INDEPENDENCE.

There is an illusory and unattainable independence which is a mere dream, but there is also a reasonable and attainable independence not really inconsistent with our obligations to humanity and our country.

The dependence of the individual upon the race has never been so fully recognized as now, so that there is little fear of its being overlooked. The danger of our age, and of the future, is rather that a reasonable and possible independence should be made needlessly difficult to attain and to preserve.

The distinction between the two may be conveniently illustrated by a reference to literary production. Every educated man is dependent upon his own country for the language that he uses; and again, that language is itself dependent on other languages from which it is derived; and, farther, the modern author is indebted for a continual stimulus and many a suggestion to the writings of his predecessors, not in his own country only but in far distant lands. He cannot, therefore, say in any absolute way, “My books are my own,” but he may preserve a certain mental independence which will allow him to say that with truth in a relative sense. If he expresses himself such as he is, an idiosyncrasy affected but not annihilated by education, he may say that his books are his own.

Few English authors have studied past literature more willingly than Shelley and Tennyson, and none are more original. In these cases idiosyncrasy has been affected by education, but instead of being annihilated thereby it has gained from education the means of expressing its own inmost self more clearly. We have the true Shelley, the born Tennyson, far more perfectly than we should ever have possessed them if their own minds had not been opened by the action of other minds. Culture is like wealth, it makes us more ourselves, it enables us to express ourselves. The real nature of the poor and the ignorant is an obscure and doubtful problem, for we can never know the inborn powers that remain in them undeveloped till they die. In this way the help of the race, so far from being unfavorable to individuality, is necessary to it. Claude helped Turner to become Turner. In complete isolation from art, however magnificently surrounded by the beauties of the natural world, a man does not express his originality as a landscape-painter, he is simply incapable of expressing anything in paint.

But now let us inquire whether there may not be cases in which the labors of others, instead of helping originality to express itself, act as a check to it by making originality superfluous.

As an illustration of this possibility I may take the modern railway system. Here we have the labor and ingenuity of the race applied to travelling, greatly to the convenience of the individual, but in a manner which is totally repressive of originality and indifferent to personal tastes. People of the most different idiosyncrasies travel exactly in the same way. The landscape-painter is hurried at speed past beautiful spots that he would like to contemplate at leisure; the archÆologist is whirled by the site of a Roman camp that he would willingly pause to examine; the mountaineer is not permitted to climb the tunnelled hill, nor the swimmer to cross in his own refreshing, natural way the breadth of the iron-spanned river. And as individual tastes are disregarded, so individual powers are left uncultivated and unimproved. The only talent required is that of sitting passively on a seat and of enduring, for hours together, an unpleasant though mitigated vibration. The skill and courage of the horseman, the endurance of the pedestrian, the art of the paddler or the oarsman, are all made superfluous by this system of travelling by machines, in which previous labors of engineers and mechanics have determined everything beforehand. Happily, the love of exercise and enterprise has produced a reaction of individualism against this levelling railway system, a reaction that shows itself in many kinds of slower but more adventurous locomotion and restores to the individual creature his lost independence by allowing him to pause and stop when he pleases; a reaction delightful to him especially in this, that it gives him some pride and pleasure in the use of his own muscles and his own wits. There are still, happily, Englishmen who would rather steer a cutter across the Channel in rough weather than be shot through a long hole in the chalk.What the railway is to physical motion, settled conventions are to the movements of the mind. Convention is a contrivance for facilitating what we write or speak by which we are relieved from personal effort and almost absolved from personal responsibility. There are men whose whole art of living consists in passing from one conventionalism to another as a traveller changes his train. Such men may be envied for the skill with which they avoid the difficulties of life. They take their religion, their politics, their education, their social and literary opinions, all as provided by the brains of others, and they glide through existence with a minimum of personal exertion. For those who are satisfied with easy, conventional ways the desire for intellectual independence is unintelligible. What is the need of it? Why go, mentally, on a bicycle or in a canoe by your own toilsome exertions when you may sit so very comfortably in the train, a rug round your lazy legs and your softly capped head in a corner?

