CHAPTER VII

“LAVENGRO” AND HIS CRITICS

AT this period Borrow suffered frequently from attacks of melancholia; little vexations upset him terribly. He was more than once assaulted by roughs while on his way home to Oulton from Lowestoft, and the remedy that occurred to him was that he should be made a magistrate so that he might take short measures with the ruffians who infested the woods. He applied in various quarters for this appointment. But the Whigs were in and Borrow was a Tory. Neither the influence of Lockhart nor the admiration which Gladstone entertained for “The Bible in Spain” sufficed to prevail against the eternal principle of “the spoils to the victors.”

In connection with this episode, as may be imagined, several persons were placed upon Borrow’s index. Lockhart himself soon got there. When Ford’s “Handbook for Spain” appeared, the author was exceedingly anxious that Borrow should write the article on it for the _Quarterly Review_. No man could have done it with ampler knowledge or invested it with more absorbing interest than “El Gitano,” as Lockhart dubbed him in the correspondence on the subject. But the essay Borrow produced, written in ill-health, and betraying all the evidences of a jaundiced and embittered mind, was in no sense a review of Ford’s book. It was a long screed against those persons and tendencies in Spanish politics that aroused his ire. The extract given by Dr. Knapp is in the very best invective style of the Appendix. Lockhart behaved exceedingly well in the matter. He would publish the article in the _Quarterly_ if Borrow would permit him to insert extracts from Ford’s book in suitable places, so that the reader might be able to obtain some glimmering of the author’s style and subject. Borrow petulantly replied that he would not have the paper tampered with. Lockhart then very properly exercised his editorial authority, and refused to publish it. He softened the decision by suggesting that Borrow’s work would make an admirable magazine article, mentioning periodicals that would be glad to have it. The suggestion was not adopted, the article remained in proof-sheet in the hands of Murray, and Lockhart was numbered among the increasing army of Borrow’s mortal enemies. It was an unhappy sequel to this incident that the friendship between Ford and Borrow cooled off, and their intercourse ceased altogether a few years later—by no desire of Ford’s, as the correspondence shows.

More trouble arose from the obscure dispute with Bowring, in which Borrow accused him of palming off upon the House of Commons as his own the Manchu-Tartar version of the Scriptures that Borrow had printed at St. Petersburg, in order to get for himself the consulship at Canton, while at the same time affecting to promote the candidature of Borrow for the post. To any impartial mind the evidence in favour of this theory is scanty, and the theory itself improbable. That Borrow believed it there can be no doubt; it tinged his life with added gall and wormwood, and helped to divert the course and purpose of his book. A further grievance was the failure of the British Museum trustees to get the funds for a mission to the Convent of St. Catharine on Sinai in search of the manuscript of the fourth-century Greek Testament, afterwards acquired by Tischendorf for Alexander II. of Russia. But it would be tiresome to follow all the convolutions of Borrow’s tempers and jealousies throughout these troubled years. They are amply reflected in many portions of the literary work he was doing.

Time drifted, and it was 1848 before Murray could make a definite announcement about “Lavengro.” In that year appeared in his “list of new works in preparation” the following:—“‘Lavengro’: An Autobiography. By George Borrow, author of ‘The Bible in Spain,’ etc. 3 vols., post 8vo.” In October the first volume went to press, and then there was more vacillation about the title of the book. It was advertised in the _Quarterly Review_ and the _Athenæum_ in November, and December as “Life: A Drama.” That form was immediately dropped. Borrow was taken ill and work ceased. In July, 1849, the old advertisement describing it as an autobiography was restored, though we well know now that by this time it had ceased to be autobiographical in the conventional sense. Finally the pangs of labour ended with the year 1850, and “Lavengro—The Scholar—The Gypsy—The Priest” was delivered to the reading world and to the tender mercies of the critics in February, 1851.

It will be seen that the autobiographical claim was abandoned at the last. In the preface, which he accomplished just in time to get it to press, Borrow modified his description of the book: “In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe a _Dream_.” Later he denied that he ever said it was an autobiography, or that he ever authorised anybody else to say it was; this in spite of the advertisements quoted above, and of the general impression he had allowed to be created that he was writing an account of his life.

