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# 2025-11-30 - Intellectual Vagabondage by Floyd Dell
I expected this to be a book about a vagabond who was also an
intellectual, similar to another book i read in 2023:
DIR The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham
What i found instead was a story that wanders literate paths,
rather than literal ones.
> We were spiritual vagrants, seeking the true road.
The author loved books and it shows clearly. I enjoyed his whirlwind
tour of books and ideas. Below are 5 public domain books that i want
to read now, thanks to reading Intellectual Vagabondage. The last
three are poetry.
DIR The Ego And Its Own by Max Stirner
DIR Mutual Aid by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
DIR Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Edward Fitzgerald
DIR Songs From Vagabondia
DIR More Songs From Vagabondia
The edition i read had a scan of the due date slip. The book had
been checked out 3 times, in 1938, 1961, and 1967, and then it was
digitized in 2022. Checked out 3 times over the course of 97 years.
Guess i wandered off the beaten path. *grin*
What follows are salient quotes from the book with my own thoughts in
square brackets.
* * *
A book is not important because it was written by the illustrious
Soandso; no, but rather is Soandso illustrious because he has said
something that anonymous thousands wanted to hear.
A book, then, reveals to us what large numbers of people have felt
about the world. They may not have been willing to acknowledge such
feelings as their own; they may not even have been consciously aware
of having such feelings...
A significant writer is a person whose conscious emotions correspond
to the deep unexpressed feelings of others, and whose candor and
courage and sheer writing ability are adequate to the task of
expressing these feelings, [and so] becomes their spokes[person].
Literature is, for the purpose of this inquiry, a record of the
significant stages in the history of what men and women have thought
and felt about the world in which they lived.
[Specifically, literate men & women.]
As children, we found in "Robinson Crusoe" a world of our own. ... it
was with relief that we escaped to Crusoe's island, where we were
monarch of all we surveyed. We lived in imagination Crusoe's life,
and our cramped egotism found free scope in the creation of a world
after our own fancy. We did not feel lost and helpless; we felt
happy. We built a house, tamed the wild animals, made ourselves
clothing from their skins, and found food to eat. We learned in such
play to believe that we were self-sufficient and all-conquering. We
learned that the individual is by right the master of [one's]
environment, and not its helpless victim. We found, in short,
reassurance as to our individual significance, in this fantasy of
mastery over the realm of nature.
The conditions of pioneer life involved almost inevitably a
repudiation of the feudal scheme. When Captain John Smith, in a
colony hard pressed by hunger, gave orders that he who did not work
should not eat, he abrogated the whole sacred medieval tradition of
class-duties and class-privileges. A man, in conflict with elemental
nature, could not remain noble or commoner, he became simply a man.
That idea, coming to people weary of class restrictions, fascinated
the imagination.
It was a revolutionary idea. It implied that a man could do his own
fighting, his own plowing, his own praying, his own governing...
It was early in the eighteenth century when this idea was first
expressed in a realistic prose fantasy by a capable man of letters.
The book, "Robinson Crusoe," became the most famous book of its
time.
As a matter of fact, the Declaration of Independence was a
reiteration of truths held to be self-evident not only in America but
among the trading class and their sympathizers everywhere. It was a
characteristic intellectual expression of the Utopian mood of the
late eighteenth century.
The eighteenth-century mind was a reasonable mind. As the age of
faith waned, the age of reason had set in, and men believed in the
power of reason instead of in other miracles. They believed that they
could by thinking discover truth. They did not know to what an extent
all human thought is colored and shaped by human passions--and theirs
by the passion of hope.
We, looking back at the age to which they looked forward, can admire
even while we smile sadly at their hopes--their vast and shining
hopes for the future of mankind.
The bourgeoisie required a world of free, unhampered opportunity. It
must needs abhor the injustices of decaying feudalism, and aspire to
a world in which men would be free and equal--a world of
self-dependence, laissez-faire, unrestricted individual enterprise.
Forty years from 1776 brings us down to 1816, with all the world's
eyes turned upon the fallen Napoleon.
[The Byronic mood] is certainly a mood vastly different from the
glorious Utopianism of the eighteenth century. It is a kind of
romantic despair. And in 1816, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, it expressed for the intelligent young people of Europe
their deepest feelings about the world in which they lived.
