Turning back over these pages, I am conscious that I have failed to give real experiences their proper life. Describing solitude I have been dull; I have fixed the rushing flames of emotion in poor flamboyant lines. I have written far more than any reader but yourself will have cared to follow; but now at any rate the confession is over, and in the future I shall work, and use my sight for a worthier end than introspection. It has been said that the tale of any life is interesting if sincerely told; and it may be that the most ordinary lives have the advantage, because it is the common experience which touches most hearts. For the greater part mine has been a common life, unglorified by hazards in the field, or bright fulfilment of ambition; it had been better for its peace if it might wholly have kept the comfortable, usual way.
I sometimes wonder whether the printing of these pages will reveal to me any kinsmen in affliction, for such there must be going westward alone, and I wish that for a moment we might foregather as we pass, to compare the marvels of our isolation. Then perhaps I might be urged to higher effort, hearing stories more pitiful than mine, tales of silent courage under ban of excommunion to shame me from the very thought of despair. Poets have metaphorically given colours to souls; mine, I feel, is only grey, the common hue of shadows; but it was steeped in gloom by a veritable pain and evils really undergone. And as I reflect upon what I have written, and try to imagine it read by some brisk person utterly content with life, I can well understand that the whole thing would appear to him incredible, too preposterously strange for belief, a rigmarole of sick fancies beyond the power of hellebore. So be it: I expect small comprehension and no mercy, for indeed I have written caring little for such consequence, yielding to that human thirst for utterance which only confession can slake; as one eases pain by a moan though there are none to hear it. It is not altogether a grateful task. For hardly, and then only in a fortunate hour, to one whose years and feelings have been interwoven with his own, will even a healthy man tell the tale of his hidden emotion; and mine is the deeper reticence of a habit which has ever held closely to the recipe of fernseed. To entrust a confidence to one of unproven sympathy, is to risk a profitless embarrassment. It has been most truly said that both parties to such impulsive avowals, whenever they afterwards meet, must feel a constraint as of confederacy in misdemeanour.
I have hope that though I came late to the steady labour of the vineyard, I may yet earn my wage and begin the new day with the rest. Like Joseph Poorgrass I can now almost regard my diffidence as an interesting study, and agree with the rustic man of calamities that destiny might have made things even worse. Certainly the pain grows less fierce; I can go more readily among my fellows for all but social ends. For those who live much apart learn at last to see men not as individuals but in groups: to them it is the type which counts, the forma specifica per formam individualem translucens, of which the scholastic jargon speaks. Those with whom I come in casual contact appear to me now in a vague, diffused light like the atmosphere of some other world. Dwelling upon none with the eyes of intimacy, and passing swiftly from this to that, I find each but the harmless variant of a species; if I lingered or came too near, doubtless old apprehensions would oppress me still. It is a disadvantage of this outlook that the fascination of detail is lost, and that I have less sense for the personal in life. But if I grow old I shall regain the interest in particular things and persons with which age is consoled amid many miseries; for while youth grows earnest over some riddle of high art or the occultation of Aldebaran, age is happily absorbed in the arrangement of a room or discussing the destinies of a single household.
Meanwhile, though uncongenial to my kind as entering little into their pleasures, I like to be near them in their grief or happiness, standing unnoticed in the wind of their fortune's wheel. At least I am not soured or malevolent, and when there is dancing toward, I am in the crowd upon the margin of the green. I have abandoned social obligations because I am unfitted to perform them well, and society high and low exists by their cheerful fulfilment. But I no longer rail at social law or decline to see anything but evil in conventions devised by the wisdom and refinement of centuries. If I refuse invitations and leave calls unpaid, it is because I am socially bankrupt: were I solvent I should redeem all debts.
