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Title: The Vagabond in Literature

Author: Arthur Compton-Rickett

Release date: August 5, 2010 [eBook #33356]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33356

Credits: Transcribed from the 1906 J. M. Dent & Co. edition by David
Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
VAGABOND IN LITERATURE ***

Transcribed from the 1906 J. M. Dent & Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

THE VAGABOND
IN LITERATURE

by
ARTHUR RICKETT

with
six portraits

1906
london
J. M. DENT & CO.
29 & 30 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.
All Rights Reserved
to
my friend
ALFRED E. FLETCHER

FOREWORD

In the introductory paper to this volume an attempt is made to justify the
epithet “Vagabond” as applied to writers of a certain temperament. This
much may be said here: the term Vagabond is used in no derogatory sense.
Etymologically it signifies a wanderer; and such is the meaning attached to
the term in the following pages. Differing frequently in character and in
intellectual power, a basic similarity of temperament gives the various
writers discussed a remarkable spiritual affinity. For in each one the
wandering instinct is strong. Sometimes it may take a physical, sometimes
an intellectual expression—sometimes both. But always it shows itself, and
always it is opposed to the routine and conventions of ordinary life.
These papers are primarily studies in temperament; and the literary aspects
have been subordinated to the personal element. In fact, they are studies of
certain forces in modern literature, viewed from a special standpoint. And
the standpoint adopted may, it is hoped, prove suggestive, though it does
not pretend to be exhaustive.
If the papers on Hazlitt and De Quincey are more fragmentary than the
others, it is because these writers have been already discussed by the author
in a previous volume. It has been thought unnecessary to repeat the points
raised there, and these studies may be regarded therefore as at once
supplementary and complementary.
My cordial thanks are due to Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, who has taken so
kindly and friendly an interest in this little volume. He was good enough to
read the proofs, and to express his appreciation, especially of the Borrow
and Thoreau articles, in most generous terms. I had hoped, indeed, that he
would have honoured these slight studies by a prefatory note, and he had
expressed a wish to do so. Unhappily, prior claims upon his time prevented
this. The book deals largely, it will be seen, with those “Children of the

Open Air” about whom the eloquent author of Aylwin so often has written.
I am especially glad, therefore, to quote (with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
permission) his fine sonnet, where the “Vagabond” spirit in its happiest
manifestation is expressed.

“A TALK ON WATERLOO BRIDGE
“the last sight of george borrow
“We talked of ‘Children of the Open Air,’
Who once on hill and valley lived aloof,
Loving the sun, the wind, the sweet reproof
Of storms, and all that makes the fair earth fair,
Till, on a day, across the mystic bar
Of moonrise, came the ‘Children of the Roof,’
Who find no balm ’neath evening’s rosiest woof,
Nor dews of peace beneath the Morning Star.
We looked o’er London, where men wither and choke,
Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
And lore of woods and wild wind prophecies,
Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke:
And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
Leave never a meadow outside Paradise.” [0]

A. R.
London, October, 1906

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
the vagabond element in modern literature

I Explanation of the term Vagabond 3
First note of the Vagabond temperament—restlessness
II Second note of the Vagabond temperament—a passion for the 4
Earth
Compare this with a passion for Nature
Browning—William Morris—George Meredith
III Third note of the Vagabond temperament—the note of aloofness 6
Illustrate from Borrow, Thoreau, Walt Whitman
IV Bohemianism—its relation to Vagabondage 8
Charles Lamb—a Bohemian rather than a Vagabond
The decadent movement in Verlaine, Baudelaire
The Russian Vagabond—Tolstoy, Gorky
V The Gothic Revival and Vagabondage 12
VI Robert Browning and his “Vagabond moods” 13
Tennyson and William Morris compared
VII Effect of the Vagabond temperament upon Literature 15
I
WILLIAM HAZLITT
I Discussion of the term “complexity” 19

Illustration from Herbert Spencer, showing that complexity is of
two kinds: (1) Complexity—the result of degeneration, e.g. cancer
in the body; (2) Complexity—the consequent of a higher organism,
e.g. dog more complex than dog-fish
Complexity and the Vagabond—Neuroticism and Genius
Genius not necessarily morbid because it may have sprung from a
morbid soil. Illustrate from Hazlitt
II Two opposing tendencies in Hazlitt’s temperament: 24
(1) The austere, individualistic, Puritan strain;
(2) The sensuous, voluptuous strain. Illustrations of each
III The Inquisitiveness of Hazlitt 28
No patience with readers who will not quit their own small back
gardens. He is for ranging “over the hills and far away”
Hazlitt and the Country—Country people—Walking tours
IV The joyfulness of Hazlitt 31
The joyfulness of the Vagabond a fundamental quality
V The styles of Hazlitt and De Quincey compared 32
The tonic wisdom of Hazlitt
II
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
I The call of the Earth and the call of the Town 37
Compare De Quincey, Charles Dickens, and Elia
The veil of phantasy in De Quincey’s writings seemed to shut him
off from the outside world
II Merits and defects of his style. Not a plastic style, but in the 40
delineation of certain moods supremely excellent
Compare De Quincey and Oscar Wilde
Our Ladies of Sorrow and De Profundis

III The intellectual grip behind the shifting phantasies 45
De Quincey as critic and historian
IV The humour of De Quincey—not very genuine page 48
Witty rather than humorous
Humour not characteristic of the Vagabond
V De Quincey—Mystic and Logician 52
The fascination of his personality
III
GEORGE BORROW
I Dreamers in Literature 57
Romantic autobiography and Lavengro
Borrow on the subject of autobiography
The Celt and the Saxon in Borrow
His egotism
Little objective feeling in his friendships
A self-absorbed and self-contained nature
The Isopel Berners episode discussed
The coldness of Borrow
II His faculty for seizing on the picturesque and picaresque elements 66
in the world about him
Illustrations from The Bible in Spain
Illustrations from Lavengro
III Borrow and the Gypsies 75
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s tribute to Borrow
Petulengro
Borrow’s faculty for characterization

“How to manage a horse on a journey”
IV Borrow and Thomas Hardy compared 82
Both drawn to characters not “screened by convention”
Differences in method of presentment
Borrow’s greater affinity with Charles Reade
His distinctive originality
The spacious freshness of his writings
In his company always “a wind on the heath”
IV
HENRY D. THOREAU
I Thoreau and his critics 89
The Saxon attitude towards him
The Walden episode
Too much has been made of it
He went to Walden not to escape ordinary life, but to fit himself for
ordinary life
II His indebtedness to Emerson 93
His poetic appreciation of Nature
Thoreau on “Walking”—compare with Hazlitt
“Emersonitis”—examples
III Thoreau and the Indians 97
The Indians were to Thoreau what the Gypsies were to Borrow.
But he lacked the picturesque vigour of Borrow
His utterances on the Indian character considered
Thoreau and civilization
Swagger and Vagabondage

IV Thoreau as a thinker 104
His Orientalism
“Donatello” (?)
His power over animals
Thoreau and children—his fondness for them
This not an argument in favour of sociability
Lewis Carroll
The “unsociability” of the Vagabond in general, and Thoreau in
particular
Thoreau and George Meredith
Similarity in attitude towards the Earth
V
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
I Romance—what is it? 117
Its twofold character
Romanticism analysed
The elfish character of Stevenson’s work
II The “Ariel” element in Stevenson predominant 120
The “unreality” of his fiction
Light but little heat
III The Romantic and the Artist 123
Blake—Shelley—Keats—Tennyson
His ideal as an artist
His courageous gaiety
IV His captivating grace 126
The essays discussed—their merits and defects

His indebtedness to Hazlitt, Lamb, Montaigne
His “private bravado”
V The artist exemplified in three ways: (1) The maker of phrases; (2) 130
The limner of pictures; (3) The painter of character. Illustrations
Dickens, Browning, and Stevenson—their love of the grotesque
Treatment of Nature in fiction from the days of Mrs. Radcliffe to
the present day
Scott—the Brontës—Kingsley—Thomas Hardy
Stevenson moralizes
VI Is the “Shorter Catechist” element a weakness? 137
Edgar Allan Poe and Stevenson
VI
RICHARD JEFFERIES
I Jefferies, Borrow, and Thoreau 141
The neuroticism of Jefferies
Distinction between susceptibility and passion
II Jefferies as an artist 143
He loved the Earth with every nerve of his body
His acute sense of touch
Compare with Keats
Illustrations
His writings, studies, and tactile sensation
Their sensuous charm
III His mysticism 148
Illustration
Compare with Tennyson

Mysticism and hysteria
The psychology of hysteria
“Yoga” and the Sufis
Oriental ecstasies and the trances of Jefferies
Max Nordau—Professor William James
De Quincey and Jefferies compared
IV Differences between Thoreau and Jefferies 156
Praise and desire alternate in Jefferies’ writings
His joy in the beauty and in the plenitude of the Earth
V Jefferies as a thinker 158
“All things seem possible in the open air”
Defect in his Nature creed
His attitude towards the animal creation
“Good sport”
His democratic sympathies—influence of Ruskin
His stoicism
His pride and reserve
Our indebtedness to him
VII
WALT WHITMAN
I The supreme example of the Vagabond in Literature 169
Mr. Swinburne’s verdict
Whitman the pioneer of a new order
No question about a “Return to Nature” with Whitman
He never left it. A spiritual native of the woods and heath

Yet wild only so far as he is cosmic
His songs no mere pæans of rustic solitudes; they are songs of the
crowded streets as well as of the country roads; of the men and
women of every type, no less than of the fields and streams
No quarrel with civilisation as such
His “rainproof coat” and “good shoes”
Compare with Borrow’s big green gamp
II Whitman’s attitude towards Art 173
Two essentials of Art—Sincerity and Beauty
Whitman’s allegiance to Sincerity
Why he has chosen the better part
His occasional failure to seize essentials
Illustrations of his powers as an artist
“On the Beach at Night”—“Reconciliation”—“When lilacs last on
the dooryard bloomed”
Whitman’s utterances on Death
Whitman’s rude nonchalance deliberate, not due to carelessness
“I furnish no specimens”
Whitman’s treatment of sea
The question of outspokenness in Literature
Mr. Swinburne’s dictum
Stevenson’s criticism—“A Bull in a China Shop”
“The Children of Adam”
Merits and defects of his Sex Cycle
Whitman and Browning
The poetry of animalism

Whitman, William Morris, and Byron
Mr. Burroughs’ eulogy of Whitman discussed
The treatment of love in modern poetry
On the whole the defects of Whitman’s sex poems typical of his
defects as a writer generally
Characteristics of Whitman’s style
III Whitman’s attitude towards Humanity 187
His faith in the “powerful uneducated person”
The Poet of Democracy
Whitman and Victor Hugo
His affection comprehensive rather than deep
Mr. William Clarke’s eulogy discussed
The psychology of the social reformer
Whitman and the average man
His egotism—emptied of condescension
Whitman no demagogue—his plain speaking
The Conservatism and conventionality of the masses
Illustration from Mr. Barrie’s Admirable Crichton
Democratic poets other than Whitman—Ebenezer Elliott, Thomas
Hood, and Mrs. Browning
Whitman’s larger utterance
Whitman and William Morris compared
Affinity with Tolstoy
IV Whitman’s attitude towards Life 198
No moralist—but a philosophy of a kind
The value of “messages” in Literature

Whitman and Browning compared
Whitman and culture
Whitman and science
Compares here with Tennyson and Browning
Tonic influence of his writings
“I shall be good health to you”
His big, genial sanity

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

William Hazlitt Photogravure Frontispiece
From a crayon drawing by W. Bewick, executed in 1822
Thomas de Quincey 38
From an engraving by W. H. More
George Borrow 60
From a portrait in the possession of Mr. John Murray. Reproduced by kind
permission of Mr. Murray
Robert Louis Stevenson 118
From a woodcut by R. Bryden
Richard Jefferies 146
From a photograph. Reproduced by kind permission of the London
Stereoscopic Company
Walt Whitman 172
From a woodcut by R. Bryden

INTRODUCTION
the vagabond element in modern literature

“There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and
stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath.”—
Lavengro.

I

There are some men born with a vagrant strain in the blood, an unsatiable
inquisitiveness about the world beyond their doors. Natural revolutionaries
they, with an ingrained distaste for the routine of ordinary life and the
conventions of civilization. The average common-sense Englishman
distrusts the Vagabond for his want of sympathy with established law and
order. Eccentricity and unconventionality smack to him always of moral
obliquity. And thus it is that the literary Vagabond is looked at askance.
One is reminded of Mr. Pecksniff: “Pagan, I regret to state,” observed that
gentleman of the Sirens on one occasion. Unhappily no one pointed out to
this apostle of purity that the naughtiness of the Sirens was not necessarily
connected with paganism, and that the siren disposition has been found
even “in choirs and places where they sing.”
Restlessness, then, is one of the notes of the Vagabond temperament.
Sometimes the Vagabond is a physical, sometimes only an intellectual
wanderer; but in any case there is about him something of the primal
wildness of the woods and hills.
Thus it is we find in the same spiritual brotherhood men so different in
genius and character as Hazlitt, De Quincey, Thoreau, Whitman, Borrow,
Jefferies, Stevenson.

Thoreau turned his back on civilization, and found a new joy of living in the
woods at Maine. ’Tis the Open Road that inspired Whitman with his rude,
melodic chants. Not the ways of men and women, but the flaunting
“pageant of summer” unlocked the floodgates of Jefferies’ heart. Hazlitt
was never so gay, never wrote of books with such relish, as when he was
recounting a country walk. There are few more beautiful passages than
those where he describes the time when he walked between Wrexham and
Llangollen, his imagination aglow with some lines of Coleridge. De
Quincey loved the shiftless, nomadic life, and gloried in uncertainties and
peradventures. A wandering, open-air life was absolutely indispensable to
Borrow’s happiness; and Stevenson had a schoolboy’s delight in the make-
believe of Romance.

II

Another note now discovers itself—a passion for the Earth. All these men
had a passion for the Earth, an intense joy in the open air. This feeling
differs from the Nature-worship of poets like Wordsworth and Shelly. It is
less romantic, more realistic. The attitude is not so much that of the devotee
as that of the lover. There is nothing mystical or abstract about it. It is
direct, personal, intimate. I call it purposely a passion for the Earth rather
than a passion for Nature, in order to distinguish it from the pronounced
transcendentalism of the romantic poets.
The poet who has expressed most nearly the attitude of these Vagabonds
towards Nature—more particularly that of Thoreau, Whitman, Borrow, and
Jefferies—is Mr. George Meredith.
Traces of it may be found in Browning with reference to the “old brown
earth,” and in William Morris, who exclaimed—

“My love of the earth and the worship of it!”

but Mr. Meredith has given the completest expression to this Earth-worship.
One thinks of Thoreau and Jefferies when reading Melampus—

“With love exceeding a simple love of the things
That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;
Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings
From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck;
Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;
Or, cast their web between bramble and thorny hook;
The good physician Melampus, loving them all,
Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book.”

While that ripe oddity, “Juggling Jerry,” would have delighted the
“Romany”-loving Borrow.
Indeed the Nature philosophy of Mr. Meredith, with its virile joy in the rich
plenitude of Nature and its touch of wildness has more in common with
Thoreau, with Jefferies, with Borrow, and with Whitman than with
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, or even with Tennyson—the first of our
poets to look upon the Earth with the eyes of the scientist.

III

But a passion for the Earth is not sufficient of itself to admit within the
charmed circle of the Vagabond; for there is no marked restlessness about
Mr. Meredith’s genius, and he lacks what it seems to me is the third note of
the genuine literary Vagabond—the note of aloofness, of personal
detachment. This it is which separates the Vagabond from the generality of
his fellows. No very prolonged scrutiny of the disposition of Thoreau,
Jefferies, and Borrow is needed to reveal a pronounced shyness and
reserve. Examine this trait more closely, and it will exhibit a certain
emotional coldness towards the majority of men and women. No one can
overlook the chill austerity that marks Thoreau’s attitude in social
converse. Borrow, again, was inaccessible to a degree, save to one or two
intimates; even when discovered among congenial company, with the
gipsies or with companions of the road like Isopel Berners, exhibiting, to
me, a genial bleakness that is occasionally exasperating.
It was his constitutional reserve that militated against the success of
Jefferies as a writer. He was not easy to get on with, not over fond of his
kind, and rarely seems quite at ease save in the solitude of the fields.

Whitman seems at first sight an exception. Surely here was a friendly man
if ever there was one. Yet an examination of his life and writings will
compel us to realize a lack of deep personal feeling in the man. He loves
the People rather than the people. Anyone who will go along with him is a
welcome comrade. This catholic spirit of friendliness is delightful and
attractive in many ways, but it has its drawbacks; it is not possible perhaps
to have both extensity and intensity of emotion. There is the impartial
friendliness of the wind and sun about his salutations. He loves all men—
because they are a part of Nature; but it is the common human element in
men and women themselves that attracts him. There was less of the
Ishmaelite about Whitman than about Thoreau, Borrow, or Jefferies; but the
man whose company he really delighted in was the “powerful, uneducated
man”—the artisan and the mechanic. Those he loved best were those who
had something of the elemental in their natures—those who lived nearest to
the earth. Without denying for a moment that Whitman was capable of
genuine affection, I cannot help feeling, from the impression left upon me
by his writings, and by accounts given by those who knew him, that what I
must call an absence of human passion—not necessarily affection—which
seems to characterize more or less the Vagabond generally, may be detected
in Whitman, no less than in Thoreau and Borrow. It would seem that the
passion for the earth, which made them—to use one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
happy phrases—“Children of the Open Air,” took the place of a passion for
human kind.
In the papers dealing with these writers these points are discussed at greater
length. For the present reference is made to them in order to illustrate the
characteristics of the Vagabond temperament, and to vindicate my generic
title.
The characteristics, then, which I find in the Vagabond temperament are (1)
Restlessness—the wandering instinct; this expresses itself mentally as well
as physically. (2) A passion for the Earth—shown not only in the love of
the open air, but in a delight in all manifestations of life. (3) A
constitutional reserve whereby the Vagabond, though rejoicing in the
company of a few kindred souls, is put out of touch with the majority of
men and women. This is a temperamental idiosyncrasy, and must not be
confounded with misanthropy.

These characteristics are not found in equal degree among the writers
treated of in these pages. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes
another. That is to be expected. But to some extent all these characteristics
prevail.

IV

There is a certain type of Vagabondage which may be covered by the term
“Bohemianism.” But ’tis of a superficial character mostly, and is in the
nature of a town-made imitation. Graces and picturesqueness it may have
of a kind, but it lacks the rough virility, the sturdy grit, which is the most
attractive quality of the best Vagabond.
Bohemianism indeed is largely an attitude of dress; Vagabondage an
attitude of spirit. At heart the Bohemian is not really unconventional; he is
not nomadic by instinct as is the Vagabond.
Take the case of Charles Lamb. There was a man whose habits of life were
pleasantly Bohemian, and whose sympathy with the Vagabond temperament
has made some critics over-hastily class him temperamentally with writers
like Hazlitt and De Quincey. He was not a true Vagabond at all. He was a
Bohemian of the finer order, and his graces of character need no encomium
to-day. But he was certainly not a Vagabond. At heart he was devoted to
convention. When released from his drudgery of clerkship he confessed
frankly how potent an influence routine had been and still was in his life.
This is not the tone of the Vagabond. Even Elia’s wanderings on paper are
more apparent than real, and there is a method in his quaintest fantasies.
His discursive essays are arabesques observing geometrical patterns, and
though seemingly careless, follow out cunningly preconceived designs. He
only appears to digress; but all his bypaths lead back into the high road.
Hazlitt, on the other hand, was a genuine digressionalist; so was De
Quincey; so was Borrow. There is all the difference between their literary
mosaic and the arabesques of Lamb. And should one still doubt how to
classify Elia, one could scarcely place him among the “Children of the
Open Air.” Make what allowance you like for his whimsical remarks about
the country, it is certain that no passion for the Earth possessed him.

One characteristic, however, both the Bohemian and the Vagabond have in
common—that is, restlessness. And although there is a restlessness which
is the outcome of superabundant nervous energy—the restlessness of
Dickens in his earlier years, for instance—yet it must be regarded as, for the
most part, a pathological sign. One of the legacies of the Industrial
Revolution has been the neurotic strain which it has bequeathed to our
countrymen. The stress of life upon the nervous system in this era of
commercialism has produced a spirit of feverish unrest which, permeating
society generally, has visited a few souls with special intensity. It has never
been summed up better than by Ruskin, when, in one of his scornful
flashes, he declared that our two objects in life were: whatever we have, to
get more; and wherever we are, to go somewhere else. Nervous instability
is very marked in the case of Hazlitt and De Quincey; and there was a strain
of morbidity in Borrow, Jefferies, and Stevenson.
Far more pronounced in its neurotic character is Modern Bohemianism—as
I prefer to call the “town Vagabond.” The decadent movement in literature
has produced many interesting artistic figures, but they lack the grit and the
sanity of outlook which undoubtedly marks the Vagabond. In France to-day
morbidity and Vagabondage are inseparable.
Gallic Vagabonds, such as Verlaine and Baudelaire, interesting as they are
to men of letters and students of psychology, do not engage our affections
as do the English Vagabonds. We do not take kindly to their personalities.
It is like passing through the hot streets after inhaling the scent of the
woodland. There is something stifling and unhealthy about the atmosphere,
and one turns with relief to the vagabondage of men like Whitman, who are
“enamoured of growth out of doors.”
Of profounder interest is the Russian Vagabond. In Russian Literature the
Vagabond seems to be the rule, not the exception.
Every great Russian writer has more or less of the Vagabond about him.
Tolstoy, it is true, wears the robe of the Moralist, and Tolstoy the Ascetic
cries down Tolstoy the Artist. But I always feel that the most enduring part
of Tolstoy’s work is the work of the Vagabond temperament that lurks
beneath the stern preacher. Political and social exigencies have driven him

to take up a position which is certainly not in harmony with many traits in
his nature.
In the case of Gorky, of course, we have the Vagabond naked and
unashamed. His novels are fervent defences of the Vagabond. What could
be franker than this?—“I was born outside society, and for that reason I
cannot take in a strong dose of its culture, without soon feeling forced to get
outside it again, to wipe away the infinite complications, the sickly
refinements, of that kind of existence. I like either to go about in the
meanest streets of towns, because, though everything there is dirty, it is all
simple and sincere; or else to wander about in the high roads and across the
fields, because that is always interesting; it refreshes one morally, and needs
no more than a pair of good legs to carry one.” Racial differences mark off
in many ways the Russian Vagabond from his English brother; a strange
fatalism, a fierce melancholy, and a nature of greater emotional intensity;
but in the passage quoted how much in common they have also.

V

There were literary Vagabonds in England before the nineteenth century.
Many interesting and picturesque figures—Marlowe’s, for instance—arrest
the attention of the student, and to some extent the characteristics noted
may be traced in these. But every century, no less than every country, has
its psychological atmosphere, and the modern literary Vagabond is quite a
distinctive individual. Some I know are inclined to regard Goldsmith as
one of the Vagabond band; but, although a charming Vagabond in many
ways, he did not express his Vagabondage in his writings. The spirit of his
time was not conducive to Vagabond literature. The spirit of the succeeding
age especially favoured the Vagabond strain.
The Gothic Revival, and the newly-awakened interest in medievalism,
warmed the imaginations of verse men and prose men alike. The impulse to
wander, to scale some “peak in Darien” for the joy of a “wild surmise,”
seized every artist in letters—poet, novelist, essayist. A longing for the
mystic world, a passion for the unknown, surged over men’s minds with the
same power and impetuosity as it had done in the days of the Renaissance.
Ordinary life had grown uglier, more sordid; life seemed crushed in the
thraldom of mechanism. Men felt like schoolboys pent up in a narrow

whitewashed room who look out of the windows at the smiling and alluring
world beyond the gates. Small wonder that some who hastened to escape
should enter more thoroughly than more cautious souls into the
unconventional and the changeful.
The swing of the pendulum was sure to come, and it is not surprising that
the mid-century furnishes fewer instances of literary Vagabonds and of
Vagabond moods. But with the pre-Raphaelite Movement an impulse
towards Vagabondage revived. And the era which started with a De
Quincey closed with a Stevenson.

VI

Many writers who cannot be classed among the Vagabonds gave occasional
expression to the Vagabond moods which sweep across every artist’s soul at
some time or other. It would be beside my purpose to dwell at length upon
these Vagabond moods, for my chief concern is with the thorough-going
wanderer. Mention may be made in passing, however, of Robert Browning,
whose cordial detestation of Bohemianism is so well known. Outwardly
there was far less of the Vagabond about him than about Tennyson.
However the romantic spirit may have touched his boyhood and youth,
there looked little of it in the staid, correctly dressed, middle-aged
gentleman who attended social functions and cheerfully followed the life
conventional. One recalls his disgust with George Sand and her Bohemian
circle, his hatred for spiritualism, his almost Philistine horror of the shiftless
and lawless elements in life. At the same time I feel that Mr. Chesterton, in
his brilliant monograph of the poet, has overstated the case when he says
that “neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything
but an Englishman of the middle class.” He had mixed blood in his veins,
and the fact that his grandmother was a Creole is not to be lightly brushed
aside by a Chestertonian paradox. For the Southern blood shows itself from
time to time in an unmistakable manner. It is all very well to say that “he
carried the prejudices of his class (i.e. the middle class) into eternity!” But
we have to reckon with the hot passion of “Time’s Revenges,” the daring
unconventionality of “Fifine at the Fair,” and the rare sympathy and
discernment of the gipsy temperament in “The Flight of the Duchess.”
Conventional prejudices Browning undoubtedly had, and there was a

splendid level-headedness about the man which kept in check the
extravagances of Vagabondage.
But no poet who has studied men and women as he had studied them,
pondering with loving care the curious, the complex, the eccentric, could
have failed to break away at times from the outlook of the middle-class
Englishman.
Tennyson, on the other hand, looking the handsome Vagabond to the life,
living apart from the world, as if its conventions and routine were
distasteful to him, had scarcely a touch of the Vagabond in his
temperament. That he had no Vagabond moods I will not say; for the poet
who had no Vagabond moods has yet to be born. But he frowned them
down as best he could, and in his writings we can see the typical, cultured,
middle-class Englishman as we certainly fail to see in Browning. A great
deal of Tennyson is merely Philistinism made musical. The romantic
temper scarcely touches him at all; and in those noble poems—“Lucretius,”
“Ulysses,” “Tithonus”—where his special powers find their happiest
expression, the attitude of mind has nothing in common with that of the
Vagabond. It was classic art, not romantic art, that attracted Tennyson.
Compare the “Guinevere” of Tennyson with the “Guenevere” of Morris,
and you realize at once the vast difference that separates Sentimentalism
from Romanticism. And Vagabondage can be approached only through the
gateway of Romanticism.

VII

In looking back upon these discursive comments on the Vagabond element
in modern literature, one cannot help asking what is the resultant effect of
the Vagabond temperament upon life and thought. As psychologists no
doubt we are content to examine its peculiarities and extravagances without
troubling to ask how far it has made for sanity and sweetness.
Yet the question sooner or later rises to our lips. This Vagabond
temperament—is its charm and attractiveness merely superficial? I cannot
think so. I think that on the whole its effect upon our literature has been
salutary and beneficial.

These more eager, more adventurous spirits express for us the holiday mood
of life. For they are young at heart, inasmuch as they have lived in the
sunshine, and breathed in the fresh, untainted air. They have indeed
scattered “a new roughness and gladness” among men and women, for they
have spoken to us of the simple magic of the Earth.

I
WILLIAM HAZLITT

“He that is weary, let him sit,
My soul would stir
And trade in courtesies and wit,
Quitting the fur
To cold complexions needing it.”
George Herbert.
“Men of the world, who know the world like men,
Who think of something else beside the pen.”
Byron.

I

It is not unusual to hear the epithet “complex” flung with a too ready
alacrity at any character who evinces eccentricity of disposition. In olden
days, when regularity of conduct, and conformity even in small particulars
were regarded as moral essentials, the eccentric enjoyed short shrift. The
stake, the guillotine, or the dungeons of the Inquisition speedily put an end
to the eccentricities. A slight measure of nonconformity was quite enough
to earn the appellation of witch or wizard. One stood no chance as an
eccentric unless the eccentricity was coupled with unusual force of
character.
Alienists assure us that insanity is on the increase, and it is certain that
modern conditions of life have favoured nervous instabilities of
temperament, which express themselves in eccentricities of conduct. But
nervous instability is one thing, complexity another. The fact that they may

co-exist affords us no excuse for confusing them. We speak of a man’s
personality, whereas it would be more correct to speak of his personalities.
Much has been written of late years about multi-personalities, until the
impression has spread that the possession of a number of differing
personalities is a special form of insanity. This is quite wrong. The sane,
no less than the insane man has a number of personalities, and the
difference between them lies in the power of co-ordination. The sane man
is like a skilful driver who is able to control his team of horses; whereas the
insane man has lost control of his steeds, and allows first one and then the
other to get the mastery of him.
The personalities are no more numerous than before, only we are made
aware of their number.
In a sense, therefore, every human being is complex. Inheritance and
environment have left distinctive characteristics, which, if the power of co-
ordination be weakened, take possession of the individual as opportunity
may determine. We usually apply the term personality to the resulting
blend of the various personalities in his nature. In the case of sane men and
women the personality is a very composite affair. What we are thinking of
frequently when we apply the epithet “complex” is a certain
contradictoriness of temperament, the result of opposing strains of blood. It
is the quality, not the quantities, of the personalities that affects us. If not
altogether happy, the expression may in these cases pass as a rough
indication of the opposing element in their nature. But when used, as it
often is, merely to indicate an eccentricity, the epithet assumes a restricted
significance. A may be far more complex than B; but his power of co-
ordination, what we call his will, is strong, whereas that of B is weak, so we
reserve the term complex for the weaker individual. But why reserve the
term complex for a few literary decadents who have lost the power of co-
ordination, and not apply it to a mind like Shakespeare’s, who was certainly
as complex a personality as ever lived?
Now I do not deny that it is wrong to apply the term complexity to men of
unstable, nervous equilibrium. What I do deny is the right to apply the term
to these men only, thus disseminating the fallacy—too popular nowadays—
that genius and insanity are inseparable.

