O solitudo, sola beatitudo, Saint Bernard said; but might he not
have said just as well, _O societas, sola felicitas_? Just as truly,
I think; because when a man says that the only happiness is this or
that, he is like a lover saying that Mary Jane is the one woman in the
world. She may be truly the one woman for him, though even that is
not probable; but he cannot mean to assert that she is the only woman
living, nor to deny that each of the others might be the one woman
for somebody. Now, when a Hegelian philosopher, contradicting Saint
Bernard, says that society is his be-all and end-all, that he himself
is nothing but an invisible point at which relations cross, and that if
you removed from him his connection with Hegel, with his university,
his church, his wife, and his publishers, there would be nothing left,
or at best a name and a peg to hang a gown on, far be it from me to
revise his own analysis of his nature; society may be the only felicity
and the only reality for him. But that cannot annul the judgement of
Saint Bernard. He had a great mind and a great heart, and he knew
society well; at least, he accepted the verdict which antiquity had
passed on society, after a very long, brilliant, and hearty experience
of it; and he knew the religious life and solitude as well; and I can't
help thinking that he, too, must have been right in his self-knowledge,
and that solitude must have been the only happiness for him.
Nevertheless, the matter is not limited to this confronting of divers
honest judgements, or confessions of moral experience. The natures
expressed in these judgements have a long history, and are on different
levels; the one may be derived from the other. Thus it is evident
that the beatific solitude of Saint Bernard was filled with a kind of
society; he devoted it to communion with the Trinity, or to composing
fervent compliments to the Virgin Mary. It was only the society to be
found in inns and hovels, in castles, sacristies, and refectories, that
he thought it happiness to avoid. That the wilderness to which hermits
flee must be peopled by their fancy, could have been foreseen by any
observer of human nature. Tormenting demons or ministering angels
must needs appear, because man is rooted in society and his instincts
are addressed to it; for the first nine months, or even years, of his
existence he is a parasite; and scarcely are these parental bonds a
little relaxed, when he instinctively forms other ties, that turn
him into a husband and father, and keep him such all his days. If
ever he finds happiness in solitude, it can only be by lavishing on
objects of his imagination the attentions which his social functions
require that he should lavish on something. Without exercising these
faculties somehow his nature would be paralysed; there would be no
fuel to feed a spiritual flame. All Saint Bernard could mean, then,
is that happiness lies in this substitution of an ideal for a natural
society, in converse with thoughts rather than with things. Such a
substitution is normal, and a mark of moral vigour; we must not be
misled into comparing it with a love of dolls or of lap-dogs. Dolls
are not impersonal, and lap-dogs are not ideas: they are only less
rebellious specimens of the genus thing; they are more portable idols.
To substitute the society of ideas for that of things is simply to
live in the mind; it is to survey the world of existences in its truth
and beauty rather than in its personal perspectives, or with practical
urgency. It is the sole path to happiness for the intellectual man,
because the intellectual man cannot be satisfied with a world of
perpetual change, defeat, and imperfection. It is the path trodden by
ancient philosophers and modern saints or poets; not, of course, by
modern writers on philosophy (except Spinoza), because these have not
been philosophers in the vital sense; they have practised no spiritual
discipline, suffered no change of heart, but lived on exactly like
other professors, and exerted themselves to prove the existence of
a God favourable to their own desires, instead of searching for the
God that happens to exist. Certainly this path, in its beginnings,
is arduous, and leaves the natural man somewhat spare and haggard;
he seems to himself to have fasted for forty days and forty nights,
and the world regards his way of living afterwards as rather ghostly
and poor. But he usually congratulates himself upon it in the end;
and of those who persevere some become saints and some poets and some
philosophers.
Yet why, we may ask, should happiness be found exclusively in this
ideal society where none intrudes? If the intellectual man cannot lay
up his treasures in a world of change, the natural man can perfectly
well satisfy his instincts within it; and why shouldn't the two live
amicably together in a house of two stories?
I can see no essential reason; but historically natural society long
ago proved a moral failure. It could not harmonize nor decently satisfy
even the instincts on which it rests. Hence the philosophers have felt
bound not only to build themselves a superstructure but to quit the
ground floor--materially, if possible, by leading a monastic fife,
religiously in any case by not expecting to find much except weeping
and wailing in this vale of tears. We may tax this despair with being
premature, and call such a flight into an imaginary world a desperate
expedient; at any time the attempts of the natural man to live his
comic life happily may be renewed, and may succeed. Solitude peopled
with ideas might still remain to employ the mind; but it would not be
the only beatitude.
Yet the insecurity of natural society runs deeper, for natural society
itself is an expedient and a sort of refuge of despair. It, too, in
its inception, seemed a sacrifice and a constraint. The primitive soul
hates order and the happiness founded on order. The barbarous soul
hates justice and peace. The belly is always rebelling against the
members. The belly was once all in all; it was a single cell floating
deliciously in a warm liquid; it had no outer organs; it thought it
didn't need them. It vegetated in peace; no noises, no alarms, no
lusts, no nonsense. Ah, veritably solitude was blessedness then! But
it was a specious solitude and a precarious blessedness, resting on
ignorance. The warm liquid might cool, or might dry up; it might breed
all sorts of enemies; presently heaven might crack and the cell be
cleft in two. Happy the hooded microbe that put forth feelers in time,
and awoke to its social or unsocial environment! I am not sure that,
beneath the love of ideal society, there was not in Saint Bernard a
lingering love of primeval peace, of seminal slumber; that he did
not yearn for the cell bio-logical as well as for the cell monastic.
Life, mere living, is a profound ideal, pregnant with the memory of a
possible happiness, the happiness of protoplasm; and the advocate of
moral society must not reckon without his host. He has a rebellious
material in hand; his every atom is instinct with a life of its own
which it may reassert, upsetting his calculations and destroying
his organic systems. Only the physical failure of solitude drove
the spirit at first into society, as the moral failure of society
may drive it later into solitude again. If any one said, then, that
happiness lies only in society, his maxim would be no less sincere
and solid than Saint Bernard's, but it would not be so profound. For
beneath natural society, in the heart of each of its members, there is
always an intense and jealous solitude, the sleep of elemental life
which can never be wholly broken; and above natural society there is
always another solitude--a placid ethereal wilderness, the heaven of
ideas--beckoning the mind.
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