“What is an autobiography?” Borrow once asked Mr Theodore Watts-Dunton (who had called his attention to several bold coincidences in Lavengro). “Is it the mere record of the incidents of a man’s life? or is it a picture of the man himself—his character, his soul?” [396] Mr Watts-Dunton confirms Borrow’s letters when he says “That he [Borrow] sat down to write his own life in Lavengro I know. He had no idea then of departing from the strict line of fact.”
At times Borrow seemed to find his pictures flat, and heightened the colour in places, as a painter might heighten the tone of a drapery, a roof or some other object, not because the individual spot required it, but rather because the general effect he was aiming at rendered it necessary. He did this just as an actor rouges his face, darkens his eyebrows and round his eyes, that he may appear to his audience a living man and not an animated corpse.
Borrow was drawing himself, striving to be as faithful to the original as Boswell to Johnson. Incidents! what were they? the straw with which the bricks of personality are made. A comparison of Lavengro with Borrow’s letters to the Bible Society is instructive; it is the same Borrow that appears in both, with the sole difference that in the Letters he is less mysterious, less in the limelight than in Lavengro.
Mr Watts-Dunton, with inspiration, has asked whether or not Lavengro and The Romany Rye form a spiritual autobiography; and if they do, whether that autobiography does or does not surpass every other for absolute truth of spiritual representation. Borrow certainly did colour his narrative in places. Who could write the story of his early life with absolute accuracy? without dwelling on and elaborating certain episodes, perhaps even adjusting them somewhat? That would not necessarily prove them untrue.
There are, unquestionably, inconsistencies in Lavengro and The Romany Rye—they are admitted, they have been pointed out. There are many inaccuracies, it must be confessed; but because a man makes a mistake in the date of his birth or even the year, it does not prove that he was not born at all. Borrow was for ever making the most inaccurate statements about his age.
In the main Lavengro would appear to be autobiographical up to the period of Borrow’s coming to London. After this he begins to indulge somewhat in the dramatic. The meeting with the pickpocket as a thimble-rigger at Greenwich might pass muster were it not for the rencontre with the apple-woman’s son near Salisbury. The Dingle episode may be accepted, for Mr John Sampson has verified even the famous thunder-storm by means of the local press. Isopel Berners is not so easy to settle; yet the picture of her is so convincing, and Borrow was unable to do more than colour his narrative, that she too must have existed.
The failure of Lavengro is easily accounted for. Borrow wrote of vagabonds and vagabondage; it did not mitigate his offence in the eyes of the critics or the public that he wrote well about them. His crime lay in his subject. To Borrow, a man must be ready and able to knock another man down if necessity arise. When nearing sixty he lamented his childless state and said very mournfully: “I shall soon not be able to knock a man down, and I have no son to do it for me.” [398] He glorified the bruisers of England, in the face of horrified public opinion. England had become ashamed of its bruisers long before Lavengro was written, and this flaunting in its face of creatures that it considered too low to be mentioned, gave mortal offence. That in Lavengro was the best descriptions of a fight in the language, only made the matter worse. Borrow’s was an age of gentility and refinement, and he outraged it, first by glorifying vagabondage, secondly by decrying and sneering at gentility.
“Qui n’ a pas l’esprit de son âge,
De son âge a tout le malheur.”
And Borrow proved Voltaire’s words.
It is not difficult to understand that an age in which prize-fighting is anathema should not tolerate a book glorifying the ring; but it is strange that Borrow’s simple paganism and nature-worship should not have aroused sympathetic recognition. Poetry is ageless, and such passages as the description of the sunrise over Stonehenge should have found some, at least, to welcome them, even when found in juxtaposition with bruisers and gypsies.