Books: The Life of George Borrow

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There is a world of meaning in a paragraph from one of John Murray's
(the Second) letters (21st June 1843) to Borrow in which he enquires,
"Did you receive a note from Mme. Simpkinson which I forwarded ten
days ago? I have not seen her since your abrupt departure from her
house."

It is rather regrettable that the one side of Borrow's character has
to be so emphasised. He could be just and gracious, even to the
point of sternly rebuking one who represented his own religious
convictions and supporting a dissenter. After a Bible Society's
meeting at Mutford Bridge (the nearest village to Oulton Hall), the
speakers repaired to the Hall to supper. One of the guests, an
independent minister, became involved in a heated argument with a
Church of England clergyman, who reproached him for holding
Calvinistic views. The nonconformist replied that the clergy of the
Established Church were equally liable to attack on the same ground,
because the Articles of their Church were Calvinistic, and to these
they had all sworn assent. The reply was that the words were not
necessarily to be taken in their literal sense. At this Borrow
interposed, attacking the clergyman in a most vigorous fashion for
his sophistry, and finally reducing him to silence. The Independent
minister afterwards confessed that he had never heard "one man give
another such a dressing down as on that occasion." {384a}

Borrow was capable of very deep feeling, which is nowhere better
shown than in his retort to Richard Latham whom he met at Dr Hake's
table. Well warmed by the generous wine, Latham stated that he
should never do anything so low as dine with his publisher. "You do
not dine with John Murray, I presume?" he added. "Indeed I do,"
Borrow responded with deep emotion. "He is a most kind friend. When
I have had sickness in the house he has been unfailing in his
goodness towards me. There is no man I more value." {384b}

Borrow was a frequent visitor to the Hakes at Bury St Edmunds. W. B.
Donne gives a glimpse to him in a letter to Bernard Barton (12th
Sept. 1848).

"We have had a great man here--and I have been walking with him and
aiding him to eat salmon and mutton and drink port--George Borrow--
and what is more we fell in with some gypsies and I heard his speech
of Egypt, which sounded wondrously like a medley of broken Spanish
and dog Latin. Borrow's face lighted by the red turf fire of the
tent was worth looking at. He is ashy-white now--but twenty years
ago, when his hair was like a raven's wing, he must have been hard to
discriminate from a born Bohemian. Borrow is best on the tramp: if
you can walk 4.5 miles per hour, as I can with ease and do by choice,
and can walk 15 of them at a stretch--which I can compass also--then
he will talk Iliads of adventures even better than his printed ones.
He cannot abide those Amateur Pedestrians who saunter, and in his
chair he is given to groan and be contradictory. But on Newmarket-
heath, in Rougham Woods he is at home, and specially when he meets
with a thorough vagabond like your present correspondent." {385a}

The present Mr John Murray recollects Borrow very clearly as

"tall, broad, muscular, with very heavy shoulders" and of course the
white hair. "He was," continues Mr Murray, "a figure which no one
who has seen it is likely to forget. I never remember to have seen
him dressed in anything but black broad cloth, and white cotton socks
were generally distinctly visible above his low shoes. I think that
with Borrow the desire to attract attention to himself, to inspire a
feeling of awe and mystery, must have been a ruling passion."

Borrow was frequently the guest of his publisher at Albemarle Street,
in times well within the memory of Mr Murray, who relates how on one
occasion

"Borrow was at a dinner-party in company with Whewell {385b} [who by
the way it has been said was the original of the Flaming Tinman,
although there is very little to support the statement except the
fact that Dr Whewell was a proper man with his hands] both of them
powerful men, and both of them, if report be true, having more than a
superficial knowledge of the art of self-defence. A controversy
began, and waxed so warm that Mrs Whewell, believing a personal
encounter to be imminent, fainted, and had to be carried out of the
room. Once when Borrow was dining with my father he disappeared into
a small back room after dinner, and could not be found. At last he
was discovered by a lady member of the family, stretched on a sofa
and groaning. On being spoken to and asked to join the other guests,
he suddenly said: Go away! go away! I am not fit company for
respectable people. There was no apparent cause for this strange
conduct, unless it were due to one of those unaccountable fits to
which men of genius (and this description will be allowed him by
many) are often subject.

