Yet nothing impresses him more than the fact
that every one carries a solitude with him, wherever he goes, like a
shadow. Twice, with an interval of three years between, this idea recurs
in the form of a hint for romance. "Two lovers or other persons, on the
most private business, to appoint a meeting in what they supposed to be
a place of the utmost solitude, and to find it thronged with people."
The idea implied is, that this would in fact be the completest privacy
they could have wished. "The situation of a man in the midst of a crowd,
yet as completely in the power of another, life and all, as if they two
were in the deepest solitude." This contradiction between the
_apparent_ openness that must rule one's conduct among men, and the
real secrecy that may coexist with it, even when one is most exposed to
the gaze of others, excites in his mind a whole train of thought based
on the falsity of appearances. If a man can be outwardly open and
inwardly reserved in a good sense, he can be so in a bad sense; so, too,
he may have the external air of great excellence and purity, while
internally he is foul and unfaithful. This discovery strikes our
perfectly sincere and true-hearted recluse with intense and endless
horror. He tests it, by turning it innumerable ways, and imagining all
sorts of situations in which such contradictions of appearance and
reality might be illustrated. At one time, he conceives of a friend who
should be true by day, and false at night.
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