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.