constantly increasing, but of whose poetry Borrow’s knowledge was of a shadowy kind, when suddenly he put a stop to the conversation by ludicrously asking, in his strong voice, ‘Have they not been trying to resuscitate him?’” [394b]

By the time that Lavengro appeared, Borrow was estranged from his generation. The years that intervened between the success of The Bible in Spain and the publication of Lavengro had been spent by him in war; he had come to hate his contemporaries with a wholesome, vigorous hatred. He would give them his book; but they should have it as a stray cur has a bone—thrown at them. Above all, they should not for a moment be allowed to think that it contained an intimate account of the life of the supreme hater who had written it. When there had been sympathy between them, Borrow was prepared to allow his public to peer into the sacred recesses of his early life. Now that there was none, he denied that Lavengro was more than “a dream”, forgetting that he had so often written of it as an autobiography, had even seen it advertised as such, and insisted that it was fiction.

When Lavengro was published Borrow was an unhappy and disappointed man. He had found what many other travellers have found when they come home, that in the wilds he had left his taste and toleration for conventional life and ideas. The life in the Peninsula had been thoroughly congenial to a man of Borrow’s temperament: hardships, dangers, imprisonments,—they were his common food. He who had defied the whole power of Spain, found himself powerless to prevent his Rector from keeping a dog, or a railway line from being cut through his own estate and his peace of mind disturbed by the rumble of trains and the shriek of locomotive-whistles. He had beaten the Flaming Tinman and Count Ofalia, but Samuel Morton Peto had vanquished and put him to flight by virtue of an Act of Parliament, in all probability without being conscious of having achieved a signal victory. Borrow’s life had been built up upon a wrong hypothesis: he strove to adapt, not himself to the Universe; but the Universe to himself.

It is easy to see that a man with this attitude of mind would regard as sheer vindictiveness the adverse criticism of a book that he had written with such care, and so earnest an endeavour to maintain if not improve upon the standard created in a former work. It never for a moment struck him that the men who had once hailed him “great”, should now admonish him as a result of the honest exercise of their critical faculties. No; there was conspiracy against him, and he tortured himself into a pitiable state of wrath and melancholy. A later generation has been less harsh in its judgment. The controversial parts of Lavengro have become less controversial and the magnificent parts have become more magnificent, and it has taken its place as a star of the second magnitude.

The question of what is actual autobiography and what is so coloured as to become practically fiction, must always be a matter of opinion. The early portion seems convincing, even the first meeting with the gypsies in the lane at Norman Cross. It has been asked by an eminent gypsy scholar how Borrow knew the meaning of the word “sap”, or why he addressed the gypsy woman as “my mother”. When the Gypsy refers to the “Sap there”, the child replies, “what, the snake”? The employment of the other phrase is obviously an inadvertent use of knowledge he gained later.

In writing to Mrs George Borrow (24th March 1851) to tell her that W. B. Donne had been unable to obtain Lavengro for The Edinburgh Review as it had been bespoken a year previously by Dr Bowring, Dr Hake adds that Donne had written “putting the editor in possession of his view of Lavengro, as regards verisimilitude, vouching for the Daguerreotype-like fidelity of the picture in the first volume, etc., etc., in order to prevent him from being taken in by a spiteful article.” This passage is very significant as being written by one of Borrow’s most intimate friends, with the sure knowledge that its contents would reach him. It leaves no room for doubt that, although Borrow denied publicly the autobiographical nature of Lavengro, in his own circle it was freely admitted and referred to as a life.