We find men fleeing by choice into some imaginative refuge from their
fellows--seeking with morbid fondness those far and solitary peaks,
glaciers, caverns, seas, deserts, which constitute the favorite
milieu of early nineteenth-century poetry. Ocean and mountain and
desert are alone free from the visible taint of man's folly. In sheer
relief from the disgust or the horror with which the mind is
afflicted by the cities and the battlefields of civilization, it
turns to the rebellious and untamed purity of Nature, to all those
wild and lonely aspects of earth as yet undisfigured by the
impurities of man's spirit!
Rousseau believed that [humanity] could return to Nature. He was full
of confidence. Byron had no such hope.
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..."
"Man marks the earth with ruin."
Between these two utterances, sufficiently characteristic of the
times in which they were written--one full of infinite promise and
the other full of shame and discouragement--some great disaster had
occurred. The Utopian promises of the eighteenth century had seemed
to prove false and vain; and Byronism was the immediate reaction to
this spiritual shock.
[People] had hoped for universal happiness. What they actually faced
was a continually increasing misery. The great discoveries of the
eighteenth century in the realm of physical science, which had been
intended to make man the master of things, were being supplemented by
new discoveries and inventions which tended more and more to make him
their slave. And the young enterprise of capitalism expressed itself
in the most merciless exploitation of its human victims, particularly
in England, where it also earliest began to justify itself in its
mercilessness by a new theory of economics. "All men are created free
and equal" became more frankly: "Each man for himself and the devil
take the hindmost."
To leave England became the typically English thing for English poets
to do. They left England because they could not live in England; and
they could not live in England because England was the foremost
capitalist country on earth. That is why they went to Italy, and in
particular to Florence, which was simply a lovely relic of medieval
antiquity. They had, in fact, left England in the effort to escape
from capitalism; and they had turned--not to the future, for they
were without hope--but to the past.
Tennyson and Browning had the centers of their spiritual orbits set
in the medieval world; and though they swung out occasionally into
sight of the realities of their own time, yet they were always drawn
back into times of King Arthur and Count Gismond, where they
instinctively preferred to dwell.
Dickens and Thackeray preached against preaching. The people in their
pages who have theories are either hypocrites or fools. "Kindliness
and tolerance are worth all the creeds in the world." Such is the
substance of their criticism. They had taken the precaution to put
the public off its guard. They too hated contemporary England; but
they criticized it emotionally, not intellectually. Instead of
theories, they provided floods of comedy and pathos. They made people
laugh and cry who did not want to think.
Both Dickens and Thackeray had begun their literary careers as
humorists--they had learned the art of giving the public what it
wanted. And what it wanted most of all was to forget its own
troubles.
[Carlyle], like the poets, was disgusted with the modern world; and
like them he had turned back to the medieval world for solace. He saw
there a social scheme which satisfied him, in its contrast to the
chaos of modern industrialism--a system of class duties and class
privileges so beautiful in its perfection that he solemnly proposed
it, in all seriousness, as a solution of latter-day problems.
[I wonder whether this kind of nostalgia can explain the popularity
of steampunk and why so many Disney settings feature feudal and
colonial period costume ala Disney Princessess.]
The reign of verbal extravagance, the Early Victorian Boom in words,
seems to have collapsed gradually as a result of the impact upon
the public mind of the Darwinian theory... The publication of the
Darwinian views served to change the mood of the period from one of
emotionalism to one of skepticism.
Spencer, Huxley, and in the field of fiction, George Eliot, represent
this critical spirit. But the most significant figure is perhaps that
of Matthew Arnold.
He did not commit suicide, like the Greek philosopher, nor retire
from the world, like Obermann; he was too much of a gentleman, and of
a pagan stoic, to do either. He continued to live a busy and useful
life, and to write acute and sympathetic criticism of men and books.
Nevertheless, he represents the beginnings of a spiritual breakdown,
in an age that could not face its own reality. He foreshadows the
hysterias, the new religions, the mad mysticisms, which became more
and more the relief in which sensitive men and women found solace
against the meaninglessness of existence.
