The Vagabond in Literature. Arthur Compton-Rickett

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.

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      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.

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      There were literary Vagabonds in England before the