Читать книгу A History of Solitude - David Vincent, Дэвид Винсент - Страница 7

In 1791, the first full-length study of solitude for more than four centuries was published in England. Solitude Considered with Respect to its Dangerous Influence Upon the Mind and Heart was a shortened translation of the four-volume Über die Einsamkeit, written in 1784 and 1785 by Johann Georg Zimmermann, personal physician to George III in Hanover and to the late Frederick the Great. The book was not universally welcomed. ‘An essay on solitude, in 380 pages,’ grumbled the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘seems to require confinement in a solitary cell to read it.’¹ But there were plenty of purchasers prepared to undertake the challenge. It was an immediate publishing success, generating further editions and competing translations annually during the 1790s, and a scattering of reprints in the first third of the following century.² ‘Zimmerman on Solitude’, widely available on second-hand bookstalls, became part of the literary furniture of the modernizing society.³

The topic was inherently controversial. ‘Various are the opinions concerning Solitude,’ observed the Critical Review in its response to the publication. ‘By some it is considered as the parent of all human excellence and felicity; by others, as the depraver of the faculties, and the source of disquietude: and those who can endure it have been stated to be either above or below the standard of humanity.’⁴ Early English versions of Zimmermann’s book, which omitted much of the criticism of solitude, led to a popular misconception that it was a mere celebration of retirement.⁵ However Zimmermann’s powerfully argued treatise was a much more complex document. Throughout the book he addressed the task of balancing ‘all the comforts and blessings of Society’ with ‘all the advantages of Seclusion’.⁶ Neither way of living was sufficient in itself, or invulnerable to destruction by its opposite. ‘When we scrutinise its calamitous operation in the cloister and the desert,’ Zimmermann wrote, ‘we shall revolt with horror from the lamentable and hateful spectacle; and acknowledge ourselves fully persuaded, that, if the proper condition of man does not consist in a promiscuous and dissipated commerce with the world, still less does he fulfil the duties of his station, by a savage and stubborn renunciation of their society.’⁷

The proper condition of man, and woman, is the subject of this history. It seeks to understand how people over the last two centuries have conducted themselves in the absence of company. Zimmermann’s treatise was a way station in a debate about social engagement and disengagement that stretches back to classical times and has acquired new urgency in our own era.⁸ Current anxieties about the ‘loneliness epidemic’ and the fate of interpersonal relations in the digital culture are reformulations of dilemmas that have surfaced in prose and verse for more than two millennia. In selecting the topic of his magnum opus, itself an expanded version of a shorter study of 1755–6, Zimmermann made no claim to originality. He was engaging with a range of authorities, particularly Petrarch’s The Life of Solitude, written between 1346 and 1356, and published as a book just over a century later.⁹ Petrarch was conducting a discussion with early and pre-Christian authorities, and Zimmermann in turn was seeking to re-focus rather than invent the subject. He was a Swiss German with a French-speaking mother, widely read in English as well as his native languages, and conversant with the numerous eighteenth-century treatments of the topic in novels and poetry.¹⁰ His book was rapidly translated because both its subject matter and its evidential frame of reference were familiar to any educated European of the period. It stood in the mainstream of one of the longest debates in Western culture and at the same time constituted a critical reaction to a period of unprecedented change. Zimmermann was deeply immersed in the urban bourgeois society that was beginning to recognize itself as an historical force, and in his old age witnessed the French Revolution taking place on the other side of his native Jura.

The point of departure and return in Solitude Considered was what Zimmermann termed ‘social and liberal intercourse’.¹¹ Despite a personal predilection for withdrawal, he was sympathetic to the Enlightenment endorsement of social exchange as the engine of cultural and mental progress. As one of Europe’s leading medical practitioners, he was professionally committed to physical engagement with his patients. Theoretical explanations, learned and advanced in the closet, were not sufficient. Effective treatment of sickness required direct observation and accumulated practical experience.¹² Zimmermann’s emphasis on social contact constituted a description of his own methods and achievement:

The best and sagest moralists have ever sought to mix with mankind; to review every class of life; to study the virtues, and detect the vices, by which each are peculiarly marked. It has been by founding their disquisitions and essays on men and manners, upon actual observation, that they have owed much of the success, with which their virtuous efforts have been crowned.¹³