The theory of Evolution was not exactly new. In its vaguer
philosophic form, it had been current for a century, as the notion of
a universal change from cruder to finer and lower to higher modes of
life. In its general biological significance it had been set forth by
Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin.
To a century which was seeking escape from the realization of the
horrors among which it lived, [social Darwinism] showed a universe in
which those horrors were reflected upon a grand scale--a
"Nature red in tooth and claw." It was... a scientific sanction of
the doctrine of "Each man for himself and the devil take the hindmost."
["Nature red in tooth and claw" is not objective. See:
> In his 1902 book, Mutual Aid, he argued that the struggles for
> existence is not so much of each against all, but of masses of
> organisms against a hostile environment.
>
> Kropotkin was inspired by a setting quite unlike the one that had
> inspired Darwin. Darwin visited tropical regions with abundant
> wildlife, whereas Kropotkin explored Siberia. The ideas of both men
> reflect the difference between a rich environment, resulting in the
> sort of population density and competition envisioned by Malthus,
> and an environment that is frozen and unfriendly most of the time.
> ... Instead of animals duking it out, and the victors running off
> with the prize, he saw a communal principle at work. In subzero
> cold, you either huddle together or die.
DIR The Age of Empathy by Frans De Waal
]
But the most desperate pressure upon the human imagination was made
by that part of the Darwinian theory which required eons of time for
the processes of evolution to be fulfilled. ... they were worried
about how many millenniums it was going to take to get them somewhere
else. They were not, in fact, anxious about the past; they were
anxious about the future.
Popular Darwinism made it impossible for them to look forward with
any hope. If change was a matter of ages, and if the creation of a
new form of society was to be effected by such ages upon ages of
"struggle for existence," then it was a desperate outlook. Men did
not want to think about the struggle for existence at all; they could
not bear to think of a millennium of it. They could not bring
themselves to believe in this terrible idea of slow and gradual
change.
It was some time before the Darwinian point of view found sympathetic
expression in any literature other than that of controversy. But we
may assign to the prose and poetry of George Meredith and of Thomas
Hardy this influence.
But there was implicit in the art-for-art's-sake movement something
neither austere nor secluded--something which yearned to express its
contempt for the outside world, and more than that, to find reflected
in the lurid anger of the outside world a significance...
Oscar Wilde was representative precisely of this flamboyancy, this
lurid advertising of a difference between his ideals and those of the
world in which he lived. He walked down Piccadilly--not, as he is
palely caricatured in Gilbertian light opera, "with a poppy or a lily
in his medieval hand," but carrying a sunflower. The sunflower was
chosen because it was what ordinary people called a weed; and the new
sensations which the cult of estheticism brought to the shocked
attention of the public were selected upon the same principle...
... it may be said that the abnormality for which Wilde was
imprisoned is temperamentally akin to queernesses not at all
indictable nor in any ordinary moral sense disreputable, but which
yet constitute a group of emotional states upon the extremer edge of
which not merely abnormality, but insanity, may be found.
[queerness indeed]
It is the final renunciation of relations with a world felt to be
intolerable; a spiritual divorce from reality. In this mood, the
artist does not quarrel with the world, nor laugh at it, nor, least
of all, seek to persuade it that its realities are poorer than his
own dreams; in this mood, the unhappy one does not even leave the
world, and seek refuge in cave or garret or "ivory tower", [one]
remains in but not of the world, utterly content with the realm of
[one's] own dreaming.
This is the last frontier of literature, the stepping-off place into
the realm of madness--of private and incommunicable dream.
We have seen what the literature of the nineteenth century meant to
those for whom it was written. What that literature meant to us, for
whom it was not written, but upon whom it was thrust, is quite
another matter. It meant, to many of us, almost nothing at all.
We had our own lives to live--and all these classical utterances of
nineteenth-century literature had no relation to our lives. From the
stormy mouthings of Byron to the sanctimonious solemnities of
Tennyson, they were a bore.
We were of the present. And, though we did not realize it, what we
wanted was an interpretation of our own time--an interpretation
which would make us feel its significance, and the significance of
our own part in it.
