Borrow’s Spanish portrait of himself was worthy of its background. Much was required of him in a world where a high fantastical acrobatic mountebankery was almost a matter of ceremony, where riders stand on their heads in passing their rivals and cooks punt a casserole over their heads to the wall behind by way of giving notice: much was required of him and he proved worthy. He saw himself, I suppose, as a great imaginative master of fiction sees a hero. His attitude cannot be called vanity: it is too consistent and continuous and its effect by far too powerful. He puts his own name into the speeches of other men in a manner that is very rare: he does not start at the sound of Don Jorge. He said to the silent archbishop: “I suppose your lordship knows who I am? . . . I am he whom the Manolos of Madrid call Don Jorgito el Ingles; I am just come out of prison, whither I was sent for circulating my Lord’s Gospel in this Kingdom of Spain.” He allows the archbishop to put this celebrity on horseback: “Vaya! how you ride! It is dangerous to be in your way.” His horses are magnificent: “What,” he asks, “what is a missionary in the heart of Spain without a horse? Which consideration induced me now to purchase an Arabian of high caste, which had been brought from Algiers by an officer of the French legion. The name of this steed, the best I believe that ever issued from the desert, was Sidi Habismilk.”

Who can forget Quesada and his two friends lording it on horseback over the crowd, and Borrow shouting “Viva Quesada,” or forget the old Moor of Tangier talking of horses?—

“‘Good are the horses of the Moslems,’ said my old friend; ‘where will you find such? They will descend rocky mountains at full speed and neither trip nor fall; but you must be cautious with the horses of the Moslems, and treat them with kindness, for the horses of the Moslems are proud, and they like not being slaves. When they are young and first mounted, jerk not their mouths with your bit, for be sure if you do they will kill you—sooner or later you will perish beneath their feet. Good are our horses, and good our riders—yea, very good are the Moslems at mounting the horse; who are like them? I once saw a Frank rider compete with a Moslem on this beach, and at first the Frank rider had it all his own way, and he passed the Moslem. But the course was long, very long, and the horse of the Frank rider, which was a Frank also, panted; but the horse of the Moslem panted not, for he was a Moslem also, and the Moslem rider at last gave a cry, and the horse sprang forward, and he overtook the Frank horse, and then the Moslem rider stood up in his saddle. How did he stand? Truly he stood on his head, and these eyes saw him. He stood on his head in the saddle as he passed the Frank rider, and he cried, Ha, ha! as he passed the Frank rider; and the Moslem horse cried, Ha, ha! as he passed the Frank breed, and the Frank lost by a far distance. Good are the Franks, good their horses; but better are the Moslems, and better the horses of the Moslems.’”

It is said that he used to ride his black Andalusian horse in Madrid with a Russian skin for a saddle and without stirrups. He had, he says, been accustomed from childhood to ride without a saddle. Yet Borrow could do without a horse. He never fails to make himself impressive. He stoops to his knee to scare a huge and ferocious dog by looking him full in the eyes. The spies, as he sat waiting for the magistrate at Madrid, whisper, “He understands the seven Gypsy jargons,” or “He can ride a horse and dart a knife full as well as if he came from my own country.” The captain of the ship tells a friend in a low voice, overheard by Borrow: “That fellow who is lying on the deck can speak Christian, too, when it serves his purpose; but he speaks others which are by no means Christian. He can talk English, and I myself have heard him chatter in Gitano with the Gypsies of Triana. He is now going amongst the Moors; and when he arrives in their country, you will hear him, should you be there, converse as fluently in their gibberish as in Christiano—nay, better, for he is no Christian himself. He has been several times on board my vessel already; but I do not like him, as I consider that he carries something about with him which is not good.”

The American at Tangier is perplexed by his speaking both Moorish and Gaelic, by hearing from an Irish woman that he is “a fairy man.”

He does not confine himself to the mysterious sublime. He tells us, for example, that Mendizabal, the Prime Minister, was a huge athletic man, “somewhat taller than myself, who measure six-feet-two without my shoes.” Several times he was mistaken for a Jew, and once for a Rabbi, by the Jews themselves. Add to this the expression that he put on for the benefit of the farrier at Betanzos: he was stooping to close the vein that had been opened in the leg of his horse, and he “looked up into the farrier’s face, arching his eyebrows. ‘Carracho! what an evil wizard!’ muttered the farrier, as he walked away.”

Mendizabal, The Spanish Minister

In the wilds he grew a beard—he had one at Jaraicejo—and it is perhaps worth noticing this, to rebut the opinion that he could not grow a beard, and that he was therefore as other men are with the same disability. He speaks more than once of his shedding tears, and at Lisbon he kissed the stone above Fielding’s grave. But these are little things of little importance in the landscape portrait which emerges from the whole of the book, of the grave adventurer, all but always equal in his boldness and his discretion, the lord of those wild ways and wild men, who “rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm” all over Spain.

In brief, he is the very hero that a wondering and waiting audience would be satisfied to see appearing upon such a stage. Except Dante on his background of Heaven and Hell, and Byron on his background of Europe and Time, no writer had in one book placed himself with greater distinction before the world. His glory was threefold. He was the man who was a Gypsy in politics, because he had lived with Gypsies so long. He was the man who said to the Spanish Prime Minister: “It is a pleasant thing to be persecuted for the Gospel’s sake.” He was the man of whom it was said by an enemy, after the affair of Benedict Mol, that Don Jorge was at the bottom of half the knavish farces in Spain.