Yet, in fact, “Lavengro” is little else. It followed faithfully the original plan throughout the first volume. Then came Borrow’s journey in the East and his return to accumulate hatreds, nurse revenges, and conduct wordy war with the battalions of his imaginary foes. And, in order to vent his spleen upon them, he deliberately altered the tenour of his book. The episodes of travel on the English roads were already protracting themselves beyond manageable length when events occurred that determined him to reject the whole scheme of the two remaining volumes first designed, and to extend these episodes still further so as to drag in some of his pet aversions and exhibit them in a disgraceful or ridiculous light. Particularly did he pour forth the vials of his wrath upon Bowring, the Old Radical, inserting the incident of the postilion and his story specially for the purpose.

But while Borrow was down in the summer-house at Oulton writing marvellous pages on odd scraps of paper, probing profound depths of speculation, and rising to the dizziest heights of natural eloquence, while he allowed himself to be possessed and fascinated by the gypsies and the jockeys, the tramps and the wastrels, the thimble-engroes and the pugilists, and all the weird company that defile through the haunting pages of his book, while the development of Catholic missions in England diverted his ultra-Protestant mind to the machinations of mythical Jesuits and gave him the figure of the Man in Black; while he piled rage and scorn upon the devoted head of John Bowring, who added to his other sins against the Borrovian covenant a characteristically Unitarian indifference to the “No Popery” cry {132}—all this time “Lavengro” was not making much progress with his life, the publisher was appealing to him to hurry, and the hungry printer was sending up pitiable cries for “copy.” Borrow, having gone off on a branch line, utterly declined to return. He had occupied nearly two volumes in describing the events of a few months—from his descent upon London and Sir Richard Phillips to his sojourn in Mumper’s Dell. He was in the middle of the postilion’s story, wherein the Old Radical was receiving his shrewdest knocks, when Murray issued his ultimatum, and Mrs. Borrow was despatched to London with the last of the manuscript (November, 1850). He had been obliged to break off abruptly, for Murray threatened, if the book were not finished there and then, to “throw it up.” Promising himself to complete the narrative in a sequel, Borrow left “Lavengro” as we have it now. The reviewers and the reading world, instead of the autobiography in common form which they had been led to expect, received a picaresque hotch-potch about which the best they could find to say was that it was “remarkable.”

The almost unanimous verdict of the critics was highly unfavourable. The _Athenæum_ (whose review was written by Dilke) spoke of the warm expectations that had been raised and the great disappointment that was felt; _Fraser_, in which William Stirling (Sir William Stirling-Maxwell) discussed it, was vigorously satirical about Borrow’s trivial mystifications, his dashes, dots, and asterisks; _Blackwood_ was “sick of the Petulengros and their jargon,” and its reviewer acutely perceived the internal evidence of the changes in plan and disposition which had been made while the work was in progress. The two persons who found anything good to say about the book were friends of Borrow—Dr. Gordon Hake and Mr. W. B. Donne. It is curious that these were the only reviewers who displayed much prescience in their criticism. Hake took the bold course of prophecy: “Lavengro’s” roots, he said, would strike deep into the soil of English letters. Donne perceived that, as he said, the public had been looking for a second Marco Polo, and were presented instead with a nineteenth-century Defoe.

In spite, however, of all that could be said in its favour, the public would have none of “Lavengro.” Three thousand copies of the first edition were printed. Notwithstanding Murray’s confident prophecy that it would find a ready sale, it fell almost lifeless, and twenty-one years passed before another edition was called for. It is a little difficult to understand the attitude of the public and the Press towards a work which, in spite of its obvious faults, is one of the most virile and most entrancing works of English literature. The true explanation is to be found in the theory suggested by Mr. Watts-Dunton. “Lavengro” was a complete failure, he said, and its reception by the Press, the accusations of “lowness and vulgarity,” embittered Borrow. Why was it that the public of that day considered such books as “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” to be low and vulgar? The fact was that “Lavengro,” issuing forth in the year of the great Exhibition, made its bow before the most genteel and most philistine age of Victorian literature. A writer hardly dared to admit that a man was a man or a woman a woman. We have arrived at the other extreme in the process of emancipating ourselves from philistinism, and there is no excuse in Art or Nature for many of the books written and published at the present time. But the reception of “Lavengro” was largely due to the mawkish sentiment against which Borrow hysterically declaimed as “gentility-nonsense,” and we have fortunately outgrown it. In time readers came to see the extraordinary merits of Borrow’s books; they bought them as they were re-issued, read them, liked them, and will go on reading and liking them. Gypsyism has, in fact, become popular in the genteelest circles.