We wanted, though we did not realize it, a literature of our
own--books produced by, for and out of the age in which we lived. But
there were, quite literally, no such books. The truth was, of course,
that in the time when we were growing up, the human imagination was a
chaos, filled with the wreckage of a century-long conflict of which
we were unaware, between Utopian ideals and machine-made facts.
Nevertheless, in our childhood, there was Jules Verne. He gave us a
vision of the splendors of scientific achievement, of the mind
triumphing over the stubborn limitations of our earthly environment.
We were ready to believe in this age in which we lived as an age in
which Science was magnificently remaking the world.
Science was cutting up frogs in the laboratory, and stringing our
towns with electric wires. It was not re-making the world; it was
merely producing a variety of conveniences. And the most notable of
these conveniences, the modern bathroom, was a symbol of the quality
of its achievement. Here was nothing to arouse the lyricism of youth.
Even the automobile, which began to appear on our streets, was not
exactly a thing to stir the imagination. It was odd, it was
efficient, but it was not a sign of the triumph of Science; it did
not transcend the familiar world; it was merely what it seemed, a
horseless carriage...
But the authorities did not want us to have weapons against social
tyrannies, and none of these--literally, none--had been given to us
in the schools. Wendell Phillips was to us merely a name in the
history lesson. Whittier was known to us only as the author of an
extremely long poem about Snow, and two sentimental ballads...
Walt Whitman was by these same educational authorities considered too
indecent an author to be quoted; or if he did appear, it was as the
Good Gray Poet, and the author of "O Captain! My Captain!" Emerson
was a Philosopher (whatever that was) and the author of a very silly
little poem about a Mountain and a Squirrel. And Thoreau, the
stubborn Anarchist who went to jail rather than pay his poll-tax, was
known only as a "Nature-Lover"! The educational authorities did not
want us to know the truth about this American literature. They were
afraid that the real Emerson and Thoreau and Phillips and Whittier
and Whitman would corrupt our young minds.
These men had been Destroyers--fierce antagonists of a Compromise
between free capitalism and a slave system. It is true that the
agitation against negro slavery was related to a broader movement
against a more widespread form of economic bondage. It is true that
the kind of Freedom which Thoreau and Emerson wrote about was a
freedom far surpassing that promised by the Emancipation
Proclamation.
"I ask," says Nietzsche, "not freedom from what, but freedom to
what?"
We were spiritual vagrants, seeking the true road.
There was perhaps one book out of all the literature of the past
which had a universal currency among us, one poem which had a real
meaning to us all... Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam."
The secret of the spell which this book cast upon the imagination of
the late nineteenth century can be found in the fact betrayed by its
title--the fact that the West had exhausted its spiritual energy in
the vain effort to answer the riddle of life, and it had turned to
hear what the East had to utter out of its vaster disillusionment.
The East had replied in effect: The answer is that there is no
answer. Life is a meaningless illusion. In the end, as in the
beginning, is Nothing.
If we translate this statement into terms of Western theology, it
means simply that there is no Heaven and no Hell; that the present
moment is all. And if we translate it again into the idiom of social
idealism, it means that the idea of a social Hereafter which had
tormented the nineteenth-century imagination was illusion: Utopia but
a vision of fulfilled desire, and [people's] worst fears for the
future but the reflection of their own bad consciences...
But there were other ways than stoic endurance of pain which are
opened up by the theory of personal irresponsibility; having realized
that nothing matters, one might as well endure Pleasure!
[good old nihilism]
In this mood, out of the wisdom of the East, Fitzgerald set before
the Western world the vain pageant of its life.
> We are-no other than a moving row
> Of magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
It was the tender and melancholy music of Fitzgerald's phrases which
gave beauty to these ideas; but it was the utter philosophical
sincerity, the completeness and candor with which they set forth a
view of life, that gave power to the phrases. It was a call to youth,
troubled with questionings about life, to trouble no more. With such
eloquence and tenderness did Fitzgerald's Omar describe the weary
circle of adolescent thought, so gently did he mock at the
uselessness of thinking, so seductively did he weave every hue of
warm earthly loveliness into his garland of flowers to crown the head
of careless revelry, that youth must needs enter into his enchanted
garden of forgetfulness.
