Part 12 (1/2)
Will it come with a blessing or curse?
Will its bonnets be lower or higher?
Will its morals be better or worse?
The author of this perhaps seems to some a mere jesting Pilate, and if he does, they are quite right not to even try to like him.
I have seen disdainful remarks on those critics who, however warily, admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coa.r.s.e and omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. ”One to one” is not ”cursedly confined” in the relation of book and reader; and a man need not be a Don Juan of letters to have a list of almost _mille e tre_ loves in that department. He must indeed love the best or those among the best only, in the almost innumerable kinds, which is not a very severe restriction. And Praed is of this so fortunately numerous company. I do not agree with those who lament his early death on the ground of its depriving literature or politics of his future greatness.
In politics he would most probably not have become anything greater than an industrious and respectable official; and in letters his best work was pretty certainly done. For it was a work that could only be done in youth. In his scholarly but not frigidly correct form, in his irregular sallies and flashes of a genius really individual as far as it went but never perhaps likely to go much farther, in the freshness of his imitations, in the imperfection of his originalities, Praed was the most perfect representative we have had or ever are likely to have of what has been called, with a perhaps reprehensible parody on great words, ”the eternal undergraduate within us, who rejoices before life.” He is thus at the very antipodes of Wertherism and Byronism, a light but gallant champion of cheerfulness and the joy of living. Although there is about him absolutely nothing artificial--the curse of the lighter poetry as a rule--and though he attains to deep pathos now and then, and once or twice (notably in ”The Red Fisherman”) to a kind of grim earnestness, neither of these things is his real _forte_. Playing with literature and with life, not frivolously or without heart, but with no very deep cares and no very pa.s.sionate feeling, is Praed's att.i.tude whenever he is at his best. And he does not play at playing as many writers do: it is all perfectly genuine. Even Prior has not excelled such lines as these in one of his early and by no means his best poems (an adaptation too), for mingled jest and earnest--
But Isabel, by accident, Was wandering by that minute; She opened that dark monument And found her slave within it; _The clergy said the Ma.s.s in vain, The College could not save me: But life, she swears, returned again With the first kiss she gave me._
Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this att.i.tude towards life after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an elderly youth, which is of all things most detestable, or a caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the G.o.ds mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as the poet of Medora's musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of the Abbot's nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip--
And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball,
of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies, and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five.
Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been, is, nor ever will be in the temper and circ.u.mstances of which Praed's verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in which they once really existed, the many beloved shadows of the past.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] 1. _The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge._ In two volumes. London, 1864. 2. _Essays by Winthrop Mackworth Praed, collected and arranged by Sir George Young, Bart._ London, 1887. 3. _The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young._ London, 1888.
[20] Since I wrote this I have been reminded by my friend Mr. Mowbray Morris of Byron's
I enter thy garden of roses, Beloved and fair Haidee.
It is not impossible that this _is_ the immediate original. But Praed has so improved on it as to deserve a new patent.
XIII
GEORGE BORROW
In this paper I do not undertake to throw any new light on the little-known life of the author of _Lavengro_. Among the few people who knew Borrow intimately, surely some one will soon be found who will give to the world an account of his curious life, and perhaps some specimens of those ”mountains of ma.n.u.script” which, as he regretfully declares, never could find a publisher--an impossibility which, if I may be permitted to offer an opinion, does not reflect any great credit on publishers. For the present purpose it is sufficient to sum up the generally-known facts that Borrow was born in 1803 at East Dereham in Norfolk, his father being a captain in the army, who came of Cornish blood, his mother a lady of Norfolk birth and Huguenot extraction. His youth he has himself described in a fas.h.i.+on which n.o.body is likely to care to paraphrase. After the years of travel chronicled in _Lavengro_, he seems to have found scope for his philological and adventurous tendencies in the rather unlikely service of the Bible Society; and he sojourned in Russia and Spain to the great advantage of English literature. This occupied him during the greater part of the years from 1830 to 1840. Then he came back to his native country--or, at any rate, his native district--married a widow of some property at Lowestoft, and spent the last forty years of his life at Oulton Hall, near the piece of water which is thronged in summer by all manner of sportsmen and others.
