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