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The Altar Fire

by Arthur Christopher Benson · English · Gutenberg #4612 · 502,719 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Altar Fire

Author: Arthur Christopher Benson


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #4612]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALTAR FIRE ***




Produced by Don Lainson and Charles Aldarondo. HTML version
by Al Haines.









THE ALTAR FIRE


By

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON



  Cecidit autem ignis Domini,
  et voravit holocaustum



1907






PREFACE


It will perhaps be said, and truly felt, that the following is a morbid
book. No doubt the subject is a morbid one, because the book
deliberately gives a picture of a diseased spirit. But a pathological
treatise, dealing with cancer or paralysis, is not necessarily morbid,
though it may be studied in a morbid mood. We have learnt of late
years, to our gain and profit, to think and speak of bodily ailments as
natural phenomena, not to slur over them and hide them away in attics
and bedrooms. We no longer think of insanity as demoniacal possession,
and we no longer immure people with diseased brains in the secluded
apartments of lovely houses. But we still tend to think of the
sufferings of the heart and soul as if they were unreal, imaginary,
hypochondriacal things, which could be cured by a little resolution and
by intercourse with cheerful society; and by this foolish and secretive
reticence we lose both sympathy and help. Mrs. Proctor, the friend of
Carlyle and Lamb, a brilliant and somewhat stoical lady, is recorded to
have said to a youthful relative of a sickly habit, with stern
emphasis, "Never tell people how you are! They don't want to know." Up
to a certain point this is shrewd and wholesome advice. One does
undoubtedly keep some kinds of suffering in check by resolutely
minimising them. But there is a significance in suffering too. It is
not all a clumsy error, a well-meaning blunder. It is a deliberate part
of the constitution of the world.

Why should we wish to conceal the fact that we have suffered, that we
suffer, that we are likely to suffer to the end? There are abundance of
people in like case; the very confession of the fact may help others to
endure, because one of the darkest miseries of suffering is the
horrible sense of isolation that it brings. And if this book casts the
least ray upon the sad problem--a ray of the light that I have learned
to recognise is truly there--I shall be more than content. There is no
morbidity in suffering, or in confessing that one suffers. Morbidity
only begins when one acquiesces in suffering as being incurable and
inevitable; and the motive of this book is to show that it is at once
curative and curable, a very tender part of a wholly loving and
Fatherly design.

A. C. B.

Magdalene College, Cambridge,

July 14, 1907.




INTRODUCTION


I had intended to allow the records that follow--the records of a
pilgrimage sorely beset and hampered by sorrow and distress--to speak
for themselves. Let me only say that one who makes public a record so
intimate and outspoken incurs, as a rule, a certain responsibility. He
has to consider in the first place, or at least he cannot help
instinctively considering, what the wishes of the writer would have
been on the subject. I do not mean that one who has to decide such a
point is bound to be entirely guided by that. He must weigh the
possible value of the record to other spirits against what he thinks
that the writer himself would have personally desired. A far more
important consideration is what living people who play a part in such
records feel about their publication. But I cannot help thinking that
our whole standard in such matters is a very false and conventional
one. Supposing, for instance, that a very sacred and intimate record,
say, two hundred years old, were to be found among some family papers,
it is inconceivable that any one would object to its publication on the
ground that the writer of it, or the people mentioned in it, would not
have wished it to see the light. We show how weak our faith really is
in the continuance of personal identity after death, by allowing the
lapse of time to affect the question at all; just as we should consider
it a horrible profanation to exhume and exhibit the body of a man who
had been buried a few years ago, while we approve of the action of
archaeologists who explore Egyptian sepulchres, subscribe to their
operations, and should consider a man a mere sentimentalist who
suggested that the mummies exhibited in museums ought to be sent back
for interment in their original tombs. We think vaguely that a man who
died a few years ago would in some way be outraged if his body were to
be publicly displayed, while we do not for an instant regard the
possible feelings of delicate and highly-born Egyptian ladies, on whose
seemly sepulture such anxious and tender care was expended so many
centuries ago.

