LETTER VI.
TO A FRIEND WHO KINDLY WARNED THE AUTHOR OF THE BAD EFFECTS OF SOLITUDE.
Væ solis—Society and solitude alike necessary—The use of each—In solitude we know ourselves—Montaigne as a book-buyer—Compensations of solitude—Description of one who loved and sought it—How men are driven into solitude—Cultivated people in the provinces—Use of solitude as a protection for rare and delicate natures—Shelley’s dislike to general society—Wordsworth and Turner—Sir Isaac Newton’s repugnance to society—Auguste Comte—His systematic isolation and unshakable firmness of purpose—Milton and Bunyan—The solitude which is really injurious—Painters and authors—An ideal division of life.
You cry to me Væ solis! and the cry seems not the less loud and stirring that it comes in the folds of a letter. Just at first it quite startled and alarmed me, and made me strangely dissatisfied with my life and work; but farther reflection has been gradually reconciling me ever since, and now I feel cheerful again, and in a humor to answer you.
Woe unto him that is alone! This has been often said, but the studious recluse may answer, Woe unto him that is never alone and cannot bear to be alone!
We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest. I thank heaven for a thousand pleasant and profitable conversations with acquaintances and friends; I thank heaven also, and not less gratefully, for thousands of sweet hours that have passed in solitary thought or labor, under the silent stars.
Society is necessary to give us our share and place in the collective life of humanity, but solitude is necessary to the maintenance of the individual life. Society is to the individual what travel and commerce are to a nation; whilst solitude represents the home life of the nation, during which it develops its especial originality and genius.
The life of the perfect hermit, and that of those persons who feel themselves nothing individually, and have no existence but what they receive from others, are alike imperfect lives. The perfect life is like that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share in its strength and discipline, but can also go forth alone in the solitude of the infinite sea. We ought to belong to Society, to have our place in it, and yet to be capable of a complete individual existence outside of it.
Which of the two is the grander, the ship in the disciplined fleet, arranged in order of battle, or the ship alone in the tempest, a thousand miles from land? The truest grandeur of the ship is neither in one nor the other, but in the capacity for both. What would that captain merit who either had not seamanship enough to work under the eye of the admiral, or else had not sufficient knowledge of navigation to be trusted out of the range of signals?
I value society for the abundance of ideas that it brings before us, like carriages in a frequented street; but I value solitude for sincerity and peace, and for the better understanding of the thoughts that are truly ours. Only in solitude do we learn our inmost nature and its needs. He who has lived for some great space of existence apart from the tumult of the world, has discovered the vanity of the things for which he has no natural aptitude or gift—their relative vanity, I mean, their uselessness to himself, personally; and at the same time he has learned what is truly precious and good for him. Surely this is knowledge of inestimable value to a man: surely it is a great thing for any one in the bewildering confusion of distracting toils and pleasures to have found out the labor that he is most fit for and the pleasures that satisfy him best. Society so encourages us in affectations that it scarcely leaves us a chance of knowing our own minds; but in solitude this knowledge comes of itself, and delivers us from innumerable vanities.
Montaigne tells us that at one time he bought books from ostentation, but that afterwards he bought only such books as he wanted for his private reading. In the first of these conditions of mind we may observe the influence of society; in the second the effect of solitude. The man of the world does not consult his own intellectual needs, but considers the eyes of his visitors; the solitary student takes his literature as a lonely traveller takes food when he is hungry, without reference to the ordered courses of public hospitality.