Many years ago Mr. Watts-Dunton succeeded in throwing a gleam of light upon Borrow’s own view of the work. He tells us how, when they were discussing the question of the real nature of autobiography, Borrow exclaimed, “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?” And Mr. Watts-Dunton adds observations applying the inference to Borrow’s book. He points out what we have already seen—that he sat down to write his own life in “Lavengro,” and that 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 was 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,” says Mr. Watts-Dunton, “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.”

This view of the eccentricities and purple patches of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” is interesting, and certainly just to a point. It does not account for the whole of the leaps that Borrow took in one direction and another; it does not explain Mr. Platitude, or the Man in Black, or the Old Radical. The reason for their creation has been already stated. The “instinct of wonder,” the Celtic imagination, now brooding, now soaring, does, however, explain much in the books that cannot be explained by reference to actual facts of the author’s career, and does justify in a sense his theory of autobiography—that the truest self-revelation may be found not so much in the mere recital of bare facts as in the impression of the form of his thought, and in the reflection of the colours that glow in his soul.

If the year of the great Exhibition was an unfortunate year for the commercial fortunes of “Lavengro,” the Exhibition itself had certain irresistible attractions for “Lavengro’s” author. It had drawn to London a large congregation of the peoples of the earth, and the thought that in Hyde Park twenty languages were chiming a rare cacophony was too much for him. He went off to town to see the show, taking his step-daughter with him. The tall man with the white hair, striding about under the glass roof, soon began to create a minor sensation, which was by no means to the liking of Miss Clarke. To see a group of foreigners in converse was enough for him. He went up to them and addressed them in their own tongue, and repeated the process so often that it began to be whispered about that he was “uncanny,” and he excited so much remark that his daughter thought it better to drag him away.

While Borrow was at Oulton struggling with the composition of “Lavengro,” quarrelling with the vicar, denouncing Sir Morton Peto, procrastinating with his publisher, and passing some of the most miserable, if the most fruitful years of his life, he made an acquaintance which ripened into an important and valuable friendship. The Misses Harvey introduced the Borrows to Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, then resident as a physician at Bury St. Edmund’s—the friendly critic of “Lavengro” already mentioned. Visits were paid and repaid by the two families at Bury and at Oulton, and a close association and familiarity grew up. Dr. Hake thus becomes one of the most trustworthy and most interesting authorities on this portion of Borrow’s life, and relates many exceedingly suggestive stories illustrating the varied and strangely contradictory phases of Borrow’s character. His sketch of the personality of his friend, inscribed in his “Memoirs,” has often been quoted. Its principal value is that it brings out with the authority of a medical man the cause of much that frequently seems inexplicable in Borrow—his native hypochondria, and the reason for his violent antipathy towards society, and especially “genteel” society: “Society he loved and hated alike; he loved it that he might be pointed out and talked of; he hated it because he was not the prince he felt himself in its midst.” I refer again in this connection to the view proffered to me by Mr. Watts-Dunton, gleaned from intercourse with Borrow at a later period of his life, that his denunciation of respectability and “gentility-nonsense” was simply by way of revenge upon the Philistines; that he loved real respectability and good repute, worshipped fame and success, and equally hated insignificance and failure.

