My Life

I

It seems a long time since the day when Josiah Flynt came to me in the Temple, with a letter of introduction from his sister, whom I had met at the house of friends in London. The contrast was startling. I saw a little, thin, white, shriveled creature, with determined eyes and tight lips, taciturn and self-composed, quietly restless; he was eying me critically, as I thought, out of a face prepared for disguises, yet with a strangely personal life looking out, ambiguously enough, from underneath. He spoke a hybrid speech; he was not interested apparently in anything that interested me. I had never met any one of the sort before, but I found myself almost instantly accepting him as one of the people who were to mean something to me. There are those people in life, and the others; the others do not matter.

The people who knew me wondered, I think, at my liking Flynt; his friends, I doubt not, wondered that he could get on with me. With all our superficial unlikeness, something within us insisted on our being comrades. We found out the points at which undercurrents in us flowed together. Where I had dipped, he had plunged, and that aim, which I was expressing about then, to "roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, to haunt the strange corners of cities, to know all the useless, and improper, and amusing people who are alone very much worth knowing," had been achieved by him. I was ready for just such a companion, hesitating on the edge of a road which he had traveled.

We went together, not only about London, but on little journeys to France and Belgium, and on a longer visit to Germany. All that was ceaselessly entertaining to me, and came as a sort of margin to the not more serious enterprises of "The Savoy," the days of Beardsley, Conder, and Dowson. Flynt never quite fitted into that group, but he watched it with curiosity, as part of the material for his study of life.

I have been reading over his kindly and playful sayings about me in this book, which are veracious enough in the main substance of them, and it hurts me to think that I shall never go round to the Crown with him any more, or sit with him again in a café in Berlin. It was there, at the Embergshalle, that I found a poem of mine which is called "Emmy," but it was not for the sake of "material," or for those "impressions and sensations" of which he speaks, that I went about with him, but for the sake of the things themselves; and I wondered if he realized it. So what pleases me most now is when he says that he never thought of my books, or of myself as a literary man, when we were together. It was because he was so much more, in his way, than a literary man, that I cared for him so much, and it was of things more intimate than books that I liked to talk with him.

His ideas were always his own, and seemed to most people to be eccentric. He had come to them by way of his own experience, or by deduction from the experience of others whom he had learned to know from inside. His mind was stubborn; you saw it in his dogged face, in which the thin lips were pressed tightly together and the eyes fixed level. He was rarely turned out of his ground by an argument, for he avoided debating about things that he did not know. I never saw him conscious of the beauty of anything; I do not think he read much, or cared for books. His talk was generally cynical, and he believed in few people and few opinions.

Flynt had no sense of style, and when he began to try to write down what he had seen and what he thought of it, the first result was at once tedious and formal, the life all gone out of what had so literally been lived. I was a fierce critic, and drove and worried him to be natural in his writing, to write as he would talk, in a dry, curt, often ironical way. His danger in writing was to be too literal for art and not quite literal enough for science. He was too completely absorbed in people and things to be able ever to get aloof from them; and to write well of what one has done and seen one must be able to get aloof from oneself and from others. If ever a man loved wandering for its own sake it was George Borrow; but George Borrow had a serious and whimsical brain always at work, twisting the things that he saw into shapes that pleased him more than the shapes of the things in themselves. I tried to get Flynt to read Borrow, but books were of little use to him. He did finally succeed in saying more or less straightforwardly what he wanted to say, but his work will remain a human document, of value in itself, behind which one can divine only a part of the whole man. There was far more in his mind, his sensations were far subtler, his curiosity was more odd and rare, than any one who did not know him will ever recognize from his writing. His life was a marvelous invention: he created it in action, and the words in which he put it down are only a kind of commentary, or footnote to it.