As a matter of fact, if we turn to Spencer’s exposition of the evolutionary
doctrine we shall find an illustration ready at hand to show that complexity
is of two kinds. Evolution, as he tells us, is a change from homogeneity to
heterogeneity, from a simple to a complex. Thus a dog is more complex
than a dog-fish, a man than a dog, a Shakespeare greater than a Shaw. But
complexity, though a law of Evolution, is not the law of Evolution. Mere
complexity is not necessarily a sign of a higher organism. It may be
induced by injury, as, for instance, the presence of a marked growth such as
cancer. Here we have a more complex state, but complexity of this kind is
on the road to dissolution and disintegration. Cancer, in fact, in the body is
like disaffection in an army. The unity is disturbed and differences are
engendered. Thus, given a measure of nervous instability, a complexity
may be induced, a disintegration of the composite personality into the
various separate personalities, that bespeaks a lower, not a higher organism.
[21]

Now all this may seem quite impertinent to our subject, but I have
discussed the point at length because complexity is certainly one of the
marks of the Vagabond, and it is important to make quite clear what is
connoted by that term.
Recognizing, then, the two types of complexity, the type of complexity with
which I am concerned especially in these papers is the higher type. I have
not selected these writers merely on account of their eccentricities or
deviations from the normal. Mere eccentricity has a legitimate interest for
the scientist, but for the psychologist it is of no particular moment. Hazlitt
is not interesting because he was afflicted with a morbid egotism; or
Borrow because he suffered from fits of melancholia; or De Quincey
because he imagined he was in debt when he had plenty of money. It was
because these neurotic signs were associated with powerful intellects and
exceptional imaginations, and therefore gave a peculiar and distinctive
character to their writings—in short, because they happened to be men of
genius, men of higher complex organisms than the average individual—that
they interest so strongly.
It seems to me a kind of inverted admiration that is attracted to what is
bizarre and out of the way, and confounds peculiarity with cleverness and
eccentricity with genius.

The real claim that individuals have upon our appreciation and sympathy is
mental and moral greatness; and the sentimental weakness with the
“oddity” is no more rational, no more to be respected, than a sympathy
which extends to physical monstrosities and sees nothing to admire in a
normal, healthy body.
It may be urged, of course, by some that I have admitted to a neurotic strain
affecting more or less all the Vagabonds treated of in this volume, and this
being so, it is clear that the morbid tendencies in their temperament must
have conditioned the distinctive character of their genius.
Now it is quite true that the soil whence the flower of their genius sprung
was in several cases not without a taint; but it does not follow that the
flower itself is tainted. And here we come upon the fallacy that seems to
me to lie at the basis of the doctrine which makes genius itself a kind of
disease. The soil of the rose garden may be manured with refuse that
Nature uses in bringing forth the lovely bloom of the rose. But the
poisonous character of the refuse has been chemically transformed in giving
vitality to the roses. And so from unhealthy stock, from temperaments
affected by disease, have sprung the roses of genius—transformed by the
mysterious alchemy of the imagination into pure and lovely things. There
are, of course, poisonous flowers, just as there is a type of genius—not the
highest type—that is morbid. But this does not affect my contention that
genius is not necessarily morbid because it may have sprung from a morbid
soil. Hazlitt is a case in point. His temperament was certainly not free from
morbidity, and this morbidity may be traced in his writings. The most
signal instance is the Liber Amoris—an unfortunate chapter of sentimental
autobiography which did irreparable mischief to his reputation. But there is
nothing morbid in Hazlitt at his best; and let it be added that the bulk of
Hazlitt’s writings displays a noble sanity.
Much has been written about his less pleasing idiosyncrasies, and no writer
has been called more frequently to account for deficiencies. It is time
surely that we should recall once more the tribute of Lamb: “I think William
Hazlitt to be in his natural and healthy state one of the wisest and finest
spirits breathing.”

II

The complexity of Hazlitt’s temperament was especially emphasized by the
two strong, opposing tendencies that called for no ordinary power of co-
ordination. I mean the austere, individualistic, Puritan strain that came
from his Presbyterian forefathers; and a sensuous, voluptuous strain that
often ran athwart his Puritanism and occasioned him many a mental
struggle. The general effect of these two dements in his nature was this: In
matters of the intellect the Puritan was uppermost; in the realm of the
emotions you felt the dominant presence of the opposing element.
In his finest essays one feels the presence at once of the Calvinist and the
Epicurean; not as two incompatibles, but as opposing elements that have
blent together into a noble unity; would-be rivals that have co-ordinated so
that from each the good has been extracted, and the less worthy sides
eliminated. Thus the sweetness of the one and the strength of the other
have combined to give more distinction and power to the utterance.
Take this passage from one of his lectures:—

“The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power,
and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is
beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty,
in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all
men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of
his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature;
to be identified with, and to foreknow, and to record, the feelings of all
men, at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions;
and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers that nature
does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they
are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they
affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was
Homer, such was Shakespeare, whose works will last as long as nature,
because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting
impulses of feature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial
spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their Maker. The
power of the imagination in them is the representative power of all
nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the
universe.”

And this:—

“The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or
repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd boy is a poet
when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the
countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice
when he gazes after the Lord Mayor’s show; the miser when he hugs
his gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage
who paints his idol with blood; the slave who worships a tyrant, or the
tyrant who fancies himself a god; the vain, the ambitious, the proud,
the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the
rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their
own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the
others think and act.”
“Poetry is not a branch of authorship; it is the stuff of which our life is
made.”

The artist is speaking in Hazlitt, but beneath the full, rich exuberance of the
artist, you can detect an under-note of austerity.
Then again, his memorable utterance about the Dissenting minister from
one of his essays on “Court Influence.”

“A Dissenting minister is a character not so easily to be dispensed
with, and whose place cannot be well supplied. It is a pity that this
character has worn itself out; that that pulse of thought and feeling has
ceased almost to beat in the heart of a nation, who, if not remarkable
for sincerity and plain downright well-meaning, are remarkable for
nothing. But we have known some such, in happier days, who had
been brought up and lived from youth to age in the one constant belief
in God and of His Christ, and who thought all other things but dross
compared with the glory hereafter to be revealed. Their youthful
hopes and vanity had been mortified in them, even in their boyish
days, by the neglect and supercilious regards of the world; and they
turned to look into their own minds for something else to build their
hopes and confidence upon. They were true priests. They set up an
image in their own minds—it was truth; they worshipped an idol there

—it was justice. They looked on man as their brother, and only bowed
the knee to the Highest. Separate from the world, they walked humbly
with their God, and lived in thought with those who had borne
testimony of a good conscience, with the spirits of just men in all ages.
. . . Their sympathy was not with the oppressors, but the oppressed.
They cherished in their thoughts—and wished to transmit to their
posterity—those rights and privileges for asserting which their
ancestors had bled on scaffolds, or had pined in dungeons, or in
foreign climes. Their creed, too, was ‘Glory to God, peace on earth,
goodwill to man.’ This creed, since profaned and rendered vile, they
kept fast through good report and evil report. This belief they had, that
looks at something out of itself, fixed as the stars, deep as the
firmament; that makes of its own heart an altar to truth, a place of
worship for what is right, at which it does reverence with praise and
prayer like a holy thing, apart and content; that feels that the greatest
Being in the universe is always near it; and that all things work
together for the good of His creatures, under His guiding hand. This
covenant they kept, as the stars keep their courses; this principle they
stuck by, for want of knowing better, as it sticks by them to the last. It
grows with their growth, it does not wither in their decay. It lives
when the almond-tree flourishes, and is not bowed down with the
tottering knees. It glimmers with the last feeble eyesight, smiles in the
faded cheek like infancy, and lights a path before them to the grave!”

Here is a man of Puritan lineage speaking; but is it the voice of Puritanism
only? Surely it is a Puritanism softened and refined, a Puritanism which is
free of those harsh and unpleasing elements that have too often obscured its
finer aspects. I know of no passage in his writings which for spacious
eloquence, nobleness of thought, beauty of expression, can rival this. It was
written in 1818, when Hazlitt was forty years old, and in the plenitude of
his powers.

III

But the power of co-ordination was not always exerted; perhaps not always
possible. Had it been so, then Hazlitt would not take his place in this little
band of literary Vagabonds.

There are times when the Puritan element disappears; and it is Hazlitt the
eager, curious taster of life that is presented to us. For there was the restless
inquisitiveness of the Vagabond about him. This gives such delightful
piquancy to many of his utterances. He ranges far and wide, and is willing
to go anywhere for a fresh sensation that may add to the interest of his
intellectual life. He has no patience with readers who will not quit their
own small back gardens. He is for ranging “over the hills and far away.”
No sympathy he with the readers who take timid constitutionals in
literature, choosing only the well-worn paths. He is a true son of the road;
the world is before him, and high roads and byways, rough paths and
smooth paths, are equally acceptable, provided they add to his zest and
enjoyment.
Not that he cares for the new merely because it is new. The essay on
“Reading Old Books” is proof enough of that. A literary ramble must not
merely be novel, it must have some element of beauty about it, or he will
revisit the old haunts of whose beauty he has full cognizance.
The passion for the Earth which was noted as one of the Vagabond’s
characteristics is not so pronounced in Hazlitt and De Quincey as with the
later Vagabonds. But it is unmistakable all the same. There are, he says,
“only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate
things—books, pictures, and the face of Nature.” The somewhat curious
use of the word “inanimate” here as applied to the “face of Nature” scarcely
does justice to his intense, vivid appreciation of the life of the open air; but
at any rate it differentiates his attitude towards Nature from that of
Wordsworth and his school. It is a feeling more direct, more concrete, more
personal.
He has no special liking for country people. On the contrary, he thinks
them a dull, heavy class of people.
“All country people hate one another,” he says. “They have so little
comfort that they envy their neighbours the smallest pleasure and
advantage, and nearly grudge themselves the necessaries of life. From not
being accustomed to enjoyment, they become hardened and averse to it—
stupid, for want of thought, selfish, for want of society.”

No; it is the sheer joy of being in the open, and learning what Whitman
called the “profound lesson of reception,” that attracted Hazlitt. “What I
like best,” he declares, “is to lie whole mornings on a sunny bank on
Salisbury Plain, without any object before me, neither knowing nor caring
how time passes, and thus, ‘with light-winged toys and feathered idleness,
to melt down hours to moments.’” A genuine Vagabond mood this.
Hazlitt, like De Quincey, had felt the glamour of the city as well as the
glamour of the country; not with the irresistibility of Lamb, but for all that
potently. But an instinct for the open, the craving for pleasant spaces, and
the longing of the hard-driven journalist for the gracious leisure of the
country, these things were paramount with both Hazlitt and De Quincey.
In Hazlitt’s case there is a touch of wildness, a more primal delight in the
roughness and solitude of country places than we find in De Quincey.
“One of the pleasantest things,” says Hazlitt, in true Vagabond spirit, “is
going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.”
The last touch is not only characteristic of Hazlitt, it touches that note of
reserve verging on anti-social sentiment that was mentioned as
characteristic of the Vagabond.
He justifies his feeling thus with an engaging frankness: “The soul of a
journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel. Do just as one pleases. We
go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences;
to leave ourselves behind; much more to get rid of others. . . . It is hard if I
cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing
for joy. From the point of yonder rolling cloud I plunge into my past being,
and revel there, as the sunburnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that
wafts him to his native shore. Then long-forgotten things, like ‘sunken
wrack and sunless treasures,’ burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel,
think, and be myself again.”

IV

Taken on the whole, the English literary Vagabond is a man of joy, not
necessarily a cheerful man. There is a deeper quality about joy than about
cheerfulness. Cheerfulness indeed is almost entirely a physical

idiosyncrasy. It lies on the surface. A man, serious and silent, may be a
joyful man; he can scarcely be a cheerful man. Moody as he was at times,
sour-tempered and whimsical as he could be, yet there was a fine quality of
joy about Hazlitt. It is this quality of joy that gives the sparkle and relish to
his essays. He took the same joy in his books as in his walks, and he
communicates this joy to the reader. He appears misanthropic at times, and
rages violently at the world; but ’tis merely a passing gust of feeling, and
when over, it is easy to see how superficial it was, so little is his general
attitude affected by it.
The joyfulness of the Vagabond is no mere light-hearted, graceful spirit. It
is of a hardy and virile nature—a quality not to be crushed by misfortune or
sickness. Outwardly, neither the lives of Hazlitt nor De Quincey were what
we would call happy. Both had to fight hard against adverse fates for many
years; both had delicate constitutions, which entailed weary and protracted
periods of feeble health.
But there was a fundamental serenity about them. At the end of a hard and
fruitless struggle with death, Hazlitt murmured, “Well, I’ve had a happy
life.” De Quincey at the close of his long and varied life showed the same
tranquil stoicism that had carried him through his many difficulties.
Joyfulness permeates Thoreau’s philosophy of life; and until his system was
shattered by a painful and incurable complaint, Jefferies had the same
splendid capacity for enjoyment, a huge satisfaction in noting the splendour
and rich plenitude of the Earth. Whitman’s fine optimism defied every
attack from without and within; and the deliberate happiness of Stevenson,
when temptation to despondency was so strong, is one of his most attractive
characteristics.
Yet the characteristic belongs to the English race, and it is quite other with
the Russian. Melancholy in his cast of thought, and pessimistic in his
philosophy, the Russian Vagabond presents a striking contrast in this
particular.

V

Comparing the styles of Hazlitt and De Quincey, one is struck with the
greater fire and vigour of Hazlitt.
Indeed, the term which De Quincey applied to certain of his writings
—“impassioned prose”—is really more applicable to many of Hazlitt’s
essays. The dream fugues of De Quincey are delicately imaginative, but
real passion is absent from them. The silvery, far-away tones of the opium-
eater do not suggest passion.
Besides, an elaborate, involved style such as his does not readily convey
passion of any kind. It moves along too slowly, at too leisurely a pace. On
the other hand, the prose of Hazlitt was very frequently literally
“impassioned.” It was sharp, concise, the sentences rang out resolutely and
clearly. And no veil of phantasy hung at these times between himself and
the object of his description, as with De Quincey, muffling the voice and
blurring the vision. Defects it had, which there is no necessity to dwell on
here, but there was a passion in Hazlitt’s nature and writings which we do
not find in his contemporary.
Trying beyond doubt as was the wayward element in Hazlitt’s disposition,
to his friends it is not without its charm as a literary characteristic. His
bitterness against Coleridge in his later years leads him to dwell the longer
upon the earlier meetings, upon the Coleridge of Wem and Nether Stowey,
and thus his very prejudices leave his readers frequently as gainers.
A passing whim, a transient resentment, will be the occasion of some finely
discursive essay on abstract virtues and vices. And, after all, there is at
bottom such noble enthusiasm in the man, and where his subjects were not
living people, and his judgment is not blinded by some small prejudices,
how fair, how just, how large and admirable his view. His faults and
failings were of such a character as to bring upon the owner their own
retribution. He paid heavily for his mistakes. His splenetic moods and his
violent dislikes arose not from a want of sensibility, but from an excess of
sensibility. So I do not think they need seriously disturb us. After all, the
dagger he uses as a critic is uncommonly like a stage weapon, and does no
serious damage.
Better even than his brilliant, suggestive, if capricious, criticisms are his
discursive essays on men and things. These abound in a tonic wisdom, a

breadth of imagination as welcome as they are rare.

II
THOMAS DE QUINCEY

“In thoughts from the visions of the night when deep sleep falleth on
men.”—Job.

I

Although a passion for the Earth is a prevalent note in the character of the
literary Vagabond, yet while harking to the call of the country, he is by no
means deaf to the call of the town. With the exception of Thoreau, who
seemed to have been insensible to any magic save that of the road and
woodland, our literary Vagabonds have all felt and confessed to the spell of
the city. It was not, as in the case of Lamb and Dickens, the one compelling
influence, but it was an influence of no small potency.
The first important event in De Quincey’s life was the roaming life on the
hillside of North Wales; the second, the wanderings in “stony-hearted
Oxford Street.” Later on the spell of London faded away, and a longing for
the country possessed him once more. But the spell of London was
important in shaping his literary life, and must not be under-estimated.
Mention has been made of Lamb and Dickens, to whom the life of the town
meant so much, and whose inspiration they could not forgo without a pang.
But these men were not attracted in the same way as De Quincey. What
drew De Quincey to London was its mystery; whereas it was the stir and
colour of the crowded streets that stirred the imagination of the two
Charles’s. We scarcely realize as we read of those harsh experiences, those
bitter struggles with poverty and loneliness, that the man is writing of his
life in London, is speaking of some well-known thoroughfares. It is like
viewing a familiar scene in the moonlight, when all looks strange and
weird. A faint but palpable veil of phantasy seemed to shut off De Quincey

from the outside world. In his most poignant passages the voice has a
ghostly ring; in his most realistic descriptions there is a dreamlike
unreality. A tender and sensitive soul in his dealings with others, there are
no tears in his writings. One has only to compare the early recorded
struggles of Dickens with those of De Quincey to feel the difference
between the two temperaments. The one passionately concrete, the other
dispassionately abstract. De Quincey will take some heartfelt episode and
deck it out in so elaborate a panoply of rhetoric that the human element
seems to have vanished. Beautiful as are many of the passages describing
the pathetic outcast Ann, the reader is too conscious of the stylist and the
full-dress stylist.
That he feels what he is writing of, one does not doubt; but he does not suit
his manner to his matter. For expressing subtle emotions, half shades of
thought, no writer is more wonderfully adept than De Quincey. But when
the episode demands simple and direct treatment his elaborate cadences feel
out of place.
When he pauses in his description to apostrophize, then the disparity affects
one far less; as, for instance, in this apostrophe to “noble-minded” Ann after
recalling how on one occasion she had saved his life.

“O youthful benefactress! how often in succeeding years, standing in
solitary places, and thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect love
—how often have I wished that, as in ancient times the curse of a
father was believed to have a supernatural power, and to pursue its
object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfilment, even so the benediction
of a heart oppressed with gratitude might have a like prerogative;
might have power given it from above to chase, to haunt, to waylay, to
pursue thee into the central darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were
possible) even into the darkness of the grave, there to awaken thee
with an authentic message of peace and forgiveness, and of final
reconciliation!”

Perhaps the passage describing how he befriended the small servant girl in
the half-deserted house in Greek Street is among the happiest, despite a note
of artificiality towards the close:—

“Towards nightfall I went down to Greek Street, and found, on taking
possession of my new quarters, that the house already contained one

single inmate—a poor, friendless child, apparently ten years old; but
she seemed hunger-bitten; and sufferings of that sort often make
children look older than they are. From this forlorn child I learned that
she had slept and lived there alone for some time before I came; and
great joy the poor creature expressed when she found that I was in
future to be her companion through the hours of darkness. The house
could hardly be called large—that is, it was not large on each separate
storey; but, having four storeys in all, it was large enough to impress
vividly the sense of its echoing loneliness; and, from the want of
furniture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious uproar on the
staircase and hall; so that, amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and
hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more from
the self-created one of ghosts. Against these enemies I could promise
her protection; human companionship was in itself protection; but of
other and more needful aid I had, alas! little to offer. We lay upon the
floor, with a bundle of law papers for a pillow, but with no other
covering than a large horseman’s cloak; afterwards, however, we
discovered in a garret an old sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some
fragments of other articles, which added a little to our comfort. The
poor child crept close to me for warmth, and for security against her
ghostly enemies. . . . Apart from her situation, she was not what would
be called an interesting child. She was neither pretty, nor quick in
understanding, nor remarkably pleasing in manners. But, thank God!
even in those years I needed not the embellishments of elegant
accessories to conciliate my affections. Plain human nature, in its
humblest and most homely apparel, was enough for me; and I loved
the child because she was my partner in wretchedness.”

II

I cannot agree with Mr. H. S. Salt when, in the course of a clever and
interesting biographical study of De Quincey, [40] he says: “It (in re style)
conveys precisely the sense that is intended, and attains its effect far less by
rhetorical artifice than by an almost faultless instinct in the choice and use
of words.”

In the delineation of certain moods he is supremely excellent. But surely
the style is not a plastic style; and its appeal to the ear rather than to the
pictorial faculty limits its emotional effect upon the reader. Images pass
before his eyes, and he tries to depict them by cunningly devised phrases;
but the veil of phantasy through which he sees those images has blurred
their outline and dimmed their colouring. The phrase arrests by its musical
cadences, by its solemn, mournful music. Even some of his most admirable
pieces—the dream fugues, leave the reader dissatisfied, when they touch
poignant realities like sorrow. Despite its many beauties, that dream fugue,
“Our Ladies of Sorrow,” seems too misty, too ethereal in texture for the
intense actuality of the subject. Compare some of its passages with
passages from another prose-poet, Oscar Wilde, where no veil of phantasy
comes between the percipient and the thing perceived, and it will be strange
if the reader does not feel that the later writer has a finer instinct for the
choice and use of words.
It would be untrue to say that Wilde’s instinct was faultless. A garish
artificiality spoils much of his work; but this was through wilful perversity.
Even in his earlier work—in that wonderful book, Dorian Gray, he realized
the compelling charm of simplicity in style. His fairy stories, The Happy
Prince, for instance, are little masterpieces of simple, restrained writing,
and in the last things that came from his pen there is a growing appreciation
of the value of simplicity.
De Quincey never realized this; he recognized one form of art—the
decorative. And although he became a master of that form, it was inevitable
that at times this mode of art should fail in its effect.
Here is a passage from Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow:—

“The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of
Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for
vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of
lamentation—Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be
comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when
Herod’s sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were
stiffened for ever which were heard at times as they trotted along
floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not

unmarked in heaven. Her eyes are sweet and subtle; wild and sleepy
by turns; often times rising to the clouds, often times challenging the
heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish
memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the
sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld
the mustering of summer clouds.”

And here is Oscar Wilde in De Profundis:—

“Prosperity, pleasure, and success, may be rough of grain and common
in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is
nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does
not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. . . . It is a wound that
bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must
bleed again, though not in pain. Behind joy and laughter there may be
a temperament coarse, hard, and callous. But behind sorrow there is
always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in Art is .
. . no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well
of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon, and Narcissus
to Narcissus. Truth in Art is the unity of a thing with itself—the soul
made incarnate, the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is
no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to
me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the
appetite made to blind the one and clog the other, but out of sorrow
have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is
pain.”

I have not quoted these passages in order to pit one style against another;
for each writer sets himself about a different task. A “dream fugue”
demands a treatment other than the simpler, more direct treatment essential
for Wilde’s purpose. It is not because De Quincey the artist chose this
especial form for once in order to portray a mood that the passage merits
consideration; but because De Quincey always treated his emotional
experiences as “dream fugues.” Of suffering and privation, of pain and
anguish bodily and mental, he had experiences more than the common lot.
But when he tries to show this bleeding reality to us a mist invariably arises,
and we see things “as in a glass darkly.”

There is a certain passage in his Autobiography which affords a key to this
characteristic of his work.
When quite a boy he had constituted himself imaginary king of an
imaginary kingdom of Gombrom. Speaking of this fancy he writes: “O
reader! do not laugh! I lived for ever under the terror of two separate wars
and two separate worlds; one against the factory boys in a real world of
flesh and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and pursuit, that were
anything but figurative; the other in a world purely aerial, where all the
combats and the sufferings were absolute moonshine. And yet the simple
truth is that for anxiety and distress of mind the reality (which almost every
morning’s light brought round) was as nothing in comparison of that Dream
Kingdom which rose like a vapour from my own brain, and which
apparently by the fiat of my will could be for ever dissolved. Ah, but no! I
had contracted obligations to Gombrom; I had submitted my conscience to
a yoke; and in secret truth my will had no autocratic power. Long
contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow,
sympathy with the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated
wrongs; these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually
frozen that shadow into a region of reality far denser than the material
realities of brass or granite.”
This confession is a remarkable testimony to the reality of De Quincey’s
imaginative life. “I had contracted obligations to Gombrom.” Yes, despite
his practical experiences with the world, it was Gombrom, “the moonlight”
side of things, that appealed to him. The boys might fling stones and
brickbats, just as the world did later—but though he felt the onslaught, it
moved him far less than did the phantasies of his imagination.
There is no necessity to weigh Wilde’s experiences of “Our Ladies of
Sorrow” beside those of De Quincey. All we need ask is which impresses
us the more keenly with the actuality of sorrow. And I think there can be no
doubt that it is not De Quincey.
“The Dream Kingdom that rose like a vapour” from his brain, this it was—
this Vagabond imagination of his—that was the one great reality in life. It
is a mistake to assume, as some have done, that this faculty for
daydreaming was a legacy of the opium-eating. The opium gave an added

brilliance to the dream-life, but it did not create it. He was a dreamer from
his birth—a far more thorough-going dreamer than was ever Coleridge.
There was a strain of insanity about him undoubtedly, and it says much for
his intellectual activity and moral power that the Dream Kingdom did not
disturb his mental life more than it did. Had he never touched opium to
relieve his gastric complaint, he would have been eccentric—that is, if he
had lived. Without some narcotic it is doubtful whether his highly sensitive
organization would have survived the attacks of disease. As it was, the
opium not only eased the pain, but lifted his imagination above the ugly
realities of life, and afforded a solace in times of loneliness and misery.

III

Intellectually he was a man of a conservative turn of mind, with an
ingrained respect for the conventions of life, but temperamentally he was a
restless Vagabond, with a total disregard for the amenities of civilization,
asking for nothing except to live out his own dream-life. Dealing with him
as a writer, you found a shrewd, if wayward critic, with no little of “John
Bull” in his composition. Deal with him as a man, you found a bright,
kindly, nervous little man in a chronic state of shabbiness, eluding the
attention of friends so far as possible, and wandering about town and
country as if he had nothing in common with the rest of mankind. His
Vagabondage is shown best in his purely imaginative work, and in the
autobiographical sketches.
Small and insignificant in appearance to the casual observer, there was
something arresting, fascinating about the man that touched even the
irascible Carlyle. Much of his work, one can well understand, seemed to
this lover of facts “full of wire-drawn ingenuities.” But with all his
contempt for phantasy, there was a touch of the dreamer in Carlyle, and the
imaginative beauty, apart from the fanciful prettiness in De Quincey’s work,
would have appealed to him. For there was power, intellectual grip, behind
the shifting fancies, and both as a critic and historian he has left behind him
memorable work. As critic he has been taken severely to task for his
judgments on French writers and on many lights of eighteenth-century
thought. Certainly De Quincey’s was not the type of mind we should go to
for an interpretative criticism of the eighteenth century. Yet we must not

forget his admirable appreciation of Goldsmith. At his best, as in his
criticism of Milton and Wordsworth, he shows a fine, delicate, analytical
power, which it is hard to overpraise.
“Obligations to Gombrom” do not afford the best qualification for the
historian. One can imagine the hair rising in horror on the head of the late
Professor Freeman at the idea of the opium-eater sitting down seriously to
write history.
Yet he had, like Froude, the power of seizing upon the spectacular side of
great movements which many a more accurate historian has lacked.
Especially striking is his Revolt of the Tartars—the flight eastward of a
Tartar nation across the vast steppes of Asia, from Russia to Chinese
territory. Ideas impressed him rather than facts, and episodes rather than a
continuous chain of events. But when he was interested, he had the power
of describing with picturesque power certain dramatic episodes in a nation’s
history.
A characteristic of the literary Vagabond is the eager versatility of his
intellectual interests. He will follow any path that promises to be
interesting, not so much with the scholar’s patient investigation as with the
pedestrian’s delight in “fresh woods and pastures new.”
A prolific writer for the magazines, it is inevitable that there should be a
measure that is ephemeral in De Quincey’s voluminous writings. But it is
impossible not to be struck by the wide range of his intellectual interests. A
mind that is equally at home in the economics of Ricardo and the
transcendentalism of Wordsworth; that can turn with undiminished zest
from Malthus to Kant; that could deal lucidly with the “Logic of Political
Economy,” despite the dream-world that finds expression in the
“impassioned prose”; that could delight in such broadly farcical absurdities
as “Sortilege and Astrology,” and such delicately suggestive studies as “On
the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” a mind of this adventurous and
varied type is assuredly a very remarkable one. That he should touch every
subject with equal power was not to be expected, but the analytic brilliance
that characterizes even his mystical writings enabled him to treat such
subjects as political economy with a sureness of touch and a logical grasp

that has astonished those who had regarded him as merely an
inconsequential dreamer of dreams.

