Chief cause of his loneliness—so far as I could judge his complex

personality at all—seemed that he never found a sympathetic, truly

understanding ear for those deeply primitive longings that fairly

ravaged his heart. And this very isolation made him often afraid; it

proved that the rest of the world, the sane majority at any rate, said

No to them. I, who loved him and listened, yet never quite apprehended

his full meaning. Far more than the common Call of the Wild, it was.

He yearned, not so much for a world savage, uncivilized, as for a

perfectly natural one that had never known, perhaps never needed

civilization—a state of freedom in a life unstained.

He never wholly understood, I think, the reason why he found

himself in such stern protest against the modern state of things, why

people produced in him a state of death so that he turned from men to

Nature—to find life. The things the nations exclusively troubled

themselves about all seemed to him so obviously vain and worthless,

and, though he never even in his highest moments felt the claims of

sainthood, it puzzled and perplexed him deeply that the conquest over

Nature in all its multifarious forms to-day should seem to them so

infinitely more important than the conquest over self. What the world

with common consent called Reality, seemed ever to him the most crude

and obvious, the most transient, the most blatant unReality. His love

of Nature was more than the mere joy of tumultuous pagan instincts. It

was, in the kind of simple life he craved, the first step towards the

recovery of noble, dignified, enfranchised living. In the denial of

all this external flummery he hated, it would leave the soul

disengaged and free, able to turn her activities within for spiritual

development. Civilization now suffocated, smothered, killed the soul.

Being in the hopeless minority, he felt he must be somewhere wrong, at

fault, deceived. For all men, from a statesman to an engine-driver,

agreed that the accumulation of external possessions had value, and

that the importance of material gain was real… . Yet, for himself,

he always turned for comfort to the Earth. The wise and wonderful

Earth opened her mind and her deep heart to him in a way few other men

seemed to know. Through Nature he could move blind-folded along, yet

find his way to strength and sympathy. A noble, gracious life stirred

in him then which the pettier human world denied. He often would

compare the thin help or fellowship he gained from ordinary social

intercourse, or from what had seemed at the time quite a successful

gathering of his kind, with the power he gained from a visit to the

woods or mountains. The former, as a rule, evaporated in a single day;

the other stayed, with ever growing power, to bless whole weeks and

months.

And hence it was, whether owing to the truth or ignorance of his

attitude, that a sense of bleak loneliness spread through all his

life, and more and more he turned from men to Nature.

Moreover, foolish as it must sound, I was sometimes aware that

deep down in him hid some nameless, indefinable quality that

proclaimed him fitted to live in conditions that had never known the

restraints of modern conventions—a very different thing to doing

without them once known. A kind of childlike, transcendental innocence

he certainly possessed, naïf, most engaging, and—utterly impossible.

It showed itself indirectly, I think, in this distress under modern

conditions. The multifarious apparatus of the spirit of To-day

oppressed him; its rush and luxury and artificiality harassed him

beyond belief. The terror of cities ran in his very blood.

When I describe him as something of an outcast, therefore, it will

be seen that he was such both voluntarily and involuntarily.

“What the world has gained by brains is simply nothing to what it

has lost by them–-”

“A dream, my dear fellow, a mere dream,” I stopped him, yet with

sympathy because I knew he found relief this way. “Your constructive

imagination is too active.”

“By Gad,” he replied warmly, “but there is a place somewhere, or a

state of mind—the same thing—where it’s more than a dream. And,

what’s more, bless your stodgy old heart, some day I’ll get there.”

“Not in England, at any rate,” I suggested.