ef as in "Captain Singleton" and a
thousand novels. Again and again we are made perfectly certain that the
man could not have written otherwise. He is sounding his own depths, and
out of mere shyness, at times, uses the transparent amateur trick of
pretending that he was writing of someone else. Years afterwards, when
Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him, "What is the real nature of autobiography?"
he answered in questions: "Is it a mere record of the incidents of a
man's life? or is it a picture of the man himself--his character, his
soul?"

CHAPTER VI--THE BIOGRAPHER'S MATERIAL

"Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" give Borrow's character and soul by
direct and indirect means. Their truth and fiction produce a consistent
picture which we feel to be true. Dr. Knapp has shown, where the facts
are accessible, that Borrow does not much neglect, mislay or pervert
them. But neither Dr. Knapp nor anyone else has captured facts which
would be of any significance had Borrow told us nothing himself. Some of
the anecdotes lap a branch here and there; some disclose a little rotten
wood or fungus; others show the might of a great limb, perhaps a knotty
protuberance with a grotesque likeness, or the height of the whole;
others again are like clumsy arrogant initials carved on the venerable
bark. I shall use some of them, but for the most part I shall use
Borrow's own brush both to portray and to correct.

CHAPTER VII--PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST

The five works of Borrow's maturity--from "The Zincali: or the Gypsies of
Spain," written when he had turned thirty, to "Wild Wales," written when
he had turned fifty--have this in common, and perhaps for their chief
quality, that of set purpose and by inevitable accident they reveal
Borrow, the body and the spirit of the man. Together they compose a
portrait, if not a small gallery of portraits. Of these the most
deliberate is the one that emerges from "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye."
In these books, written after he had passed forty, he described the first
twenty-two years of his life, without, so far as is known, using any
notebooks or other contemporary documents. As I have said before, the
literal accuracy of such a description must have been limited by his
power and his willingness to see things as they were. In some ways there
is no greater stranger to the youth of twenty than the man of forty who
was once that youth, and if he overcomes that strangeness it is often by