It need not be imagined that Omar, or Fitzgerald, seduced young men
into overmuch dalliance with either wine or women, not to speak of
song. For all these things belong to the world of reality, the
painful world of reality, which it is the mission of Oriental
philosophy even in Omarian vein to teach us to renounce. It was the
unphilosophic tribe, the robustly illusioned ones who were able to
enjoy unthinkingly the commonplace gifts of life--it was these who
really carried out Omar's injunctions, usually without having heard
of Omar. But as for imaginative youth--no: it was usually to a realm
of purely fanciful revelry that Omar introduced his young readers: to
a world in which women and wine are a symbol of forgetfulness--a
world of dreams.
The actual women of the time, at least those with whose conversation
a philosopher would not become bored after a very few minutes, were
demanding that they be taken very seriously indeed. The world, it
seemed, was full of Modern Women.
We had sought escape from intellectual and spiritual struggle in the
companionship of the other sex, only to find ourselves involved in a
more poignant intellectual and spiritual struggle--the struggle to
understand the humanness of women; and we seemed to like it! If women
were not troublesomely modern, we sought to make them so.
It was not man that they were hostile to, but that masculine
authoritarianism which is nearly coextensive with our sex. It was not
the masculine cigarette they wanted so much as the abrogation of the
masculine right to boss women around and tell them what they should
and should not do.
[It was legal for men to smoke in public but not women.]
The difference between the masculine and the feminine idealists of
this period is now apparent. We were content with what was happening
to woman because what we wanted was something for ourselves--a
Glorious Play-fellow. ... But they wanted something
different--something for themselves. They wanted freedom only as a
means to the increased satisfaction of a self-respect--or an egotism,
if you will--too long cramped and chafed by masculine rule. They
wanted Happiness--the happiness that comes from being a freely
expressive and largely active personality.
Perhaps the things we men thought important were not so important.
Perhaps--a profound "perhaps"--their emotions about their situation
were truer than our ideas, their disappointment more significant than
our approval. Perhaps there was not so very much fun in being a
modern woman after all.
[Perhaps this was a factor in why the flappers disappeared.
HTML What Became of the Flapper by Zelda Fizgerald (p.14,44,71)
]
So far as there were special woman's problems, they must be solved,
it seemed to us, not otherwise than by the efforts of women
themselves. But on the whole, as it appeared more and more to us,
their problems were the same as everybody else's... They were
oppressed; so was mankind at large.
[intersectionality]
We had lost the power of conceiving Change in large terms. There had
been one appeal to us, one attempt to stimulate our imaginations to
such a conception, in the form of a book by Edward Bellamy, called
"Looking Backward."
[
DIR Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy
The author predicted credit cards with automatic currency conversion,
the decline of musical ability due to mass produced music and radio,
and warehouse stores such as Costco.
]
Bellamy's book was different. It showed a reign of universal peace
and order, in which all the friction of present-day competition had
been eliminated by a gigantic combination of industrial processes
under the rule of the State; a régime of cleanliness, efficiency and
common sense, in which machines did the dirty work, and everybody was
enlightened, useful and happy. ... This classic of scientific
Utopianism had provoked the sketching of a different kind of Utopia
by William Morris in his "News From Nowhere"--a quasi-medieval
Utopia, with a healthy amount of dirt, disorder and adventure, and
with machinery thrown on the scrap-heap. But, so far as we were
concerned, it was not the excessive orderliness and mechanical
efficiency of this vision of Bellamy's which made it fail to convince
us. It was not that we did not think such a state of affairs
desirable, but rather that we could not think such a state of affairs
possible. It was too good to be true.
[
DIR News From Nowhere by William Morris
]
Therefore it was the milder programs of political and social reform
which first won our adherence.
[incremental improvement or compromise]
We were all the while being unconsciously controlled by our
quasi-Darwinian idea that evolution required eons of time. We did not
dare to think of making a quick job of it. This was before the day of
the I. W. W. and direct action, which, by the way, received their
original impetus from other sources than the Socialist movement. We
accepted the tempo of the American Federation of Labor as the tempo
of industrial change. We adjusted ourselves to the status quo.