He died but a few years ago; and even since his death he seems to have lacked the due meed of praise which the Lord Chief Justice of the equal foot usually brings, even to persons far less deserving than Borrow.
There is this difficulty in writing about him, that the audience must necessarily consist of fervent devotees on the one hand, and of complete infidels, or at least complete know-nothings, on the other. To any one who, having the faculty to understand either, has read _Lavengro_ or _The Bible in Spain_, or even _Wild Wales_, praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to seem impertinence. To anybody else (and unfortunately the anybody else is in a large majority) praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to look like that very dubious kind of praise which is bestowed on somebody of whom no one but the praiser has ever heard. I cannot think of any single writer (Peac.o.c.k himself is not an exception) who is in quite parallel case. And, as usual, there is a certain excuse for the general public.
Borrow kept himself, during not the least exciting period of English history, quite aloof from English politics, and from the life of great English cities. But he did more than this. He is the only really considerable writer of his time in any modern European nation who seems to have taken absolutely no interest in current events, literary and other. Putting a very few allusions aside, he might have belonged to almost any period. His political idiosyncrasy will be noticed presently; but he, who lived through the whole period from Waterloo to Maiwand, has not, as far as I remember, mentioned a single English writer later than Scott and Byron. He saw the rise, and, in some instances, the death, of Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, d.i.c.kens. There is not a reference to any one of them in his works. He saw political changes such as no man for two centuries had seen, and (except the Corn Laws, to which he has some half-ironical allusions, and the Ecclesiastical t.i.tles Bill, which stirred his one active sentiment) he has referred to never a one. He seems in some singular fas.h.i.+on to have stood outside of all these things. His Spanish travels are dated for us by references to Dona Isabel and Don Carlos, to Mr. Villiers and Lord Palmerston. But cut these dates out, and they might be travels of the last century. His Welsh book proclaims itself as written in the full course of the Crimean War; but excise a few pa.s.sages which bear directly on that event, and the most ingenious critic would be puzzled to ”place” the composition. Shakespeare, we know, was for all time, not of one age only; but I think we may say of Borrow, without too severely or conceitedly marking the difference, that he was not of or for any particular age or time at all. If the celebrated query in Longfellow's _Hyperion_, ”What is time?” had been addressed to him, his most appropriate answer, and one which he was quite capable of giving, would have been, ”I really don't know.”
To this singular historical vagueness has to be added a critical vagueness even greater. I am sorry that I am unable to confirm or to gainsay at first hand Borrow's wonderfully high estimate of certain Welsh poets. But if the originals are anything like his translations of them, I do not think that Ab Gwilym and Lewis Glyn Cothi, Gronwy Owen and Huw Morris can have been quite such mighty bards as he makes out.
Fortunately, however, a better test presents itself. In one book of his, _Wild Wales_, there are two estimates of Scott's works. Borrow finds in an inn a copy of _Woodstock_ (which he calls by its less known t.i.tle of _The Cavalier_), and decides that it is ”trashy”: chiefly, it would appear, because the portrait therein contained of Harrison, for whom Borrow seems, on one of his inscrutable principles of prejudice, to have had a liking, is not wholly favourable. He afterwards informs us that Scott's ”Norman Horseshoe” (no very exquisite song at the best, and among Scott's somewhat less than exquisite) is ”one of the most stirring lyrics of modern times,” and that he sang it for a whole evening; evidently because it recounts a defeat of the Normans, whom Borrow, as he elsewhere tells us in sundry places, disliked for reasons more or less similar to those which made him like Harrison, the butcher. In other words, he could not judge a work of literature as literature at all. If it expressed sentiments with which he agreed, or called up a.s.sociations which were pleasant to him, good luck to it; if it expressed sentiments with which he did not agree, and called up no pleasant a.s.sociations, bad luck.
In politics and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a certain amount of regret, and his general att.i.tude is quite Eldonian.