But in this case there is no such responsibility. None of the persons
concerned have any objection to the publication of these records, and
as for the writer himself he was entirely free from any desire for a
fastidious seclusion. His life was a secluded one enough, and he felt
strongly that a man has a right to his own personal privacy. But his
own words sufficiently prove, if proof were needed, that he felt that
to deny the right of others to participate in thoughts and experiences,
which might uplift or help a mourner or a sufferer, was a selfish form
of individualism with which he had no sympathy whatever. He felt, and I
have heard him say, that one has no right to withhold from others any
reflections which can console and sustain, and he held it to be the
supreme duty of a man to ease, if he could, the burden of another. He
knew that there is no sympathy in the world so effective as the sharing
of similar experiences, as the power of assuring a sufferer that
another has indeed trodden the same dark path and emerged into the
light of Heaven. I will even venture to say that he deliberately
intended that his records should be so used, for purposes of
alleviation and consolation, and the bequest that he made of his papers
to myself, entrusting them to my absolute discretion, makes it clear to
me that I have divined his wishes in the matter. I think, indeed, that
his only doubt was a natural diffidence as to whether the record had
sufficient importance to justify its publication. In any case, my own
duty in the matter is to me absolutely clear.

But I think that it will be as well for me to sketch a brief outline of
my friend's life and character. I would have preferred to have done
this, if it had been possible, by allowing him to speak for himself.
But the earlier Diaries which exist are nothing but the briefest
chronicle of events. He put his earlier confessions into his books, but
he was in many ways more interesting than his books, and so I will try
and draw a portrait of him as he appeared to one of his earliest
friends. I knew him first as an undergraduate, and our friendship was
unbroken after that. The Diary, written as it is under the shadow of a
series of calamities, gives an impression of almost wilful sadness
which is far from the truth. The requisite contrast can only be
attained by representing him as he appeared to those who knew him.

He was the son of a moderately wealthy country solicitor, and was
brought up on normal lines. His mother died while he was a boy. He had
one brother, younger than himself, and a sister who was younger still.
He went to a leading public school, where he was in no way
distinguished either in work or athletics. I gathered, when I first
knew him, that he had been regarded as a clever, quiet, good-natured,
simple-minded boy, with a considerable charm of manner, but decidedly
retiring. He was not expected to distinguish himself in any way, and he
did not seem to have any particular ambitions. I went up to Cambridge
at the same time as he, and we formed a very close friendship. We had
kindred tastes, and we did not concern ourselves very much with the
social life of the place. We read, walked, talked, played games, idled,
and amused ourselves together. I was more attached to him, I think,
than he was to me; indeed, I do not think that he cared at that time to
form particularly close ties. He was frank, engaging, humorous, and
observant; but I do not think that he depended very much upon any one;
he rather tended to live an interior life of his own, of poetical and
fanciful reflection. I think he tended to be pensive rather than
high-spirited--at least, I do not often remember any particular
ebullition of youthful enthusiasm. He liked congenial company, but he
was always ready to be alone. He very seldom went to the rooms of other
men, except in response to definite invitations; but he was always
disposed to welcome any one who came spontaneously to see him. He was a
really diffident and modest fellow, and I do not think it even entered
into his head to imagine that he had any social gifts or personal
charm. But I gradually came to perceive that his mind was of a very
fine quality. He had a mature critical judgment, and, though I used to
think that his tastes were somewhat austere, I now see that he had a
very sure instinct for alighting upon what was best and finest in books
and art alike. He used to write poetry in those days, but he was shy of
confessing it, and very conscious of the demerits of what he wrote. I
have some of his youthful verses by me, and though they are very
unequal and full of lapses, yet he often strikes a firm note and
displays a subtle insight. I think that he was more ambitious than I
perhaps knew, and had that vague belief in his own powers which is
characteristic of able and unambitious men. His was certainly, on the
whole, a cold nature in those days. He could take up a friendship where
he laid it down, by virtue of an easy frankness and a sympathy that was
intellectual rather than emotional. But the suspension of intercourse
with a friend never troubled him.

I became aware, in the course of a walking tour that I took with him in
those days, that he had a deep perception of the beauties of nature; it
was not a vague accessibility to picturesque impressions, but a
critical discernment of quality. He always said that he cared more for
little vignettes, which he could grasp entire, than for wide and
majestic prospects; and this was true of his whole mind.

