The Vagabond in Literature Part 2

Now it is quite true that the soil whence the flower of their genius sprung was in several cases not without a taint; but it does not follow that the flower itself is tainted. And here we come upon the fallacy that seems to me to lie at the basis of the doctrine which makes genius itself a kind of disease. The soil of the rose garden may be manured with refuse that Nature uses in bringing forth the lovely bloom of the rose. But the poisonous character of the refuse has been chemically transformed in giving vitality to the roses. And so from unhealthy stock, from temperaments affected by disease, have sprung the roses of genius-transformed by the mysterious alchemy of the imagination into pure and lovely things. There are, of course, poisonous flowers, just as there is a type of genius-not the highest type-that is morbid. But this does not affect my contention that genius is not necessarily morbid because it may have sprung from a morbid soil. Hazlitt is a case in point. His temperament was certainly not free from morbidity, and this morbidity may be traced in his writings. The most signal instance is the _Liber Amoris_-an unfortunate chapter of sentimental autobiography which did irreparable mischief to his reputation. But there is nothing morbid in Hazlitt at his best; and let it be added that the bulk of Hazlitt's writings displays a n.o.ble sanity.

Much has been written about his less pleasing idiosyncrasies, and no writer has been called more frequently to account for deficiencies. It is time surely that we should recall once more the tribute of Lamb: "I think William Hazlitt to be in his natural and healthy state one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing."

II

The complexity of Hazlitt's temperament was especially emphasized by the two strong, opposing tendencies that called for no ordinary power of co-ordination. I mean the austere, individualistic, Puritan strain that came from his Presbyterian forefathers; and a sensuous, voluptuous strain that often ran athwart his Puritanism and occasioned him many a mental struggle. The general effect of these two dements in his nature was this: In matters of the intellect the Puritan was uppermost; in the realm of the emotions you felt the dominant presence of the opposing element.

In his finest essays one feels the presence at once of the Calvinist and the Epicurean; not as two incompatibles, but as opposing elements that have blent together into a n.o.ble unity; would-be rivals that have co-ordinated so that from each the good has been extracted, and the less worthy sides eliminated. Thus the sweetness of the one and the strength of the other have combined to give more distinction and power to the utterance.

Take this pa.s.sage from one of his lectures:-

"The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of pa.s.sion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impa.s.sioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with, and to foreknow, and to record, the feelings of all men, at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakespeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting impulses of feature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their Maker. The power of the imagination in them is the representative power of all nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the universe."

And this:-

"The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd boy is a poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser when he hugs his gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage who paints his idol with blood; the slave who wors.h.i.+ps a tyrant, or the tyrant who fancies himself a G.o.d; the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act."

"Poetry is not a branch of authors.h.i.+p; it is the stuff of which our life is made."

The artist is speaking in Hazlitt, but beneath the full, rich exuberance of the artist, you can detect an under-note of austerity.

Then again, his memorable utterance about the Dissenting minister from one of his essays on "Court Influence."

"A Dissenting minister is a character not so easily to be dispensed with, and whose place cannot be well supplied. It is a pity that this character has worn itself out; that that pulse of thought and feeling has ceased almost to beat in the heart of a nation, who, if not remarkable for sincerity and plain downright well-meaning, are remarkable for nothing. But we have known some such, in happier days, who had been brought up and lived from youth to age in the one constant belief in G.o.d and of His Christ, and who thought all other things but dross compared with the glory hereafter to be revealed.

Their youthful hopes and vanity had been mortified in them, even in their boyish days, by the neglect and supercilious regards of the world; and they turned to look into their own minds for something else to build their hopes and confidence upon. They were true priests. They set up an image in their own minds-it was truth; they wors.h.i.+pped an idol there-it was justice. They looked on man as their brother, and only bowed the knee to the Highest. Separate from the world, they walked humbly with their G.o.d, and lived in thought with those who had borne testimony of a good conscience, with the spirits of just men in all ages. . . . Their sympathy was not with the oppressors, but the oppressed. They cherished in their thoughts-and wished to transmit to their posterity-those rights and privileges for a.s.serting which their ancestors had bled on scaffolds, or had pined in dungeons, or in foreign climes. Their creed, too, was 'Glory to G.o.d, peace on earth, goodwill to man.' This creed, since profaned and rendered vile, they kept fast through good report and evil report. This belief they had, that looks at something out of itself, fixed as the stars, deep as the firmament; that makes of its own heart an altar to truth, a place of wors.h.i.+p for what is right, at which it does reverence with praise and prayer like a holy thing, apart and content; that feels that the greatest Being in the universe is always near it; and that all things work together for the good of His creatures, under His guiding hand. This covenant they kept, as the stars keep their courses; this principle they stuck by, for want of knowing better, as it sticks by them to the last. It grows with their growth, it does not wither in their decay. It lives when the almond-tree flourishes, and is not bowed down with the tottering knees. It glimmers with the last feeble eyesight, smiles in the faded cheek like infancy, and lights a path before them to the grave!"