IV

I cannot agree with Dr. Japp [48] when, in the course of some laudatory
remarks on De Quincey’s humour, he says: “It is precisely here that De
Quincey parts company, alike from Coleridge and from Wordsworth;
neither of them had humour.”
In the first place De Quincey’s humour never seems to me very genuine.
He could play with ideas occasionally in a queer fantastic way, as in his
elaborate gibe on Dr. Andrew Bell.

“First came Dr. Andrew Bell. We knew him. Was he dull? Is a
wooden spoon dull? Fishy were his eyes, torpedinous was his manner;
and his main idea, out of two which he really had, related to the moon
—from which you infer, perhaps, that he was lunatic. By no means. It
was no craze, under the influence of the moon, which possessed him; it
was an idea of mere hostility to the moon. . . . His wrath did not pass
into lunacy; it produced simple distraction; and uneasy fumbling with
the idea—like that of an old superannuated dog who longs to worry,
but cannot for want of teeth.”

A clever piece of analytical satire, if you like, but not humorous so much as
witty. Incongruity, unexpectedness, belongs to the essence of humour.
Here there is that cunning display of congruity between the old dog and the
Doctor which the wit is so adroit in evolving.
Similarly in the essay on “Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,” the
style of clever extravaganza adopted in certain passages is witty, certainly,
but lacks the airy irresponsibility characterizing humour. Sometimes he
indulges in pure clowning, which is humorous in a heavy-handed way. But
grimacing humour is surely a poor kind of humour.
Without going into any dismal academic discussion on Wit and Humour, I
think it is quite possible to differentiate these two offsprings of imagination,
making Wit the intellectual brother of the twain. Analytical minds naturally

turn to wit, by preference: Impressionistic minds to humour. Dickens, who
had no gift for analysis, and whose writings are a series of delightful
unreflective, personal impressions, is always humorous, never witty.
Reflective writers like George Eliot or George Meredith are more often
witty than humorous.
I do not rate De Quincey’s wit very highly, though it is agreeably diverting
at times, but it was preferable to his humour.
The second point to be noted against Dr. Japp is his reference to Coleridge.
No one would claim Wordsworth as a humorist, but Coleridge cannot be
dismissed with this comfortable finality. Perhaps he was more witty than
humorous; he also had an analytic mind of rarer quality even than De
Quincey’s, and his Table Talk is full of delightful flashes. But the amusing
account he gives of his early journalistic experiences and the pleasant way
in which he pokes fun at himself, can scarcely be compatible with the
assertion that he had “no humour.”
Indeed, it was this quality, I think, which endeared him especially to Lamb,
and it was the absence of this quality which prevented Lamb from giving
that personal attachment to Wordsworth which he held for both Coleridge
and Hazlitt.
But the comparative absence of humour in De Quincey is another
characteristic of Vagabondage. Humour is largely a product of civilization,
and the Vagabond is only half-civilized. I can see little genuine humour in
either Hazlitt or De Quincey. They had wit to an extent, it is true, but they
had this despite, not because, of their Vagabondage. Thoreau,
notwithstanding flashes of shrewd American wit, can scarcely be accounted
a humorist. Whitman was entirely devoid of humour. A lack of humour is
felt as a serious deficiency in reading the novels of Jefferies; and the airy
wit of Stevenson is scarcely full-bodied enough to rank him among the
humorists.
This deficiency of humour may be traced to the characteristic attitude of the
Vagabond towards life, which is one of eager curiosity. He is inquisitive
about its many issues, but with a good deal of the child’s eagerness to know
how a thing happened, and who this is, and what that is. Differing in many
ways, as did Borrow and De Quincey, we find the same insatiable curiosity;

true, it expressed itself differently, but there is a basic similarity between the
impulse that took Borrow over the English highways and gave him that zest
for travel in other countries, and the impulse that sent De Quincey
wandering over the various roads of intellectual and emotional inquiry.
Thoreau’s main reason for his two years’ sojourn in the woods was one of
curiosity. He “wanted to know” what he could find out by “fronting” for a
while the essential facts of life, and he left, as he says, “for as good a reason
as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to
live.” In other words, inquisitiveness inspired the experiment, and
inquisitiveness as to other experiments induced him to terminate the Walden
episode.
Now, in his own way, De Quincey was possibly the most inquisitive of all
the Vagabonds. The complete absence of the imperative mood in his
writings has moved certain moralists like Carlyle to impatience with him.
There is a fine moral tone about his disposition, but his writings are
engagingly unmoral (quite different, of course, from immoral). He has
called himself “an intellectual creature,” and this happy epithet exactly
describes him. He collected facts, as an enthusiast collects curios, for
purposes of decoration. He observed them, analysed their features, but
almost always with a view to æsthetic comparisons.
And to understand De Quincey aright one must follow him in his
multitudinous excursions, not merely rest content with a few fragments of
“impassioned prose,” and the avowedly autobiographic writings. For the
autobiography extends through the sixteen volumes of his works. The
writings, no doubt, vary in quality; in many, as in the criticism of German
and French writers, acute discernment and astounding prejudices jostle one
another. But this is no reason for turning impatiently away. Indeed, it is an
additional incentive to proceed, for they supply such splendid psychological
material for illustrating the temperament and tastes of the writer. And this
may confidently be said: There is “fundamental brainwork” in every article
that De Quincey has written.

V

What gives his works their especial attraction is not so much the analytic
faculty, interesting as it is, or the mystical turn of mind, as in the piquant

blend of the two. Thus, while he is poking fun at Astrology or Witchcraft,
we are conscious all the time that he retains a sneaking fondness for the
occult. He delights in dreams, omens, and coincidences. He reminds one at
times of the lecturer on “Superstitions,” who, in the midst of a brilliant
analysis of its futility and absurdity, was interrupted by a black cat walking
on to the platform, and was so disturbed by this portent that he brought his
lecture to an abrupt conclusion.
On the whole the Mystic trampled over the Logician. His poetic
imagination impresses his work with a rich inventiveness, while the logical
faculty, though subsidiary, is utilized for giving form and substance to the
visions.
It is curious to contrast the stateliness of De Quincey’s literary style, the
elaborate full-dress manner, with the extreme simplicity of the man. One
might be tempted to add, surely here the style is not the man. His friends
have testified that he was a gentle, timid, shrinking little man, and
abnormally sensitive to giving offence; and to those whom he cared for—
his family, for instance—he was the incarnation of affection and tenderness.
Yet in the writings we see another side, a considerable sprinkle of sturdy
prejudices, no little self-assertion and pugnacity. But there is no real
disparity. The style is the man here as ever. When roused by opposition he
could even in converse show the claws beneath the velvet. Only the
militant, the more aggressive side of the man is expressed more readily in
his writings. And the gentle and amiable side more readily in personal
intimacy. Both the life and the writings are wanted to supply a complete
picture.
In one respect the records of his life efface a suspicion that haunts the
reader of his works. More than once the reader is apt to speculate as to how
far the arrogance that marks certain of his essays is a superficial quality, a
literary trick; how far a moral trait. The record of his conversations tends to
show that much of this was merely surface. Unlike Coleridge, unlike
Carlyle, he was as willing to listen as to talk; and he said many of his best
things with a delightful unconsciousness that they were especially good.
He never seemed to have the least wish to impress people by his cleverness
or aptness of speech.

But when all has been said as to the personality of the man as expressed in
his writings—especially his Confessions, and to his personality as
interpreted by friends and acquaintances—there remains a measure of
mystery about De Quincey. This is part of his fascination, just as it is part
of the fascination attaching to Coleridge. The frank confidences of his
Confessions hide from view the inner ring of reserve, which gave a strange
impenetrability to his character, even to those who knew and loved him
best. A simple nature and a complex temperament.
Well, after all, such personalities are the most interesting of all, for each
time we greet them it is with a note of interrogation.

III
GEORGE BORROW

“The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening Paradise.”
Gray.
“He had an English look; that is was square
In make, of a complexion white and ruddy.”
Byron.

I

Why is it that almost as soon as we can toddle we eagerly demand a story of
our elders? Why is it that the most excitable little girl, the most incorrigible
little boy can be quieted by a teaspoonful of the jam of fiction? Why is it
that “once upon a time” can achieve what moral strictures are powerless to
effect?
It is because to most of us the world of imagination is the world that
matters. We live in the “might be’s” and “peradventures.” Fate may have
cast our lot in prosaic places; have predetermined our lives on humdrum
lines; but it cannot touch our dreams. There we are princes, princesses—
possessed of illimitable wealth, wielding immeasurable power. Our bodies
may traverse the same dismal streets day after day; but our minds rove
luxuriantly through all the kingdoms of the earth.
Those wonderful eastern stories of the “Flying Horse” and the “Magic
Carpet,” symbolize for us the matter-of-fact world and the matter-of-dream
world. Nay, is there any sound distinction between facts and dreams? After
all—

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

But there are dreams and dreams—dreams by moonlight and dreams by
sunlight. Literature can boast of many fascinating moonlight dreams—
Ancient Mariners and Christabels, Wonder Books and Tanglewood Tales.
And the fairies and goblins, the witches and wizards, were they not born by
moonlight and nurtured under the glimmer of the stars?
But there are dreams by sunlight and visions at noonday also. Such dreams
thrill us in another but no less unmistakable way, especially when the
dreamer is a Scott, a William Morris, a Borrow.
And dreamers like Borrow are not content to see visions and dream dreams,
their bodies must participate no less than their minds. They must needs set
forth in quest of the unknown. Hardships and privations deter them not.
Change, variety, the unexpected, these things are to them the very salt of
life.
This untiring restlessness keeps a Richard Burton rambling over Eastern
lands, turns a Borrow into the high-road and dingle. This bright-eyed
Norfolk giant took more kindly to the roughnesses of life than did Hazlitt
and De Quincey. Quite as neurotic in his way, his splendid physique makes
us think of him as the embodiment of fine health. Illness and Borrow do
not agree. We think of him swinging along the road like one of Dumas’
lusty adventurers, exhibiting his powers of horsemanship, holding his own
with well-seasoned drinkers—especially if the drink be Norfolk ale—
conversing with any picturesque rag-tag and bob-tail he might happen
upon. There is plenty of fresh air in his pages. No thinker like Hazlitt, no
dreamer like De Quincey; but a shrewd observer with the most amazing
knack of ingratiating himself with strangers.
No need for this romancer to seek distant lands for inspiration. Not even
the villages of Spain and Portugal supplied him with such fine stuff for
romance as Mumper’s Dingle. He would get as strange a story out of a
London counting-house or an old apple-woman on London Bridge as did
many a teller of tales out of lonely heaths and stormy seas.

Lavengro and The Romany Rye are fine specimens of romantic
autobiography. His life was varied enough, abounding in colour; but the
Vagabond is never satisfied with things that merely happen. He is equally
concerned with the things that might happen, with the things that ought to
happen. And so Borrow added to his own personal record from the
storehouse of dreams. Some have blamed him for not adhering to the actual
facts. But does any autobiographer adhere to actual facts? Can any man,
even with the most sensitive feeling for accuracy, confine himself to a
record of what happened?
Of course not. The moment a man begins to write about himself, to delve
in the past, to ransack the storehouse of his memory; then—if he has
anything of the literary artist about him, and otherwise his book will not be
worth the paper it is written on—he will take in a partner to assist him.
That partner’s name is Romance.
As a revelation of temperament, the Confessions of Rousseau and the
Mémoires of Casanova are, one feels, delightfully trustworthy. But no sane
reader ever imagines that he is reading an accurate transcript from the life
of these adventurous gentlemen. The difference between the editions of De
Quincey’s Opium Eater is sufficient to show how the dreams have
expanded under popular approbation.
Borrow himself suggests this romantic method when he says, “What is an
autobiography? Is it a mere record of a man’s life, or is it a picture of the
man himself?” Certainly, no one carried the romantic colouring further than
he did. When he started to write his own life in Lavengro he had no notion
of diverging from the strict line of fact. But the adventurer Vagabond
moved uneasily in the guise of the chronicler. He wanted more elbow-
room. He remembered all that he hoped to encounter, and from hopes it
was no far cry to actualities.
Things might have happened so! Ye gods, they did happen so! And after
all it matters little to us the exact proportion of fact and fiction. What does
matter is that the superstructure he has raised upon the foundation of fact is
as strange and unique as the palace of Aladdin.
However much he suggested the typical Anglo-Saxon in real life, there was
the true Celt whenever he took pen in hand.

A stranger blend of the Celt and the Saxon indeed it would be hard to find.
The Celtic side is not uppermost in his temperament—this strong, assertive,
prize-fighting, beer-loving man (a good drinker, but never a drunkard)
seems far more Saxon than anything else. De Quincey had no small
measure of the John Bull in

his temperament, and Borrow had a great deal more. The John Bull side
was very obvious. Yet a Celt he was by parentage, and the Celtic part was
unmistakable, though below the surface. If the East Anglian in him had a
weakness for athleticism, boiled mutton and caper sauce, the Celt in him
responded quickly to the romantic associates of Wales.
Readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s charming romance Aylwin will recall the
emphasis laid on the passionate love of the Welsh for a tiny strip of Welsh
soil. Borrow understood all this; he had a rare sympathy with the Cymric
Celt. You can trace the Celt in his scenic descriptions, in his feeling for the
spell of antiquity, his restlessness of spirit. And yet in his appearance there

was little to suggest the Celt. Small wonder that many of his friends spoke
of this white-haired giant of six foot three as if he was first and foremost an
excellent athlete.
Certainly he had in full measure an Englishman’s delight and proficiency in
athletics—few better at running, jumping, wrestling, sparring, and
swimming.
In many respects indeed Borrow will not have realized the fancy picture of
the Englishman as limned by Hawthorne’s fancy—the big, hearty, self-
opiniated, beef-eating, ale-drinking John Bull. Save to a few intimates like
Mr. Watts-Dunton and Dr. Hake he seems to have concealed very
effectually the Celtic sympathies in his nature. But no reader of his books
can be blind to this side of his character; and then again, as in all the literary
Vagabonds, it is the complexity of the man’s temperament that attracts and
fascinates.
The man who can delight in the garrulous talk of a country inn, understand
the magic of big solitudes; who can keenly appraise the points of a horse
and feel the impalpable glamour of an old ruin; who will present an
impenetrable reserve to the ordinary stranger and take the fierce, moody
gypsy to his heart; who will break almost every convention of civilization,
yet in the most unexpected way show a sturdy element of conventionality; a
man, in short, of so many bewildering contradictions and strangely assorted
qualities as Borrow cannot but compel interest.
Many of the contradictory traits were not, as they seemed, the
inconsequential moods of an irresponsible nature, but may be traced to the
fierce egotism of the man. The Vagabond is always an egotist; the egotism
may be often amusing, and is rarely uninteresting. But the personal point of
view, the personal impression, has for him the most tremendous
importance. It makes its possessor abnormally sensitive to any
circumstances, any environment, that may restrict his independence or
prevent the full expression of his personal tastes and whims. Among our
Vagabonds the two most pronounced egotists are Borrow and Whitman.
The secret of their influence, their merits, and their deficiencies lies in this
intense concentration of self. An appreciation of this quality leads us to
comprehend a good deal of Borrow’s attitude towards men and women.

Reading Lavengro and The Romany Rye the reader is no less struck by the
remarkable interest that Borrow takes in the people—especially the rough,
uncultured people—whom he comes across, as in the cheerful indifference
with which he loses sight of them and passes on to fresh characters. There
is very little objective feeling in his friendships; as flesh and blood
personages with individualities of their own—loves, hopes, faiths of their
own—he seems to regard them scarcely at all. They exist chiefly as
material for his curiosity and inquisitiveness. Hence there is a curious
selfishness about him—not the selfishness of a passionate, capricious
nature, but the selfishness of a self-absorbed and self-contained nature.
Perhaps there was hidden away somewhere in his nature a strain of
tenderness, of altruistic affection, which was reserved for a few chosen
souls. But the warm human touch is markedly absent from his writings,
despite their undeniable charm.
Take the Isopel Berners episode. Whether Isopel Berners was a fiction of
the imagination or a character in real life matters not for my purpose. At
any rate the episode, his friendship with this Anglo-Saxon girl of the road,
is one of the distinctive features of both Lavengro and The Romany Rye.
The attitude of Borrow towards her may safely be regarded as a clear
indication of the man’s character.
A girl of fine physical presence and many engaging qualities such as were
bound to attract a man of Borrow’s type, who had forsaken her friends to
throw in her lot with this fellow-wanderer on the road. Here were the ready
elements of a romance—of a friendship that should burn up with the
consuming power of love the baser elements of self in the man’s
disposition, and transform his nature.
And what does he do?
He accepts her companionship, just as he might have accepted the
companionship of one of his landlords or ostlers; spends the time he lived
with her in the Dingle in teaching her Armenian, and when at last, driven to
desperation by his calculating coldness, she comes to take farewell of him,
he makes her a perfunctory offer of marriage, which she, being a girl of fine
mettle as well as of strong affection, naturally declines. She leaves him,

and after a few passages of philosophic regret, he passes on to the next
adventure.
Now Borrow, as we know, was not physically drawn towards the ordinary
gypsy type—the dark, beautiful Celtic women; and it was in girls of the fair
Saxon order such as Isopel Berners that he sought a natural mate.
Certainly, if any woman was calculated by physique and by disposition to
attract Borrow, Isopel Berners was that woman. And when we find that the
utmost extent of his passion is to make tea for her and instruct her in
Armenian, it is impossible not to be disagreeably impressed by the
unnatural chilliness of such a disposition. Not even Isopel could break
down the barrier of intense egoism that fenced him off from any profound
intimacy with his fellow-creatures.
Perhaps Dr. Jessop’s attack upon him errs in severity, and is to an extent, as
Mr. Watts-Dunton says, “unjust”; but there is surely an element of truth in
his remarks when he says: “Of anything like animal passion there is not a
trace in all his many volumes. Not a hint that he ever kissed a woman or
even took a little child upon his knee.” Nor do I think that the anecdote
which Mr. Watts-Dunton relates about the beautiful gypsy, to whom Borrow
read Arnold’s poem, goes far to dissipate the impression of Borrow’s
insensibility to a woman’s charm.
A passing tribute to the looks of an extraordinarily beautiful girl is quite
compatible with a comparative insensibility to feminine beauty and
feminine graces. That Borrow was devoid of animal passion I do not
believe—nor indeed do his books convey that impression; that he had no
feeling for beauty either would be scarcely compatible with the Celtic
element in his nature. I think it less a case—as Dr. Jessop seems to think—
of want of passion as of a tyrannous egotism that excluded any element
likely to prove troublesome. He would not admit a disturbing factor—such
as the presence of the self-reliant Isopel—into his life.
No doubt he liked Isopel well enough in his fashion. Otherwise certainly he
would not have made up his mind to marry her. But his own feelings, his
own tastes, his own fancies, came first. He would marry her—oh yes!—
there was plenty of time later on. For the present he could study her

character, amuse himself with her idiosyncrasies, and as a return for her
devotion and faithful affection teach her Armenian. Extremely touching!
But the episode of Isopel Berners is only one illustration, albeit a very
significant one, of Borrow’s calculating selfishness. No man could prove a
more interesting companion than he; but one cannot help feeling that he
was a sorry kind of friend.
It may seem strange at first sight, finding this wanderer of the road in the
pay of the Bible Society, and a zealous servant in the cause of militant
Protestantism. But the violent “anti-Popery” side of Borrow is only another
instance of his love of independence. The brooding egotism that chafed at
the least control was not likely to show any sympathy with sacerdotalism.
There was no trace of philosophy in Borrow’s frankly expressed views on
religious subjects. They were honest and straightforward enough, with all
the vigorous unreflective narrowness of ultra-Protestantism.
It says much for the amazing charm of Borrow’s writing that The Bible in
Spain is very much better than a glorified tract. It must have come as a
surprise to many a grave, pious reader of the Bible Society’s publications.
And the Bible Society made the Vagabond from the literary point of view.
Borrow’s book—The Zincali—or an account of the gypsies of Spain,
published in 1841, had brought his name before the public. But The Bible
in Spain (1843) made him famous—doubtless to the relief of “glorious John
Murray,” the publisher, who was doubtful about the book’s reception.
It is a fascinating book, and if lacking the unique flavour of the romantic
autobiographies, Lavengro and The Romany Rye, has none the less many of
the characteristics that give all his writings their distinctive attraction.

II

Can we analyse the charm that Borrow’s books and Borrow’s personality
exercise over us, despite the presence of unpleasing traits which repel?
In the first place he had the faculty for seizing upon the picturesque and
picaresque elements in the world about him. He had the ready instinct of

the discursive writer for what was dramatically telling. Present his
characters in dramatic form he could not; one and all pass through the
crucible of his temperament before we see them. We feel that they are
genuinely observed, but they are Borrovized. They speak the language of
Borrow. While this is quite true, it is equally true that he knows exactly
how to impress and interest the reader with the personages.
Take this effective little introduction to one of the characters in The Bible in
Spain:—

“At length the moon shone out faintly, when suddenly by its beams I
beheld a figure moving before me at a slight distance. I quickened the
pace of the burra, and was soon close at its side. It went on, neither
altering its pace nor looking round for a moment. It was the figure of a
man, the tallest and bulkiest that I had hitherto seen in Spain, dressed
in a manner strange and singular for the country. On his head was a
hat with a low crown and broad brim, very much resembling that of an
English waggoner; about his body was a long loose tunic or slop,
seemingly of coarse ticken, open in front, so as to allow the interior
garments to be occasionally seen; these appeared to consist of a jerkin
and short velveteen pantaloons. I have said that the brim of the hat
was broad, but broad as it was, it was insufficient to cover an immense
bush of coal-black hair, which, thick and curly, projected on either
side; over the left shoulder was flung a kind of satchel, and in the right
hand was held a long staff or pole.
“There was something peculiarly strange about the figure, but what
struck me the most was the tranquillity with which it moved along,
taking no heed of me, though, of course, aware of my proximity, but
looking straight forward along the road, save when it occasionally
raised a huge face and large eyes towards the moon, which was now
shining forth in the eastern quarter.
“‘A cold night,’ said I at last. ‘Is this the way to Talavera?’
“‘It is the way to Talavera, and the night is cold.’
“‘I am going to Talavera,’ said I, ‘as I suppose you are yourself.’

“‘I am going thither, so are you, Bueno.’
“The tones of the voice which delivered these words were in their way
quite as strange and singular as the figure to which the voice belonged;
they were not exactly the tones of a Spanish voice, and yet there was
something in them that could hardly be foreign; the pronunciation also
was correct, and the language, though singular, faultless. But I was
most struck with the manner in which the last word, bueno, was
spoken. I had heard something like it before, but where or when I
could by no means remember. A pause now ensued; the figure stalking
on as before with the most perfect indifference, and seemingly with no
disposition either to seek or avoid conversation.
“‘Are you not afraid,’ said I at last, ‘to travel these roads in the dark?
It is said that there are robbers abroad.’
“‘Are you not rather afraid,’ replied the figure, ‘to travel these roads in
the dark—you who are ignorant of the country, who are a foreigner, an
Englishman!’
“‘How is it that you know me to be an Englishman?’ demanded I,
much surprised.
“‘That is no difficult matter,’ replied the figure; ‘the sound of your
voice was enough to tell me that.’
“‘You speak of voices,’ said I; ‘suppose the tone of your own voice
were to tell me who you are?’
“‘That it will not do,’ replied my companion; ‘you know nothing about
me—you can know nothing about me.’
“‘Be not sure of that, my friend; I am acquainted with many things of
which you have little idea.’
“‘Por exemplo,’ said the figure.
“‘For example,’ said I, ‘you speak two languages.’
“The figure moved on, seemed to consider a moment, and then said
slowly, ‘Bueno.’

“‘You have two names,’ I continued; ‘one for the house and the other
for the street; both are good, but the one by which you are called at
home is the one which you like best.’
“The man walked on about ten paces, in the same manner as he had
previously done; all of a sudden he turned, and taking the bridle of the
burra gently in his hand, stopped her. I had now a full view of his face
and figure, and those huge features and Herculean form still
occasionally revisit me in my dreams. I see him standing in the
moonshine, staring me in the face with his deep calm eyes. At last he
said—
“‘Are you then one of us?’”

An admirable sketch, adroitly conceived and executed beyond doubt, but as
a fragment of dialogue remarkable for its literary skill rather than for its
characterization.
His instinct for the picturesque never fails him. This is one of the reasons
why, despite his astounding garrulousness, the readers of his books are
never wearied.
Whether it be a ride in the forest, a tramp on foot, an interview with some
individual who has interested him, the picturesque side is always presented,
and never is he at better advantage than when depicting some scene of
gypsy life.
Opening The Bible in Spain at random I happen on this description of a
gypsy supper. It is certainly not one of the best or most picturesque, but as
an average sample of his scenic skill it will serve its purpose well.

“Hour succeeded hour, and still we sat crouching over the brasero,
from which, by this time, all warmth had departed; the glow had long
since disappeared, and only a few dying sparks were to be
distinguished. The room or hall was now involved in utter darkness;
the women were motionless and still; I shivered and began to feel
uneasy. ‘Will Antonio be here to-night?’ at length I demanded.

“‘No tenga usted cuidao, my London Caloro,’ said the gypsy mother,
in an unearthly tone; ‘Pepindorio [70] has been here some time.’
“I was about to rise from my seat and attempt to escape from the
house, when I felt a hand laid upon my shoulder, and in a moment I
heard the voice of Antonio.
“‘Be not afraid, ’tis I, brother; we will have a light anon, and then
supper.’
“The supper was rude enough, consisting of bread, cheese, and olive.
Antonio, however, produced a leathern bottle of excellent wine; we
dispatched these viands by the light of an earthern lamp which was
placed upon the floor.
“‘Now,’ said Antonio to the youngest female, ‘bring me the pajandi,
and I will sing a gachapla.’
“The girl brought the guitar, which with some difficulty the gypsy
tuned, and then, strumming it vigorously, he sang—
“I stole a plump and bonny fowl,
But ere I well had dined,
The master came with scowl and growl,
And me would captive bind.
“My hat and mantle off I threw,
And scour’d across the lea,
Then cried the beng [71] with loud halloo,
Where does the Gypsy flee?”
“He continued playing and singing for a considerable time, the two
younger females dancing in the meanwhile with unwearied diligence,
whilst the aged mother occasionally snapped her fingers or beat time
on the ground with her stock. At last Antonio suddenly laid down the
instrument.
“‘I see the London Caloro is weary. Enough, enough; to-morrow more
thereof—we will now to the charipé’ (bed).

‘“With all my heart,’ said I; ‘where are we to sleep?’
“‘In the stable,’ said he, ‘in the manger; however cold the stable may
be, we shall be warm enough in the bufa.’”

Perhaps his power in this direction is more fully appreciated when he deals
with material that promises no such wealth of colour as do gypsy scenes
and wanderings in the romantic South.
Cheapside and London Bridge suit him fully as well as do Spanish forests
or Welsh mountains. True romancer as he is, he is not dependent on
conventionally picturesque externals for arresting attention; since he will
discover the stuff of adventure wherever his steps may lead him. The
streets of Bagdad in the “golden prime” of Haroun Alraschid are no more
mysterious, more enthralling, than the well-known thoroughfares of modern
London. No ancient sorceress of Eastern story can touch his imagination
more deeply than can an old gypsy woman. A skirmish with a publisher is
fully as exciting as a tilt in a medieval tourney; while the stories told him by
a rural landlord promise as much relish as any of the tales recounted by
Oriental barbers and one-eyed Calenders.
Thus it is that while the pervasive egotism of the man bewitches us, we
yield readily to the spell of his splendid garrulity. It is of no great moment
that he should take an occasional drink to quench his thirst when passing
along the London streets. But he will continue to make even these little
details interesting. Did he think fit to recount a sneeze, or to discourse upon
the occasion on which he brushed his hair, he would none the less, I think,
have held the reader’s attention.
Here is the episode of a chance drink; it is a drink and nothing more; but it
is not meant to be skipped, and does not deserve to be overlooked.

