The Vagabond in Literature

by Arthur Compton-Rickett

V

It may be well to gather up the scattered impressions, and to look at the thought that underlies his fervid utterances. Beginning as merely an interested observer of Nature, his attitude becomes more enthusiastic, as knowledge grows of her ways, and what began in observation ends in aspiration. The old cry, “Return to Nature,” started by Rousseau, caught by the poets of the “Romantic Revival” in England, and echoed by the essayists of New England, fell into silence about the middle of last century. It had inspired a splendid group of Nature poets; and for a time it was felt some new gospel was needed. Scientific and philosophical problems took possession of men’s minds; the intellectual and emotional life of the nation centred more and more round the life of the city. For a time this was, perhaps, inevitable. For a time Nature regarded through the eyes of fresh scientific thought had lost her charm. Even the poets who once had been content to worship, now began to criticize. Tennyson qualified his homage with reproachings. Arnold carried his books of philosophy into her presence. But at last men tired of this questioning attitude. America produced

a Whitman; and in England William Morris and Richard Jefferies—among others—cried out for a simpler, freer, more childlike attitude.

“All things seem possible,” declared Jefferies, “in the open air.” To live according to Nature was, he assured his countrymen, no poet’s fancy, but a creed of life. He spoke from his own experience; life in the open, tasting the wild sweetness of the Earth, had brought him his deepest happiness; and he cried aloud in his exultation, bidding others do likewise. “If you wish your children,” says he, “to think deep things, to know the holiest emotions, take them to the woods and hills, and give them the freedom of the meadows.” On the futility of bookish learning, the ugliness and sordidness of town life, he is always discoursing. His themes were not fresh ones; every reformer, every prophet of the age had preached from the same text. And none had put the case for Nature more forcibly than Wordsworth when he lamented—

“The world is too much with us.”

But the plea for saner ways of living cannot be urged too often, and if Jefferies in his enthusiasm exaggerates the other side of the picture, pins his faith over much on solitudes and in self-communion, too little on the gregarious instincts of humankind, yet no reformer can make any impression on his fellows save by a splendid one-sidedness.

The defect of his Nature creed which calls for the most serious criticism is not the personal isolation on which he seems to insist. We herd together so much—

some unhappily by necessity, some by choice, that it would be a refreshing thing, and a wholesome thing, for most of us to be alone, more often face to face with the primal forces of Nature.

The serious defect in his thought seems to me to lie in his attitude towards the animal creation. It is summed up in his remark: “There is nothing human in any living Animal. All Nature, the Universe as far as we see, is anti- or ultra-human outside, and has no concern with man.” In this statement he shows how entirely he has failed to grasp the secret of the compelling power of the Earth—a secret into which Thoreau entered so fully.

Why should the elemental forces of Nature appeal so strongly to us? Why does the dweller in the open air feel that an unseen bond of sympathy binds him to the lowest forms of sentient life? Why is a St. Francis tender towards animals? Why does a Thoreau take a joy in the company of the birds, the squirrels, and feel a sense of companionship in the very flowers? Nay, more: what is it that gives a Jefferies this sense of communion? why, if the Earth has no “concern with man,” should it soothe with its benison, and fire his being with such ecstatic rapture? If this doctrine of a Universal Brotherhood is a sentimental figment, the foundation is swept away at once of Jefferies’ Nature creed. His sense of happiness, his delight in the Earth, may no doubt afford him consolation, but it is an irrational comfort, an agreeable delusion.

And yet no one can read a book of Jefferies without realizing that here is no sickly fancy—however sickness

may have imparted a hectic colouring here and there—but that the instinct of the Artist is more reliable than the theory of the Thinker. Undoubtedly his Nature creed is less comprehensive than Thoreau’s. Jefferies regarded many animals as “good sport”; Thoreau as good friends. “Hares,” he says, “are almost formed on purpose to be good sport.” The remark speaks volumes. A man who could say that has but a poor philosophic defence to offer for his rapt communion with Nature.