Dr. Hake’s anecdotes illustrate his impatience of much of the kind of fame and notice he attracted, the outbursts of violence with which he greeted people who did not appeal to him, and the intensity of his egoism. Poor Agnes Strickland was anxious to be introduced to him, and, after expressing her great admiration of his books, she begged to be allowed to send him a copy of her “Queens of England.” Borrow cried, “For God’s sake don’t, madam; I should not know what to do with them.” And, getting up, he said to Mr. Donne, of the London Library, who had introduced the ill-assorted pair, “What a d— fool that woman is!” There was Mrs. Bevan, the wife of the Suffolk banker, with whom he went to dine, Dr. Hake being of the company. Borrow knew that the bank had dealt, as he thought, rigorously with a friend who was in financial straits. Mrs. Bevan, who, of course, had no responsibility in this matter, sat next to Borrow at dinner. Dr. Hake describes her as “a simple, unpretending woman, desirous of pleasing him,” which she sought to do by describing the pleasure with which she had read his books. “Pray, what books do you mean, madam?” said Borrow. “Do you mean my account-books?” And he rose from the table, walking up and down the room during dinner, and wandered about the house till the carriage was ordered. There was Thackeray, whom he met at Hardwicke House, in Suffolk. Thackeray ventured to ask him whether he had read the “Snob Papers” in _Punch_. “In _Punch_?” said Borrow. “It is a periodical I never look at!”

Instances of his boorishness could be multiplied, but it is sufficiently proved. Let us see what there is on the other side of the account.

There is a tale told by Mr. Ewing Ritchie {140} which illustrates the fact that Borrow thoroughly detested the practice of snubbing—when he witnessed it as a third person. A clergyman at the supper table at Oulton Hall (then let to a tenant who was a Nonconformist) made an onslaught upon a young Independent minister for holding Calvinistic opinions. The occasion of this Christian dispute was the more appropriate as they had all just returned from an undenominational meeting of the Bible Society, at which Borrow had made a speech. The minister stood up to the cleric, and told him that the Thirty-nine Articles to which he had sworn assent were Calvinistic. The reply to this was that there was a mode of explaining away the Articles: we were not bound to take the words “in their natural sense.” The young Nonconformist confessed that he did not understand that way out of the difficulty, and subsided. Then Borrow stepped into the fray, “opening fire on the clergyman,” says Mr. Ritchie, “in a very unexpected manner, and giving him such a setting-down as the hearers, at any rate, never forgot. All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms was held up by Borrow to ridicule, and the clergyman was beaten at every point.” The comment of the young minister to Mr. Ritchie was, “Never did I hear one man give another such a dressing as on that occasion.” It was very like to be tremendous when Borrow had his Protestant bonnet on and at the same time thought he saw a member of the Church he loved making himself ridiculous.

The interview between Borrow and the Rev. Whitwell Elwin has been previously mentioned (p. 52). “What party are you in the Church?” he suddenly exclaimed to the Rector of Booton. “Tractarian, Moderate, or Evangelical? I am happy to say _I_ am the old High.” “I am happy to say I am _not_,” replied Elwin. A conversation thus begun with unpromising differences of opinion about the ethics of review-writing, and continued in an atmosphere of theological disputation, would ordinarily have ended in a violent quarrel. Borrow must have been in an especially benignant mood that day, for he allowed Elwin to throw aspersions upon his pronunciation of the Norfolk dialect, and yet did not bring the _séance_ to a conclusion with lightning in his eyes, thunder on his brows, and storms of invective flowing from his eloquent tongue. “Borrow boasted,” says Elwin, “of his proficiency in the Norfolk dialect, which he endeavoured to speak as broadly as possible. I told him that he had not cultivated it with his usual success.” But the clouds cleared, the protagonists became warm friends, and promised to visit each other. It does not appear that Elwin ever went to Oulton, but Borrow did go to Booton, exerted himself to please his hosts by calling upon his stores of anecdote and adventure, and entranced the children of the rectory by singing gypsy songs to them. It will be remembered that Elwin was then editing the _Quarterly Review_ as deputy for Lockhart. He begged Borrow to “try his hand at an article for the _Review_.” But Borrow was far too sore with reviews and reviewers to entertain such a proposal; the incident of Ford’s “Handbook,” too, was recent. “Never!” he cried. “I have made a resolution never to have anything to do with such a blackguard trade!”