But we were not living in the age of Bakunin, and we could not really
believe in the possibility of overthrowing the State by force. To
begin with, the State had all the force. And further than that, all
our instincts were against the use of force. So, for that matter were
the instincts of all the Anarchists we knew. There was not a
Dynamiter among them; they were gentle, disillusioned, kindly people,
who had ceased, like us, to believe in the superstition of
State-worship. They had nothing in particular to put in the place of
that belief, except a belief which we could not share--an old,
eighteenth-century belief in the natural goodness of the human soul.
[
TEXT Mikhail Bakunin
]
We were more disillusioned than they.
One book more than any other served to break for us, who were in this
mood, the bonds of sympathy which still held us to the old life of
political hopes and plans. That book was Max Stirner's "The Ego and
Its Own." It had nothing to do with the question immediately
confronting us. It had nothing to do with economics at all. It had to
do with the soul. It was, essentially, a religious tract--a
compendium of pious consolations for weary minds; but it was couched
in a philosophical dialect calculated to reach our kind of mind. To
us, burdened with heavy hopes that had turned to fears about the
State, it said: "What has the State to do with you?" It offered to
set us free from that obsession--and from all such obsessions. It
preached a naked freedom, a beautiful clean unhampered separateness
of the soul. ... And it was pleasant to put off these burdens of old
belief. It was a relief not to have to worry about the State any
more--nor anything else.
[focus on one's sphere of influence rather than a grandiose vision]
The cult of vagabondage had begun. In the series of boyish lyrics in
which it flowered, the "Songs from Vagabondia" and its successors by
Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, the zest! for being somewhere
else--the "wanderlust," as it began to be called--was divorced
utterly from any form of political idealism, and reunited with the
romantic tradition of homeless but happy poets and artists. These
books of song, with their hearty gusto for accidental and irrelevant
experience, touched all youth to the quick.
Your true Bohemian was the Last of the Mohicans and the First of the
Greenwich Villagers. He [or she] was also Omar and Walt Whitman in
one.
> I tell you that we--
> While you are smirking
> And lying, and shirking
> Life's duty of duties--
And what may that be, from the point of view of Vagabondia? What is
life's duty-of-duties?
> Honest sincerity--
To wit, one of the two things which a vagabond idealist, however
robbed of [one's] social patrimony, however disgraced and outcast,
can still do--tell the truth. But the truth about what?
> We are in verity Free.
Free--to what, precisely?
> Free to rejoice
> In blisses and beauties,
> Free as the voice
> Of the wind as it passes,
> Free as the bird
> In the weft of the grasses,
> Free as the word
> Of the sun to the sea!
> Free!
The other thing which capitalism cannot take away from its vagabond
idealists is the love of beauty. Their stake in the world has shrunk
to that.
> But what care we? Linger
> A moment to kiss--
> No time's amiss
> To a vagabond's ardor--
> Then finish the larder
> And pull down the curtain.
... note that it furnishes an innocent transition to the stage, of
masculine idealism in which woman, and the love of woman, as serious
realities, are eliminated from the scheme of living.
We have seen in these songs a blithe insurgence of the Play spirit,
which is one of the finest elements of young idealism. But we have
seen here also a blithe confession of the restricted sphere of life
in which this play spirit cares--or dares--to manifest itself.
Their play is not the beginning, but the renunciation of endeavor. It
is a prolonged holiday away from life.
One takes what one can. And what one takes, in the way of woman's
love, is already being called something else. It is being called
comradeship. It is being put with the casual and hearty relationships
which subsist between man and man.
More now than ever were the writers, and artists in general, divorced
from serious participation in the affairs of the world. And it was
from them that we learned what might be termed the super-vagabond
point of view. From this point of view the world is simply a
spectacle--something to look at.
It is also to be found in any aristocracy, among that minority, that
super-aristocracy whose members have had the opportunity to get what
they wanted, and have found out that it did not satisfy them after
all. The best minds in an aristocracy, as we observed, tend to cease
from participation in the human struggle; tend merely to look on,
with cynicism or with pity, as the case might be. To them... all the
world's a stage and all the men and women merely players.
[Buddha came from aristocracy. Coincidence?]
