George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

Borrow did not forget the incident. Perpinia abstained from tobacco, and in a fortnight, after several visits to the camp, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the child was recovering from its illness.

“Is not Perpinia very grateful to you and to me?” said the friend.

“Yes,” said Borrow, with a twinkle in his eye. “She manages to feel grateful to you and me for making her give up the pipe, and also to believe at the same time that her child was saved by the good luck that came to her because she guarded the magpie.”

CHAPTER XVI
BORROW’S BOOKS

Strong was the appeal made to a very wide public by “The Bible in Spain.” What was the nature of the appeal? It was unique; but it was not inherently surprising. “I woke one morning and found myself famous,” said Byron of the reception of “Childe Harold.” Borrow’s gigantic leap from the shades of chilly neglect into the sunshine of popularity was equally sudden and less obviously explicable. He had none of the social advantages that helped to spread the notoriety of Byron’s achievement. Comparatively few people knew anything about the obscure son of the adjutant of the Norfolk Militia; and we have already seen that his special type of genius made no special impression on that generation. Yet “The Bible in Spain” went forth from Albemarle Street into “the reading world” to make a triumphal progress amidst storms of applause.

This furore was created not entirely by the real merits of the book, but largely by adventitious circumstances. It has great merits. But there is more work, there is better work, in “Lavengro”; the latter is a far more representative Borrow book than its forerunner. It has more of Borrow’s humour, more of his subtility; it is far more fascinating as a human document. Yet “Lavengro” was still-born. It was received with no applause. The critics disapproved of it, and the public did not buy it. Whereas thirty-five thousand copies of “The Bible in Spain” were sold in a year, it took the same time to get rid of a thousand copies of “Lavengro.” Thus, the real reasons of the success of 1843 did not reside primarily in the qualities for which we admire the book to-day. The attributes that make it something more than a mere record of a colporteur’s labours, its picaresque liveliness, its saturnine humour, its vivid sketches of romantic rascality, keep it alive. The narrator moves, like some new Gil Blas, through a series of scenes which give the reader a savour of the atmosphere of Spain hardly excelled in English literature. It is evident from the experience of “Lavengro” that these were not the attributes that caused the book to sell in its thousands when it was published. The cause of its huge circulation was that it appealed to a public which would buy in large quantities a record of missionary enterprise and religious adventure, and would not have bought any book that Borrow could write if the religious interest had been absent. No doubt, when they had bought and read, the quality of the work as literature produced in them unaccustomed and pleasing sensations not to be obtained from most books purchased for similar reasons. Borrow’s evangelism attracted them and his art retained them.

The bulk of “The Bible in Spain” consists of transcripts of letters written to the Bible Society reporting upon his proceedings in the Peninsula. Suppose the letters had never been written. Suppose Borrow had merely described his travels and adventures in Spain in a secular-fashion, is it possible to question that the book would have shared the same fate, as “Lavengro”? Partly by design, partly by accident, the contents were skilfully mixed and flavoured to a nicety. True, it contained more than a soupçon of gypsyism and scoundrelism. True, its finest passages are devoted to gypsies and vagabonds and their haunts and habits. Yet, the dominant elements are religious. It is not proposed to suggest that any hypocrisy is involved. Borrow was, in his peculiar fashion, a deeply religious man. His passionate Protestantism was thoroughly sincere. When he declaimed against Romish superstitions, and laid his vigorous flail upon Batuscha, “the paralytic,” he meant every word he said. When, describing the ravishing scenery at Monte Moro, he declares, “I sat down on a broken wall and remained gazing, and listening, and shedding tears of rapture; for of all the pleasures which a bountiful God permitteth His children to enjoy, none are so dear to some hearts as the music of forests and streams . . . ” he is not canting for the benefit of Earl Street, though in other circumstances the sentiment might have been differently expressed. And the majority of his readers perused this with the Bible Society in their minds. One remembers having “The Bible in Spain” placed in one’s youthful hands, with stress laid on the fact that this was the work of a man who had encountered infinite perils and suffered amazing hardships in a pious cause, and with injunctions to observe not the remarkable beauties of the book but the benighted condition of the priest-ridden children of Spain, to compare it with the blessings of unlimited Bible-reading which oneself enjoyed.

There is no need to labour this point. The perspective has cleared with the passage of years. There is no less admiration for the fine work which the Bible Society did and is doing, and a great deal more perspicuous admiration of Borrow’s book. Literature owes much to the Bible Society in many ways, and one of its debts lies here—that it found Borrow employment at a time when he was in sore straits, and provided him with the means of introducing to the public the fruits of his literary labour.

It has already been suggested that, in point of art, “The Bible in Spain” does not bear comparison with “Lavengro.” For what it is worth, that is a deliberate judgment. But it should be said that no such comparison ought to be instituted. The two books are widely different in inspiration, in purpose, in execution. The record of the Spanish journeys has an interest of its own, and may stand on its own merits. As a descriptive and narrative writer Borrow had few superiors in his time. His style smacks of Defoe, smacks of the Bible, smacks of the archaic poets and romancers he loved so well. But it is his own style—at once a noble and spacious style and no style at all. There is no preciosity and there is little elegance in it; but there is naturalism, virility, grandeur. Only when he becomes didactic does his power decline. Then, in spite of his tremendous vigour of invective, he rarely rises above the level of the leader-writer, with his eye on the thing nearest to his fond prejudices, searching for the most offensive word that happens to be handy.

There is probably less sermonising in “The Bible in Spain” than in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.” Borrow is in love with Spain as Spain. He abounds in admiration of the country and its climate, the nobility of its people and their “stern, heroic virtue.” He does not gloss over the savagery and crime to be found among them, but he observes that there is very little of low, vulgar vice in the great body of the Spanish nation. His fulminations are reserved for the politicians and the warring factions that distressed the land, and for the “atrocious projects of malignant Rome.” He is generous in his approval of the valour and the probity of the people as a whole. He moves among them with a freedom that can only be attained by the man who knows the language—and not by all men who know it. For Spaniards are sensitive about their noble tongue, and do not like to hear it mutilated by those who are not to the manner born. Borrow had no nervousness about his linguistic powers. He gives some entertaining instructions to Englishmen who want to make themselves understood in a foreign language: they should speak with much noise and vociferation, opening their mouths wide. “Is it surprising,” he asks, “that the English are in general the worst linguists in the world, seeing that they pursue a system diametrically opposite? For example, when they attempt to speak Spanish, the most sonorous tongue in existence, they scarcely open their lips, and, putting their hands in their pockets, fumble lazily instead of applying them to the indispensable office of gesticulation.” He, at any, rate, succeeded in vociferating and gesticulating his way through Spain to good purpose, and his picture of the country is enriched by a wealth of intimacy that would have been beyond the power of almost any other Englishman.

It is astonishing that a man with so many insular prejudices as Borrow, a person so dogmatic, and so utterly scornful of the religion that pervades the very soil of Spain, should have been able to ingratiate himself with its people as he did, while on an errand which most of them must have considered damnably heretical. The secret is to be sought in his love of the romantic and the quality of simpatia, which, in spite of all his idiosyncrasies, he possessed in very high degree.