Human curiosity: that made up the main part of Flynt's nature; and with it went the desire to find out everything by trying it, not merely by observing. None of the great wanderers of letters, Borrow or Stevenson, was so really a born vagabond; none had so little in the way of second thoughts behind him on his way through the world. The spectacle, the material, all that was so much to these artists, was to him only so much negligible quantity, an outer covering which he had to get through. He went to see Tolstoy in Russia, and was taken into his house, and digged in his garden. He went to see Ibsen at Munich. To neither did he go for anything but that for which he went to the tramps and convicts: to find out what sort of human beings they were at close quarters.

Whatever he has written of value has been the record of personal experience, and after several books in which there is much serious instruction as well as external fact and adventure, he ended with this candid story of himself, of what he knew about himself, and of that larger part which he did not understand, except that it led him where he had to go. The narrative breaks off before he had time to end it, with what was really the comedy of his life: the vagabond, ending by becoming so fantastically useful a member of society; the law, which he had defied, clever enough to annex him; he himself, clever enough to take wages for doing over again what he had done once for nothing, at its expense. Was it a way of "ranging" himself a little, and would he, if things had gone well, have answered the question, which I was fond of asking: What would remain for him in the world when he had tramped over all the roads of it? As it happened, he got short benefit from the change of position. He made more money than was good for him, out of detective service, first for the railroads, then for the police, and what had been one of the temptations of his life was easier, indeed seemed to him now necessary, to be succumbed to. He had an inherited tendency to drink, which had been partly kept down; now this new contact, so perilous for him, reawakened and strengthened the tendency into permanence. Gradually things slipped through his hands; the demand for books, articles, lectures, increased, as his power of complying with that demand ebbed out of him. He had friends, who held by him as long as he would let them. One of them was the only woman whom he had ever seriously cared for, besides his mother and his sisters. For three years he was rarely sober, and drink killed him. At the end he shut himself away in his room at the hotel in Chicago, as Dowson shut himself away in his lodgings in Featherstone Buildings, and Lionel Johnson in his rooms in Gray's Inn; as a sick animal goes off into a lonely corner in the woods to die in.

II

Josiah Flynt was never quite at home under a roof or in the company of ordinary people, where he seemed always like one caught and detained unwillingly. An American, who had studied in a German university, brought up, during his early life, in Berlin, he always had a fixed distaste for the interests of those about him, and an instinctive passion for whatever exists outside the border-line which shuts us in upon respectability. There is a good deal of affectation in the literary revolt against respectability, together with a child's desire to shock its elders, and snatch a lurid reputation from those whom it professes to despise. My friend never had any of this affectation; life was not a masquerade to him, and his disguises were the most serious part of his life. The simple fact is, that respectability, the normal existence of normal people, did not interest him; he could not even tell you why, without searching consciously for reasons; he was born with the soul of a vagabond, into a family of gentle, exquisitely refined people: he was born so, that is all. Human curiosity, which in most of us is subordinate to some more definite purpose, existed in him for its own sake; it was his inner life, he had no other; his form of self-development, his form of culture. It seems to me that this man, who had seen so much of humanity, who had seen humanity so closely, where it has least temptation to be anything but itself, really achieved culture, almost perfect of its kind, though the kind were of his own invention. He was not an artist, who can create; he was not a thinker or a dreamer, or a man of action; he was a student of men and women, and of the outcasts among men and women, just those people who are least accessible, least cared for, least understood, and therefore, to one like my friend, most alluring. He was not conscious of it, but I think there was a great pity at the heart of this devouring curiosity. It was his love of the outcast which made him like to live with outcasts, not as a visitor in their midst, but as one of themselves.

For here is the difference between this man and the other adventurers who have gone about among tramps, and criminals, and other misunderstood or unfortunate people. Some have been philanthropists, and have gone with the Bible in their hands; others have been journalists, and have gone with note-books in their hands; all have gone as visitors, plunging into "the bath of multitude," as one might go holiday making to the seaside and plunge into the sea. But this man, wherever he has gone, has gone with a complete abandonment to his surroundings; no tramp has ever known that "Cigarette" was not really a tramp; he has begged, worked, ridden outside trains, slept in workhouses and gaols, not shirked one of the hardships of his way; and all the time he has been living his own life (whatever that enigma may be!) more perfectly, I am sure, than when he was dining every day at his mother's or his sister's table.