I suppose that I tended to idealise him; but he certainly seems to me,
in retrospect, to have then been invested with a singular charm. He was
pure-minded and fastidious to a fault. He had considerable personal
beauty, rather perhaps of expression than of feature. He was one of
those people with a natural grace of movement, gesture and speech. He
was wholly unembarrassed in manner, but he talked little in a mixed
company. No one had fewer enemies or fewer intimate friends. The
delightful ears soon came to an end, and one of the few times I ever
saw him exhibit strong emotion was on the evening before he left
Cambridge, when he altogether broke down. I remember his quoting a
verse from Omar Khayyam:--

  "Yet ah! that spring should vanish with the rose,
   That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close,"

and breaking off in the middle with sudden tears.

It was necessary for me to adopt a profession, and I remember envying
him greatly when he told me that his father, who, I gathered, rather
idolised him, was quite content that he should choose for himself at
his leisure. He went abroad for a time; and I met him next in London,
where he was proposing to read for the bar; but I discovered that he
had really found his metier. He had written a novel, which he showed
me, and though it was in some ways an immature performance, it had, I
felt, high and unmistakable literary qualities. It was published soon
afterwards and met with some success. He thereupon devoted himself to
writing, and I was astonished at his industry and eagerness. He had for
the first time found a congenial occupation. He lived mostly at home in
those days, but he was often in London, where he went a good deal into
society. I do not know very much about him at this time, but I gather
that he achieved something of a social reputation. He was never a
voluble talker; I do not suppose he ever set the table in a roar, but
he had a quiet, humorous and sympathetic manner. His physical health
was then, as always, perfect. He was never tired or peevish; he was
frank, kindly and companionable; he talked little about himself, and
had a genuine interest in the study of personality, so that people were
apt to feel at their best in his society. Meanwhile his books came out
one after another--not great books exactly, but full of humour and
perception, each an advance on the last. By the age of thirty he was
accepted as one of the most promising novelists of the day.

Then he did what I never expected he would do; he fell wildly and
enthusiastically in love with the only daughter of a Gloucestershire
clergyman, a man of good family and position. She was the only child;
her mother had died some years before, and her father died shortly
after the marriage. She was a beautiful, vigorous girl, extraordinarily
ingenuous, simple-minded, and candid. She was not clever in the common
acceptance of the term, and was not the sort of person by whom I should
have imagined that my friend would have been attracted. They settled in
a pleasant house, which they built in Surrey, on the outskirts of a
village. Three children were born to them--a boy and a girl, and
another boy, who survived his birth only a few hours. From this time he
almost entirely deserted London, and became, I thought, almost
strangely content with a quiet domestic life. I was often with them in
those early days, and I do not think I ever saw a happier circle. It
was a large and comfortable house, very pleasantly furnished, with a
big garden. His father died in the early years of the marriage, and
left him a good income; with the proceeds of his books he was a
comparatively wealthy man. His wife was one of those people who have a
serene and unaffected interest in human beings. She was a religious
woman, but her relations with others were rather based on the purest
kindliness and sympathy. She knew every one in the place, and, having
no touch of shyness, she went in and out among their poorer neighbours,
the trusted friend and providence of numerous families; but she had not
in the least what is called a parochial mind. She had no touch of the
bustling and efficient Lady Bountiful. The simple people she visited
were her friends and neighbours, not her patients and dependents. She
was simply an overflowing fountain of goodness, and it was as natural to
her to hurry to a scene of sorrow and suffering as it is for most
people to desire to stay away. My friend himself had not the same
taste; it was always rather an effort to him to accommodate himself to
people in a different way of life; but it ought to be said that he was
universally liked and respected for his quiet courtesy and simplicity,
and fully as much for his own sake as for that of his wife. This fact
could hardly be inferred from his Diary, and indeed he was wholly
unconscious of it himself, because he never realised his natural charm,
and indeed was unduly afraid of boring people by his presence.

