Lavengro

“ If the conduct of Lavengro with regard to drink is open to little censure, assuredly the use which he makes of his fists is entitled to none at all. Because he has a pair of tolerably strong fists, and knows to a certain extent how to use them, is he a swaggerer or oppressor? To what ill account does he turn them? Who more quiet, gentle, and inoffensive than he? He beats off a ruffian who attacks him in a dingle; has a kind of friendly tussle with Mr. Petulengro, and behold the extent of his fistic exploits. ”

“ I, for example, simply cannot read Lavengro or get to know Borrow. Nowhere in me is there any response to his thoughts and emotions. It is true that I feel a vivid distaste for his style, which perhaps ought to be something to start on; but it does not seem to be enough to melt my icy indifference to the man and his work. I can learn nothing of myself from Lavengro, and so I can learn nothing of Borrow. It is a pity. My world might be by just so much the richer, less black-and-white. ”

“ Surely no one but Lavengro could have lived in a dingle with a girl like Belle Berners, and passed the time in trying to teach her Armenian. Without strong passion no very deeply coloured life-tapestry can, in these unadventurous days, be woven. The manufactured incidents of which there are so many in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” are introduced to give colour to a web of life that strong Passion had left untinged. ”

“ It was the spirit of Lavengro, however, that supplied the real driving power, for in his veins, clearly, the sweet passion of earth runs side by side with a strong savour of humanity. Youth, spontaneity, and enthusiasm colour these striking Caucasian pictures, for the vagabond was also a poet. You follow his adventures with the same interest you follow an engrossing novel, because you see the man and feel something of his passion. ”

“ Lavengro is full of riches. As for his courage, who else could begin a passage ‘O England,’ and emerge triumphantly a page and a half lower down as Borrow does in The Bible in Spain?
O England! long, long may it be ere the sun of thy glory sink beneath the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous clouds are now gathering rapidly round thee, still, still may it please the Almighty to disperse them, and to grant thee a futurity longer in duration and still brighter in renown than thy past! ”

“ Now, this class of individuals entertain a mortal hatred for ‘Lavengro’ and its writer, and never lose an opportunity of vituperating both. It is true that such hatred is by no means surprising. There is certainly a great deal of difference between Lavengro and their own sons; the one thinking of independence and philology, whilst he is clinking away at kettles, and hammering horse-shoes in dingles ”

“ Alas, as is so often the case in life, Lavengro and the reader are only just beginning to realise the beauty and the value of the “bellissima,” as the man in black calls her, when she is on the point of sinking beneath our horizon, passing away like the brief music of an aubade. ”

“ What motive, save a love for what is low, could induce him to do such things? Would the writer have everybody who is in need of recreation go into the country, mend kettles under hedges, and make pony shoes in dingles? To such an observation the writer would answer, that Lavengro had an excellent motive in doing what he did, but that the writer is not so unreasonable as to wish everybody to do the same. It is not everybody who can mend kettles. It is not everybody who is in similar circumstances to those in which Lavengro was. ”

“ Armenian merchants cuff deaf and dumb clerks in London counting-houses; prize-fighters, dog-fanciers, Methodist preachers, Romany ryes and their rawnees move on and off. Why should not strange things happen to Lavengro? Why should not strange folk suddenly make their appearance before him and as suddenly take their departure? Is he not strange himself? Did he not puzzle Mr. Petulengro, excite the admiration of Mrs. Petulengro, the murderous hate of Mrs. Herne, and drive Isopel Berners half distracted?
Nobody has, so far, attempted to write the life of George Borrow. Nor can we wonder. ”

“ Away from the dingle and Jasper his view of life is as follows—ale, Tate and Brady, and the gloves:
“But, above all, the care and providence of God are manifested in the case of Lavengro himself, by the manner in which he is enabled to make his way in the world up to a certain period, without falling a prey either to vice or poverty. ”

“ All the same, it has not, none of these three books has, the distinctive mark of first class genius that belongs to the other two in the five-volumed edition of Borrow’s Collected Works that many of us have read through more than once. Not all clever people have thought Lavengro and The Romany Rye to be thus great. A critic in the Athenaeum declared Lavengro when it was published in 1851 to be “balderdash,” while a critic writing just fifty years afterwards and writing from Norfolk, alas! ”

“ Both of their own accord introduced the subject of Lavengro. The Radical called the writer a grumbler, just as if there had ever been a greater grumbler than himself until, by the means above described, he had obtained a place; he said that the book contained a melancholy view of human nature—just as if anybody could look in his face without having a melancholy view of human nature. ”

“ Flamson—a clown—who will, perhaps, shout—“I say he is no gentleman; for who can be a gentleman who keeps no gig?”
The indifference exhibited by Lavengro for what is merely genteel, compared with his solicitude never to infringe the strict laws of honour, should read a salutary lesson. The generality of his countrymen are far more careful not to transgress the customs of what they call gentility, than to violate the laws of honour or morality. ”

“ Had Lavengro, instead of being the work of an independent mind, been written in order to further any of the thousand and one cants, and species of nonsense prevalent in England, the author would have heard much less about its not being true, both from public detractors and private censurers.
“But Lavengro pretends to be an autobiography,” say the critics; and here the writer begs leave to observe, that it would be well for people who profess to have a regard for truth, not to exhibit in every assertion which they make a most profligate disregard of it ”