"On another occasion, when dining with my father at Wimbledon, he was
regaled with a 'haggis,' a dish which was new to him, and of which he
partook to an extent which would have astonished many a hardy
Scotsman. One summers day, several years later, he again came to
dinner, and having come on foot, entered the house by a garden door,
his first words--without any previous greetings--were: 'Is there a
haggis to-day?'" {386a}

CHAPTER XXIV: LAVENGRO--1843-1851

During all these years Lavengro had been making progress towards
completion, irregular and spasmodic it would appear; but still each
year brought it nearer to the printer. "I cannot get out of my old
habits," Borrow wrote to Dawson Turner (15th January 1844), "I find I
am writing the work . . . in precisely the same manner as The Bible
in Spain, viz., on blank sheets of old account books, backs of
letters, etc. In slovenliness of manuscript I almost rival Mahomet,
who, it is said, wrote his Coran on mutton spade bones." "His
[Borrow's] biography will be passing strange if he tells the WHOLE
truth," Ford writes to a friend (27th February 1843). "He is now
writing it by my advice. I go on . . . scribbling away, though with
a palpitating heart," Borrow informs John Murray (5th February 1844),
"and have already plenty of scenes and dialogues connected with my
life, quite equal to anything in The Bible in Spain. The great
difficulty, however, is to blend them all into a symmetrical whole."
On 17th September 1846 he writes again to his publisher:

"I have of late been very lazy, and am become more addicted to sleep
than usual, am seriously afraid of apoplexy. To rouse myself, I rode
a little time ago to Newmarket. I felt all the better for it for a
few days. I have at present a first rate trotting horse who affords
me plenty of exercise. On my return from Newmarket, I rode him
nineteen miles before breakfast."

Another cause of delay was the "shadows" that were constantly
descending upon him. His determination to give only the best of
which he was capable, is almost tragic in the light of later events.
To his wife, he wrote from London (February 1847): "Saw M[urray] who
is in a hurry for me to begin [the printing]. I will not be hurried
though for anyone."

In the Quarterly Review, July 1848, under the heading of Mr Murray's
List of New Works in Preparation, there appeared the first
announcement of Lavengro, an Autobiography, by George Borrow, Author
of The Bible in Spain, etc., 4 vols. post 8vo. This was repeated in
October. During the next two months the book was advertised as Life;
A Drama, in The Athenaeum and The Quarterly Review, and the first
title-page (1849) was so printed. On 7th October John Murray wrote
asking Borrow to send the manuscript to the printer. This was
accordingly done, and about two-thirds of it composed. Then Borrow
appears to have fallen ill. On 5th January 1849 John Murray wrote to
Mrs Borrow:

"I trust Mr Borrow is now restored to health and tranquillity of
mind, and that he will soon be able to resume his pen. I desire this
on his own account and for the sake of poor Woodfall [the printer],
who is of course inconvenienced by having his press arrested after
the commencement of the printing."

Writing on 27th November 1849, John Murray refers to the work having
been "first sent to press--now nearly eighteen months." This is
clearly a mistake, as on 7th October 1848, thirteen and a half months
previously, he asks Borrow to send the manuscript to the printer that
he may begin the composition. John Murray was getting anxious and
urges Borrow to complete the work, which a year ago had been offered
to the booksellers at the annual trade-dinner.

"I know that you are fastidious, and that you desire to produce a
work of distinguished excellence. I see the result of this labour in
the sheets as they come from the press, and I think when it does
appear it will make a sensation," wrote the tactful publisher.
"Think not, my dear friend," replied Borrow, "that I am idle. I am
finishing up the concluding part. I should be sorry to hurry the
work towards the last. I dare say it will be ready by the middle of
February." The correspondence grew more and more tense. Mrs Borrow
wrote to the printer urging him to send to her husband, who has been
overworked to the point of complaint, "one of your kind encouraging
notes." Later Borrow went to Yarmouth, where sea-bathing produced a
good effect upon his health; but still the manuscript was not sent to
the despairing printer. "I do not, God knows! wish you to overtask
yourself," wrote the unhappy Woodfall; "but after what you last said,
I thought I might fully calculate on your taking up, without further
delay, the fragmentary portions of your 1st and 2nd volumes and let
us get them out of hand."

