Taken on the whole, the English literary Vagabond is a man of joy, not
necessarily a cheerful man. There is a deeper quality about joy than
about cheerfulness. Cheerfulness indeed is almost entirely a physical
idiosyncrasy. It lies on the surface. A man, serious and silent, may be
a joyful man; he can scarcely be a cheerful man. Moody as he was at
times, sour-tempered and whimsical as he could be, yet there was a fine
quality of joy about Hazlitt. It is this quality of joy that gives the
sparkle and relish to his essays. He took the same joy in his books as
in his walks, and he communicates this joy to the reader. He appears
misanthropic at times, and rages violently at the world; but 'tis merely
a passing gust of feeling, and when over, it is easy to see how
superficial it was, so little is his general attitude affected by it.
The joyfulness of the Vagabond is no mere light-hearted, graceful spirit.
It is of a hardy and virile nature--a quality not to be crushed by
misfortune or sickness. Outwardly, neither the lives of Hazlitt nor De
Quincey were what we would call happy. Both had to fight hard against
adverse fates for many years; both had delicate constitutions, which
entailed weary and protracted periods of feeble health.
But there was a fundamental serenity about them. At the end of a hard
and fruitless struggle with death, Hazlitt murmured, "Well, I've had a
happy life." De Quincey at the close of his long and varied life showed
the same tranquil stoicism that had carried him through his many
difficulties.
Joyfulness permeates Thoreau's philosophy of life; and until his system
was shattered by a painful and incurable complaint, Jefferies had the
same splendid capacity for enjoyment, a huge satisfaction in noting the
splendour and rich plenitude of the Earth. Whitman's fine optimism
defied every attack from without and within; and the deliberate happiness
of Stevenson, when temptation to despondency was so strong, is one of his
most attractive characteristics.
Yet the characteristic belongs to the English race, and it is quite other
with the Russian. Melancholy in his cast of thought, and pessimistic in
his philosophy, the Russian Vagabond presents a striking contrast in this
particular.
V
Comparing the styles of Hazlitt and De Quincey, one is struck with the
greater fire and vigour of Hazlitt.
Indeed, the term which De Quincey applied to certain of his
writings--"impassioned prose"--is really more applicable to many of
Hazlitt's essays. The dream fugues of De Quincey are delicately
imaginative, but real passion is absent from them. The silvery, far-away
tones of the opium-eater do not suggest passion.
Besides, an elaborate, involved style such as his does not readily convey
passion of any kind. It moves along too slowly, at too leisurely a pace.
On the other hand, the prose of Hazlitt was very frequently literally
"impassioned." It was sharp, concise, the sentences rang out resolutely
and clearly. And no veil of phantasy hung at these times between himself
and the object of his description, as with De Quincey, muffling the voice
and blurring the vision. Defects it had, which there is no necessity to
dwell on here, but there was a passion in Hazlitt's nature and writings
which we do not find in his contemporary.
Trying beyond doubt as was the wayward element in Hazlitt's disposition,
to his friends it is not without its charm as a literary characteristic.
His bitterness against Coleridge in his later years leads him to dwell
the longer upon the earlier meetings, upon the Coleridge of Wem and
Nether Stowey, and thus his very prejudices leave his readers frequently
as gainers.
A passing whim, a transient resentment, will be the occasion of some
finely discursive essay on abstract virtues and vices. And, after all,
there is at bottom such noble enthusiasm in the man, and where his
subjects were not living people, and his judgment is not blinded by some
small prejudices, how fair, how just, how large and admirable his view.
His faults and failings were of such a character as to bring upon the
owner their own retribution. He paid heavily for his mistakes. His
splenetic moods and his violent dislikes arose not from a want of
sensibility, but from an excess of sensibility. So I do not think they
need seriously disturb us. After all, the dagger he uses as a critic is
uncommonly like a stage weapon, and does no serious damage.
Better even than his brilliant, suggestive, if capricious, criticisms are
his discursive essays on men and things. These abound in a tonic wisdom,
a breadth of imagination as welcome as they are rare.
II
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
"In thoughts from the visions of the night when deep sleep falleth on
men."--JOB.
I
Although a passion for the Earth is a prevalent note in the character of
the literary Vagabond, yet while harking to the call of the country, he
is by no means deaf to the call of the town. With the exception of
Thoreau, who seemed to have been insensible to any magic save that of the
road and woodland, our literary Vagabonds have all felt and confessed to
the spell of the city. It was not, as in the case of Lamb and Dickens,
the one compelling influence, but it was an influence of no small
potency.
