I am quite sure that I like solitude. There is no pleasure in the world
like waking up in the morning and feeling that absolutely the whole day
is at one's disposal; that one can work when one likes, go out when it
is fine, have one's meals when one prefers, even when one is hungry.
There is no one near enough to drop in, in this blissful corner of the
world, and a caller is a rare bird. I have too much to do ever to be
bored, and indeed the day is seldom long enough for all I have
designed. Best of all, my work, though abundant, is seldom pressing. I
have hardly ever anything to do that must be done that moment. With
some people that would end in putting off everything till the last
moment, but that is not the case with me. The greatest luxury I know is
to have accumulated stores of work on which one can draw; and my
tendency is, if ever a piece of work is entrusted to me, to do it at
once. I have few gregarious instincts, I suppose. I like eating alone,
reading alone, and walking alone. There is also a good deal to be said
for learning to enjoy solitude, for it is the one luxury that a man
without any close home ties can command. An independent bachelor is
sure, whether he likes it or not, to have, as life goes on, more and
more enforced solitude--that is, if he detests living in a town. I have
not even nephews and nieces whom it would be natural to see something
of; and thus it is a wise economy to practise for solitude.
From the point of view of work, too, it is undeniably delightful. I
need never suspend a train of thought; I can write till I have finished
a subject. There is never the abominable necessity of stopping in the
middle of a sentence, with the prospect of having laboriously to
recapture the mood; and it is the same with reading. If I am interested
in a book, I can read on till I am satiated. Never before in my life
have I had the chance of reading, as Theocrite praised God, "morning,
evening, noon, and night." But now, if I get really absorbed in a
volume, I can let the whole story, tragedy or comedy, open before me,
take its course, and draw to a close. The result is that I find I can
apprehend a book in a way that I have never apprehended one before, in
its entirety; one can enter wholly and completely into the mind of an
author, into the progress of a biography; so that to read a book now is
like sitting out a play.
All this is very delightful; and no less delightful, too, is it, if the
mood takes me, to wander off for a whole day in the country; to moon
onwards entirely oblivious of time; to stop on a hill-top and survey a
scene, to turn into a village church and sit long in the cool gloom; to
seek out the heart of a copse, all carpeted with spring flowers, and to
lie on a green bank, with the whisper of the leaves in one's ear; or to
sit beside a stream, near a crystal pool, half-hidden in sedges, and to
see hour by hour what goes on in the dim waterworld. I do not mean to
say that it would not be pleasanter to share one's rambles with a
congenial companion; but it is not easy to find one; either there are
differences of opinion, or the subtle barriers of age to overleap, or
one is conscious that there are regions of one's mind in which a friend
will inevitably and fretfully miss his way--there are not many friends,
for anyone, to whom his mind can lie perfectly and unaffectedly open;
and thus, though I do not hesitate to say that I would prefer the
society of the perfect friend to my loneliness, yet I prefer my
loneliness to the incursions of the imperfect friend.
Then at the close of day there is a prospect of a long, quiet evening;
one can go to bed when one wishes, with the thought of another
unclouded and untroubled day before one. Liberty is, after all, the
richest gift that life can give.
And now, having made this panegyric on solitude, I will be just and
fair-minded, and I will say exactly what I have found the disadvantages
to be.
In the first place, though I do not grow morbid, I find a loss of
proportion creeping over me. I attach an undue importance to small
things. A troublesome letter, which in a busy life one would answer and
forget, rattles in the mind like a pea in a bladder. A little
incident--say, for instance, that one has to find fault with a
servant--assumes altogether unreal importance. In a busy life one would
make up one's mind as well as one could, and act. But here it is not
easy to make up one's mind. One weighs all contingencies too minutely;
one is too considerate, if that is possible; and if one makes up one's
mind, perhaps, to find fault, the presence in the house of a
dissatisfied person is an undue weight on the mind. Or one reads an
unfavourable review, and is too much occupied with its possible results
on one's literary prospects. It is not depression that these things
induce, but one expends too much energy and thought upon them.