If we conceived of ourselves as flowers crushed under the brutal hoof
of commercialism, it helped us to reflect that hoofs are stronger
than flowers. We even forced ourselves to admire the tremendous
rhythm of the gesture by which the stronger crushed the weaker to
death. And if we disdained to pity ourselves, we were certainly not
going to pity anybody else. Life, we felt, consisted so largely of
spilt milk that there was no use crying over it--we might just as
well celebrate the magnificent inevitability of the spilling. And if
the hard indifference which we achieved was actually neither Greek
nor scientific, it was at least the best we outcast vagabonds could
do to maintain our dignity under the circumstances.
To the older generation, no doubt, the appearance of H.G. Wells upon
the literary horizon was no very startling phenomenon. He was to them
a curious and ingenious inventor of "scientific fantasies," a kind of
successor to Jules Verne. He wrote interestingly of airplanes, and
Martians, and exploring the Moon. ... But to us, in our decaying and
autumnal world, his voice was the wild west wind, from whose presence
the dead leaves of old aesthetic creeds and pessimistic philosophies
scattered "like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing"; a wind bearing
winged seeds. ... a Shelleyan wind, prophetic of the Spring.
We had been living in a fixed world, a world which seemed in all
essential respects to have existed for ever, and which would last to
eternity. At least--the changes in it were so slight and
circumstantial as to be meaningless; and with these changes, which
were the product of ulterior forces, we had nothing to do. We were
the creatures of the past, and the victims of the present.
And suddenly there came into our minds the magnificent and well-nigh
incredible conception of Change--not petty little pseudo-Darwinian
changes, trivial and orderly--but gigantic, miraculous change, an
overwhelming of the old in ruin and an emergence of the new.
We who were early readers of H.G. Wells were not among those who
were surprised by the World War; we had read about it too often, and
in too intimate detail, in his pages. We had faced in imagination not
only its horror, but the famine, the economic ruin, and the political
debacle which followed in its train. ... It was true, too, that
something new was coming to birth; and we could at least dimly
glimpse that something through the smoke of ruin. ...
It was our future. We, accepting it, made it our own.
It may seem a little ridiculous, this dedication of our lives to the
Future. It was a little ridiculous. But it gave us self-respect. We
understood ourselves in relation to something besides our individual
ambitions and our individual miseries.
Regarded closely, every one of Mr. Wells' heroes is seen to be a
crank, a curious and pathetic mixture of egotist and fool.
Nobody in any of Mr. Wells' novels ever achieves anything with the
help of any organized body, scientific, political or economic--he
does it all by himself.
When a decaying order is about to collapse, it can still be held
together for a time by the magic of words; but when the users of
words are seeking to destroy rather than to conserve that order, its
doom is dated...
Humanity appears to have climbed painfully up from the primeval slime
and reached out its hands toward the stars in vain. Its arts and
sciences, its religion and politics, its braveries and prides, have
provided it with the full means of self-destruction, and there seems
to be nothing to stay its hand.
But it may now be noted that the view of life which sincerely denies
validity to almost the whole scheme of civilized life is a view
natural enough to what we may call spiritual vagabonds--to those who,
whatever their actual position in the worldly scheme of things, have
withdrawn from it altogether or in great part their loyalty and
belief and consent.
It is, then, in an uncensored infantile view of life that we find the
most convincing excuse for our adult failures to cope with the world.
Or, if not there, we may finally find it in the honest homosexual
view of life--that sincerely tragic point of view from which all
those institutions and efforts and romantic hopes and ideals which
center about heterosexual love are utterly meaningless. Our Tramp's
Progress leads ultimately to this.
... the duty of explaining life in terms of the arts (or of
discovering the artistic achievements in which life is thus dealt
with and calling attention to--them) so as to make living more
comprehensible and more enjoyable in its widest sense. That task is
being left more and more to the movies, the comic strips, and a
literature which undertakes only to solace its audiences with simple
wish-fulfillments of a quasi-infantile nature.
author: Dell, Floyd, 1887-1969
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Floyd_Dell
LOC: PS3507.E49 I6
HTML source: https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-EAO-220
tags: ebook,history,non-fiction,vagabond
title: Intellectual Vagabondage
# Tags
DIR ebook
DIR history
DIR non-fiction
DIR vagabond