Two successful marriages and increasing worldly fame underpinned his broader analysis. ‘Affectionate intercourse,’ he wrote at the beginning of Solitude Considered, ‘is an inexhaustible fund of delight and happiness. In the expression of our feelings, in the communication of our opinions, in the reciprocal interchange of ideas and sentiments, there lies a treasure of enjoyment, for which the solitary hermit, and even the surly misanthrope, continually sighs.’¹⁴ Zimmermann shared with the intellectuals with whom he worked and corresponded across Europe the Enlightenment belief that human nature was essentially social, and that all other modes of living were either a deviation or a temporary respite from the pursuit of personal contentment and collective advancement.¹⁵ ‘Solitude must render the heart callous,’ he observed in his collected Aphorisms. ‘What has it whilst alone to pity, or to cherish? It makes no provision but for itself; there its care begins, there it terminates. Humanity is unknown to the Solitaire. Without it, and all the dear cares that it includes, of what worth is existence?’¹⁶ Diderot’s Encyclopédie debated the subject. Respect should be paid to the Carthusians, but their way of life belonged to much earlier centuries of church persecution. Times had changed. ‘In our tranquil era,’ the Encyclopédie argued, ‘a truly robust virtue is one that walks firmly through obstacles, and not one that flees them. … A solitary is, in regard to rest of mankind, like an inanimate being; his prayers and his contemplative life, which no one sees, have no influence on society which has more need of examples of virtue before its eyes than in the forests.’¹⁷

Duty and self-interest conspired to relegate solitude to the margins of useful living. Zimmermann’s contemporary Christian Garve, an influential propagandist of the German Enlightenment, summarized the approach: ‘Overall, and in the nature of things, society seems to be made for times of health, vivacity, and amusement; solitude, by contrast, seems to be the natural haven of the infirm, the grieved, and the stricken.’¹⁸ There were classical precedents for this emphasis, but the more recent authorities with whom Zimmermann was debating had taken an alternative view. Petrarch was in flight from the corruption and distraction of urban commerce: ‘And so, to dismiss the matter once for all,’ he concluded, ‘in my opinion practically every busy man is unhappy.’¹⁹ In the late sixteenth century, Montaigne, in his ‘Essay on Solitude’, set out an essentially secular argument for withdrawal from the press of business. He presented a set of prescriptions for solitary self-sufficiency: ‘Now since we are undertaking to live, without companions, by ourselves, let us make our happiness depend on ourselves; let us loose ourselves from the bonds which tie us to others; let us gain power over ourselves to live really and truly alone – and of doing so in contentment.’²⁰ His notion of retirement was not an intermission from public life but a permanent cessation.

By the later seventeenth century, the increasing prosperity and influence of the commercial classes were reflected in a new emphasis in the long-standing debate over the competing virtues of contemplation and action. John Evelyn, who in his private life found time for meditative retreat, adopted the case for sociable endeavour in both business and religion in response to a provocative essay by the Scottish lawyer George Mackenzie.²¹ In Publick Employment and an Active Life Prefer’d to Solitude, he argued against extreme forms of spiritual and secular withdrawal. ‘Certainly,’ he wrote, ‘those who either know the value of themselves, or their imployments, may find useful entertainments, without retiring into Wildernesses, immuring themselves, renouncing the World, and deserting publick affairs.’²² The free exchange of ideas was the driver of both personal and collective wealth. ‘For, believe it Sir,’ he insisted, ‘the Wisest men are not made in Chambers and Closets crowded with shelves; but by habitudes and active Conversations.’²³ Periods of reflection were adjuncts to public life, not substitutes for it. The structures of commerce and politics were still vulnerable to the seductive appeal of escape from the demands and disciplines of collective discourse. ‘The result of all is,’ Evelyn’s essay concluded, ‘Solitude produces ignorance, renders us barbarous, feeds revenge, disposes to envy, creates Witches, dispeoples the World, renders it a desart, and would soon dissolve it.’²⁴