“Notwithstanding the excellence of the London pavement, I began,
about nine o’clock, to feel myself thoroughly tired; painfully and
slowly did I drag my feet along. I also felt very much in want of some
refreshment, and I remembered that since breakfast I had taken
nothing. I was in the Strand, and glancing about I perceived that I was
close by an hotel which bore over the door the somewhat remarkable
name of ‘Holy Lands.’ Without a moment’s hesitation I entered a

well-lighted passage, and turning to the left I found myself in a well-
lighted coffee-room, with a well-dressed and frizzled waiter before
me. ‘Bring me some claret,’ said I, for I was rather faint than hungry,
and I felt ashamed to give a humble order to so well-dressed an
individual. The waiter looked at me for a moment, then making a low
bow he bustled off, and I sat myself down in the box nearest to the
window. Presently the waiter returned, bearing beneath his left arm a
long bottle, and between the fingers of his right hand two purple
glasses; placing the latter on the table, set the bottle down before me
with a bang, and then standing still appeared to watch my movements.
You think I don’t know how to drink a glass of claret, thought I to
myself. I’ll soon show you how we drink claret where I come from;
and filling one of the glasses to the brim, I flickered it for a moment
between my eyes and the lustre, and then held it to my nose; having
given that organ full time to test the bouquet of the wine, I applied the
glass to my lips. Taking a large mouthful of the wine, which I
swallowed slowly and by degrees that the palate might likewise have
an opportunity of performing its functions. A second mouthful I
disposed of more summarily; then placing the empty glass upon the
table, I fixed my eyes upon the bottle and said nothing; whereupon the
waiter who had been observing the whole process with considerable
attention, made me a bow yet more low than before, and turning on his
heel retired with a smart chuck of the head, as much as to say, ‘It is all
right; the young man is used to claret.’”

A slight enough incident, but, like every line which Borrow wrote, intensely
temperamental. How characteristic this of the man’s attitude: “You think I
don’t know how to drink a glass of claret, thought I to myself.” Then with
what deliberate pleasure does he record the theatrical posing for the benefit
of the waiter. How he loves to impress! You are conscious of this in every
scene which he describes, and it is quite useless to resent it. The only way
to escape it is by leaving Borrow unread. And this no wise man can do
willingly.
The insatiable thirst for adventure, the passion for the picturesque and
dramatic, were so constant with him, that it need not surprise us when he
seizes upon every opportunity for mystifying and exciting interest. It is
possible that the “veiled period” in his life about which he hints is veiled

because it was a time of privation and suffering, and he is consequently
anxious to forget it. But I do not think it likely. Nor do the remarks of Mr.
Watts-Dunton on this subject support this theory. Indeed, Mr. Watts-
Dunton, who knew him so intimately, and had ample occasion to note his
love of “making a mystery,” hints pretty plainly that “the veiled period”
may well be a pleasant myth invented by Borrow just for the excitement of
it, not because there was anything special to conceal, or because he wished
to regard certain chapters in his life as a closed book.

III

Mention has been made of Borrow’s feeling for the picaresque elements in
life. Give him a rogue, a wastrel, any character with a touch of the untamed
about him, and no one delighted him more in exhibiting the fascinating
points of this character and his own power in attracting these rough,
unsocial fellows towards him and eliciting their confidences. Failing the
genuine article, however, Borrow had quite as remarkable a knack of giving
even for conventional people and highly respectable thoroughfares a
roguish and adventurous air. Indeed it was this sympathy with the
picaresque side of life, this thorough understanding of the gypsy
temperament, that gives Borrow’s genius its unique distinction. Other
characteristics, though important, are subsidiary to this. Writers such as
Stevenson have given us discursive books of travel; other Vagabonds have
shown an equal zest for the life of the open air—Thoreau and Whitman, for
example. But contact with the gypsies revealed Borrow to himself, made
him aware of his powers. It is not so much a case of like seeking like, as of
like seeking unlike. Affinities there were, no doubt, between the Romany
and the “Gorgio” Borrow, but they are strong temperamental differences.
On the one side an easy, unconscious nonchalance, a natural vivacity; on
the other a morbid self-consciousness and a pronounced strain of
melancholy. And it was doubtless the contrast that appealed to him so
strongly and helped him to throw off his habitual moody reserve.
For beneath that unpromising reserve, as a few chosen friends knew, and as
the gypsies knew, there was a frank camaraderie that won their hearts.
Was he, one naturally asks, when once this barrier of reserve had been
broken down, a lovable man? Certainly he seems to have won the affection

of the gypsies; and the warm admiration of men like Mr. Watts-Dunton
points to an affirmative answer. And yet one hesitates. He attracted people,
that cannot be gainsaid; he won many affections, that also is
uncontrovertible. But to call a man lovable it is not sufficient that he should
win affection, he must retain it. Was Borrow able to do this? There is the
famous case of Isopel to answer in the negative. She loved him, but she
found him out. Was it not so? How else explain the gradual change of
demeanour, and the sad, disillusioned departure. Perhaps at first the
independence of the man, his freedom from sentimentality, piqued,
interested, and attracted her. This is often the case with women. They may
fall in love with an unsentimental man, but they can never be happy with
him.
Isopel retained a regard for her fellow-comrade of the road, but she would
not be his wife.
Of his literary friends no one has written so warmly in defence of Borrow,
or shown a more discerning admiration of his qualities than Mr. Watts-
Dunton.
And yet in the warm tribute which Mr. Watts-Dunton has paid to Borrow I
cannot help feeling that some of the illustrations he gives in justification of
his eulogy are scarcely adequate. It may well be that he has a wealth of
personal reminiscences which he could quote if so inclined, and make good
his asseverations. As it is, one can judge only by what he tells us. And
what does he tell us?
To show that Borrow took an interest in children, Mr. Watts-Dunton quotes
a story about Borrow and the gipsy child which “Borrow was fond of telling
in support of his anti-tobacco bias.” The point of the story lies in the
endeavours of Borrow to dissuade a gypsy woman from smoking her pipe,
whilst his friend pointed out to the woman how the smoke was injuring the
child whom she was suckling. Borrow used his friend’s argument, which
obviously appealed to the maternal instinct in order to persuade the woman
to give up her pipe. There is no reason to think that Borrow was especially
concerned for the child’s welfare. What concerned him was a human being
poisoning herself with nicotine, and his dislike particularly to see a woman
smoking. After the woman had gone he said to his friend: “It ought to be a

criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all.” And that it was frankly as
an anti-tobacco crusader that he considered the episode, is proved surely by
Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, when he adds: “Whenever he (Borrow) was told,
as he sometimes was, that what brought on the ‘horrors’ when he lived
alone in the Dingle, was the want of tobacco, this story was certain to come
up.”
One cannot accept this as a specially striking instance of Borrow’s interest
in children, any more than the passing reference (already noted) to the
extraordinarily beautiful gypsy girl, as an instance of his susceptibility to
feminine charms.
Failing better illustrations at first hand, one turns toward his books, where
he reveals so many characteristics, and here one is struck by the want of
susceptibility, the obvious lack of interest in the other sex, showed by his
few references to women, and what is even more significant the absence of
any love story in his own life, apart from his books (his marriage with the
well-to-do widow, though a happy one, can scarcely be called romantic).
These things certainly outweigh the trivial incident which Mr. Watts-
Dunton recalls.
As for the pipe episode, it reminds me of Macaulay’s well-known gibe at
the Puritans, who objected to bear-baiting, he says, less because it gave pain
to the bear than because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Similarly his
objection to the pipe seems not so much on account of the child suffering,
as because the woman took pleasure in this “pernicious habit.”
But enough of fault-finding. After all, Mr. Watts-Dunton has done a signal
service to literature by preferring the claims of Borrow, and has upheld him
loyally against attacks which were too frequently mean-spirited and unfair.
Obviously, Borrow was a man of an ingratiating personality, which is a very
different thing from saying that he was a man with an ingratiating manner.
Of all manners, the ingratiating is the one most likely to arouse suspicion in
the minds of all but the most obtuse. An ingratiating personality, however,
is one that without effort and in the simplest way attracts others, as a
magnet attracts iron. Once get Borrow interested in a man, it followed quite
naturally that the man was interested in Borrow. He might be a rough,

unsociable fellow with whom others found it hard to get on, but Borrow
would win his confidence in a few moments.
Borrow seemed to know exactly how to approach people, what to say, and
how to say it. Sometimes he may have preferred to stand aloof in moody
reserve; that is another matter. But given the inclination, he had a genius
for companionship, as some men have a genius for friendship. As a rule it
will be found that the Vagabond, the Wanderer, is far better as a companion
than as friend. What he cares for is to smile, chatter, and pass on. Loyal he
may be to those who have done him service, but he is not ready to encroach
upon his own comfort and convenience for any man. Borrow remained
steadfast to his friends, but a personal slight, even if not intended, he
regarded as unforgivable.
The late Dr. Martineau was at school with him at Norwich, and after a
youthful escapade on Borrow’s part, Martineau was selected by the master
as the boy to “horse” Borrow while he was undergoing corporal
punishment. Probably the proceeding was quite as distasteful to the young
Martineau as to the scapegrace. But Borrow never forgot the incident nor
forgave the compulsory participator in his degradation. And years
afterwards he declined to attend a social function when he had ascertained
that Martineau would be there, making a point of deliberately avoiding
him. Another instance this of the morbid egotism of the man.
Where, however, no whim or caprice stood in the way, Borrow reminds one
of the man who knows as soon as he has tapped the earth with the “divining
rod” whether or no there is water there. Directly he saw a man he could tell
by instinct whether there was stuff of interest there; and he knew how to
elicit it. And never is he more successful than when dealing with the
“powerful, uneducated man.” Consequently, no portion of his writings are
more fascinating than when he has to deal with such figures. Who can
forget his delightful pictures of the gypsy—“Mr. Petulengro”? Especially
the famous meeting in Lavengro, when he and the narrator discourse on
death.

“‘Life is sweet, brother.’
“‘Do you think so?’

“‘Think so! There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun,
moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on
the heath. Life is very sweet, brother. Who would wish to die?’
“‘I would wish to die.’
“‘You talk like a Gorgio—which is the same as talking like a fool—
were you a Romany chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die indeed! A
Romany chal would wish to live for ever.’
“‘In sickness, Jasper?’
“‘There’s the sun and stars, brother.’
“‘In blindness, Jasper?’
“‘There’s the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I
would gladly live for ever. Dosta, we’ll now go to the tents and put on
the gloves; and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be
alive.’”

Then again there is the inimitable ostler in The Romany Rye, whose talk
exhales what Borrow would call “the wholesome smell of the stable.” His
wonderful harangues (Borrovized to a less extent than usual) have all the
fine, breathless garrulity of this breed of man, and his unique discourse on
“how to manage a horse on a journey” occupies a delightful chapter. Here
are the opening sentences:—

“‘When you are a gentleman,’ said he, ‘should you ever wish to take a
journey on a horse of your own, and you could not have a much better
than the one you have here eating its fill in the box yonder—I wonder,
by the by, how you ever came by it—you can’t do better than follow
the advice I am about to give you, both with respect to your animal and
yourself. Before you start, merely give your horse a couple of
handfuls of corn and a little water, somewhat under a quart, and if you
drink a pint of water yourself out of the pail, you will feel all the better
during the whole day; then you may walk and trot your animal for
about ten miles, till you come to some nice inn, where you may get
down, and see your horse led into a nice stall, telling him not to feed

him till you come. If the ostler happens to be a dog-fancier, and has an
English terrier dog like that of mine there, say what a nice dog it is,
and praise its black and fawn; and if he does not happen to be a dog-
fancier, ask him how he’s getting on, and whether he ever knew worse
times; that kind of thing will please the ostler, and he will let you do
just what you please with your own horse, and when your back is
turned he’ll say to his comrades what a nice gentleman you are, and
how he thinks he has seen you before; then go and sit down to
breakfast, get up and go and give your horse a feed of corn; chat with
the ostler two or three minutes till your horse has taken the shine out of
his oats, which will prevent the ostler taking any of it away when your
back is turned, for such things are sometimes done—not that I ever did
such a thing myself when I was at the inn at Hounslow; oh, dear me,
no! Then go and finish your breakfast.’”

IV

It is interesting to compare Borrow’s studies in unvarnished human nature
with the characterizations of novelists like Mr. Thomas Hardy. Both
Borrow and Hardy are drawn especially to rough primal characters,
characters not “screened by conventions.” As Mr. Hardy puts it in an essay
contributed to the Forum in 1888.

“The conduct of the upper classes is screened by conventions, and thus
the real character is not easily seen; if it is seen it must be pourtrayed
subjectively, whereas in the lower walks conduct is a direct expression
of the inner life, and their characters can be directly pourtrayed
through the act.”

Mr. Hardy’s rustics differ from Borrow’s rustics, however, in the method of
presentment. Mr. Hardy is always the sympathetic, amused observer. The
reader of that delicious pastoral “Under the Greenwood Tree” feels that he
is listening to a man who is recounting something he has overheard. The
account is finely sympathetic, but there is an unmistakable note of
philosophic detachment. The story-teller has enjoyed his company, but is
obviously not of them. That is why he will gossip to you with such relish of
humour. Borrow, on the other hand, speaks as one of them. He is far less

amused by his garrulous ostlers and whimsical landlords than profoundly
interested in them. Then again, though the Vagabond type appeals to Mr.
Hardy, it appeals to him not because of any temperamental affinity, but
because he happens to be a curious, wistful spectator of human life. He
sees in the restless Vagabond an extreme example of the capricious sport of
fate, but while his heart goes out to him his mind stands aloof.
Looking at their characterization from the literary point of view, it is
evident that Mr. Hardy is the greater realist. He would give you an ostler,
whereas Borrow gives you the ostler. Borrow knows his man thoroughly,
but he will not trouble about little touches of individualization. We see the
ostler vividly—we do not see the man—save on the ostler side. With Hardy
we should see other aspects beside the ostler aspect of the man.
A novelist with whom Borrow has greater affinity is Charles Reade. There
is the same quick, observant, unphilosophical spirit; the same preference for
plain, simple folk, the same love of health and virility. And in The Cloister
and the Hearth, one of the great romances of the world, one feels touches of
the same Vagabond spirit as animates Lavengro and The Romany Rye. The
incomparable Denys, with his favourite cry, “Le diable est mort,” is a
splendid study in genial vagrancy.
Literary comparisons, though they discover affinities, but serve to
emphasize in the long run the distinctive originality of Borrow’s writings.
He has himself admitted to the influence of Defoe and Lesage. But though
his manner recalls at times the manner of Defoe, and though the form of his
narrative reminds the reader of the Spanish rogue story, the psychological
atmosphere is vastly different. He may have taken Defoe as his model just
as Thackeray took Fielding; but Vanity Fair is not more unlike Tom Jones
than is Lavengro unlike Robinson Crusoe.
It is idle to seek for the literary parentage of this Vagabond. Better far to
accept him as he is, a wanderer, a rover, a curious taster of life, at once a
mystic and a realist. He may have qualities that repel; but so full is he of
contradictions that no sooner has the frown settled on the brow than it gives
place to a smile. We may not always like him; never can we ignore him.
Provocative, unsatisfying, fascinating—such is George Borrow. And most
fascinating of all is his love of night, day, sun, moon, and stars, “all sweet

things.” Cribbed in the close and dusty purlieus of the city, wearied by the
mechanical monotony of the latest fashionable novel, we respond gladly to
the spacious freshness of Lavengro and The Romany Rye. Herein lies the
spell of Borrow; for in his company there is always “a wind on the heath.”

IV
HENRY D. THOREAU

“Enter these enchanted woods
You who dare.”
George Meredith.

I

Thoreau has suffered badly at the hands of the critics. By some he has been
regarded as a poser, and the Walden episode has been spoken of as a mere
theatrical trick. By others he has been derided as a cold-blooded hermit,
who fled from civilization and the intercourse of his fellows. Even Mr.
Watts-Dunton, the eloquent friend of the Children of the Open Air, quite
recently in his introduction to an edition of Walden has impugned his
sincerity, and leaves the impression that Thoreau was an uncomfortable
kind of egotist. He has not lacked friends, but his friends have not always
written discreetly about him, thus giving the enemy opportunity to
blaspheme. And while not unmindful of Mr. H. S. Salt’s sympathetic
biography, nor the admirable monograph by Mr. “H. A. Page,” there is no
denying the fact that the trend of modern criticism has been against him.
The sarcastic comments of J. R. Lowell, and the banter of R. L. Stevenson,
however we may disagree with them, are not to be lightly ignored, coming
from critics usually so sane and discerning.
Since it is the Walden episode, the two years’ sojourn in the woods near
Concord, that has provoked the scornful ire of the critics, it may be well to
re-examine that incident.
From his earliest years Thoreau was a lover of the open air. It was not
merely a poetic appreciation such as Emerson had of the beauties of nature

—though a genuine poetic imagination coloured all that he wrote—but an
intellectual enthusiasm for the wonders of the natural world, and, most
important of all, a deep and tender sympathy with all created things
characteristic of the Eastern rather than the Western mind. He observed as a
naturalist, admired like a poet, loved with the fervour of a Buddhist; every
faculty of his nature did homage to the Earth.
Most of us will admit to a sentimental regard for the open air and for
country sights and sounds. But in many cases it reduces itself to a vague
liking for “pretty scenery” and an annual conviction that a change of air will
do us good. And so it is that the man who prefers to live the greater part of
his life in the open is looked upon either as a crank or a poser. Borrow’s
taste for adventure, and the picturesque vigour of his personality, help
largely in our minds to condone his wandering instinct. But the more
passive temperament of Thoreau, and the absence in his writings of any
stuff of romance, lead us to feel a kind of puzzled contempt for the man.
“He shirks his duty as a citizen,” says the practical Englishman; “He
experienced nothing worth mentioning,” says the lover of adventure.
Certainly he lacked many of the qualities that make the literary Vagabond
attractive—and for this reason many will deny him the right to a place
among them—but he was neither a skulker nor a hermit.
In 1839, soon after leaving college, he made his first long jaunt in company
with his brother John. This was a voyage on the Concord and Merrimac
rivers—a pleasant piece of idling turned to excellent literary account. The
volume dealing with it—his first book—gives sufficient illustration of his
practical powers to dissipate the absurd notion that he was a mere
sentimentalist. No literary Vagabond was ever more skilful with his hands
than Thoreau. There was scarcely anything he could not do, from making
lead pencils to constructing a boat. And throughout his life he supported
himself by manual labour whenever occasion demanded. Had he been so
disposed he could doubtless have made a fortune—for he had all the nimble
versatility of the American character, and much of its shrewdness. His
attacks, therefore, upon money-making, and upon the evils of civilization,
are no mere vapourings of an incompetent, but the honest conviction of a
man who believes he has chosen the better part.

In his Walk to Wachusett there are touches of genial friendliness with the
simple, sincere country folk, and evidence that he was heartily welcome by
them. Such a welcome would not have been vouchsafed to a cold-blooded
recluse.
The keen enjoyment afforded to mind and body by these outings suggested
to Thoreau the desirability of a longer and more intimate association with
Nature. Walden Wood had been a familiar and favoured spot for many
years, and so he began the building of his tabernacle there. So far from
being a sudden, sensational resolve with an eye to effect, it was the natural
outcome of his passion for the open.
He had his living to earn, and would go down into Concord from time to
time to sell the results of his handiwork. He was quite willing to see friends
and any chance travellers who visited from other motives than mere
inquisitiveness. On the other hand, the life he proposed for himself as a
temporary experiment would afford many hours of congenial solitude, when
he could study the ways of the animals that he loved and give free
expression to his naturalistic enthusiasms.
Far too much has been made of the Walden episode. It has been written
upon as if it had represented the totality of Thoreau’s life, instead of being
merely an interesting episode. Critics have animadverted upon it, as if the
time had been spent in brooding, self-pity, and sentimental affectations, as if
Thoreau had gone there to escape from his fellow-men. All this seems to
me wide of the mark. Thoreau was always keenly interested in men and
manners; his essays abound in a practical sagacity, too frequently
overlooked. He went to Walden not to escape from ordinary life, but to fit
himself for ordinary life. The sylvan solitudes, as he knew, had their
lessons for him no less than the busy haunts of men.
Of course it would be idle to deny that he found his greatest happiness in
the woods and fields; it is this touch of wildness that makes of him a
Vagabond. But though not an emotional man, his was not a hard nature so
much as a reserved, self-centred nature, rarely expressing itself in outward
show of feeling. That he was a man capable of strong affection is shown by
his devotion to his brother. Peculiarities of temperament he had certainly,
idiosyncrasies as marked as those of Borrow. These I wish to discuss later.

For the moment I am concerned to defend him from the criticism that he
was a loveless, brooding kind of creature, more interested in birds and
fishes than in his fellow-men. For he was neither loveless nor brooding,
and the characteristics that have proved most puzzling arose from the
mingled strain in his nature of the Eastern quietist and the shrewd Western.
These may now be considered more leisurely. I will deal with the less
important first of all.

II

Some of his earlier work suffers somewhat from a too faithful discipleship
of Emerson; but when he had found himself, as he has in Walden, he can
break away from this tendency, and there are many lovely passages
untouched by didacticism.

“The stillness was intense and almost conscious, as if it were a natural
sabbath. The air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same
effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture—to give it an ideal
remoteness and perfection. The landscape was bathed in a mild and
quiet light, while the woods and fences chequered and partitioned it
with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched far away
with lawnlike smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct
and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairyland.”

But while there is the Wordsworthian appreciation of the peaceful moods of
Nature and of the gracious stillnesses, there is the true spirit of the
Vagabond in his Earth-worship. Witness his pleasant “Essay on Walking”:
—

“We are but faint-hearted crusaders; even the walkers nowadays
undertake no persevering world’s end enterprises. Our expeditions are
but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from
which we set out. Half of the walk is but retracing our steps. We
should go forth on the shortest walks, perchance, in the spirit of
stirring adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our
embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdom. If you have

paid your debts and made your will and settled all your affairs, and are
a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”

There is a relish in this sprightly abjuration that is transmittible to all but the
dullest mind. The essay can take its place beside Hazlitt’s “On Going a
Journey,” than which we can give it no higher praise.
With all his appreciation of the quieter, the gentler aspects of nature, he has
the true hardiness of the child of the road, and has as cheery a welcome for
the east wind as he has for the gentlest of summer breezes. Here is a little
winter’s sketch:—

“The wonderful purity of Nature at this season is a most pleasing fact.
Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rush of the dead
leaves of autumn are concealed by a clean napkin of snow. In the bare
fields and trickling woods see what virtue survives. In the coldest and
bleakest places the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. A cold
and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can
withstand it but what has a virtue in it; and accordingly whatever we
meet with in cold and bleak places as the tops of mountains, we
respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness.”

But Thoreau’s pleasant gossips about the woods in Maine, or on the
Concord River, would pall after a time were they not interspersed with
larger utterances and with suggestive illustrations from the Books of the
East. Merely considered as “poet-naturalist” he cannot rank with Gilbert
White for quaint simplicity, nor have his discursive essays the full, rich note
that we find in Richard Jefferies. That his writings show a sensitive
imagination as well as a quick observation the above extracts will show.
But unfortunately he had contracted a bad attack of Emersonitis, from
which as literary writer he never completely recovered. Salutary as
Emerson was to Thoreau as an intellectual irritant, he was the last man in
the world for the discursive Thoreau to take as a literary model.
Many fine passages in his writings are spoiled by vocal imitations of the
“voice oracular,” which is the more annoying inasmuch as Thoreau was no
weak replica of Emerson intellectually, showing in some respects indeed a
firmer grasp of the realities of life. But for some reason or other he grew

enamoured of certain Emersonian mannerisms, which he used whenever he
felt inclined to fire off a platitude. Sometimes he does it so well that it is
hard to distinguish the disciple from his master. Thus:—

“How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not a seedtime of
character?”

Again:—

“Only he can be trusted with goods who can present a face of bronze
to expectations.”

Unimpeachable in sentiment, but too obviously inspired for us to view them
with satisfaction. And Thoreau at his best is so fresh, so original, that we
decline to be put off with literary imitations, however excellently done.
And thus it is that Thoreau has been too often regarded as a mere disciple of
Emerson. For this he cannot altogether escape blame, but the student will
soon detect the superficiality of the criticism, and see the genuine Thoreau
beneath the Emersonian veneer.
Thoreau lacked the integrating genius of Emerson, on the one hand, yet
possessed an eye for concrete facts which the master certainly lacked. His
strength, therefore, lay in another direction, and where Thoreau is seen at
his best is where he is dealing with the concrete experiences of life,
illustrating them from his wide and discursive knowledge of Indian
character and Oriental modes of thought.

III

Insufficient attention has been paid, I think, to Thoreau’s sympathy with the
Indian character and his knowledge of their ways.
The Indians were to Thoreau what the gypsies were to Borrow. Appealing
to certain spiritual affinities in the men’s natures, they revealed their own
temperaments to them, enabling them to see the distinctiveness of their
powers. Thoreau was never quite able to give this intimate knowledge such
happy literary expression as Borrow. Apprehending the peculiar charm, the
power and limitations of the Indian character, appreciating its philosophical

value, he lacked the picturesque pen of Borrow to visualize this for the
reader.
A lover of Indian relics from his childhood, he followed the Indians into
their haunts, and conversed with them frequently. Some of the most
interesting passages he has written detail conversations with them. One
feels he knew and understood them; and they no less understood him, and
talked with him as they certainly would not have done with any other white
man. But one would have liked to have heard much more about them. If
only Thoreau could have given us an Indian Petulengro, how interesting it
would have been!
But, like the Indian, there was a reserve and impenetrability about Thoreau
which prevented him from ever becoming really confidential in print. If he
had but unbended more frequently, and not sifted his thought so
conscientiously before he gave us the benefit of it, he would certainly have
appealed to our affections far more than he does.
One feels in comparing his writings with the accounts of him by friends
how much that was interesting in the man remains unexpressed in terms of
literature. Partly this is due, no doubt, to his being tormented with the idea
of self-education that he had learnt from Emerson. In a philosopher and
moralist self-education is all very well. But in a naturalist and in a writer
with so much of the Vagabond about him as Thoreau this sensitiveness
about self-culture, this anxiety to eliminate all the temperamental tares, is
blameworthy.
The care he took to eliminate the lighter element in his work—the flash of
wit, the jocose aside—a care which pursued him to the last, seems to show
that he too often mistook gravity for seriousness. Like Dr. Watts’ bee
(which is not Maeterlinck’s) he “improved the shining hour,” instead of
allowing the shining hour to carry with it its own improvement, none the
less potent for being unformulated. But beside the Emersonian influence,
there is the Puritan strain in Thoreau’s nature, which must not be
overlooked. No doubt it also is partly accountable for his literary silences
and austere moods.
To revert to the Indians.

If Thoreau does not deal dramatically with his Indians, yet he had much that
is interesting and suggestive to say about them. These are some passages
from A Week on the Concord:—

“We talk of civilizing the Indians, but that is not the name for his
improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim
forest-life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is
admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature.
He has glances of starry recognition to which our salons are strangers.
The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like
the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling
but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. . . . We would not
always be soothing and taming Nature, breaking the horse and the ox,
but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the buffalo. The Indian’s
intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest
independence of each. If he is somewhat of a stranger in her midst, the
gardener is too much of a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul
in the latter’s closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in
the former’s distance. In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man
degenerates at length and yields to the incursion of more northern
tribes.
‘Some nations yet shut in
With hills of ice.’
“There are other savager and more primeval aspects of Nature than our
poets have sung. It is only white man’s poetry—Homer and Ossian
even can never revive in London or Boston. And yet behold how these
cities are refreshed by the mere tradition or the imperfectly transmitted
fragrance and flavour of these wild fruits. If one could listen but for an
instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he
will not exchange his savageness for civilization. Nations are not
whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong temptations, but the Indian
does well to continue Indian.”

