We are glad to observe, from sundry symptoms which have of late been manifested, that the taste for the supernatural is again reviving amongst us. It is not safe now to deny miracles, to sneer at stories of winking images, or to speak lightly of the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius. Cardinal Wiseman, in his future attempts to familiarise us with the doctrines of saintly interference, will find a good deal of work already cut and dry for his hand. Pious young noblemen, whose perversion is only of a few weeks' standing, have already laid in such a stock of exuberant faith, that all Europe rings with the fame of their pilgrimages; and the chain in the church of St Peter ad Vincula has already been suspended around more than one English neck, in token of the entire submission of the proselytes to the spiritual yoke of Rome.
Nor is the hankering after the supernatural confined only to the sphere of religious belief. Were it so, we should not have ventured even to allude to the subject; for it matters nothing to us what amount of pilgrims may choose to press forward to Loretto, with or without the salutary but inconvenient impediment of pease. But we are going a great deal faster and farther. We have renewed some of the popular beliefs of bygone centuries; and in a short time we may hope to discover a few of the lost secrets of the Chaldeans and the Magi. Astrology, never wholly extinguished as a science, is again beginning to look up. Raphael and Zadkiel—we ask pardon of the latter gentleman if we have mistaken his name, for we quote merely from memory, and have none of his invaluable treatises lying on our table—will calculate your nativity for a trifle, and give you in January a shrewd hint as to the aspect of public matters at the ensuing Christmas. Reichenbach will tell you all about ghosts, luminous children, and suchlike apparitions as seem perpetually to have disturbed the repose of the gifted Lady Fanshawe. By a little fasting and maceration, and possibly a course of purgatives, you may even succeed in reducing yourself to a state of clairvoyance, in which case your curiosity will be amply gratified by a visit to the nearest churchyard. You will then thoroughly understand the occult theory of corpse-candles, and various other things undreamed of in your philosophy, so long as you adhere to your present gross diet of beef-steaks and porter, and pride yourself on your Particular Madeira. Almost any lubberly boy can now discover you a spring by means of the divining-rod. Travelling is no longer a luxury confined to the rich. If you wish to be transported to any known part of the earth with a rapidity greater than that of Malagigi's flying demon, who conveyed Charlemagne on his back from Pampeluna to Paris in the course of a summer's night, you have only to go to a biologist, and your desires are at once accomplished. He will request you to sit down and favour him for a few minutes with the inspection of a button which he places in your fist—a strange sensation of drowsiness steals over your brain—and you are instantly in the power of the sorcerer. He will set you down wherever you please. You may either gather grapes in the vineyards of sunny Tuscany, or take an airing, on the top of the Pyramids, or wander in a buffalo prairie, or study the habits of the walrus and white bear on the frozen shores of Nova Zembla. We have ourselves seen an enthusiastic sportsman, whilst under the influence of this magical delusion, stalk an imaginary red-deer with considerable effect through the midst of a crowded lecture-room; and, had he been armed with a proper couteau-de-chasse, we entertain little doubt that he would have gralloched a gaping urchin who happened to be standing in real flesh and blood close to the spot where the spectral stag rolled over at the discharge of his walking-stick. After this, who shall deny magic? James VI. was right after all, and we ought to be put in possession of a cheap reprint of his treatise on Demonology. Everybody recollects Lord Prudhoe's account of the wonder-working magician of Cairo, who required nothing more than a few drops of ink, and the aid of a child, to conjure up the phantoms of living persons from any quarter of the globe. The necessity of resorting to Cairo for a repetition of that phenomenon is now superseded. One of the magic crystals, known to Albertus Magnus and Cornelius Agrippa, has lately been recovered, and is now preserved in London. It has its legendary history, known to Horace Walpole, who kept it among his other curiosities at Strawberry Hill; but its miraculous powers seem to have been dormant, or, at all events, to have been unobserved, until a very recent date. In short, we are gradually working our way to a region which lies beyond the ken of science—a circumstance which cannot fail to give intense gratification to poets and novelists, who have been grievously trammelled for a long time in their legitimate functions, by the priggish scrupulousness and materialism of the votaries of exact science and analysis. Laud we the gods therefor! We may hope once more to see poetry disentangled from the thraldom of the Philosophical Institutions.