Letters continued to pass to and fro, but the balance of manuscript
was not forthcoming until November 1850, when Mrs Borrow herself took
it to London. Another trade-dinner was at hand, and John Murray had
written to Mrs Borrow, "If I cannot show the book then--I must throw
it up." To Mrs Borrow this meant tragedy. The poor woman was
distracted, and from time to time she begs for encouraging letters.
In response to one of these appeals, John Murray wrote with rare
insight into Borrow's character, and knowledge of what is most likely
to please him: "There are passages in your book equal to De Foe."

The preface when eventually submitted to John Murray disturbed him
somewhat. "It is quaint," he writes to Mrs Borrow, "but so is
everything that Mr Borrow writes." He goes on to suggest that the
latter portion looks too much as if it had been got up in the
interests of "Papal aggression," and he calls attention to the oft-
repeated "Damnation cry". There appears to have been some
modification, a few "Damnation Cries" omitted, the last sheet passed
for press, and on 7th February 1851 Lavengro was published in an
edition of three thousand copies, which lasted for twenty-one years.

The appearance of Lavengro was indeed sensational: but not quite in
the way its publisher had anticipated. Almost without exception the
verdict was unfavourable. The book was attacked vigorously. The
keynote of the critics was disappointment. Some reviews were purely
critical, others personal and abusive, but nearly all were
disapproving. "Great is our disappointment" said the Athenaeum. "We
are disappointed," echoed Blackwood. Among the few friendly notices
was that of Dr Hake, in which he prophesied that "Lavengro's roots
will strike deep into the soil of English letters." Even Ford wrote
(8th March):

"I frankly own that I am somewhat disappointed with the very LITTLE
you have told us about YOURSELF. I was in hopes to have a full,
true, and particular account of your marvellously varied and
interesting biography. I do hope that some day you will give it to
us."

In this chorus of dispraise Borrow saw a conspiracy. "If ever a book
experienced infamous and undeserved treatment," he wrote, {390a} "it
was that book. I was attacked in every form that envy and malice
could suggest." In The Romany Rye he has done full justice to the
subject, exhibiting the critics with blood and foam streaming from
their jaws. In the original draft of the Advertisement to the same
work he expresses himself as "proud of a book which has had the
honour of being rancorously abused and execrated by every unmanly
scoundrel, every sycophantic lacquey, and EVERY POLITICAL AND
RELIGIOUS RENEGADE in Britain." A few years previously, Borrow had
written to John Murray, "I have always myself. If you wish to please
the public leave the matter [the revision of The Zincali] to me."
{391a} From this it is evident that Borrow was unprepared for
anything but commendation from critics and readers.

Dr Bowring had some time previously requested the editor of The
Edinburgh Review to allow him to review Lavengro; but no notice ever
appeared. In all probability he realised the impossibility of
writing about a book in which he and his family appeared in such an
unpleasant light. It is unlikely that he asked for the book in order
to prevent a review appearing in The Edinburgh, as has been
suggested.

In the Preface, Lavengro is described as a dream; yet there can be
not a vestage of doubt that Borrow's original intention had been to
acknowledge it as an autobiography. This work is a kind of biography
in the Robinson Crusoe style, he had written in 1844. This he
contradicted in the Appendix to The Romany Rye; yet in his manuscript
autobiography {391b} (13th Oct. 1862) he says: "In 1851 he published
Lavengro, a work in which he gives an account of his early life."
Why had Borrow changed his mind?

When Lavengro was begun, as a result of Ford's persistent appeals,
Borrow was on the crest of the wave of success. He saw himself the
literary hero of the hour. The Bible in Spain was selling in its
thousands. The press had proclaimed it a masterpiece. He had seen
himself a great man. The writer of a great book, however, does not
occupy a position so kinglike in its loneliness as does gentleman a
gypsy, round whom flock the gitanos to kiss his hand and garments as
if he were a god or a hero. The literary and social worlds that The
Bible in Spain opened to Borrow were not to be awed by his mystery,
or, disciplined into abject hero-worship by one of those steady
penetrating gazes, which cowed jockeys and alguacils. They claimed
intellectual kinship and equality, the very things that Borrow had no
intention of conceding them. He would have tolerated their
"gentility nonsense" if they would have acknowledged his paramountcy.
He found that to be a social or a literary lion was to be a tame
lion, and he was too big for that. His conception of genius was that
it had its moods, and mediocrity must suffer them.

