Borrow, who was now in his thirty-eighth year, set to work at Oulton upon his “Bible in Spain,” which was published by Mr. John Murray, three years later, in 1843. Of his method, or lack of method, in working, something may be gathered from the preface to the second edition of “The Zincali,” which was written about the time of the issue of the former book. Mr. Murray had advised him to try his hand at something different from his “sorry trash” [41] about gipsies, and write a work that would really be of credit to the great firm in Albemarle Street. Borrow responded by starting on an account of his wanderings in Spain.
“At first I proceeded slowly—sickness was in the land, and the face of Nature was overcast—heavy rainclouds swam in the heavens, the blast howled amid the pines which nearly surround my lonely
dwelling, and the waters of the lake, which lies before it, so quiet in general and tranquil, were fearfully agitated . . . A dreary summer and autumn passed by, and were succeeded by as gloomy a winter. I still proceeded with the Bible in Spain. The winter passed, and spring came, with cold dry winds and occasional sunshine, whereupon I arose, shouted, and mounting my horse, even Sidi Habismilk, I scoured all the surrounding district, and thought but little of the Bible in Spain. So I rode about the country, over the heaths, and through the green lanes of my native land, occasionally visiting friends at a distance, and sometimes, for variety’s sake, I stayed at home and amused myself by catching huge pike, which lie perdue in certain deep ponds skirted with lofty reeds, upon my land, and to which there is a communication from the lagoon by a deep and narrow watercourse. I had almost forgotten the Bible in Spain. Then came the summer with much heat and sunshine, and then I would lie for hours in the sun and recall the sunny days I had spent in Andalusia, and my thoughts were continually reverting to Spain, and at last I remembered that the Bible in Spain was still unfinished; whereupon I arose and said: ‘This loitering profiteth nothing,’ and I hastened to my summer-house by the side or the lake, and there I thought and wrote, and thought and wrote, until I had finished the ‘Bible in Spain.’”
Within a few weeks of the publication of the “Bible in Spain,” Borrow’s name was in everyone’s
mouth. Attempts were made to “lionise” him; but were met with his distinct disapproval, though it was always a pleasure to him to be looked upon as a celebrity. To escape from the Mrs. Leo Hunters of fashionable society, he almost immediately fled to the Continent, where he went on another pilgrimage. Having journeyed through Turkey, Albania, Hungary, and Wallachia, he again came home to Oulton, and completed “Lavengro,” which had been commenced almost as soon as the manuscript of “The Bible in Spain” had left his hands. This book was finished in the summer-house of his garden by the broad where most of his future work was done, and was issued in 1851.
Defending himself against the critics who attacked him for intermingling truth and fiction in “Lavengro,” he afterwards wrote: “In the preface ‘Lavengro’ is stated to be a dream; and the writer takes this opportunity of stating that he never said it was an autobiography; never authorised any person to say that it was one; and that he has in innumerable instances declared in public and in private, both before and after the work was published, that it was not what is generally termed an autobiography: but a set of people who pretend to write criticisms on books, hating the author for various reasons, amongst others, because, having the proper pride of a gentleman and a scholar, he did not in the year 1843, choose to permit himself to be exhibited and made a zany of in London, and especially because
he will neither associate with, nor curry favour with, them who are neither gentlemen nor scholars—attack his book with abuse and calumny.”
Interrogated by Mr. Theodore Watts as to the real nature of an autobiography, Borrow asked the question, “What is an autobiography? Is it a mere record of the incidents of a man’s life? or is it a picture of the man himself—his character, his soul?”
This, Mr. Watts thinks, was a very suggestive query of Borrow’s with regard to himself and his work. “That he sat down to write his own life in ‘Lavengro’ I know. He had no idea then of departing from the strict line of fact. Indeed, his letters to his friend, Mr. John Murray, would alone be sufficient to establish this in spite of his calling ‘Lavengro’ a dream. In the first volume he did almost confine himself to matters of fact. But as he went on he clearly found that the ordinary tapestry into which Destiny had woven the incidents of his life were not tinged with sufficient depth of colour to satisfy his sense of wonder. . . . When he wishes to dive very boldly into the ‘abysmal deeps of personality,’ he speaks and moves partly behind the mask of some fictitious character . . . Let it be remembered that it was this instinct of wonder, not the instinct of the mere poseur, that impelled him to make certain exaggerated statements about the characters themselves that are introduced into his books.”
The village of Oulton lies on the border of the marshland about a mile from the most easterly point of England, and within hearing of the beating of the billows of the wild North Sea. Borrow’s home, which was little more than a cottage, stood on the side of a slight rising bank overlooking Oulton Broad, and was sheltered from the winds of the sea and marshland by a belt of storm-rent pines. The house contained a sitting-room on either side of the entrance-hall, a kitchen, four bedrooms, and two attics. It was its smallness and compactness that commended it to Borrow, and it also had the extra recommendation to a man of his disposition of being quiet and secluded. Indeed, so out-of-the-way was its situation that to take a boat upon the broad was looked upon as the best and most direct means of attaining this isolated nook of the Broadland.