He was not exactly a hard worker, but he was singularly regular;
indeed, though he sometimes took a brief holiday after writing a book,
he seldom missed a day without writing some few pages. One of the
reasons why they paid so few visits was that he tended, as he told me,
to feel so much bored away from his work. It was at once his occupation
and his recreation. He was not one of those who write fiercely and
feverishly, and then fall into exhaustion; he wrote cheerfully and
temperately, and never appeared to feel the strain. They lived quietly,
but a good many friends came and went. He much preferred to have a
single guest, or a husband and wife, at a time, and pursued his work
quietly all through. He used to see that one had all one could need,
and then withdrew after tea-time, not reappearing until dinner. His
wife, it was evident, was devoted to him with an almost passionate
adoration. The reason why life went so easily there was that she
studied unobtrusively his smallest desires and preferences; and thus
there was never any sense of special contrivance or consideration for
his wishes: the day was arranged exactly as he liked, without his ever
having to insist upon details. He probably did not realise this, for
though he liked settled ways, he was sensitively averse to feeling that
his own convenience was in any way superseding or overriding the
convenience of others. It used to be a great delight and refreshment to
stay there. He was fond of rambling about the country, and was an
enchanting companion in a tete-a-tete. In the evening he used to expand
very much into a genial humour which was very attractive; he had, too,
the art of making swift and subtle transitions into an emotional mood;
and here his poetical gift of seeing unexpected analogies and delicate
characteristics gave his talk a fragrant charm which I have seldom
heard equalled.

It was indeed a picture of wonderful prosperity, happiness, and
delight. The children were engaging, clever, and devotedly
affectionate, and indeed the atmosphere of mutual affection seemed to
float over the circle like a fresh and scented summer air. One used to
feel, as one drove away, that though one's visit had been a pleasure,
there would be none of the flatness which sometimes follows the
departure of a guest, but that one was leaving them to a home life that
was better than sociability, a life that was both sacred and beautiful,
full to the brim of affection, yet without any softness or
sentimentality.

Then came my friend's great success. He had written less since his
marriage, and his books, I thought, were beginning to flag a little.
There was a want of freshness about them; he tended to use the same
characters and similar situations; both thought and phraseology became
somewhat mannerised. I put this down myself to the belief that life was
beginning to be more interesting to him than art. But there suddenly
appeared the book which made him famous, a book both masterly and
delicate, full of subtle analysis and perception, and with that
indescribable sense of actuality which is the best test of art. The
style at the same time seemed to have run clear; he had gained a
perfect command of his instrument, and I had about this book, what I
had never had about any other book of his, the sense that he was
producing exactly the effects he meant to produce. The extraordinary
merit of the book was instantly recognised by all, I think, but the
author. He went abroad for a time after the book was published, and
eventually returned; it was at that point of his life that the Diary
began.

I went to see him not long after, and it became rapidly clear to me
that something had happened to him. Instead of being radiant with
success, eager and contented, I found him depressed, anxious, haggard.
He told me that he felt unstrung and exhausted, and that his power of
writing had deserted him. But I must bear testimony at the same time to
the fact which does not emerge in the Diary, namely, the extraordinary
gallantry and patience of his conduct and demeanour. He struggled
visibly and pathetically, from hour to hour, against his depression. He
never complained; he never showed, at least in my presence, the
smallest touch of irritability. Indeed to myself, who had known him as
the most equable and good-humoured of men, he seemed to support the
trial with a courage little short of heroism. The trial was a sore one,
because it deprived him both of motive and occupation. But he made the
best of it; he read, he took long walks, and he threw himself with
great eagerness into the education of his children--a task for which he
was peculiarly qualified. Then a series of calamities fell upon him: he
lost his boy, a child of wonderful ability and sweetness; he lost his
fortune, or the greater part of it. The latter calamity he bore with
perfect imperturbability--they let their house and moved into
Gloucestershire. Here a certain measure of happiness seemed to return
to him. He made a new friend, as the Diary relates, in the person of
the Squire of the village, a man who, though an invalid, had a strong
and almost mystical hold upon life. Here he began to interest himself
in the people of the place, and tried all sorts of education and social
experiments. But his wife fell ill, and died very suddenly; and, not
long after, his daughter died too. He was for a time almost wholly
broken down. I went abroad with him at his request for a few weeks, but
I was myself obliged to return to England to my professional duties. I
can only say that I did not expect ever to see him again. He was like a
man, the spring of whose life was broken; but at the same time he bore
himself with a patience and a gentleness that fairly astonished me. We
were together day by day and hour by hour. He made no complaint, and he
used to force himself, with what sad effort was only too plain, to
converse on all sorts of topics. Some time after he drifted back to
England; but at first he appeared to be in a very listless and dejected
state. Then there arrived, almost suddenly, it seemed to me, a change.
He had made the sacrifice; he had accepted the situation. There came to
him a serenity which was only like his old serenity from the fact that
it seemed entirely unaffected; but it was based, I felt, on a very
different view of life. He was now content to wait and to believe. It
was at this time that the Squire died; and not long afterwards, the
Squire's niece, a woman of great strength and simplicity of character,
married a clergyman to whom she had been long attached, both being
middle-aged people; and the living soon afterwards falling vacant, her
husband accepted it, and the newly-married pair moved into the Rectory;
while my friend, who had been named as the Squire's ultimate heir, a
life-interest in the property being secured to the niece, went into the
Hall. Shortly afterwards he adopted a nephew--his sister's son--who,
with the consent of all concerned, was brought up as the heir to the
estate, and is its present proprietor.