We have made this preface less in application to the work which we are about to notice, than from a certain feeling of disappointment which came over us during its perusal. It is not at all the kind of book which we expected from Mr Borrow. His previous writings had prepared us for a work of extraordinary interest, and the preliminary advertisement stimulated our curiosity to the highest pitch. Lavengro; the Scholar—the Gipsy—the Priest! Not for years have our eyes lighted on a more fascinating or mysterious title. Who, in the name of Mumbo Jumbo, we thought, can this Lavengro be? Cagliostro we know, and Katterfelto we have heard of, but Lavengro is altogether a new name for a conjuror. From what country does he come—in what favoured land is laid the scene of his exploits? Is he a Moldavian, a Wallachian, a Hungarian, a Bohemian, a Copt, an Armenian, or a Spaniard? The mystery grew deeper as we pondered: we could hardly sleep of nights for thinking of this Lavengro. Then what a field for cogitation was presented by the remainder of the suggestive title! The Scholar—the Gipsy—the Priest! Dr Faustus—Johnnie Faa—and Friar Bacon! Why, the whole title was as redolent of magic as a meadow in summer-time of myrrh! Then we thought over the hints which Mr Borrow had thrown out in his earliest volume. We recollected his mysterious intercourse with the gipsies, and his reception by that fraternity in Spain. We were aware that he had not yet explicitly accounted for his trafficking with the outcasts of Egypt, and we looked for some new revelations on the subjects of fortune-telling, hocus-pocus, and glamour. Lavengro, with his three attributes like those of Vishnu, might possibly be the Grand Cazique, the supreme prince of the nation of tinkers!
We have read the book, and we are disappointed. The performance bears no adequate relation to the promise. The story—if that can be designated as a story which the author describes as "a dream, partly of study, partly of adventure," is in the form of an autobiography, in which we recognise Mr Borrow in the characters of Lavengro and the Scholar. The Gipsy is a horse-couper, with a tolerable taste for the ring; and the Priest a Romish Jesuit, with a decided taste for gin and water. The scene is laid in the British islands; and the adventures, though interesting in their way, neither bear the impress of the stamp of truth, nor are they so arranged as to make the work valuable, if we consider it in the light of fiction.
Of Mr Borrow personally we know nothing. In common with many others, we admired the lively style and freshness of his earlier book, The Bible in Spain; and, without altogether swallowing as genuine the whole of its details, we were willing to believe, that the author was a person of uncommon attainments, energy, and perseverance; a good philologer, and an intimate acquaintance of the gipsies. This much we were ready to concede. But ever and anon there occurred oblique hints and obscure inuendoes, which seemed to point at some secret or mystery pertinent to the author, just as, in a melodrama, it is common for an individual in a slouched hat and russet mantle to insinuate that he is somebody in disguise, without condescending to favour us with a glimpse of his visage. These we set down at their proper value—that is, we considered them, sheer humbug. It was Mr Borrow's own fault if we did him wrong. He may be, for aught we know, as notable a personage as Paracelsus; but if so, he ought to claim his honours boldly, not copy a trick which is now somewhat stale through repetition.
In Lavengro the same thing occurs, and even more conspicuously. We cannot, by possibility, separate the ingredients of fact from those of fiction. Mr Borrow will not permit us to know whether it is an autobiography or a pure romance. In all probability it partakes of the nature of both. Enough of reality is retained to identify it with the actual author; enough of fiction introduced to make that author appear a most singularly gifted being. If Apollonius of Tyana had undertaken the task of compiling his own memoirs, instead of trusting to the pen of Damis, he could not have hit upon a better plan. Benvenuto Cellini and Vidocq, by adopting this method, have each of them earned a very fair portion of celebrity; and we do not in the least degree doubt that Mr Borrow will be equally successful. His situations are often striking; the characters which he introduces must have the charm of novelty to the great majority of readers; his descriptive powers are above the common mark; and his ideas are frequently original. If, in the more ambitious passages, his style is occasionally turgid, we are inclined to overlook that blemish in consideration of his other accomplishments; if the humour of his characters is sometimes forced and tiresome, we are ever and anon repaid by sketches which would do credit to the skill of a more refined artist. Yet, with all this, the original fault remains. We cannot yield to Mr Borrow that implicit credence which is the right of a veracious autobiographer; we cannot accord him that conventional credence which we give to the avowed romancer. The fact destroys the fiction; and the fiction neutralises the fact.
