ere true, if half of it were true, Borrow was
not the great man, the great writer that I take him to be. But it is not
true. _Lavengro_ with its continuation _The Romany Rye_, is a great work
of imagination, of invention; it is in no sense a photograph, a memory
picture, and it abounds in humour as it abounds in many other great
characteristics. What makes an author supremely great? Surely a certain
quality which we call genius, as distinct from the mere intellectual
power of some less brilliant writer:--

True genius is the ray that flings
A novel light o'er common things

and here it is that Borrow shines supreme. He has invested with quite
novel light a hundred commonplace aspects of life. Not an inventor! not
imaginative! Why, one of the indictments against him is that
philologists decry his philology and gyptologists his gypsy learning. If,
then, his philology and his gypsy lore were imperfect, as I believe they
were, how much the greater an imaginative writer he was. To say that
_Lavengro_ merely indicates keen observation is absurd. Not the keenest
observation will crowd so many adventures, adventures as fresh and as
novel as those of Gil Blas or Robinson Crusoe, into a few months'
experience. "I felt some desire," says Lavengro, "to meet with one of
those adventures which upon the roads of England are generally as
plentiful as blackberries in autumn." I think that most of us will
wander along the roads of England for a very long time before we meet an
Isopel Berners, before we have such an adventure as that of the
blacksmith and his horse, or of the apple woman whose favourite reading
was _Moll Flanders_. These and a hundred other adventures, the fight
with the Flaming Tinman, the poisoning of Lavengro by the gypsy woman,
the discourse with Ursula under the hedge, when once read are fixed upon
the memory for ever. And yet you may turn to them again and again, and
with ever increasing zest. The story of Isopel Berners is a piece of
imaginative writing that certainly has no superior in the literature of
the last century. It was assuredly no photographic experience. Isopel
Berners is herself a creation ranking among the fine creations of
womanhood of the finest writers. I doubt not but that it was inspired by
some actual memory of Borrow--the memory of some early love affair in
which the distractions of his mania for word-learning--the Armenian and
other languages--led him to pass by some o