in a certain small market town. I had been in the place several days, and had come to know most of its prominent figures well by sight, when one fellow, whom I was always seeing, here, there, and everywhere, began to excite my curiosity. He was an oldish man, with a close-shaven, tanned face, and always dressed in gaiters and what seemed to be a long smock, with a curiously-shaped cap, of the same material as his smock, pressed down upon his head. These and other particulars I noted with interest, but what intrigued me most was a long pole, roughly shaped like a shepherd’s crook, which he always carried in his hand, and which seemed to be some implement of his trade. But what his trade was, I could not guess; I never saw him employed in any way, never caught him piloting beasts towards the market or making any kind of use of the mysterious pole. Yet whenever I ran across him, which I did frequently, he always seemed to be fully occupied, neither rushing heedlessly nor yet loitering, but resolutely pressing forward to some important piece of business—a sober man of affairs. Even in a little market town, there are many ways of earning bread and beer that fall outside the scope of a stranger’s knowledge, tiny trades that are commonplaces in one shire and unknown in the next, and I might easily have contented myself with assuming that my man was thus engaged. But the archaic costume and the quaintly fashioned pole, now so familiar, were too provocative, and led me to question my landlady, whose talk was fluent and full of good matter, though rather obscure. I had scarcely begun my description of the man before she had snatched the subject from me and panted forth the whole tale.
In spite of his quaint figure, I had set my man down as a sober busy citizen, engaged in some obscure little trade of his own. He was nothing of the kind. He was even more fantastic than his clothes, more mysterious than his own strange implement. For it appeared that this fellow was nothing more nor less than a crack-brained idler, one who had—in my landlady’s words—‘gone soft in the head.’ Up to a few years ago a lonely quiet man, expecting nothing from the world, he had suddenly come into a fortune, and the surprise and joy that followed this stroke of luck had turned his brain; thenceforward he blossomed madly and ran to amazing whims and crotchets, harmless enough, but strangely odd and diverting. His greatest and most delectable fantasy was this, that he took upon himself, from time to time, the duty of acting in a definite character, usually one of the ancient trades of the world; he would dress himself for the part, and, so far as it was possible, take over the habits, the interests, the mode of speech of the particular type he copied. Thus, he would be a sailor for some time, then a fisherman, and after that maybe a gamekeeper or forester; always dressing himself accordingly and keeping strictly to the type, and not declining to the actual indistinguishable characters of our own day, but presenting in his attire, as it were, the ideal sailor or forester; and so, tricked out in such homely yet symbolic vestments, perhaps thinking to take a place with the poet, ‘in the calm and proud procession of eternal things.’
When I saw him, he was a shepherd; indeed, a shepherd appeared to be his favourite character, for he had maintained the part for some time, and, according to report, showed no signs of changing. There are few shepherds in that part of the country, and the few there are do not wear smocks or carry a crook as he did. But he followed his usual practice, looked back to a simpler, smaller and more clearly defined world, and dressed the part to mark it off from all other trades. It was the least he could do, seeing that he did no actual work and devoted all his energies to the masquerade. His apparent busyness was all moonshine. The sheep he herded could not be driven to any mart in this world, for they were nothing but drifting phantoms. When he walked the sunlit streets, his grotesque shadow pursued by laughter, he hurried to mythical appointments, moved in shadowy markets, and trafficked in thin air. At the end of the day, after being urged here and there by his lively fancy, doubtless he returned home as tired and as well-content with his day’s unsubstantial labour as any sober man of business; sometimes maybe he would return elated, at others mortified, for there must be triumphs and grievous losses even in this matter of pursuing phantoms. Then, in the evening, his crook laid aside, perhaps he would make his plans for the next day; but what such plans could be, no man can imagine, for they must be dreams within a dream and shadows of a shadow. So he would pass his time, hurting no man, his life, like that of all such quaint fellows, only marred by loneliness. Nor would he lack a companion, supposing his present whimsy holds, if I had my way; for somewhere in a large and dirty city there is a sheepdog that I once knew, a dog that had never known the life it was meant to lead, never seen the hills with the sheep scattered upon them, and yet, in the yard of a warehouse, it spent its days herding invisible sheep, running round bales and barking furiously at barrels. Were that dog mine, the crazy shepherd should have him, so that the two might walk the streets together, happily pursuing their mythical flocks and otherwise busying themselves in their dream-pastures.
The maggots of the brain are not to be enumerated and labelled: what led this harmless fellow to such fantasies, no man can know. Perhaps after the sudden stroke of fortune sent his wits wandering he had been mastered by some old thought, some half-forgotten protest against the drab formlessness of labour in our day, against the absence of any marks of distinction between men of one trade and men of another; he had reverted to a more ordered clear-cut time, when every man was stamped with the sign of one or other of the ancient industries. Only in some such way, can one attempt to explain this strange masquerade of his. He has his own vision of life, his own idea of that poetry which transfigures the mechanism of blood and bone; and I trust that he will be left to himself to go his own way, for when he is weary of a shepherd’s life, there are still many time-old tradesmen, from tinker to tailor, that he can personate. Nor will it be long before I see him again, caring little whether he is still a shepherd or metamorphosed into a fisherman or cobbler, so long as he is still with us, going his own fantastic gait.
AUDACITY IN AUTHORSHIP
THERE is one certain characteristic of contemporary literature which everyone must have remarked, but to which it is very difficult to give a name. It is straining language to call it this or that quality; yet a name it must have, and Audacity will do as well as another. At the worst, it is more than audacity, it is downright impudence; at the best, it becomes engaging sauciness, youth pirouetting to the breakfast-table, or rises to magnificent unwisdom and shows us, once again, the bright fool darting before the van of the angels. It must not, however, be confused with stark originality, which presents us with the strange shape of some creature new to this world, and which is far above mere audacity. There are many ways in which a writer may approach his audience: he may seem to let us overhear him, may seem to meditate aloud, in the manner of Pater; he may take us into a corner and pour out a stream of confessions and confidences, in the manner of Hazlitt; or thrust us into the darkness and belabour us back again into the light, in the manner of Carlyle; there are these and a score of other ways, but the most of them are going out of fashion. It is all ‘Boot, Saddle and Away!’ with so many of our writers now, and we, as unoffending readers, are continually harassed by the sallies of these wild horsemen. No longer are we to be soothed, cajoled, fascinated or awed; unless we are shocked or irritated, the trick fails. We must be surprised by one or two great blows, or goaded into admiration by a thousand pinpricks. We must all play the part of poor, elderly, disapproving relatives, while our authors strut about as wild young nephews, who expect nothing from us but unwilling admiration and envious side-glances. Never was there such bravery at the end of a pen.
What then, one asks, are the signs and marks of audacity in literature by which it can be recognised in this place or that. They are countless. The ramifications of this fantastic growth cannot be traced; it blossoms so wantonly, drops such strange fruit, that a man has already seen it everywhere, or almost everywhere, or is by nature blind to it, having perhaps been nourished upon it, and knowing nothing else. It comes out in so many different ways that only a few can be noticed here. When a writer shows undisguised contempt for his readers, as so many writers do, then audacity is degenerating into sheer impudence. This sort of contempt is usually shown in two ways: firstly, by supreme carelessness in matter, as if to suggest that the very dregs of our author’s mind are good enough for his particular audience, and perhaps better than the best of his
