There are some people in the world, I am sure, who are born solitary,
who are not conscious of any closeness of relationship with others.
They are not necessarily ungenial people--indeed they sometimes have a
great deal of external geniality; but when it is a question of forming
a closer relationship, they are alarmed and depressed by the
responsibility which attaches to it, and become colder instead of
warmer, the deeper and more imperative that the claims upon them
become. Such people are not as a rule unhappy, because they are spared
the pain which arises from the strain of intimacy, and because loss and
bereavement do not rend and devastate their hearts. They miss perhaps
the best kind of happiness, but they do not suffer from the penalties
that dog the great affections of men.
I had an old friend, who was a boy at school with me, who was of this
type. He was essentially solitary in spirit, though he was amiable and
sociable enough. There can be no harm in my telling the story of his
life, as the actors in it are all long ago dead.
He was at the University with me, though not at the same College; I
think that owing to a certain similarity of tastes, and perhaps of
temperament, I was his nearest and most intimate friend. He confided in
me as far as he confided in any one; but I always felt that there was a
certain fence behind which I was never admitted; and probably it was
because I never showed any signs of desiring to claim more than he was
ready to give in the way of intimacy that he found himself very much at
his ease with me.
A year or two after he left the University I heard from him, to my
great surprise, that he was engaged to be married. I went up to see him
in town, where he was then living, and he took me to see his fiancée.
She was one of the most beautiful and charming creatures I have ever
seen, and the two were evidently, as the phrase goes, very much in
love. I must say that my friend was superficially a most attractive
fellow; he had a commanding presence, and great personal beauty, and
there was a certain air of mystery about him which must, I think, have
added to the charm. They were married, and for a time, to all
appearances, enjoyed great happiness. A child was born to them, a
daughter. I saw them at intervals, and my impression was that my friend
had found the one thing that he wanted, the companionship of a loving,
beautiful, and intelligent woman.
It was in the course of the year after the birth of the child that I
became aware that something had gone wrong; a shadow seemed to have
fallen upon them. I became aware in the course of a few days which I
spent with them in a little house by the sea, which they had taken for
the summer, that all was not well. My friend seemed to me distrait and
heavy-hearted; his wife seemed to be pathetically affectionate and
anxious. There was no indifference or harshness apparent in his manner
to her; indeed, he seemed to me to be extraordinarily considerate and
tender. One day--we had gone off in the morning for a long ramble on
the cliffs, leaving his wife in the company of an old school friend of
hers who had come to stay with them--he suddenly said to me, with a
determined air, that he wished to consult me on a point. I expressed
the utmost readiness to be of use, and wondered in an agitated way what
the matter could be; but he was silent for so long--we were sitting on
a grassy headland high above a broad, calm expanse of summer sea--that
I wondered if he had repented of his resolution. At last he spoke. I
will not attempt to reproduce his words, but he said to me, with an
astonishing calmness, that he found that he was ceasing to care for his
wife: he said very quietly that it was not that he cared for anyone
else, but that his marriage had been a mistake; that he had engaged
himself in a moment of passion, and that this had subsequently
evaporated. In the days of his first love he had poured out his heart
to his wife, and now he no longer desired to do so; he did not wish any
more to share his thoughts with her, and he was aware that she was
conscious of this; he said that it was infinitely pathetic and
distressing to him to see the efforts that she made to regain his
confidence, and that he tried as far as he could to talk to her freely,
but that he had no longer any sincere desire to do it, and that the
effort was acutely painful; he was, he said, deeply distressed that she
should be bound to him, and he indicated that he was fully aware that
her own affection for him had undergone no change, and that it was not
likely to do so. He asked me what he had better do. Should he continue
to struggle with his reluctance to communicate his feelings to her;
should he endeavour to make her acquiesce in altered relations; should
he tell her frankly what had happened; or should he--he confessed that
he would prefer this himself--arrange for a virtual separation? "I
feel," he said, "that I have lost the only thing in the world I really
care about--my liberty." It sounds, as I thus describe the situation,
as though my friend was acting in an entirely selfish and cold-blooded
manner; but I confess that it did not strike me in that light at the
time. He spoke in a mood of dreary melancholy, as a man might speak who
had committed a great mistake, and felt himself unequal to the
responsibilities he had assumed. He spoke of his wife with a deep
compassionateness, as though intensely alive to the sorrow that he had
inconsiderately inflicted upon her. He condemned himself unsparingly,
and said frankly that he had known all the time that he was doing wrong
in allowing himself to be carried away by his passion. "I hoped," he
said, "that it might have been the awakening of a new life in me, and
that it would be an initiation for me into the inner life of the world,
from which I had always been excluded." He went on to say that he would
make any sacrifice he could for her happiness--adding gravely, looking
at me with a strange air, that if he thought that she would be the
happier if he killed himself, he would not hesitate to do it. "But live
as we are living," he said, "I cannot. My life has become a continual
and wearing drama, in which I can never be myself, but am condemned to
play an unreal part."
I made him the only answer that was possible--namely, that I thought
that he had undertaken a certain responsibility and that he was bound
in honour to fulfil it. I added that I thought that the whole of his
future peace of mind depended upon his rising to the situation, even
though it were to be a martyrdom. I said that I thought, believing as I
did in the providential guidance of individual lives, that it was the
crisis of his fate; that he had the opportunity of playing a noble
part.
"Yes," he said dispassionately, "if it was the case of a single action
of the kind that is usually called heroic, I think I could do it; what
I can't say that I think I am equal to is the making of my life into
one long pretence; and what is more, it will not be successful--I
cannot hope to deceive her day after day."
"Well," I said, "it is a terrible position; but I think you are bound
to make the attempt."
"Thanks," he said; "you don't mind my having asked you? I thought it
would perhaps make things clearer, and I think that on the whole I
agree with you." He then began to talk of other matters with the utmost
calmness. The sequel is a strange one; what he said to his wife I do
not know, but for the few days that I spent with them there was a very
different feeling in the air; he had contrived to reassure her, and her
anxiety seemed for a time, at all events, to be at an end. A few days
after I left them, the child fell ill, and died within a week. The
shock was too much for the wife, and within a month she followed the
child to the grave. My friend was left alone; and it seemed to me like
a ghastly fulfilment of his desires. I was with him at the funeral of
his wife; is it terrible to relate that there was a certain
tranquillity about him that suggested the weariness of one off whom a
strain had been lifted? But his own life was to be a short one; about
two years after he himself died very suddenly, as he had always desired
to die. I saw him often in the interval; he never recurred to the
subject, and I never liked to reopen it. Only once did he speak to me
of her. "I feel," he said to me on one occasion, quite suddenly, "that
the two are waiting for me somewhere, and that they understand; and my
hope is that when I am freed from this vile body I shall be
different--perhaps worthy of their love; it is all within me somewhere,
though I cannot get at it. Don't think of me," he said, turning to me,
"as a very brutal person. I have tried my best; but I think that the
capacity for real feeling has been denied me."
It is a very puzzling episode; what I feel is that though we always
recognise the limitations of people physically and mentally, we do not
sufficiently recognise the moral and emotional limitations. We think of
the will as a dominant factor in people's lives, as a thing that we can
all make use of if we choose; we forget that it is just as strictly
limited and conditioned as all our other faculties.