These changes in the proof of what was afterwards called “Lavengro” were, it need hardly be said, made in order to bring the words nearer to a representation of the idea in Borrow’s brain, and nearer to a perfect harmony with one another. Take the case of Jasper Petulengro’s arm. Borrow knew the man Ambrose Smith well enough to know whether he had a long or a short arm: for did not Jasper say to him when he was dismal, “We’ll now go to the tents and put on the gloves, and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!” Possibly he had a short arm like his father, but in reading the proof it must somehow have seemed to Borrow that his Jasper Petulengro—founded on Ambrose Smith and at many points resembling him—ought to have a long arm. The short arm was true to “the facts”; the long arm was more impressive and was truer to the created character, which was more important.

It was hardly these little things that kept Borrow working at “Lavengro” for nearly half of his fourth decade and a full half of his fifth. But these little things were part of the great difficulty of making an harmonious whole by changing, cutting out and inserting. When Ford and John Murray’s reader asked him for his life they probably meant a plain statement of a few “important facts,” such facts as there could hardly be two opinions about, such facts as fill the ordinary biography or “Who’s Who.” Borrow knew well enough that these facts either produce no effect in the reader’s mind or they produce one effect here and a different one there, since the dullest mind cannot blankly receive a dead statement without some effort to give it life. Borrow was not going to commit himself to incontrovertible statements such as are or might be made to a Life Insurance Company. He had no command of a tombstone style and would not have himself circumscribed with full Christian name, date of birth, etc., as a sexton or parish clerk might have done for him. Twenty years later indeed—in 1862—he did write such an account of himself to be printed as part of an appendix to a history of his old school at Norwich. It is full of dates, but they are often inaccurate, and the years 1825 to 1833 he fills with “a life of roving adventures.” He cannot refrain from calling himself a great rider, walker and swimmer, or from telling the story of how he walked from Norwich to London—he calls it London to Norwich—in twenty-seven hours. But in 1862 he could rely on “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye”; he was an author at the end of his career, and he had written himself down to the best of his genius. The case was different in 1842.

He saw himself as a man variously and mysteriously alive, very different from every other man and especially from certain kinds of man. When you look at a larch wood with a floor of fern in October at the end of twilight, you are not content to have that wood described as so many hundred poles growing on three acres of land, the property of a manufacturer of gin. Still less was Borrow content to sit down at Oulton, while the blast howled amid the pines which nearly surround his lonely dwelling, and answer the genial Ford’s questions one by one: “What countries have you been in? What languages do you understand?” and so on. Ford probably divined a book as substantial and well-furnished with milestones as “The Bible in Spain,” and he cheerfully told Borrow to make the broth “thick and slab.”

Ford, in fact, doubled the difficulty. Not only did Borrow feel that his book must create a living soul, but the soul must be heroic to meet the expectations of Ford and the public. The equestrian group had been easy enough—himself mounted on Sidi Habismilk, with the swift Jew and the Gypsy at his side—but the life of a man was a different matter. Nor was the task eased by his exceptional memory. He claimed, as has been seen, to remember the look of the viper seen in his third year. Later, in “Lavengro,” he meets a tinker and buys his stock-in-trade to set himself up with. The tinker tries to put him off by tales of the Blazing Tinman who has driven him from his beat. Borrow answers that he can manage the Tinman one way or other, saying, “I know all kinds of strange words and names, and, as I told you before, I sometimes hit people when they put me out.” At last the tinker consents to sell his pony and things on one condition. “Tell me what’s my name,” he says; “if you can’t, may I—.” Borrow answers: “Don’t swear, it’s a bad habit, neither pleasant nor profitable. Your name is Slingsby—Jack Slingsby. There, don’t stare, there’s nothing in my telling you your name: I’ve been in these parts before, at least not very far from here. Ten years ago, when I was little more than a child, I was about twenty miles from here in a post chaise, at the door of an inn, and as I looked from the window of the chaise, I saw you standing by a gutter, with a big tin ladle in your hand, and somebody called you Jack Slingsby. I never forget anything I hear or see; I can’t, I wish I could. So there’s nothing strange in my knowing your name; indeed there’s nothing strange in anything, provided you examine it to the bottom. Now what am I to give you for the things?”

(I once heard a Gypsy give a similar and equal display of memory.) Dr. Knapp has corroborated several details of “Lavengro” which confirm Borrow’s opinion of his memory. Hearing the author whom he met on his walk beyond Salisbury, speak of the “wine of 1811, the comet year,” Borrow said that he remembered being in the market-place of Dereham, looking at that comet. {30} Dr Knapp first makes sure exactly when Borrow was at Dereham in 1811 and then that there was a comet visible during that time. He proves also from newspapers of 1820 that the fight, in the twenty sixth chapter of “Lavengro,” ended in a thunderstorm like that described by Borrow and used by Petulengro to forecast the violent end of Thurtell.