But he combined with his general Toryism very curious Radicalisms of detail, such as are to be found in Cobbett (who, as appeared at last, and as all reasonable men should have always known, was really a Tory of a peculiar type), and in several other English persons. The Church, the Monarchy, and the Const.i.tution generally were dear to Borrow, but he hated all the aristocracy (except those whom he knew personally) and most of the gentry. Also, he had the odd Radical sympathy for anybody who, as the vernacular has it, was ”kept out of his rights.” I do not know, but I should think, that Borrow was a strong Tichbornite. In that curious book _Wild Wales_, where almost more of his real character appears than in any other, he has to do with the Crimean War. It was going on during the whole time of his tour, and he once or twice reports conversations in which, from his knowledge of Russia, he demonstrated beforehand to Welsh inquirers how improbable, not to say impossible, it was that the Russian should be beaten. But the thing that seems really to have interested him most was the case of Lieutenant P---- or Lieutenant Parry, whom he sometimes refers to in the fuller and sometimes in the less explicit manner. My own memories of 1854 are rather indistinct, and I confess that I have not taken the trouble to look up this celebrated case. As far as I can remember, and as far as Borrow's references here and elsewhere go, it was the doubtless lamentable but not uncommon case of a man who is difficult to live with, and who has to live with others. Such cases occur at intervals in every mess, college, and other similar aggregation of humanity. The person difficult to live with gets, to use an Oxford phrase, ”drawn.” If he is reformable he takes the lesson, and very likely becomes excellent friends with those who ”drew” him. If he is not, he loses his temper, and evil results of one kind or another follow. Borrow's Lieutenant P---- seems unluckily to have been of the latter kind, and was, if I mistake not, recommended by the authorities to withdraw from a situation which, to him, was evidently a false and unsuitable one. With this Borrow could not away. He gravely chronicles the fact of his reading an ”excellent article in a local paper on the case of Lieutenant P----”; and with no less gravity (though he was, in a certain way, one of the first humorists of our day) he suggests that the complaints of the martyred P---- to the Almighty were probably not unconnected with our Crimean disasters. This curious parochialism pursues him into more purely religious matters. I do not know any other really great man of letters of the last three-quarters of a century of whose att.i.tude Carlyle's famous words, ”regarding G.o.d's universe as a larger patrimony of Saint Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt the Pope,”
are so literally true. It was not in Borrow's case a case of _sancta simplicitas_. He has at times flashes of by no means orthodox sentiment, and seems to have fought, and perhaps hardly won, many a battle against the army of the doubters. But when it comes to the Pope, he is as single-minded an enthusiast as John Bunyan himself, whom, by the way, he resembles in more than one point. The att.i.tude was, of course, common enough among his contemporaries; indeed any man who has reached middle life must remember numerous examples among his own friends and kindred.
But in literature, and such literature as Borrow's, it is rare.
Yet again, the curiously piecemeal, and the curiously arbitrary character of Borrow's literary studies in languages other than his own, is noteworthy in so great a linguist. The entire range of French literature, old as well as new, he seems to have ignored altogether--I should imagine out of pure John Bullishness. He has very few references to German, though he was a good German scholar--a fact which I account for by the other fact, that in his earlier literary period German was fas.h.i.+onable, and that he never would have anything to do with anything that fas.h.i.+on favoured. Italian, though he certainly knew it well, is equally slighted. His education, if not his taste for languages, must have made him a tolerable (he never could have been an exact) cla.s.sical scholar. But it is clear that insolent Greece and haughty Rome possessed no attraction for him. I question whether even Spanish would not have been too common a toy to attract him much, if it had not been for the accidental circ.u.mstances which connected him with Spain.
Lastly (for I love to get my devil's advocate work over), in Borrow's varied and strangely attractive gallery of portraits and characters, most observers must perceive the absence of the note of pa.s.sion. I have sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a mere wayward piece of irony--a kind of conscious ascetic myth. But I am afraid the interpretation will not do. The subsequent conversation with Ursula Petulengro under the hedge might be only a companion piece; even the more wonderful, though much less interesting, dialogue with the Irish girl in the last chapters of _Wild Wales_ might be so rendered by a hardy exegete. But the negative evidence in all the books is too strong. It may be taken as positively certain that Borrow never was ”in love,” as the phrase is, and that he had hardly the remotest conception of what being in love means. It is possible that he was a most cleanly liver--it is possible that he was quite the reverse: I have not the slightest information either way. But that he never in all his life heard with understanding the refrain of the ”Pervigilium,”