But this on the whole matters little. There is time to be slow in
decision; there is time to forecast possibilities. Indeed, it is an
advantage for the solitary man to cultivate an over-elaborate way of
considering a subject, a slow picking-up and matching of patterns, a
maddening deliberation, simply by way of recreation. For a danger of
solitude, if one likes one's work, is that one works too much and too
hard. Then one writes too much, forgets to fill the cistern; one uses
up the old phrases, the old ideas. All which is a sore temptation to a
forgetful writer like myself, who re-invents and re-discovers the old
sentences with a shock of pleasing novelty and originality, only to
find it all written in an earlier book.
But these are all superficial material difficulties such as have to be
faced in every life. The real and dark danger of solitude is the
self-absorption that is bound to follow. With one like myself, to whom
the meeting of a new person is a kind of momentous terror, who feels
forced instinctively to use all possible arts to render a clumsy
presence and a heavy manner bearable, whose only hope is to be
respectfully tolerated, to whom society is not an easy recreation but
an arduous game, who would always sooner write a dozen letters than
have an interview, with such an one the solitary life tends to make one
ghost-like and evasive before one's time. Yet it is not for nothing, I
reflect, that Providence has never pushed a pawn to me in the shape of
an official wife, and has markedly withheld me from nephews and nieces.
It is not for nothing that relationships with others appear to me in
the light of a duty, at least in the initial stages, rather than a
pleasure.
And yet I reflect that I should doubtless be a better man, even with a
shrewish wife and a handful of heavy, unattractive children. I should
have to scheme for them, to make things easier for them, to work for
them, to recommend them, to cherish them, to love them. These dear
transforming burdens are denied me. And yet would the sternest and
severest mentor in the world bid me marry without love, for the sake of
its effect on my character? "No," he would say, "not that! but let
yourself go, be rash, fall in love, marry in haste! It is your only
salvation." But that is like telling a dwarf that it is his only
salvation to be six feet high--it cannot be done by taking thought. No
one can see more acutely and clearly, in more terrible and melancholy
detail, than myself what one misses. Call it coldness, call it
indifference, call it cowardice--the matter is not mended. If one is
cold, one does not grow hot by pretending to perspire; if one is
indifferent, one does not become enthusiastic by indulging in hollow
rhetoric. If one is cowardly, one can only improve by facing a
necessary danger, not by thrusting oneself into perilous situations. To
marry without love, for the sake of the discipline, is as if a dizzy
man should adventure himself alone upon the Matterhorn; the rashness of
proved incapacity is not courage, but a detestable snobbishness. One
must make the best of the hard problem of God, not add to its
complexity, in order to increase one's patience. Neither men nor angels
have any patience with a fool, and it is the deed of a fool to
cultivate occasions of folly. One serves best by making the most of
one's faculties, not by choosing a life where one's disabilities have
full play, in order to correct them. I might as well tell the Pharisee,
who bids me let myself go, to take to drink, in order that he may learn
moral humility, or to do dishonest things for the discipline of
reprobation. I do not think so ill of God as not to believe that he is
trying to help me; as the old poet said, "The Gods give to each man
whatever is most appropriate to him. Man is dearer to the Gods than to
himself." God has sent me many gifts, both good and evil; but he has
not sent me a wife, perhaps in pity for a frail creature of his hand,
who might have had to bear that tedious fate! But I know what I miss,
and see that loveless self-interest is the dark bane of solitude. One
may call it a moral leprosy if one loves hard names; but no leper would
choose to be a leper if he could avoid it. Whatever happens in this dim
world, we should be tender and compassionate of one another. It is a
mere stupidity, that stupidity which is of the nature of sin, to
compassionate a man for being ill or poor, and not to compassionate him
for being cold and lonely. The solitary man must dwell within his own
shadow, and make what sport he can; and it is the saddest of all the
privileges of reasoning beings, that reason can thus debar a man from
wholesome experience. Even in the desolation of ruined Babylon the
satyr calls to his fellow and the great owl rears her brood; but the
narrow and shivering soul must sit in solitude, till perhaps on a day
of joy he may see the background of his dark heart all alive with a
tapestry of shining angels, bearing vials in their hands of the water
of Life.