The Life of George Borrow [174]
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." {398a} 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 age, De son age 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. 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, {399a} "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,
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." {398a} 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 age, De son age 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. 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, {399a} "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,