These are no empty generalizations, but the comments of a man who has
observed closely and sympathetically. All of Thoreau’s references to Indian
life merit the closest attention. For, as I have said, they help to explain the

man himself. He had a sufficient touch of wildness to be able to detach
himself from the civilized man’s point of view. Hence the life of the woods
came so naturally to him. The luxuries, the excitements, that mean so much
to some, Thoreau passed by indifferently. There is much talk to-day of “the
simple life,” and the phrase has become tainted with affectation. Often it
means nothing more than a passing fad on the part of overfed society people
who are anxious for a new sensation. A fad with a moral flavour about it
will always commend itself to a certain section. Certainly it is quite
innocuous, but, on the other hand, it is quite superficial. There is no real
intention of living a simple life any more than there is any deep resolve on
the part of the man who takes the Waters annually to abstain in the future
from over-eating. But with Thoreau the simple life was a vital reality. He
was not devoid of American self-consciousness, and perhaps he pats
himself on the back for his healthy tastes more often than we should like.
But of his fundamental sincerity there can be no question.
He saw even more clearly than Emerson the futility and debilitating effect
of extravagance and luxury—especially American luxury. And his whole
life was an indignant protest.
Yet it is a mistake to think (as some do) that he favoured a kind of
Rousseau-like “Return to Nature,” without any regard to the conventions of
civilization. “It is not,” he states emphatically, “for a man to put himself in
opposition to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds
himself through obedience to the laws of his own being, which will never
be one of opposition to a just government. I left the woods for as good a
reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more
lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
This is not the language of a crank, or the words of a man who, as Lowell
unfairly said, seemed “to insist in public in going back to flint and steel
when there is a match-box in his pocket.”
Lowell’s criticism of Thoreau, indeed, is quite wide of the mark. It assumes
throughout that Thoreau aimed at “an entire independence of mankind,”
when Thoreau himself repeatedly says that he aimed at nothing of the sort.
He made an experiment for the purpose of seeing what a simple, frugal,
open-air life would do for him. The experiment being made, he returned

quietly to the conditions of ordinary life. But he did not lack self-assurance,
and his frank satisfaction with the results of his experiment was not
altogether pleasing to those who had scant sympathy with his passion for
the Earth.
To be quite fair to Lowell and other hostile critics one must admit that,
genuine as Thoreau was, he had the habit common to all self-contained and
self-opiniated men of talking at times as though his very idiosyncrasies
were rules of conduct imperative upon others. His theory of life was sound
enough, his demand for simple modes of living, for a closer communion
with Nature, for a more sympathetic understanding of the “brute creation,”
were reasonable beyond question. But the Emersonian mannerism (which
gives an appearance of dogmatism, when no dogmatism is intended) starts
up from time to time and gives the reader the impression that the path to
salvation traverses Walden, all other paths being negligible, and that you
cannot attain perfection unless you keep a pet squirrel.
But if a sentence here and there has an annoying flavour of complacent
dogmatism, and if the note of self-assertion grows too loud on occasion for
our sensitive ears, [102] yet his life and writings considered as a whole do
not assuredly favour verdicts so unfavourable as those of Lowell and
Stevenson.
Swagger and exaggeration may be irritating, but after all the important
thing is whether a man has anything to swagger about, whether the case
which he exaggerates is at heart sane and just.
Every Vagabond swaggers because he is an egotist more or less, and
relishes keenly the life he has mapped out for himself. But the swagger is
of the harmless kind; it is not really offensive; it is a sort of childish
exuberance that plays over the surface of his mind, without injuring it, the
harmless vanity of one who having escaped from the schoolhouse of
convention congratulates himself on his good luck.
Swagger of this order you will find in the writings even of that quiet,
unassuming little man De Quincey. Hazlitt had no small measure of it, and
certainly it meets us in the company of Borrow. It is very noticeable in
Whitman—far more so than in Thoreau. Why then does this quality tend to
exasperate more when we find it in Walden? Why has Thoreau’s sincerity

been impugned and Whitman escaped? Why are Thoreau’s mannerisms
greeted with angry frowns, and the mannerisms, say of Borrow, regarded
with good-humoured intolerance? Chiefly, I think, because of Thoreau’s
desperate efforts to justify his healthy Vagabondage by Emersonian
formulas.
I am not speaking of his sane and comprehensive philosophy of life. The
Vagabond has his philosophy of life no less than the moralist, though as a
rule he is content to let it lie implicit in his writings, and is not anxious to
turn it into a gospel. But he did not always realize the difference between
moral characteristics and temperamental peculiarities, and many of his
admirers have done him ill service by trying to make of his very
Vagabondage (admirable enough in its way) a rule of faith for all and
sundry. Indeed, I think that much of the resentment expressed against
Thoreau by level-headed critics is due to the unwise eulogy of friends.
Thoreau has become an object of worship to the crank, and in our
annoyance with the crank—who is often a genuine reformer destitute of
humour—we are apt to jumble up devotee and idol together. Idol-worship
never does any good to the idol.

IV

As a thinker Thoreau is suggestive and stimulating, except when he tries to
systematize. Naturally I think he had a discursive and inquisitive, rather
than a profound and analytical mind. He was in sympathy with Eastern
modes of regarding life; and the pantheistic tendency of his religious
thought, especially his care and reverence for all forms of life, suggest the
devout Buddhist. The varied references scattered throughout his writings to
the Sacred Books of the East show how Orientalism affected him.
Herein we touch upon the most attractive side of the man; for it is this
Orientalism, I think, in his nature that explains his regard for, and his
sympathy with, the birds and animals.
The tenderness of the Buddhist towards the lower creation is not due to
sentimentalism, nor is it necessarily a sign of sensitiveness of feeling. In
his profoundly interesting study of the Burmese people Mr. Fielding Hall

has summed up admirably the teaching of Buddha: “Be in love with all
things, not only with your fellows, but with the whole world, with every
creature that walks the earth, with the birds in the air, with the insects in the
grass. All life is akin to man.” The oneness of life is realized by the
Eastern as it seldom is by the Western. The love that stirs in your heart
kindled the flower into beauty, and broods in the great silent pools of the
forest.
But Nature is not always kind. That he cannot help feeling. She inspires
fear as well as love. She scatters peace and consolation, but can scatter also
pain and death. All forms of life are more or less sacred. The creatures of
the forest whose ferocity and cunning are manifest, may they not be
inhabited by some human spirit that has misused his opportunities in life?
Thus they have an affinity with us, and are signs of what we may become.
And if a measure of sacredness attaches to all life, however unfriendly and
harmful it may seem, the gentler forms of life are especially to be objects of
reverence and affection.
In one particular, however, Thoreau’s attitude towards the earth and all that
therein is differed from the Buddhist, inasmuch as the fear that enters into
the Eastern’s Earth-worship was entirely purged from his mind. Mr. Page
has instituted a suggestive comparison between Thoreau and St. Francis
d’Assisi. Certainly the rare magnetic attraction which Thoreau seemed to
have exercised over his “brute friends” was quite as remarkable as the
power attributed to St. Francis, and it is true to say that in both cases the
sympathy for animals is constantly justified by a reference to a dim but real
brotherhood. The brutes are “undeveloped men”; they await their
transformation and stand on their defence; and it is very easy to see that
inseparably bound up with this view there are certain elements of mysticism
common to the early saint and the American “hut builder.” [106]
And yet, perhaps, Mr. Page presses the analogy between the medieval saint
and the American “poet-naturalist” too far. St. Francis had an ardent,
passionate nature, and whether leading a life of dissipation or tending to the
poor, there is about him a royal impulsiveness, a passionate abandonment,
pointing to a temperament far removed from Thoreau’s.

Prodigal in his charities, riotous in his very austerities, his tenderness
towards the animals seems like the overflowing of a finely sensitive and
artistic nature. With Thoreau one feels in the presence of a more tranquil,
more self-contained spirit; his affection is the affection of a kindly scientist
who is intensely interested in the ways and habits of birds, beasts, and
fishes; one who does not give them the surplus of the love he bears towards
his fellow-men so much as a care and love which he does not extend so
freely towards his fellows. I do not mean that he was apathetic, especially
when his fellow-creatures were in trouble; his eloquent defence of John
Brown, his kindliness towards simple folk, are sufficient testimony on this
score. But on the whole his interest in men and women was an abstract
kind of interest; he showed none of the personal curiosity and eager
inquisitiveness about them that he showed towards the denizens of the
woods and streams. And if you are not heartily interested in your fellow-
men you will not love them very deeply.
I am not sure that Hawthorne was so far out in his characterization
“Donatello”—the creature half-animal, half-man, which he says was
suggested by Thoreau. It does not pretend to realize all his characteristics,
nor do justice to his fine qualities. None the less in its picture of a man with
a flavour of the wild and untameable about him—whose uncivilized nature
brings him into a close and vital intimacy with the animal world, we detect
a real psychological affinity with Thoreau. May not Thoreau’s energetic
rebukes of the evils of civilization have received an added zest from his
instinctive repugnance to many of the civilized amenities valued by the
majority?
Many of Thoreau’s admirers—including Mr. Page and Mr. Salt—defend
him stoutly against the charge of unsociability, and they see in this feeling
for the brute creation an illustration of his warm humanitarianism.
“Thoreau loves the animals,” says Mr. Page, “because they are manlike and
seem to yearn toward human forms.” It seems to me that Thoreau’s
affection was a much simpler affair than this. He was drawn towards them
because he felt an affinity with them—an affinity more compelling in its
attraction than the affinity of the average human person.
No doubt he felt, as Shelley did when he spoke of “birds and even insects”
as his “kindred,” that this affinity bespoke a wider brotherhood of feeling

than men are usually ready to acknowledge. But this is not the same as
loving animals because they are manlike. He loved them surely because
they were living things, and he was drawn towards all living things, not
because he detected any semblance to humankind in them. The difference
between these two attitudes is not easy to define clearly; but it is a real, not
a nominal difference.
It is argued, however, as another instance of Thoreau’s undervalued
sociability, that he was very fond of children. That he was fond of children
may be admitted, and some of the pleasantest stories about him relate to his
rambles with children. His huckleberry parties were justly famous, if report
speaks true. “His resources for entertainment,” says Mr. Moncure Conway,
“were inexhaustible. He would tell stories of the Indians who once dwelt
thereabouts till the children almost looked to see a red man skulking with
his arrow and stone, and every plant or flower on the bank or in the water,
and every fish, turtle, frog, lizard about was transformed by the wand of his
knowledge from the low form into which the spell of our ignorance had
reduced it into a mystic beauty.”
Emerson and his children frequently accompanied him on these
expeditions. “Whom shall we ask?” demanded Emerson’s little daughter.
“All children from six to sixty,” replied her father.

“Thoreau,” writes Mr. Conway in his Reminiscences, “was the guide,
for he knew the precise locality of every variety of berry.”
“Little Edward Emerson, on one occasion, carrying a basket of fine
huckleberries, had a fall and spilt them all. Great was his distress, and
offers of berries could not console him for the loss of those gathered
by himself. But Thoreau came, put his arm round the troubled child,
and explained to him that if the crop of huckleberries was to continue
it was necessary that some should be scattered. Nature had provided
that little boys and girls should now and then stumble and sow the
berries. ‘We shall,’ he said, ‘have a grand lot of bushes and berries on
this spot, and we shall owe them to you.’ Edward began to smile.”

Thoreau evidently knew how to console a child, no less than how to make
friends with a squirrel. But his fondness for children is no more an

argument for his sociability, than his fondness for birds or squirrels. As a
rule it will be found, I think, that a predilection for children is most marked
in men generally reserved and inaccessible. Lewis Carroll, for instance, to
take a famous recent example, was the reverse of a sociable man. Shy,
reserved, even cold in ordinary converse, he would expand immediately
when in the company of children. Certainly he understood them much
better than he did their elders. Like Thoreau, moreover, Lewis Carroll was
a lover of animals.
Social adaptability was not a characteristic of Thackeray, his moroseness
and reserve frequently alienating people; yet no one was more devoted to
children, or a more delightful friend to them.
So far from being an argument in favour of its possessor’s sociability, it
seems to be a tolerable argument against it. It is not hard to understand
why. When analysed this fondness for children is much the same in quality
as the fondness for animals. A man is drawn towards children because there
is something fresh, unsophisticated, and elemental about them. It has no
reference to their moral qualities, though the æsthetic element plays a
share. Thoreau knew how to comfort little Edward Emerson just as he
knew how to cheer the squirrel that sought a refuge in his waistcoat. This
fondness, however, must not be confused with the paternal instinct. A man
may desire to have children, realize that desire, interest himself in their
welfare, and yet not be really fond of them. As children they may not
attract him, but he regards them as possibilities for perpetuating the family
and for enhancing its prestige.
A good deal of nonsense is talked about the purity and innocence of
childhood. Children are consequently brought up in a morbidly sentimental
atmosphere that makes of them too quickly little prigs or little hypocrites. I
do not believe, however, that any man or woman who is genuinely fond of
children is moved by this artificial point of view. The innocence and purity
of children is a middle-class convention. None but the unreal sentimentalist
really believes in it. What attracts us most in children is naturalness and
simplicity. We note in them the frank predominance of the instinctive life,
and they charm us in many ways just as young animals do.

Lewis Carroll’s biographer speaks of “his intense admiration for the white
innocence and uncontaminated spirituality of childhood.”
If this be true then it shows that the Rev. C. L. Dodgson had a great deal to
learn about children, who are, or should be, healthy little pagans. But
though his liking for them may not have been free of the sentimental taint,
there is abundant proof that other less debatable qualities in childhood
appealed to him with much greater force.
“Uncontaminated spirituality,” forsooth. I would as soon speak of the
uncontaminated spirituality of a rabbit. I am sure rabbits are a good deal
more lovable than some children.
Thoreau’s love of children, then, seems to be only a fresh instance of his
attraction towards simpler, more elemental forms of life. Men and women
not ringed round by civilized conventions, children who have the freshness
and wildness of the woods about them; such were the human beings that
interested him.
Such an attitude has its advantages as well as its limitations. It calls neither
for the censorious blame visited upon Thoreau by some of the critics nor the
indiscriminate eulogy bestowed on him by others.
The Vagabond who withdraws himself to any extent from the life of his day,
who declines to conform to many of its arbitrary conventions, escapes much
of the fret and tear, the heart-aching and the disillusionment that others
share in. He retains a freshness, a simplicity, a joyfulness, not vouchsafed
to those who stay at home and never wander beyond the prescribed limits.
He exhibits an individuality which is more genuinely the legitimate
expression of his temperament. It is not warped, crossed, suppressed, as
many are.
And this is why the literary Vagabond is such excellent company, having
wandered from the beaten track he has much to tell others of us who have
stayed at home. There is a wild luxuriance about his character that is
interesting and fascinating—if you are not thrown for too long in his
company. The riotous growth of eccentricities and idiosyncrasies are
picturesque enough, though you must expect to find thorns and briars.

On the other hand, we must beware of sentimentalizing the Vagabond, and
to present him as an ideal figure—as some enthusiasts have done—seems to
me a mistake. As a wholesome bitter corrective to the monotonous sweet of
civilization he is admirable enough. Of his tonic influence in literature
there can be no question. But it is well for the Vagabond to be in the
minority. Perhaps these considerations should come at the close of the
series of Vagabond studies, but they arise naturally when considering
Thoreau—for Thoreau is one of the few Vagabonds whom his admirers
have tried to canonize. Not content with the striking qualities which the
Vagabond naturally exhibits, some of his admirers cannot rest without
dragging in other qualities to which he has no claim. Why try to prove that
Thoreau was really a most sociable character, that Whitman was the
profoundest philosopher of his day, that Jefferies was—deep down—a
conventionally religious man? Why, oh why, may we not leave them in
their pleasant wildness without trying to make out that they were the best
company in the world for five-o’clock teas and chapel meetings?
For—and it is well to admit it frankly—the Vagabond loses as well as gains
by his deliberate withdrawal from the world. No man can live to himself
without some injury to his character. The very cares and worries, the
checks and clashings, consequent on meeting other individualities tend to
keep down the egotistic elements in a man’s nature. The necessary give and
take, the sacrifice of self-interests, the little abnegations, the moral
adjustment following the appreciation of other points of view; all these
things are good for men and women. Yes, and it is good even to mix with
very conventional people—I do not say live with them—however
distasteful it may be, for the excessive caution, the prudential, opportunistic
qualities they exhibit, serve a useful purpose in the scheme of things. The
ideal thing, no doubt, is to mix with as many types, as many varieties of the
human species, as possible. Browning owes his great power as a poet to his
tireless interest in all sorts and conditions of men and women.
It is idle to pretend then that Thoreau lost nothing by his experiments, and
by the life he fashioned for himself. Nature gives us plenty of choice; we
are invited to help ourselves, but everything must be paid for. There are
drawbacks as well as compensations; and the most a man can do is to strike
a balance.

And in Thoreau’s case the balance was a generous one.
Better than his moralizing, better than his varied culture, was his intimacy
with Nature. Moralists are plentiful, scholars abound, but men in close,
vital sympathy with the Earth, a sympathy that comprehends because it
loves, and loves because it comprehends, are rare. Let us make the most of
them.
In one of his most striking Nature poems Mr. George Meredith exclaims:—

“Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare,
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form:
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.”

So to understand Nature you must trust her, otherwise she will remain at
heart fearsome and cryptic.

“You must love the light so well
That no darkness will seem fell;
Love it so you could accost
Fellowly a livid ghost.”

Mr. Meredith requires us to approach Nature with an unswerving faith in
her goodness.
No easy thing assuredly; and to some minds this attitude will express a
facile optimism. Approve it or reject it, however, as we may, ’tis a
philosophy that can claim many and diverse adherents, for it is no dusty
formula of academic thought, but a message of the sunshine and the winds.

Talk of suffering and death to the Vagabond, and he will reply as did
Petulengro, “Life is sweet, brother.” Not that he ignores other matters, but
it is sufficient for him that “life is sweet.” And after all he speaks as to what
he has known.

V
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

“Choice word and measured phrase above the reach
Of ordinary man.”
Wordsworth (Revolution and Independence).
“Variety’s the very spice of life
That gives it all its flavour.”
Cowper.
. . . “In his face,
There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
Of passion and impudence and energy.
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,
Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist:
A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
And something of the Shorter Catechist.
W. E. Henley.

I

Romance! At times it passes athwart our vision, yet no sooner seen than
gone; at times it sounds in our ears, only to tremble into silence ere we
realize it; at times it touches our lips, and is felt in the blood, but our
outstretched arms gather naught but the vacant air. The scent of a flower,
the splendour of a sunrise, the glimmer of a star, and it wakens into being.

Sometimes when standing in familiar places, speaking on matters of every
day, suddenly, unexpectedly, it manifests its presence. A turn of the head, a
look in the eye, an inflection of the voice, and this strange, indefinable thing
stirs within us. Or, it may be, we are alone, traversing some dusty highway
of thought, when in a flash some long-forgotten memory starts at our very
feet, and we realize that Romance is alive.
I would fain deem Romance a twin—a brother and sister. The one fair and
radiant with the sunlight, strong and clean-fibred, warm of blood and joyous
of spirit; a creature of laughter and delight. I would fancy him regarding
the world with clear, shining eyes, faintly parted lips, a buoyant expectancy
in every line of his tense figure. Ready for anything and everything; the
world opening up before him like a white, alluring road; tasting curiously
every adventure, as a man plucks fruit by the wayside, knowing no horizon
to his outlook, no end to his journey, no limit to his enterprise.
As such I see one of the twins. And the other? Dark and wonderful; the
fragrance of poesy about her hair, the magic of mystery in her unfathomable
eyes. Sweet is her voice and her countenance is comely. A creature of
moonlight and starshine. She follows in the wake of her brother; but his
ways are not her ways. Away, out of sound of his mellow laughter, she is
the spirit that haunts lonely places. There is no price by which you may win
her, no entreaty to which she will respond. Compel her you cannot, woo
her you may not. Yet, uninvited, unbidden, she will steal into the garret,
gaunt in its lonesome ugliness, and bend over the wasted form of some poor
literary hack, until his dreams reflect the beauty of her presence.
And yet, when one’s fancy has run riot in order to recall Romance, how
much remains that cannot be put

into words. One thing, however, is certain. Romance must be large and
generous enough to comprehend the full-blooded geniality of a Scott, the
impalpable mystery of a Coleridge or Shelley, to extend a hand to the sun-
tanned William Morris, and the lover of twilight, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Borrow was a Romantic, so is Stevenson. Scott was a Romantic, likewise
Edgar Allan Poe. If Romance be not a twin, then it must change its form
and visage wondrously to appeal to temperaments so divergent. But if
Romance be a twin (the conceit will serve our purpose) then one may
realize how Scott and Borrow followed in the brother’s wake; Stevenson
and Poe being drawn rather towards the sister.
In the case of Stevenson it may seem strange that one who wrote stirring
adventures, who delighted boys of all ages with Treasure Island and Black
Arrow (oh, excellent John Silver!), and followed in the steps of Sir Walter
in The Master of Ballantrae and Catriona, should not be associated with the
adventurous brother. But Scott and Stevenson have really nothing in
common, beyond a love for the picturesque—and there is nothing
distinctive in that. It is an essential qualification in the equipment of every
Romantic. Adventures, as such, did not appeal to Stevenson, I think; it was
the spice of mystery in them that attracted him. Watch him and you will
find he is not content until he has thrown clouds of phantasy over his

pictures. His longer stories have no unity—they are disconnected episodes
strung lightly together, and this is why his short stories impress us far more
with their power and brilliance.
Markheim and Jekyll and Hyde do not oppress the imagination in the same
way as do Poe’s tales of horror; but they show the same passion for the dark
corners of life, the same fondness for the gargoyles of Art. This is Romance
on its mystic side.
Throughout his writings—I say nothing of his letters, which stand in a
different category—one can hear

“The horns of Elfland faintly blowing.”

Sometimes the veil of phantasy is shaken by a peal of impish laughter, as if
he would say, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” but the attitude that
persists—breaks there must be, and gusty moods, or it would not be
Stevenson—is the attitude of the Romantic who loves rather the night side
of things.

II

Much has been written about the eternal boy in Stevenson. I confess that
this does not strike me as a particularly happy criticism. In a superficial
sort of way it is, of course, obvious enough; he was fond of “make-believe”;
took a boyish delight in practical joking; was ever ready for an adventure.
But so complex and diverse his temperament that it is dangerous to seize on
one aspect and say, “There is the real Stevenson.” Ariel, Hamlet, and the
Shorter Catechist cross and recross his pages as we read them. Probably
each reader of Stevenson retains most clearly one special phase. It is the
Ariel in Stevenson that outlasts for me the other moods. If any one phase
can be said to strike the keynote of his temperament, it is the whimsical,
freakish, but kindly Ariel—an Ariel bound in service to the Prospero of
fiction—never quite happy, longing for his freedom, yet knowing that he
must for a while serve his master. One can well understand why John
Addington Symonds dubbed Stevenson “sprite.” This elfish dement in
Stevenson is most apparent in his letters and stories.

The figures in his stories are less flesh-and-blood persons than the shapes—
some gracious, some terrifying—that the Ariel world invoke. It is not that
Stevenson had no grip on reality; his grip-hold on life was very firm and
real. Beneath the light badinage, the airy, graceful wit that plays over his
correspondence, there is a steel-like tenacity. But in his stories he leaves
the solid earth for a phantastic world of his own. He does so deliberately:
he turns his back on reality, has dealings with phantom passions. His
historical romances are like ghostly editions of Scott. There is light, but
little heat in his fictions. They charm our fancy, but do not seize upon our
imagination. Stevenson’s novels remind one of an old Punch joke about the
man who chose a wife to match his furniture. Stevenson chooses his
personages to match his furniture—his cunningly-woven tapestries of style;
and the result is that we are too conscious of the tapestry on the wall, too
little conscious of the people who move about the rooms. If only Stevenson
had suited his style to his matter, as he does in his letters, which are written
in fine Vagabond spirit—his romances would have seemed less artificial. I
say seemed, for it was the stylist that stood in the way of the story-teller.
Stevenson’s sense of character was keen enough, particularly in his ripe, old
“disreputables.” But much of his remarkable psychology was lost, it seems
to me, by the lack of dramatic presentment.
Borrow’s characters do not speak Borrow so emphatically as do
Stevenson’s characters speak Stevenson. And with Stevenson it matters
more. Borrow’s picturesque, vivid, but loose, loquacious style, fits his
subject-matter on the whole very well. But Stevenson’s delicate, nervous,
mannerized style suits but ill some of the scenes he is describing. If it suits,
it suits by a happy accident, as in the delightful sentimentality, Providence
and the Guitar.
To appraise Stevenson’s merits as a Romantic one has to read him after
reading Scott, Dumas, Victor Hugo; or, better still, to peruse these giants
after dallying with Ariel.
We realize then what it is that we had vaguely missed in Stevenson—the
human touch. These men believe in the figments of their imagination, and
make us believe in them.

Stevenson is obviously sceptical as to their reality; we can almost see a
furtive smile upon his lip as he writes. But there is nothing unreal about the
man, whatever we feel of the Artist.
In his critical comments on men and matters, especially when Hamlet and
the Shorter Catechist come into view, we shall find a vigorous sanity, a
shrewd yet genial outlook, that seems to say there is no make-believe here;
here I am not merely amusing myself; here, honestly and heartily admitted,
you may find the things that life has taught me.

III

Stevenson had many sides, but there were two especially that reappear
again and again, and were the controlling forces in his nature. One was the
Romantic element, the other the Artistic. It may be thought that these twain
have much in common; but it is not so. In poetry the first gives us a Blake,
a Shelley; the second a Keats, a Tennyson. Variety, fresh points of view,
these are the breath of life to the Romantic. But for the Artist there is one
constant, unchanging ideal. The Romantic ventures out of sheer love of the
venture, the other out of sheer love for some definite end in view. It is not
usual to find them coexisting as they did in Stevenson, and their dual
existence gives an added piquancy and interest to his work. It is the
Vagabond Romantic in him that leads him into so many byways and secret
places, that sends him airily dancing over the wide fields of literature; ever
on the move, making no tabernacle for himself in any one grove. And it is
the Artist who gives that delicacy of finish, that exquisitive nicety of touch,
to the veriest trifle that he essays. The matter may be beggarly, the manner
is princely.
Mark the high ideal he sets before him: “The Artist works entirely upon
honour. The Public knows little or nothing of those merits in its quest of
which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of
design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap
accomplishment, which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires; these
they can recognize, and these they value. But to those more exquisite
refinements of proficiency and finish, which the Artist so ardently desires
and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must
toil ‘like a miner buried in a landslip,’ for which day after day he recasts

and revises and rejects, the gross mass of the Public must be ever blind. To
those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest point of merit, posterity may
possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable, that you fail by even a hair’s
breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under the
shadow of this cold thought alone in his studio the Artist must preserve
from day to day his constancy to the ideal.” [124a]
An exacting ideal, but one to which Stevenson was as faithful as a Calvinist
to his theology. The question arises, however; is the fastidiousness, the
patient care of the Artist, consistent with Vagabondage? Should one not say
the greater the stylist, the lesser the Vagabond?
This may be admitted. And thus it is that in the letters alone do we find the
Vagabond temperament of Stevenson fully asserting itself. Elsewhere ’tis
held in check. As Mr. Sidney Colvin justly says: [124b] “In his letters—
excepting a few written in youth, and having more or less the character of
exercises, and a few in after years which were intended for the public eye—
Stevenson, the deliberate artist is scarcely forthcoming at all. He does not
care a fig for order, or logical sequence, or congruity, or for striking a key
of expression and keeping it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and
unstudied of human beings. He will write with the most distinguished
eloquence on one day, with simple good sense and good feeling on a
second, with flat triviality on another, and with the most slashing, often
ultra-colloquial vehemency on a fourth, or will vary through all these
moods, and more, in one and the same letter.”
Fresh and spontaneous his letters invariably appear; with a touch of the
invalid’s nervous haste, but never lacking in courage, and with nothing of
the querulousness which we connect with chronic ill-health. Weak and
ailing, shadowed by death for many years before the end, Stevenson
showed a fine fortitude, which will remain in the memory of his friends as
his most admirable character. With the consistency of Mark Tapley (and
with less talk about it) he determined to be jolly in all possible
circumstances. Right to the end his wonderful spirits, his courageous gaiety
attended him; the frail body grew frailer, but the buoyant intellect never
failed him, or if it did so the failure was momentary, and in a moment he
was recovered.

No little of his popularity is due to the desperate valour with which he
contested the ground with death, inch by inch, and died, as Buckle and John
Richard Green had done, in the midst of the work that he would not quit.
Romance was by him to the last, gladdening his tired body with her
presence; and if towards the end weariness and heart-sickness seized him
for a spell, yet the mind soon resumed its mastery over weakness. In a
prayer which he had written shortly before his death he had petitioned:
“Give us to awake with smiles, give us to labour smiling; as the sun lightens
the world, so let our lovingkindness make bright this house of our
habitation.” Assuredly in his case this characteristic petition had been
realized; the prevalent sunniness of his disposition attended him to the last.

IV

Of all our writers there has been none to whom the epithet “charming” has
been more frequently applied. Of late the epithet has become a kind of
adjectival maid-of-all-work, and has done service where a less emphatic
term would have done far better. But in Stevenson’s case the epithet is fully
justified. Of all the literary Vagabonds he is the most captivating. Not the
most interesting; the most arresting, one may admit. There is greater power
in Hazlitt; De Quincey is more unique; the “prophetic scream” of Whitman
is more penetrating. But not one of them was endowed with such wayward
graces of disposition as Stevenson. Whatever you read of his you think
invariably of the man. Indeed the personal note in his work is frequently
the most interesting thing about it. I mean that what attracts and holds us is
often not any originality, any profundity, nothing specially inherent in the
matter of his speech, but a bewitchingly delightful manner.
Examine his attractive essays, Virginibus Puerisque and Familiar Studies of
Men and Books, and this quality will manifest itself. There is no pleasanter
essay than the one on “Walking Tours”; it dresses up wholesome truths with
so pleasant and picturesque a wit; it is so whimsical, yet withal so finely
suggestive, that the reader who cannot yield to its fascination should consult
a mental specialist.
For instance:—

“It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us
fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are
many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in
spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape
on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the
brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain
jolly humours—of the hope and spirit with which the march begins at
morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening’s rest.
He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on or takes it off with
more delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key for that
of the arrival. Whatever he does will be further rewarded in the
sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless chain.”

