Isopel Berners | Page 8

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 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