Philosophy and Tramps

IT was a carroty-haired tramp who first interested me in reading Montaigne’s Essays, and this he accomplished not so much by pure eloquence as by the law of contradiction. If he had not said — but that belongs to another part of my story!

First and last I have had much and nutritious converse with gentlemen of the road. In the old days, before vagrancy laws became practically operative, I fed, clothed, dosed, admonished, and exchanged confidences with many a wandering wight. The spirit of errancy constitutes in itself a sort of individualism, and I have often wished that the average masculine person knew how to be as interesting as some of the tramps I have met. Conventionalizing the human race tends sadly toward squeezing the juice out of its tricks and manners.

I have in my address book the street and number of an amiable hobo whose headquarters are in Quincy, Massachusetts, and who proposes to give me a home in case I ever come to need such a haven.

“May ye niver want the same,” he exclaimed, in a gush of generous emotion, “but av ye chance to do so, ’t is there, an’ a hear-r-ty welcome wid it. Write the address down to wanst, lady, list ye for-r-git.”

When I cast my eyes upon my shelf of plants I see there a thrifty geranium, the offshoot of a parent growth which was bestowed upon me by a grateful but erratic wanderer, a wanderer who wept over the crimson loveliness of a rose, and who, in later days, having been, as he phrased it, “convicted of sin,” came to urge upon me the privilege of “meeting him in heaven.”

There was the young but precocious Southern gentleman who was fleeing from the consequences of a drunken quarrel; there was — but why enumerate, since he of the carroty hair is sufficiently typical to represent the long but engaging series of my vagrant friends.

The carroty one was not handsome, except as an exponent of the Socratic style of beauty. Snub-nosed he was, and freckle-faced, but he had a square brow, and a double row of sound and gleaming teeth. His clothes, though rusty, were clean and well-fitting, with the air of having been originally designed for their wearer, and not the abortive result of a chance benefaction. Strangest of all, the wanderer displayed well-kept hands, and equally well-preserved table manners; and under the thatch of carroty locks there shone from this freckled, snubnosed countenance that which appealed to me most of all, — the joy of the open road.

The bestowal of my cates upon an errant seeker entitles me, according to my own judgment, to sit by his side while he partakes, and probe for the heart of his mystery. The carroty one was singularly willing to reveal himself. The conversation at first assumed a violently socialistic trend, illustrative of my visitor’s right to demand, and mine to supply, the good things of life for his benefit; but presently matters took a more personal turn, and I was listening to the details of his life story.

He was, it seemed, a Swede by birth, educated, or, more properly speaking, half educated, at a government school in his own country, and after his graduation succeeding to a minor government office. In those days of respectability he considered himself, and doubtless was considered by others, to be a rather clever fellow, a belief which prevailed to such an extent that presently its object, to use his own language, “acquired the swell head.”

If he could thus distinguish himself at an early age in his own slow-going country, he argued, what might he not accomplish in America, that hotbed for vaulting ambitions ? So he resigned his government position, bade farewell to the blonde-haired maiden of his love, and sailed for the land of the free.

Unfortunately, the land of the free, already overburdened with swell-heads, received the wanderer coldly; in due season the blonde maiden, weary with waiting for promised honors, wedded another; and the disappointed one, bereft of both love and ambition, and having in an evil moment tasted the joys of freedom, henceforth threw off the trammels of conventionality, and became what he termed “an habitual thraveler.”

The determining factors leading to this career in his case seemed to be not so much the temptations of idleness as the prizes of adventure. The winding country roads led him on, the sea called him from rocky coast to coast, the mountains wooed him to their solitudes. Sometimes he worked in the hayfields for a brief season of respectability, but oftener he slept by the wayside, or borrowed the haymow as a surreptitious shelter, and shared the farmer’s crops without the burden of asking permission. It was ever the poetic, the audacious, side of life and nature that appealed to this carrotyhaired wanderer. It might be that the gulfs would wash him down; it might be he would touch the Happy Isles; and apparently he cheerfully accepted either possibility.

There was a prosperous cousin in New York, who would have furnished employment for his erratic relative had not the offer come too late, after its recipient had become fatally enamored of the joys of freedom. Since no better might be, the prosperous one bestowed cast-off garments constructed by the most expensive tailors, a small but sufficient income for pressing needs, an occasional shelter, and an unfailing appetite for his kinsman’s whimsicalities. On one occasion, when a dinner guest had failed the cousin at the last moment, the carroty-haired “ thraveler" had been clothed in fitting raiment, and allowed to lead a “so-lovely lady” to the feast; and during that function, he beguiled the fair one with such tales of clear streams and vernal meadows that she long remembered to question her host in regard to the whereabouts of his interesting kinsman.