An admirable opening, full of the right relish. And the wit and relish are
maintained down to the last sentence. But it cannot fail to awaken
memories of the great departed in the reader of books. “Now to be properly
enjoyed,” counsels Stevenson, “a walking tour should be gone upon alone. .
. . a walking tour should be gone upon alone because freedom is of the
essence,” and so on in the same vein for twenty or thirty lines. One
immediately recalls Hazlitt—“On Going a Journey”: “One of the
pleasantest things is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself. . . . The
soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one
pleases.”
A suspicion seizes the mind of the reader, and he will smile darkly to
himself. But Stevenson is quite ready for him. “A strong flavour of Hazlitt,
you think?” he seems to say, then with the frank ingenuousness of one who
has confessed to “playing the sedulous ape,” he throws in a quotation from
this very essay of Hazlitt’s and later on gives us more Hazlitt. It is
impossible to resent it; it is so openly done, there is such a charming
effrontery about the whole thing. And yet, though much that he says is
obviously inspired by Hazlitt, he will impart that flavour of his own less
mordant personality to the discourse.
If you turn to another, the “Truth of Intercourse,” it is hard to feel that it
would have thrived had not Elia given up his “Popular Fallacies.” There is
an unmistakable echo in the opening paragraph: “Among sayings that have
a currency, in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them, for the sake

of a half-truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with the
error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the monstrous proposition
that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were!”
Similarly in other essays the influence of Montaigne is strongly felt; and
although Stevenson never fails to impart the flavour of his own
individuality to his discourses—for he is certainly no mere copyist—one
realizes the unwisdom of those enthusiastic admirers who have bracketed
him with Lamb, Montaigne, and Hazlitt. These were men of the primary
order; whereas Stevenson with all his grace and charm is assuredly of the
secondary order. And no admiration for his attractive personality and
captivating utterances should blind us to this fact.
As a critic of books his originality is perhaps more pronounced, but wise
and large though many of his utterances are, here again it is the pleasant
wayward Vagabond spirit that gives salt and flavour to them. There are
many critics less brilliant, less attractive in their speech, in whose judgment
I should place greater reliance. Sometimes, as in the essay on “Victor
Hugo’s Romances,” his own temperament stands in the way; at other times,
as in his “Thoreau” article, there is a vein of wilful capriciousness, even of
impish malice, that distorts his judgment. Neither essays can be passed
over; in each there is power and shrewd flashes of discernment, and both
are extremely interesting. One cannot say they are satisfying. Stevenson
does scant justice to the extraordinary passion, the Titanic strength, of
Hugo; and in the case of Thoreau he dwells too harshly upon the less
gracious aspects of the “poet-naturalist.”
It is only fair to say, however, that in the case of Thoreau he made generous
amends in the preface to the Collected Essays. Both the reconsidered
verdict and the original essay are highly characteristic of the man. Other
men have said equally harsh things of Thoreau. Stevenson alone had the
fairness, the frank, childlike spirit to go back upon himself. These are the
things that endear us to Stevenson, and make it impossible to be angry with
any of his paradoxes and extravagant capers. Who but Stevenson would
have written thus: “The most temperate of living critics once marked a
passage of my own with a cross and the words, ‘This seems nonsense.’ It
not only seemed, it was so. It was a private bravado of my own which I had
so often repeated to keep up my spirits that I had grown at last wholly to

believe it, and had ended by setting it down as a contribution to the theory
of life.”
Touched by this confidence, one reads Stevenson—especially the letters—
with a more discerning eye, a more compassionate understanding; and if at
times one feels the presence of the Ariel too strong, and longs for a more
human, less elfin personality, then the thought that we are dealing with
deliberate “bravado” may well check our impatience.
Men who suffer much are wont to keep up a brave front by an appearance
of indifference.

V

To turn now to another side of Stevenson—Stevenson the Artist, the
artificer of phrases, the limner of pictures. His power here is shown in a
threefold manner—in deft and happy phrasing, in skilful characterization, in
delicately suggestive scenic descriptions.
This, for instance, as an instance of the first:—

“The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for
parlours with a regulated atmosphere, and takes his morality on the
principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body
or soul becomes so engrossing that all the noises of the outer world
begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated
temperature; and the tin shoes go equally forward over blood and ruin”
(New Arabian Nights).

Or this:—

“Whitman, like a large, shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the
beaches of the world, and baying at the moon” (Men and Books).

Or this:—

“To have a catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an
opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself.
There are too many of these catchwords in the world for people to rap

out upon you like an oath by way of an argument. They have a
currency as intellectual counters, and many respectable persons pay
their way with nothing else” (Virginibus Puerisque).

In his characterization he is at his best—like Scott and Borrow—when
dealing with the picaresque elements in life. His rogues are depicted with
infinite gusto and admirable art, and although even they, in common with
most of his characters, lack occasionally in substance and objective reality,
yet when he has to illustrate a characteristic he will do so with a sure touch.
Take, for instance, this sketch of Herrick in The Ebb Tide—the weak,
irresolute rascal, with just force enough to hate himself. He essays to end
his ignominious career in the swift waters:—

. . . “Let him lie down with all races and generations of men in the
house of sleep. It was easy to say, easy to do. To stop swimming;
there was no mystery in that, if he could do it. Could he?
“And he could not. He knew it instantly. He was instantly aware of an
opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible, clinging to life
with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, sinew by sinew;
something that was at once he and not he—at once within and without
him; the shutting of some miniature valve within the brain, which a
single manly thought would suffice to open—and the grasp of an
external fate ineluctable to gravity. To any man there may come at
times a consciousness that there blows, through all the articulations of
his body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that
another girds him, and carries him whither he would not. It came even
to Herrick with the authority of a revelation—there was no escape
possible. The open door was closed in his recreant face. He must go
back into the world and amongst men without illusion. He must
stagger on to the end with the pack of his responsibility and disgrace,
until a cold, a blow—a merciful chance blow—or the more merciful
hangman should dismiss him from his infamy.
“There were men who could commit suicide; there were men who
could not; and he was one who could not. His smile was tragic. He
could have spat upon himself.”

Profoundly dissimilar in many ways, one psychological link binds together
Dickens, Browning, and Stevenson—a love of the grotesque, a passion for
the queer, phantastic sides of life. Each of them relished the tang of
roughness, and in Browning’s case the relish imparts itself to his style. Not
so with Stevenson. He will delve with the others for curious treasure; but
not until it is fairly wrought and beaten into a thing of finished beauty will
he allow you to get a glimpse of it.
This is different from Browning, who will fling his treasures at you with all
the mud upon them. But I am not sure that Stevenson’s is always the better
way. He may save you soiling your fingers; but the real attractiveness of
certain things is inseparable from their uncouthness, their downright
ugliness. Sometimes you feel that a plainer setting would have shown off
the jewel to better advantage. Otherwise one has nothing but welcome for
such memorable figures as John Silver, the Admiral in The Story of a Lie,
Master Francis Villon, and a goodly company beside.
It is impossible even in such a cursory estimate of Stevenson as this to pass
over his vignettes of Nature. And it is the more necessary to emphasize
these, inasmuch as the Vagabond’s passion for the Earth is clearly
discernible in these pictures. They are no Nature sketches as imagined by a
mere “ink-bottle feller”—to use a phrase of one of Mr. Hardy’s rustics. One
of Stevenson’s happiest recollections was an “open air” experience when he
slept on the earth. He loved the largeness of the open air, and his intense
joy in natural sights and sounds bespeaks the man of fine, even hectic
sensibility, whose nerves quiver for the benison of the winds and sunshine.
Ever since the days of Mrs. Radcliffe, who used the stormier aspects of
Nature with such effect in her stories, down to Mr. Thomas Hardy, whose
massive scenic effects are so remarkable, Nature has been regarded as a
kind of “stage property” by the novelist.
To the great writers the Song of the Earth has proved an inspiration only
second to the “Song of Songs,” and the lesser writer has imitated as best he
could so effective a decoration. But there is no mistaking the genuine lover
of the Earth. He does not—as Oscar Wilde wittily said of a certain popular
novelist—“frighten the evening sky into violent chromo-lithographic
effects”; he paints the sunrises and sunsets with a loving fidelity which

there is no mistaking. Nor are all the times and seasons of equal interest in
his eyes. If we look back at the masters of fiction (ay, and mistresses too)
in the past age, we shall note how each one has his favourite aspect, how
each responds more readily to one special mood of the ancient Earth.
Mention has been made of Mrs. Radcliffe. Extravagant and absurd as her
stories are in many ways, she was a genuine lover of Nature, especially of
its grand and sublime aspects. Her influence may be traced in Scott, still
more in Byron. The mystic side of Nature finds its lovers chiefly in the
poets, in Coleridge and in Shelley. But at a later date Nathaniel Hawthorne
found in the mysticism of the Earth his finest inspiration; while throughout
the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë wail the bleak winds of the North,
and the grey storm-clouds are always hurrying past. Even in Dickens there
is more snow than sunshine, and we hear more of “the winds that would be
howling at all hours” than of the brooding peace and quiet of summer days.
Charles Kingsley is less partial towards the seasons, and cares less about the
mysticism than the physical influences of Nature.
In our own day Mr. George Meredith has reminded us of the big geniality of
the Earth; and the close relationship of the Earth and her moods with those
who live nearest to her has found a faithful observer in Mr. Hardy.
Stevenson differs from Meredith and Hardy in this. He looks at her
primarily with the eye of the artist. They look at her primarily with the eye
of the scientific philosopher.
Here is a twilight effect from The Return of the Native:—

“The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet
the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as
rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. . . . The place became full of a
watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep,
the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic
form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus unmoved
during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it
could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow. . .
. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a
thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness,
emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity.”

Contrast with this a twilight piece from Stevenson:—

“The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless changing colour,
dark and glossy like a serpent’s back. The stars by innumerable
millions stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was bright, like
a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater
luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon. Their light
was dyed in every sort of colour—red, like fire; blue, like steel; green,
like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own
lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we
know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos
of contesting luminaries—a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the hill
and rugged tree-tops stood out redly dark.”

Each passage has a fresh beauty that removes it from the perfunctory
tributes of the ordinary writer. But the difference between the Artist and the
Philosopher is obvious. Not that Mr. Hardy has no claims as an artist.
Different as their styles are, and although Stevenson has a more fastidious
taste for words, the large, deliberate, massive art of Hardy is equally
effective in its fashion. That, however, by the way. The point is that Mr.
Hardy never rests as an artist—he is quite as concerned with the
philosophic as with the pictorial aspects of the scene. Stevenson rejoices as
a Romantic; admires like an Artist.

VI

But if Stevenson does not care to philosophize over Nature—herein parting
company with Thoreau as well as Hardy—he can moralize on occasion, and
with infinite relish too.
“Something of the Shorter Catechist,” as his friend Henley so acutely said.
There is the Moralist in his essays, in some of the short stories—Jekyll and
Hyde is a morality in disguise, and unblushingly so is A Christmas Sermon.
Some of his admirers have deplored this tendency in Stevenson; have
shaken their heads gloomily over his Scottish ancestry, and spoken as
apologetically about the moralizing as if it had been kleptomania.

Well, there it is as glaring and apparent as Borrow’s big green gamp or De
Quincey’s insularity. “What business has a Vagabond to moralize?” asks
the reader. Yet there is a touch of the Moralist in every Vagabond
(especially the English-speaking Vagabond), and its presence in Stevenson
gives an additional piquancy to his work. The Lay Morals and the
Christmas Sermon may not exhilarate some readers greatly, but there is a
fresher note, a larger utterance in the Fables. And even if you do not care
for Stevenson’s “Hamlet” and “Shorter Catechist” moods, is it wise, even
from the artistic point of view, to wish away that side of his temperament?
Was it the absence of the “Shorter Catechist” in Edgar Allan Poe that sent
him drifting impotently across the world, brilliant, unstable, aspiring,
grovelling; a man of many fine qualities and extraordinary intensity of
imagination, but tragically weak where he ought to have been strong? And
was it the “Shorter Catechist” in Stevenson that gave him that grip-hold of
life’s possibilities, imbued him with his unfailing courage, and gave him as
Artist a strenuous devotion to an ideal that accompanied him to the end? Or
was it so lamentable a defect as certain critics allege? I wonder.

VI
RICHARD JEFFERIES

“Noises of river and of grove
And moving things in field and stall
And night birds’ whistle shall be all
Of the world’s speech that we shall hear.”
William Morris.
“The poetry of earth is never dead.”
Keats.

I

The longing of a full, sensuous nature for fairer dreams of beauty than come
within its ken; the delight of a passionate soul in the riotous wealth of the
Earth, the luxuriant prodigality of the Earth; the hysterical joy of the invalid
in the splendid sanity of the sunlight—these are the sentiments that well up
from the writings of Richard Jefferies.
By comparison with him, Thoreau’s Earth-worship seems quite a stolid
affair, and even Borrow’s frank enjoyment of the open air has a strangely
apathetic touch about it.
No doubt he felt more keenly than did the Hermit of Walden, or the Norfolk
giant, but it was not so much passionate intensity as nervous susceptibility.
He had the sensitive quivering nerves of the neurotic which respond to the
slightest stimulus. Of all the “Children of the Open Air” Jefferies was the
most sensitive; but for all that I would not say that he felt more deeply than
Thoreau, Borrow, or Stevenson.

Some people are especially susceptible by constitution to pain or pleasure,
but it would be rash to assume hastily that on this account they have more
deeply emotional natures. That they express their feelings more readily is
no guarantee that they feel more deeply.
In other words, there is a difference between susceptibility and passion.
Whether a man has passion—be it of love or hate—can be judged only by
his general attitude towards his fellow-beings, and by the stability of the
emotion.
Now Jefferies certainly had keener sympathies with humankind than
Thoreau, and these sympathies intensified as the years rolled by. Few men
have espoused more warmly the cause of the agricultural labourer. Perhaps
Hodge has never experienced a kinder advocate than Jefferies. To accuse
him of superficiality of emotion would be unfair; for he was a man with
much natural tenderness in his disposition.
All that I wish to protest against is the assumption made by some that
because he has written so feelingly about Hodge, because he has shown so
quick a response to the beauties of the natural world, he was therefore
gifted with a deep nature, as has been claimed for him by some of his
admirers.
One of the characteristics that differentiates the Vagabond writer from his
fellows is, I think, a lack of passion—always excepting a passion for the
earth, a quality lacking human significance. In their human sympathies
they vary: but in no case, not even with Whitman, as I hope to show in my
next paper, is there a passion for humankind. There may be curiosity about
certain types, as with Borrow and Stevenson; a delight in simple natures, as
with Thoreau; a broad, genial comradeship with all and sundry, as in the
case of Whitman; but never do you find depth, intensity.
Jefferies then presents to my mind all the characteristics of the Vagabond,
his many graces and charms, his notable deficiencies, especially the
absence of emotional stability. This trait is, of course, more pronounced in
some Vagabonds than in others; but it belongs to his inmost being. Eager,
curious, adventurous; tasting this experience and that; his emotions share
with his intellect in a chronic restless transition. More easily felt than

defined is the lack of permanence in his nature; his emotions flame fitfully
and in gusts, rather than with steady persistence. Finally, despite the
tenderness and kindliness he can show, the egotistic elements absorb too
much of his nature. A great egotist can never be a great lover.
This may seem a singularly ungracious prelude to a consideration of
Richard Jefferies; but whatever it may seem it is quite consistent with a
hearty admiration for his genius, and a warm appreciation of the man.
Passion he had of a kind, but it was the rapt, self-centred passion of the
mystic.
He interests us both as an artist and as a thinker. It will be useful, therefore,
to keep these points of view as separate as possible in studying his writings.

II

Looking at him first of all as an artist, the most obvious thing that strikes a
reader is his power to convey sensuous impressions. He loved the Earth,
not as some have done with the eye or ear only, but with every nerve of his
body. His scenic pictures are more glowing, more ardent than those of
Thoreau. There was more of the poet, less of the naturalist in Jefferies.
Perhaps it would have been juster to call Thoreau a poetic naturalist, and
reserved the term poet-naturalist for Jefferies. Be that as it may, no one can
read Jefferies—especially such books as Wild Life in a Southern County, or
The Life of the Fields, without realizing the keen sensibility of the man to
the sensuous impressions of Nature.
Again and again in reading Jefferies one is reminded of the poet Keats.
There is the same physical frailty of constitution and the same rare
susceptibility to every manifestation of beauty. There is, moreover, the
same intellectual devotion to beauty which made Keats declare Truth and
Beauty to be one. And the likeness goes further still.
The reader who troubles to compare the sensuous imagery of the three great
Nature poets—Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, will realize an individual
difference in apprehending the beauties of the natural world. Wordsworth
worships with his ear, Shelley with his eye, Keats with his sense of touch.

Sound, colour, feeling—these things inform the poetry of these great poets,
and give them their special individual charm.
Now, in Jefferies it is not so much the colour of life, or the sweet harmonies
of the Earth, that he celebrates, though of course these things find a place in
his prose songs. It is the “glory of the sum of things” that diffuses itself and
is felt by every nerve in his body.
Take, for instance, the opening to Wild Life in a Southern County:—

“The inner slope of the green fosse is inclined at an angle pleasant to
recline on, with the head just below the edge, in the summer sunshine.
A faint sound as of a sea heard in a dream—a sibilant “sish-sish”—
passes along outside, dying away and coming again as a fresh wave of
the wind rushes through the bennets and the dry grass. There is the
happy hum of bees—who love the hills—as they speed by laden with
their golden harvest, a drowsy warmth, and the delicious odour of wild
thyme. Behind, the fosse sinks and the rampart rises high and steep—
two butterflies are wheeling in uncertain flight over the summit. It is
only necessary to raise the head a little way, and the cod breeze
refreshes the cheek—cool at this height, while the plains beneath glow
under the heat.”

This, too, from The Life of the Fields:—

“Green rushes, long and thick, standing up above the edge of the ditch,
told the hour of the year, as distinctly as the shadow on the dial the
hour of the day. Green and thick and sappy to the touch, they felt like
summer, soft and elastic, as if full of life, mere rushes though they
were. On the fingers they left a green scent; rushes have a separate
scent of green, so, too, have ferns very different to that of grass or
leaves. Rising from brown sheaths, the tall stems, enlarged a little in
the middle like classical columns, and heavy with their sap and
freshness, leaned against the hawthorn sprays. From the earth they had
drawn its moisture, and made the ditch dry; some of the sweetness of
the air had entered into their fibres, and the rushes—the common
rushes—were full of beautiful summer.”

Jefferies’ writings are studies in tactile sensation. This is what brings him
into affinity with Keats, and this is what differentiates him from Thoreau,
with whom he had much in common. Of both Jefferies and Thoreau it
might be said what Emerson said of his friend, that they “saw as with a
microscope, heard as with an ear-trumpet.” As lovers of the open air and of
the life of the open air, every sense was preternaturally quickened. But
though both observed acutely, Jefferies alone felt acutely.
“To me,” he says, “colour is a sort of food; every spot of colour is a drop of
wine to the spirit.”
It took many years for him to realize where exactly his strength as a writer
lay. In early and later life he again and again essayed the novel form, but,
superior as were his later fictions—Amaryllis at the Fair, for instance, to
such crude stuff as The Scarlet Shawl—it is as a prose Nature poet that he
will be remembered.
He knew and loved the Earth; the atmosphere of the country brought into
play all the faculties of his nature. Lacking in social gifts, reserved and shy
to an extreme, he neither knew much about men and women, nor cared to
know much. With a few exceptions—for the most part studies of his own
kith and kin—the personages of his stories are shadow people; less vital
realities than the trees, the flowers, the birds, of whom he has to speak.

But where he writes of what he has felt, what he has

realized, then, like every fine artist, he transmits his enthusiasm to others.
Sometimes, maybe, he is so full of his subject, so engrossed with the
wonders of the Earth, that the words come forth in a torrent, impetuous,
overwhelming. He writes like a man beside himself with sheer joy. The
Life of the Fields gives more than physical pleasure, more than an
imaginative delight, it is a religion—the old religion of Paganism. He has,
as Sir Walter Besant truly said, “communed so much with Nature, that he is
intoxicated with her fulness and her beauty. He lies upon the turf, and feels
the embrace of the great round world.” [147]
Even apart from fiction, his earlier work varied greatly in quality. With the
publication of The Game-keeper at Home, it was clear that a new force had
entered English literature. A man of temperamental sympathies with men
like Borrow and Thoreau, nevertheless with a power and individuality of his

own. But if increasing years brought comparative recognition, they brought
also fresh physical infirmities. The last few years of his life were one
prolonged agony, and yet his finest work was done in them, and that
splendid prose-poem, “The Pageant of Summer,” was dictated in the direst
possible pain. As the physical frame grew weaker the passion for the Earth
grew in intensity; and in his writing there is all that desperate longing for
the great healing forces of Nature, that ecstasy in the glorious freedom of
the open air, characteristic of the sick man.
At its best Jefferies’ style is rich in sensuous charm, and remarkable no less
for its eloquence of thought than for its wealth of observation.

III

One characteristic of his art is of especial interest; I mean the mystical
quality which he imparts to certain of his descriptions of Nature. The
power of mystic suggestion is a rare one; even poets like Keats and Shelley
could not always command it successfully—and perhaps Blake, Coleridge,
and Rossetti alone of our poets possessed it in the highest degree. It is
comparatively an easy matter to deal with the mysticism of the night. The
possibilities of darkness readily impress the imagination. But the mysticism
of the sunlight—the mysticism not of strange shapes, but of familiar things
of every day, this, though felt by many, is the most difficult thing in the
world to suggest in words.
The “visions” of Jefferies, his moods of emotional exaltation, recall not
only the opium dream of De Quincey, but the ecstasies of the old Mystics.
The theological colouring is not present, but there is the same sharpened
condition of the senses, the same spiritual hunger for a fuller life, the same
sense of physical detachment from the body.
In that fascinating volume of autobiography The Story of my Heart,
Jefferies gives many remarkable instances of these visions. Here is one:—

“I looked at the hills, at the dewy grass, and then up through the elm
branches to the sky. In a moment all that was behind me—the house,
the people, the sound—seemed to disappear and to leave me alone.
Involuntarily I drew a long breath, then I breathed slowly. My

thought, or inner conscience, went up through the illumined sky, and I
was lost in a moment of exaltation. This lasted only a very short time,
only a part of a second, and while it lasted there was no formulated
wish. I was absorbed. I drank the beauty of the morning. I was
exalted.”

One is reminded of Tennyson’s verses:—

“Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—
“Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no knowledge may declare.” [149]

“Ah!” says the medical man, with a wise shake of the head, “this mental
condition is a common enough phenomenon, though only on rare occasions
does it express itself in literature. It is simple hysteria.”
The transcendentalist who has regarded this state of mind as a spiritual
revelation, and looked upon its possessor as one endowed with special
powers of intuition, is indignant with this physiological explanation. He is
more indignant when the medical man proceeds to explain the ecstatic
trances of saints, those whom one may call professional mystics. “Brutal
materialism,” says the transcendentalist.
Now although hysteria is commonly regarded as a foolish exhibition of
weakness on the part of some excitable men and women, there is absolutely
no scientific reason why any stigma should attach to this phenomenon. Nor
is there any reason why the explanation should be considered as derogatory
and necessarily connected with a materialistic view of the Universe.
For what is hysteria? It is an abnormal condition of the nervous system
giving rise to certain physiological and psychical manifestations. With the
physiological ones we are not concerned, but the psychical manifestation
should be of the greatest interest to all students of literature who are also
presumably students of life. The artistic temperament is always associated
with a measure of nervous instability. And where there is nervous

instability there will always be a tendency to hysteria. This tendency may
be kept in check by other faculties. But it is latent—ready to manifest itself
in certain conditions of health or under special stress of excitement. It does
not follow that every hysterical person has the artistic temperament; for
nervous instability may be the outcome of nervous disease, epilepsy,
insanity, or even simple neuroticism in the parents. But so powerful is the
influence of the imagination over the body, that the vivid imagination
connoted by the artistic temperament controls the nervous system, and
when it reaches a certain intensity expresses itself in some abnormal way.
And it is the abnormal psychical condition that is of so much significance in
literature and philosophy.
This psychical condition is far commoner in the East than in the West.
Indeed in India, training in mystical insight goes by the name of Yoga.
[151a]
The passive, contemplative temperament of the Oriental favours this
ecstatic condition.

“The science of the Sufis,” says a Persian philosopher of the eleventh
century, [151b] “aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and
at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. . .
. Just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye
opens to discuss various intellectual objects uncomprehended by
sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light
which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to
reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only during
the transport by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is
endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and
which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you
know their true nature?—what one can comprehend? But the transport
which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate
perception, as if one touched the objects with one’s hand.”

It is worthy of note how that every ecstatic condition is marked by the same
characteristics; and in the confession of Jefferies, the admissions of
Tennyson, and in the utterance of religious mystics of every kind, two
factors detach themselves. The vision or state of mind is one of expectant
wonder. Something that cannot be communicated in words thrills the entire

being. That is one characteristic. The other is that this exaltation, this
revelation to the senses, is one that appeals wholly to sensation. It can be
felt; it cannot be apprehended by any intellectual formulæ. It can never be
reduced to logical shape. And the reference to “touch” in the quotation just
made will remind the reader of the important part played by the tactile sense
in Jefferies’ æsthetic appreciations.
We are not concerned here with any of the philosophical speculations
involved in these “trance conditions.” All that concerns us is the
remarkable literature that has resulted from this well-ascertained psychical
condition. How far the condition is the outcome of forces beyond our
immediate ken which compel recognition from certain imaginative minds,
how far it is a question of physical disturbance; or, in other words, how far
these visions are objective realities, how far subjective, are questions that he
beyond the scope of the present paper. One thing, however, is indisputable;
they have exercised a great fascination over men of sensitive, nervous
temperaments, and are often remarkable for the wider significance they
have given to our ideals of beauty.
The fact that mysticism may arise out of morbid conditions of health does
not justify us, I think, in looking upon it with Max Nordau as “the fruit of a
degenerate brain.” Such a criticism is at one with the linking of genius with
insanity—an argument already broached in the paper dealing with Hazlitt.
Professor William James—who certainly holds no brief for the mystic—
makes the interesting suggestion that “these mystical flights are inroads
from the subconscious life of the cerebral activity, correlative to which we
as yet know nothing.” [153a]

“As a rule,” he says elsewhere, “mystical states merely add a super-
sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness.
They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our
spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a
new expressiveness, and make a new connection with our active life.
They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our
senses have immediately seized.”

The connection between mysticism and hysteria, and the psychological
importance of hysteria, merits the fullest consideration in dealing with the
writings of these literary Vagabonds. Stevenson’s mysticism is more
speculative than that of Jefferies; the intellectual life played a greater share
in his case, but it is none the less marked; and quite apart from, perhaps
even transcending, their literary interest is the psychological significance of
stories like Markheim and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

A medical friend of Jefferies, Dr. Samuel Jones, [153b] has said, when
speaking of his “ecstasies”: “His is not the baneful, sensuous De Quincey
opium-deliriation; he felt a purer delight than that which inspired the
visions of Kubla Khan; he saw ‘no damsel with a dulcimer,’ but thrilled
with yearning unspeakable for the ‘fuller soul,’ and felt in every trembling
fibre of his frame the consciousness of incarnate immortality.”
This attempt to exalt Jefferies at the expense of De Quincey and Coleridge
seems to me unfortunate. Enough has been said already in the remarks on
De Quincey to show that the dreams of De Quincey were no mere opium
dreams. De Quincey was a born dreamer, and from his earliest days had
visions and ecstatic moods. The opium which he took (primarily at any rate
to relieve pain, not, as Dr. Jones suggests, to excite sensuous imagery)
undoubtedly intensified the dream faculty, but it did not produce it.
I confess that I do not know quite what the Doctor means by preferring the
“purer delight” of the Jefferies exaltation to the vision that produced Kubla
Khan. If he implies that opium provoked the one and that “the pure breath
of Nature” (to use his own phrase) inspired the other, and that the latter
consequently is the purer delight, then I cannot follow his reasoning.
A vision is not the less “pure” because it has been occasioned by a drug.
One of the sublimest spiritual experiences that ever happened to a man
came to John Addington Symonds after a dose of chloroform. Nitrous
oxide, ether, Indian hemp, opium, these things have been the means of
arousing the most wonderful states of ecstatic feeling.
Then why should Kubla Khan be rated as a less “pure” delight than one of
the experiences retailed in The Story of my Heart? Is our imagination so
restricted that it cannot enjoy both the subtleties of Coleridge and the fuller
muse of Jefferies?

The healing power of Nature has never found happier expression than in
The Story of my Heart. In words of simple eloquence he tells us how he
cured the weariness and bitterness of spirit by a journey to the seashore.

“The inner nature was faint, all was dry and tasteless; I was weary for
the pure fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling
uncontrollable drove me to the sea. . . . Then alone I went down to the
sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the
sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and
its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness
under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me.
The wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth
and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched the surge with my
hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind. I
prayed aloud in the roar of the waves—my soul was strong as the sea,
and prayed with the sea’s might. Give me fulness of life like to the sea
and the sun, and to the earth and the air; give me fulness of physical
life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me a greatness and
perfection of soul higher than all things; give me my inexpressible
desire which swells in me like a tide—give it to me with all the force
of the sea.”

Those who know Jefferies only by his quieter passages of leisurely
observation are surprised when they find such a swirl of passionate longing
in his autobiography.

