George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

As we have seen, they cauterised Borrow because he had not written the book they expected him to write, just as their predecessors had “pulled Pope to pieces” for not being Shakespeare or Milton. Borrow was odd and singular, and had transgressed every canon of the taste of the time. But he was fully conscious that he had written a fine book. Their abuse, their satire, their indifference sent him into a fine frenzy, in which he pretended to despise the whole tribe. “By God! ’tis good, and if you lik’t you may.” But the affectation was ill-sustained by the performance; he set about to bludgeon them in very good earnest, and seized the opportunity of time, space, and inclination to wield his weapon across the heads of a great many other offenders besides the critics.

The bludgeon is the only possible figure to use. In this amazing display of whirling invective Borrow is like no other protagonist in literature. For many reasons it were possible to wish that he had never written it; for others it is precious. It neither pricks the enemy like Pope, nor incises him like Swift, nor burns him like Gifford, nor lashes him like Byron. It simply pounds him as the Flaming Tinman was pounded by Borrow’s long right. It begins, innocently enough, with an exposition of the principles on which “Lavengro” was written, the principles it upheld, the morals it inculcated, and the author’s reasons for supposing that it deserved well of the world. In this last particular the chapter is curious. According to Borrow, the book is worthy because it demonstrates how the hand of Providence constantly guides the destinies of the hero, preventing him in all his doings from falling a prey either to vice or to poverty. He admitted that Lavengro was not a remarkably religious person up to the point where the book took leave of him, but it was very likely that he would eventually become religious, though not precise or straight-laced. He would retain with his scholarship “something of his gypsyism, his predilection for the hammer and tongs, and perhaps some inclination to put on certain gloves—not white kid—with any friend who might be inclined for a little old-English diversion.” The absence of any straight-lacedness from his character was also to be predicated in the matter of ale. He did not believe that either fondness for invigorating exercise or willingness to partake of any of the good things provided by the Almighty (meaning especially ale with plenty of malt, not too much hops, and at least two years old) would be any bar to his entrance into heaven.

One would not for worlds suggest that Borrow laid this stress upon the moralities and the theology of his book what time his tongue was in his cheek. But he could hardly have failed to see that it was his gypsyism rather than his theology that would lend the work its permanent importance. The second chapter of the Appendix is an anti-Popery tirade which it would be tiresome to follow. He boasts of how in Spain he “hewed right and left, making the priests fly before him and run away squeaking that the Devil was after them.” Which is hardly an accurate account of the matter, and is only introduced apparently in order that he may belabour Bowring. The process is this: The Bible Society sent Borrow to Spain to perform these deeds of derringdo; the Bible Society was not supported by the Government, but rather frowned upon, so that any man wearing its colours was excluded from the chance of serving his country, while “a fellow who unites in himself the bankrupt trader, the broken author, or rather book-maker, and the laughed-down single-speech spouter of the House of Commons, may look forward, always supposing that he has been a foaming Radical, to the Government of an important colony.” It seems almost necessary to apologise, even at this distance of time, to the descendants of Sir John Bowring, so virulent and unjust is Borrow in his strictures.

Borrow is accused of bigotry in his anti-Papist campaign. Bigotry! There is no excuse for even a whisper of the word in anything that he has done. Bigots yourselves, messieurs! A person may speak and write against Rome without bigotry, but “it is impossible for anyone but a bigot or a bad man to write or speak in her praise.” Which clears the ground for an understanding of the outlook of our very paragon of all tolerance.

In the third chapter, “On Foreign Nonsense,” there speaks John Bull, the patriotic Briton, the Germanophobe in a time when Teutophilism was the fashion, who, in the heyday of the prophet Carlyle’s authority, declared that “of German literature”—but words failed him to characterise German literature, and he had to express himself by a note of exclamation and a dash, and grudgingly admitted that there was one fine poem in the German language—“Oberon,” to wit. This from the disciple of William Taylor was a little strong; but Borrow on the rampage trampled even on Taylor, with a reservation of praise for his scholarship. The essay on “gentility-nonsense” is decidedly the best of them all. These two chapters are the most effective, the richest in the diction of wrath, and they touch the highest point he reaches in criticism. Here, if anywhere, is to be found the merit of the Appendix.