Amongst his contemporaries, Zimmermann was unusual in seeking to explore the range of circumstances that might cause an individual to retreat from the domestic and public structures of eighteenth-century life. His wide reading in several European languages and his professional engagement with illness and personal breakdown caused him to take seriously the possibilities of withdrawal. At its most benign, solitude was ‘a tendency to self-collection and freedom’.²⁵ There was a tradition of seeking a retreat in order to think or engage in creative work. ‘I may not deny,’ admitted Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, ‘but that there is some profitable Meditation, Contemplation, and kinde of Solitarinesse to be embraced, which the Fathers so highly commend. … [which] Petrarch, Erasmus, Stella, and other so much magnify in their bookes.’²⁶ During the eighteenth century, the attraction of such an avoidance of company was becoming more apparent. It was partly that the sheer noise and intensity of living in the bustling urban centres made ever more attractive the search for the peace and quiet in which thoughts might be collected. Some kind of time alone was required to write, or to plan new ventures. A place always had to be found, argued Zimmermann, for ‘an enterprising and ardent mind’ to retire ‘from the uninteresting distractions of company, to digest and mature in solitude’, that he might better formulate his ‘adventurous and capacious projects’.²⁷ It was not a rejection of intercourse, but rather an escape from its more trivial and distracting aspects in order that more profound or ambitious interventions might be made in the intellectual or commercial life of the community.

Towards the end of the century, the implications of ‘self-collection’ were taking on a more focussed meaning, particularly in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker were posthumously published in 1782, just as Zimmermann was preparing to write his treatise. As The Gentleman’s Review irreverently put it, ‘Philosophers have just found out that the best way to bring a man to an acquaintance with himself, or, in short, to his senses, is to sequester himself into solitude.’²⁸ The search for a narrative identity, discoverable only through solitary self-analysis, opened a path towards a new genre of literary autobiography.²⁹ Rousseau explained the project of the Solitary Walker: ‘It is in this state of mind that I resume the painstaking and sincere self-examination that I formerly called my Confessions. I am devoting my last days to studying myself and to preparing the account of myself which I shall soon have to render.’³⁰ Zimmermann was ambivalent about Rousseau’s rejection of company in his search for self-knowledge. He was sympathetic to the personal sufferings that had forced the philosopher into retirement. His critics, he argued, were ‘allowing nothing for the attack of human injustice and cruelty; nothing for the torments of penury; nothing for the ravages of sickness; the bloom and vigour of his genius is forgotten’.³¹ But he had little confidence that the true self was only discoverable in the absence of society, and was convinced that the project to which Rousseau was committed in the closing years of his life could only lead to personal ruin: ‘Every physician, however, who studies the history of Rousseau, will plainly perceive that the seeds of dejection, sadness and hypochondriacism, were sown in his frame of mind and temper.’³²

Once he had negotiated the kind of withdrawal with which any writer was familiar, Zimmermann’s catalogue of solitude became increasingly negative. At best he had an understanding of the circumstances that could cause a rejection of society, at worst he was wholly critical of both motive and outcome. He lived a life, like Montaigne before him, where the deaths of partners, children, and friends were a constant threat to the maintenance of any intimate relations.³³ According to Samuel-Auguste Tissot, a fellow Swiss doctor and lifelong friend, his first wife suffered ‘a nervous disorder, which added infinitely to Zimmermann’s sorrows, [and] made him wish more earnestly for retirement’.³⁴ He was later widowed and lost his daughter from his first marriage. Whilst he could scarcely commend the state, he was well aware of the presence of what in our own time would be termed bereavement: ‘Solitude is often terrible to the mourner, whose happiness is buried in an untimely grave; who would give all the joys of earth, for one accent of the beloved voice, whose tuneful vibrations must never more fill his ear and heart with rapture; and who, when alone, languishes with the remembrance of his irreparable loss.’³⁵ Those connected with the sufferer could do what they could to ease them back to society; Zimmermann himself later remarried, and, claimed Tissot, ‘the happiness of this union was never disturbed for a moment’.³⁶