IV

The points of affinity between Thoreau and Jefferies are sufficiently
obvious; and yet no two writers who have loved the Earth, and found their
greatest happiness in the life of the woods and fields, as did these two men,
have expressed this feeling so variously. Thoreau, quiet, passive, self-
contained, has seized upon the large tranquillity of Nature, the coolness and
calm, “the central piece subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.”
Interspersed with his freshly observed comments on the myriad life about
him are moral reflections, shrewd criticism of men and things, quaint and
curious illustrations from his scholarly knowledge. But although he may

not always talk of the Earth, there is the flavour of the Earth, the sweetness
and naturalness of the Earth, about his finest utterances.
Jefferies, feverish, excitable, passionate, alive to the glorious plenitude of
the Earth, has seized upon the exceeding beauty, and the healing beauty of
natural things. No scholar like Thoreau, he brings no system of thought, as
did the American, for Nature to put into shape. Outside of Nature all is arid
and profitless to him. He comes to her with empty hands, and seeks for
what she may give him. To Thoreau the Earth was a kind and gracious
sister; to Jefferies an all-sufficing mistress.
The reader who passes from Thoreau to Jefferies need have no fear that he
will be wearied with the same point of view. On the contrary, he will
realize with pleasure how differently two genuine lovers of the Earth can
express their affection.
In Jefferies’ song of praise, his song of desire—praise and desire alternate
continually in his writings—there are two aspects of the Earth upon which
he dwells continually—the exceeding beauty of the Earth, and the
exceeding plenitude of the Earth. Apostrophes to the beauty have been
quoted already; let this serve as an illustration of the other aspect:—

“Everything,” [157a] he exclaims, “on a scale of splendid waste. Such
noble broadcast, open-armed waste is delicious to behold. Never was
there such a lying proverb as ‘Enough is as good as a feast.’ [157b]
Give me the feast; give me squandered millions of seeds, luxurious
carpets of petals, green mountains of oak leaves. The greater the waste
the greater the enjoyment—the nearer the approach to real life.
Casuistry is of no avail; the fact is obvious; Nature flings treasures
abroad, puffs them with open lips along on every breeze; piles up
lavish layers of them in the free, open air, packs countless numbers
together in the needles of a fir tree. Prodigality and superfluity are
stamped on everything she does.”

This is no chance passage, no casual thought. Again and again Jefferies
returns to the richness and plenty of the Earth. And his style, suiting itself
to the man’s temperament, is rich and overflowing, splendidly diffuse,

riotously exulting, until at times there is the very incoherence of passion
about it.
Thus, in looking at the man’s artistic work, its form of expression, its
characteristic notes, something of the man’s way of thinking has impressed
itself upon us.

V

It may be well to gather up the scattered impressions, and to look at the
thought that underlies his fervid utterances. Beginning as merely an
interested observer of Nature, his attitude becomes more enthusiastic, as
knowledge grows of her ways, and what began in observation ends in
aspiration. The old cry, “Return to Nature,” started by Rousseau, caught by
the poets of the “Romantic Revival” in England, and echoed by the
essayists of New England, fell into silence about the middle of last century.
It had inspired a splendid group of Nature poets; and for a time it was felt
some new gospel was needed. Scientific and philosophical problems took
possession of men’s minds; the intellectual and emotional life of the nation
centred more and more round the life of the city. For a time this was,
perhaps, inevitable. For a time Nature regarded through the eyes of fresh
scientific thought had lost her charm. Even the poets who once had been
content to worship, now began to criticize. Tennyson qualified his homage
with reproachings. Arnold carried his books of philosophy into her
presence. But at last men tired of this questioning attitude. America
produced a Whitman; and in England William Morris and Richard Jefferies
—among others—cried out for a simpler, freer, more childlike attitude.
“All things seem possible,” declared Jefferies, “in the open air.” To live
according to Nature was, he assured his countrymen, no poet’s fancy, but a
creed of life. He spoke from his own experience; life in the open, tasting
the wild sweetness of the Earth, had brought him his deepest happiness; and
he cried aloud in his exultation, bidding others do likewise. “If you wish
your children,” says he, “to think deep things, to know the holiest emotions,
take them to the woods and hills, and give them the freedom of the
meadows.” On the futility of bookish learning, the ugliness and sordidness
of town life, he is always discoursing. His themes were not fresh ones;
every reformer, every prophet of the age had preached from the same text.

And none had put the case for Nature more forcibly than Wordsworth when
he lamented—

“The world is too much with us.”

But the plea for saner ways of living cannot be urged too often, and if
Jefferies in his enthusiasm exaggerates the other side of the picture, pins his
faith over much on solitudes and in self-communion, too little on the
gregarious instincts of humankind, yet no reformer can make any
impression on his fellows save by a splendid one-sidedness.
The defect of his Nature creed which calls for the most serious criticism is
not the personal isolation on which he seems to insist. We herd together so
much—some unhappily by necessity, some by choice, that it would be a
refreshing thing, and a wholesome thing, for most of us to be alone, more
often face to face with the primal forces of Nature.
The serious defect in his thought seems to me to lie in his attitude towards
the animal creation. It is summed up in his remark: “There is nothing
human in any living Animal. All Nature, the Universe as far as we see, is
anti- or ultra-human outside, and has no concern with man.” In this
statement he shows how entirely he has failed to grasp the secret of the
compelling power of the Earth—a secret into which Thoreau entered so
fully.
Why should the elemental forces of Nature appeal so strongly to us? Why
does the dweller in the open air feel that an unseen bond of sympathy binds
him to the lowest forms of sentient life? Why is a St. Francis tender
towards animals? Why does a Thoreau take a joy in the company of the
birds, the squirrels, and feel a sense of companionship in the very flowers?
Nay, more: what is it that gives a Jefferies this sense of communion? why, if
the Earth has no “concern with man,” should it soothe with its benison, and
fire his being with such ecstatic rapture? If this doctrine of a Universal
Brotherhood is a sentimental figment, the foundation is swept away at once
of Jefferies’ Nature creed. His sense of happiness, his delight in the Earth,
may no doubt afford him consolation, but it is an irrational comfort, an
agreeable delusion.

And yet no one can read a book of Jefferies without realizing that here is no
sickly fancy—however sickness may have imparted a hectic colouring here
and there—but that the instinct of the Artist is more reliable than the theory
of the Thinker. Undoubtedly his Nature creed is less comprehensive than
Thoreau’s. Jefferies regarded many animals as “good sport”; Thoreau as
good friends. “Hares,” he says, “are almost formed on purpose to be good
sport.” The remark speaks volumes. A man who could say that has but a
poor philosophic defence to offer for his rapt communion with Nature.
How can you have communion with something “anti- or ultra-human”?
The large utterance, “All things seem possible in the open air” dwindles
down rather meanly when the speaker looks at animals from the
sportsman’s point of view. Against his want of sympathy with the lower
forms of creation one must put his warm-hearted plea for the agricultural
poor. In his youth there was a certain harsh intolerance about his attitude
towards his fellows, but he made ample amends in Hodge and his Master,
still more in The Dewy Morn, for the narrow individualism of his earlier
years.
One might criticize certain expressions as extravagant when he lashed out
against the inequalities in society. But after all there is only a healthy
Vagabond flavour about his fling at “modern civilization,” and the genuine
humanitarian feeling is very welcome. Some of his unpublished “Notes on
the Labour Question” (quoted by Mr. Salt in his able study of Jefferies) are
worthy of Ruskin. This, for instance, is vigorously put:—

“‘But they are paid to do it,’ says Comfortable Respectability (which
hates anything in the shape of a ‘question,’ glad to slur it over
somehow). They are paid to do it. Go down into the pit yourself,
Comfortable Respectability, and try it, as I have done, just one hour of
a summer’s day, then you will know the preciousness of a vulgar pot of
beer! Three and sixpence a day is the price of these brawny muscles,
the price of the rascally sherry you parade before your guests in such
pseudo-generous profusion. One guinea a week—that is one stall at
the Opera. But why do they do it? Because Hunger and Thirst drive
them. These are the fearful scourges, the whips worse than the knout,
which lie at the back of Capital, and give it its power. Do you suppose
these human beings, with minds, and souls, and feelings, would not

otherwise repose on the sweet sward, and hearken to the song-birds as
you may do on your lawn at Cedar Villa?”

Really the passage might have come out of Fors Clavigera; it is Ruskinian
not only in sentiment, but in turn of expression. Ruskin impressed Jefferies
very considerably, one would gather, and did much to open up his mind and
broaden his sympathies. Making allowance for certain inconsistencies of
mood, hope for and faith in the future, and weary scepticism, there is a fine
stoicism about the philosophy of Jefferies. His was not the temperament of
which optimists are made. His own terrible ill-health rendered him keenly
sensitive to the pain and misery of the world. His deliberate seclusion from
his fellow-men—more complete in some ways than Thoreau’s, though not
so ostensible—threw him back upon his own thoughts, made him morbidly
introspective.
Then the æsthetic Idealism which dominated him made for melancholy, as
it invariably does. The Worshipper at the shrine of Beauty is always
conscious that

“. . . . In the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”

He realizes the tragic ineffectuality of his aspiration—

“The desire of the moth for the star,”

as Shelley expresses it, and in this line of poetry the mood finds
imperishable expression.
But the melancholy that visits the Idealist—the Worshipper of Beauty—is
not by any means a mood of despair. The moth may not attain the star, but
it feels there is a star to be attained. In other words, an intimate sense of the
beauty of the world carries within it, however faintly, however overlaid
with sick longing, a secret hope that some day things will shape themselves
all right.
And thus it is that every Idealist, bleak and wintry as his mood may be, is
conscious of the latency of spring. Every Idealist, like the man in the

immortal allegory of Bunyan, has a key in his bosom called Promise. This
it is that keeps from madness. And so while Jefferies will exclaim:—

“The whole and the worst the pessimist can say is far beneath the least
particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man.” He will also
declare, “There lives on in me an impenetrable belief, thought burning
like the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real,
something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its
own existence now.”

It is a mistake to attach much importance to Jefferies’ attempts to
systematize his views on life. He lacked the power of co-ordinating his
impressions, and is at his best when giving free play to the instinctive life
within him. No Vagabond writer can excel him in the expression of feeling;
and yet perhaps no writer is less able than he to account for, to give a
rational explanation of his feelings. He is rarely satisfactory when he
begins to explain. Thoreau’s lines about himself seem to me peculiarly
applicable to Jefferies:—

“I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide
Methinks
For milder weather.
“A bunch of violets without their roots
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.
“Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah, the children will not know
Till Time has withered them,

The woe
With which they’re rife.”

Jefferies was a brave man, with a rare supply of resolution and patience.
His life was one long struggle against overwhelming odds. “Three great
giants,” as he puts it—“disease, despair, and poverty.” Not only was his
physical health against him, but his very idiosyncrasies all conspired to
hinder his success. His pride and reserve would not permit him to take help
from his friends. He even shrank from their sympathy. His years of
isolation, voluntary isolation, put him out of touch with human society. His
socialistic tendencies never made him social. His was a kind of abstract
humanitarianism. A man may feel tenderly, sympathize towards humanity,
yet shrink from human beings. Misanthropy did not inspire him; he did not
dislike his fellow-men; it was simply that they bewildered and puzzled him;
he could not get on with them. So it will be seen that he had not the
consolation some men take in the sympathy and co-operation of their
fellows. After all, this is more a defect of temperament than a fault of
character, and he had to pay the penalty. Realizing this, it is impossible to
withhold admiration for the pluck and courage of the man. As a lover of
Nature, and an artist in prose, he needs no encomium to-day. In his
eloquent “Eulogy” Sir Walter Besant gave fitting expression to the debt of
gratitude we owe this poet-naturalist—this passionate interpreter of English
country life.
What Borrow achieved for the stirring life of the road, Jefferies has done for
the brooding life of the fields. What Thoreau did for the woods at Maine
and the waters of Merrimac, Jefferies did for the Wiltshire streams and the
Sussex hedgerows. He has invested the familiar scenery of Southern
England with a new glamour, a tenderer sanctity; has arrested our
indifferent vision, our careless hearing, turned our languid appreciation into
a comprehending affection.
Ardent, shy, impressionable, proud, stout-hearted pagan and wistful idealist;
one of the most pathetic and most interesting figures in modern literature.

VII
WALT WHITMAN

“So will I sing on, fast as fancies come;
Rudely the verse being as the mood it paints.”
Robert Browning.
“A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays
And confident to-morrows.”
Wordsworth.

I

The “good gray poet” is the supreme example of the Vagabond in literature.
It is quite possible for one not drawn towards the Vagabond temperament to
admire Stevenson, for Stevenson was a fine artist; to take delight in the
vigorous “John Bullism” of Lavengro; to sympathize with the natural
mysticism of Jefferies; the Puritan austerity of Thoreau. In short, there are
aspects in the writings of the other “Vagabonds” in this volume which
command attention quite apart from the characteristics specifically
belonging to the literary Vagabond.
But it is not possible to view Whitman apart from his Vagabondage. He is
proud of it, glories in it, and flings it in your face. Others, whatever strain
of wildness they may have had, whatever sympathies they may have felt for
the rough sweetness of the earth, however unconventional their habits,
accepted at any rate the recognized conventions of literature. As men, as
thinkers, they were unconventional; as artists conventional. They retained
at any rate the literary garments of civilized society.

Not so Whitman. He is the Orson of literature. Unconventionality he
carries out to its logical conclusion, and strides stark naked among our
academies of learning. A strange, uncouth, surprising figure, it is
impossible to ignore him however much he may shock our susceptibilities.
Many years ago Mr. Swinburne greeted him as “a strong-winged soul with
prophetic wings”; subsequently he referred to him as a “drunken apple-
woman reeling in a gutter.” For this right-about-face he has been upbraided
by Whitman’s admirers. Certainly it is unusual to find any reader starting
out to bless and ending with a curse. Usually it is the precedent of Balaam
that is followed. But Mr. Swinburne’s mingled feelings typify the attitude
of every one who approaches the poet, though few of us can express
ourselves so resourcefully as the author of Poems and Ballads.
There may be some students who accept Whitman without demur at the
outset on his own terms. All I can say is that I never heard of one.
However broad-minded you may consider yourself, however catholic in
your sympathies, Whitman is bound to get athwart some pet prejudice, to
discover some shred of conventionality. Gaily, heedlessly, you start out to
explore his writings, just as you might start on a walking tour. He is in
touch with the primal forces of Nature, you hear. “So much the better,” say
you; “civilization has ceased to charm.” “You are enamoured of wildness.”
Thus men talk before camping out, captivated by the picturesque and
healthy possibilities, and oblivious to the inconveniences of roughing it.
But just as some amount of training is wanted before a walking tour, or a
period of camping out, so is it necessary to prepare yourself for a course of
Whitman. And this, not because there is any exotic mystery about
Whitman, not because there are any intellectual subtleties about his work,
as there are in Browning, but because he is the pioneer of a new order, and
the pioneer always challenges the old order; our tastes require adjusting
before they can value it properly.
There is no question about a “Return to Nature” with Whitman. He never
left it. Thoreau quitted the Emersonian study to get fresh inspiration from
the woods. Even Jefferies, bred up in the country, carried about with him
the delicate susceptibilities of the neurotic modern. Borrow retained a firm
grip-hold of many conventions of the city. But Whitman? It was no case

with him of a sojourn in the woods, or a ramble on the heath. He was a
spiritual native of the woods and heath; not, as some seem to think, because
he was a kind of wild barbarian who loved the rough and uncouth, and
could be found only in unfrequented parts, but because he was in touch with
the elemental everywhere. The wildness of Whitman, the barbarian aspects
of the man, have been overrated. He is wild only in so far as he is cosmic,
and the greater contains the less. He loves the rough and the smooth, not
merely the rough. His songs are no mere pæans of rustic solitudes; they are
songs of the crowded streets, as well of the country roads; of men and
women—of every type—no less than of the fields and the streams. In fact,
he seeks the elemental everywhere. Thoreau found it in the Indian, Borrow
in the gypsies, Whitman, with a finer comprehensiveness, finds it in the
multitude. His business is to bring it to the surface, to make men and
women rejoice in—not shrink from—the great primal forces of life. But he
is not for moralizing—

“I give nothing as duties,
What others give as duties I give as loving impulses.
(Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?)”

He has no quarrel with civilization as such. The teeming life of the town is
as wonderful to him as the big solitude of the Earth. Carlyle’s pleasantry
about the communistic experiments of the American Transcendentalists
would have no application for him. “A return to Acorns and expecting the
Golden Age to arrive.”
Here is no exclusive child of Nature:—

“I tramp a perpetual journey, . . .
My signs are a rainproof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the
woods . . .
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy.”

People talk of Whitman as if he relied entirely on the “staff cut from the
woods”; they forget his rainproof coat and good shoes. Assuredly he has no
mind to cut himself adrift from the advantages of civilization.

The rainproof coat, indeed, reminds one of Borrow’s green gamp, which
caused such distress to his friends and raised doubts in the minds of Mr.
Watts-Dunton and Dr. Hake as to whether he was a genuine child of

the open air. [173] No one would cavil at that term as applied to Whitman—
yet one must not forget the “rainproof coat.”
In regarding the work of Whitman there are three aspects which strike one
especially. His attitude towards Art, towards Humanity, towards Life.

II

First of all, Whitman’s attitude towards Art.
For the highest art two essentials are required—Sincerity and Beauty. The
tendency of modern literature has been to ignore the first and to make the
second all-sufficient. The efforts of the artist have been concentrated upon

the workmanship, and too often he has been satisfied with a merely
technical excellence.
It is a pleasant and attractive pastime, this playing with words. Grace,
charm, and brilliance are within the reach of the artificer’s endeavour. But
a literature which is the outcome of the striving after beauty of form,
without reference to the sincerity of substance, is like a posy of flowers torn
away from their roots. Lacking vitality, it will speedily perish.
No writer has seen this more clearly than Whitman, and if in his vigorous
allegiance to Sincerity he has seemed oblivious at times to the existence of
Beauty, yet he has chosen the better part. And for this reason. Beauty will
follow in the wake of Sincerity, whether sought for or no, and the writer
whose one passion it is to see things as they are, and to disentangle from the
transient and fleeting the great truths of life, finds that in achieving a noble
sincerity he has also achieved the highest beauty.
The great utterances of the world are beautiful, because they are true.
Whereas the artist who is determined to attain beauty at all costs will obtain
beauty of a kind—“silver-grey, placid and perfect,” as Andrea del Sarto
said, but the highest beauty it will not be, for that is no mere question of
manner, but a perfect blend of manner and matter.
It will no doubt be urged that, despite his sincerity, there is a good deal in
Whitman that is not beautiful. And this must be frankly conceded. But this
will be found only when he has failed to separate the husk from the kernel.
Whitman’s sincerity is never in question, but he does not always appreciate
the difference between accuracy and truth, between the accidental and the
essential. For instance, lines like these—

“The six framing men, two in the middle, and two at each end,
carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam.”

or physiological detail after this fashion:—

“Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws and the jaw
hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck sheer.

Strong shoulders, manly beard, hind shoulders, and the ample size
round of the chest,
Upper arm, armpit, elbow socket, lower arms, arm sinews, arm bones.
Wrist and wrist joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger
joints, finger nails, etc., etc.”

The vital idea lying beneath these accumulated facts is lost sight of by the
reader who has to wade through so many accurate non-essentials.
It is well, I think, to seize upon the weakness of Whitman’s literary style at
the outset, for it explains so much that is irritating and disconcerting.
Leaves of Grass he called his book, and the name is more significant than
one at first realizes. For there is about it not only the sweetness, the
freshness, the luxuriance of the grass; but its prolific rankness—the wheat
and the tares grow together.
It has, I know, been urged by some of Whitman’s admirers that his power as
a writer does not depend upon his artistic methods or non-artistic methods,
and he himself protested against his Leaves being judged merely as
literature. And so there has been a tendency to glorify his very
inadequacies, to hold him up as a poet who has defied successfully the
unwritten laws of Art.
This is to do him an ill service. If Whitman’s work be devoid of Art, then it
possesses no durability. Literature is an art just as much as music, painting,
or sculpture. And if a man, however fine, however inspiring his ideas may
be, has no power to shape them—to express them in colour, in sound, in
form, in words—to seize upon the essentials and use no details save as
suffice to illustrate these essentials, then his work will not last. For it has
no vitality.
In other words, Whitman must be judged ultimately as an artist, for Art
alone endures. And on the whole he can certainly bear the test. His art was
not the conventional art of his day, but art it assuredly was.
In his best utterances there are both sincerity and beauty.
Who could deny the title of artist to the man who wrote those noble verses,
“On the Beach at Night”?—

“On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
“Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.
“From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all
Watching, silently weeps.
“Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in
apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the
Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine
out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall
again shine.
“Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?
“Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,

Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.”

or those touching lines, “Reconciliation”?—

“Word over all beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly
lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly
Wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—
I draw near—
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.”

Again, take that splendid dirge in memory of President Lincoln, majestic in
its music, spacious and grand in its treatment. It is too long for quotation,
but the opening lines, with their suggestive beauty, and the Song to Death,
may be instanced.

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
“O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul!
“In the dooryard fronting an old farmhouse near the whitewash’d
palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I

love.
With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate coloured blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
*****
“Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
“Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
“Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come
unfalteringly.
*****
“The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul-turning to thee, O vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
“Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the
prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death.”

This is not only Art, but great Art. So fresh in their power, so striking in
their beauty, are Whitman’s utterances on Death that they take their place in
our memories beside the large utterances of Shakespeare, Milton, and
Shelley.

It is a mistake to think that where Whitman fails in expression it is through
carelessness; that he was a great poet by flashes, and that had he taken more
pains he would have been greater still. We have been assured by those who
knew him intimately that he took the greatest care over his work, and would
wait for days until he could get what he felt to be the right word.
To the student who comes fresh to a study of Whitman it is conceivable that
the rude, strong, nonchalant utterances may seem like the work of an
inspired but careless and impatient artist. It is not so. It is done
deliberately.
“I furnish no specimens,” he says; “I shower them by exhaustless laws,
fresh and modern continually, as Nature does.”
He is content to be suggestive, to stir your imagination, to awaken your
sympathies. And when he fails, he fails as Wordsworth did, because he
lacked the power of self-criticism, lacked the faculty of humour—that
saving faculty which gives discrimination, and intuitively protects the artist
from confusing pathos with bathos, the grand and the grandiose. Nowhere
is this more apparent than in his treatment of Sex. Frankness,
outspokenness on the primal facts of life are to be welcomed in literature.
All the great masters—Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, have
dealt openly and fearlessly with the elemental passions. There is nothing to
deplore in this, and Mr. Swinburne was quite right when he contended that
the domestic circle is not to be for all men and writers the outer limit of
their world of work. So far from regretting that Whitman claimed right to
equal freedom when speaking of the primal fact of procreation as when
speaking of sunrise, sunsetting, and the primal fact of death, every clean-
minded man and woman should rejoice in the poet’s attitude. For he
believed and gloried in the separate personalities of man and woman,
claiming manhood and womanhood as the poet’s province, exulting in the
potentialities of a healthy sexual life. He was angry, as well he might be,
with the furtive snigger which greets such matters as motherhood and
fatherhood with the prurient unwholesomeness of a mind that can sigh
sentimentally over the “roses and raptures of Vice” and start away
shamefaced from the stark passions—stripped of all their circumlocutions.
He certainly realized as few have done the truth of that fine saying of

Thoreau’s, that “for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in
Nature.”
But at the same time I cannot help feeling that Stevenson was right when he
said that Whitman “loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by
attracting too much of our attention—that of a Bull in a China Shop.” [180]
His aim is right enough; it is to his method one may take objection. Not on
the score of morality. Whitman’s treatment of passion is not immoral; it is
simply like Nature herself—unmoral. What shall we say then about his sex
cycle, “Children of Adam”? Whitman, in his anxiety to speak out, freely,
simply, naturally, to vindicate the sanity of coarseness, the poetry of
animalism, seems to me to have bungled rather badly. There are many fine
passages in his “Song of the Body Electric” and “Spontaneous Me,” but
much of it impresses me as bad art, and is consequently ineffectual in its
aim. The subject demands a treatment at once strong and subtle—I do not
mean finicking—and subtlety is a quality not vouchsafed to Whitman.
Lacking it, he is often unconsciously comic where he should be gravely
impressive. “A man’s body is sacred, and a woman’s body is sacred.”
True; but the sacredness is not displayed by making out a tedious inventory
of the various parts of the body. Says Whitman in effect: “The sexual life is
to be gloried in, not to be treated as if it were something shameful.” Again
true; but is there not a danger of missing the glory by discoursing noisily on
the various physiological manifestations. Sex is not the more wonderful for
being appraised by the big drum.
The inherent beauty and sanctity of Sex lies surely in its superb
unconsciousness; it is a matter for two human beings drawn towards one
another by an indefinable, world-old attraction; scream about it, caper over
it, and you begin to make it ridiculous, for you make it self-conscious.
Animalism merely as a scientific fact serves naught to the poet, unless he
can show also what is as undeniable as the bare fact—its poetry, its
coarseness, and its mystery go together. Browning has put it in a line:—

“. . . savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain—and God renews
His ancient rapture.”

It is the “rapture” and the mystery which Whitman misses in many of his
songs of Sex.
There is no need to give here any theological significance to the word
“God.” Let the phrase stand for the mystic poetry of animalism. Whitman
has no sense of mystery.
I have another objection against “The Children of Adam.” The loud, self-
assertive, genial, boastful style of Whitman suits very well many of his
democratic utterances, his sweeping cosmic emotions. But here it gives one
the impression of a kind of showman, who with a flourishing stick is
shouting out to a gaping crowd the excellences of manhood and
womanhood. Deliberately he has refrained from the mood of imaginative
fervour which alone could give a high seriousness to his treatment—a high
seriousness which is really indispensable. And his rough, slangy, matter-of-
fact comments give an atmosphere of unworthy vulgarity to his subject.
Occasionally he is carried away by the sheer imaginative beauty of the
subject, then note how different the effect:—

“Have you ever loved the body of a woman,
Have you ever loved the body of a man,
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all
Nations and times all over the earth?”
“If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body is
More beautiful than the most beautiful face.”

If only all had been of this quality. But interspersed with lines of great
force and beauty are cumbrous irrelevancies, wholly superfluous details.
William Morris has also treated the subject of Sex in a frank, open fashion.
And there is in his work something of the easy, deliberate spaciousness that
we find in Whitman. But Morris was an artist first and foremost, and he
never misses the poetry of animalism; as readers of the “Earthly Paradise”
and the prose romances especially know full well.

It is not then because Whitman treats love as an animal passion that I take
objection to much in his “Children of Adam.” There are poets enough and
to spare who sing of the sentimental aspects of love. We need have no
quarrel with Whitman’s aim as expressed by Mr. John Burroughs: “To put
in his sex poems a rank and healthy animality, and to make them as frank as
the shedding of pollen by the trees, strong even to the point of offence.” All
we ask is for him to do so as a poet, not as a mere physiologist. And when
he speaks one moment as a physiologist, next as a poet; at one time as a
lover, at another as a showman, the result is not inspiring. “He could not
make it pleasing,” remarks Mr. Burroughs, “a sweet morsel to be rolled
under the tongue; that would have been levity and sin, as in Byron and the
other poets . . . He would sooner be bestial than Byronic, he would sooner
shock by his frankness than inflame by his suggestion.” This vague linking
together of “Byron and the other poets” is not easy to understand. In the
first place, not one of the moderns has treated love from the same
standpoint. Shelley, for instance, is transcendental, Byron elemental,
Tennyson sentimental; Rossetti looks at the soul through the body,
Browning regards the body through the soul. There is abundant variety in
the treatment. Then, again, why Byron should be singled out especially for
opprobrium I fail to see, for love is to him the fierce elemental passion it is
for Whitman. As for frankness, the episode of Haidee and Don Juan does
not err on the side of reticence. Nor is it pruriently suggestive. It is a
splendid piece of poetic animalism. Let us be fair to Byron. His work may
in places be disfigured by an unworthy cynicism; his treatment of sexual
problems be marred by a shallow flippancy. But no poet had a finer
appreciation of the essential poetry of animalism than he, and much of his
cynicism, after all, is by way of protest against the same narrow morality at
which Whitman girds. To single Byron out as a poet especially obnoxious
in his treatment of love, and to condemn him so sweepingly, seems to me
scarcely defensible. To extol unreservedly the rankness and coarseness of
“The Children of Adam,” and to have no word of commendation, say, for so
noble a piece of naturalism as the story of Haidee, seems to me lacking in
fairness. Besides, it suggests that the only treatment in literature of the
sexual life is a coarse, unpleasing treatment, which I do not suppose Mr.
Burroughs really holds. Whitman has vindicated, and vindicated finely, the
inherent truth and beauty of animalism. But so has William Morris, so has
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so has poor flouted Byron. And I will go further,

and say that these other poets have succeeded often where Whitman has
failed; they have shown the beauty and cosmic significance, when Whitman
has been merely cataloguing the stark facts.
It may be objected, of course, that Whitman does not aim in his sex poems
at imaginative beauty, that he aims at sanity and wholesomeness; that what
he speaks—however rank—makes for healthy living. May be; I am not
concerned to deny it. What I do deny is the implication that the
wholesomeness of a fact is sufficient justification for its treatment in
literature. There are a good many disagreeable things that are wholesome
enough, there are many functions of the body that are entirely healthy. But
one does not want them enshrined in Art.
To attack Whitman on the score of morality is unjustifiable; his sex poems
are simply unmoral. But had he flouted his art less flagrantly in them they
would have been infinitely more powerful and convincing, and given the
Philistines less opportunity for blaspheming.
I have dwelt at this length upon Whitman’s treatment of Sex largely because
it illustrates his strength and weakness as a literary artist. In some of his
poems—those dealing with Democracy, for instance—we have Whitman at
his best. In others, certainly a small proportion, we get sheer, unillumined
doggerel. In his sex poems there are great and fine ideas, moments of
inspiration, flashes of beauty, combined with much that is trivial and
tiresome.
But this I think is the inevitable outcome of his style. The style, like the
man, is large, broad, sweeping, tolerant; the sense of “mass and multitude”
is remarkable; he aims at big effects, and the quality of vastness in his
writings struck John Addington Symonds as his most remarkable
characteristic. [186] This vast, rolling, processional style is splendidly
adapted for dealing with the elemental aspects of life, with the vital
problems of humanity. He sees everything in bulk. His range of vision is
cosmic. The very titles are suggestive of his point of view—“A Song of the
Rolling Earth,” “A Song of the Open Road,” “A Song for Occupation,”
“Gods.” There are no detailed effects, no delicate points of light and shade
in his writings, but huge panoramic effects. It is a great style, it is an
impressive style, but it is obviously not a plastic style, nor a versatile style.

