George Borrow and His Circle Part 45

FOOTNOTES:

[261] A word that is very misleading, as no writer was ever so little the founder of a school.

[262] Although this fact was not known until 1908 when I published _The Brontes: Life and Letters_. See vol. ii. p. 24, where Charlotte Bronte writes: 'In George Borrow's works I found a wild fascination, a vivid graphic power of description, a fresh originality, an athletic simplicity, which give them a stamp of their own.'

[263] Theodore Watts-Dunton, Augustine Birrell, Francis Hindes Groome, and Thomas Seccombe. Lionel Johnson's essay on Borrow is the more valuable in its enthusiasm in that it was written by a Roman Catholic.

Writing in the _Outlook_ (April 1, 1899) he said:

'What the four books mean and are to their lovers is upon this sort.

Written by a man of intense personality, irresistible in his hold upon your attention, they take you far afield from weary cares and business into the enamouring airs of the open world, and into days when the countryside was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form the worst side of "civilised" life in cities. They give you the sense of emanc.i.p.ation, of manumission into the liberty of the winding road and fragrant forest, into the freshness of an ancient country-life, into a _milieu_ where men are not copies of each other. And you fall in with strange scenes of adventure, great or small, of which a strange man is the centre as he is the scribe; and from a description of a lonely glen you are plunged into a dissertation upon difficult old tongues, and from dejection into laughter, and from gypsydom into journalism, and everything is equally delightful, and nothing that the strange man shows you can come amiss. And you will hardly make up your mind whether he is most Don Quixote, or Rousseau, or Luther, or Defoe; but you will always love these books by a brave man who travelled in far lands, travelled far in his own land, travelled the way of life for close upon eighty years, and died in perfect solitude. And this will be the least you can say, though he would not have you say it--_Requiescat in pace Viator_.'

[264] In _Res Judicatae_ 1892 (a paper reprinted from _The Reflector_, Jan. 8, 1888), in his Introduction to _Lavengro_ (Macmillan, 1900), in an essay ent.i.tled 'The Office of literature,' in the second series of _Obiter Dicta_, and in an address at Norwich; on July 5, 1913, reprinted in full in the _Eastern Daily Press_ of July 7, 1913.

[265] There are but three references to Borrow in Stevenson's writings, all of them perfunctory. These are in _Memories and Portraits_ ('A Gossip on a novel of Dumas"), in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_ ('Some aspects of Robert Burns'), and in _The Ideal House_.

[266] _The Spectator_, July 12, 1913.

[267] On July 6, 1913, Dr. H. C. Beeching, Dean of Norwich, preached a sermon on Borrow in Norwich Cathedral, which in its graceful literary enthusiasm may be counted the culminating point of recognition of Borrow so far, when the place is considered. The sermon has been published by Jarrold and Sons of Norwich.