My friend lived some fifteen years after that, a quiet, active, and
obviously contented life. I was a frequent guest at the Hall, and I am
sure that I never saw a more attached circle. My friend became a
magistrate, and he did a good deal of county business; but his main
interest was in the place, where he was the trusted friend and
counsellor of every household in the parish. He took a great deal of
active exercise in the open air; he read much. He taught his nephew,
whom he did not send to school. He regained, in fuller measure than
ever, his old delightful charm of conversation, and his humour, which
had always been predominant in him, took on a deeper and a richer
tinge; but whereas in old days he had been brilliant and epigrammatic,
he was now rather poetical and suggestive; and whereas he had formerly
been reticent about his emotions and his religion, he now acquired what
is to my mind the profoundest conversational charm--the power of making
swift and natural transitions into matters of what, for want of a
better word, I will call spiritual experience. I remember his once
saying to me that he had learnt, from his intercourse with his village
neighbours, that the one thing in the world in which every one was
interested was religion; "even more," he added, with a smile, "than is
the one subject in which Sir Robert Walpole said that every one could
join."

I do not suppose that his religion was of a particularly orthodox kind;
he was impatient of dogmatic definition and of ecclesiastical
tendencies; but he cared with all his heart for the vital principles of
religion, the love of God and the love of one's neighbour.

He lived to see his adopted son grow up to maturity; and I do not think
I ever saw anything so beautiful as the confidence and affection that
subsisted between them; and then he died one day, as he had often told
me he desired to die. He had been ailing for a week, and on rising from
his chair in the morning he was seized by a sudden faintness and died
within half-an-hour, hardly knowing, I imagine, that he was in any
danger.

It fell to me to deal with his papers. There was a certain amount of
scattered writing, but no completed work; it all dated from before the
publication of his great book. It was determined that this Diary should
eventually see the light, and circumstances into which I need not now
enter have rendered its appearance advisable at the present date.

The interest of the document is its candour and outspokenness. If the
tone of the record, until near the end, is one of unrelieved sadness,
it must be borne in mind that all the time he bore himself in the
presence of others with a singular courage and simplicity. He said to
me once, in an hour of dark despair, that he had drunk the dregs of
self-abasement. That he believed that he had no sense of morality, no
loyal affection, no love of virtue, no patience or courage. That his
only motives had been timidity, personal ambition, love of
respectability, love of ease. He added that this had been slowly
revealed to him, and that the only way out was a way that he had not as
yet strength to tread; the way of utter submission, absolute
confidence, entire resignation. He said that there was one comfort,
which was, that he knew the worst about himself that it was possible to
know. I told him that his view of his character was unjust and
exaggerated, but he only shook his head with a smile that went to my
heart. It was on that day, I think, that he touched the lowest depth of
all; and after that he found the way out, along the path that he had
indicated.