The first important event in De Quincey's life was the roaming life on
the hillside of North Wales; the second, the wanderings in "stony-hearted
Oxford Street." Later on the spell of London faded away, and a longing
for the country possessed him once more. But the spell of London was
important in shaping his literary life, and must not be under-estimated.
Mention has been made of Lamb and Dickens, to whom the life of the town
meant so much, and whose inspiration they could not forgo without a pang.
But these men were not attracted in the same way as De Quincey. What
drew De Quincey to London was its mystery; whereas it was the stir and
colour of the crowded streets that stirred the imagination of the two
Charles's. We scarcely realize as we read of those harsh experiences,
those bitter struggles with poverty and loneliness, that the man is
writing of his life in London, is speaking of some well-known
thoroughfares. It is like viewing a familiar scene in the moonlight,
when all looks strange and weird. A faint but palpable veil of phantasy
seemed to shut off De Quincey from the outside world. In his most
poignant passages the voice has a ghostly ring; in his most realistic
descriptions there is a dreamlike unreality. A tender and sensitive soul
in his dealings with others, there are no tears in his writings. One has
only to compare the early recorded struggles of Dickens with those of De
Quincey to feel the difference between the two temperaments. The one
passionately concrete, the other dispassionately abstract. De Quincey
will take some heartfelt episode and deck it out in so elaborate a
panoply of rhetoric that the human element seems to have vanished.
Beautiful as are many of the passages describing the pathetic outcast
Ann, the reader is too conscious of the stylist and the full-dress
stylist.
That he feels what he is writing of, one does not doubt; but he does not
suit his manner to his matter. For expressing subtle emotions, half
shades of thought, no writer is more wonderfully adept than De Quincey.
But when the episode demands simple and direct treatment his elaborate
cadences feel out of place.
When he pauses in his description to apostrophize, then the disparity
affects one far less; as, for instance, in this apostrophe to
"noble-minded" Ann after recalling how on one occasion she had saved his
life.
[Picture: Thomas de Quincey]
"O youthful benefactress! how often in succeeding years, standing in
solitary places, and thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect
love--how often have I wished that, as in ancient times the curse of
a father was believed to have a supernatural power, and to pursue its
object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfilment, even so the
benediction of a heart oppressed with gratitude might have a like
prerogative; might have power given it from above to chase, to haunt,
to waylay, to pursue thee into the central darkness of a London
brothel, or (if it were possible) even into the darkness of the
grave, there to awaken thee with an authentic message of peace and
forgiveness, and of final reconciliation!"
Perhaps the passage describing how he befriended the small servant girl
in the half-deserted house in Greek Street is among the happiest, despite
a note of artificiality towards the close:--
"Towards nightfall I went down to Greek Street, and found, on taking
possession of my new quarters, that the house already contained one
single inmate--a poor, friendless child, apparently ten years old;
but she seemed hunger-bitten; and sufferings of that sort often make
children look older than they are. From this forlorn child I learned
that she had slept and lived there alone for some time before I came;
and great joy the poor creature expressed when she found that I was
in future to be her companion through the hours of darkness. The
house could hardly be called large--that is, it was not large on each
separate storey; but, having four storeys in all, it was large enough
to impress vividly the sense of its echoing loneliness; and, from the
want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious uproar on
the staircase and hall; so that, amidst the real fleshly ills of cold
and hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more
from the self-created one of ghosts. Against these enemies I could
promise her protection; human companionship was in itself protection;
but of other and more needful aid I had, alas! little to offer. We
lay upon the floor, with a bundle of law papers for a pillow, but
with no other covering than a large horseman's cloak; afterwards,
however, we discovered in a garret an old sofa-cover, a small piece
of rug, and some fragments of other articles, which added a little to
our comfort. The poor child crept close to me for warmth, and for
security against her ghostly enemies. . . . Apart from her
situation, she was not what would be called an interesting child.
She was neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor remarkably
pleasing in manners. But, thank God! even in those years I needed
not the embellishments of elegant accessories to conciliate my
affections. Plain human nature, in its humblest and most homely
apparel, was enough for me; and I loved the child because she was my
partner in wretchedness."