George Borrow Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903

Excerpt

GEORGE BORROW.

It is a singular coincidence, perhaps, that during one and the same summer we should be celebrating centenaries of Samuel Pepys and George Borrow.  Pepys died in the early summer of 1703; Borrow was born in July, 1803.  Unlike each other in almost every respect, they are dui palor, as Borrow would say, in one very material point.  The reputation of each of them has risen to such a point that, except for injudicious and exaggerated praise, it can have little to fear in the future; and in each case this reputation is based primarily upon autobiography.  Among the world’s autobiographers the author of “Lavengro” is entitled, we feel sure, to rank with St. Augustine, Cellini, Pepys, Rousseau, Franklin; and, for truthfulness, it is very probable, if we could only estimate it properly, that he would have to be put at the top of the class.  His nearest competitor in this respect would undoubtedly be Pepys, and the veracity in both cases not the result of a double share of innate truthfulness, but very largely an accident, due to lack of invention and an absence of that powerful literary style which in the case of a Leigh Hunt or a Stevenson distorts everything that passes through it.  In Pepys the malignity of the literary fairy is more than compensated by the worthy secretary’s insatiable appetite for life; in Borrow by the wanderlust or extraordinary passion and faculty for adventure, which makes his best books such an ambrosial hash of sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, gipsies, prisons, half-in-halves, cosas de España—what you will.

George Henry Borrow, to give him for once his full baptismal name, was born at East Dereham, “a beautiful little town in the western division of Norfolk,” on July 5, 1803.  His father, who came of an old Cornish family, was in his forty-fifth year when Borrow was born, having married ten years previously Anne Perfrement, of a family which had migrated from Dauphiné in the days of Dutch William.  The father was captain in a marching regiment, the West Norfolk Militia.  Like Sterne’s therefore, Borrow’s early life was nomadic, and his school-life was broken between Edinburgh, Clonmel, and Norwich.  But his real mentors were found in this last city, where he came in contact with a French emigré named d’Éterville.  Here, too, he fell under the influence of “godless Billy” Taylor, and dreamt of writing plays and poems and abusing religion.  Here, too, while he ought to have been studying law, he was claiming acquaintance with gipsies, bruisers, and shady characters, such as the notorious Thurtell.  A more dangerous influence to Borrow than any, perhaps, was that of Sir John Bowring, a plausible polyglot, who deliberately used his facility in acquiring and translating tongues as a ladder to an administrative post abroad.  Borrow, as was perhaps natural, put a wrong construction upon his sympathy, and his apparently disinterested ambition to leave no poetic fragment in Russian, Swedish, Polish, Servian, Bohemian, or Hungarian unrendered into English.  He determined to emulate a purpose so lofty in its detachment, and the mistake cost him dear, for it led him for long years into a veritable cul de sac of literature; it led also to the accentuation of that pseudo-philological mania which played such havoc with the ordinary development of rational ideas in a man in many respects so sane as Borrow....