RECLUSES AND THE WORLD.
THE great naturalist and thinker who was buried on Wed- nesday in Westminster Abbey owed no small part of his vast influence over European thought to his comparatively secluded life at Down, succeeding, as it did, to that five years' voyage which, however little room it may have afforded for absolute solitude, must certainly have produced many of the same results, in submitting his mind during long nights and long days of forced inaction, to the full weight of those thoughts on. the conditions which modify and even revolu- tionise the organisms of Nature, with which the great spectacles of the various scenes which he visited had evid- ently filled him. When reviewing his five years' voyage, Mr. Darwin said :—" In calling up the images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes ; yet those plains are pronounced by all wretched and use- less. They can be described only by negative characters, without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains ; they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why, then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory P Why have not the still more level, the greener and more fertile Pampas, which are serviceable to mankind, produced an equal impression ?" Mr. Darwin did not himself answer the question, and perhaps at the time could
not have answered it ; but we suspect that we can answer it for him, that his own book, interpreted by his later writings, sug- gests the answer, because it shows that the phenomena of those arid and desert plains had impressed most powerfully on him the great problem of which he ultimately gave the solution. In speaking of the geology of Patagonia, in an earlier por- tion of the same book, he says, after describing vividly the plains, " as they rise like steps, one behind the other,"—" An examination of the geology of La Plata and Patagonia leads to the belief that all the features of the land result from slow and gradual changes," and after mentioning the number of extinct species of which you find the fossil remains on these lifeless plains, he goes on to argue that the same causes which so often make a species rare are precisely the causes which ultimately extinguish it. " To admit that species generally become rare before they become extinct,—to feel no surprise at the compara- tive rarity of one species with another, and yet to call in some extraordinary agent, and to marvel greatly when a species ceases to exist, appears to me much the same as to admit that sickness in the individual is the prelude to death,—to feel no surprise at sickness,—but when the sick man dies, to consider and believe that he died through violence." It is clear, then, that the interest associated with the plains of Patagonia was, in a great degree, the imaginative interest excited in Mr. Darwin's mind by seeing vividly the burial-place of so many species, and realising that the same causes which lead to the extinction of one species must lead also to the comparative advantage of others. Doubtless during that long voyage his mind continued to brood over the scenes of desolation and death which, more powerfully than any others, suggested to him the clue of his subsequent discovery. And if there was seclusion enough on that long voyage to preoccupy completely Mr. Darwin's scientific imagina- tion with that great problem, and haunt him with the scenes which most vividly suggested it, there was seclusion enough to give birth to the great ideas which the quiet life at Down enabled him to develope.
It was just the same with the great thinker whom Mr. Fronde has commemorated for us. But for the life at Craigenputtoch, " Salter Resartus " could never have been written ; nor, indeed, would the general conception of " The French Revolution " ever have been thought out. It was in the dreams and reveries of that wild moorland that Carlyle's genius was matured. Again, what poet has had so great an influence over the minds of those whom he has influenced at all, as Wordsworth ? And does not the influence of Wordsworth date from that great Hegira when " it came to pass," as Mr. Bagehot puts it, "that William Words- worth went up into the hills," there to meditate freely on those few but living thoughts and images which made his poems live for ever in the hearts of his disciples. Take the case of another man of probably greater spiritual influence than any of the three we have as yet named,—Cardinal Newman. He himself tells us how one of the great Oxford authorities,—Bishop Coplestone, if we remember rightly,—saluted him, in one of his habitually lonely walks at Oxford, with the sentence," Never less alone than when alone;" and he himself also tells us how his long musings in the lonely fishing boats of the Mediterranean, and in sickness among strangers in Sicily, blew up into living flame the smothered fire of his slow-lit genius.
Englishmen too often forget that that which for the average man is the dull, and, perhaps, even the stupefying life of seclusion, is the very condition under which great genius is nursed into its highest intensity. To be really dominated by great thoughts, you must have lived in them, and lived in them till they assumed a hundred different aspects which they are only capable of assuming for one who has applied them to all those circumstances of his life and his reading to which they are really applicable. Thought never be- comes a passion until you have brooded over it, till it flashes new light for you on a hundred half-familiar things, which, familiar as they were, you never really understood till you regarded them by the light of this thought. And till thought becomes a passion, it hardly ever becomes a power. The true reason why the thoughts of men influence them so little, is that they just pass over the mind like wind over the grass, and never really saturate it. It takes solitude to get yourself saturated by any thought, and to the great majority of men even solitude will not effect it, but only lower their thinking power to the congealing point. Nevertheless, as Mr. Darwin saw in relation to the growth and decay of species, the very condition which kills out a weak thinking power, feeds and elevates to the glowing point a strong thinking power. Lord Beaconsfield always said, and said truly enough, that men were ruled not by their interests, but by passion and imagination. Till the life of a thought becomes identical with the life of an emotion, it will never really dominate the minds of mon. And so far as we can judge by history, this result is never attained for thought, without long, solitary brooding over it, till it becomes the master-key of the mind which con- ceived it. " The passions of a man," says a striking preacher of the day (Mr. Scott Holland), " are themselves intelligent ; they move under the motives of reason." That, no doubt, is more or less tree of all men ; bat of men of genius, it is also true that their ideas are themselves passions, that they move with the tidal strength of passion, and, therefore, carry all before them. And we could hardly define better what we conceive to be the difference between a man of genius and a man of no genius, than by saying that with men of genius the thoughts behave more like passions than thoughts, and yet are, to all in- tents and purposes, thoughts still; while with ordinary men, thoughts mould and modify passions, but never live the life of passion.
Doubtless, the reason why solitude is so necessary to give to great thoughts the sway of great passions, is precisely the same as the reason why a tree which is lopped of its redundant foliage sends out roots only the deeper and stronger for the pruning. Hardy minds which cannot find outward distractions, grow in- wards ; and this very often even though, if they had outward distractions, they would expend themselves in those distractions. It takes, however, some exceptional affinity for the life of thought, to render it possible at all that thought should grow into a passion. Isolate some men with their thoughts, and their thoughts simply dry up altogether. Isolate others with their thoughts, and the thoughts take living forms, with which their whole being gradually becomes identified. This is only another way of saying that solitude tends in every considerable thinker to turn the life of thought into the life of real action ; to him, thought becomes action, and therefore also passion, for effective action breeds passion quite as truly as passion breeds action ;—indeed, no passions are higher than those which spring out of a man's knowledge that his thoughts are giving him a new hold over the life within and outside him, and are substituting for a dim and hesitating tradition, the talisman of a new vision, and the spell of a new clue to the ways either of nature or of man.
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