Isopel Berners | Page 8

mention but two more English contemporaries of
Borrow, there was Thomas Watts, of the British Museum, who could
read nearly fifty languages, including Chinese; and Canon Cook, the
editor of the _Speaker's Commentary_, who claimed acquaintance with
fifty-four. It is commonly said of Cardinal Mezzofanti that he could
speak thirty and understand sixty. It is quite plain from the pages of
Lavengro itself that Borrow did not share Gregory XVI.'s high estimate
of the Cardinal's mental qualifications, unrivalled linguist though he
was. That a "word-master" so abnormal is apt to be deficient in logical
sense seems to have been Borrow's deliberate opinion (with a saving
clause as to exceptions), and I have often thought that it must have been
Shakespeare's too, for does he not ascribe a command of tongues to the
man who is perhaps the most consummate idiot in the whole range of
Shakespearean portraiture?
MARIA. That quaffing and drinking will undo you: I heard my lady
talk of it yesterday, and of a foolish knight that you brought in here to
be her wooer.
SIR TOBY BELCH. Who? Sir Andrew Ague-cheek?
MARIA. Ay, he.
SIR TOBY. He's as tall a man as any in Illyria.
MARIA. What's that to the purpose?
SIR TOBY. Why, he has three thousand ducats a year.
MARIA. Ay, but he'll have but a year in all these ducats: he's a very
fool and a prodigal.
SIR TOBY. Fie that you'll say so! He plays o' the viol de gamboys, and

speaks three or four languages word for word, without book.
The extraordinary linguistic gifts of a Mezzofanti were not, it is true,
concentrated in Borrow (whose powers in this direction have been
magnified), but they were sufficiently prominent in him to have a
determining effect upon his mind. Thus he was distinguished less for
broad views than for an extraordinary faculty for detail; when he
attempts to generalise we are likelier to get a flood of inconsequent
prejudices than a steady flow of reasoned opinions.
We can frequently study an author with good effect through the
medium of his literary admirations; we have already noticed a few of
Borrow's predilections in real life. With regard to literature, his
predilections (or more particularly what Zola would call his haines)
were fully as protestant and as thorough. His indifference to the
literature of his own time might be termed brutal; his intellectual
self-sufficiency was worthy of a Macaulay or of a Donne. A
fellow-denouncer of snobs, he made Thackeray very uncomfortable by
his contemptuous ignorance of _The Snob Papers_, and even of the
name of the periodical in which they were appearing. Concerning Keats
he once asked, "Have they not been trying to resuscitate him?" When
Miss Strickland wanted to send him her Lives, he broke out: "For God's
sake don't, madam; I should not know where to put them or what to do
with them." Scott's Woodstock he picked up more than once and
incontinently threw down as "trashy." As a general rule he judged a
modern author by his prejudices. If these differed by a hair's breadth
from his own he damned the whole of his work. He had to his credit a
vast fund of quaint out-of-the-way reading; not to be acquainted with
this was dense unpardonable ignorance: what he had not read was
scarcely knowledge. He was not what one could fairly call unread in
the classical authors, for in a survey of his reviewers he compared
himself complacently enough with Cervantes, Bunyan and Le Sage. He
had the utmost suspicion of literary models; to try to be like somebody
else was the too popular literary precept that he held in the greatest
abhorrence. The gravity of his prescription of Wordsworth as a specific
in cases of chronic insomnia is probably due rather to the thorough
sincerity of his view than to any conscious subtlety of humour. He

disliked Scott especially for his easy tolerance of Jacobites and Papists,
{25} while he distrusted his portraits, those portraits of the rougher
people which may have frequently been over-praised by Scott's
admirers. We most of us love Scott, it is a fact, beyond the power of
nice discrimination. As to the verisimilitude of a portrait such as that of
Meg Merrilies we must allow Borrow to be a most competent critic, but
we are at a loss to sympathise with his failure to appreciate studies of
such lifelike fidelity as Edie Ochiltree and Andrew Fairservice, whose
views anent "the muckle hure that sitteth on seven hills, as if ane wasna
braid eneugh for her auld hinder end," had so much that was in
sympathy with Borrow's own.
Of all such prejudices and peculiarities, no less than of his gifts,
Borrow was ridiculously proud. In certain respects he was as vainly,
querulously, and childishly assertive