Book: Dreamthorp

A >> Alexander Smith >> Dreamthorp




In the fine sense in which I take the word, the English are the
greatest vagabonds on the earth, and it is the healthiest trait in
their national character. The first fine day in spring awakes the
gipsy in the blood of the English workman, and incontinently he
"babbles of green fields." On the English gentleman lapped, in the
most luxurious civilisation, and with the thousand powers and resources
of wealth at his command, descends oftentimes a fierce unrest, a
Bedouin-like horror of cities and the cry of the money-changer, and in
a month the fiery dust rises in the track of his desert steed, or in
the six months' polar midnight he hears the big wave clashing on the
icy shore. The close presence of the sea feeds the Englishman's
restlessness. She takes possession of his heart like some fair
capricious mistress. Before the boy awakes to the beauty of cousin
Mary, he is crazed by the fascinations of ocean. With her voices of
ebb and flow she weaves her siren song round the Englishman's coasts
day and night. Nothing that dwells on land can keep from her embrace
the boy who has gazed upon her dangerous beauty, and who has heard her
singing songs of foreign shores at the foot of the summer crag. It is
well that in the modern gentleman the fierce heart of the Berserker
lives yet. The English are eminently a nation of vagabonds. The sun
paints English faces with all the colours of his climes. The
Englishman is ubiquitous. He shakes with fever and ague in the swampy
valley of the Mississippi; he is drowned in the sand pillars as they
waltz across the desert on the purple breath of the simoom; he stands
on the icy scalp of Mont Blanc; his fly falls in the sullen Norwegian
fiords; he invades the solitude of the Cape lion; he rides on his
donkey through the uncausewayed Cairo streets. That wealthy people,
under a despotism, should be travellers seems a natural thing enough.
It is a way of escape from the rigours of their condition. But that
England--where activity rages so keenly and engrosses every class;
where the prizes of Parliament, literature, commerce, the bar, the
church, are hungered and thirsted after; where the stress and intensity
of life ages a man before his time; where so many of the noblest break
down in harness hardly halfway to the goal--should, year after year,
send off swarms of men to roam the world, and to seek out danger for
the mere thrill and enjoyment of it, is significant of the indomitable
pluck and spirit of the race. There is scant danger that the rust of
sloth will eat into the virtue of English steel. The English do the
hard work and the travelling of the world. The least revolutionary
nation of Europe, the one with the greatest temptations to stay at
home, with the greatest faculty for work, with perhaps the sincerest
regard for wealth, is also the most nomadic. How is this? It is
because they are a nation of vagabonds; they have the "hungry heart"
that one of their poets speaks about.