How can you have communion with something “anti- or ultra-human”? The large utterance, “All things seem possible in the open air” dwindles down rather meanly when the speaker looks at animals from the sportsman’s point of view. Against his want of sympathy with the lower forms of creation one must put his warm-hearted plea for the agricultural poor. In his youth there was a certain harsh intolerance about his attitude towards his fellows, but he made ample amends in Hodge and his Master, still more in The Dewy Morn, for the narrow individualism of his earlier years.

One might criticize certain expressions as extravagant when he lashed out against the inequalities in society. But after all there is only a healthy Vagabond flavour about his fling at “modern civilization,” and the genuine humanitarian feeling is very welcome. Some of his unpublished “Notes on the Labour Question” (quoted by Mr. Salt in his able study of Jefferies) are worthy of Ruskin. This, for instance, is vigorously put:—

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

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

him back upon his own thoughts, made him morbidly introspective.

Then the æsthetic Idealism which dominated him made for melancholy, as it invariably does. The Worshipper at the shrine of Beauty is always conscious that

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

He realizes the tragic ineffectuality of his aspiration—

“The desire of the moth for the star,”

as Shelley expresses it, and in this line of poetry the mood finds imperishable expression.

But the melancholy that visits the Idealist—the Worshipper of Beauty—is not by any means a mood of despair. The moth may not attain the star, but it feels there is a star to be attained. In other words, an intimate sense of the beauty of the world carries within it, however faintly, however overlaid with sick longing, a secret hope that some day things will shape themselves all right.

And thus it is that every Idealist, bleak and wintry as his mood may be, is conscious of the latency of spring. Every Idealist, like the man in the immortal allegory of Bunyan, has a key in his bosom called Promise. This it is that keeps from madness. And so while Jefferies will exclaim:—

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

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

“I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide
Methinks
For milder weather.

“A bunch of violets without their roots
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.

“Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah, the children will not know
Till Time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.”

Jefferies was a brave man, with a rare supply of resolution and patience. His life was one long struggle

against overwhelming odds. “Three great giants,” as he puts it—“disease, despair, and poverty.” Not only was his physical health against him, but his very idiosyncrasies all conspired to hinder his success. His pride and reserve would not permit him to take help from his friends. He even shrank from their sympathy. His years of isolation, voluntary isolation, put him out of touch with human society. His socialistic tendencies never made him social. His was a kind of abstract humanitarianism. A man may feel tenderly, sympathize towards humanity, yet shrink from human beings. Misanthropy did not inspire him; he did not dislike his fellow-men; it was simply that they bewildered and puzzled him; he could not get on with them. So it will be seen that he had not the consolation some men take in the sympathy and co-operation of their fellows. After all, this is more a defect of temperament than a fault of character, and he had to pay the penalty. Realizing this, it is impossible to withhold admiration for the pluck and courage of the man. As a lover of Nature, and an artist in prose, he needs no encomium to-day. In his eloquent “Eulogy” Sir Walter Besant gave fitting expression to the debt of gratitude we owe this poet-naturalist—this passionate interpreter of English country life.

What Borrow achieved for the stirring life of the road, Jefferies has done for the brooding life of the fields. What Thoreau did for the woods at Maine and the waters of Merrimac, Jefferies did for the Wiltshire streams and the Sussex hedgerows. He has invested the familiar scenery of Southern England with a new

glamour, a tenderer sanctity; has arrested our indifferent vision, our careless hearing, turned our languid appreciation into a comprehending affection.

Ardent, shy, impressionable, proud, stout-hearted pagan and wistful idealist; one of the most pathetic and most interesting figures in modern literature.

VII
WALT WHITMAN

“So will I sing on, fast as fancies come;
Rudely the verse being as the mood it paints.”

Robert Browning.

“A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays
And confident to-morrows.”

Wordsworth.