I decline therefore to denounce Chesterfield and deify Thoreau: there was exaggeration in both men, and though my sympathies are rather with the recluse of Walden pond, it is quite probable that Chesterfield was the more useful of the two. I am a bad player, I have not the high spirits or the conversational skill which each should contribute to the social game. And in almost any sport the incompetent confer a benefit by standing out: at least, that is the opinion which I hear the average player express. If I lived in the backwoods where any guest is welcome, it might be my duty to act differently. But my ways are cast in places where there is no need for social press-gangs, and the highways and hedges are left unsearched. If therefore by abstention I gain a qualified peace for myself, and confer positive benefit on others, I may go my way without serious reproach.
And I did wisely not to marry, for I should have clung too closely to my study for the happiness of any woman. I once saw an advertisement in the newspaper inserted by a discontented young wife whose husband was a recluse and would not take her out of evenings. She wanted to communicate with congenial people, and, like a desperate sailor marooned, was driven to wave her signal in the sight of the casual eye. This frank confession of abandonment made a profound impression upon me. I thought to myself, "Master recluse, you are a pilferer and have filched a life. I am yet more solitary in my estate, and if I followed your example, should be guilty of a greater wrong." There are, indeed, hours when I feel embittered at the thought that for one innocent defect a whole life should be amerced of joy; the finality of loss appals: all is so irrevocable; le vase est imbibé, l'étoffe a pris son pli. Avoided not without cause by those who were my natural associates, I grow impenetrable of access, and even in my own family unfamiliar. The resentment that welled up in the man who told the story of Henry Ryecroft obtains the mastery, and I feel one in spirit with that lonely analyst of disillusions. Sometimes a worse darkness gathers round, till I long for one of those intense and all-absorbing creeds which somehow seem to tend the brightest hearth-fires which earth knows: for philosophy, though it invented the void, never built a little Gidding.
It is then that I feel like the suppliant of the old Babylonian prayer, "one whose kin are afar off, whose city is distant," and all that appears before my sight is one scroll of wrongs which this evil heritage has inflicted upon me. It has made my best years rich in misery; it has cut me off from marriage; it has compelled me, one hating vain complaint, to live querulously in the optative mood. Neither poverty nor sickness could chastise more heavily; for poverty is strong in numbers and sickness rich in sympathy, but diffidence reaps laughter and is alone. When such thoughts win dominion over the mind I could envy what sufferer you will his most awful punishment. For in his agony be sure there is movement and action; his limbs are torn, yet he is dragged onward: by his very writhing in the bonds he confesses his life. But I lie in some dead waste where nothing moves and all is mist without horizon, lost in an abhorred blankness of dismay to which no positive suffering may be likened. Thither comes no fierce provocation to quicken into Promethean scorn; life lies whelmed in blackness unlit by flashes of defiance or the cold splendour of disdain.
Empedocles once described his dream of retribution for the last unutterable offence. For thrice ten thousand years the sinner roams estranged from bliss, taking all mortal shapes, wearing with tired feet all the sad ways of life. Æther sweeps him out to Ocean, Ocean casts him naked on the shores of Earth, Earth hurls him upward to the flames of Helios, and he, relentless, spurns the victim back to Æther, that the dread cycle may begin anew. But to be for ever driven in this majestic whirl of change, to receive the chastisement of all elements and survive unbroken for a new revolution of the wheel, this is but an assurance of the very pride of life, it is the charter of an invincible manhood. The doom which in truth befits the unutterable sin is rather the blank pain without accident or period, without point or salience to draw from stunned nature her last energies of resentment. It is well for me that this misery is short-lived, and that either by thinking on that ideal love I know the miracle of the twenty-ninth sonnet, or, struggling with instant effort out of the toils, try to see myself as I appear to others, one who should scorn to sit in thirst when there are wells yet for the seeking.
It is a strange life to lead in this pleasureful world; and if when it is over I were condemned to live again, coming like Er the Armenian to that meadow where the lots are thrown down for each to choose his own, I am already decided what character I should elect to play. I should neither cast myself for a protagonist's part nor again for that of a dumb actor in those backgrounds I know too well; but just for a plain manly character, strong to face all fortunes and rich in troops of friends. There should be no more evasion or dreary wrestling of mind with body; but life should move to a restrained harmony, and no elusive wind should carry half the music away.