There is an amiability about the genuine vagabond which takes captive
the heart. We do not love a man for his respectability, his prudence
and foresight in business, his capacity of living within his income, or
his balance at his banker's. We all admit that prudence is an
admirable virtue, and occasionally lament, about Christmas, when bills
fall in, that we do not inherit it in a greater degree. But we speak
about it in quite a cool way. It does not touch us with enthusiasm.
If a calculating-machine had a hand to wring, it would find few to
wring it warmly. The things that really move liking in human beings
are the gnarled nodosities of character, vagrant humours, freaks of
generosity, some little unextinguishable spark of the aboriginal
savage, some little sweet savour of the old Adam. It is quite
wonderful how far simple generosity and kindliness of heart go in
securing affection; and, when these exist, what a host of apologists
spring up for faults and vices even. A country squire goes recklessly
to the dogs; yet if he has a kind word for his tenant when he meets
him, a frank greeting for the rustic beauty when she drops a courtesy
to him on the highway, he lives for a whole generation in an odour of
sanctity. If he had been a disdainful, hook-nosed prime minister who
had carried his country triumphantly through some frightful crisis of
war, these people would, perhaps, never have been aware of the fact;
and most certainly never would have tendered him a word of thanks, even
if they had. When that important question, "Which is the greatest foe
to the public weal--the miser or the spendthrift?" is discussed at the
artisans' debating club, the spendthrift has all the eloquence on his
side--the miser all the votes. The miser's advocate is nowhere, and he
pleads the cause of his client with only half his heart. In the
theatre, Charles Surface is applauded, and Joseph Surface is hissed.
The novel-reader's affection goes out to Tom Jones, his hatred to
Blifil. Joseph Surface and Blifil are scoundrels, it is true; but
deduct the scoundrelism, let Joseph be but a stale proverb-monger and
Blifil a conceited prig, and the issue remains the same. Good humour
and generosity carry the day with the popular heart all the world over.
Tom Jones and Charles Surface are not vagabonds to my taste. They were
shabby fellows both, and were treated a great deal too well. But there
are other vagabonds whom I love, and whom I do well to love. With what
affection do I follow little Ishmael and his broken-hearted mother out
into the great and terrible wilderness, and see them faint beneath the
ardours of the sunlight! And we feel it to be strict poetic justice
and compensation that the lad so driven forth from human tents should
become the father of wild Arabian men, to whom the air of cities is
poison, who work without any tool, and on whose limbs no conqueror has
ever yet been able to rivet shackle or chain. Then there are Abraham's
grandchildren, Jacob and Esau--the former, I confess, no favourite of
mine. His, up at least to his closing years, when parental affection
and strong sorrow softened him, was a character not amiable. He lacked
generosity, and had too keen an eye on his own advancement. He did not
inherit the noble strain of his ancestors. He was a prosperous man;
yet in spite of his increase in flocks and herds,--in spite of his
vision of the ladder, with the angels ascending and descending upon
it,--in spite of the success of his beloved son,--in spite of the
weeping and lamentation of the Egyptians at his death,--in spite of his
splendid funeral, winding from the city by the pyramid and the
sphinx,--in spite of all these things, I would rather have been the
hunter Esau, with birthright filched away, bankrupt in the promise,
rich only in fleet foot and keen spear; for he carried into the wilds
with him an essentially noble nature--no brother with his mess of
pottage could mulct him of that. And he had a fine revenge; for when
Jacob, on his journey, heard that his brother was near with four
hundred men, and made division of his flocks and herds, his
man-servants and maid-servants, impetuous as a swollen hill-torrent,
the fierce son of the desert, baked red with Syrian light, leaped down
upon him, and fell on his neck and wept. And Esau said, "What meanest
thou by all this drove which I met?" and Jacob said, "These are to find
grace in the sight of my lord;" then Esau said, "I have enough, my
brother, keep that thou hast unto thyself." O mighty prince, didst
thou remember thy mother's guile, the skins upon thy hands and neck,
and the lie put upon the patriarch, as, blind with years, he sat up in
his bed snuffing the savory meat? An ugly memory, I should fancy!

Commend me to Shakspeare's vagabonds, the most delightful in the world!
His sweet-blooded and liberal nature blossomed into all fine
generosities as naturally as an apple-bough into pink blossoms and
odours. Listen to Gonsalvo talking to the shipwrecked Milan nobles
camped for the night in Prospero's isle, full of sweet voices, with
Ariel shooting through the enchanted air like a falling star;--

"Had I the plantation of this isle, my lord,
I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service none; contract, succession,
Bourne, bound of land, tilth, title, vineyard none;
No use of metal coin, or wine, or oil;
No occupation--all men idle--all!
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;
All things in common nature should produce,
Without sweat or endurance; treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine
Would I not have; but nature would bring forth
Of its own kind all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age."


What think you of a world after that pattern? "As You Like it" is a
vagabond play, and, verily, if there waved in any wind that blows a
forest peopled like Arden's, with an exiled king drawing the sweetest,
humanest lessons from misfortune; a melancholy Jacques, stretched by
the river bank, moralising on the bleeding deer; a fair Rosalind,
chanting her saucy cuckoo-song; fools like Touchstone--not like those
of our acquaintance, my friends; and the whole place, from centre to
circumference, filled with mighty oak bolls, all carven with lovers'
names,--if such a forest waved in wind, I say, I would, be my worldly
prospects what they might, pack up at once, and cast in my lot with
that vagabond company. For there I should find more gallant
courtesies, finer sentiments, completer innocence and happiness, more
wit and wisdom, than I am like to do here even, though I search for
them from shepherd's cot to king's palace. Just to think how those
people lived! Carelessly as the blossoming trees, happily as the
singing birds, time measured only by the patter of the acorn on the
fruitful soil! A world without debtor or creditor, passing rich, yet
with never a doit in its purse, with no sordid care, no regard for
appearances; nothing to occupy the young but love-making, nothing to
occupy the old but perusing the "sermons in stones" and the musical
wisdom which dwells in "running brooks"! But Arden forest draws its
sustenance from a poet's brain: the light that sleeps on its leafy
pillows is "the light that never was on sea or shore." We but please
and tantalise ourselves with beautiful dreams.

