Isopel Berners | Page 7

I, with half a sigh.
Taggart tapped his box.
"A great deal of time. I really think that my ballads--"
Taggart took snuff.

"If published, would do me credit. I'll make an effort, and offer them to
some other publisher."
Taggart took a double quantity of snuff.
Equally Sterne-like is the conclusion to a chapter: "Italy--what was I
going to say about Italy?"
Less superficial is the influence of Cervantes and his successors of the
Picaresque school, down to the last and most representative of them in
England, namely Defoe and Smollett. Profoundest of all, perhaps, is the
influence of Defoe, of whose powers of intense realisation, exhibited in
the best parts of Robinson Crusoe, we get a fine counterpart amid the
outcasts in Mumper's Lane. Bound up with the truthfulness and
originality of the Author is that strange absence of sycophancy, which
we may flatter ourselves is no exceptional thing, but which is in reality
a very rare phenomenon in literature.
Apart from this independence of character which he so justly prized,
and a monomania or two, such as his devotion to philology or
detestation of popery, Borrow's mental peculiarities are not by any
means so extravagant as has been supposed. His tastes were for the
most part not unusual, though they might be assorted in a somewhat
uncommon manner. He was a thorough sportsman in the best sense, but
he combined with his sporting zeal an instinctive hatred of gambling, of
bad language, and of tyranny or cruelty in any form. He entertained a
love for the horse in the stable without bowing down to worship the
stage-coachmen, the jockeys, and other ignoble heroes of "horsey" life.
He loved his country and "the quiet, unpretending Church of England."
He was ready to exalt the obsolescent fisticuffs and the "strong ale of
Old England," but he was not blind either to the drunkenness or to the
overbearing brutality which he had reason to fear might be held to
disfigure the character of the swilling and prize-fighting sections
among his compatriots. {20a}
Borrow was a master of whim; but it is easy to exaggerate his
eccentricity. As a traveller who met with adventures upon the roads of
Britain he was surpassed by a dozen writers that could be named, and

in our own day--to mention one--by that truly eccentric being "The
Druid." {20b} The Druid had a special affinity with Borrow, in regard
to his kindness for an old applewoman. His applewoman kept a stall in
the Strand to which the Druid was a constant visitor, mainly for the
purpose of having a chat and borrowing and repaying small sums,
rarely exceeding one shilling. As an author, again, Borrow was as
jealous as one of Thackeray's heroines; he could hardly bear to hear a
contemporary book praised. Whim, if you will, but scarcely an example
of literary eccentricity.
Borrow developed a delightful faculty for adventure upon the high road,
but such a faculty was far less singular than his gift--akin to the greatest
painter's power of suggesting atmosphere--of investing each scene and
incident with a separate and distinct air of uncompromising reality.
Many persons may have had the advantage of hearing conversation as
brilliant or as wise as that of the dinner at Dilly's: what is distinctive of
genius is the power to convey the general feeling of the interlocutors, to
suggest a dramatic effect, an artistic whole, as Boswell does, by the
cumulative effect of infinitesimal factors. The triumph in each case is
one not of opportunities but of the subtlest literary sense.
Similarly, Borrow's fixed ideas had little that was really exceptional or
peculiar about them. His hatred of mumbo-jumbo and priestcraft was
but a part of his steady love of freedom and sincerity. His linguistic
mania had less of a philological basis than he would have us believe.
Impatience that Babel should act as a barrier between kindred souls, an
insatiable curiosity, prompted by the knowledge that the language of
minorities was in nine cases out of ten the direct route to the heart of
the secret of folks that puzzled him--such were the motives that
stimulated a hunger for strange vocabularies, not in itself abnormal.
The colloquial faculty which he undoubtedly possessed--for we are told
by Taylor that when barely eighteen he already knew English, Welsh,
Irish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, and
Portuguese--rarely goes with philological depth any more than with
idiomatic purity. Borrow learnt some languages to translate, many to
speak imperfectly. {22}

But as a comparative philologist, with claims to scientific equipment,
his Targum, with its boasted versions from thirty languages or dialects,
pales considerably before the almost contemporary _Philological
Grammar_, based upon a comparison of over sixty tongues, by the
Dorset poet William Barnes, who, like Borrow himself, was a
self-taught man. To