to wife and children. In the Arvon edition of that book, dedicated to a Welsh poet, I have said what I had previously often said to Borrow, that, “although I have seen a good deal of the races of Europe, I put the Cymric race in many ways at the top of them all. They combine, as I think, the poetry, the music, the instinctive love of the fine arts, and the humour of the other Celtic peoples with the practicalness and bright-eyed sagacity of the very different race to which they were so closely linked by circumstance – the race whom it is the fashion to call the Anglo-Saxon. And as to the charm of the Welsh girls, no one who knows them as you and I do, can fail to be struck by it continually. Winifred Wynne I meant to be the typical Welsh girl as I have found her – affectionate, warm-hearted, self-sacrificing and brave.”
IV
BORROW’S METHOD OF AUTOBIOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE COMPARED WITH THE METHODS OF DEFOE, WILKIE COLLINS, DICKENS AND THE ABBÉ PRÉVOST
It seems almost necessary that in this desultory talk upon “Wild Wales” I should, before proceeding any further, say a few words upon the book in its relations to two of Borrow’s other autobiographic narratives, “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” and I do not know any literary subject more suggestive of interesting criticism.
Although Borrow always acknowledged Defoe as his master, he had, of course, qualities of his own that were as unlike Defoe’s qualities as they were unlike those of any other writer. And as this speciality of his has, so far as I know, never been discussed, I should have liked, had space permitted, to give interest to my remarks upon “Wild Wales” by a thorough comparison between Borrow’s imaginative works and Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe.” This is impossible in the space at my command. And yet a few words upon the subject I cannot resist indulging in, for it relates to the very core and central light of Borrow’s genius; and I may now never have another opportunity of touching upon it.
I remember a long talk I once had with him upon the method of Defoe as contrasted and compared with his own method in “Lavengro,” “The Romany Rye,” and “Wild Wales,” and the method of other writers who adopt the autobiographic form of fiction. He agreed with me that the most successful of all stories in the autobiographic form is “Robinson Crusoe,” although “Jane Eyre,” “David Copperfield” and “Great Expectations” among English novels, and “Gil Blas” and “Manon Lescaut” among French novels, are also autobiographic in form. It is of all forms the most difficult. But its advantages, if they can be secured without making too many artistic sacrifices, are enormous. Flexibility is, of course, the one quality it lacks, but, lacking that, it cannot secure the variety of picture and the breadth of movement which is the special strength of the historic form.
The great pupils of Defoe – and by pupils I mean those writers who try to give as much commonplace ἀπάτη as possible to new and striking incidents – Edgar Poe, Wilkie Collins, Gaboriau and others, recognize the immense aid given to illusion by adopting the autobiographic form.
The conversation upon this subject occurred in one of my rambles with Borrow and Dr. Gordon Hake in Richmond Park, when I had been pointing out to the former certain passages in “Robinson Crusoe” where Defoe adds richness and piquancy to the incidents by making the reader believe that these incidents will in the end have some deep influence, spiritual or physical, upon the narrator himself.
Borrow was not a theorizer, and yet he took a quaint interest in other people’s theorizings. He asked me to explain myself more fully. My reply in substance was something like this: Although in “Robinson Crusoe” the autobiographer is really introduced only to act as eye-witness for the purpose of bringing out and authenticating the incidents of the dramatic action, Defoe had the artistic craftiness to make it appear that this was not so – to make it appear that the incidents are selected by Crusoe in such a way as to exhibit and develop the emotions moving within his own breast. Defoe’s apparent object in writing the story was to show the effect of a long solitude upon the human heart and mind; but it was not so – it was simply to bring into fiction a series of incidents and adventures of extraordinary interest and picturesqueness – incidents such as did in part happen to Alexander Selkirk. But Defoe was a much greater artist than he is generally credited with being, and he had sufficient of the artistic instinct to know that, interesting as these external incidents were in themselves, they could be made still more interesting by humanizing them – by making it appear that they worked as a great life-lesson for the man who experienced them, and that this was why the man recorded them. Those moralizings of Crusoe upon the way in which the disasters of his life came upon him as “judgments,” on account of his running away from his parents, seem to humanize the wheels of circumstance. They create in the reader’s mind the interest in the man’s personality which Defoe wished to create.
In reply to my criticism, Borrow said, “May not the same be said of Le Sage’s ‘Gil Blas’?”
And when I pointed out to him that there was a kind of kinship between the two writers in this particular he asked me to indicate in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” such incidents in which Defoe’s method had been followed by himself as had struck me. I pointed out several of them. Borrow, as a rule, was not at all given to frank discussion of his own artistic methods, indeed, he had a great deal of the instinct of the literary histrio– more than I have ever seen in any other writer – but he admitted that he had consciously in part and in part unconsciously adopted Defoe’s method. The fact is, as I said to Borrow on that occasion, and as I have since had an opportunity of saying more fully in print, there are two kinds of autobiographic stories, and these two kinds are, if properly examined, really more unlike each other than the autobiographic form is unlike what is generally supposed to be its antithesis – the historic form. In one kind of autobiographic story, of which “Rob Roy” is a typical example, the narrator, though nominally the protagonist, is really not much more than the passive eye-witness of the dramatic action – not much more than the chorus to other characters who govern, or at least influence, the main issue. Inasmuch as he is an eye-witness of the dramatic action, he gives to it the authenticity of direct testimony. Through him the narrative gains a commonplace ἀπάτη such as is beyond the scope of the scattered forces of the historic form, howsoever powerfully handled. By the first-hand testimony of the eye-witness Frank Osbaldistone in Scott’s fascinating novel, the more active characters, those who really control the main issue, Di Vernon, Rashleigh Osbaldistone, Rob, and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, are painted in much more vivid and much more authentic colours than the method of the historic form would allow.
It is in the nature of things that this kind of autobiographic fiction, howsoever strong may be the incidents, is not nearly so absorbing as is the other kind I am going to instance, the psychological, to which “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” belong; for in literature, as in life, the more interest we feel in the character, the more interest we feel in what befalls the character. Unlike the kind of autobiographic fiction typified by “Rob Roy,” in which, as I have said, the main issue is little influenced and not at all controlled by the narrator but by other characters, or, if not by other characters, by the wheels of circumstance; – in the psychological kind of autobiographic fiction, the personality of the narrator controls, or largely controls, the main issue of the dramatic action. In other words, the incidents in the latter kind of autobiographic fiction are selected and marshalled for the purpose of declaring the character of the narrator. The most superb exemplars of this kind of autobiographic narrative are stories which in all other respects are extremely unlike Borrow’s – “Caleb Williams,” “Manon Lescaut,” “Jane Eyre,” and “Villette.”
A year or two ago I recurred to this subject in some comments I made upon some judgments of a well-known and admirable critic. I will take the liberty of referring here to one or two of the remarks I then made, for they seem to bear very directly upon Borrow’s method as compared with Defoe’s. The same artistic instinct which we see in Defoe and in Borrow’s quasi autobiographic work is exhibited by the Abbé Prévost in “Manon Lescaut.” The real object of the last-mentioned story (which, it will be remembered, is