The children of the brain become to us actual existences, more actual,
indeed, than the people who impinge upon us in the street, or who live
next door. We are more intimate with Shakspeare's men and women than
we are with our contemporaries, and they are, on the whole, better
company. They are more beautiful in form and feature, and they express
themselves in a way that the most gifted strive after in vain. What if
Shakspeare's people could walk out of the play-books and settle down
upon some spot of earth and conduct life there? There would be found
humanity's whitest wheat, the world's unalloyed gold. The very winds
could not visit the place roughly. No king's court could present you
such an array. Where else could we find a philosopher like Hamlet? a
friend like Antonio? a witty fellow like Mercutio? where else Imogen's
piquant's face? Portia's gravity and womanly sweetness? Rosalind's true
heart and silvery laughter? Cordelia's beauty of holiness? These would
form the centre of the court, but the purlieus, how many-coloured!
Malvolio would walk mincingly in the sunshine there; Autolycus would
filch purses. Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch would be eternal
boon companions. And as Falstaff sets out homeward from the tavern,
the portly knight leading the revellers like a three-decker a line of
frigates, they are encountered by Dogberry, who summons them to stand
and answer to the watch as they are honest men. If Mr. Dickens's
characters were gathered together, they would constitute a town
populous enough to send a representative to Parliament. Let us enter.
The style of architecture is unparalleled. There is an individuality
about the buildings. In some obscure way they remind one of human
faces. There are houses sly-looking, houses wicked-looking, houses
pompous-looking. Heaven bless us! what a rakish pump! what a
self-important town-hall! what a hard-hearted prison! The dead walls
are covered with advertisements of Mr. Sleary's circus. Newman Noggs
comes shambling along. Mr. and the Misses Pecksniff come sailing down
the sunny side of the street. Miss Mercy's parasol is gay; papa's
neck-cloth is white, and terribly starched. Dick Swiveller leans
against a wall, his hands in his pockets, a primrose held between his
teeth, contemplating the opera of Punch and Judy, which is being
conducted under the management of Messrs. Codlings and Short. You turn
a corner and you meet the coffin of little Paul Dombey borne along.
Who would have thought of encountering a funeral in this place? In the
afternoon you hear the rich tones of the organ from Miss La Creevy's
first floor, for Tom Pinch has gone to live there now, and as you know
all the people as you know your own brothers and sisters, and
consequently require no letters of introduction, you go up and talk
with the dear old fellow about all his friends and your friends, and
towards evening he takes your arm, and you walk out to see poor Nelly's
grave--a place which he visits often, and which he dresses with flowers
with his own hands. I know this is the idlest dreaming, but all of us
have a sympathy with the creatures of the drama and the novel. Around
the hardest cark and toil lies the imaginative world of the poets and
romancists, and thither we sometimes escape to snatch a mouthful of
serener air. There our best lost feelings have taken a human shape.
We suppose that boyhood with its impulses and enthusiasms has subsided
with the gray cynical man whom we have known these many years. Not a
bit of it. It has escaped into the world of the poet, and walks a
love-flushed Romeo in immortal youth. We suppose that the Mary of
fifty years since, the rose-bud of a girl that crazed our hearts,
blossomed into the spouse of Jenkins, the stockbroker, and is now a
grandmother. Not at all. She is Juliet leaning from the balcony, or
Portia talking on the moonlight lawns at Belmont. There walk the
shadows of our former selves. All that Time steals he takes thither;
and to live in that world is to live in our lost youth, our lost
generosities, illusions, and romances.

