I expected this to be a book about a vagabond who was also an intellectual, similar to another book i read in 2023:
The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham [1]
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.
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.
The Age of Empathy by Frans De Waal [7] ]
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. [8]]
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" [9].
[ Edward Bellamy 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" [11]--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.
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 [12], 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.
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
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Floyd_Dell
title: Intellectual Vagabondage