The French ideal of “good form” is to be undistinguishable from others; by which it is not understood that you are to be undistinguishable from the multitude of poor people, but one of the smaller crowd of rich and fashionable people. Independence and originality are so little esteemed in what is called “good society” in France that the adjectives “indÉpendant” and “original” are constantly used in a bad sense. “Il est trÈs indÉpendant” often means that the man is of a rude, insubordinate, rebellious temper, unfitting him for social life. “Il est original,” or more contemptuously, “C’est un original,” means that the subject of the criticism has views of his own which are not the fashionable views, and which therefore (whatever may be their accuracy) are proper objects of well-bred ridicule.

I cannot imagine any state of feeling more destructive of all interest in human intercourse than this, for if on going into society I am only to hear the fashionable opinions and sentiments, what is the gain to me who know them too well already? I could even repeat them quite accurately with the proper conventional tone, so why put myself to inconvenience to hear that dull and wearisome play acted over again? The only possible explanation of the pleasure that French people of some rank appear to take in hearing things, which are as stale as they are inaccurate, repeated by every one they know, is that the repetition of them appears to be one of the signs of gentility, and to give alike to those who utter them and to those who hear, the profound satisfaction of feeling that they are present at the mysterious rites of Caste.

There is probably no place in the whole world where the feeling of mental independence is so complete as it is in London. There is no place where differences of opinion are more marked in character or more frank and open in expression; but what strikes one as particularly admirable in London is that in the present day (it has not always been so) men of the most opposite opinions and the most various tastes can profess their opinions and indulge their tastes without inconvenient consequences to themselves, and there is hardly any opinion, or any eccentricity, that excludes a man from pleasant social intercourse if he does not make himself impossible and intolerable by bad manners. This independence gives a savor to social intercourse in London that is lamentably wanting to it elsewhere. There is a strange and novel pleasure (to one who lives habitually in the country) in hearing men and women say what they think without deference to any local public opinion.

In many small places this local public opinion is so despotic that there is no individual independence in society, and it then becomes necessary that a man who values his independence, and desires to keep it, should learn the art of living contentedly outside of society.

It has often occurred to me to reflect that there are many men in London who enjoy a pleasant and even a high social position, who live with intelligent people, and even with people of great wealth and exalted rank, and yet who, if their lot had been cast in certain small provincial towns, would have found themselves rigorously excluded from the upper local circles, if not from all circles whatsoever.

I have sometimes asked myself, when travelling on the railway through France, and visiting for a few hours one of those sleepy little old cities, to me so delightful, in which the student of architecture and the lover of the picturesque find so much to interest them, what would have been the career of a man having, for example, the capacity and the convictions of Mr. Gladstone, if he had passed all the years of his manhood in such a place.

It commonly happens that when Nature endows a man with a vigorous personality and its usual accompaniment, an independent way of seeing things, she gives him at the same time powerful talents with which to defend his own originality; but in a small and ancient city, where everything is traditional, intellectual force is of no avail, and learning is of no use. In such a city, where the upper class is an exclusive caste impenetrable by ideas, the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone would be ineffectual, and if exercised at all would be considered in bad taste. His learning, even, would tend to separate him from the unlearned local aristocracy. The simple fact that he is in favor of parliamentary government, without any more detailed information concerning his political opinions, would put him beyond the pale, for parliamentary government is execrated by the French rural aristocracy, who tolerate nothing short of a determined monarchical absolutism. His religious views would be looked upon as those of a low Dissenter, and it would be remembered against him that his father was in trade. Such is the difference, as a field for talent and originality, between London and an aristocratic little French city, that those very qualities which have raised our Prime Minister to a not undeserved pre-eminence in the great place would have kept him out of society in the small one. He might, perhaps, have talked politics in some cafÉ with a few shop-keepers and attorneys.