Borrow would rush precipitately from the house where he was a guest;
he would be unpardonably rude to some inoffensive and well-meaning
woman who thought to please him by admiring his books; he would
magnify a fight between their respective dogs into a deadly feud
between himself and the rector of his parish: thus he made enemies
by the dozen and, incidentally, earned for himself an extremely
unenviable reputation. A hero with a lovable nature is twice a hero,
because he is possessed of those qualities that commend themselves to
the greater number. Wellington could never be a serious rival in a
nation's heart to dear, weak, sensitive, noble Nelson, who lived for
praise and frankly owned to it.

Borrow's lovable qualities were never permitted to show themselves in
public, they were kept for the dingle, the fireside, or the inn-
parlour. That he had a sweeter side to his nature there can be no
doubt, and those who saw it were his wife, his step-daughter, and his
friends, in particular those who, like Mr Watts-Dunton and Mr A.
Egmont Hake, have striven for years to emphasise the more attractive
part of his strange nature.

Borrow's attitude towards literature in itself was not calculated to
gain friends for him. He was uncompromisingly and caustically severe
upon some of the literary idols of his day, men who have survived
that terrible handicap, contemporary recognition and appreciation.

He was not a deep reader, hardly a reader at all in the accepted
meaning of the word. He frankly confessed that books were to him of
secondary importance to man as a subject for study. In his
criticisms of literature, he was apt to confuse the man with his
works. His hatred of Scott is notorious; it was not the artist he so
cordially disliked, but the politician; he admitted that Scott "wrote
splendid novels about the Stuarts." {393a} He hailed him as "greater
than Homer;" {393b} but the House of Stuart he held in utter
detestation, and when writing or speaking of Scott he forgot to make
a rather necessary distinction. He wrote:

"He admires his talents both as a prose writer and a poet; as a poet
especially. {393c} . . . As a prose writer he admires him less, it
is true, but his admiration for him in that capacity is very high,
and he only laments that he prostituted his talents to the cause of
the Stuarts and gentility . . . in conclusion, he will say, in order
to show the opinion which he entertains of the power of Scott as a
writer, that he did for the spectre of the wretched Pretender what
all the kings of Europe could not do for his body--placed it on the
throne of these realms." {393d}

In later years Borrow paid a graceful tribute to Scott's memory.
When at Kelso, in spite of the rain and mist, he "trudged away to
Dryburgh to pay my respects to the tomb of Walter Scott, a man with
whose principles I have no sympathy, but for whose genius I have
always entertained the most intense admiration." {393e} It was just
the same with Byron, "for whose writings I really entertained
considerable admiration, though I had no particular esteem for the
man himself." {393f}

With Wordsworth it was different, and it was his cordial dislike of
his poetry that prompted Borrow to introduce into The Romany Rye that
ineffectual episode of the man who was sent to sleep by reading him.
Tennyson he dismissed as a writer of "duncie books."

For Dickens he had an enthusiastic admiration as "a second Fielding,
a young writer who . . . has evinced such talent, such humour,
variety and profound knowledge of character, that he charms his
readers, at least those who have the capacity to comprehend him."
{394a} He was delighted with The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.

His reading was anything but thorough, in fact he occasionally showed
a remarkable ignorance of contemporary writers. Mr A. Egmont Hake
tells how:

"His conversation would sometimes turn on modern literature, with
which his acquaintance was very slight. He seemed to avoid reading
the products of modern thought lest his own strong opinions should
undergo dilution. We were once talking of Keats whose fame had been
constantly increasing, but of whose poetry Borrow's knowledge was of
a shadowy kind, when suddenly he put a stop to the conversation by
ludicrously asking, in his strong voice, 'Have they not been trying
to resuscitate him?'" {394b}

By the time that Lavengro appeared, Borrow was estranged from his
generation. The years that intervened between the success of The
Bible in Spain and the publication of Lavengro had been spent by him
in war; he had come to hate his contemporaries with a wholesome,
vigorous hatred. He would give them his book; but they should have
it as a stray cur has a bone--thrown at them. Above all, they should
not for a moment be allowed to think that it contained an intimate
account of the life of the supreme hater who had written it. When
there had been sympathy between them, Borrow was prepared to allow
his public to peer into the sacred recesses of his early life. Now
that there was none, he denied that Lavengro was more than "a dream",
forgetting that he had so often written of it as an autobiography,
had even seen it advertised as such, and insisted that it was
fiction.

