road prejudices and low tastes appeared obscurantist,
dark, squalid, unintelligible. {27b} He ran out his books upon a line
directly counter to the literary current of the day, and, naturally
enough, the critical billow broke over him.

Hazlitt's proposition--so readily accepted by the smug generation of his
day--that London was the only place in which the child could grow up
completely into the man--would have appeared the most perverse kind of
nonsense to Borrow. The complexity of a modern type, such as that of a
big organiser of industrial labour, did not impress him. He esteemed the
primitive above the economic man, and was apt to judge a human being
rather as Robinson Crusoe might have done than in the spirit of a juryman
at an Industrial Exhibition. Again, his feeling for nature was intimate
rather than enthusiastic, at a time when people still looked for a good
deal of pretty Glover-like composition in their landscapes.

One of the most original traits of Borrow's genius was the care and
obstinacy with which he defended his practical, vigorous and alert
personality against the allurements of word-painting, of Nature and of
Reverie. He could respond to the thrill of natural beauty, he could
enjoy his mood when it veritably came upon him, just as he could enjoy a
tankard of old ale or linger to gaze upon a sympathetic face; but he
refused to pamper such feelings, still more to simulate them; he refused
to allow himself to become the creature of literary or poetic ecstasy; he
refused to indulge in the fashionable debauch of dilettante melancholy.
He wrote about his life quite naturally, "as if there were nothing in
it." Another and closely allied cause of perplexity and discontent to
the literary connoisseurs was Borrow's lack of style. By style, in the
generation of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Dickens and George Eliot, was
implied something recondite--a wealth of metaphor, imagery, allusion,
colour and perfume--a palette, a pounce-box, an optical instrument, a
sounding-board, a musical box, anything rather than a living tongue. To
a later race of stylists, who have gone as far as Samoa and beyond in the
quest of exotic perfumery, Borrow would have said simply, in the words of
old Montaigne, "To smell, though well, is to stink,"--"Malo, quam bene
olere, nil olere." Borrow, in fact, by a right instinct went back to the
straightforward manner of Swift and Defoe, Smollett and Cobbett, whose
vigorous prose he spec