It is this revolt against the finnicking conventions, this hard-hitting at every self-sufficient snob’s head in a self-satisfied age, that gives the work its air of modernity, and places it en rapport with the twentieth century. Once again there is no delicate satire, no fine irony, no touch of the “Snob Papers,” in the “gentility-nonsense” chapter. It is simply energetic quarter-staff play, with resounding thwacks upon the head of any unlucky wight who happens to have charged “vulgarity” upon Borrow because he had endeavoured to bring his tatterdemalion crew of gypsies, mumpers, and tinkers into the decent and respectable parlours of the English middle-classes. That was all very well on the operatic stage. The gypsy villains in The Bohemian Girl were entertaining enough when they entered the marble halls and spoilt the furniture and pilfered the wine behind the footlights, as they had been doing any night for the last ten years; but this was serious literature and a very different matter. Borrow laid about him with a will, and defended smithery against jobbery, and tinkering against philandering, and the dingle against the drawing-room with almost lyrical eloquence. Was it not better for Lavengro to make the forge glow by the roadside, and manufacture donkey-shoes for Isopel, than to borrow another man’s money and go to Brighton, with the sister of Annette le Noir, though that would have been an exceedingly genteel thing to do? Was not the successor of Jack Slingsby more worthy of respect than Mr. Flamson, the railway contractor? Had not the jockey at Horncastle, who offered him a fair price for his horse, a better title to honour “than the scoundrelly lord who attempts to cheat him of one-fourth of its value?” There is great temptation to quote largely from these hectic chapters, but one sample must suffice. “Millions,” he says, seem to think otherwise on these questions,

“by their servile adoration of people whom, without rank, wealth, and fine clothes, they would consider infamous, but whom, possessed of rank, wealth, and glittering habiliments, they seem to admire all the more for their profligacy and crimes. Does not a blood-spot or a lust-spot on the clothes of a blooming emperor give a kind of zest to the genteel young god? Do not the pride, superciliousness, and selfishness of a certain aristocracy make it all the more regarded by its worshippers? and do not the clownish and gutter-blood admirers of Mr. Flamson like him all the more because they are conscious that he is a knave? If such is the case—and, alas! is it not the case?—they cannot be too frequently told that fine clothes, wealth, and titles adorn a person in proportion as he adorns them; that if worn by the magnanimous and good they are ornaments indeed, but if by the vile and profligate they are merely san benitos, and only serve to make their infamy doubly apparent; and that a person in seedy raiment and tattered hat, possessed of courage, kindness, and virtue, is entitled to more respect from those to whom his virtues are manifested than any cruel profligate emperor, selfish aristocrat, or knavish millionaire in the world.”

The appropriate sequel to this flaming fury against the worship of material wealth and the idolatry of worldly success is his protest against Sir Walter Scott’s Jacobitism, which he called “Scotch gentility-nonsense” and “Charlie-o’er-the-Waterism.” With a full brush and rapid strokes he paints a Hogarthian picture of the Stewarts, more remarkable for the piquancy of its epithets than the accuracy of its history. A disgraceful procession of abandoned reprobates hurries across his pages: the “dirty, cowardly miscreant,” James I.; the “cruel, revengeful tyrant,” Charles I.; the “lazy and sensual” Charles II.; the “poor creature,” James II.; and the miserable Pretenders, especially Charles Edward of that ilk, a “worthless, ignorant youth” and a “profligate, illiterate old man.” All these lamentable persons, these blotches on the face of history, according to Borrow, were dead and happily buried out of the sight of decent people until Scott gave them resurrection by his power of fine writing. It was Scott who summoned Jacobitism and Laudism out of their graves; the wave of Popery now passing so destructively over England came from Oxford, it was true; but Scott sent it to Oxford. And Scott, accordingly, is scarified. His secret is ruthlessly wrenched from him. Why did he revive Jacobitism? It was because he worshipped gentility and adored the born-great. Scott denounced Murat and heaped contumely upon him as the son of a pastrycook; but was not the pedigree of the pastrycook better than that of the Edinburgh pettifogger who was Scott’s progenitor?

Working himself up to a foaming frenzy, Borrow attributes all Scott’s mortal sufferings to the vengeance of an angry Deity for taking the part of the wicked Jacobites against the righteous Williamites, “for lauding up to the skies the miscreants and robbers, and calumniating the noble spirts of Britain, the salt of England, and his own country!” Scott became paralysed in body and mind, pitiable to others, and loathsome to himself. “Ah!” exclaims Borrow, “God knows perfectly well how to strike!” A modern audience gapes in amazement at the rodomontade, and wonders whether the man who pumps it out page after page can be quite sane, especially when he declares that he has been influenced “not by any feeling of malice or ill-will, but simply by a regard for the truth.” But Borrow saw red whenever he was out raiding the pastures of “Popery” or seeking a joust with gentility, and the verdict against him may be softened a little when the reader lights upon one or more of his fine tributes to the genius of Scott, who “did for the sceptre of the wretched Pretender what all the kings of Europe could not do for his body—placed it on the throne of these realms; and for Popery what Popes and Cardinals strove in vain to do for three centuries—brought back its mummeries and nonsense into the temples of the British Isles.”

The eighth chapter of the Appendix, “On Canting Nonsense,” need not detain us; his outbreak against the teetotalers and anti-pugilists has received sufficient notice. As for the “Pseudo-Critics,” every Borrow lover wishes it had never been written, picturesque as is the apologue of the eminent reviewers of the London Press in the character of vipers with their fangs drawn, held up by their tails. Still more is it to be regretted that Borrow’s temper in the dispute with Bowring led him to perpetrate the last two chapters, full of rancour and spleen as they are, their charges of perfidy against Sir John unsupported by any evidence, and contradicted by the probabilities of the case.