Borrow’s previous success only served to emphasize the bitterness of his defeat, for so he regarded the failure of his originality to carry his darling “Lavengro” through the breakers. He complained that he had “had the honour” of being rancorously abused by every unmanly scoundrel, every sycophantic lackey, and every political and religious renegade in the kingdom. His fury was that of an angry bull tormented by gnats. His worst passions were aroused, his most violent prejudices confirmed. But the abuse did not divert him by a hairbreadth from his preconceived plan. He proceeded with deliberation to carry on in “The Romany Rye” the story so abruptly suspended at the close of the hundredth chapter of “Lavengro.” The first chapters of “The Romany Rye” (which was not actually published until May, 1857) are quite equal to anything that Borrow ever wrote. The book falls off a little towards the close, which is, if possible, even more abrupt and inconclusive than that of “Lavengro” itself. In the appendix, the bigotries, hatreds, and centrifugal propensities which made up the George Borrow of 1850–57 were emphasized and underlined for the benefit of the flunkeys, vipers, and “yahoos” who had dared to asperse his autobiography. He never carried his story on from 1825 to 1832 or wrote the once projected “Bible in Russia”; perhaps he never meant to do so; but, even if he had, we more than doubt whether they would have approached in value the first 116 chapters of his immortal autobiography. His remaining work was the detailed journal of a vacation tour in “Wild Wales,” which was in no way inferior to its predecessors in literary value, though it is considerably below them in general interest. Wild people and old word-music, in its “native wood-notes wild,” were a passion with Borrow to the last, and helped to save him from himself. He suffered terribly from horror of death, religious gloom (“the horrors”), solitariness, and disappointment. He experienced a series of rebuffs, failing in succession to obtain a Consulship, a seat on the quorum, employment in China, and a manuscript-hunting mission from the British Museum. His unrivalled qualifications as a linguist failed to obtain for him posts for which he was eminently fitted, but to which he saw inferior men preferred. If a roving commission or an administrative post could have been found for him abroad, by preference in the East as he himself desired, hard work might have gone far to exorcise his melancholy, and we might have had from his pen contributions to the study of Eastern life that would have added lustre to a group of writers already represented in England by Curzon and Kinglake, Lane and Morier, Palgrave and Burton. With Burton’s love of roving adventure, of strange tongues, and of anthropology in its widest sense, the author of “The Bible in Spain” had many points in common. As it was, with brief intervals of solitary excursion in the “Celtic fringe” or the Near East, Borrow remained glooming at home, working himself up into a state of nervous excitement bordering upon dementia about a neighbour’s dog or a railway bisecting his wife’s land. The gloom, of course, was not chronic. There were days upon which he was himself again, the old George Borrow. Generally speaking, his days and years were passed in a moody inactivity, now at Oulton, then at Yarmouth, next in London, finally at Oulton again, where he “died, as he had lived, alone” on July 26, 1881. It seemed for the time as if he had outlived his reputation. Appearances are proverbially deceptive.
George Borrow’s life and works are one and the same thing. Few great writers have been more persistently autobiographical than Borrow was. Boswell, said Johnson once, had only two subjects, Dr. Johnson and James Boswell, and he, the Doctor, was heartily sick of both; but Borrow had only one subject—himself, from which he practically never wandered. The merry gests and marvellous exploits of the incomparable George Borrow—these form the unique theme of our Gitano Crusoe. But it is not enough to say that Borrow’s autobiographical methods are unique. His life is presented to us in four panels, each as unlike the others as it is possible to be in size, shape, texture, and surface. The scale varies as much as that of an ordnance map, sometimes 25 inches to the mile, at others five miles to the inch. The colours upon the palette are artfully changed, details are sometimes obtruded, at others significantly hidden. A casual glance obscures rather than reveals the fact that, whether he is writing of his early life and struggles (“Lavengro,” i.–lviii.), of one vivid Bohemian episode of his early manhood (“Lavengro”—“Romany Rye”), of the crowning triumph of his maturity (“Bible in Spain”), or of a vacation tour during the autumn of a disappointed life (“Wild Wales”), Borrow was always working upon the same model, with the same desperate and conscientious zeal, with the same extraordinary gust and vigour, with the same genius, the same bias, the same limitations.
As a man of letters he must be judged primarily as a biographer, and, if this be done, it will be found that Borrow has achieved the great object of biography; he has transmitted a great personality. The blemishes in his work are not particularly hard to find. Inadvertently we may have been betrayed into indicating one or two of them. But it is not by any means safe ground. With the exception of Jane Austen (and temporarily speaking, perhaps Charles Dickens) there is hardly any literary character whom it is so dangerous to approach without passports and periphrases (securing retreat, if necessary) and plentiful kow-tows as George Borrow. Among all literary clansmen you shall hardly find one more implacable, more fierce, or more blindly fanatical than your Borrovian. Charles Lamb is almost the only author we can think of (out of Scotland) who is worshipped by his admirers with quite the same canine sort of affection. But the cult of Lamb is restricted largely to briefless Templars, to University men and “Oxford M.A.’s”; the Borrovian is drawn from a lower social stratum, from printers, librarians, booksellers, and others who seldom read books, from indexers, dictionary makers, and such harmless drudges of literature. To men of such close and restricted horizons the breath of the Romany Rye is as that of “the wind on the heath, brother.” Hence the stern and unbending jealousy of their cult. Real literary enthusiasts of advanced years are almost as rare in our streets as elderly naval men of the peculiar type discovered by Mr. Gilbert. Yet a chance word in a London thoroughfare has before now elicited this ingenuous confession of faith: “I’d walk any distance to see anything belonging to George Borrow or to read anything fresh of his. Lord bless you, I almost worship that man!”
Footnotes:
[213a] It was not the policy of the Times Literary Supplement to give the name of the author. For completeness the author is Thomas Seccombe, and the editor of the TLS. at the time was James Thursfield.—DP.
[213b] Two brothers. See “Gypsies in Spain,” Preface to Second Edition.