The book was published in December, 1842, and dated 1843. Ford, whose interest in it was continuous, had given Borrow much advice; he prophesied success. “Avoid words; stick to deeds,” was his counsel. There should be no “fine writing,” but plenty of wild adventure, “journals . . . sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, rambles, and the interior of Spanish prisons.” Borrow was to “avoid rant and cant. Dialogues always tell; they are dramatic, and give an air of reality.” With how much fidelity Borrow followed this advice needs no emphasis. How accurate was Ford’s diagnosis of the public taste the sequel demonstrates.
There was a loud chorus of praise from the literary papers. Those who had approved “The Zincali” called their readers to witness how they had unerringly detected the trail of true genius. The Athenæum and the Examiner led the way. Ford wrote a pæan in the Edinburgh; the Quarterly was sorry it had overlooked the “Gypsies,” but made up for the omission by its reception of “The Bible.” The author became the lion of the hour; visiting London, he was fêted with ambassadors and “princes and members of Parliament,” as he wrote to his wife. “On Saturday night I went to a grand soirée, and the people came in throngs to be introduced to me. To-night I am going to the Bishop of Norwich, to-morrow to another place, and so on.” He was overwhelmed with congratulations from private friends, among whose letters those of Hasfeldt from St. Petersburg gave him most pleasure. Six editions of the book were sold in England before the end of the year; it was pirated in America by three houses; it was translated into French, German, and Russian. Borrow was the most scintillating star in the literary firmament of 1843.
The book deserved its success. It has all the Borrovian merits and few of the Borrovian defects. There is the charm of the wonderful style, which is no style at all, the crisp sentence, the unexpected epithet, the penetrating phrase, jumpy and abrupt, but compelling the reader to take the jump and make the sudden halt because it is the only thing to do. There is the astonishing variety of adventure, of character, of colour, of scene, the wealth of incident, the compelling force of narrative. Ford said that Borrow “sometimes put him in mind of Gil Blas; [118] but he had not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor did he gild the bad.” There was, he added, a touch of Bunyan in the way in which, like that enthusiastic tinker, he hammered away at the Devil, or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. It was, in fine, such a book as had never been placed in the hands of the public which now read it with tremendous avidity—the public interested in foreign missions, in the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts—in a word, “the religious world.” “The Bible in Spain” coloured with all the hues of romance the great work of disseminating the Scriptures; it introduced them to new people and to new scenes; it candied the villainies of gypsies with the frosted sugar of evangelical effort, and if it recited strange things of superstitious papists and dubious prophetesses, was not the guide who introduced these matters to them “a devout agent of the Bible Society,” whose end justified all the means he sought? The “polyglot gentleman” was the most piquant sensation that had ever made its way into thousands of English drawing-rooms.
It was obvious that so great a success must be followed up, and “The Bible in Spain” was hardly in the press before Borrow was pondering a scheme for a book to follow it. For many reasons, the matter was long in maturing. The chief of them, probably, was Borrow’s health. As he grew older, his innate melancholy deepened into hypochondria, from which he emerged occasionally with fits of high-strung merriment. At forty years of age he had lived three ordinary lives. He was irritable and eccentric, the irresponsible victim of megrims. Success did not sweeten life for him. While he was the literary lion of London, he growled at those who fêted and flattered him as though he would devour them. He was certainly an admirer of George Borrow himself, and he was not displeased with the flattery; but it left him unsatisfied. Hasfeldt, with whom he still corresponded, noted his unrest, rallied him, tried to cheer him, adjuring him to philosophy. But the lack of peace was the effect of a deeper cause than Hasfeldt’s friendly soul could divine; deeper than Borrow himself could plumb.
“I did very wrong not to bring you when I came” (so he wrote to his wife from London, when at the zenith of his social success and at the nadir of mental and spiritual tribulation), “for without you I cannot get on at all. Left to myself, a gloom comes upon me which I cannot describe. . . . My place seems to be in our own dear cottage, where, with your help, I hope to prepare for a better world. . . . The poor bird when in trouble has no one to fly to but his mate.”
His condition displayed itself in ridiculous quarrels with his neighbours, particularly about the conflicts in which their dogs were involved. It was characteristic of Borrow that he would never admit his own dog to be in the wrong. One dispute is set out by Dr. Knapp in a formal correspondence with the vicar of Oulton. The parson described the Borrow dog as “a beast of a very quarrelsome and savage disposition.” Borrow retorted that the animal was “a harmless house-dog.” The last passage of Borrow’s last letter on the subject was:
“Circumstances over which Mr. Borrow at present has no control will occasionally bring him and his family under the same roof with Mr. Denniss; that roof, however, is the roof of the House of God, and the prayers of the Church of England are wholesome from whatever mouth they may proceed.”
He became absolutely furious when a railway was taken through his estate and past his house by one of the schemes of Sir Morton Peto.
It was in this temper that he began the book which was to stir generations into controversy, to arouse bitter criticism and tremendous recrimination, to destroy for his lifetime the literary reputation that Borrow had earned—the book destined, in the irony of fate, to be that upon which such share of immortality as Borrow possesses will probably rest.
“Lavengro” passed through many mutations while it was planning and writing. The idea of an autobiography had been suggested by Ford, who wanted him to publish his “whole adventures for the last twenty years,” describing the countries he had visited, discussing the languages he knew, and treating of the people he had lived with. The “reader” who had pronounced judgment for Murray upon the manuscript of “The Bible in Spain” had thought it would be well to prefix to that narrative some pages of autobiographical matter. These hints fructified early, for “The Bible” had hardly issued from the press before he was suggesting to Murray another book: “Capital subject: early life, studies and adventures; some account of my father, William Taylor, Whiter, Big Ben, etc. etc.”