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 AthenÆum 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 AthenÆum. “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, [390] “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?” [396] 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.

There are, unquestionably, inconsistencies in Lavengro and The Romany Rye—they are admitted, they have been pointed out. There are many inaccuracies, it must be confessed; but because a man makes a mistake in the date of his birth or even the year, it does not prove that he was not born at all. Borrow was for ever making the most inaccurate statements about his age.

In the main Lavengro would appear to be autobiographical up to the period of Borrow’s coming to London. After this he begins to indulge somewhat in the dramatic. The meeting with the pickpocket as a thimble-rigger at Greenwich might pass muster were it not for the rencontre with the apple-woman’s son near Salisbury. The Dingle episode may be accepted, for Mr John Sampson has verified even the famous thunder-storm by means of the local press. Isopel Berners is not so easy to settle; yet the picture of her is so convincing, and Borrow was unable to do more than colour his narrative, that she too must have existed.

The failure of Lavengro is easily accounted for. Borrow wrote of vagabonds and vagabondage; it did not mitigate his offence in the eyes of the critics or the public that he wrote well about them. His crime lay in his subject. To Borrow, a man must be ready and able to knock another man down if necessity arise. When nearing sixty he lamented his childless state and said very mournfully: “I shall soon not be able to knock a man down, and I have no son to do it for me.” [398] He glorified the bruisers of England, in the face of horrified public opinion. England had become ashamed of its bruisers long before Lavengro was written, and this flaunting in its face of creatures that it considered too low to be mentioned, gave mortal offence. That in Lavengro was the best descriptions of a fight in the language, only made the matter worse. Borrow’s was an age of gentility and refinement, and he outraged it, first by glorifying vagabondage, secondly by decrying and sneering at gentility.

“Qui n’ a pas l’esprit de son Âge,
De son Âge a tout le malheur.”

And Borrow proved Voltaire’s words.

It is not difficult to understand that an age in which prize-fighting is anathema should not tolerate a book glorifying the ring; but it is strange that Borrow’s simple paganism and nature-worship should not have aroused sympathetic recognition. Poetry is ageless, and such passages as the description of the sunrise over Stonehenge should have found some, at least, to welcome them, even when found in juxtaposition with bruisers and gypsies.

Borrow loved to mystify, but in Lavengro he had overreached himself. “Are you really in existence?” wrote one correspondent who was unknown to Borrow, “for I also have occasionally doubted whether things exist, as you describe your own feelings in former days.”

John Murray wrote (8th Nov. 1851):—

“I was reminded of you the other day by an enquiry after Lavengro and its author, made by the Right Honourable John Wilson Croker. [399a] Knowing how fastidious and severe a critic he is, I was particularly glad to find him expressing a favourable opinion of it; and thinking well of it his curiosity was piqued about you. Like all the rest of the world, he is mystified by it. He knew not whether to regard it as truth or fiction. How can you remedy this defect? I call it a defect, because it really impedes your popularity. People say of a chapter or of a character: ‘This is very wonderful, if true; but if fiction it is pointless.’—Will your new volumes explain this and dissolve the mystery? If so, pray make haste and get on with them. I hope you have employed the summer in giving them the finishing touches.”

“There are,” says a distinguished critic, [399b] “passages in Lavengro which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England—unsurpassed, I mean, for mere perfection of style—for blending of strength and graphic power with limpidity and music of flow.” Borrow’s own generation would have laughed at such a value being put upon anything in Lavengro.

Another thing against the books success was its style. It lacked what has been described as the poetic ecstacy or sentimental verdure of the age. Trope, imagery, mawkishness, were all absent, for Borrow had gone back to his masters, at whose head stood the glorious Defoe. Borrow’s style was as individual as the man himself. By a curious contradiction, the tendency is to overlook literary lapses in the very man towards whom so little latitude was allowed in other directions. Many Borrovians have groaned in anguish over his misuse of that wretched word “Individual.” A distinguished man of letters [400a] has written:—“I would as lief read a chapter of The Bible in Spain as I would Gil Blas; nay, I positively would give the preference to SeÑor Giorgio.” Another critic, and a severe one, has written:—

“It is not as philologist, or traveller, or wild missionary, or folk-lorist, or antiquary, that Borrow lives and will live. It is as the master of splendid, strong, simple English, the prose Morland of a vanished road-side life, the realist who, Defoe-like, could make fiction seem truer than fact. To have written the finest fight in the whole world’s literature, the fight with the Flaming Tinman, is surely something of an achievement.” [400b]

It is Borrow’s personality that looms out from his pages. His mastery over the imagination of his reader, his subtle instinct of how to throw his own magnetism over everything he relates, although he may be standing aside as regards the actual events with which he is dealing, is worthy of Defoe himself. It is this magnetism that carries his readers safely over the difficult places, where, but for the author’s grip upon them, they would give up in despair; it is this magnetism that prompts them to pass by only with a slight shudder, such references as the feathered tribe, fast in the arms of Morpheus, and, above all, those terrible puns that crop up from time to time. There is always the strong, masterful man behind the words who, like a great general, can turn a reverse to his own advantage.

In his style perhaps, after all, lay the secret of Borrow’s unsuccess. He was writing for another generation; speaking in a voice too strong to be heard other than as a strange noise by those near to him. It may be urged that The Bible in Spain disproves these conclusions; but The Bible in Spain was a peculiar book. It was a chronicle of Christian enterprise served up with sauce picaresque. It pleased and astonished everyone, especially those who had grown a little weary of godly missioners. It had the advantage of being spontaneous, having been largely written on the spot, whereas Lavengro and The Romany Rye were worked on and laboured at for years. Above all, it had the inestimable virtue of being known to be True. To the imaginative intellectual, Truth or Fiction are matters of small importance, he judges by Art; but to the general public of limited intellectual capacity, Truth is appreciated out of all proportion to its artistic importance. If Borrow had published The Bible in Spain after the failure of Lavengro, it would in all probability have been as successful as it was appearing before.