In the winters, so my visitor informed me, he usually “ran over to London.” That city, in his judgment, furnished the most desirable winter resort, and he easily got an opportunity to work his passage across seas on a cattle steamer.

It must be confessed that the man-ofthe-world completeness of my hobo’s career began to make me feel small, yet I plucked up courage to question him in regard to food for the mind.

“You are an intelligent man,” I announced; “what do you do for books and reading matter?”

There were newspapers to be had everywhere, it seemed, — “and for libraries,” declared my hero, “I carry my own.” Thereupon, with a grand air, he cast two small volumes on the table before me, the one a well-worn copy of selections from Montaigne’s Essays, the other a compilation from the Odes of Horace, both much annotated by the pencil of their constant reader.

I was informed in picturesque English that both these authors wrote for men only, and would not interest me. Montaigne, in particular, it appeared, offered nothing that would appeal to the female intellect. It was only too evident that, through all his pretended courtesy, my guest thought very small beer of the sex to which I belong, except in their appointed vocation of prinking themselves as solovely creatures.

“What is it,” I persisted, still prodding for reasons, “that you find in Montaigne ? Since I can never appreciate him myself, I want his inwardness in a nutshell.”

The carroty-haired wrinkled his forehead till his snub-nose and his freckles seemed all that remained of him.

“It is,” he answered wisely, “that Montaigne is balance. He haf wings, yet they betray him not; he fly,yet with hees feet on the groun’. He haf what you call ‘the stuff’ in him.”

My spirit began to rise within me. Why should I allow myself to be permanently snubbed by carroty-haired and impecunious tramps?

“Don’t you think,” I asked severely, “that as an able-bodied man, with sufficient education to appreciate Montaigne and Horace, you owe some duty to the world you live in ? ”

This inquiry brought forth another flood of picturesque idiom. On the preceding night, it seemed, the wanderer had slept on fragrant hay under the golden stars. There was a lake near by, and in the morning he had appropriated an ancient rowboat, and gone forth to catch most artistically dappled fish. It was an easy and long-accustomed task to broil these decorated dainties over glowing coals; and, with potatoes roasted in the ashes, they formed a breakfast which monarchs might envy. The so-shining lake ruffled its waters under the morning breeze; every flower and shrub was sweet with the dews of the summer night, and, thus encompassed about by fragrance and buoyant airs, this happy wanderer had enjoyed his morning meal, a favorite author ready at hand in either pocket to furnish him at any moment with mental sustenance.

“I haf no one,” my philosopher went on scornfully. “ My desired-one is marry to another; I haf not the obligations to any. Shall I then gif up all this of leeberty and clear airs, that I may toil for bifsteak and grosseries ? ”

Grosseries, thus masquerading, appealed to me as a most apt word. I myself have much knowledge of so-shining lakes and clear morning airs; there are so many persons of accounted excellence to whom bifsteak and grosseries — or the equivalents for which they stand — represent the only reasonable prizes of existence; and these considerations, together with the fact that my ethics — some of them, at least — have always been fluid quantities, melted me toward my traveling friend’s logic so that the joints of my mind were as water, and I sped the carroty one on his way with the sincere hope that he might neither repent nor reform. On many a summer morning I think of him as pursuing his winding roads or lingering by the side of his so-shining lakes. Some day to him, as to his immortal snub-nosed prototype, the inexorable draught of hemlock wall be presented, yet I have faith to think he will quaff it gayly.

In the meantime, I am not the sort of woman before whom stunts may be paraded with impunity, and what a mere weak-minded female might do with Montaigne I meant to do. It was not that I was in entire darkness concerning the great Frenchman from whom even Shakespeare drew inspiration. When I had been moved to browse among Fmerson’s Representative Men, I had often found myself passing by Plato, the Philosopher, Napoleon, the Man of the World, and even Shakespeare, the Poet, to linger, though scarce knowing why, with Montaigne, the Cynic.

I had even filled some blank pages in the book with quotations from his cynicship, such as: —

“There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.”

“All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate.”

