They produced a meagre crop of translations, of no consequence either as exercises or as poetry. But that would be a perverse view to take of Borrow’s studies. Their virtue was not in their verbal fruits, but in the quality they added to his later work. For example, those “deeds of northern kings rehearsed” were rehearsed a great deal better by other people, and the works of Elis Wyn had been more efficiently dealt with by a Welshman. But would the shining history of Isopel Berners have been as glorious if Lavengro had not been the sort of man to compare her with Ingeborg, the northern queen who engaged and defeated in single combat each of her long string of redoubtable brothers? Or would not the fascinating converse of Lavengro with the Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, have lost half its charm if the young man had not been able to talk familiarly with him of Master Elis Wyn and the Bardd Cwsg? It is the reflected colour of all this word-learning that gives it a high place in Borrow’s development.
He began to study languages almost before he was out of frocks. He did not find his métier till he was thirty-eight: “The Zincali; or, The Gypsies of Spain” was published in 1841. This was late for a man who had been so deeply devoted to the pen. His processes were slow, too. His other books of any significance numbered only four, and they occupied twenty-one years in gestation. “The Bible in Spain” was dated 1842, “Lavengro” appeared in 1850, “The Romany Rye” in 1857, and “Wild Wales” in 1862. Much was concentrated in these few works, laboriously elaborated as they were, and produced with horrible pangs of travail. They crystallised—if such a term may be used of Borrow—the experiences of a long life of wandering through the world, and they recorded the opinions collected or developed by a self-centred man of violent prejudices. They provide an almost unparalleled conglomeration of good and bad, of false and sound. They commit inexcusable crimes against every canon of taste—and they have in them the true stuff of poetry and romance. The glamour of these last is over them all. The poetry of Borrow, one of the most natural poets who have written in English, takes its spring in the keen observation and appreciation of the elemental joys found in Nature’s least-trodden ways, and the elemental humours of her least sophisticated children. It recalls Sidney’s epigram of the excellent poets that never versified and the versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets. For Borrow’s verse, on the whole, is villainous, and much of his prose is truest poetry. He restored to us, at any rate for a time, the picaresque element in romantic literature, and revived our indulgent fondness for the good-humoured villains of low life.
With the jovial virtues of Le Sage, however, Borrow combined in a remarkable way some of the quaintest characteristics of Sterne. The mark of “Shandyism” is strong upon portions of his work—but let it be said at once that the philo-pugilist Borrow is absolutely free from any taint of the pornographic double entendre of the Rev. Laurence Sterne, M.A. Captain Tom Borrow often rivals My Uncle Toby, and the battle with Ben Bryan in Hyde Park may be compared as a staple reminiscence with the Siege of Namur; but there is no Widow Wadman in “Lavengro.” Ab Gwilym becomes in some points as delightful as Slawkenbergius, and there are episodes in “The Bible in Spain” and “Lavengro” which may compare with the stories of the Dead Ass and of Lefevre, the Monk and Maria; but it can be said of Borrow’s books with more truth than a sententious critic once said it of Sterne’s, that they may be submitted to the taste, feeling, good sense, and candour of the public “without the least apprehension that the perusal of any part of them will be followed by consequences unfavourable to the interests of society.” It may be a negative virtue that a book fails “to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of innocence”; but, for what it is worth, any book of Borrow’s has that merit.
Interesting as these comparisons may be to his admirers, Borrow must not be judged by any purely literary standards. One discerning critic, Mr. Thomas Seccombe, has observed that he “wrote with infinite difficulty.” That is evident in almost every page. He had no fatal facility in composition. He developed no graces of style. The man who loves Stevenson is probably a man who will also love Borrow, but for reasons quite apart from style. Borrow’s awkward forms and ugly lapses were calculated to make Stevenson’s delicately tuned literary organism shudder in its marrow. Their likeness lies in their love of Out-of-Doors, their capacity for discovering and enjoying the unusual adventure in the commonplace environment.
