to show the effect of a long solitude upon the human heart and mind; but it was not so—it was simply to bring into fiction a series of incidents and adventures of extraordinary interest and picturesqueness—incidents such as did in part happen to Alexander Selkirk.  But Defoe was a much greater artist than he is generally credited with being, and he had sufficient of the artistic instinct to know that, interesting as these external incidents were in themselves, they could be made still more interesting by humanizing them—by making it appear that they worked as a great life-lesson for the man who experienced them, and that this was why the man recorded them.  Those moralizings of Crusoe upon the way in which the disasters of his life came upon him as “judgments,” on account of his running away from his parents, seem to humanize the wheels of circumstance.  They create in the reader’s mind the interest in the man’s personality which Defoe wished to create.

In reply to my criticism, Borrow said, “May not the same be said of Le Sage’s ‘Gil Blas’?”

And when I pointed out to him that there was a kind of kinship between the two writers in this particular he asked me to indicate in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” such incidents in which Defoe’s method had been followed by himself as had struck me.  I pointed out several of them.  Borrow, as a rule, was not at all given to frank discussion of his own artistic methods, indeed, he had a great deal of the instinct of the literary histrio—more than I have ever seen in any other writer—but he admitted that he had consciously in part and in part unconsciously adopted Defoe’s method.  The fact is, as I said to Borrow on that occasion, and as I have since had an opportunity of saying more fully in print, there are two kinds of autobiographic stories, and these two kinds are, if properly examined, really more unlike each other than the autobiographic form is unlike what is generally supposed to be its antithesis—the historic form.  In one kind of autobiographic story, of which “Rob Roy” is a typical example, the narrator, though nominally the protagonist, is really not much more than the passive eye-witness of the dramatic action—not much more than the chorus to other characters who govern, or at least influence, the main issue.  Inasmuch as he is an eye-witness of the dramatic action, he gives to it the authenticity of direct testimony.  Through him the narrative gains a commonplace ἀπάτη such as is beyond the scope of the scattered forces of the historic form, howsoever powerfully handled.  By the first-hand testimony of the eye-witness Frank Osbaldistone in Scott’s fascinating novel, the more active characters, those who really control the main issue, Di Vernon, Rashleigh Osbaldistone, Rob, and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, are painted in much more vivid and much more authentic colours than the method of the historic form would allow.

It is in the nature of things that this kind of autobiographic fiction, howsoever strong may be the incidents, is not nearly so absorbing as is the other kind I am going to instance, the psychological, to which “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” belong; for in literature, as in life, the more interest we feel in the character, the more interest we feel in what befalls the character.  Unlike the kind of autobiographic fiction typified by “Rob Roy,” in which, as I have said, the main issue is little influenced and not at all controlled by the narrator but by other characters, or, if not by other characters, by the wheels of circumstance;—in the psychological kind of autobiographic fiction, the personality of the narrator controls, or largely controls, the main issue of the dramatic action.  In other words, the incidents in the latter kind of autobiographic fiction are selected and marshalled for the purpose of declaring the character of the narrator.  The most superb exemplars of this kind of autobiographic narrative are stories which in all other respects are extremely unlike Borrow’s—“Caleb Williams,” “Manon Lescaut,” “Jane Eyre,” and “Villette.”

A year or two ago I recurred to this subject in some comments I made upon some judgments of a well-known and admirable critic.  I will take the liberty of referring here to one or two of the remarks I then made, for they seem to bear very directly upon Borrow’s method as compared with Defoe’s.  The same artistic instinct which we see in Defoe and in Borrow’s quasi autobiographic work is exhibited by the Abbé Prévost in “Manon Lescaut.”  The real object of the last-mentioned story (which, it will be remembered, is an episode in a much longer story) was to paint vivid pictures of the careless life of Paris at the period of the story, and especially to paint in vivid colours a kind of character which is essentially peculiar to Paris, the light-hearted, good-natured, unheeding grisette.  But by making it appear that the incidents in Chevalier des Grieux’s life are selected by him in order to show the effect of the life-lesson upon himself, Prévost gives to every incident the piquancy which properly belongs to this, the psychological form of autobiographic fiction.  It must, however, be admitted that at its best the autobiographic form of fiction is rarely, very rarely, broad enough to be a satisfactory form of art, even when, as in “The Woman in White,” the story consists of a series of autobiographic narratives stitched together.  It was this difficulty which confronted Dickens when he wrote “Bleak House.”  When he was writing “David Copperfield” he had felt the sweetness and fascination of writing in the autobiographic form, and had seen the sweetness and fascination of reading it; but he also felt how constricted the form is in regard to breadth, and it occurred to him that he could combine the two forms—that he could give in the same book the sweetness and the fascination and the authenticity of the autobiographic form and the breadth and variety of the historic form.  To bring into an autobiographic narrative the complex and wide-spreading net that forms the story of “Bleak House” was, of course, impossible, and so he mixed up the chapters of Esther Summerson’s autobiographic narrative with chapters of the history of the great Chancery suit and all that flowed from it.  In order to minimize as much as possible the confusion of so very confused a scheme as this, he wrote the historic part of the book in the present tense; and the result is the most oppressively-laboured novel that was ever produced by a great novelist.

I have dwelt at length upon this subject because if I were asked to name one of the greatest masters of the autobiographic form, in any language, I should, I think, have to name Borrow.  In one variety of that form he gave us “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” in the other, “Wild Wales.”

V
WHY ARE THE WELSH GYPSIES IGNORED IN “WILD WALES”?

“Wild Wales” seems to have disappointed Borrovians because it ignores the Welsh gypsies, the most superior branch of all the Romany race, except, perhaps, the gypsy musicians of Hungary.  And certainly it is curious to speculate as to why he ignores them in that fashion.  Readers of “The Romany Rye” wonder why, after his adventure with Mrs. Herne and her granddaughter, and his rescue by the Welshman, Peter Williams, on reaching the Welsh border, Borrow kept his mouth closed.  Several reasons have occurred to me, one of which is that his knowledge of Welsh Romany was of the shakiest kind.  Another reason might have been that in “The Romany Rye,” as much of his story as could be told in two volumes being told, he abruptly broke off as he had broken off at the end of the third