It would be sufficiently easy to fill several volumes with similar nuggets from an author who tossed them forth from a never-failing mine. Such dallyings as these, however, are but touching the hem of Montaigne’s vast and many-folded garments. Voluminous does not fairly express his quantity. He flows like a river, and babbles like a brook. When I read Montaigne or Wordsworth or Landor, I am always reminded of the advice which the baseball coacher on the sidelines so often repeats to the men on bases: “Run on anything!” Each one of these worthies — to continue the parlance of the ball-field — accepts all his chances.

If Wordsworth never gave to the world “ Lines Suggested by Seeing a Favorite Cat Crossing the Road,” it was simply because that spectacle never chanced to arrest his “inward eye;” if Montaigne never meditated, as did another celebrated author, on producing a chapter about “ Buttonholes,” such reticence was not in any degree owing to barrenness as concerned that or any other known topic. And had he attempted it, he would perchance have begun with shoestrings, wandered on to darning-needles and pruning-hooks, quoted a dozen or so of Latin authors in regard to ploughshares, related anecdotes concerning dealings of the Cymbrians, Scythians, Lacedæmonians, Romans, and the like, with knots and fastenings, mentioned his own personal experience in the matter of hooks and eyes, and ended by an exposition of the practical, mechanical, and ethical relations between a buttonhole and a button, — and every quaint and divaricating line would have endeared him to his affectionate reader.

My friend the traveler need not have urged upon my notice the essentially masculine fibre of his author’s productions. One has only to read the preface of Montaigne’s works in order to recognize there the mighty and intuitive self-confidence of his sex.

“This, reader,” he tells us, “is a book without guile. . . . It was intended for the particular use of my relations and friends, in order that when they have lost me, which they must soon do, they may find here” — to wit, in five hundred and nineteen closely printed pages of autobiographical essays — “some traces of my quality and humor, and may thereby nourish a more entire and lively recollection of me.”

What woman ever lived whose egotism was sufficiently colossal to induce her to expect such liveliness of recollection on the part of relatives and friends ? Yet to Montaigne it apparently never occurred that he was making any excessive draft on the interest of his well-wishers.

My first excursion into the broad field of Montaigne’s “quality and humor” was by way of the essay on “Vanity,” chosen because I had noticed it as one of those included in the pocket edition carried by my wandering friend. Long before I had really made this essay my own, I knew the secret of the infatuation of Montaigne-lovers. One finds his pages so simple, yet so subtle, so naive, yet so wise, so discursive, yet so intimately human,— and, withal, the writer of them possesses such a delicious aptitude for “talking through his hat.”

I could not, however, agree with the criticism which pronounced him wholly a man’s man, though that discovery would not have discouraged my researches. I suppose most women are drawn toward their masculine friends, lovers, and countrymen rather by their mutual differences and divergences of character and habit than by any law of similarity. In earliest childhood I had studied, during a period of strenuous companionship with a dearly-loved brother very little older than myself, the peculiarities of the abyss which yawns between male and female methods of reaching the goal, and of shedding off the consequences of arrival thereat. I could, in fact, remember the very day when my studies came to an end in an eternal, though slightly unreconciled, acceptance of the facts in the case.

It was on a day in early spring, and “Miss Sophia,” who was temporarily in charge of our household, sighed as she beheld the joyous splendor of the March morning and listened to the booming call of the brook.

“I sh’ll be glad when this freshet’s over,” she announced at the breakfast table, looking at my young brother with Cassandra-like prescience. “I wish ’t I was as sure I was goin’ to have roast turkey for dinner as I be ’t you’ll trail her into some mischief or ’nother ’fore the day’s out.”

I modestly avoided Miss Sophia’s prophetic glance. It was true, she had no real knowledge of the fact that my brother and myself intended to consecrate this vacation forenoon to playing “Lizy Harris crossing the river on the ice,” but in a general way she was fully persuaded that my fellow conspirator “would n’t be happy if he wan’t up to some contraption.”

When I emerged into the dazzle of out of doors, however, all my misgivings fled. The play of “Lizy” went triumphantly on. Clasping my largest doll to my maternal bosom, I escaped from slavery, I eluded my pursuers, I reached the tavern by the riverside. By this time my facile imagination had made the scene entirely real; the passion of flight was in my veins; I shuddered at the thought of the bloodhounds on my track. My brother, who had by turns assumed the rôles of the various other actors in the scene, cried as if panic-stricken, “They’re comin’! Run, or they’ll get yer!”

