George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

Another favourite theme of debate has been the autobiographical problem. We have traced the history of the composition of “Lavengro,” and seen that the book is truly an autobiography, though not a chronology. Borrow invented little and recorded much. Most of the things that happen in “Lavengro” happened in its author’s life, as Elwin said. He unquestionably grouped figures and events for the sake of effect. Such a concatenation as Borrow himself, Isopel Berners, the Petulengros, Tawno Chikno, the Man in Black, and the Innkeeper in the immediate neighbourhood of one Staffordshire dingle at the same time was, of course, never known to history. Such dramatis personæ are far too striking to have been collected by coincidence. The meeting of the queenly Isopel, princess of roadside heroines, and Lavengro, crallis (chief) of hedge philologists, and their method of intellectual commerce, tax the credulity of the reader sufficiently. But the residuum of fact is considerable; there is more essential truth than concrete fiction in “Lavengro,” and it complies with the terms of Borrow’s own conception of an autobiography.

It has been shown that the world was unready for such a book. It was busy about diverse affairs. It had passed out of the Byronic phase in which Borrow attempted to detain it. The men of 1850 were unable to appreciate his manner, and cared nothing about his matter. Now that he made no definite appeal to the Bible Society public, and had removed himself out of the atmosphere of Old Spain, shimmering with romance, he found that there was no public left for him. What use had the world in the climacterical year of the great, progressive nineteenth century for the petty philosophy and the infinitesimal adventures of a tinker who was not “inspired” in any sense of which it was cognisant? It was just about to appoint Matthew Arnold as Inspector of Schools: that was more to the purpose. It had crowned Alfred Tennyson as Poet Laureate; it was weeping and roaring over “David Copperfield”; it was preparing to admit Thackeray among the Immortals, for he was on the point of publishing “The History of Henry Esmond, Esq.” If it wanted fierce controversy, was not Carlyle thundering out his “Latter-day Pamphlets”? If it wanted picturesque history, was not Macaulay sufficient—were not working men’s clubs in Lancashire passing him votes of thanks for having made history intelligible to the masses? If it wanted politics or economics, did it not possess its John Bright and its Richard Cobden, and was there not Mill’s “Principles of Political Economy,” fresh from the press, to be read? It wanted Free Libraries, not free manners. Ruskin could satisfy all its taste for archaism. It had rid itself of Chartism, and was coquetting with Christian Socialism; “Alton Locke” was far more likely to appeal to its sympathies than the innkeeper at Willenhall.

One perceives how inevitable was the dismal fate of “Lavengro,” launched at the head of a society fermenting, effervescing, seething with progressive optimism, feverish in its eager industrial advance, filled with sentiment, vibrating with hopeful emotions, its literary affections fastened partly upon Macaulay, partly upon Carlyle, partly upon Tennyson. The apparition of a book like “Lavengro” was ludicrous in its eyes, dressed in the style of a dead century, and concerned with subjects as dead as its habiliments. What had all this farrago of gypsies, horse-witches, apple-women, green lanes, breezy heaths, and road-girls (however magnificent) to do with any soul in 1850, with Manchesterism or with Kingsleyism, with the buzz of commercial prosperity, or the growth of social idealism or the development of political liberties, or with current culture, or with the sentiment of the age? Nothing at all. The frantically busy world went on building schools and inspecting them, planning railways and running trains on them, raising mills and factories and grinding and making, discussing problems and settling them; and it passed Borrow by. It did not want a Romany Defoe, a modern Smollett, a new and more truculent Bunyan, and it barely nodded to him as he attempted to arrest its steps. It cared not a brass farthing about his opinions, which did not matter at all; unfortunately, it cared as little about his naturalism, which mattered a great deal.