When Lavengro was published Borrow was an unhappy and disappointed
man. He had found what many other travellers have found when they
come home, that in the wilds he had left his taste and toleration for
conventional life and ideas. The life in the Peninsula had been
thoroughly congenial to a man of Borrow's temperament: hardships,
dangers, imprisonments,--they were his common food. He who had
defied the whole power of Spain, found himself powerless to prevent
his Rector from keeping a dog, or a railway line from being cut
through his own estate and his peace of mind disturbed by the rumble
of trains and the shriek of locomotive-whistles. He had beaten the
Flaming Tinman and Count Ofalia, but Samuel Morton Peto had
vanquished and put him to flight by virtue of an Act of Parliament,
in all probability without being conscious of having achieved a
signal victory. Borrow's life had been built up upon a wrong
hypothesis: he strove to adapt, not himself to the Universe; but the
Universe to himself.

It is easy to see that a man with this attitude of mind would regard
as sheer vindictiveness the adverse criticism of a book that he had
written with such care, and so earnest an endeavour to maintain if
not improve upon the standard created in a former work. It never for
a moment struck him that the men who had once hailed him "great",
should now admonish him as a result of the honest exercise of their
critical faculties. No; there was conspiracy against him, and he
tortured himself into a pitiable state of wrath and melancholy. A
later generation has been less harsh in its judgment. The
controversial parts of Lavengro have become less controversial and
the magnificent parts have become more magnificent, and it has taken
its place as a star of the second magnitude.

The question of what is actual autobiography and what is so coloured
as to become practically fiction, must always be a matter of opinion.
The early portion seems convincing, even the first meeting with the
gypsies in the lane at Norman Cross. It has been asked by an eminent
gypsy scholar how Borrow knew the meaning of the word "sap", or why
he addressed the gypsy woman as "my mother". When the Gypsy refers
to the "Sap there", the child replies, "what, the snake"? The
employment of the other phrase is obviously an inadvertent use of
knowledge he gained later.

In writing to Mrs George Borrow (24th March 1851) to tell her that W.
B. Donne had been unable to obtain Lavengro for The Edinburgh Review
as it had been bespoken a year previously by Dr Bowring, Dr Hake adds
that Donne had written "putting the editor in possession of his view
of Lavengro, as regards verisimilitude, vouching for the
Daguerreotype-like fidelity of the picture in the first volume, etc.,
etc., in order to prevent him from being TAKEN IN BY a spiteful
article." This passage is very significant as being written by one
of Borrow's most intimate friends, with the sure knowledge that its
contents would reach him. It leaves no room for doubt that, although
Borrow denied publicly the autobiographical nature of Lavengro, in
his own circle it was freely admitted and referred to as a life.

"What is an autobiography?" Borrow once asked Mr Theodore Watts-
Dunton (who had called his attention to several bold coincidences in
Lavengro). "Is it the mere record of the incidents of a man's life?
or is it a picture of the man himself--his character, his soul?"
{396a} Mr Watts-Dunton confirms Borrow's letters when he says "That
he [Borrow] sat down to write his own life in Lavengro I know. He
had no idea then of departing from the strict line of fact."

At times Borrow seemed to find his pictures flat, and heightened the
colour in places, as a painter might heighten the tone of a drapery,
a roof or some other object, not because the individual spot required
it, but rather because the general effect he was aiming at rendered
it necessary. He did this just as an actor rouges his face, darkens
his eyebrows and round his eyes, that he may appear to his audience a
living man and not an animated corpse.

Borrow was drawing himself, striving to be as faithful to the
original as Boswell to Johnson. Incidents! what were they? the straw
with which the bricks of personality are made. A comparison of
Lavengro with Borrow's letters to the Bible Society is instructive;
it is the same Borrow that appears in both, with the sole difference
that in the Letters he is less mysterious, less in the limelight than
in Lavengro.

Mr Watts-Dunton, with inspiration, has asked whether or not Lavengro
and The Romany Rye form a spiritual autobiography; and if they do,
whether that autobiography does or does not surpass every other for
absolute truth of spiritual representation. Borrow certainly did
colour his narrative in places. Who could write the story of his
early life with absolute accuracy? without dwelling on and
elaborating certain episodes, perhaps even adjusting them somewhat?
That would not necessarily prove them untrue.

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