The Spirit of Place, and Other Essays

								

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 Honour 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 favourite 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 to-day, by the
way, some such fondling as a heroine of the dock 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 he is 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 fulfil 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 life-long
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 un-self-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 passer-by, they are essentially alone.