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The evocative title is drawn from a quote by Thomas Traherne (1637—1674):
A man that Studies Happiness must sit alone like a sparrow upon
the Hous Top, and like a Pelican in the Wilderness.
ibition explores the intriguing tradition of the hermit by bringing
together a stimulating and varied range of unusual images and objects.
Western hermits are represented in images by Salvatore Rosa (‘A
philosopher contemplating a skull’), Richard Wilson (‘The
Hermitage at the Villa Madama’) and a superb painting by William
Dyce, ‘Christ in the Garden of Gethsemene’. John McEwan
makes a link between Patricia Neville’s 1987 picture Sir Charles
Ross of Balnagown Castle and the Wendy house: ‘a fanciful portrait
of an early 20th Century laird who lived much of his life up a tree
on his Ross-shire estate, is a reminder that there is a Peter Pan
side to the hermitage urge’.1
Any author or artist knows that the creative act is a solitary
affair. The notion of escape from the constraints of normal life,
workplace, to commune with nature, to ‘find oneself’,
or simply to concentrate to achieve purity of thought is an ancient
one. The renunciation of the ways of the world to commune with nature
or the Creator is also long-established. In the Hindu tradition,
the author reminds us, the fourth stage of life is the time to give
away your possessions and become a holy man, or hermit. Mahler required
not only solitude to compose but complete silence in the garden
in the Austrian Tyrol where the cows’ bells had to be muffled
while he wrote his third symphony.
In the eighteenth century, retreats were built in gentlemen’s
parks all over England.
Some kind of game was being played here, or fairytale story
invented, or fruitful fantasy indulged. If it was more than
simply a small step into a childhood never quite lost, what
was it that the hermit stood for in the play of ideas which
so enchanted the eighteenth century gentleman? Here is the classical
world, the temples and groves, the measured walks, the echoes
of the classical authors learned at school — and in wanders
a figure quite at odds with all of it. He comes from another
world. He has no possessions.2
In Colegate’s analysis, the hermit is the personification
of many characteristics: green man, personification of the ancient
forest, wild man, holy man in the desert. He is also the outcast,
disenchanted leader: ‘he is perhaps the ultimate reproach,
the shadow over the bright clarity of the classical world, the voice
in the wilderness which says blessed are the meek. Whatever he is,
he has always attracted attention, sometimes awe, sometimes envy,
usually respect. To our extremely gregarious species, the solitary
is a challenge.’3
Pelican in the wilderness, the book, presents a wide range
of examples of hermits and solitaries. In the eighteenth century
it was not unusual for hired hermits to be installed in country
houses — after-dinner entertainment could take place in the
form of a walk in the wood and a surprise encounter with a suitably
ragged and outlandish figure. The hermitage in an Arcadian setting
could evoke romantic and fictional events, ‘played with sexual
intrigue, as well as with nature and solitude, history and the idea
of holiness.’4
In art, St Francis of Assisi in the wilderness or St Jerome in
his cave (with books and a sleeping lion) connect solitude, nature,
study and contemplation. The Australian artist Arthur Boyd (1920—1999),
who lived for 30 years in England, could have been included in this
exhibition. In the 1960s he did a large series of original and brilliant
pastels, lithographs and paintings on the subject of St Francis
of Assisi. In the 1970s, the theme of the cave was explored in his
paintings of the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales, where books
were burned to denote the end of civilisation. He drew heavily on
classical mythology for his art, and in spite of the demands of
fame in his latter years he managed always to live in geographically
inaccessible places (remote Suffolk and the Shoalhaven River) to
protect his solitude and privacy.5
In the eighteenth century, Rousseau’s influence in defining
attitudes towards nature was enormously influential, although he
himself said he would die of boredom if he had to be a hermit for
long. In 1848, John Stuart Mill wrote about the importance of preserving
places where people could be alone. In the mid-nineteenth century
in America, Henry David Thoreau stated: ‘In Wildness is the
preservation of the world.’ John Ruskin also described the
joy in nature, of the sanctitiy of nature which was not for him
a religious sanctity. Colegate describes many aspects of this subject
beautifully:
What one might call a hermit tendency constitutes a thin but
uninterrupted thread through history, a pull of the tide towards
some other moon, a nostalgia for paradise or a hope of heaven.
Whether for a poet or a misanthrope, a mystic or a seeker for
a moment's silence, there has always been a need for a hermitage.6
Pelican in the wilderness geographically covers China, Ladakh
and India; Thailand, Russia and Siberia; the American frontier;
and the Egyptian and other deserts. Celtic solitaries, religious
hermit orders, medieval anchorites, and Romantic notions are explored.
Authors (JK Huysman, Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert) and artists’
visions (Breughel, Redon, Mondrian, Kandinsky) of solitude are examined.
Perils of the solitary life include melancholy and insanity: ‘A
solitary may take leave of his senses, misinterpret messages or
invent them, diminish, despair, die.’7
There are a number of important subtexts in this publication. Colegate
points out that, ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge were passionate
idealists, believing that the French Revolution had changed mankind’s
prospects for ever. What was remarkable was that, when disillusionment
set in, two men of such intellectual ability should turn away from
the hope of political action and take refuge in the idea of becoming
philosopher-poets in seclusion.’8
There are links between the historical figures described here and
those who fight today for ecological issues, those who strive to
protect green belts around towns, to curb the excesses of an urban
sprawl. All about there are instances of developers who see in a
beautiful wood or seaview, not the chance to contemplate wonderment
or glimpses of the sublime but the chance to exploit their assets
for a slice of the tourist industry. Silence is not high on the
agenda of such individuals.
In the context of a discussion of Buddhist sects and the theosophical
movement, Colegate discusses the influence of theosophy on writers
(WB Yeats) and artists (Kandinsky, Mondrian) in the early part of
the twentieth century. A particular anecdote is told which reveals
that solitude and creativity do not necessarily have to take place
on a mountain or in a hermitage:
Mondrian was more or less a recluse for much of his life, living
in a small bed-sitting room near the Gare Montparnasse in Paris.
There he would work meticulously on his calm geometrical paintings,
whose planes of strong colour and opposing non-colour had for
him a simple metaphysical accuracy. His fellow painter Ben Nicholson
visited him in the 1930s, and climbed the steep staircase to the
little room where Mondrian was at work, evidently oblivious of
the sound of the trains from the station and the rhythmical thumps
from the dancing school next door. Nicholson wrote that the feeling
of light in the little room, and the pauses and silences in Mondrian’s
conversation reminded him of ‘those hermits’ caves where
lions went to have thorns taken out of their paws.’9
References
1. The Sunday Telegraph, 5 May 2002. Review: 11.
2. Isabel Colegate. A pelican in the wilderness: hermits, solitaries
and recluses. London: Harper-Collins, 2002: xii.
3. Ibid: xii
4. Ibid: xiii
5. Janet McKenzie. Arthur Boyd: art and life. London: Thames
& Hudson, 2000.
6. Colegate, op cit: xv—xvi.
7. Ibid: 171.
8. Ibid: 205
9. Ibid: 15.
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