Very little of Borrow’s effectiveness can seriously be attributed to this or that quality of style, for it will all amount to saying that he had an effective style. But it may be permissible to point out that it is also a style that is unnoticeable except for what it effects. It runs at times to rotten Victorianism, both heavy and vague, as when he calls El Greco or Domenico “a most extraordinary genius, some of whose productions possess merit of a very high order.” He is capable of calling the eye the “orb of vision,” and the moon “the beauteous luminary.” I quote a passage lest it should seem incredible:

“The moon had arisen when we mounted our horses to return to the village, and the rays of the beauteous luminary danced merrily on the rushing waters of the Tagus, silvered the plain over which we were passing, and bathed in a flood of brightness the bold sides of the calcareous hill of Villaluengo, the antique ruins which crowned its brow. . . .”

Description, taking him away from men and from his active self, often lured him into this kind of thing. And, nevertheless, such is Borrow that I should by no means employ a gentleman of refinement to go over “The Bible in Spain” and cross out the like. It all helps in the total of half theatrical and wholly wild exuberance and robustness. Another minute contributory element of style is the Biblical phrasing. His home and certainly his work for the Society had made him familiar with the Bible. He quotes it several times in passages which bring him into comparison, if not equality, with Jesus and with Paul. A little after quoting, “Ride on, because of the word of righteousness,” he writes: “I repaired to the aqueduct, and sat down beneath the hundred and seventh arch, where I waited the greater part of the day, but he came not, whereupon I arose and went into the city.” He is fond of “even,” saying, for example, or making Judah Lib say, “He bent his way unto the East, even to Jerusalem.” The “beauteous luminary” vein and the Biblical vein may be said to be inseparable from the long cloak, the sombrero, the picturesque romance and mystery of Spain, as they appeared to one for whom romance and mystery alike were never without pomp. But with all his rant he is invariably substantial, never aerial, and he chequers it in a Byronic manner with a sudden prose reference to bugs, or a question, or a piece of dialogue.

His dialogue can hardly be over-praised. It is life-like in its effect, though not in its actual phrases, and it breaks up the narrative and description over and over again at the right time. What he puts into the mouth of shepherds with whom he sits round the fire is more than twice as potent as if it were in his own narrative; he varies the point of view, and yet always without allowing himself to disappear from the scene—he, the seÑor traveller. These spoken words are, it is true, in Borrow’s own style, with little or no colloquialism, but they are simpler. They also, in their turn, are broken up by words or phrases from the language of the speaker. The effect of this must vary with the reader. The learned will not pause, some of the unlearned will be impatient. But as a glossary was afterwards granted at Ford’s suggestion, and is now to be had in the cheapest editions of “The Bible in Spain,” these few hundred Spanish or Gypsy words are at least no serious stumbling block. I find them a very distinct additional flavour in the style. A good writer can afford these mysteries. Children do not boggle at the unpronounceable names of a good book like “The Arabian Nights,” but rather use them as charms, like Izaak Walton’s marrow of the thighbone of a heron or a piece of mummy. The bullfighter speaks:

“‘Cavaliers and strong men, this cavalier is the friend of a friend of mine. Es mucho hombre. There is none like him in Spain. He speaks the crabbed Gitano, though he is an Inglesito.’

“‘We do not believe it,’ replied several grave voices. ‘It is not possible.’

“‘It is not possible, say you? I tell you it is.—Come forward, Balseiro, you who have been in prison all your life, and are always boasting that you can speak the crabbed Gitano, though I say you know nothing of it—come forward and speak to his worship in the crabbed Gitano.’

“A low, slight, but active figure stepped forward. He was in his shirt sleeves, and wore a montero cap; his features were handsome, but they were those of a demon.

“He spoke a few words in the broken Gypsy slang of the prison, inquiring of me whether I had ever been in the condemned cell, and whether I knew what a gitana was.

“‘Vamos Inglesito,’ shouted Sevilla, in a voice of thunder, ‘answer the monro in the crabbed Gitano.’

“I answered the robber, for such he was, and one, too, whose name will live for many years in the ruffian histories of Madrid—I answered him in a speech of some length, in the dialect of the Estremenian Gypsies.

“‘I believe it is the crabbed Gitano,’ muttered Balseiro. ‘It is either that or English, for I understand not a word of it.’

“‘Did I not say to you,’ cried the bullfighter, ‘that you knew nothing of the crabbed Gitano? But this Inglesito does. I understood all he said. Vaya, there is none like him for the crabbed Gitano. He is a good ginete, too; next to myself, there is none like him, only he rides with stirrup leathers too short.—Inglesito, if you have need of money, I will lend you my purse. All I have is at your service, and that is not a little; I have just gained four thousand chulÉs by the lottery. Courage, Englishman! Another cup. I will pay all—I, Sevilla!’

“And he clapped his hand repeatedly on his breast, reiterating, ‘I, Sevilla! I—’”

Borrow breaks up his own style in the same way with foreign words. As Ford said in his “Edinburgh Review” criticism:

“To use a Gypsy term for a linguist, ‘he knows the seven jargons’; his conversations and his writings resemble an intricate mosiac, of which we see the rich effect, without comprehending the design. . . . Mr. Borrow, in whose mouth are the tongues of Babel, selects, as he dashes along currente calamo, the exact word for any idiom which best expresses the precise idea which sparkles in his mind.”

This habit of Borrow’s should be compared with Lamb’s archaisms, but, better still, with Robert Burton’s interlardation of English and Latin in “The Anatomy of Melancholy.”

Here again what I may call his spotted dog style is only a part of the whole, and as the whole is effective, we solemnly conclude that this is due in part to the spotted dog. My last word is that here, as always in a good writer, the whole is greater than the mere sum of the parts, just as with a bad writer the part is always greater than the whole. Or a truer way of saying this is that many elements elude discovery, and therefore the whole exceeds the discoverable parts. Nor is this the whole truth, for the mixing is much if not all, and neither Borrow nor any critic knows anything about the mixing, save that the drink is good that comes of it.