I

The “good gray poet” is the supreme example of the Vagabond in literature. It is quite possible for one not drawn towards the Vagabond temperament to admire Stevenson, for Stevenson was a fine artist; to take delight in the vigorous “John Bullism” of Lavengro; to sympathize with the natural mysticism of Jefferies; the Puritan austerity of Thoreau. In short, there are aspects in the writings of the other “Vagabonds” in this volume which command attention quite apart from the characteristics specifically belonging to the literary Vagabond.

But it is not possible to view Whitman apart from his Vagabondage. He is proud of it, glories in it, and flings it in your face. Others, whatever strain of wildness they may have had, whatever sympathies they may have felt for the rough sweetness of the earth, however unconventional their habits, accepted at any rate the recognized conventions of literature. As men, as thinkers, they were unconventional; as artists conventional. They retained at any rate the literary garments of civilized society.

Not so Whitman. He is the Orson of literature.

Unconventionality he carries out to its logical conclusion, and strides stark naked among our academies of learning. A strange, uncouth, surprising figure, it is impossible to ignore him however much he may shock our susceptibilities.

Many years ago Mr. Swinburne greeted him as “a strong-winged soul with prophetic wings”; subsequently he referred to him as a “drunken apple-woman reeling in a gutter.” For this right-about-face he has been upbraided by Whitman’s admirers. Certainly it is unusual to find any reader starting out to bless and ending with a curse. Usually it is the precedent of Balaam that is followed. But Mr. Swinburne’s mingled feelings typify the attitude of every one who approaches the poet, though few of us can express ourselves so resourcefully as the author of Poems and Ballads.

There may be some students who accept Whitman without demur at the outset on his own terms. All I can say is that I never heard of one. However broad-minded you may consider yourself, however catholic in your sympathies, Whitman is bound to get athwart some pet prejudice, to discover some shred of conventionality. Gaily, heedlessly, you start out to explore his writings, just as you might start on a walking tour. He is in touch with the primal forces of Nature, you hear. “So much the better,” say you; “civilization has ceased to charm.” “You are enamoured of wildness.” Thus men talk before camping out, captivated by the picturesque and healthy possibilities, and oblivious to the inconveniences of roughing it.

But just as some amount of training is wanted before a walking tour, or a period of camping out, so is it necessary to prepare yourself for a course of Whitman. And this, not because there is any exotic mystery about Whitman, not because there are any intellectual subtleties about his work, as there are in Browning, but because he is the pioneer of a new order, and the pioneer always challenges the old order; our tastes require adjusting before they can value it properly.

There is no question about a “Return to Nature” with Whitman. He never left it. Thoreau quitted the Emersonian study to get fresh inspiration from the woods. Even Jefferies, bred up in the country, carried about with him the delicate susceptibilities of the neurotic modern. Borrow retained a firm grip-hold of many conventions of the city. But Whitman? It was no case with him of a sojourn in the woods, or a ramble on the heath. He was a spiritual native of the woods and heath; not, as some seem to think, because he was a kind of wild barbarian who loved the rough and uncouth, and could be found only in unfrequented parts, but because he was in touch with the elemental everywhere. The wildness of Whitman, the barbarian aspects of the man, have been overrated. He is wild only in so far as he is cosmic, and the greater contains the less. He loves the rough and the smooth, not merely the rough. His songs are no mere pæans of rustic solitudes; they are songs of the crowded streets, as well of the country roads; of men and women—of every type—no less than of the fields and the streams. In fact, he seeks the elemental everywhere.

Thoreau found it in the Indian, Borrow in the gypsies, Whitman, with a finer comprehensiveness, finds it in the multitude. His business is to bring it to the surface, to make men and women rejoice in—not shrink from—the great primal forces of life. But he is not for moralizing—

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

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

Here is no exclusive child of Nature:—

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

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

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

In regarding the work of Whitman there are three aspects which strike one especially. His attitude towards Art, towards Humanity, towards Life.