He was well aware of my propensity for identifying myself with my part, but his love of mischief constantly spurred him to see the spectacle to the bitter end. He now gave vent to a deep-mouthed bay, and just below the “big bridge,” where the current rushed fastest, I sprang upon a whirling cake of frozen snow, thence to another, and almost at the farther bank I was swept down in a mad rush of babbling waters, that, shrieking in my ears, buffeted me at last against the barrier of “Mis’ Weekses fence.”

When I was dragged forth, sore and dripping, my rescuer remarked dispassionately, as he helped to wring the icy water from my clothes, “Anybody’d think you’d learn a little common sense some time. What’d you do it for ? You knew there wan’t any bloodhounds after you really. Jolly! didn’t your heels fly!” and, overcome by the glee of the recollection, he gave way to unfeeling laughter.

This lack of sympathy, though sad, was only what one expected as a matter of course. Boys, for some inscrutable reason, were made like that. It might be that, in the fullness of time, I should by some indirect and unacknowledged method become convinced that my brother felt sorrow for my plight, but not by any indication here and now. Nor would his regret prevent him from speeding me to fresh undoing when occasion offered.

All this I had already learned to look upon as a part of that inscrutable and unalterable partiality for boys to which one must constantly look forward from the Being who created them. The curse of Eden, which was mentioned familiarly in my Sunday school lessons, was somehow mixed up in it. One loved boys, one yearned after them, one yielded them admiring obedience, and one paid the penalty. The author of one’s woes walked away unmoved when the cataclysm came, freely shedding off responsibility, as my brother was doing now.

“You’ll catch it,” he suggested soothingly, “when Miss Sophia sees what didoes you’ve been cutting up.”

I did not catch it, except as I suffered vicariously from the anathemas pronounced upon my companion in sin; and, sitting in my little armchair before the fire, after I had been dried and comforted, I wrestled simultaneously with the unfortunate piece of knitting which Miss Sophia presented to me as an appropriately feminine task, and the unsolved and unsolvable problems of sex.

Why should things which were right, or at least comparatively unreproved, in my brother, be wrong in me ?

Why was he endowed with a ceaseless and indisputable advantage over me by birthright alone, and not in the working out of any moral law ?

Yet even while these questions struggled in my breast, I knew that there was a fascination for me in my brother’s tyranny, that when he returned at noon I should voluntarily place my neck under the yoke once more, should wax triumphant under his smile, and wither drearily when it pleased him to frown.

All this puzzling condition of things resulted somehow from the first few chap ters of Genesis; and, while I felt the irony of my destiny, reasoned dimly over it, sometimes struggled against it, was full of budding theories about it, there were candid moments when I acknowledged to myself that, perhaps, take it for all in all, I would not change it if I could.

To one who had thus early in life accepted her fate as a female creature, there was nothing which fatally affected Montaigne’s charm as a writer in the mere fact that he had never chanced to conceive of women as beings possessed of souls. From first to last he strove mightily to be fair to a sex for the existence of which he felt no intellectual and scarcely any domestic necessity; nor do I think the fact that several of his wisest essays were addressed to women materially disproves this statement. He used these favored fair ones simply as pegs on which to hang his ever-flowing draperies of thought.

He went toward marriage with the quality of cheerful alacrity which would have inspired a journey to the whippingpost. “Might I have had my own will,” he tells us, “I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would have had me.” No quainter piece of polite literature can be found than the letter which our philosopher addressed to his wife as a kind of necessary compliment on the occasion of the death of an only daughter. And the alacrity with which he relegates to Plutarch the task of consoling her in her affliction testifies to the entire consistency of his habitual claim that the dignity of marriage is best subserved when a husband refrains from becoming too fond of his wife. Even in view of this consideration, however, such a brief and refrigerated epistle suggests an amazing degree of reticence in a writer who needs only the turning of a faucet to enable him to pour forth a quenchless stream of ideas on any and every subject, from thumbs to immortality.

