Lavengro, by George Borrow

Transcribed from the 1900 Macmillian and Co. Edition by David Price, email [email protected]

LAVENGRO
THE SCHOLAR, THE GYPSY, THE PRIEST

BY
GEORGE BORROW

ILLUSTRATED BY E. J. SULLIVAN

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY AUGUSTINE
BIRRELL, Q.C., M.P.

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
new york: the macmillan company
1900

All rights reserved

First published in “Macmillan’s Illustrated Standard Novel,” 1896
Reprinted 1900

INTRODUCTION

The author of Lavengro, the Scholar, the Gypsy, and the Priest has after his fitful hour come into his own, and there abides securely.  Borrow’s books,—carelessly written, impatient, petulant, in parts repellant,—have been found so full of the elixir of life, of the charm of existence, of the glory of motion, so instinct with character, and mood, and wayward fancy, that their very names are sounds of enchantment, whilst the fleeting scenes they depict and the deeds they describe have become the properties and the pastimes for all the years that are still to be of a considerable fraction of the English-speaking race.

And yet I suppose it would be considered ridiculous in these fine days to call Borrow a great artist.  His fascination, his hold upon his reader, is not the fascination or the hold of the lords of human smiles and tears.  They enthrall us; Borrow only bewitches.  Isopel Berners, hastily limned though she be, need fear comparison with no damsel that ever lent sweetness to the stage, relish to rhyme, or life to novel.  She can hold up her head and take her own part amidst all the Rosalinds, Beatrices, and Lucys that genius has created and memory can muster.  But how she came into existence puzzles us not a little.  Was she summoned out of nothingness by the creative fancy of Lavengro, or did he really first set eyes upon her in the dingle whither she came with the Flaming Tinman, whose look Lavengro did not like at all?  Reality and romance, though Borrow made them wear double harness, are not meant to be driven together.  It is hard to weep aright over Isopel Berners.  The reader is tortured by a sense of duty towards her.  This distraction prevents our giving ourselves away to Borrow.  Perhaps after all he did meet the tall girl in the dingle, in which case he was a fool for all his pains, losing a gift the gods could not restore.

Quite apart from this particular doubt, the reader of Borrow feels that good luck, happy chance, plays a larger part in the charm of the composition than is quite befitting were Borrow to be reckoned an artist.  But nobody surely will quarrel with this ingredient.  It can turn no stomach.  Happy are the lucky writers!  Write as they will, they are almost certain to please.  There is such a thing as ‘sweet unreasonableness.’

But no sooner is this said than the necessity for instant and substantial qualification becomes urgent, for though Borrow’s personal vanity would have been wounded had he been ranked with the literary gentlemen who do business in words, his anger would have been justly aroused had he been told he did not know how to write.  He did know how to write, and he acquired the art in the usual way, by taking pains.  He might with advantage have taken more pains, and then he would have done better; but take pains he did.  In all his books he aims at producing a certain impression on the minds of his readers, and in order to produce that impression he was content to make sacrifices; hence his whimsicality, his out-of-the-wayness, at once his charm and his snare, never grows into wantonness and seldom into gross improbability.  He studied effects, as his frequent and impressive liturgical repetitions pleasingly demonstrate.  He had theories about most things, and may, for all I know, have had a theory of cadences.  For words he had no great feeling except as a philologist, and is capable of strange abominations.  ‘Individual’ pursues one through all his pages, where too are ‘equine species,’ ‘finny tribe’; but finding them where we do even these vile phrases, and others nearly as bad, have a certain humour.

This chance remark brings me to the real point.  Borrow’s charm is that he has behind his books a character of his own, which belongs to his books as much as to himself; something which bears you up and along as does the mystery of the salt sea the swimmer.  And this something lives and stirs in almost every page of Borrow, whose restless, puzzling, teasing personality pervades and animates the whole.

He is the true adventurer who leads his life, not on the Stock Exchange amidst the bulls and bears, or in the House of Commons waiting to clutch the golden keys, or in South Africa with the pioneers and promoters, but with himself and his own vagrant moods and fancies.  There was no need for Borrow to travel far afield in search of adventures.  Mumpers’ Dell was for him as good an environment as Mexico; a village in Spain or Portugal served his turn as well as both the Indies; he was as likely to meet adventures in Pall Mall as in the far Soudan.  Strange things happen to him wherever he goes; odd figures step from out the hedgerow and engage him in wild converse; beggar-women read Moll Flanders on London Bridge; 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.  How could any one dare to follow in the phosphorescent track of Lavengro and The Romany Rye, or add a line or a hue to the portraits there contained of Borrow’s father and mother—the gallant soldier who had no chance, and whose most famous engagement took place, not in Flanders, or in Egypt, or on the banks of the Indus or Oxus, but in Hyde Park, his foe being Big Ben Brain; and the dame of the oval face, olive complexion, and Grecian forehead, sitting in the dusky parlour in the solitary house at the end of the retired court shaded by lofty poplars?  I pity ‘the individual’ whose task it should be to travel along the enchanted wake either of Lavengro in England or Don Jorge in Spain.  Poor would be his part; no better than that of Arthur in ‘The Bothie’:—

And it was told, the Piper narrating and Arthur correcting,
Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture,
He to a matter-of-fact still softening, paring, abating,
He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal,
He to the merest it-was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing,
River to streamlet reducing, and fall to slope subduing:
So it was told, the Piper narrating, corrected of Arthur.

George Borrow, like many another great man, was born in Norfolk, at East Dereham, in 1803, and at an early age began those rambles he has made famous, being carried about by his father, Captain Borrow, who was chiefly employed as