Its very merits necessarily carry with them corresponding defects. The
massiveness sometimes proves mere unwieldiness, the virile strength tends
to coarseness, the eye fixed on certain broad distant effects misses the
delicate by-play of colour and movement in the foreground. The persistent
unconventionality of metre and rhythm becomes in time a mannerism as
pronounced as the mannerism of Tennyson and Swinburne.
I do not urge these things in disparagement of Whitman. No man can take
up a certain line wholeheartedly and uncompromisingly without incurring
the disabilities attaching to all who concentrate on one great issue.
And if sometimes he is ineffectual, if on occasion he is merely strident in
place of authoritative, how often do his utterances carry with them a superb
force and a conviction which compel us to recognize the sagacious genius
of the man.

III

Indeed, it is when we examine Whitman’s attitude towards Humanity that
we realize best his strength and courage. For it is here that his qualities find
their fittest artistic expression. Nothing in Whitman’s view is common or
unclean. All things in the Universe, rightly considered, are sweet and
good. Carrying this view into social politics, Whitman declares for absolute
social equality. And this is done in no doctrinaire spirit, but because of
Whitman’s absolute faith and trust in man and woman—not the man and
woman overridden by the artifices of convention, but the “powerful
uneducated person.” Whitman finds his ideal not in Society (with a capital
S), but in artisans and mechanics. He took to his heart the mean, the vulgar,
the coarse, not idealizing their weaknesses, but imbuing them with his own
strength and vigour.

“I am enamoured of growth out of doors,
Of men that live among cattle, or taste of the ocean or woods,
Of the builder and steerers of ships, and the wielders of axes, and
The drivers of horses.
I can eat and sleep with them week in week out.”

Such are his comrades. And well he knows them. For many years of his
life he was roving through country and city, coming into daily contact with
the men and women about whom he has sung. Walt Whitman—farm boy,
school teacher, printer, editor, traveller, mechanic, nurse in the army
hospital, Government clerk. Truly our poet has graduated as few have done
in the school of Life. No writer of our age has better claims to be
considered the Poet of Democracy.
But he was no sentimentalist. More tolerant and passive in disposition than
Victor Hugo, he had the same far-seeing vision when dealing with the
people. He recognized their capacity for good, their unconquerable faith,
their aspirations, their fine instincts; but he recognized also their brutality
and fierceness. He would have agreed with Spencer’s significant words:
“There is no alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden
instincts”; but he would have denied Spencer’s implication that leaden
instincts ruled the Democracy. And he was right. There is more real
knowledge of men and women in Leaves of Grass and Les Miserables than
in all the volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy. Thus Whitman announces
his theme:—

“Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine.
The modern man I sing.”

“Whitman,” wrote the late Mr. William Clarke, in his stimulating study of
the Poet, [188] “sings of the Modern Man as workman, friend, citizen,
brother, comrade, as pioneer of a new social order, as both material and
spiritual, final and most subtle, compound of spirit and nature, firmly
planted on this rolling earth, and yet ‘moving about in worlds not realized.’
As representative democratic bard Whitman exhibits complete freedom
from unconventionality, a very deep human love for all, faith in the
rationality of the world, courage, energy, and the instincts of solidarity.”
In the introductory essay to this volume some remarks were made about the
affections of the literary Vagabond in general and of Whitman in particular,
which call now for an ampler treatment, especially as on this point I find
myself, apparently, at issue with so many able and discerning critics of
Whitman. I say apparently because a consideration of the subject may

show that the difference, though real, is not so fundamental as it appears to
be.
That Whitman entertained a genuine affection for men and women is, of
course, too obvious to be gainsaid. His noble work in the hospitals, his
tenderness towards criminals and outcasts—made known to us through the
testimony of friends—show him to be a man of comprehensive sympathies.
No man of a chill and calculating nature could have written as he did, and,
although his writings are not free of affectation, the strenuous, fundamental
sincerity of the man impresses every line.
But was it, to quote William Clarke, “a very deep human love”? This seems
to me a point of psychological interest. A man may exhibit kindliness and
tenderness towards his fellow-creatures without showing any deep personal
attachment. In fact, the wider a man’s sympathies are the less room is there
for any strong individual feeling. His friend, Mr. Donaldson, has told us
that he never remembers Whitman shedding a tear of grief over the death of
any friend. Tears of joy he shed often; but no tear of sorrow, of personal
regret. It is true that Mr. Donaldson draws no particular inference from this
fact. It seems to me highly significant. The absence of intense emotion is
no argument truly for insensibility; but to a man of large, sweeping
sympathies such as Whitman the loss of a particular friend did not strike
home as it would do in men of subtler temperaments.
Cosmic emotions leave no room for those special manifestations of
concentrated feeling in individual instances which men with a narrower
range of sympathies frequently show.
For in denying that Whitman was a man capable of “a very deep human
love,” no moral censure is implied. If not deep, it was certainly
comprehensive; and rarely, if ever, do the two qualities coexist. Depth of
feeling is not to be found in men of the tolerant, passive type; it is the
intolerant, comparatively narrow-minded man who loves deeply; the man of
few friends, not the man who takes the whole human race to his heart in one
colossal embrace. Narrowness may exist, of course, without intensity. But
intensity of temperament always carries with it a certain forceful
narrowness. Such a man, strongly idiosyncratic, with his sympathies
running in a special groove, is capable of one or two affections that absorb

his entire nature. Those whom he cares for are so subtly bound up with the
peculiarities of his temperament that they become a part of his very life.
And if they go, so interwoven are their personalities with the fibres of his
being, that part of his life goes with them. To such the death of an intimate
friend is a blow that shatters them beyond recovery. Courage and
endurance, indeed, they may show, and the undiscerning may never note
how fell the blow has been. But though the healing finger of Time will
assuage the wound, the scars they will carry to their dying day.
As a rule, such men, lovable as they may be to the few, are not of the stuff
of which social reformers are made. They feel too keenly, too sensitively,
are guided too much by individual temperamental preferences. It is of no
use for any man who has to deal with coarse-grained humanity, with all
sorts and conditions of men, to be fastidious in his tastes. A certain
bluntness, a certain rude hardiness, a certain evenness of disposition is
absolutely necessary. We are told of Whitman by one of his most ardent
admirers that his life was “a pleased, uninterested saunter through the world
—no hurry, no fever, no strife, hence no bitterness, no depression, no
wasted energies . . . in all his tastes and attractions always aiming to live
thoroughly in the free nonchalant spirit of the day.”
Yes; this is the type of man wanted as a social pioneer, as a poet of the
people. A man who felt more acutely, for whom the world was far too
terrible a place for sauntering, would be quite unfitted for Whitman’s task.
It was essential that he should have lacked deep individual affection.
Something had to be sacrificed for the work he had before him, and we
need not lament that he had no predilection for those intimate personal ties
that mean so much to some.
A man who has to speak a word of cheer to so many can ill afford to linger
with the few. He is not even concerned to convert you to his way of
thinking. He throws out a hint, a suggestion, the rest you must do for
yourself.
“I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual
look upon you, and then averts his face. Leaving you to prove and define
it. Expecting the main things from you.”

Nowhere are Whitman’s qualities more admirably shown than in his attitude
towards the average human being. As a rule the ordinary man is not a
person whom the Poet delights to honour. He is concerned with the
exceptional, the extraordinary type. Whitman’s attitude then is of special
interest.

“I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you;
None has understood you, but I understand you;
None has done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself.
None but has found you imperfect; I only find no imperfection in you.
None but would subordinate you; I only am he who will never consent
to subordinate you.”
*****
“Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of
all;
From the head of the centre figure, spreading a nimbus of gold-
coloured light.
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of
gold-coloured light.
From My hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams
effulgently flowing for ever.
O! I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are; you have slumbered upon yourself
all your time. . . .”

And so on, in a vein of courageous cheer, spoken with the big, obtrusive,
genial egotism that always meets us in Whitman’s writings. Whitman’s
egotism proves very exasperating to some readers, but I do not think it
should trouble us much. After all it is the egotism of a simple, natural,
sincere nature; there is no self-satisfied smirk about it, no arrogance. He is
conscious of his powers, and is quite frank in letting you know this.
Perhaps his boisterous delight in his own prowess may jar occasionally on
the nerves; but how much better than the affected humility of some writers.
And the more you study his writings the less does this egotism affect even
the susceptible. Your ears get attuned to the pitch of the voice, you realize
that the big drum is beaten with a purpose. For it must be remembered that

it is an egotism entirely emptied of condescension. He is vain certainly, but
mainly because he glories in the common heritage, because he feels he is
one of the common people. He is proud assuredly, but it is pride that exults
in traits that he shares in common with the artist, the soldier, and the sailor.
He is no writer who plays down to the masses, who will prophesy fair
things—like the mere demagogue—in order to win their favour. And it is a
proof of his plain speaking, of his fearless candour, that for the most part
the very men for whom he wrote care little for him.
Conventionality rules every class in the community. Whitman’s gospel of
social equality is not altogether welcome to the average man. One
remembers Mr. Barrie’s pleasant satire of social distinction in The
Admirable Crichton, where the butler resents his radical master’s
suggestion that no real difference separates employer and employed. He
thinks it quite in keeping with the eternal fitness of things that his master
should assert the prerogative of “Upper Dog,” and points out how that there
are many social grades below stairs, and that an elaborate hierarchy
separates the butler at one end from the “odds and ends” at the other.
In like manner the ordinary citizen resents Whitman’s genuine democratic
spirit, greatly preferring the sentimental Whiggism of Tennyson.
Whitman reminds us by his treatment of the vulgar, the ordinary, the
commonplace, that he signalizes a new departure in literature. Of poets
about the people there have been many, but he is the first genuine Poet of
the People.
Art is in its essence aristocratic, it strives after selectness, eschews the
trivial and the trite. There is, therefore, in literature always a tendency
towards conservatism; the literary artist grows more and more fastidious in
his choice of words; the cheap and vulgar must be rigorously excluded, and
only those words carrying with them stately and beautiful associations are
to be countenanced. Thus Classicism in Art constantly needs the
freshening, broadening influence of Romanticism.
What Conservatism and Liberalism are to Politics Classicism and
Romanticism are to Art. Romantic revolutions have swept over literature
before the nineteenth century, and Shakespeare was the first of our great
Romantics. Then with the reaction Formalism and Conservatism crept in

again. But the Romantic Revival at the beginning of the nineteenth century
went much further than previous ones. Out of the throes of the Industrial
Revolution had been born a lusty, clamorous infant that demanded
recognition—the new Demos. And it claimed not only recognition in
politics, but recognition in literature. Wordsworth and Shelley essayed to
speak for it with varying success; but Wordsworth was too exclusive, and
Shelley—the most sympathetic of all our poets till the coming of Browning
—was too ethereal in his manner. Like his own skylark, he sang to us
poised midway between earth and heaven; a more emphatically flesh and
blood personage was wanted.
Here and there a writer of genuine democratic feeling, like Ebenezer Elliott,
voiced the aspirations of the people, but only on one side. Thomas Hood
and Mrs. Browning sounded a deeper note; but the huge, clamorous
populace needed a yet fuller note, a more penetrating insight, a more
forceful utterance. And in America, with its seething democracy—a
democracy more urgent, more insistent than our own—it found its
spokesman. That it did not recognize him, and is only just beginning to do
so, is not remarkable. It did not recognize him, for it had scarcely
recognized itself. Only dimly did it realize its wants and aspirations.
Whitman divined them; he is the Demos made articulate.
And not only did he sweep away the Conservative traditions and
conventions of literature, he endeavoured to overthrow the aristocratic
principle that underlies it. Selectness he would replace with simplicity. No
doubt he went too far. That is of small moment. Exaggeration and over-
emphasis have their place in the scheme of things. A thunderstorm may be
wanted to clear the air, and if it does incidentally some slight damage to
crops and trees it is of no use grumbling.
But in the main Whitman’s theory of Art was very true and finely
suggestive, and is certainly not the view of a man who cares for nothing but
the wild and barbaric.

“The art of Art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of
letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity, nothing can
make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the
heave of impulse, and pierce intellectual depths, and give all subjects

their articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon.
But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of
the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment
of trees in the woods, and grass by the woodside, is the flawless
triumph of Art.”

A fitting attitude for a Poet of Democracy, one likely to bring him into
direct contact with the broad, variegated stream of human life.
What perhaps he did not realize so clearly is that Nature, no less than Art,
exercises the selective facility, and corrects her own riotous extravagance.
And thus on occasion he falls into the very indefiniteness, the very excess
he deprecates.
The way in which his Art and democratic spirit correspond suggests
another, though less unconventional poet of the Democracy—William
Morris. The spaciousness the directness, the tolerance that characterise
Whitman’s work are to be found to Morris. Morris had no eclectic
preferences either in Art or Nature. A wall paper, a tapestry, an epic were
equally agreeable tasks; and a blade of grass delighted him as fully as a
sunset. So with men. He loved many, but no one especially. Catholicity
rather than intensity characterised his friendships. And, like Whitman, he
could get on cheerfully enough with surprisingly unpleasant people,
provided they were working for the cause in which he was interested. [197]
That is the secret. Whitman and Morris loved the Cause. They looked at
things in the mass, at people in the mass. This is the true democratic spirit.
They had no time, nor must it be confessed any special interest—in the
individual as such. What I have said about Whitman’s affection being
comprehensive rather than intense applies equally to Morris. Why?
Because it is the way of the Democrat and the Social Reformer. To such the
individual suggests a whole class, a class suggests the race. Whitman is
always speaking to man as man, rarely does he touch on individual men. If
he does so, it is only to pass on to some cosmic thoughts suggested by the
particular instance.
Perhaps the most inspiring thing about Whitman’s attitude towards
humanity is his thorough understanding of the working classes, and his
quick discernment of the healthy naturalism that animates them. He neither

patronizes them nor idealizes them; he sees their faults, which are obvious
enough; but he also sees, what is not so obvious, their fine independence of
spirit, their eager thirst for improvement, for ampler knowledge, for larger
opportunities, and their latent idealism.
No doubt there is more independence, greater vigour, less servility, in
America than in England; but the men he especially delights in, the artisan
or mechanic, represent the best of the working classes in either country.
In this respect Whitman and Tolstoy, differing in so many ways, join hands.
In the “powerful uneducated person” they see the salvation of society, the
renovation of its anæmic life.

IV

Whitman is no moralist, and has no formal philosophy to offer. But the
modern spirit which always seeks after some “criticism of life” does not
forsake even the Vagabond. He is certainly the only Vagabond, with the
exception of Thoreau, who has felt himself charged with a message for his
fellows. The popular tendency is to look for a “message” in all literary
artists, and the result is that the art in question is knocked sometimes out of
all shape in order to wrest from it some creed or ethical teaching. And as
the particular message usually happens to be something that especially
appeals to the seeker, the number of conflicting messages wrung from the
unfortunate literary artist are somewhat disconcerting.
But in Whitman’s case the task of the message hunter is quite simple.
Whitman never leaves us in doubt what he believes in, and what ideas he
wishes to propagate. It is of course easy—perhaps inevitable—that with a
writer whose method it is to hint, suggest, indicate, rather than formulate,
elaborate, codify, the student should read in more than was intended. And,
after all, as George Eliot said, “The words of Genius bear a wider meaning
than the thought which prompted them.” But at any rate there is no
mistaking the general outline of his thought, for his outlook upon life is as
distinctive as Browning’s, and indeed possesses many points of similarity.
But in speaking of Whitman’s message one thing must be borne in mind.
Whitman’s work must not be adjudged merely as a special blend of
Altruism and Individualism. No man ever works, it has been well said [199]

—not even if philanthropy be his trade—from the primary impulse to help
or console other people, any more than his body performs its functions for
the sake of other people. And what Professor Nettleship says of Browning
might be applied with equal truth to Whitman. His work consists “not in
his being a teacher, or even wanting to be one, but in his doing exactly the
work he liked best and could not help doing.” And Whitman’s stimulating
thought is not the less true for that, for it is the spontaneous expression of
his personality, just as fully as a melody or picture is an expression of an
artist’s personality. He could no more help being a teacher than he could
help breathing. And his teaching must be valued not in accordance with the
philosophy of the schools, not by comparison with the ethics of the
professional moralist, but as the natural and inevitable outcome of his
personality and temperament.
As a panacea for social evils Whitman believes in the remedial power of
comradeship in a large-hearted charity.

“You felons on trial in courts,
You convicts in prison cells, you sentenced assassins chained and
handcuffed with iron,
Who am I, too, that I am not on trial or in prison?
Me ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chained
With iron, or my ankles with iron?”

Mark the watchful impassiveness with which he gazes at the ugly side of
life.

“I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame;
I hear convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves,
remorseful after deeds done;
*****
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny;
I see martyrs and prisoners—
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall
be killed, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon

labourers, the poor, and upon negroes and the like;
All these—all the meanness and agony without end, I sit and look out
upon,
See, hear, and am silent.”

No one is too base, too degraded for Whitman’s affection. This is no mere
book sentiment with him; and many stories are told of his tenderness and
charity towards the “dregs of humanity.” That a man is a human being is
enough for Whitman. However he may have fallen there is something in
him to appeal to. He would have agreed with Browning that—

“Beneath the veriest ash there hides a spark of soul,
Which, quickened by Love’s breath, may yet pervade the whole
O’ the grey, and free again be fire; of worth the same
Howe’er produced, for great or little flame is flame.”

Like Browning, also, Whitman fears lassitude and indifference more than
the turmoil of passion. He glories in the elemental. At present he thinks we
are too fearful of coarseness and rankness, lay too much stress on
refinement. And so he delights in “unrefinement,” glories in the woods, air-
sweetness, sun-tan, brawn.

“So long!
I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual bold,
And I announce an did age that shall lightly and joyfully meet its
translation.”

Cultured conventions, of which we make so much, distress him. They tend,
he argues, to enervation, to a poor imitative, self-conscious art, to an
artificial, morbid life.
His curative methods were heroic; but who can say that they were not
needed, or that they were mischievous?
Certainly in aiming first of all at sincerity he has attained that noble beauty
which is born of strength. Nature, as he saw, was full of vital loveliness by
reason of her very power. The average literary artist is always seeking for
the loveliness, aiming after beauty of form, without a care whether what he

is saying has the ring of sincerity and truth, whether it is in touch with the
realities of Nature. And in his super-refinements he misses the beauty that
flashes forth from the rough, savage songs of Whitman.
Whitman does not decry culture. But he places first the educative influence
of Nature. “The best Culture,” he says, “will always be that of the manly
and courageous instincts and loving perception, and of self-respect.”
No advocate of lawlessness he; the influence of modern sciences informs
every line that he has written.
As Mr. Burroughs very justly says: “Whitman’s relation to science is
fundamental and vital. It is the soil under his feet. He comes into a world
from which all childish fear and illusion has been expelled. He exhibits the
religious and poetic faculties perfectly adjusted to a scientific, industrial,
democratic age, and exhibits them more fervent and buoyant than ever
before. We have gained more than we have lost. The world is anew created
by science and democracy, and he pronounces it good with the joy and
fervour of the old faith.”
In this respect Mr. Burroughs thinks that Whitman shared with Tennyson
the glory of being one of the two poets in our time who have drawn
inspiration from this source. Certainly no poet of our time has made finer
use as an artist of scientific facts than the late Laureate.
But Tennyson seems scarcely to have drawn inspiration from science as did
Browning, if we look at the thought underlying the verse. On the whole
scientific discoveries depressed rather than cheered him, whereas from
Paracelsus onwards Browning accepts courageously all the results of
modern science, and, as in the case of Whitman, it enlarged his moral and
spiritual horizon.
But he was not a philosopher as Browning was; indeed, there is less of the
philosopher about Whitman than about any poet of our age. His method is
quite opposed to the philosophic. It is instinctive, suggestive, and as full of
contradictions as Nature herself. You can no more extract a philosophy
from his sweeping utterances than you can from a tramp over the hills.
But, like a tramp over the hills, Whitman fits every reader who accompanies
him for a stronger and more courageous outlook. It is not easy to say with

Whitman as in the case of many writers: “This line quickened my
imagination, that passage unravelled my perplexities.” It is the general
effect of his writings that exercises such a remarkable tonic influence.
Perhaps he has never indicated this cumulative power more happily than in
the lines that conclude his “Song of Myself.”

“You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

Yes; that is Whitman’s secret—“Good health.” To speak of him as did his
biographer, Dr. Bucke, as “perhaps the most advanced nature the world has
yet produced,” to rank him, as some have done, with the world’s greatest
moral teachers, beside Jesus and Socrates, seems to me the language of
hysterical extravagant. Nay, more, it misses surely the special significant of
his genius.
In his religious thought, his artistic feelings, his affections, there is breadth
of sympathy, sanity of outlook, but an entire absence of intensity, of depth.
We shall scan his pages vainly for the profound aspiration, the subtle
spiritual insight of our greatest religious teachers. In his indifference to
form, his insensibility to the noblest music, we shall realize his artistic
limitations.
Despite his genial comradeship, the more intimate, the more delicate
experiences of friendship are not to be found in his company. Delicacy,
light and shade, subtlety, intensity, for these qualities you must not seek
Whitman. But that is no reason for neglecting him. The Modern and
Ancient world are rich in these other qualities, and the special need of the
present day is not intensity so much as sanity, not subtlety so much as
breadth.
In one of his clever phrases Mr. Havelock Ellis has described Whitman “as
a kind of Titanic Undine.” [204] Perhaps it is a good thing for us that he

never “found his soul.” In an age of morbid self-introspection there is
something refreshing in an utterance like this, where he praises the animals
because—

“They do not screech and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.”

In a feverish, restless age it is well to feel the presence of that large, passive,
tolerant figure. There is healing in the cool, firm touch of his hand; healing
in the careless, easy self-confidence of his utterance. He has spoken to us
of “the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth,
and the great charity of the earth.” And he has done this with the rough
outspokenness of the elements, with the splendid audacity of Nature
herself. Brawn, sun-tan, air-sweetness are things well worth the having, for
they mean good health. That is why we welcome the big, genial sanity of
Walt Whitman, for he has about him the rankness and sweetness of the
Earth.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

(Some of the most noteworthy books and articles dealing with the authors
discussed in this volume are indicated below.)
William Hazlitt (1778–1830).
Memoirs, by William Carew Hazlitt. Four Generations of a Literary
Family, by W. C. Hazlitt (1897). William Hazlitt, by Augustine Birrell.
William Hazlitt, by Alexander Ireland (Frederick Warne & Co., 1889).
Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859).
De Quincey, by David Masson (Macmillan & Co.). De Quincey and his
Friends, by James Hogg (1895). De Quincey, by H. S. Salt (“Bell’s
Miniature Series of Great Writers”).
George Borrow (1803–81).
Life and Letters (2 vols.), by Dr. Knapp. Introductions to Lavengro
(Frederick Warne & Co.), The Romany Rye (Frederick Warne & Co.), Wild
Wales (J. M. Dent & Co.), by Theodore Watts-Dunton. Article in
Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Literature. “Reminiscences of George
Borrow” (Athenæum, Sept. 3, 10, 1881).
Henry D. Thoreau (1817–62).
Thoreau, his Life and Aims, by H. A. Page (Chatto & Windus). Thoreau, by
H. S. Salt (“Great Writers Series”). Essays by R. L. Stevenson (Familiar
Studies of Men and Books), and J. R. Lowell (My Study Window).
The best edition of Thoreau’s writings is published by the Riverside Press,
Cambridge, U.S.A. Some useful volumes of selections are issued by Walter
Scott, Limited, with good introductions by Will. H. Dricks. Walden, with
introduction by Theodore Watts-Dunton (Henry Froude).

R. L. Stevenson (1850–94).
Letters of R. L. Stevenson to his Family and Friends (2 vols.), by Sidney
Colvin, with introduction. R. L. Stevenson, by L. Cope Cornford
(Blackwood & Son).
Richard Jefferies (1848–87).
Eulogy of Richard Jefferies, by Walter Besant (1888). Nature in Books, by
P. Anderson Graham (Methuen, 1891). Richard Jefferies, by H. S. Salt
(Swan Sonnenschein, 1894). Dictionary of National Biography.
Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Literature.
Walt Whitman (1819–92).
Walt Whitman, by William Clarke (Swan Sonnenschein). Essay by R. L.
Stevenson (Familiar Studies of Men and Books). Walt Whitman: a Study,
by J. Addington Symonds. Walt Whitman, by R. M. Bucke (Philadelphia).
Walt Whitman, by John Burroughs (Constable). The New Spirit (Essay on
Whitman), by Havelock Ellis (Walter Scott). The best edition of Leaves of
Grass, published by David McKay, Philadelphia.

plymouth
william brendon and son, ltd.
printers

SOME PRESS APPRECIATIONS
of
“PERSONAL FORCES
IN MODERN LITERATURE”

(Newman—Martineau—Huxley—Wordsworth—Keats—Rossetti—
Dickens—Hazlitt—De Quincey)
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
“The agreeable work of a man of taste and many sympathies.”—The
Athenæum.
“It is delightful to come across a book so careful, to enlightened, and so full
of fresh comments.”—The Tribune.
“A brilliant contribution to critical literature.”
The Clarion.
“Clever monographs.”—The Outlook.
“Always suggestive and stimulating.”
The Morning Leader.
“Mr. Rickett writes capably, sanely, and vividly, with a just perception of
the distinctive quality of his subjects and considerable power in presenting
them in an interesting and engaging way.”—The Daily News.
“Mr. Rickett is a sound critic and he has a scholarly acquaintance with his
subjects.”
“Claudius Clear” in The British Weekly.

“An acute, sympathetic, and original critic.”
The Glasgow Herald.

J. M. DENT & CO. 29 & 30 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

Footnotes

[0] The Coming of Love and Other Poems, by Theodore Watts-Dunton
(John Lane).
[21] For an excellent summary of this doctrine, vide Introduction to
Herbert Spencer, by W. H. Hudson.
[40] Thomas De Quincey, by H. S. Salt (Bell’s Miniature Biographies).
[48] De Quincey’s Life and Writings, p. 456, by A. H. Japp, LL.D.
[70] The gypsy word for Antonio.
[71] Devil.
[102] It is a peculiarly American trait. The same thing dominates
Whitman. Saxon egotism and Yankee egotism are quite distinctive
products.
[106] Thoreau, by H. A. Page.
[124a] Later Essays.
[124b] Introduction, The Letters of Robert Lents Stevenson.
[147] The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies by Walter Besant.
[149] Perhaps even more remarkable is the abnormal state of consciousness
described in the “Ancient Sage.”
[151a] Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, by F. Max Müller.
[151b] Quoted by Professor William James, Varieties of Religions
Experiences, p. 402.

[153a] Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 427.
[153b] Vide Richard Jefferies, by H. S. Salt.
[157a] The Life of the Fields, p. 72.
[157b] Curious similarity of thought here with Elia’s “popular fallacy,”
though probably quite uninspired by Lamb. Jefferies was no great reader.
It is said that he knew little or nothing of Thoreau.
[173] Vide Introduction to Borrow’s The Romany Rye, by Theodore Watts-
Dunton.
[180] Familiar Studies of Men and Books, by R. L. Stevenson.
[186] Walt Whitman, a study, by J. A. Symonds.
[188] Walt Whitman, by William Clarke, p. 79.
[197] Vide Life of William Morris by J. W. Mackail.
[199] Robert Browning: Essays and Thought, by John T. Nettleship.
[204] The New Spirit, by Havelock Ellis.

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