It may be objected that Mr. Gladstone, as an English Liberal, would naturally be out of place in France and little appreciated there, so I will take the cases of a Frenchman in France and an Englishman in England. A brave French officer, who was at the same time a gentleman of ancient lineage and good estate, chose (for reasons of his own which had no connection with social intercourse) to live upon a property that happened to be situated in a part of France where the aristocracy was strongly Catholic and reactionary. He then found himself excluded from “good society,” because he was a Protestant and a friend to parliamentary government. Reasons of this kind, or the counter-reasons of Catholicism and disapprobation of parliaments, would not exclude a polished and amiable gentleman from society in London. I have read in a biographical notice of Sidney Dobell that when he lived at Cheltenham he was excluded from the society of the place because his parents were Dissenters and he had been in trade.

In cases of this kind, where exclusion is due to hard prejudices of caste or of religion, a man who has all the social gifts of good manners, kind-heartedness, culture, and even wealth, may find himself outside the pale if he lives in or near a small place where society is a strong little clique well organized on definitely understood principles. There are situations in which exclusion of that kind means perfect solitude. It may be argued that to escape solitude the victim has nothing to do but associate with a lower class, but this is not easy or natural, especially when, as in Dobell’s case, there is intellectual culture. Those who have refined manners and tastes and a love for intellectual pursuits, usually find themselves disqualified for entering with any real heartiness and enjoyment into the social life of classes where these tastes are undeveloped, and where the thoughts flow in two channels,—the serious channel, studded with anxieties about the means of existence, and the humorous channel, which is a diversion from the other. Far be it from me to say anything that might imply any shade of contempt or disapprobation of the humorous spirit that is Nature’s own remedy for the evils of an anxious life. It does more for the mental health of the middle classes than could be done by the most sublimated culture; and if anything concerning it is a subject for regret it is that culture makes us incapable of enjoying poor jokes. It is, however, a simple matter of fact that although men of great culture may be humorists (Mr. Lowell is a brilliant example), their humor is both more profound in the serious intention that lies under it, and vastly more extensive in the field of its operations than the trivial humor of the uneducated; whence it follows that although humor is the faculty by which different classes are brought most easily into cordial relations, the humorist who has culture will probably find himself À l’Étroit with humorists who have none, whilst the cultured man who has no humor, or whose humorous tendencies have been overpowered by serious thought, is so terribly isolated in uneducated society that he feels less alone in solitude. To realize this truth in its full force, the reader has only to imagine John Stuart Mill trying to associate with one of those middle-class families that Dickens loved to describe, such as the Wardle family in Pickwick.

It follows from these considerations that unless a man lives in London, or in some other great capital city, he may easily find himself so situated that he must learn the art of being happy without society.As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

There are two good reasons against the excessive dread of solitude. The first is that solitude is very rarely so absolute as it appears from a distance; and the second is that when the evil is real, and almost complete, there are palliatives that may lessen it to such a degree as to make it, at the worst, supportable, and at the best for some natures even enjoyable in a rather sad and melancholy way.

Let us not deceive ourselves with conventional notions on the subject. The world calls “solitude” that condition in which a man lives outside of “society,” or, in other words, the condition in which he does not pay formal calls and is not invited to state dinners and dances. Such a condition may be very lamentable, and deserving of polite contempt, but it need not be absolute solitude.