In point of fact, Montaigne, though endlessly capable of sentiment, possessed absolutely no sentimentality. With all his social instinct, his vivacity of spirit, his kind-heartedness even, other human creatures existed for him rather as foils, by contrast with whose qualities he might the better study his own, than as necessary companions. His masculine fibre was not inconsistent with an inexhaustible degree of that personality of application which is wont to be considered as mainly a feminine attribute. In a world of revolution and turmoil, boiling passions and limitless indulgence, this tranquil philosopher sat peacefully in his tower, turning the inner light of his manysided intelligence on the mental, moral, and physical evolution of Michel de Montaigne. That inner consciousness of his was a key that interpreted the human world, and the reader of his rambling, egotistical, inconsequent pages finds them veined with the lifeblood of a man who embodied in himself the varied humanity of men. Nothing that concerned Montaigne was uninteresting to himself. Nothing that related to himself seemed to him to be either common or unclean, and by that alembic of good faith he cleansed his plain-speaking of evil intent.

“Authors have hitherto communicated themselves to the people by some particular and foreign mark,” he says; “I, the first of any, by my universal being; as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer. . . . I have this, at least, according to rule, that never any man treated of a subject he better understood and knew, than I what I have undertaken, in which I am the most understanding man alive.” When I first began to deluge myself with Montaigne’s candor, I wondered if half the pretenses and reserves in which we entrench ourselves were not unnecessary ones, — if a state of society in which one could say what one meant, strip off disguises, go straight for the goal, would not be an ideal one; but having, a little later, spent a summer in a country neighborhood where reserves were not the fashion, I arrived at the conclusion that absolute limpidity can flourish acceptably only in that future existence where a popular hymn assures us that we may expect “ to know as we are known.” Indeed, one trembles a little when one thinks of results that may accrue in that blissful spot. Even Montaigne’s transparency has been enriched not a little by the process of crystallization which it has been undergoing for three hundred years.

For myself, I care not at all for the many discussions which have been waged by many critics concerning Montaigne’s religious attitude, his skepticism, the worth or worthlessness of his philosophy, whether he did or did not believe in the dogma of Christianity. All these problems, the solution of which must depend so much upon phrasings, interpretations, and discriminations concerning terms, fade into insignificance before the picture, limned by his own hand on that threecentury-old canvas, of Michel de Montaigne, the man who had “the stuff in him.”

That phrase — “the stuff in him” — has an especial and abiding significance for me, on account of a bygone tale which I am not going to be too modest to mention. Once upon a time, a sufficient number of years ago, I chanced to spend a week at an island camp owned by a wooden-faced old general who had led a desperate but successful charge during the Civil War. He was the sort of general to whom desperate charges might naturally be entrusted, because he belonged to the species of human catapult that, once launched, becomes incapable of deflection.

In these piping times of angelic meekness, we are all hurrahing for an eternal peace; but in that bygone day of which I write, a few bloody-minded persons still survived whose pulses could be stirred by the thought of those mistaken but well-meaning heroes of the past,—

That old general’s gimlet-eyed but unrevealing gaze pierced all the joints of my armor, and penetrated my soul with a sense of my many deficiencies; but, on the last day of my stay, as the ancient warrior and myself, alone on the sad sea sand, were presiding over a mighty kettle of clams, he surprised me with a hollow whisper which filled my heart with joy, and made me feel that I had been brevetted on the field of battle. “You ’ve got the stuff in you!” — that was what the Valiant One pronounced, and many a time thereafter on the ceaseless battlefield of life the stuff in me would have been much poorer stuff than it proved, had I not remembered the obligation which bound me to live up to that old general’s accolade.

Montaigne, “a sufficient man, sufficient throughout,” needed no man’s accolade. Open his pages anywhere,— for he is above all things an author to be read at random, — and through all his meanderings, his whimsicalities, his posturings, one finds in him that quality of sturdy manhood which may be built on the bed rock of clear sense, of judgment far outrunning the age in which he lived, of probity that could not be tampered with, of courage that hesitated through indolence alone, never through cowardice,—and such sturdy manhood in this world is pretty good stuff out of which to manufacture sturdy angelhood in a world to come.

If, in the chances and changes of the transition that comes to the humblest of us, I should some day find the Happy Isles; if, led by his hate for the “grosseries” of this life, my friend, the “habitual thraveler,” should, all unaware, in some golden hour stray over the boundary which separates the earthly road from the heavenly, it may be that we shall meet at last upon a so-lovely paradisiacal pathway,

compare notes as to what divine transfigurations three hundred years of immortality have wrought in the “quality and humor” which made up the mortal stuff of Michel de Montaigne. To be endlessly interesting is not a bad recommendation, even for a seraph. One hopes, indeed, that a tedious angel is an impossible being; yet one trembles when one remembers the material of which saints — socalled — are made.