The Booton episode is related mainly because it offers an opportunity of referring to a trait of Borrow which has been the subject of strange misrepresentation. Dr. Jessopp wrote for the _Daily Chronicle_ {142} a review of a new edition of “The Romany Rye,” in which the following remarkable passage occurred:

“Of anything like animal passion there is not a trace in all his many volumes. Not a hint that he ever kissed a woman or ever took a little child upon his knee. He was beardless; his voice was not the voice of a man. His outbursts of wrath never translated themselves into uncontrollable acts of violence; they showed themselves in all the rancorous hatred that could be put into words—the fire smouldered in that sad heart of his. Those big bones and huge muscles and the strong brain were never to be reproduced in an offspring to be proud of. How if he were the Narses of literature—one who could be only what he was, though we are always inclined to lament that he was not something more?”

One does not care to discuss the principal suggestion here involved, save to say that there is not a tittle of evidence to support it, that it cannot be believed by any student of some of the most robust and most virile works in the English language, and that the alleged facts upon which it is based have been categorically contradicted by Mr. Thomas Hake (the eldest son of Dr. Gordon Hake) in an interesting letter to Mr. Watts-Dunton. {143} This gentleman, the author of several novels, who knew more of Borrow than anyone else, must not be confounded with his younger brother, Mr. Egmont Hake (mentioned on page 8), the well-known author of “The Story of Chinese Gordon.” It will be a great pity if Mr. Thomas Hake does not give us his reminiscences of the author of “Lavengro.” One point, however, of Dr. Jessopp’s impeachment of Borrow may be taken up without offence. There is not a hint, says Dr. Jessopp, that Borrow “ever kissed a woman or ever took a little child upon his knee.” It is a new demand upon biographers that they shall record, even by way of hint, the osculatory adventures of their heroes, and possibly the best reply is that there is certainly no hint that he never kissed a woman, and there is plenty of testimony to the fact that he was no misogynist. But if a hint will suffice it may be found in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s account of the conversation between them and the gypsy woman Perpinia, whom he warned against smoking tobacco while she was suckling an infant: “It ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,” growled Borrow. “Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale tobacco—pheugh!” The inference is so obvious that one need not pursue the argument by inversion of the story. When one comes to Dr. Jessopp’s picture of Borrow in his relation to children, however, there is a large quantity of direct evidence gathered from many quarters which proves it to be erroneous. Mr. Thomas Hake, in the letter just cited, says:

“When our family lived at Bury St. Edmund’s in the ’fifties, my father, as you know, was one of Borrow’s most intimate friends, and he was frequently at our house, and Borrow and my father were a good deal in correspondence (as Dr. Knapp’s book shows), and my impression of Borrow is exactly the contrary of that which it would be if he in the least resembled Dr. Jessopp’s description of him. At that time George was in the nursery and I was a child. He took a wonderfully kind interest in us all . . . but the one he took most notice of was George, chiefly because he was a very massive child. It was then that he playfully christened him ‘Hales,’ because he said that the child would develop into a second ‘Norfolk giant.’ You will remember that he always addressed George by that name.”

The truth is that Borrow was exceedingly fond of children. He appealed strongly to them. No such impression as he made upon the Elwin children at Booton, upon the boys of Dr. Gordon Hake’s family at Bury, upon the Cornish children he encountered in 1854 (p. 170), was ever made by a man who did not understand children and sympathise with them.

The chronicle to the end of 1853 may be very briefly recounted. Borrow’s mother had been persuaded in 1849 to leave the house in Willow Lane, Norwich, where she had lived alone ever since his departure for St. Petersburg, and take up her quarters with the family at Oulton. In the midst of the writing of “The Romany Rye” in 1853, Dr. Hake ordered Borrow’s wife not to remain at Oulton during the coming winter. Borrow himself welcomed the prospect of a change, and in August he and the three women of his household removed to Yarmouth, where they lived in lodgings for seven years, except when they were engaged in the excursions which he presently organised in various parts of the United Kingdom.