There were other kinds of misfortune which, as in the case of Rousseau, might propel the individual into retirement. ‘A wounded spirit,’ Zimmermann wrote, ‘seeks shelter in the lenient repose of privacy, from the shocks of rivalry, the intrusion of misguided friendship, and malicious assaults of secret or avowed enmity.’³⁷ Such people, too, deserved sympathy, though not imitation. Beyond those forced into retreat through no fault of their own, there were the many individuals who were thrust into it by misconduct or inadvisably chose the condition. The most amorphous group were those who had failed to meet the ethical standards or behavioural demands of eighteenth-century society. It took a certain level of self-belief to participate in domestic, commercial, or political networks. Once this was lost by defeat or moral shortcoming, withdrawal was the looming prospect:

Shame or remorse, a poignant sense of past follies, the regret of disappointed hope, or the lassitude of sickness, may so wound or enervate the soul, that it shall shrink from the sight and touch of its equals, and retire to bleed and languish, unmolested, except by its internal cares, in the coverts of solitude. In these instances, the disposition to retreat is not an active impulse of the mind to self-collection; but a fearful and pusillanimous aversion from the shocks and the attrition of society.³⁸

In contrast to the elite souls who chose a temporary retreat the better to engage with the highest endeavours of their time, these were outcasts, driven from company by a sense of their own demerits.

The category of exile overlapped with the pathological condition of melancholy. In eighteenth-century intellectual culture, there were no hard boundaries between the sciences, literature, and philosophy. Zimmermann’s excursions into poetry, political commentary, and guides to living were bound up with his principal occupational identity as a doctor. His first publication was a treatise on ‘Irritability’, referring not to short temper but to the functioning of the nerves of the heart. He brought to solitude his experience as a leading medical authority, and his discussion of melancholy was later cited by Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, the mid-nineteenth-authority on mental illness, as a key contribution to the topic.³⁹ Melancholy had been a nosological term for two millennia, encompassing sadness, fear, and depression.⁴⁰ During Zimmermann’s working life, the psychological causes were increasingly foregrounded over the physiological, which traditionally had been located in an excess of black bile.⁴¹ A related category was that of hypochondria, or hypochondriasis, from which Tissot claimed Zimmermann himself intermittently suffered. This lacked the modern association of imaginary illness but referred instead to a collection of symptoms for which there were no evident physical causes.⁴² The conditions were at the centre of a growing interest in the capacity of states of mind to generate bodily malfunctions. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton observed that ‘the Minde most effectually workes upon the Body, producing by his passions and perturbations, miraculous alterations, as Melancholy, Despaire, cruell diseases, and sometimes death it selfe’.⁴³ His speculation received increasing medical support. As Thomas Trotter excitedly wrote in 1812, ‘at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we do not hesitate to affirm, that nervous disorders have now taken the place of fevers, and may be justly reckoned two thirds of the whole, with which civilized society is afflicted’.⁴⁴

So broad a collection of ailments had no single diagnosis or prognosis, but a pronounced rejection of society featured in every account and at every stage of the illness. According to Zimmermann,

An unseasonable and ungovernable propensity to Solitude is one of the most general and unequivocal symptoms of melancholy: all those whose feelings are a prey to images of chagrin, regret, and disappointment, shun the light of heaven, and the aspect of man; incapable of attaching themselves to any ideas but those which torment and destroy them, they fly the necessity of efforts at once painful and ineffectual.⁴⁵

The withdrawal from company was often the first visible sign of a looming mental crisis. ‘When persons begin to be melancholy,’ observed William Buchan’s contemporary bestseller Domestic Medicine, ‘they are dull, dejected, timorous, watchful, fond of solitude, fretful, fickle, captious, and inquisitive, solicitous about trifles, sometimes niggardly, at other times prodigal.’⁴⁶ Increasingly the sufferer could find no source of pleasure except in the denial of intercourse with those who might have been able to help them out of their deepening depression. Philippe Pinel’s influential Treatise on Insanity of 1801, set out for the coming century the principal characteristics of the illness: ‘The symptoms generally comprehended by the term melancholia are taciturnity, a thoughtful pensive air, gloomy suspicions, and a love of solitude.’⁴⁷ How an individual arranged his or her social life was now the legitimate concern of European doctors. Too much time alone immediately raised warning flags. Medical textbooks routinely devoted a section on solitude in their advice on the causes and treatment of the most pervasive form of mental illness. Pathological melancholy was distinguished from the increasingly fashionable ‘white’ melancholy, a condition professed by those with a pronounced literary sensibility, denoting a low-key withdrawal for the purpose of observing the lessons of nature and the rural world.⁴⁸ Thomas Gray, author of the most widely read poem on country life in the second half of the eighteenth century, mocked his own predilections:

Mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part; which though it seldom laughs or dances, not ever amounts to what calls Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of a state, and ca ne laisse que de s’amuser. The only fault of it is insipidity; which is apt now and then to give a sort of Ennui.⁴⁹

‘Black’ melancholy was altogether more serious, a one-way journey towards a complete breakdown of mental and physical health.

As a doctor, Zimmermann could take a practical view of the pathologies of solitary living, seeking to reduce their incidence through medical intervention and published writings. It was otherwise with his final category of negative solitude, which he treated with unremitting hostility throughout his treatise. His tour of the landscape concluded with its spiritual dimension:

This long catalogue of the numerous causes which conduct to Solitude, is closed by Religion and Fanaticism. The former leads to the serenity and quiet of retirement, from the purest and noblest of considerations, the best propensities, and the finest energies. It is the passion of the strongest and best regulated minds. The latter is a rebellion against nature; a violation and perversion of reason; a renunciation of virtue; the folly and vice of narrow and oblique understandings; produced by a misapprehension of the Deity, and an ignorance of themselves.⁵⁰

Zimmermann had no argument with religion itself. A Swiss Protestant, he was at ease with his denomination’s mixed economy of private prayer and collective worship. His problem was with the eremitical tendency in the Catholic Church, whose influence had been curtailed but by no means obliterated by the Reformation. The objection was not just to current monastic practice, limited as it was even in the Catholic regions of Europe. Rather, Zimmermann was exercised by the broader status and moral authority of the tradition of seclusion rooted in the desert hermits of the fourth century, who in turn were seeking to replicate Christ’s sojourn in the wilderness.⁵¹ He aimed his fire directly at the founding fathers of the Catholic Church: ‘So far were these madmen, who are deemed to be the stars of the infant Church, from understanding human nature, that they employed their knowledge to exact from themselves and their proselytes everything unnatural and impracticable.’⁵² What he repeatedly termed ‘fanaticism’ had no place in the rational, sociable culture of late eighteenth-century urban Europe.⁵³

Zimmermann’s point of departure lay in his conception of how to live. Although an observant Christian, he had no sense that a silent, intensely personal communion with God was the ultimate purpose of man’s time on earth. Solitude Considered was a treatise on the pursuit of happiness, centred on the individual’s inherent sociability. The irreversible rejection of comfort and company represented a perversion of human nature. Zimmermann’s problem was with those who, ‘instigated by religious fervour, and perceiving nothing but corruption in the joys of social life, and sinful abomination in its virtues, retire from the spectacle to contemplate in the sacred gloom of the monastery, or the solitude of the cave and desert, a Being whose essence is unalterable purity, unlimited goodness and perfection’.⁵⁴ He took issue with a spiritual tradition that argued, in the words of the seventeenth-century Cistercian Cardinal Bona, that ‘no one can find God except he is solitary, for God himself is alone and solitary’.⁵⁵ At best, such a public renunciation of society was a form of self-indulgence. Zimmermann was of the same view as John Evelyn that the practice trivialized rather than grounded Christian worship. ‘Verily,’ wrote Evelyn, ‘there is more of Ambition and empty glory in some Solitudes, and affected Retreats, than in the most expos’d and conspicuous actions whatsoever: Ambition is not only in publick places, and pompous circumstances; but at home, and in the interior life; Heremits themselves are not recluse enough to seclude that subtile spirit, Vanity.’⁵⁶ At worst, it overlapped with other forms of insanity. ‘Religious melancholy’ was seen as a particularly lethal category of mental illness. ‘All authors who have treated this subject,’ noted John Haslam in his Observations on Madness and Melancholy of 1809, ‘appear to agree respecting the difficulty of curing religious madness.’⁵⁷ The human mind was incapable of coping alone with the consequences of seeking out the most profound spiritual revelations. Christian observance was entirely beneficial, continued Haslam, ‘but when an anxious curiosity leads us to unveil that which must ever be shrouded from our view, the despair, which always attends these impotent researches, will necessarily reduce us to the most calamitous state’.⁵⁸ This category of melancholy remained part of the diagnostic tool-kit of nineteenth-century doctors, and still featured in Krafft-Ebbing’s compendious textbook on insanity in 1904.⁵⁹

