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.