Absolute solitude would be the state of Crusoe on the desert island, severed from human kind and never hearing a human voice; but this is not the condition of any one in a civilized country who is out of a prison cell. Suppose that I am travelling in a country where I am a perfect stranger, and that I stay for some days in a village where I do not know a soul. In a surprisingly short time I shall have made acquaintances and begun to acquire rather a home-like feeling in the place. My new acquaintances may possibly not be rich and fashionable: they may be the rural postman, the innkeeper, the stone-breaker on the roadside, the radical cobbler, and perhaps a mason or a joiner and a few more or less untidy little children; but every morning their greeting becomes more friendly, and so I feel myself connected still with that great human race to which, whatever may be my sins against the narrow laws of caste and class, I still unquestionably belong. It is a positive advantage that our meetings should be accidental and not so long as to involve any of the embarrassments of formal social intercourse, as I could not promise myself that the attempt to spend a whole evening with these humble friends might not cause difficulties for me and for them. All I maintain is that these little chance talks and greetings have a tendency to keep me cheerful and preserve me from that moody state of mind to which the quite lonely man exposes himself. As to the substance and quality of our conversations, I amuse myself by comparing them with conversations between more genteel people, and do not always perceive that the disparity is very wide. Poor men often observe external facts with the greatest shrewdness and accuracy, and have interesting things to tell when they see that you set up no barrier of pride against them. Perhaps they do not know much about architecture and the graphic arts, but on these subjects they are devoid of the false pretensions of the upper classes, which is an unspeakable comfort and relief. They teach us many things that are worth knowing. Humble and poor people were amongst the best educators of Shakspeare, Scott, Dickens, Wordsworth, George Eliot. Even old Homer learned from them touches of nature which have done as much for his immortality as the fire of his wrathful kings.

Let me give the reader an example of this chance intercourse just as it really occurred. I was drawing architectural details in and about a certain foreign cathedral, and had the usual accompaniment of youthful spectators who liked to watch me working, as greater folks watch fashionable artists in their studios. Sometimes they rather incommoded me, but on my complaining of the inconvenience, two of the bigger boys acted as policemen to defend me, which they did with stern authority and promptness. After that one highly intelligent little boy brought paper and pencil from his father’s house and set himself to draw what I was drawing. The subject was far too difficult for him, but I gave him a simpler one, and in a very short time he was a regular pupil. Inspired by his example, three other little boys asked if they might do likewise, so I had a class of four. Their manner towards me was perfect,—not a trace of rudeness nor of timidity either, but absolute confidence at once friendly and respectful. Every day when I went to the cathedral at the same hour my four little friends greeted me with such frank and visible gladness that it could neither have been feigned nor mistaken. During our lessons they surprised and interested me greatly by the keen observation they displayed; and this was true more particularly of the bright little leader and originator of the class. The house he lived in was exactly opposite the rich west front of the cathedral; and I found that, young as he was (a mere child), he had observed for himself almost all the details of its sculpture. The statues, groups, bas-reliefs, and other ornaments were all, for him, so many separate subjects, and not a confused enrichment of labored stone-work as they so easily might have been. He had notions, too, about chronology, telling me the dates of some parts of the cathedral and asking me about others. His mother treated me with the utmost kindness and invited me to sketch quietly from her windows. I took a photographer up there, and set his big camera, and we got such a photograph as had been deemed impossible before. Now in all this does not the reader perceive that I was enjoying human intercourse in a very delicate and exquisite way? What could be more charming and refreshing to a solitary student than this frank and hearty friendship of children who caused no perceptible hindrance to his work, whilst they effectually dispelled sad thoughts?

Two other examples may be given from the experience of a man who has often been alone and seldom felt himself in solitude.

I remember arriving, long ago, in the evening at the head of a salt-water loch in Scotland, where in those days there existed an exceedingly small beginning of a watering-place. Soon after landing I walked on the beach with no companion but the beauty of nature and the “long, long thoughts” of youth. In a short time I became aware that a middle-aged Scotch gentleman was taking exercise in the same solitary way. He spoke to me, and we were soon deep in a conversation that began to be interesting to both of us. He was a resident in the place and invited me to his house, where our talk continued far into the night. I was obliged to leave the little haven the next day, but my recollection of it now is like the memorandum of a conversation. I remember the wild romantic scenery and the moon upon the water, and the steamer from Glasgow at the pier; but the real satisfaction of that day consisted in hours of talk with a man who had seen much, observed much, thought much, and was most kindly and pleasantly communicative,—a man whom I had never spoken to before, and have never seen or heard of since that now distant but well-remembered evening.

