{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.