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.