Now a brute memory like that, which cannot be gainsaid, is not an entirely good servant to a man who will not put down everything he can, like a boy at an examination. The ordinary man probably recalls all that is of importance in his past life, though he may not like to think so, but a man with a memory like Borrow’s or with a supply of diaries like Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff’s may well ask, “What is truth?” as Borrow often did. The facts may convey a false impression which an omission or a positive “lie” may correct.

A page from the author’s proof copy of “Lavengro,” showing Borrow’s significant corrections. (Photographed by kind permission of Mr. Kyllmann and Mr. Thos. Seccombe.) Photo: W. J. Roberts

Just at first, as has been seen, a month after his Christmas wine with Mr Petulengro, Borrow saw his life as a drama, perhaps as a melodrama, full of Gypsies, jockeys and horses, wild men of many lands and several murderers. “Capital subject,” he repeated. That was when he saw himself as an adventurer and Europe craning its neck to keep him in sight. But he knew well, and after the first flush he remembered, that he was not merely a robust walker, rider and philologist. When he was only eighteen he was continually asking himself “What is truth?” “I had,” he says, “involved myself imperceptibly in a dreary labyrinth of doubt, and, whichever way I turned, no reasonable prospect of extricating myself appeared. The means by which I had brought myself into this situation may be very briefly told; I had inquired into many matters, in order that I might become wise, and I had read and pondered over the words of the wise, so called, till I had made myself master of the sum of human wisdom; namely, that everything is enigmatical and that man is an enigma to himself; thence the cry of ‘What is truth?’ I had ceased to believe in the truth of that in which I had hitherto trusted, and yet could find nothing in which I could put any fixed or deliberate belief. I was, indeed, in a labyrinth! In what did I not doubt? With respect to crime and virtue I was in doubt; I doubted that the one was blameable and the other praiseworthy. Are not all things subjected to the law of necessity? Assuredly; time and chance govern all things: yet how can this be? alas!

“Then there was myself; for what was I born? Are not all things born to be forgotten? That’s incomprehensible: yet is it not so? Those butterflies fall and are forgotten. In what is man better than a butterfly? All then is born to be forgotten. Ah! that was a pang indeed; ’tis at such a moment that a man wishes to die. The wise king of Jerusalem, who sat in his shady arbours beside his sunny fishpools, saying so many fine things, wished to die, when he saw that not only all was vanity, but that he himself was vanity. Will a time come when all will be forgotten that now is beneath the sun? If so, of what profit is life? . . .

“‘Would I had never been born!’ I said to myself; and a thought would occasionally intrude. But was I ever born? Is not all that I see a lie—a deceitful phantom? Is there a world, and earth, and sky? . . .”

If he no longer articulated these doubts he was still not as sure of himself as Ford imagined. He was, by the way, seldom sure of his own age, and Dr. Knapp {31} gives four instances of his underestimating it by two and even five years. Whatever may be the explanation of this, after three years’ work at “Lavengro” he “will not be hurried for anyone.” He was probably finding that, with no notebooks or letters to help, the work was very different from the writing of “The Bible in Spain,” which was pieced together out of long letters to the Bible Society, and, moreover, was written within a few years of the events described. The events of his childhood and youth had retired into a perspective that was beyond his control: he would often be tempted to change their perspective, to bring forward some things, to set back others. In any case these things were no longer mere solid material facts. They were living a silent life of spirits within his brain. He took to calling the book his “life” or “autobiography,” not “Life: a Drama.” It was advertised as such; but he would not have it. At the last moment he refused to label it an autobiography, because he knew that it was inadequate, and that in any case other men would not understand or would misunderstand it. He must have felt certain that the fair figure of “Don Jorge,” created in “The Bible of Spain,” had been poisoned for most readers by many a passage in “Lavengro,” like that where he doubted the existence of self and sky and stars, or where he told of the breakdown in his health when he was sixteen and of the gloom that followed:

“But how much more quickly does strength desert the human frame than return to it! I had become convalescent, it is true, but my state of feebleness was truly pitiable. I believe it is in that state that the most remarkable feature of human physiology frequently exhibits itself. Oh, how dare I mention the dark feeling of mysterious dread which comes over the mind, and which the lamp of reason, though burning bright the while, is unable to dispel! Art thou, as leeches say, the concomitant of disease—the result of shattered nerves? Nay, rather the principle of woe itself, the fountain head of all sorrow co-existent with man, whose influence he feels when yet unborn, and whose workings he testifies with his earliest cries, when, ‘drowned in tears,’ he first beholds the light; for, as the sparks fly upward, so is man born to trouble, and woe doth he bring with him into the world, even thyself, dark one, terrible one, causeless, unbegotten, without a father. Oh, how frequently dost thou break down the barriers which divide thee from the poor soul of man, and overcast its sunshine with thy gloomy shadow. In the brightest days of prosperity—in the midst of health and wealth—how sentient is the poor human creature of thy neighbourhood! how instinctively aware that the floodgates of horror may be cast open, and the dark stream engulf him for ever and ever! Then is it not lawful for man to exclaim, ‘Better that I had never been born!’ Fool, for thyself thou wast not born, but to fulfil the inscrutable decrees of thy Creator; and how dost thou know that this dark principle is not, after all, thy best friend; that it is not that which tempers the whole mass of thy corruption? It may be, for what thou knowest, the mother of wisdom, and of the great works: it is the dread of the horror of the night that makes the pilgrim hasten on his way. When thou feelest it nigh, let thy safety word be ‘Onward’; if thou tarry, thou art overwhelmed. Courage! build great works—’tis urging thee—it is ever nearest the favourites of God—the fool knows little of it. Thou wouldst be joyous, wouldst thou? then be a fool. What great work was ever the result of joy, the puny one? Who have been the wise ones, the mighty ones, the conquering ones of this earth? the joyous? I believe not. The fool is happy, or comparatively so—certainly the least sorrowful, but he is still a fool; and whose notes are sweetest, those of the nightingale, or of the silly lark?

* * * * *

“‘What ails you, my child?’ said a mother to her son, as he lay on a couch under the influence of the dreadful one; ‘what ails you? you seem afraid!’

“Boy.—‘And so I am; a dreadful fear is upon me.’

“Mother.—‘But of what? there is no one can harm you; of what are you apprehensive?’

“Boy.—‘Of nothing that I can express; I know not what I am afraid of, but afraid I am.’

“Mother.—‘Perhaps you see sights and visions; I knew a lady once who was continually thinking that she saw an armed man threaten her, but it was only an imagination, a phantom of the brain.’

“Boy.—‘No armed man threatens me; and ’tis not a thing that would cause me any fear. Did an armed man threaten me, I would get up and fight him; weak as I am, I would wish for nothing better, for then, perhaps, I should lose this fear; mine is a dread of I know not what, and there the horror lies.’

“Mother.—‘Your forehead is cool, and your speech collected. Do you know where you are?’

“Boy.—‘I know where I am, and I see things just as they are; you are beside me, and upon the table there is a book which was written by a Florentine; all this I see, and that there is no ground for being afraid. I am, moreover, quite cool, and feel no pain—but, but—’

“And then there was a burst of ‘gemiti, sospiri ed alti guai.’ Alas, alas, poor child of clay! as the sparks fly upward, so wast thou born to sorrow—Onward!”

And if men passed over this as a youthful distemper, rather often recurring, what would they make of his saying that “Fame after death is better than the top of fashion in life”? Would they not accuse him of entertaining them, as he did his companion and half-sweetheart of the dingle, Isopel Berners, “with strange dreams of adventure, in which he figures in opaque forests, strangling wild beasts, or discovering and plundering the hordes of dragons; and sometimes . . . other things far more genuine—how he had tamed savage mares, wrestled with Satan, and had dealings with ferocious publishers”?

He did not simplify the matter by his preface. There he announced that the book was “a dream.” He had, he said, endeavoured to describe a dream, partly of adventure, in which will be found copious notices of books and many descriptions of life and manners, some in a very unusual form. A dream containing “copious notices of books”! A dream in three volumes and over a thousand pages! A dream which he had “endeavoured to describe”! From these three words it was necessary to suppose that it was a real dream, not a narrative introduced by the machinery of a dream, like “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and “The Dream of Fair Women.” And so it was. The book was not an autobiography but a representation of a man’s life in the backward dream of memory. He had refused to drag the events of his life out of the spirit land, to turn them into a narrative on the same plane as a newspaper, leaving readers to convert them back again into reality or not, according to their choice or ability. His life seemed to him a dream, not a newspaper obituary, not an equestrian statue on a pedestal in Albemarle Street opposite John Murray’s office.