The other instance is a conversation in the cabin of a steamer. I was alone, in the depth of winter, making a voyage by an unpopular route, and during a long, dark night. It was a dead calm. We were only three passengers, and we sat together by the bright cabin-fire. One of us was a young officer in the British navy, just of age; another was an anxious-looking man of thirty. Somehow the conversation turned to the subject of inevitable expenses; and the sailor told us that he had a certain private income, the amount of which he mentioned. “I have exactly the same income,” said the man of thirty, “but I married very early and have a wife and family to maintain;” and then—as we did not know even his name, and he was not likely to see us again—he seized the opportunity (under the belief that he was kindly warning the young sailor) of telling the whole story of his anxieties in detail. The point of his discourse was that he did not pretend to be poor, or to claim sympathy, but he powerfully described the exact nature of his position. What had been his private income had now become the public revenue of a household. It all went in housekeeping, almost independently of his will and outside of his control. He had his share in the food of the family, and he was just decently clothed, but there was an end to personal enterprises. The economy and the expenditure of a free and intelligent bachelor had been alike replaced by a dull, methodical, uncontrollable outgo; and the man himself, though now called the head of a family, had discovered that a new impersonal necessity was the real master, and that he lived like a child in his own house. “This,” he said, “is the fate of a gentleman who marries on narrow means, unless he is cruelly selfish.”

Frank and honest conversations of this kind often come in the way of a man who travels by himself, and they remain with him afterwards as a part of his knowledge of life. This informal intercourse that comes by chance is greatly undervalued, especially by Englishmen, who are seldom very much disposed to it except in the humbler classes; but it is one of the broadly scattered, inestimable gifts of Nature, like the refreshment of air and water. Many a healthy and happy mind has enjoyed little other human intercourse than this. There are millions who never get a formal invitation, and yet in this accidental way they hear many a bit of entertaining or instructive talk. The greatest charm of it is its consistency with the most absolute independence. No abandonment of principle is required, nor any false assumption. You stand simply on your elementary right to consideration as a decent human being within the great pale of civilization.There is, however, another sense in which every superior person is greatly exposed to the evil of solitude if he lives outside of a great capital city.

Without misanthropy, and without any unjust or unkind contempt for our fellow-creatures, we still must perceive that mankind in general have no other purpose than to live in comfort with little mental exertion. The desire for comfort is not wholly selfish, because people want it for their families as much as for themselves, but it is a low motive in this sense, that it is scarcely compatible with the higher kinds of mental exertion, whilst it is entirely incompatible with devotion to great causes. The object of common men is not to do noble work by their own personal efforts, but so to plot and contrive that others may be industrious for their benefit, and not for their highest benefit, but in order that they may have curtains and carpets.

Those for whom accumulated riches have already provided these objects of desire seldom care greatly for anything except amusements. If they have ambition, it is for a higher social rank.

These three common pursuits, comfort, amusements, rank, lie so much outside of the disciplinary studies that a man of studious habits is likely to find himself alone in a peculiar sense. As a human being he is not alone, but as a serious thinker and worker he may find himself in complete solitude.

Many readers will remember the well-known passage in Stuart Mill’s autobiography, in which he dealt with this subject. It has often been quoted against him, because he went so far as to say that “a person of high intellect should never go into unintellectual society, unless he can enter it as an apostle,” a passage not likely to make its author beloved by society of that kind; yet Mill was not a misanthropist, he was only anxious to preserve what there is of high feeling and high principle from deterioration by too much contact with the common world. It was not so much that he despised the common world, as that he knew the infinite preciousness, even to the common people themselves, of the few better and higher minds. He knew how difficult it is for such minds to “retain their higher principles unimpaired,” and how at least “with respect to the persons and affairs of their own day they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep.”

Perhaps I may do well to offer an illustration of this, though from a department of culture that may not have been in Mill’s view when he wrote the passage.

I myself have known a certain painter (not belonging to the English school) who had a severe and elevated ideal of his art. As his earnings were small he went to live in the country for economy. He then began to associate intimately with people to whom all high aims in painting were unintelligible. Gradually he himself lost his interest in them and his nobler purposes were abandoned. Finally, art itself was abandoned and he became a coffee-house politician.

