Isopel Berners | Page 9

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, and their competence more assured than that of their successors; {30} it would be safe to assert that their self-sufficiency was also decidedly more pronounced. Now for reasons which we have endeavoured to explain, the equanimity of the critical reviewers was considerably ruffled by Lavengro. Perplexed by its calling itself an autobiography, they were at the same time discontented both with its subject-matter and its style. To a not altogether misplaced curiosity on the part of the public as to Borrow's antecedents, the author of the Bible in Spain had responded by Lavengro, which he fully meant to be (what it indeed was) a masterpiece. Yet