Is it fact or fiction that Mr Borrow is a snake-tamer, a horse-charmer, and something more? These qualities certainly are claimed by the hero of this autobiography, who, before he was three years of age, could handle a viper without injury, and even, as the following extract will show, caused a Jew to stand aghast at the superhuman extent of his acquirements.
"One day a Jew—I have quite forgotten the circumstance, but I was long subsequently informed of it—one day a travelling Jew knocked at the door of a farm-house in which we had taken apartments; I was near at hand sitting in the bright sunshine, drawing strange lines on the dust with my fingers, an ape and dog were my companions; the Jew looked at me and asked me some questions, to which, though I was quite able to speak, I returned no answer. On the door being opened, the Jew, after a few words, probably relating to pedlery, demanded who the child was, sitting in the sun; the maid replied that I was her mistress's younger son, a child weak here, pointing to her forehead. The Jew looked at me again, and then said: 'Pon my conscience, my dear, I believe that you must be troubled there yourself to tell me any such thing. It is not my habit to speak to children, inasmuch as I hate them, because they often follow me and fling stones after me; but I no sooner looked at that child than I was forced to speak to it—his not answering shows his sense, for it has never been the custom of the wise to fling away their words in indifferent talk and conversation; the child is a sweet child, and has all the look of one of our people's children. Fool, indeed! did I not see his eyes sparkle just now when the monkey seized the dog by the ear?—they shone like my own diamonds—does your good lady want any—real and fine? Were it not for what you tell me, I should say it was a prophet's child. Fool, indeed! he can write already, or I'll forfeit the box which I carry on my back, and for which I would be loth to take two hundred pounds!" He then leaned forward to inspect the lines which I had traced. All of a sudden he started back and grew white as a sheet; then, taking off his hat, he made some strange gestures to me, cringing, chattering, and showing his teeth, and shortly departed, muttering something about 'holy letters,' and talking to himself in a strange tongue. The words of the Jew were in due course of time reported to my mother, who treasured them in her heart, and from that moment began to entertain brighter hopes of her youngest born than she had ever before ventured to foster."
This beats Benvenuto hollow! Nay, we are not quite certain that it does not distance the celebrated experiment of Psammetichus, king of Egypt, who, in order to ascertain which was the original language of the world, separated two infants from their mothers, intrusting them to the care of a dumb person, who daily fed them with milk. The first word which they uttered, and perseveringly reiterated, was "Beccos," which in the Phœnician language signified bread; and as nothing could be more natural than that children should clamour for their porridge, the speech of the Phœnicians was acknowledged as the native dialect of mankind. Wee Georgy Borrow, however, in company with Jocko and Snap, seems to have outstripped in precocity the Psammetichian foundlings. What "holy letters" from the Talmud the "prophet's child" inscribed, which had such a marvellous effect upon the mind and conscience of Ikey Solomons we know not, and perhaps ought not even to guess. Perhaps it was some sentence from Rabbi Jehuda Hakkadosh, bearing upon the real value of the diamonds which the impostor was proffering for sale.
A few years afterwards he becomes acquainted with an old man, whose principal occupation consisted in catching snakes, and who, upon one occasion, had enjoyed the inestimable privilege of an interview with "the king of the vipers." Practised as he was at pouching the vermin, old Adderley could teach nothing to his pupil, who, from the hour of his birth, was privileged to take a cockatrice by the tail, and seize on a cobra with impunity. He gifts him, however, with a pet viper, a fellow of infinite fancy, who nestles in Georgy's bosom, and whose timely apparition from beneath the folds of the vest not only saves him from a threatened drubbing at the hands of a Herculean gipsy, but introduces him to the acquaintance of a young gentleman of that nomad persuasion, one Jasper Petulengro, who is also the representative of the Pharaohs! More unmingled rubbish than is contained in this part of the book, it never was our fortune to turn over; and Mr Borrow must have a low estimate indeed of the public taste, when he ventures to put forward such twaddle. Fancy the intrepid snake-charming urchin of some nine or ten years' standing, thus defying Gipsy Cooper.