may offend a little, but the writer can afford many such
blemishes, for he has life in his pen. He is, as it were himself
substantial, richly-coloured, strange and with big strokes and splashes
he suggests the thing itself. There have been writers since Borrow's day
who have thought to use words so subtly that they are equivalent to
things, but in the end their words remain nothing but words. Borrow uses
language like a man, and we forget his words on account of the vividness
of the things which they do not so much create as evoke. I do not mean
that it can be called unconscious art, for it is naively conscious and
delighting in itself. The language is that of an orator, a man standing
up and addressing a mass in large and emphatic terms. He succeeds not
only in evoking things that are very much alive, but in suggesting an
artist that is their equal, instead of one, who like so many more refined
writers, is a more or less pathetic admirer of living things. In this he
resembles Byron. It may not be the highest form of art, but it is the
most immediate and disturbing and genial in its effect. Finally, the
whole book has body. It can be browsed on. It does not ask a particular
mood, being itself the result of no one mood, but of a great part of one
man's life. Turn over half a dozen pages and a story, or a picture, or a
bit of costume, or of superstition, will invariably be the reward. It
reads already like a book rather older than it really is, but not because
it has faded. There was nothing in it to fade, being too hard, massive
and unvarnished. It remains alive, capable of surviving the Gypsies
except in so far as they live within it and its fellow books.

CHAPTER XX--"THE BIBLE IN SPAIN"

In "The Zincali" Borrow used some of his private notes and others
supplied by Spanish friends, together with parts of letters to the Bible
Society. It used to be supposed that "The Bible in Spain" was made up
almost entirely from these letters. But this has now been disproved by
the newly published "Letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society."
{163a} These letters are about half the length of "The Bible in Spain,"
and yet only about a third part of them was used by Borrow in writing
that book. Some of his letters were never received by the Society and
had probably been lost on the way. But this was more of a disaster to
the Society than to Borrow. He kept journals {163b} from which his
letters were prob