The result was that “the long-talked-of autobiography” disappointed those who expected more than a collection of bold picaresque sketches. “It is not,” complained the “AthenÆum,” “an autobiography, even with the licence of fiction;” “the interest of autobiography is lost,” and as a work of fiction it is a failure. “Fraser’s Magazine” said that it was “for ever hovering between Romance and Reality, and the whole tone of the narrative inspires profound distrust. Nay, more, it will make us disbelieve the tales in ‘The Zincali’ and ‘The Bible in Spain.’” Another critic found “a false dream in the place of reality, a shadowy nothing in the place of that something all who had read ‘The Bible in Spain’ craved and hoped for from his pen.” His friend, William Bodham Donne, in “Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine,” explained how “Lavengro” was “not exactly what the public had been expecting.” Another friend, Whitwell Elwin, in the “Quarterly Review,” reviewing “Lavengro” and its continuation, “The Romany Rye,” not only praised the truth and vividness of the descriptions, but said that “various portions of the history are known to be a faithful narrative of Mr. Borrow’s career, while we ourselves can testify, as to many other parts of his volumes, that nothing can excel the fidelity with which he has described both men and things,” and “why under these circumstances he should envelop the question in mystery is more than we can divine. There can be no doubt that the larger part, and possibly the whole, of the work is a narrative of actual occurrences, and just as little that it would gain immensely by a plain avowal of the fact.” I have suggested that there were good reasons for not calling the work an autobiography. Dr. Knapp has shown in his fortieth chapter that the narrative was interrupted to admit lengthy references to much later events for purposes of “occult vengeance”; and that these interruptions helped to cause the delay and to change the title there can be little doubt.

Borrow was angry at the failure of “Lavengro,” and in the appendix to “The Romany Rye” he actually said that he had never called “Lavengro” an autobiography and never authorised anyone to call it such. This was not a lie but a somewhat frantic assertion that his critics were mistaken about his “dream.” In later years he quietly admitted that “Lavengro” gave an account of his early life.

Yet Dr. Knapp was not strictly and completely accurate in saying that the first volume of “Lavengro” is “strictly autobiographical and authentic as the whole was at first intended to be.” He could give no proof that Borrow’s memory went back to his third year or that he first handled a viper at that time. He could only show that Borrow’s accounts do not conflict with other accounts of the same matters. When they did conflict, Dr. Knapp was unduly elated by the discovery.

Take, for example, the sixteenth chapter of “Lavengro,” where he describes the horse fair at Norwich when he was a boy:

“The reader is already aware that I had long since conceived a passion for the equine race, a passion in which circumstances had of late not permitted me to indulge. I had no horses to ride, but I took pleasure in looking at them; and I had already attended more than one of these fairs: the present was lively enough, indeed horse fairs are seldom dull. There was shouting and whooping, neighing and braying; there was galloping and trotting; fellows with highlows and white stockings, and with many a string dangling from the knees of their tight breeches, were running desperately, holding horses by the halter, and in some cases dragging them along; there were long-tailed steeds, and dock-tailed steeds of every degree and breed; there were droves of wild ponies, and long rows of sober cart horses; there were donkeys and even mules: the last rare things to be seen in damp, misty England, for the mule pines in mud and rain, and thrives best with a hot sun above and a burning sand below. There were—oh, the gallant creatures! I hear their neigh upon the wind; there were—goodliest sight of all—certain enormous quadrupeds only seen to perfection in our native isle, led about by dapper grooms, their manes ribanded and their tails curiously clubbed and balled. Ha! ha!—how distinctly do they say, ha! ha!

“An old man draws nigh, he is mounted on a lean pony, and he leads by the bridle one of these animals; nothing very remarkable about that creature, unless in being smaller than the rest and gentle, which they are not; he is not of the sightliest look; he is almost dun, and over one eye a thick film has gathered. But stay! there is something remarkable about that horse, there is something in his action in which he differs from all the rest: as he advances, the clamour is hushed! all eyes are turned upon him—what looks of interest—of respect—and, what is this? people are taking off their hats—surely not to that steed! Yes, verily! men, especially old men, are taking off their hats to that one-eyed steed, and I hear more than one deep-drawn ah!

“‘What horse is that?’ said I to a very old fellow, the counterpart of the old man on the pony, save that the last wore a faded suit of velveteen, and this one was dressed in a white frock.

“‘The best in mother England,’ said the very old man, taking a knobbed stick from his mouth, and looking me in the face, at first carelessly, but presently with something like interest; ‘he is old like myself, but can still trot his twenty miles an hour. You won’t live long, my swain; tall and overgrown ones like thee never does; yet, if you should chance to reach my years, you may boast to thy great grand boys, thou hast seen Marshland Shales.’

“Amain I did for the horse what I would neither do for earl or baron, doffed my hat; yes! I doffed my hat to the wondrous horse, the fast trotter, the best in mother England; and I, too, drew a deep ah! and repeated the words of the old fellows around. ‘Such a horse as this we shall never see again, a pity that he is so old.’”

But Dr. Knapp informs us that the well-known trotting stallion, Marshland Shales, was not offered for sale by auction until 1827, when he was twenty-five years old, and ten years after the date implied in “Lavengro.” And what is more, Dr. Knapp concludes that Borrow must have been in Norwich in 1827, on the fair day, April 12.