 Solitude by Alice Maynall. Solitude from Essays by Alice Maynall. The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization has been kind. But there are multitudes to whom civilization has given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its shavings, sawdust, and waste, its failures. To them solitude is a right for gone, or a luxury unattained. A right for gone we may name it, in the case of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the nearly refined. These has the movement of the world thronged together into some blind byway. Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and virtually inimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed. They do not know it is theirs. Of many their kingdoms they are ignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have not guessed that they own for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty, and of no obscure enfranchisement. They do not claim even the solitude of closed corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key, nor could they command so much. For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how to wish. It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof, landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured by miles, they are to be numbered by days. They are freshly and freely the dominion of every man for the day of his possession. There is loneliness for innumerable solitaries. As many days as there are in all the ages, so many solitudes are there for men. This is the open house of the earth, no one is refused. Nor is the space shortened, or the silence marred, because, one by one, men in multitudes have been alone there before. Solitude is separate experience. Nay, solitudes are not to be numbered by days, but by men themselves. Every man of the living and every man of the dead might have had his privacy of light. It needs no park. It is to be found in the nearest working country, and a thicket may be as secret as a forest. It is not so difficult to get out for a time out of sight and earshot. Even if your solitude be enclosed, it is still an open solitude, so there be no cloister for the eyes, and a space of far country or a cloud in the sky be privy to your hiding place. But the best solitude does not hide at all. This, the people who have drifted together into the streets, live whole lives and never know. Do they suffer from their deprivation of even the solitude of the hiding place? There are many who never have a whole hour alone. They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as people may in a boarding house, by paradoxical choice, familiar with one another, and not intimate. They live under careless observation and subject to a vagabond curiosity. Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps the unconscious loss which is futile and barren. One knows the men and the many women who have sacrificed all their solitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or the hospital ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple, visible, without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication and practice of action and speech. Theirs assuredly is no barren or futile loss, and they have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction of solitude deferred. Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seem to stand alone and inaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many a drawing of J. F. Malay. The little figure is away, aloof. The girl stands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for the closing of the hours of pasture. Malay has her as she looks, out of sight. Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaborate possession of the rich, they too deny themselves the natural solitude of a woman with a child. A newly born child is so nursed and talked about, handled and jolted and carried about by aliens, and there is so much improtunate service going forward that a woman is hardly alone long enough to become aware in recollection how her own blood moves separately beside her with another rhythm and different pulses. All is commonplace until the doors are closed upon the two. This unique intimacy is a profound retreat, an absolute seclusion. It is more than single solitude. It is a redoubled isolation, more remote than mountains, safer than valleys, deeper than forests, and further than mid-sea. That solitude partaken, the only partaken solitude in the world, is the point of honor of ethics. Treachery to that obligation and a betrayal of that confidence might well be held to be the least pardonable of all crimes. There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer as a child's foot runs. But the favorite crime of the sentimentalist is that of a woman against her child. Her power, her intimacy, her opportunity, that should be her accusers, are held to excuse her. She gains the most slovenly of indulgences and the grossest compassion on the vulgar grounds that her crime was easy. Lawless and vain art of a certain kind is apt to claim today, by the way, some such fondling as a heroine of the doc receives, from common opinion. The vain artist had all the opportunities of the situation. He was master of his own purpose such as it was. It was his secret, and the public was not privy to his artistic conscience. He does violence to the obligations of which he is aware, and which the world does not know very explicitly. Nothing is easier. Or is he lawless in a more literal sense, but only hopes the world will believe that he has a whole code of his own making. It would, nevertheless, be less unworthy to break obvious rules obviously in the obvious face of the public and to abide the common rebuke. It has just been said that a park is by no means necessary for the preparation of a country solitude. Indeed, to make those far and wide and long approaches and avenues to peace seems to be a denial of the accessibility of what should be so simple. A step, a pace or so aside, is enough to lead thither. A park insists too much and, besides, does not insist very sincerely. In order to fulfill the apparent professions and to keep the published promise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover of long seclusion or of a very life of loneliness. He should have gained the state of solitariness which is a condition of life quite unlike any other. The traveller who may have gone astray in countries where an almost lifelong solitude is possible knows how invincibly apart are the lonely figures he has seen in desert places there. Their loneliness is broken by his passage, it is true, but hardly so to them. They look at him, but they are not aware that he looks at them. Nay, they look at him as though they were invisible. Their unself-consciousness is absolute, it is in the wild degree. They are solitaries body and soul. Even when they are curious and turn to watch the passerby, they are essentially alone. Now no one ever found that attitude in a squire's figure or that look in any country gentleman's eyes. The squire is not a lifelong solitary, he never bore himself as though he were invisible. He never had the impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remote apennines with a blind, blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling. Malay would not even have taken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvan solitudes of France. And yet nothing but a lifelong habitual and wild solitariness would be quite proportionate to a park of any magnitude. If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds. It is the London expression, and in its way the Paris expression. It is the quickly caught, though not interested look, the dull but ready glance of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart, who have neither the open secret nor the close, no reserve, no need of refuge, no flight nor impulse of flight, no moods, but what they may brave out in the street, no hope of news from solitary councils.