I doubt whether Borrow definitely and consciously copied his style from anybody, or modelled it on any man’s writings; but if we are to go anywhere for his master we must go to Defoe, whose “wondrous volume” was his “only study and principal source of amusement” in his very small boyhood at East Dereham. How he apostrophises the wizard! “Hail to thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee? England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could spare them easier far than Defoe, ‘unabashed Defoe,’ as the hunchbacked rhymer styled him.” England may not owe to Defoe all that Borrow declares she does of her “astonishing discoveries both by sea and land,” and her “naval glory,” but she certainly owes to him some of the gift that Borrow bestowed upon her. George had many other points of resemblance to the “illiterate fellow” of Swift’s satire besides this—that they were both at divers times accused of being illiterate fellows, and both answered back with compound interest of invective. Both were not only writing men, but also men of action. Both prided themselves something unduly upon their philological attainments. Both did late in life the literary work that won them lasting fame. Above all, they shared what Defoe wittily described as his “natural infirmity of homely, plain writing.” That is, they had command of a tense, nervous, vigorous English without ornate excrescences or fanciful refinements of any kind—the style which is greatest because it is no style at all, the style which bites into the mind and irritates the imagination. Both were able to give verisimilitude to the most fantastical narratives; both were masters of the form of autobiographical fiction. The parallel may finish with the remark that neither of them was a bookish man.
Borrow was not even a great reader. He spent many hours among books—but such books! They were mainly collections of ballads picked from a variety of languages fit “to add a storey to the Tower of Babel,” the detritus of the libraries he visited. He was fond of an uncommon book, whatever its intrinsic merit, but he was fonder of an uncommon human being. Men were his books. A ghostly procession of the authors with whom Borrow had hobnobbed—leaving out of account his investigations in shady paths on behalf of the Newgate Calendar—would afford a motley spectacle of tatterdemalions, the rag, tag, and bobtail of literature. He had inflated ambitions of scholarship, but, in fact, he had received only an ill-regulated education, and his taste refused all conventional rules as inventions of the Devil.
The Bible, Shakespeare in a lesser degree, and Defoe most of all—these were his classics. No bad assortment, either; but the restriction of one’s reading to these three would hardly testify to a catholic taste. His favourite poet was Byron. The two are as unlike in most particulars of their dispositions and careers as two heirs of mortality can be; but it is not difficult to realise that Byron’s life and poetry would touch deep springs in the nature of Borrow. Like Byron, he worked all his affections, all his passions, all his prejudices into the very texture of his books, and in them ran through all the gamut of his most violent emotions. Like Byron, he had a fond weakness for melancholy—what Goethe called “the hypochondriac humour.” As in the case of Byron, his melancholy alternated with spasms of furious elemental rage, expressed in the unbridled vituperation of his fellow men. So that, though no two characters more widely different figure in literary history, there were points of contact and bases of agreement between them. It was, indeed, a soul attuned to Borrow who wrote:
“’Tis sweet to win, no matter how, one’s laurels,
By blood or ink; ’tis sweet to put an end
To strife: ’tis sometimes sweet to have our quarrels
Particularly with a tiresome friend:
Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels;
Dear is the helpless creature we defend
Against the world: and dear the schoolboy spot
We ne’er forget, though there we are forgot.”
The lines may be said to depict Borrow in some of his best-known aspects—winning laurels by blood and ink, quarrelling with tiresome friends, rejoicing in the good things of life, defending his dependents, and treasuring the memories of his childhood.
He threw himself into his works in such a fashion that it is impossible to elucidate them without reference to his personal career, or to understand his proceedings without reference to his books. They are all more or less in the autobiographical form, and they are all more or less real autobiographies: how much more and how much less it is often difficult to say. The secret of the books, the reason for the fascination they exert upon mankind, must be found in the man; his own secret must be sought in two directions. One has already been indicated—his love of The Wild. From his gypsies and wanderers, his hedge-tinkers and vagroms, all the denizens of the heath and the green lanes—the society which began to vanish with the enclosure of the English fields, and is fast disappearing from the land,—material unpromising and uncongenial enough to the general, Borrow contrived to extract fine poetry and mildly thrilling romance.