A History of Solitude. David Vincent
The second feature of Zimmermann’s approach has received insufficient attention in subsequent writings on the subject. His treatise was not about solitude alone. The significance of the topic lay in the movement between the conditions of sociability and retreat. His literary intervention was designed to achieve a world in which the ‘benefits of Solitude and the advantages of Society may easily be reconciled and intermingled with each other’.74 The key criterion for distinguishing between beneficial and malign withdrawal was the capacity to manage the transition between the two states. Solitude for self-recollection was acceptable if the individual possessed the strength of mind to take the gains from the period of reflection and rejoin the fray with an enhanced sense of purpose. The virtues gained in rational intercourse prior to the sojourn in solitude would guarantee a successful return to the world of debate and association. Those, however, who sought their own company for essentially superficial or self-indulgent motives would re-enter society still in a state of moral infirmity. Other forms of retirement were increasingly dangerous because they appeared to cut off the path back to sociability altogether. ‘Leisure and Solitude,’ Zimmermann warned, ‘to the imagination clouded by sorrow and despondence, do not expel, but on the contrary increase and aggravate, the evil they are fondly employed to eradicate.’75 The ‘victim of dejection’ would never recover if he avoided the company of those who might sympathize with or understand his sufferings, which ‘cannot but be aggravated and augmented in solitude’.76 The presence of solitude as both a cause and a leading symptom of melancholy ensured that sufferers lacked the resources to make their own return to spiritual health and happiness. Their condition would feed on itself, eventually generating physical symptoms which would still further reduce the prospects of recovery: ‘Solitude itself, far from mitigating, serves only to exasperate the misery of these unhappy mortals.’77 The damage wrought by religious fanaticism began with the decision to reject collective observance and the authority of spiritual leaders. A monastic vow was a ticket to a one-way journey from which there could be no return. In the isolation of the cell, the imagination would run riot, deprived of any rational constraint. A silent God would offer no comfort: ‘Solitude renders religious melancholy an earthly hell; for the imagination is thus suffered to dwell, uninterruptedly, on the terrific apprehension so inseparable from this sickness of the mind, that the soul is abandoned of God, and an outcast from Divine mercy.’78
States of mind in solitude and the capacity to make transitions between solitude and sociability were issues that had to be addressed by every following generation in the modernizing world. Zimmermann’s own answers were of his time and conditioned by his identity as a Protestant, urban intellectual. The urgency of his treatise stemmed from a sense of the deep instability of the prevailing balance of solitude and sociability. There was a tension in Solitude Considered between an endorsement of the emerging urban civilization and a reaction against its trivializing effects that went back to Petrarch and Virgil and forward to successive cohorts of critics as populations in Western Europe increasingly clustered in towns and cities. The efficacy of the movement between society and solitude went both ways. Those who had ‘their faculties narrowed by continual intercourse with vanity and nonsense’, Zimmermann observed, were in no fit state to ‘relish the delights of seclusion’.79 It was not just the major population centres. The treatise contains a heartfelt condemnation of the superficial dramas of provincial living, derived from its author’s long and increasingly resented sojourn in Brugg, the small town near Zurich where he was born and to which he later returned as chief medical officer.80 The danger derived from a sense that the elite culture of the period was hard-wired for retirement in the face of the excesses of urban civilization. Zimmermann both sympathized with this reaction and feared its consequences. It would be impossible to maintain the forward momentum of the associative project of the Enlightenment if its leading members were, like Rousseau, continually looking over their shoulders at the attractions of sylvan retreats.
The same was true of withdrawal for spiritual contemplation. The desert fathers and their medieval successors were in the bones of European religious sensibility. They constituted a common heritage of Catholic and Protestant alike, icons to be admired, celebrated and conceivably imitated. The ferocity of Zimmermann’s attack on ‘religious insanity’ reflected his awareness of its continuing attraction. Despite the further damage caused to the surviving networks of monasteries by the French Revolution, both in France and in the countries to which the Revolution was exported, their way of life retained a fading glamour. What continued to appeal was the extremity of the experience. If the problem was the corrupting comfort of urban culture, the answer lay in a complete denial of ease and indulgence. If the obstacle to restorative contemplation was the press of other people, the solution was a total escape, whether temporary or, in specific circumstances, permanent. In this sense, the monastic ideal was at once a particular, if increasingly uncommon, institutional possibility, and a more general inspiration of varieties of spiritual retreat. Within the Christian tradition, there were those driving a religious revival who, unlike Zimmermann, believed that a direct, personal encounter with God was a feasible path to revelations unattainable in an increasingly secular and commercial society.
There was further unease about the disruptive role of the imagination. Zimmermann understood its new-found power and that it was particularly creative when individuals withdrew to consider their own thoughts.81 ‘Solitude,’ he wrote, ‘acts with continual and mighty force on the imagination, whose empire over the mind is almost always superior to that of the judgment.’82 However it was precisely when the subject was alone that imagination was likely to overthrow judgement, unexposed as it was to the critique of rational discourse. English moralists such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury had debated whether, as Lawrence Klein writes, ‘solitude bred phantasms of the mind, of which enthusiastic delusions were but one sort’.83 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Romantic Movement proposed a means of focussing the imagination through an intense, frequently solitary engagement with nature. Although Zimmermann was well aware of the time-honoured duality of town and country, his discussion of the latter was perfunctory. He had limited interest in what might be termed the geography of solitude, the association of a state of retirement with a particular spatial, preferably natural, location. He came from a part of Europe that was becoming celebrated as the most awe-inspiring manifestation of the natural world, but in his own affairs he was more concerned with finding a suitable location for his medical career. Not for him the enthusiastic project of the English radical John Thelwall, who compiled The Peripatetic; Or, Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society three years after the first English translation of Solitude Considered:
In one respect, at least, said I, after quitting the public road, in order to pursue a path, faintly tracked through the luxuriant herbage of the fields, and which left me at liberty to indulge the solitary reveries of a mind, to which the volume of nature is ever open at some page of instruction and delight; – In one respect, at least, I may boast of a resemblance to the simplicity of the ancient sages: I pursue my meditations on foot, and can find occasion for philosophic reflection, wherever yon fretted vault (the philosopher’s best canopy) extends its glorious covering.84
Walking had become and would remain a critical element of the construction and practice of solitude. It will be the central issue in Chapter 2 on the nineteenth century and will be revisited in Chapter 5 on the twentieth.
The Modern History of Solitude
The long debate over solitude was given new urgency by the Enlightenment commitment to sociability. Personal exchange drove innovation but left insufficient space for intellectual exploration and self-discovery. Social interaction promoted creativity but might also distract and trivialize if there was no opportunity for retreat and reflection. A new balance had to be struck between engagement and seclusion in the pursuit of progress. At the same time, historical forms of withdrawal retained a dangerous attraction amidst the noise and materialism of an urbanizing society. The walled cloister or unpeopled nature had long been a cleansing alternative to the corrupting pressures of the contemporary world. Both threatened