Isopel Berners | Page 9

as Goldsmith himself; while in the
haughty self-isolation with which he eschewed the society of people
with endowments as great or even greater than his own, he was quite
the opposite of "poor Goldy." If the latter had regarded his interlocutors
straight in the eyes with a look that told them he was prepared to knock
them down at a moment's notice upon the least provocation, we should
probably have heard less of his absurdities. A man who even in his old
age could walk off with E. J. Trelawny {27a} under his arm (as Mr.
Watts- Dunton assures us Borrow could) was certainly not one to be
trifled with.
Borrow's absolute unconventionality was of course an offence to many;
to Englishmen, who were dreaming in the fifties of a kind of industrial
millennium, with Cobden as the prophet and Macaulay as the preacher
of a new gospel of commercial prosperity and universal peace and
progress, Borrow's pre-railroad prejudices and low tastes appeared
obscurantist, dark, squalid, unintelligible. {27b} He ran out his books
upon a line directly counter to the literary current of the day, and,
naturally enough, the critical billow broke over him.
Hazlitt's proposition--so readily accepted by the smug generation of his
day--that London was the only place in which the child could grow up
completely into the man--would have appeared the most perverse kind

of nonsense to Borrow. The complexity of a modern type, such as that
of a big organiser of industrial labour, did not impress him. He
esteemed the primitive above the economic man, and was apt to judge a
human being rather as Robinson Crusoe might have done than in the
spirit of a juryman at an Industrial Exhibition. Again, his feeling for
nature was intimate rather than enthusiastic, at a time when people still
looked for a good deal of pretty Glover-like composition in their
landscapes.
One of the most original traits of Borrow's genius was the care and
obstinacy with which he defended his practical, vigorous and alert
personality against the allurements of word-painting, of Nature and of
Reverie. He could respond to the thrill of natural beauty, he could enjoy
his mood when it veritably came upon him, just as he could enjoy a
tankard of old ale or linger to gaze upon a sympathetic face; but he
refused to pamper such feelings, still more to simulate them; he refused
to allow himself to become the creature of literary or poetic ecstasy; he
refused to indulge in the fashionable debauch of dilettante melancholy.
He wrote about his life quite naturally, "as if there were nothing in it."
Another and closely allied cause of perplexity and discontent to the
literary connoisseurs was Borrow's lack of style. By style, in the
generation of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Dickens and George Eliot, was
implied something recondite--a wealth of metaphor, imagery, allusion,
colour and perfume--a palette, a pounce-box, an optical instrument, a
sounding-board, a musical box, anything rather than a living tongue. To
a later race of stylists, who have gone as far as Samoa and beyond in
the quest of exotic perfumery, Borrow would have said simply, in the
words of old Montaigne, "To smell, though well, is to stink,"--"Malo,
quam bene olere, nil olere." Borrow, in fact, by a right instinct went
back to the straightforward manner of Swift and Defoe, Smollett and
Cobbett, whose vigorous prose he specially admired; and he found his
choice ill appreciated by critics whose sense of style demanded that a
clear glass window should be studded with bull's-eyes. To his
distinctions of being a poet well-nigh incapable of verse, and a
humourist with marvellously little pathos, Borrow thus added one
which we are inclined to regard as the greatest of all--that of being a
great nineteenth-century prose-writer without a style.

Though he did not elaborate, or strive to attain to the cultism or polite
style of contemporary genius, Borrow seems to have written with some
difficulty (or at any rate a lack of facility), and, impervious as he was to
criticism, he retained in his prose a number of small faults that he might
easily have got rid of. His manner of introducing his generalities and
conclusions is often either superfluous, or lame and clumsy. Despite his
natural eloquence, his fondness for the apostrophe is excessive; he
preserved an irritating habit of parading such words as eclat, penchant
and monticle, and persisted in saying "of a verity," and using the word
"individual" in the sense of person. Such blemishes are microscopic
enough. It was not such trifles as these that proved stumbling-blocks to
the "men of blood and foam," as he called his critics.
Of the generality of the critics of that day it would probably be well
within the mark to aver that their equipment was more solid,