“ They got gold, it is true, and titles, very nice things, no doubt; but, surely, the life of a patriot is better than all the gold and titles in the world—at least Lavengro thinks so—but Lavengro has lived more with gypsies than Scotchmen, and gypsies do not betray their brothers. It would be some time before a gypsy would hand over his brother to the harum-beck, even supposing you would not only make him a king, but a justice of the peace, and not only give him the world, but the best farm on the Holkham estate ”

“ But though Lavengro takes up smithery, which, though the Orcadian ranks it with chess-playing and harping, is certainly somewhat of a grimy art, there can be no doubt that, had he been wealthy and not so forlorn as he was, he would have turned to many things, honourable, of course, in preference. He has no objection to ride a fine horse when he has the opportunity: he has his day-dream of making a fortune of two hundred thousand pounds by becoming a merchant and doing business after the Armenian fashion ”

“ One thing, however, is certain, which is, that Lavengro did not accept the office, which if a love for what is low had been his ruling passion he certainly would have done; consequently, he refuses to do one thing which no genteel person would willingly do, even as he does many things which every genteel person would gladly do, for example, speaks Italian, rides on horseback, associates with a fashionable young man, dines with a rich genius, et cetera. Yet—and it cannot be minced—he and gentility with regard to many things are at strange divergency ”

“ To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
Your Amazonian Sinfi’s noble story!”
II. Is there a Key to “Lavengro”?
Dr. Hake, however, and those others among Borrow’s friends who are apt to smile at the way in which critics of the highest intelligence will stand baffled and bewildered before the eccentricities of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye”—some critics treating the work as autobiography spoilt, and some as spoilt fiction—forget that while it is easy to open a locked door with a key, to open a locked door without a key is a very different undertaking. ”

“ Lastly (for I love to get my devil's advocate{411} work over) , in Borrow's varied and strangely attractive gallery of portraits and characters, most observers must perceive the absence of the note of passion. I have sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a mere wayward piece of irony—a kind of conscious ascetic myth. ”

“ From what he then heard of the sharking priest, by putting two and two together, Lavengro was now able to identify him with the “man in black.” Subsequently he heard of the efforts of the same clever dialectician to overcome the Methodist preacher Peter Williams—efforts which collapsed upon the appearance of the preacher’s wife Winifred. “Wife, wife,” muttered the disconcerted priest, “if the fool has a wife he will never do for us.” ”

“ In other words, to build up the truth of the character of Lavengro, Borrow does not shrink from manipulating certain incidents and inventing others. And 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, such as the man who touched for the evil chance, and such as the hypochondriac who taught himself Chinese to ward off despair, but could not tell the time of day by looking at the clock. ”

“ A few introductions to his books, sundry encyclopaedia articles, and one or two magazine essays made up the sum total of information concerning the author of Lavengro until Dr. Knapp’s Life appeared in 1899. That Life has been severely handled by some lovers of Borrow, and lovers of Borrow are now plentiful enough. Dr. Knapp had not the cunning of the really successful biographer. ”

“ I allude to those writers of genius who, having only partially mastered the art of importing their own individual characteristics into literary forms, end their life-work as they began it, remaining to the last amateurs in literary art. Of this class of writers George Borrow is generally taken to be the very type. Was he really so?
There are 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. ”

“ Neither of these distinguished men can honestly be said ever to have acquired what is called the legal mind, a mental equipment which the younger of them had once the effrontery to define as a talent for explaining the self-evident, illustrating the obvious and expatiating on the commonplace. ‘By adopting the law,’ says Borrow, ‘I had not ceased to be Lavengro.’ He learnt Welsh when he should have been reading Blackstone. ”

“ The two great successes amongst Borrow’s Romany characters are undoubtedly Mrs. Petulengro’s mother (old Mrs. Herne) and her grandchild Leonora, but these are the two wicked characters of the group. It is impossible to imagine anything better told than the attempt of these two to poison Lavengro: it is drama of the rarest kind. The p. xvterrible ironical dialogue over the prostrate and semi-conscious Lavengro, between the child-murderess and the hag-murderess who have poisoned him, is like nothing else in literature. ”

“ In Lavengro the same thing occurs, and even more conspicuously. We cannot, by possibility, separate the ingredients of fact from those of fiction. Mr Borrow will not permit us to know whether it is an autobiography or a pure romance. ”

“ William Knapp.
An edition of Lavengro, with a valuable Introduction by Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, was published by Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., in 1893. The work is also included in Everyman’s Library, and in other series of popular reprints.
When put to press in February, 1849, the first volume of Lavengro was set up with the title-page reading as follows:—
Life, A Drama. / By / George Borrow, Esq., / Author of “The Bible in Spain,” etc. / In Three Volumes. / Vol. i. / London: / John Murray, Albemarle Street. ”

“ Borrow had a passion for depicting the class that Hurtado de Mendoza had first caught for literature in his Lazarillo (1553) —that, namely, of the old tricksters of the highway who still retained many traits, noble and ignoble, from the primeval savage. For the characteristically mean and squalid one must go up higher in the scale of civilisation.
{30} Of all the reviews of Lavengro, extraordinary as many now appear, it was left for the month of July in the year of grace 1900 to produce the most delightfully amazing. ”

“ There is no evidence that Lavengro ever offered Petulengro a Bible. Even the denunciations of Popery have a dubious sound. What is sometimes called ‘the religious world’ were no longer buyers of Borrow. Nor was ‘the polite world’ much better pleased. The polite reader was both puzzled and annoyed. First of all: Was the book true—autobiography or romance? A polite reader objects to be made a fool of. One De Foe in a couple of centuries is enough for a polite reader. ”