It is a traditional habit of mankind to see only the disadvantages of solitude, without considering its compensations; but there are great compensations, some of the greatest being negative. The lonely man is lord of his own hours and of his own purse; his days are long and unbroken, he escapes from every form of ostentation, and may live quite simply and sincerely in great calm breadths of leisure. I knew one who passed his summers in the heart of a vast forest, in a common thatched cottage with furniture of common deal, and for this retreat he quitted very gladly a rich fine house in the city. He wore nothing but old clothes, read only a few old books, without the least regard to the opinions of the learned, and did not take in a newspaper. On the wall of his habitation he inscribed with a piece of charcoal a quotation from De Sénancour to this effect: “In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude, in all the ages.” I observed in him the effects of a lonely life, and he greatly aided my observations by frankly communicating his experiences. That solitude had become inexpressibly dear to him, but he admitted one evil consequence of it, which was an increasing unfitness for ordinary society, though he cherished a few tried friendships, and was grateful to those who loved him and could enter into his humor. He had acquired a horror of towns and crowds, not from nervousness, but because he felt imprisoned and impeded in his thinking, which needed the depths of the forest, the venerable trees, the communication with primæval nature, from which he drew a mysterious yet necessary nourishment for the peculiar activity of his mind. I found that his case answered very exactly to the sentence he quoted from De Sénancour; he lived less in his own age than others do, but he had a fine compensation in a strangely vivid understanding of other ages. Like De Sénancour, he had a strong sense of the transitoriness of what is transitory, and a passionate preference for all that the human mind conceives to be relatively or absolutely permanent. This trait was very observable in his talk about the peoples of antiquity, and in the delight he took in dwelling rather upon everything which they had in common with ourselves than on those differences which are more obvious to the modern spirit. His temper was grave and earnest, but unfailingly cheerful, and entirely free from any tendency to bitterness. The habits of his life would have been most unfavorable to the development of a man of business, of a statesman, of a leader in practical enterprise, but they were certainly not unfavorable to the growth of a tranquil and comprehensive intellect, capable of “just judgment and high-hearted patriotism.” He had not the spirit of the newspapers, he did not live intensely in the present, but he had the spirit which has animated great poets, and saints, and sages, and far-seeing teachers of humanity. Not in vain had he lived alone with Nature, not in vain had he watched in solemn twilights and witnessed many a dawn. There is, there is a strength that comes to us in solitude from that shadowy, awful Presence that frivolous crowds repel!
Solitude may be and is sometimes deliberately accepted or chosen, but far more frequently men are driven into it by Nature and by Fate. They go into solitude to escape the sense of isolation which is always most intolerable when there are many voices round us in loud dissonance with our sincerest thought. It is a great error to encourage in young people the love of noble culture in the hope that it may lead them more into what is called good society. High culture always isolates, always drives men out of their class and makes it more difficult for them to share naturally and easily the common class-life around them. They seek the few companions who can understand them, and when these are not to be had within any traversable distance, they sit and work alone. Very possibly too, in some instances, a superior culture may compel the possessor of it to hold opinions too far in advance of the opinions prevalent around him to be patiently listened to or tolerated, and then he must either disguise them, which is always highly distasteful to a man of honor, or else submit to be treated as an enemy to human welfare. Cultivated people who live in London (their true home) need never condemn themselves to solitude from this cause, but in the provinces there are many places where it is not easy for them to live sociably without a degree of reserve that is more wearisome than solitude itself. And however much pains you take to keep your culture well in the background, it always makes you rather an object of suspicion to people who have no culture. They perceive that you are reserved, they know that very much of what passes in your mind is a mystery to them, and this feeling makes them uneasy in your presence, even afraid of you, and not indisposed to find a compensation for this uncomfortable feeling in sarcasms behind your back. Unless you are gifted with a truly extraordinary power of conciliating goodwill, you are not likely to get on happily, for long together, with people who feel themselves your inferiors. The very utmost skill and caution will hardly avail to hide all your modes of thought. Something of your higher philosophy will escape in an unguarded moment, and give offence because it will seem foolish or incomprehensible to your audience. There is no safety for you but in a timely withdrawal, either to a society that is prepared to understand you, or else to a solitude where your intellectual superiorities will neither be a cause of irritation to others nor of vexation to yourself.
