for the wise. But whichever way we look at it, let us not fall into the error of imagining that it is only the little people, the insignificant people, the people incapable of achievement, who suffer from swelled head. If we do, we shall be very wrong, because we shall be achieving neither its cure nor its accomplishment; nor shall we see the thing as it is, and so attain laughter. Let us be quite frank, even if it come to admitting that our own darlings of history, nay, even our own favourite novelists or favourite actors, wore swelled heads during all their waking hours. But if we want to be very nasty, if we want to give vent to our indignation and empty our spleen upon the proud wearers of that article, we may always remember that swelled head thrives best of all in a lunatic asylum.

F

VAGABONDS

NEW of us escape at one time or another the

call of the open road; not only in summer,

when the sun glints over the hedgerows, turning "the long brown path" into a mysterious and seductive highway leading undoubtedly to El Dorado or Utopia, but in winter as well, when the trees are bare, but none the less beautiful, and the blood courses through the veins in sympathy with the rhythm of a swinging pace.

There is something primal and necessary in this fascination. The call of the open road is a mysterious call, springing out of the exuberance and the passion of life. Everyone hears it sooner or later. It inspires the schoolboy to run away from school, sends rich men careering over continents in motor cars, and sets the clerk a-dreaming of his annual holiday: that small taste of freedom which is all he ever knows.

I do not doubt that this call of the open road is the call of the wild. It is Nature bidding man re-create himself by spending himself after her large and prodigal manner. Without some such call civilisation might bring about our ruin. Thoreau, who loved the open road better than most men, saw in wildness the preservation of the world, even though that wildness

might make vagabonds of us all. And side by side with most people's love of the open road there is a furtive love of the vagabond. Poets have grown sentimental over his apparent abandonment of care, and reformers of our luxurious habits have imagined some context between the vagabond life and philosophic simplicity. But ordinary men do not want the simple life so much as the free life. After a spell of civilisation, they find themselves, as it were, tugging at their moorings; they want to break away and drive free for a while, and they half believe that vagabondage is the method.

Whether they be right or wrong, there is something to be said for the idea that all great endeavour is the result of the abandon which often expresses itself in the rake and the vagabond. The dream of El Dorado may be no more than Nature's lure to the wild. The Iman who has no stomach for the attainment of his desires is by that dream urged mysteriously into the world of active life when lack of spirit might otherwise bid him stay at home. But it does not follow that every wastrel is a hero in the cause of natural freedom.

At least, we may say that our pleasure in contemplating the vagabond and his kind is in response to a very real need. It is not so much that we see in him the incarnation of happiness, still less a model of human perfection; what we do feel is, that the vagabond is participating in the full current of life. That, of course, may wreck him, just as it may wreck us also if we follow in his steps, but a spice of danger is an added

lure to the brave heart. The dangers of football, of polo, of mountaineering or soldiering never yet made those sports unpopular, for the sufficient reason that the only life worth living is the life which is well spiced with risk. “Chance, in the last resort is God,” said Anatole France. The vagabond, if not always in the midst of romantic adventure, has always got his back to the wall; and that alone is an inspiring thing for the contemplation of all healthy people. Weary and unkempt as he usually is, in him we see, no matter how dimly, the spirit of the hero, the hero who does not care whether he succeeds or no, the hero who does not desire to be intimidated by success. Behind the most grotesque tatterdemalion of the highway may exist the romantic desire to face odds, to test personal prowess, to have no possessions, that eating and drinking may be the merrier because of the fight. The vagabond of romance symbolises such an ideal if he symbolises anything. Life for him is not a thing to be owned, but to be used; he does not stake out a claim in the world, but enjoys all claims, eternally moving onwards, seeing nothing anywhere but what may be reached and passed."

66

The correspondence between conduct and sympathy, however, is often strangely paradoxical. There is, for instance, no doubt about the desire of most of us for what we are agreed is an exemplary life. That is what we are taught at school and, in fact, what we really believe to be correct. But there is no doubt also that beneath all our very sincere

practice and advocacy of responsible virtues, we are all more or less susceptible to the charm of irresponsibility. It strikes a romantic note to which our hearts are readily attuned. Such sympathy is recorded in our works of art, particularly in literature, where so many of the most delightful figures are vagabonds of one kind or another, and so much happy writing is inspired by a spirit of abandonment. The works of writers who have something of the vagabond in their souls invariably inspire friendly devotion in their readers.

And all this sentiment of affection exists in spite of our persecution of every practical attempt at real vagabondage. Vagabonds were not always persecuted; but to-day the very word, outside of literature, is suspect. A vagabond is no longer merely a wanderer; he is an idler and a worthless fellow to boot. Still even that does not kill our inner faith in at least his romantic claims to sympathy. Our sympathies do go out more readily to the good-natured vagabond, be he tramp, troubadour, gipsy, mountebank, soldier of fortune, or ordinary rake, than to the circumspect person of equal generosity.

It is not without significance that so much of our favourite reading is about rakes and vagabonds; such a thing is no mere fad, it is a sign. Think of Falstaff and Autolycus; of Jasper Petulengro and Sinfia Lovell; of Ragged Robin and Paragot. There are few pleasanter literary memories than these. Without doubt, Falstaff was a disreputable rogue, but somehow we prefer him to Henry IV., and in the