In middle-class life, and in the professions, when a standard or ideal
is tacitly set up, to which every member is expected to conform on pain
of having himself talked about, and wise heads shaken over him, the
quick feelings of the vagabond are not frequently found. Yet, thanks
to Nature, who sends her leafage and flowerage up through all kinds of
_debris_, and who takes a blossomy possession of ruined walls and
desert places, it is never altogether dead! And of vagabonds, not the
least delightful is he who retains poetry and boyish spirits beneath
the crust of a profession. Mr. Carlyle commends "central fire," and
very properly commends it most when "well covered in." In the case of
a professional man, this "central fire" does not manifest itself in
wasteful explosiveness, but in secret genial heat, visible in fruits of
charity and pleasant humour. The physician who is a humourist commends
himself doubly to a sick-bed. His patients are as much indebted for
their cure to his smile, his voice, and a certain irresistible
healthfulness that surrounds him, as they are to his skill and his
prescriptions. The lawyer who is a humourist is a man of ten thousand.
How easily the worldly-wise face, puckered over a stiff brief, relaxes
into the lines of laughter. He sees many an evil side of human nature,
he is familiar with slanders and injustice, all kinds of human
bitterness and falsity; but neither his hand nor his heart becomes
"imbued with that it works in," and the little admixture of acid,
inevitable from his circumstances and mode of life, but heightens the
flavour of his humour. But of all humourists of the professional
class, I prefer the clergyman, especially if he is well stricken in
years, and has been anchored all his life in a country charge. He is
none of your loud wits. There is a lady-like delicacy in his mind, a
constant sense of his holy office, which warn him off dangerous
subjects. This reserve, however, does but improve the quality of his
mirth. What his humour loses in boldness, it gains in depth and
slyness. And as the good man has seldom the opportunity of making a
joke, or of procuring an auditor who can understand one, the dewy
glitter of his eyes, as you sit opposite him, and his heartfelt
enjoyment of the matter in hand, are worth going a considerable way to
witness. It is not, however, in the professions that the vagabond is
commonly found. Over these that awful and ubiquitous female, Mrs.
Grundy--at once Fate, Nemesis, and Fury--presides. The glare of her
eye is professional danger, the pointing of her finger is professional
death. When she utters a man's name, he is lost. The true vagabond is
to be met with in other walks of life,--among actors, poets, painters.
These may grow in any way their nature directs. They are not required
to conform to any traditional pattern. With regard to the
respectabilities and the "minor morals," the world permits them to be
libertines. Besides, it is a temperament peculiarly sensitive, or
generous, or enjoying, which at the beginning impels these to their
special pursuits; and that temperament, like everything else in the
world, strengthens with use, and grows with what it feeds on. We look
upon an actor, sitting amongst ordinary men and women, with a certain
curiosity,--we regard him as a creature from another planet, almost.
His life and his world are quite different from ours. The orchestra,
the foot-lights, and the green baize curtain, divide us. He is a
monarch half his time--his entrance and his exit proclaimed by flourish
of trumpet. He speaks in blank verse, is wont to take his seat at
gilded banquets, to drink nothing out of a pasteboard goblet. The
actor's world has a history amusing to read, and lines of noble and
splendid traditions, stretching back to charming Nelly's time, and
earlier. The actor has strange experiences. He sees the other side of
the moon. We roar at Grimaldi's funny face: he sees the lines of pain
in it. We hear Romeo wish to be "a glove upon that hand that he might
touch that cheek:" three minutes afterwards he beholds Romeo refresh
himself with a pot of porter. We see the Moor, who "loved not wisely,
but too well," smother Desdemona with the nuptial bolster: he sees them
sit down to a hot supper. We always think of the actor as on the
stage: he always thinks of us as in the boxes. In justice to the poets
of the present day, it may be noticed that they have improved on their
brethren in Johnson's time, who were, according to Lord Macaulay,
hunted by bailiffs and familiar with sponging-houses, and who, when
hospitably entertained, were wont to disturb the household of the
entertainer by roaring for hot punch at four o'clock in the morning.
Since that period the poets have improved in the decencies of life:
they wear broadcloth, and settle their tailors' accounts even as other
men. At this present moment Her Majesty's poets are perhaps the most
respectable of Her Majesty's subjects. They are all teetotallers; if
they sin, it is in rhyme, and then only to point a moral. In past days
the poet flew from flower to flower, gathering his honey; but he bore a
sting, too, as the rude hand that touched him could testily. He freely
gathers his honey as of old, but the satiric sting has been taken away.
He lives at peace with all men--his brethren excepted. About the true
poet still there is something of the ancient spirit,--the old "flash
and outbreak of the fiery mind,"--the old enthusiasm and dash of
humourous eccentricity. But he is fast disappearing from the catalogue
of vagabonds--fast getting commonplace, I fear. Many people suspect
him of dulness. Besides, such a crowd of well-meaning, amiable, most
respectable men have broken down of late years the pales of Parnassus,
and become squatters on the sacred mount, that the claim of poets to be
