I have seen one such struggle and one such victory.
E N G L A N D
( 1 8 5 2 - 1 8 5 8 )
The Fogs of Lo11dort
WHEN AT DAYBREAK on the 25th of August, 1 852, I passed along a wet plank on to the shore of England and looked at its dirty white promontories, I was very far from imagining that years would pass before I should leave those chalk cliffs.
Entirely under the influence of the ideas with which I had left Italy, stunned and sick, bewildered by a series of blows which had followed one on the other with such brutal rapidity, I could not look clearly at what I was doing. It seemed as though I had needed to be brought again and again into physical contact with familiar truths in order that I might renew my belief in what I had long known or ought to have known.
I had been false to my own logic and forgotten how different the man of to-day is in opinions and in actions, how noisily he begins and how modestly he carries out his programmes, how genial are his desires and how feeble his muscles.
Two months had been filled with unnecessary meetings, fruitless seeking, painful and quite useless conversations, and I was still expecting something . . . expecting something. But my real nature could not remain for long in that world of phantoms. I began little by little to grasp that the edifice I was raising had no solid ground beneath it, and that it would inevitably crumble into ruins.
I was humiliated, my pride was outraged and I was angry with myself. My conscience gnawed at me for the sacrilegious deterioration of my grief, for a year of vain anxiety; and I was aware of a fearful, inexpressible weariness. . . . How I needed then the breast of a friend who, without judging and condemning, would have received my confession and shared my unhappiness; but the desert about me extended more and more ; there was no one near to me, not one human being . . . and perhaps that was even for the best.
I had not thought of staying longer than a month in London, but little by little I began to perceive that I had absolutely nowhere to go and no reason to go anywhere. Nowhere could I have found the same hermit-like seclusion as in London.
Having made up my mind to remain there, I began by taking a house in one of the remotest parts of the town, beyond Regent's Park, near Primrose Hill.
The little girls remained in Paris ; only Sasha was with me. As the fashion is here, the house was divided into three storeys. The 445
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whole middle storey consisted of a huge, cold, uncomfortable
'drawing-room.' I turned it into a study. The owner of the house was a sculptor and had cluttered up the whole of this room with various statuettes and models ; a bust of Lola Montes was always before my eyes, together with Victoria.
When on the second or third day after our crossing, having unpacked and settled in, I went into that room in the morning, sat down in a big arm-chair and spent a couple of hours in complete stillness, \vorried by no one, I felt myself somehow free for the first time after a long, long time. My heart was not the lighter for this freedom, but yet I looked out of the window with a greeting to the sombre trees in the park, which were hardly visible through the smoky fog, and thanked them for the peacefulness.
For whole mornings I used now to sit utterly alone, often doing nothing, not even reading; Sasha would sometimes nm in, but he did not interfere with my solitude. Haug, who lived with me, never came in-without some pressing need-before dinner which was between six and seven. In this leisure I went, fact by fact, over the whole past, words and letters, other people and myself. I found mistakes to the right, mistakes to the left, vacillation, weakness, action hindered by irresolution and overreadiness to be influenced by others. And in the course of this analysis, by degrees, a revolution took place within me . . .
there were bitter moments and more than once tears rolled down my cheeks; but there were other moments, not of gladness but of courage: I was conscious of power in myself. I no longer relied on anyone else, but my confidence in myself grew stronger; I grew more independent of everyone.
The emptiness about me strengthened me and gave me time to collect myself; I grew unaccustomed to others: that is, I did not seek real intimacy with them: I avoided no one, but people became indifferent to me. I saw that I had no ties that rested on earnest, profound feelings. I was a stranger among outsiders; I had more sympathy for some than for others, but was in no close intimacy with any. It had been so in the past, too, but I had not noticed it, being continually carried away by my own thoughts; now the masquerade was over, the dominoes had been removed, the garlands had fallen from the heads, the masks from the faces, and I saw features different from those that I had surmised.
What was I to do? I could help showing that I liked many people less, that is, I knew them better, but I could not help feeling it; and, as I have said, these discoveries did not rob me of my courage, but rather strengthened it.
England
447
London life was very favourable for such a break. There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London. The manner of life, the distances, the climate, the very multitude of the population in which personality vanishes, all this together with the absence of Continental diversions conduces to the same effect. One who knows how to live alone has nothing to fear from the tedium of London. The life here, like the air here, is bad for the weak, for the frail, for one who seeks a prop outside himself, for one who seeks welcome, sympathy, attention ; the moral lungs here must be as strong as the physical lungs, whose task it is to separate oxygen from the smoky fog.
The masses are saved by battling for their daily bread, the commercial classes by their absorption in heaping up wealth, and all by the bustle of business; but nervous and romantic temperaments-fond of living among people, fond of intellectual sloth and of idly luxuriating in emotion-are bored to death and fall into despair.
·wandering lonely about London, through its stony lanes and stifling passages, sometimes not seeing a step before me for the thick, opaline fog, and colliding with shadows running-! lived through a great deal.
In the evening, when my son had gone to bed, I usually went out for a walk; I scarcely ever went to see anyone; I read the newspapers and stared in taverns at the alien race, and lingered on the bridges across the Thames.
On one side the stalactites of the Houses of Parliament would loom through the darkness, ready to vanish again; on the other, the inverted bowl of St Paul's . . . and street-lamps . . . streetlamps . . . street-lamps without end in both directions. One city, full-fed, went to sleep: the other, hungry, was not yet awake-the streets were empty and nothing could be heard but the measured tread of the policeman with his lantern. I used to sit and look, and my soul would grow quieter and more peaceful.
And so for all this I carne to love this fearful ant-heap, "·here every night a hundred thousand men knov\' not where they will lay their heads, and the police often find women and children dead of hunger beside hotels where one cannot dine for less than two pounds.