The only point of approach between Borrow and the public was the point of anti-Popery. Borrow anticipated the storm of 1850, for the bulk of his work had been written before that storm broke. His Man in Black was modelled upon what he knew of the Catholic propagandists in England, but the model was highly coloured; it was impossible for Borrow to view a priest or a Catholic of any degree except through the medium of his own ultra-Protestant spectacles. Further, the portrait is probably more malicious than it would have been but for the state of public opinion on the “Papal aggression” which was then being foreshadowed. The Man in Black is a very complete picture of the Jesuitical sneak who probably existed only in the imagination of ardent Evangelicals. But even this accidentally topical character did not save from disaster a work which was utterly out of tune with the times. Imagine Macaulay, or Kingsley, or Ruskin falling on their readers in the manner of Borrow’s preface:

“Pray, be not displeased, gentle reader, if perchance thou hast imagined that I was about to conduct thee to distant lands, and hadst promised thyself much instruction and entertainment from what I might tell thee of them. I do assure thee that thou hast no reason to be displeased, inasmuch as there are no countries in the world less known by the British than these selfsame British islands, or where more strange things are everyday occurring, whether in road or street, house or dingle.”

It was all very true, but the “gentle reader” did not want to hear about those strange things, and his ear found Borrow’s “thees” and “thous” and “hadsts” uncouth. “Charity and free and genial manners” in the Borrovian sense were foreign to his desires.

Borrow’s own favourite characters in “Lavengro,” he tells us, were the brave old soldier and his wife (his parents), the ancient gentlewoman who sold apples on London Bridge and conned the history of blessed Mary Flanders, and the wandering Methodist and his wife Winifred. Filial affection accounts for his first choice. The others are certainly delightful vignettes; but it is strange that Borrow did not bring Jasper Petulengro into his category of favourites, or Isopel Berners. Those two are immortal, and it is to them that the mind flies when “Lavengro” is mentioned.

The book—still regarding “The Romany Rye” as part of it—divides itself into two sections. The first and shorter section covers a period of some twenty years; the other, his idyll of the roads, extending from the fifty-eighth chapter of “Lavengro” to the end, deals with about a year of his life. The subject of his rural wanderings grew upon him as he wrote, and the episode of Belle Berners naturally required a spacious canvas; the reasons why he introduced the postilion’s tale have already been related. This amazing book defies analysis or classification. It is “a thing of shreds and patches,” a hotch-potch of odds and ends of learning and speculation, an uneven jumble of incidents; doubtless it is all the critics of 1851 said it was. Yet it is a great book, a treasured book, a book to read five times as Leland read it, to dip into and be tempted on and on, chapter by chapter. It has all the faults that the purists allot to it—much tiresome iteration, many split infinitives, gross errors of taste, much fuliginous and turgid writing. Yet it is a great work of literature, compelling, overpowering in many ways. It often rises in eloquence to remarkable heights and glows with all the hues of poetry: mark the dialogue on death, the midnight vigil in the Dingle. The force of sheer description in the poison scene and in the fight with the Flaming Tinman can hardly be surpassed. There are racy humour and genuine humanity in the incident of the inn where he met Jack Slingsby and his family depressed from the encounter with the Flaming Tinman, and proved to them the “genial, gladdening power” of good ale, “the true and proper drink of Englishmen.” All Borrow’s affectation of learning, all his word-chasing, all his preaching, are forgiven in the intense joy of such scenes as these. When Jack Slingsby said to him, “It’s a fine thing to be a scholar,” he retorted, “Not half so fine as to be a tinker.” It is the hedgesmith in Lavengro that gives his book its ineffable charm. “There is something highly poetical about a forge,” and Borrow has caught and transmitted its poetry to us.

The fashion in which Borrow pounced upon his critics, detractors, enemies, as he pictured them, clawed them and mangled them in the notorious Appendix has been indicated in snatches. Printed sermons and speeches can hardly be more deadly dull than a quarrel of this sort after the lapse of half a century: that is, as a rule. In this case there is a distinct survival of literary interest, for the Appendix is luminous (albeit with a lurid incandescence), and in it glow some of the gems of Borrow’s style. His critics inspired him to this tour de force, the “quartering reviewers,” those arbitrary persons who, in the sententious phrase of Hazlitt, “would be thought to have purchased a monopoly of wit, learning, and wisdom—

‘Assume the rod, affect the god,
And seem to shake the spheres.’”