a peculiar people is getting disallowed. Never in this world's history
were they so numerous; and although some people deny that they are
poets, few are cantankerous enough or intrepid enough to assert that
they are vagabonds. The painter is the most agreeable of vagabonds.
His art is a pleasant one: it demands some little manual exertion, and
it takes him at times into the open air. It is pleasant, too, in this,
that lines and colours are so much more palpable than words, and the
appeal of his work to his practised eye has some satisfaction in it.
He knows what he is about. He does not altogether lose his critical
sense, as the poet does, when familiarity stales his subject, and takes
the splendour out of his images. Moreover, his work is more profitable
than the poet's. I suppose there are just as few great painters at the
present day as there are great poets; yet the yearly receipts of the
artists of England far exceed the receipts of the singers. A picture
can usually be painted in less time than a poem can be written. A
second-rate picture has a certain market value,--its frame is at least
something. A second-rate poem is utterly worthless, and no one will
buy it on account of its binding. A picture is your own exclusive
property: it is a costly article of furniture. You hang it on your
walls, to be admired by all the world. Pictures represent wealth: the
possession of them is a luxury. The portrait-painter is of all men the
most beloved. You sit to him willingly, and put on your best looks.
You are inclined to be pleased with his work, on account of the strong
prepossession you entertain for his subject. To sit for one's portrait
is like being present at one's own creation. It is an admirable excuse
for egotism. You would not discourse on the falcon-like curve which
distinguishes your nose, or the sweet serenity of your reposing lips,
or the mildness of the eye that spreads a light over your countenance,
in the presence of a fellow-creature for the whole world; yet you do
not hesitate to express the most favourable opinion of the features
starting out on you from the wet canvas. The interest the painter
takes in his task flatters you. And when the sittings are over, and
you behold yourself hanging on your own wall, looking as it you could
direct kingdoms or lead armies, you feel grateful to the artist. He
ministers to your self-love, and you pay him his hire without wincing.
Your heart warms towards him as it would towards a poet who addresses
you in an ode of panegyric, the kindling terms of which--a little
astonishing to your friends--you believe in your heart of hearts to be
the simple truth, and, in the matter of expression, not over-coloured
in the very least. The portrait-painter has a shrewd eye for
character, and is usually the best anecdote-monger in the world. His
craft brings him into contact with many faces, and he learns to compare
them curiously, and to extract their meanings. He can interpret
wrinkles; he can look through the eyes into the man; he can read a
whole foregone history in the lines about the mouth. Besides, from the
good understanding which usually exists between the artist and his
sitter, the latter is inclined somewhat to unbosom himself; little
things leak out in conversation, not much in themselves, but pregnant
enough to the painter's sense, who pieces them together, and
constitutes a tolerably definite image. The man who paints your face
knows you better than your intimate friends do, and has a clearer
knowledge of your amiable weaknesses, and of the secret motives which
influence your conduct, than you oftentimes have yourself. A good
portrait is a kind of biography, and neither painter nor biographer can
carry out his task satisfactorily unless he be admitted behind the
scenes. I think that the landscape painter, who has acquired
sufficient mastery in his art to satisfy his own critical sense, and
who is appreciated enough to find purchasers, and thereby to keep the
wolf from the door, must be of all mankind the happiest. Other men
live in cities, bound down to some settled task and order of life; but
he is a nomad, and wherever he goes "Beauty pitches her tents before
him." He is smitten by a passionate love for Nature, and is privileged
to follow her into her solitary haunts and recesses. Nature is his
mistress, and he is continually making declarations of his love. When
one thinks of ordinary occupations, how one envies him, flecking his
oak-tree boll with sunlight, tinging with rose the cloud of the morning
in which the lark is hid, making the sea's swift fringe of foaming lace
outspread itself on the level sands, in which the pebbles gleam forever
wet. The landscape painter's memory is inhabited by the fairest
visions,--dawn burning on the splintered peaks that the eagles know,
while the valleys beneath are yet filled with uncertain light; the
bright blue morn stretching over miles of moor and mountain; the slow
up-gathering of the bellied thunder-cloud; summer lakes, and cattle
knee-deep in them; rustic bridges forever crossed by old women in
scarlet cloaks; old-fashioned waggons resting on the scrubby common,
the waggoner lazy and wayworn, the dog couched on the ground, its
tongue hanging out in the heat; boats drawn up on the shore at sunset;
the fisher's children looking seawards, the red light full on their
dresses and faces; farther back, a clump of cottages, with bait-baskets
about the door, and the smoke of the evening meal coiling up into the
coloured air. These things are forever with him. Beauty, which is a
luxury to other men, is his daily food. Happy vagabond, who lives the
whole summer through in the light of his mistress's face, and who does
nothing the whole winter except recall the splendour of her smiles!

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