George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

In connection with this episode, as may be imagined, several persons were placed upon Borrow’s index. Lockhart himself soon got there. When Ford’s “Handbook for Spain” appeared, the author was exceedingly anxious that Borrow should write the article on it for the Quarterly Review. No man could have done it with ampler knowledge or invested it with more absorbing interest than “El Gitano,” as Lockhart dubbed him in the correspondence on the subject. But the essay Borrow produced, written in ill-health, and betraying all the evidences of a jaundiced and embittered mind, was in no sense a review of Ford’s book. It was a long screed against those persons and tendencies in Spanish politics that aroused his ire. The extract given by Dr. Knapp is in the very best invective style of the Appendix. Lockhart behaved exceedingly well in the matter. He would publish the article in the Quarterly if Borrow would permit him to insert extracts from Ford’s book in suitable places, so that the reader might be able to obtain some glimmering of the author’s style and subject. Borrow petulantly replied that he would not have the paper tampered with. Lockhart then very properly exercised his editorial authority, and refused to publish it. He softened the decision by suggesting that Borrow’s work would make an admirable magazine article, mentioning periodicals that would be glad to have it. The suggestion was not adopted, the article remained in proof-sheet in the hands of Murray, and Lockhart was numbered among the increasing army of Borrow’s mortal enemies. It was an unhappy sequel to this incident that the friendship between Ford and Borrow cooled off, and their intercourse ceased altogether a few years later—by no desire of Ford’s, as the correspondence shows.

More trouble arose from the obscure dispute with Bowring, in which Borrow accused him of palming off upon the House of Commons as his own the Manchu-Tartar version of the Scriptures that Borrow had printed at St. Petersburg, in order to get for himself the consulship at Canton, while at the same time affecting to promote the candidature of Borrow for the post. To any impartial mind the evidence in favour of this theory is scanty, and the theory itself improbable. That Borrow believed it there can be no doubt; it tinged his life with added gall and wormwood, and helped to divert the course and purpose of his book. A further grievance was the failure of the British Museum trustees to get the funds for a mission to the Convent of St. Catharine on Sinai in search of the manuscript of the fourth-century Greek Testament, afterwards acquired by Tischendorf for Alexander II. of Russia. But it would be tiresome to follow all the convolutions of Borrow’s tempers and jealousies throughout these troubled years. They are amply reflected in many portions of the literary work he was doing.

Time drifted, and it was 1848 before Murray could make a definite announcement about “Lavengro.” In that year appeared in his “list of new works in preparation” the following:—“‘Lavengro’: An Autobiography. By George Borrow, author of ‘The Bible in Spain,’ etc. 3 vols., post 8vo.” In October the first volume went to press, and then there was more vacillation about the title of the book. It was advertised in the Quarterly Review and the Athenæum in November, and December as “Life: A Drama.” That form was immediately dropped. Borrow was taken ill and work ceased. In July, 1849, the old advertisement describing it as an autobiography was restored, though we well know now that by this time it had ceased to be autobiographical in the conventional sense. Finally the pangs of labour ended with the year 1850, and “Lavengro—The Scholar—The Gypsy—The Priest” was delivered to the reading world and to the tender mercies of the critics in February, 1851.

It will be seen that the autobiographical claim was abandoned at the last. In the preface, which he accomplished just in time to get it to press, Borrow modified his description of the book: “In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe a Dream.” Later he denied that he ever said it was an autobiography, or that he ever authorised anybody else to say it was; this in spite of the advertisements quoted above, and of the general impression he had allowed to be created that he was writing an account of his life.

Yet, in fact, “Lavengro” is little else. It followed faithfully the original plan throughout the first volume. Then came Borrow’s journey in the East and his return to accumulate hatreds, nurse revenges, and conduct wordy war with the battalions of his imaginary foes. And, in order to vent his spleen upon them, he deliberately altered the tenour of his book. The episodes of travel on the English roads were already protracting themselves beyond manageable length when events occurred that determined him to reject the whole scheme of the two remaining volumes first designed, and to extend these episodes still further so as to drag in some of his pet aversions and exhibit them in a disgraceful or ridiculous light. Particularly did he pour forth the vials of his wrath upon Bowring, the Old Radical, inserting the incident of the postilion and his story specially for the purpose.