Here is a man of Puritan lineage speaking; but is it the voice of Puritanism only? Surely it is a Puritanism softened and refined, a Puritanism which is free of those harsh and unpleasing elements that have too often obscured its finer aspects. I know of no pa.s.sage in his writings which for s.p.a.cious eloquence, n.o.bleness of thought, beauty of expression, can rival this. It was written in 1818, when Hazlitt was forty years old, and in the plenitude of his powers.

III

But the power of co-ordination was not always exerted; perhaps not always possible. Had it been so, then Hazlitt would not take his place in this little band of literary Vagabonds.

There are times when the Puritan element disappears; and it is Hazlitt the eager, curious taster of life that is presented to us. For there was the restless inquisitiveness of the Vagabond about him. This gives such delightful piquancy to many of his utterances. He ranges far and wide, and is willing to go anywhere for a fresh sensation that may add to the interest of his intellectual life. He has no patience with readers who will not quit their own small back gardens. He is for ranging "over the hills and far away."

No sympathy he with the readers who take timid const.i.tutionals in literature, choosing only the well-worn paths. He is a true son of the road; the world is before him, and high roads and byways, rough paths and smooth paths, are equally acceptable, provided they add to his zest and enjoyment.

Not that he cares for the new merely because it is new. The essay on "Reading Old Books" is proof enough of that. A literary ramble must not merely be novel, it must have some element of beauty about it, or he will revisit the old haunts of whose beauty he has full cognizance.

The pa.s.sion for the Earth which was noted as one of the Vagabond's characteristics is not so p.r.o.nounced in Hazlitt and De Quincey as with the later Vagabonds. But it is unmistakable all the same. There are, he says, "only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures, and the face of Nature." The somewhat curious use of the word "inanimate" here as applied to the "face of Nature" scarcely does justice to his intense, vivid appreciation of the life of the open air; but at any rate it differentiates his att.i.tude towards Nature from that of Wordsworth and his school. It is a feeling more direct, more concrete, more personal.

He has no special liking for country people. On the contrary, he thinks them a dull, heavy cla.s.s of people.

"All country people hate one another," he says. "They have so little comfort that they envy their neighbours the smallest pleasure and advantage, and nearly grudge themselves the necessaries of life. From not being accustomed to enjoyment, they become hardened and averse to it-stupid, for want of thought, selfish, for want of society."

No; it is the sheer joy of being in the open, and learning what Whitman called the "profound lesson of reception," that attracted Hazlitt. "What I like best," he declares, "is to lie whole mornings on a sunny bank on Salisbury Plain, without any object before me, neither knowing nor caring how time pa.s.ses, and thus, 'with light-winged toys and feathered idleness, to melt down hours to moments.'" A genuine Vagabond mood this.

Hazlitt, like De Quincey, had felt the glamour of the city as well as the glamour of the country; not with the irresistibility of Lamb, but for all that potently. But an instinct for the open, the craving for pleasant s.p.a.ces, and the longing of the hard-driven journalist for the gracious leisure of the country, these things were paramount with both Hazlitt and De Quincey.

In Hazlitt's case there is a touch of wildness, a more primal delight in the roughness and solitude of country places than we find in De Quincey.

"One of the pleasantest things," says Hazlitt, in true Vagabond spirit, "is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself."

The last touch is not only characteristic of Hazlitt, it touches that note of reserve verging on anti-social sentiment that was mentioned as characteristic of the Vagabond.

He justifies his feeling thus with an engaging frankness: "The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel. Do just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind; much more to get rid of others. . . . It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder rolling cloud I plunge into my past being, and revel there, as the sunburnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his native sh.o.r.e. Then long-forgotten things, like 'sunken wrack and sunless treasures,' burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and be myself again."

IV

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 pa.s.sing gust of feeling, and when over, it is easy to see how superficial it was, so little is his general att.i.tude 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 const.i.tutions, 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 Th.o.r.eau'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-"impa.s.sioned prose"-is really more applicable to many of Hazlitt's essays. The dream fugues of De Quincey are delicately imaginative, but real pa.s.sion is absent from them. The silvery, far-away tones of the opium-eater do not suggest pa.s.sion.

Besides, an elaborate, involved style such as his does not readily convey pa.s.sion 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 "impa.s.sioned." 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, m.u.f.fling the voice and blurring the vision. Defects it had, which there is no necessity to dwell on here, but there was a pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sing 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 n.o.ble 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.