The desire of traveling on many roads, and the desire of seeing many foreign faces, are almost always found united in that half-unconscious instinct which makes a man a vagabond. But I have never met any one in whom the actual love of the road is so strong as it was in Flynt. I remember, some ten years ago, when we had given one another rendezvous at St. Petersburg, that I found, when I got there, that he was already half-way across Siberia, on the new railway which they were in the act of making. But for the most part he walked. Wherever he walked he made friends; when we used to walk about London together he would get into the confidence of every sailor whom we came upon in the pot-houses about the docks. He was not fastidious, and would turn his hand, as the phrase is, to anything. And he went through every sort of privation, endured dirt, accustomed himself to the society of every variety of his fellow-creatures, without a murmur or regret.

After all, comfort is a convention, and pleasure an individual thing to every individual. "To travel is to die continually," wrote a half-crazy poet who spent most of the years of a short fantastic life in London. Well, that is a line that I have often found myself repeating as I shivered in railway stations on the other side of Europe, or lay in a plunging berth as the foam chased the snow flakes off the deck. One finds, no doubt, a particular pleasure in looking back on past discomforts, and I am convinced that a good deal of the attraction of traveling comes from an unconscious throwing forward of the mind to the time when the uncomfortable present shall have become a stirring memory of the past. But I am speaking now for those in whom a certain luxuriousness of temperament finds itself in sharp conflict with the desire of movement. To my friend, I think, this was hardly a conceivable state of mind. He was a stoic, as the true adventurer should be. Rest, even as a change, did not appeal to him. He thought acutely, but only about facts, about the facts before him; and so he did not need to create an atmosphere about himself which change might disturb. He was fond of his family, his friends; but he could do without them, like a man with a mission. He had no mission, only a great thirst; and this thirst for the humanity of every nation and for the roads of every country drove him onward as resistlessly as the drunkard's thirst for drink, or the idealist's thirst for an ideal.

And it seems to me that few men have realized, as this man realized, that "not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end." He chose his life for himself, and he has lived it, regardless of anything else in the world. He has desired strange, almost inaccessible things, and he has attained whatever he has desired. Once, as he was walking with a friend in the streets of New York, he said suddenly: "Do you know, I wonder what it is like to chase a man? I know what it is like to be chased, but to chase a man would be a new sensation." The other man laughed, and thought no more about it. A week later Flynt came to him with an official document; he had been appointed a private detective. He was set on the track of a famous criminal (whom, as it happened, he had known as a tramp); he made his plans, worked them out successfully, and the criminal was caught. To have done it was enough: he had had the sensation; he had no need, at that moment, to do any more work as a detective. Is there not, in this curiosity in action, this game mastered and then cast aside, a wonderful promptness, sureness, a moral quality which is itself success in life?

To desire so much, and what is so human; to make one's life out of the very fact of living it as one chooses; to create a unique personal satisfaction out of discontent and curiosity; to be so much oneself in learning so much from other people: is not this, in its way, an ideal, and has not this man achieved it? He had the soul and the feet of a vagabond. He cared passionately for men and women, where they are most vividly themselves, because they are no longer a part of society. He wandered across much of the earth, but he did not care for the beauty or strangeness of what he saw, only for the people. Writing to me once from Samarcand, he said: "I have seen the tomb of the Prophet Daniel; I have seen the tomb of Tamerlane." But Tamerlane was nothing to him, the Prophet Daniel was nothing to him. He mentioned them only because they would interest me. He was trying to puzzle out and piece together the psychology of the Persian beggar whom he had left at the corner of the way.

Arthur Symons.