In his discussion of religious fanaticism, Zimmermann drew a distinction between continental Europe and its outlying nation, where the monasteries had not recovered from the Reformation. ‘An Englishman,’ he wrote, ‘when melancholy, shoots himself; a melancholy Frenchman used to turn Carthusian.’⁶⁰ In a country where the only visible hermits were those employed to inhabit grottos for the entertainment of visitors to newly landscaped country estates, monastic seclusion did not appear an immediate threat to the good ordering of religious practice.⁶¹ However, in Britain as elsewhere, Enlightenment rationalism was at odds in the eighteenth century with forms of religious enthusiasm that foregrounded a direct encounter with God by the impassioned believer. Anglican and nonconformist evangelicalism had yet to generate new institutional contexts for such personal communication, but the tradition of the desert fathers remained alive and towards the end of the eighteenth century was stimulating interest amongst theologians. While Solitude Considered was going through successive English editions in the 1790s, the Reverend James Milner began publishing his influential History of the Church of Christ, which sought to educate the clergy and laity in the lives and work of the early Christians. He argued for greater, though not uncritical, respect for the monastic tradition: ‘We often hear it said, How ridiculous to think of pleasing God by austerities and solitude! Far be it from me to vindicate the superstitions of monks, and particularly the vows of celibacy. But the error is very natural, has been reprehended much too severely and the profaneness of men of the world is abundantly more dangerous.’⁶² Alongside this cautious defence of religious solitude, popular interest in the ‘superstitions’ of the Catholic churches was heightened by the outbreak of war in 1793 with Britain’s nearest Catholic neighbour. The outcome was the publication in 1796 of a novel still more sensational than Zimmermann’s treatise.

Matthew Lewis’s The Monk created a template for a category of vigorous, sometimes salacious attacks on enclosed religious institutions that was to flourish throughout much of the succeeding century in both fiction and non-fiction. The novel was written when its precocious author was still only nineteen, following a stay in Weimar to learn German.⁶³ Lewis met and translated Goethe, but there is no evidence that he encountered the Hanover-based Zimmermann either in person or in his writings. Although Lewis was widely accused of plagiarism, the sources were generally held to be the fertile German tradition of Schauerromane (shudder stories) together with home-grown gothic novels, particularly Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto of 1764, and, more immediately, Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho of 1794.⁶⁴ His attack on the perversions inherent in monasteries and nunneries reflected a wider Enlightenment sensibility of which Zimmermann was merely a representative figure. Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse, written in 1760 but not published until 1796, described in vivid detail the sufferings of a reluctant nun, confined to ‘a little dark underground chamber, where I was thrown on to a mat half-rotten with damp’, when she attempts to leave her convent.⁶⁵ Lewis’s story soon took off into realms of gothic fantasy that were entirely at odds with the ordered universe of the Swiss doctor. But early in the novel he wrote a speech which exactly captured Zimmermann’s objection to eremitical living. The eponymous Monk, Ambrosio, addresses a young man, Rosario (soon to be revealed as the cross-dressing sorceress Matilda, the Monk’s fatal nemesis), who has taken up residence in a hermitage in the monastery grounds:

Disgusted at the guilt or absurdity of Mankind, the Misanthrope flies from it; He resolves to become an Hermit, and buries himself in the Cavern of some gloomy Rock. While Hate inflames his bosom, possibly He may feel contented with his situation: But when his passions begin to cool; when Time has mellowed his sorrows, and healed those wounds which He bore with him to his solitude, think you that Content becomes his Companion? Ah! no Rosario. No longer sustained by the violence of his passions, He feels all the monotony of his way of living, and his heart becomes the prey of Ennui and weariness. He looks around and finds himself alone in the Universe: The love of society revives in his bosom, and He pants to return to that world which He has abandoned. Nature loses all her charms in his eyes: No one is near him to point out her beauties, or share in his admiration of her excellence and variety. Propped upon the fragment of some Rock He gazes upon the tumbling water-fall with a vacant eye. He views without emotion the glory of the setting Sun. He returns to his Cell at Evening, for no one there is anxious for his arrival; He has no comfort in his solitary unsavoury meal: He throws himself upon his couch of Moss despondent and dissatisfied, and wakes only to pass a day as joyless, as monotonous as the former.⁶⁶

There was no sense of the youthful hermit being sustained by an unmediated encounter with God in the silence of his cell. Bereft of society, he is incapable of preventing a collapse of spirit.

The Monk himself enjoys a reputation as a fashionable preacher, but is portrayed as ‘virtuous from vanity, not principle’.⁶⁷ Having sought to rescue the young hermit from the dangers of solitude, he himself falls into every kind of corruption, including rape and murder. The instant success of the novel both created and destroyed the reputation of its youthful author.⁶⁸ Criticism of the novel did nothing to harm sales, however, and as with other popular successes in print or on the stage in the Georgian era, it was rapidly translated into diverse cultural forms, including plays and chapbooks, which ensured that its message reached an audience well beyond the novel-reading public.⁶⁹ The issue of ‘religious fanaticism’ became one of a range of arguments about the merits and demerits of solitude that were given a new focus by the late-eighteenth-century debate but in no sense brought to a conclusion. As we shall see in Chapters 4 and 6 in particular, the function of solitary spiritual observance remained an area of controversy, innovation and experiment in areas such as penal policy, revived monasticism and evolving forms of private observance.

Zimmermann viewed solitude much as a doctor might consider the human body. If health was the central objective, it was the business of the medical practitioner to engage with the frequent threats to wellbeing and, where necessary, take action to prevent the outbreak of personal illness or wider epidemics. There was always a need for disciplined exercise by the individual to ensure moral and intellectual fitness, particularly for those with highly tuned minds. Forms of personal relaxation needed to be monitored in case they undermined the patient’s constitution. In 1760, Zimmermann’s colleague Tissot had diagnosed a particular category of solitary behaviour in a text which framed the debate on the subject until the twentieth century. Those who committed the vice of onanism, he wrote, ‘are all affected with hypochondriac or hysterical complaints, and are overcome with the accidents that accompany those grievous disorders, melancholy, sighing, tears, palpitations, suffocations, and faintings’.⁷⁰ The sequence of events was a function of a more general withdrawal from company. Once the individual began to obsess about a particular desire and ceased to participate in the affairs of others, disaster beckoned. ‘Nothing is more pernicious’, Zimmermann insisted, ‘to people inclinable to be devoted to a single idea, than idleness and inactivity; this is particularly pernicious to our patients, and they cannot too assiduously avoid laziness and solitude. Rural exercise and agriculture are more particularly diverting than any others.’⁷¹

Two aspects in particular of Zimmermann’s approach to his chosen topic were relevant to the history of solitude as the modern world took shape. The first was his conception of solitude as an event. The mere fact of physical isolation was of little interest. It was not whether but why a person was alone. What determined the impact of solitude both on the individual and on society was the state of mind that caused the retirement from company.⁷² There was all the difference between the withdrawal to the closet or the countryside for the purpose of self-collection, and the retreat to the same spaces because of emotional defeat or misguided passion. As Zimmermann wrote,

If the heart be pure, the disposition cheerful, and the understanding cultivated, temporary sequestrations from general or even private intercourse, will improve the virtues of the mind and conduce to happiness; but when the soul is corrupted, and myriads of depraved images and wishes swarm in the tainted imagination, Solitude only serves to confirm and aggravate the evil; and by keeping the mind free to brood over its rank and noxious conceptions, becomes the midwife and nurse of its unnatural and monstrous suggestions.⁷³

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.