The wild man is alone at will, and
so is the man for whom civilization has been kind.
But there are the multitudes to whom civilization
has given little but its reaction, its rebound, its
chips, its refuse, its shavings, sawdust and waste,
its failures; to them solitude is a right foregone
or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name
it, in the case of the nearly savage, and a luxury
unattained in the case of the nearly refined.
These has the movement of the world thronged together
into some blind by-way.
Their share in the enormous solitude
which is the common, unbounded, and virtually illimitable
possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed.
They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their
kingdoms they are ignorant, but of this most ignorant.
They have not guessed that they own for every man
a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and
of no obscure enfranchisement. They do not claim
even the solitude of closed corners, the narrow privacy
of the lock and key; nor could they command so much.
For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they
know not how to wish.
It lies in a perpetual distance.
England has leagues thereof, landscapes, verge beyond
verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods, and
on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not
to be measured by miles; they are to be numbered by
days. They are freshly and freely the dominion
of every man for the day of his possession. There
is loneliness for innumerable solitaries. As
many days as there are in all the ages, so many solitudes
are there for men. This is the open house of
the earth; no one is refused. Nor is the space
shortened or the silence marred because, one by one,
men in multitudes have been alone there before.
Solitude is separate experience. Nay, solitudes
are not to be numbered by days, but by men themselves.
Every man of the living and every man of the dead
might have had his “privacy of light.”
It needs no park. It is to be
found in the merest working country; and a thicket
may be as secret as a forest. It is not so difficult
to get for a time out of sight and earshot.
Even if your solitude be enclosed, it is still an
open solitude, so there be “no cloister for the
eyes,” and a space of far country or a cloud
in the sky be privy to your hiding-place. But
the best solitude does not hide at all.
This the people who have drifted together
into the streets live whole lives and never know.
Do they suffer from their deprivation of even the
solitude of the hiding-place? There are many
who never have a whole hour alone. They live
in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as people
may in a boarding-house, by paradoxical choice, familiar
with one another and not intimate. They live
under careless observation and subject to a vagabond
curiosity. Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps
the unconscious loss which is futile and barren.
One knows the men, and the many women,
who have sacrificed all their solitude to the perpetual
society of the school, the cloister, or the hospital
ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple,
visible, without moods, unchangeable, in a constant
communication and practice of action and speech.
Theirs assuredly is no barren or futile loss, and
they have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction,
of solitude deferred.
Who has painted solitude so that the
solitary seemed to stand alone and inaccessible?
There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many
a drawing of J.F. Millet. The little figure
is away, aloof. The girl stands so when the
painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for
the closing of the hours of pasture. Millet
has her as she looks, out of sight.
Now, although solitude is a prepared,
secured, defended, elaborate possession of the rich,
they too deny themselves the natural solitude of a
woman with a child. A newly-born child is so
nursed and talked about, handled and jolted and carried
about by aliens, and there is so much importunate
service going forward, that a woman is hardly alone
long enough to become aware, in recollection, how
her own blood moves separately, beside her, with another
rhythm and different pulses. All is commonplace
until the doors are closed upon the two. This
unique intimacy is a profound retreat, an absolute
seclusion. It is more than single solitude;
it is a redoubled isolation more remote than mountains,
safer than valleys, deeper than forests, and further
than mid-sea.
That solitude partaken — the
only partaken solitude in the world — is the
Point of Honour of ethics. Treachery to that
obligation and a betrayal of that confidence might
well be held to be the least pardonable of all crimes.
There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared
between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying
beside the longer, as a child’s foot runs.
But the favourite crime of the sentimentalist is that
of a woman against her child. Her power, her
intimacy, her opportunity, that should be her accusers,
are held to excuse her. She gains the most slovenly
of indulgences and the grossest compassion, on the
vulgar grounds that her crime was easy.
Lawless and vain art of a certain
kind is apt to claim to-day, by the way, some such
fondling as a heroine of the dock receives from common
opinion. The vain artist had all the opportunities
of the situation. He was master of his own purpose,
such as it was; it was his secret, and the public
was not privy to his artistic conscience. He
does violence to the obligations of which he is aware,
and which the world does not know very explicitly.
Nothing is easier. Or he is lawless in a more
literal sense, but only hopes the world will believe
that he has a whole code of his own making.
It would, nevertheless, be less unworthy to break
obvious rules obviously in the obvious face of the
public, and to abide the common rebuke.
It has just been said that a park
is by no means necessary for the preparation of a
country solitude. Indeed, to make those far and
wide and long approaches and avenues to peace seems
to be a denial of the accessibility of what should
be so simple. A step, a pace or so aside, is
enough to lead thither.
A park insists too much, and, besides,
does not insist very sincerely. In order to
fulfil the apparent professions and to keep the published
promise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover
of long seclusion or of a very life of loneliness.
He should have gained the state of solitariness which
is a condition of life quite unlike any other.
The traveller who may have gone astray in countries
where an almost life-long solitude is possible knows
how invincibly apart are the lonely figures he has
seen in desert places there. Their loneliness
is broken by his passage, it is true, but hardly so
to them. They look at him, but they are not
aware that he looks at them. Nay, they look at
him as though they were invisible. Their un-self-consciousness
is absolute; it is in the wild degree. They
are solitaries, body and soul; even when they are
curious, and turn to watch the passer-by, they are
essentially alone. Now, no one ever found that
attitude in a squire’s figure, or that look
in any country gentleman’s eyes. The squire
is not a life-long solitary. He never bore himself
as though he were invisible. He never had the
impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter Apennines,
with a blind, blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling.
Millet would not even have taken him as a model for
a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvan solitudes
of France. And yet nothing but a life-long, habitual,
and wild solitariness would be quite proportionate
to a park of any magnitude.
If there is a look of human eyes that
tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the
familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.
It is the London expression, and, in its way, the
Paris expression. It is the quickly caught,
though not interested, look, the dull but ready glance
of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart;
who have neither the open secret nor the close; no
reserve, no need of refuge, no flight nor impulse
of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in
the street, no hope of news from solitary counsels.