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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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

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.