So it is with all rare and exceptional pursuits if once we allow ourselves to take, in all respects, the color of the common world. It is impossible to keep up a foreign language, an art, a science, if we are living away from other followers of our pursuit and cannot endure solitude.

It follows from this that there are many situations in which men have to learn that particular kind of independence which consists in bearing isolation patiently for the preservation of their better selves. In a world of common-sense they have to keep a little place apart for a kind of sense that is sound and rational but not common.

This isolation would indeed be difficult to bear if it were not mitigated by certain palliatives that enable a superior mind to be healthy and active in its loneliness. The first of these is reading, which is seldom valued at its almost inestimable worth. By the variety of its records and inventions, literature continually affords the refreshment of change, not to speak of that variety which may be had so easily by a change of language when the reader knows several different tongues, and the other marvellous variety due to difference in the date of books. In fact, literature affords a far wider variety than conversation itself, for we can talk only with the living, but literature enables us to descend, like Ulysses, into the shadowy kingdom of the dead. There is but one defect in literature,—that the talk is all on one side, so that we are listeners, as at a sermon or a lecture, and not sharers in some antique symposium, our own brows crowned with flowers, and our own tongues loosened with wine. The exercise of the tongue is wanting, and to some it is an imperious need, so that they will talk to the most uncongenial human beings, or even to parrots and dogs. If we value books as the great palliative of solitude and help to mental independence, let us not undervalue those intelligent periodicals that keep our minds modern and prevent us from living altogether in some other century than our own. Periodicals are a kind of correspondence more easily read than manuscript and involving no obligation to answer. There is also the great palliative of occasional direct correspondence with those who understand our pursuits; and here we have the advantage of using our own tongues, not physically, but at least in an imaginative way.

A powerful support to some minds is the constantly changing beauty of the natural world, which becomes like a great and ever-present companion. I am anxious to avoid any exaggeration of this benefit, because I know that to many it counts for nothing; and an author ought not to think only of those who have his own mental constitution; but although natural beauty is of little use to one solitary mind, it may be like a living friend to another. As a paragraph of real experience is worth pages of speculation, I may say that I have always found it possible to live happily in solitude, provided that the place was surrounded by varied, beautiful, and changeful scenery, but that in ugly or even monotonous places I have felt society to be as necessary as it was welcome. Byron’s expression,—

“I made me friends of mountains,”

and Wordsworth’s,

“Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her,”are not more than plain statements of the companionship that some minds find in the beauty of landscape. They are often accused of affectation, but in truth I believe that we who have that passion, instead of expressing more than we feel, have generally rather a tendency to be reserved upon the subject, as we seldom expect sympathy. Many of us would rather live in solitude and on small means at Como than on a great income in Manchester. This may be a foolish preference; but let the reader remember the profound utterance of Blake, that if the fool would but persevere in his folly he would become wise.

However powerful may be the aid of books and natural scenery in enabling us to bear solitude, the best help of all must be found in our occupations themselves. Steady workers do not need much company. To be occupied with a task that is difficult and arduous, but that we know to be within our powers, and to awake early every morning with the delightful feeling that the whole day can be given to it without fear of interruption, is the perfection of happiness for one who has the gift of throwing himself heartily into his work. When night comes he will be a little weary, and more disposed for tranquil sleep than to “danser jusqu’ au jour chez l’ambassadeur de France.”

This is the best independence,—to have something to do and something that can be done, and done most perfectly, in solitude. Then the lonely hours flow on like smoothly gliding water, bearing one insensibly to the evening. The workman says, “Is my sight failing?” and lo the sun has set!There is but one objection to this absorption in worthy toil. It is that as the day passes so passes life itself, that succession of many days. The workman thinks of nothing but his work, and finds the time all too short. At length he suddenly perceives that he is old, and wonders if life might not have been made to seem a little longer, and if, after all, it has been quite the best policy always to avoid ennui.