But while Borrow was down in the summer-house at Oulton writing marvellous pages on odd scraps of paper, probing profound depths of speculation, and rising to the dizziest heights of natural eloquence, while he allowed himself to be possessed and fascinated by the gypsies and the jockeys, the tramps and the wastrels, the thimble-engroes and the pugilists, and all the weird company that defile through the haunting pages of his book, while the development of Catholic missions in England diverted his ultra-Protestant mind to the machinations of mythical Jesuits and gave him the figure of the Man in Black; while he piled rage and scorn upon the devoted head of John Bowring, who added to his other sins against the Borrovian covenant a characteristically Unitarian indifference to the “No Popery” cry [132]—all this time “Lavengro” was not making much progress with his life, the publisher was appealing to him to hurry, and the hungry printer was sending up pitiable cries for “copy.” Borrow, having gone off on a branch line, utterly declined to return. He had occupied nearly two volumes in describing the events of a few months—from his descent upon London and Sir Richard Phillips to his sojourn in Mumper’s Dell. He was in the middle of the postilion’s story, wherein the Old Radical was receiving his shrewdest knocks, when Murray issued his ultimatum, and Mrs. Borrow was despatched to London with the last of the manuscript (November, 1850). He had been obliged to break off abruptly, for Murray threatened, if the book were not finished there and then, to “throw it up.” Promising himself to complete the narrative in a sequel, Borrow left “Lavengro” as we have it now. The reviewers and the reading world, instead of the autobiography in common form which they had been led to expect, received a picaresque hotch-potch about which the best they could find to say was that it was “remarkable.”

The almost unanimous verdict of the critics was highly unfavourable. The Athenæum (whose review was written by Dilke) spoke of the warm expectations that had been raised and the great disappointment that was felt; Fraser, in which William Stirling (Sir William Stirling-Maxwell) discussed it, was vigorously satirical about Borrow’s trivial mystifications, his dashes, dots, and asterisks; Blackwood was “sick of the Petulengros and their jargon,” and its reviewer acutely perceived the internal evidence of the changes in plan and disposition which had been made while the work was in progress. The two persons who found anything good to say about the book were friends of Borrow—Dr. Gordon Hake and Mr. W. B. Donne. It is curious that these were the only reviewers who displayed much prescience in their criticism. Hake took the bold course of prophecy: “Lavengro’s” roots, he said, would strike deep into the soil of English letters. Donne perceived that, as he said, the public had been looking for a second Marco Polo, and were presented instead with a nineteenth-century Defoe.

In spite, however, of all that could be said in its favour, the public would have none of “Lavengro.” Three thousand copies of the first edition were printed. Notwithstanding Murray’s confident prophecy that it would find a ready sale, it fell almost lifeless, and twenty-one years passed before another edition was called for. It is a little difficult to understand the attitude of the public and the Press towards a work which, in spite of its obvious faults, is one of the most virile and most entrancing works of English literature. The true explanation is to be found in the theory suggested by Mr. Watts-Dunton. “Lavengro” was a complete failure, he said, and its reception by the Press, the accusations of “lowness and vulgarity,” embittered Borrow. Why was it that the public of that day considered such books as “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” to be low and vulgar? The fact was that “Lavengro,” issuing forth in the year of the great Exhibition, made its bow before the most genteel and most philistine age of Victorian literature. A writer hardly dared to admit that a man was a man or a woman a woman. We have arrived at the other extreme in the process of emancipating ourselves from philistinism, and there is no excuse in Art or Nature for many of the books written and published at the present time. But the reception of “Lavengro” was largely due to the mawkish sentiment against which Borrow hysterically declaimed as “gentility-nonsense,” and we have fortunately outgrown it. In time readers came to see the extraordinary merits of Borrow’s books; they bought them as they were re-issued, read them, liked them, and will go on reading and liking them. Gypsyism has, in fact, become popular in the genteelest circles.

Many years ago Mr. Watts-Dunton succeeded in throwing a gleam of light upon Borrow’s own view of the work. He tells us how, when they were discussing the question of the real nature of autobiography, Borrow exclaimed, “What is an autobiography? Is it a mere record of the incidents of a man’s life, or is it a picture of the man himself—his character, his soul?” And Mr. Watts-Dunton adds observations applying the inference to Borrow’s book. He points out what we have already seen—that he sat down to write his own life in “Lavengro,” and that in the first volume he did almost confine himself to matters of fact. “But, as he went on, he clearly found that the ordinary tapestry into which destiny had woven the incidents of his life was not tinged with sufficient depth of colour to satisfy his sense of wonder. When he wishes to dive very boldly into the ‘abysmal deeps of personality,’ he speaks and moves partly behind the mask of some fictitious character.” “Let it be remembered,” says Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that it was this instinct of wonder, not the instinct of the mere poseur, that impelled him to make certain exaggerated statements about the characters themselves that are introduced into his books.”

This view of the eccentricities and purple patches of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” is interesting, and certainly just to a point. It does not account for the whole of the leaps that Borrow took in one direction and another; it does not explain Mr. Platitude, or the Man in Black, or the Old Radical. The reason for their creation has been already stated. The “instinct of wonder,” the Celtic imagination, now brooding, now soaring, does, however, explain much in the books that cannot be explained by reference to actual facts of the author’s career, and does justify in a sense his theory of autobiography—that the truest self-revelation may be found not so much in the mere recital of bare facts as in the impression of the form of his thought, and in the reflection of the colours that glow in his soul.