WILLIAM HAZLITT _Photogravure Frontispiece_
From a crayon drawing by W. Bewick, executed in 1822
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 38
From an engraving by W. H. More
GEORGE BORROW 60
From a portrait in the possession of Mr. John Murray.
Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. Murray
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 118
From a woodcut by R. Bryden
RICHARD JEFFERIES 146
From a photograph. Reproduced by kind permission of the
London Stereoscopic Company
WALT WHITMAN 172
From a woodcut by R. Bryden
INTRODUCTION
THE VAGABOND ELEMENT IN MODERN LITERATURE
"There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and
stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the
heath."--_Lavengro_.
I
There are some men born with a vagrant strain in the blood, an unsatiable
inquisitiveness about the world beyond their doors. Natural
revolutionaries they, with an ingrained distaste for the routine of
ordinary life and the conventions of civilization. The average
common-sense Englishman distrusts the Vagabond for his want of sympathy
with established law and order. Eccentricity and unconventionality smack
to him always of moral obliquity. And thus it is that the literary
Vagabond is looked at askance. One is reminded of Mr. Pecksniff: "Pagan,
I regret to state," observed that gentleman of the Sirens on one
occasion. Unhappily no one pointed out to this apostle of purity that
the naughtiness of the Sirens was not necessarily connected with
paganism, and that the siren disposition has been found even "in choirs
and places where they sing."
Restlessness, then, is one of the notes of the Vagabond temperament.
Sometimes the Vagabond is a physical, sometimes only an intellectual
wanderer; but in any case there is about him something of the primal
wildness of the woods and hills.
Thus it is we find in the same spiritual brotherhood men so different in
genius and character as Hazlitt, De Quincey, Thoreau, Whitman, Borrow,
Jefferies, Stevenson.
Thoreau turned his back on civilization, and found a new joy of living in
the woods at Maine. 'Tis the Open Road that inspired Whitman with his
rude, melodic chants. Not the ways of men and women, but the flaunting
"pageant of summer" unlocked the floodgates of Jefferies' heart. Hazlitt
was never so gay, never wrote of books with such relish, as when he was
recounting a country walk. There are few more beautiful passages than
those where he describes the time when he walked between Wrexham and
Llangollen, his imagination aglow with some lines of Coleridge. De
Quincey loved the shiftless, nomadic life, and gloried in uncertainties
and peradventures. A wandering, open-air life was absolutely
indispensable to Borrow's happiness; and Stevenson had a schoolboy's
delight in the make-believe of Romance.