Author of “Romantic Germany,” “Romantic America,” etc.
HUMAN nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum inside itself. Offer the ordinary man a week’s vacation all alone, and he will look as though you were offering him a cell in Sing Sing.
“There are a great many people,” says that wise and popular oracle, Ruth Cameron, “to whom there is no prospect more terrifying than that of a few hours with only their own selves for company. To escape that terrible catastrophe, they will make friends with the most fearful bore or read the most stupid story.... If such people are marooned a few hours, not only without human companionship, but even without a book or magazine with which to screen their own stupidity from themselves, they are fairly frantic.”
If any one hates to be alone with himself, the chances are that he has not much of any self to be alone with. He is in as desolate a condition as a certain Mr. Pease of Oberlin, who, having lost his wife and children, set up his own tombstone and chiseled upon it this epitaph:
“Here lies the pod.
The Pease are shelled and gone to God.”
Now, pod-like people are always solitary wherever other people are not; and there is, of course, nothing much more distressing than solitariness. These people, however, through sheer ignorance, fall into a confusion of thought. They suppose that solitude and solitariness are the same thing. To the artist in life there is just one difference between these two: it is the difference between heaven and its antipodes. For, to the artist in life, solitude is solitariness plus the Auto-comrade.
As it is the Auto-comrade who makes all the difference, I shall try to describe his appearance. His eyes are the most arresting part of him. They never peer stupidly through great, thick spectacles of others’ making. They are scarcely ever closed in sleep, and sometimes make their happiest discoveries during the small hours. Indeed, these hours are probably called small because the Auto-comrade often turns his eyes into the lenses of a moving-picture machine that is so entertaining that it compresses the hours to seconds. These eyes, through constant, alert use, have become sharp. They can pierce through the rinds of the toughest personalities, and even penetrate on occasion into the future. They can also take in whole panoramas of the past in one sweeping look. For they are of that “inner” variety through which Wordsworth, winter after winter, used to survey his daffodil-fields. “The bliss of solitude,” he called them.