Like all our instincts, the instinct of solitude has its especial purpose, which appears to be the protection of rare and delicate natures from the commonplace world around them. Though recluses are considered by men of the world to be doomed to inevitable incompetence, the fact is that many of them have reached the highest distinction in intellectual pursuits. If Shelley had not disliked general society as he did, the originality of his own living and thinking would have been less complete; the influences of mediocre people, who, of course, are always in the majority, would have silently but surely operated to the destruction of that unequalled and personal delicacy of imagination to which we owe what is inimitable in his poetry. In the last year of his life, he said to Trelawny of Mary, his second wife, “She can’t bear solitude, nor I society—the quick coupled with the dead.” Here is a piteous prayer of his to be delivered from a party that he dreaded: “Mary says she will have a party! There are English singers here, the Sinclairs, and she will ask them, and every one she or you know. Oh the horror! For pity go to Mary and intercede for me! I will submit to any other species of torture than that of being bored to death by idle ladies and gentlemen.” Again, he writes to Mary: “My greatest delight would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the sea; would build a boat, and shut upon my retreat the flood-gates of the world. I would read no reviews and talk with no authors. If I dared trust my imagination it would tell me that there are one or two chosen companions beside yourself whom I should desire. But to this I would not listen; where two or three are gathered together, the devil is among them.” At Marlow he knew little of his neighbors. “I am not wretch enough,” he said, “to tolerate an acquaintance.” Wordsworth and Turner, if less systematic in their isolation, were still solitary workers, and much of the peculiar force and originality of their performance is due to their independence of the people about them. Painters are especial sufferers from the visits of talkative people who know little or nothing of the art they talk about, and yet who have quite influence enough to disturb the painter’s mind by proving to him that his noblest thoughts are surest to be misunderstood. Men of science, too, find solitude favorable to their peculiar work, because it permits the concentration of their powers during long periods of time. Newton had a great repugnance to society, and even to notoriety—a feeling which is different, and in men of genius more rare. No one can doubt, however, that Newton’s great intellectual achievements were due in some measure to this peculiarity of his temper, which permitted him to ripen them in the sustained tranquillity necessary to difficult investigations. Auguste Comte isolated himself not only from preference but on system, and whatever may have been the defects of his remarkable mind, and the weakness of its ultimate decay, it is certain that his amazing command over vast masses of heterogeneous material would have been incompatible with any participation in the passing interests of the world. Nothing in intellectual history has ever exceeded the unshakable firmness of purpose with which he dedicated his whole being to the elaboration of the Positive philosophy. He sacrificed everything to it—position, time, health, and all the amusements and opportunities of society. He found that commonplace acquaintances disturbed his work and interfered with his mastery of it, so he resolutely renounced them. Others have done great things in isolation that was not of their own choosing, yet none the less fruitful for them and for mankind. It was not when Milton saw most of the world, but in the forced retirement of a man who had lost health and eyesight, and whose party was hopelessly defeated, that he composed the “Paradise Lost.” It was during tedious years of imprisonment that Bunyan wrote his immortal allegory. Many a genius has owed his best opportunities to poverty, because poverty had happily excluded him from society, and so preserved him from time-devouring exigencies and frivolities.
The solitude which is really injurious is the severance from all who are capable of understanding us. Painters say that they cannot work effectively for very long together when separated from the society of artists, and that they must return to London, or Paris, or Rome, to avoid an oppressive feeling of discouragement which paralyzes their productive energy. Authors are more fortunate, because all cultivated people are society for them; yet even authors lose strength and agility of thought when too long deprived of a genial intellectual atmosphere. In the country you meet with cultivated individuals; but we need more than this, we need those general conversations in which every speaker is worth listening to. The life most favorable to culture would have its times of open and equal intercourse with the best minds, and also its periods of retreat. My ideal would be a house in London, not far from one or two houses that are so full of light and warmth that it is a liberal education to have entered them, and a solitary tower on some island of the Hebrides, with no companions but the sea-gulls and the thundering surges of the Atlantic. One such island I know well, and it is before my mind’s eye, clear as a picture, whilst I am writing. It stands in the very entrance of a fine salt-water loch, rising above two hundred feet out of the water and setting its granite front steep against the western ocean. When the evenings are clear you can see Staffa and Iona like blue clouds between you and the sunset; and on your left, close at hand, the granite hills of Mull, with Ulva to the right across the narrow strait. It was the dream of my youth to build a tower there, with three or four little rooms in it, and walls as strong as a lighthouse. There have been more foolish dreams, and there have been less competent teachers than the tempests that would have roused me and the calms that would have brought me peace. If any serious thought, if any noble inspiration might have been hoped for, surely it would have been there, where only the clouds and waves were transient, but the ocean before me, and the stars above, and the mountains on either hand, were emblems and evidences of eternity.
Note.—There is a passage in Scott’s novel, “The Pirate,” which illustrates what has been said in this letter about the necessity for concealing superior culture in the presence of less intellectual companions, and I quote it the more willingly that Scott was so remarkably free from any morbid aversion to society, and so capable of taking a sincere interest in every human being.
Cleveland is speaking to Minna:—
“I thought over my former story, and saw that seeming more brave, skilful, and enterprising than others had gained me command and respect, and that seeming more gently nurtured and more civilized than they had made them envy and hate me as a being of another species. I bargained with myself then, that since I could not lay aside my superiority of intellect and education, I would do my best to disguise and to sink, in the rude seaman, all appearance of better feeling and better accomplishments.”
A similar policy is often quite as necessary in the society of landsmen.