Borrow loved to mystify, but in Lavengro he had overreached himself. “Are you really in existence?” wrote one correspondent who was unknown to Borrow, “for I also have occasionally doubted whether things exist, as you describe your own feelings in former days.”
John Murray wrote (8th Nov. 1851):—
“I was reminded of you the other day by an enquiry after Lavengro and its author, made by the Right Honourable John Wilson Croker. [399a] Knowing how fastidious and severe a critic he is, I was particularly glad to find him expressing a favourable opinion of it; and thinking well of it his curiosity was piqued about you. Like all the rest of the world, he is mystified by it. He knew not whether to regard it as truth or fiction. How can you remedy this defect? I call it a defect, because it really impedes your popularity. People say of a chapter or of a character: ‘This is very wonderful, if true; but if fiction it is pointless.’—Will your new volumes explain this and dissolve the mystery? If so, pray make haste and get on with them. I hope you have employed the summer in giving them the finishing touches.”
“There are,” says a distinguished critic, [399b] “passages in Lavengro which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England—unsurpassed, I mean, for mere perfection of style—for blending of strength and graphic power with limpidity and music of flow.” Borrow’s own generation would have laughed at such a value being put upon anything in Lavengro.
Another thing against the books success was its style. It lacked what has been described as the poetic ecstacy or sentimental verdure of the age. Trope, imagery, mawkishness, were all absent, for Borrow had gone back to his masters, at whose head stood the glorious Defoe. Borrow’s style was as individual as the man himself. By a curious contradiction, the tendency is to overlook literary lapses in the very man towards whom so little latitude was allowed in other directions. Many Borrovians have groaned in anguish over his misuse of that wretched word “Individual.” A distinguished man of letters [400a] has written:—“I would as lief read a chapter of The Bible in Spain as I would Gil Blas; nay, I positively would give the preference to Señor Giorgio.” Another critic, and a severe one, has written:—
“It is not as philologist, or traveller, or wild missionary, or folk-lorist, or antiquary, that Borrow lives and will live. It is as the master of splendid, strong, simple English, the prose Morland of a vanished road-side life, the realist who, Defoe-like, could make fiction seem truer than fact. To have written the finest fight in the whole world’s literature, the fight with the Flaming Tinman, is surely something of an achievement.” [400b]
It is Borrow’s personality that looms out from his pages. His mastery over the imagination of his reader, his subtle instinct of how to throw his own magnetism over everything he relates, although he may be standing aside as regards the actual events with which he is dealing, is worthy of Defoe himself. It is this magnetism that carries his readers safely over the difficult places, where, but for the author’s grip upon them, they would give up in despair; it is this magnetism that prompts them to pass by only with a slight shudder, such references as the feathered tribe, fast in the arms of Morpheus, and, above all, those terrible puns that crop up from time to time. There is always the strong, masterful man behind the words who, like a great general, can turn a reverse to his own advantage.
In his style perhaps, after all, lay the secret of Borrow’s unsuccess. He was writing for another generation; speaking in a voice too strong to be heard other than as a strange noise by those near to him. It may be urged that The Bible in Spain disproves these conclusions; but The Bible in Spain was a peculiar book. It was a chronicle of Christian enterprise served up with sauce picaresque. It pleased and astonished everyone, especially those who had grown a little weary of godly missioners. It had the advantage of being spontaneous, having been largely written on the spot, whereas Lavengro and The Romany Rye were worked on and laboured at for years. Above all, it had the inestimable virtue of being known to be True. To the imaginative intellectual, Truth or Fiction are matters of small importance, he judges by Art; but to the general public of limited intellectual capacity, Truth is appreciated out of all proportion to its artistic importance. If Borrow had published The Bible in Spain after the failure of Lavengro, it would in all probability have been as successful as it was appearing before.
CHAPTER XXV
SEPTEMBER 1849–FEBRUARY 1854
One of the finest traits in Borrow’s character was his devotion to his mother. He was always thoughtful for her comfort, even when fighting that almost hopeless battle in Russia, and later in the midst of bandits and bloody patriots in Spain. She was now, in 1849, an old woman, too feeble to live alone, and it was decided to transfer her to Oulton. An addition to the Hall was constructed for her accommodation, and she was to be given an attendant-companion in the person of the daughter of a local farmer.