This is no place for eulogy and panegyric. My task has been just to
trace the portrait of my friend as he appeared to others; his own words
shall reveal the inner spirit. The beauty of the life to me was that he
attained, unconsciously and gradually, to the very virtues which he
most desired and in which he felt himself to be most deficient. He had
to bear a series of devastating calamities. He had loved the warmth and
nearness of his home circle more deeply than most men, and the whole of
it was swept away; he had depended for stimulus and occupation alike
upon his artistic work, and the power was taken from him at the moment
of his highest achievement. His loss of fortune is not to be reckoned
among his calamities, because it was no calamity to him. He ended by
finding a richer treasure than any that he had set out to obtain; and I
remember that he said to me once, not long before his end, that
whatever others might feel about their own lives, he could not for a
moment doubt that his own had been an education of a deliberate and
loving kind, and that the day when he realised that, when he saw that
there was not a single incident in his life that had not a deep and an
intentional value for him, was one of the happiest days of his whole
existence. I do not know that he expected anything or speculated on
what might await him hereafter; he put his future, just as he put his
past and his present, in the hands of God, to Whom he committed himself
"as unto a faithful Creator."




THE ALTAR FIRE


September 8, 1888.

We came back yesterday, after a very prosperous time at Zermatt; we
have been there two entire months. Yes, it was certainly prosperous! We
had delicious weather, and I have seen a number of pleasant people. I
have done a great deal of walking, I have read a lot of novels and old
poetry, I have sate about a good deal in the open air; but I do not
really like Switzerland; there are of course an abundance of noble
wide-hung views, but there are few vignettes, little on which the mind
and heart dwell with an intimate and familiar satisfaction. Those airy
pinnacles of toppling rocks, those sheets of slanted snow, those
ice-bound crags--there is a sense of fear and mystery about them! One
does not know what is going on there, what they are waiting for; they
have no human meaning. They do not seem to have any relation to
humanity at all. Sunday after Sunday one used to have sermons in that
hot, trim little wooden church--some from quite famous preachers--about
the need of rest, the advantage of letting the mind and eye dwell in
awe upon the wonderful works of God. Of course the mountains are
wonderful enough; but they make me feel that humanity plays a very
trifling part in the mind and purpose of God. I do not think that if I
were a preacher of the Gospel, and had a speculative turn, I should
care to take a holiday among the mountains. I should be beset by a
dreary wonder whether the welfare of humanity was a thing very dear to
God at all. I should feel very strongly what the Psalmist said, "What
is man that Thou art mindful of him?" It would take the wind out of my
sails, when I came to preach about Redemption, because I should be
tempted to believe that, after all, human beings were only in the world
on sufferance, and that the aching, frozen, barren earth, so inimical
to life, was in even more urgent need of redemption. Day by day, among
the heights, I grew to feel that I wanted some explanation of why the
strange panorama of splintered crag and hanging ice-fall was there at
all. It certainly is not there with any reference to man--at least it
is hard to believe that it is all there that human beings may take a
refreshing holiday in the midst of it. When one penetrates Switzerland
by the green pine-clad valleys, passing through and beneath those
delicious upland villages, each clustering round a church with a
glittering cupola, the wooden houses with their brown fronts, their big
eaves, perched up aloft at such pleasant angles, one thinks of
Switzerland as an inhabited land of valleys, with screens and
backgrounds of peaks and snowfields; but when one goes up higher still,
and gets up to the top of one of the peaks, one sees that Switzerland
is really a region of barren ridges, millions of acres of cold stones
and ice, with a few little green cracks among the mountain bases, where
men have crept to live; and that man is only tolerated there.

One day I was out with a guide on a peak at sunrise. Behind the bleak
and shadowy ridges there stole a flush of awakening dawn; then came a
line of the purest yellow light, touching the crags and snowfields with
sharp blue shadows; the lemon-coloured radiance passed into fiery gold,
the gold flushed to crimson, and then the sun leapt into sight, and
shed the light of day upon the troubled sea of mountains. It was more
than that--the hills made, as it were, the rim of a great cold shadowy
goblet; and the light was poured into it from the uprushing sun, as
bubbling and sparkling wine is poured into a beaker. I found myself
thrilled from head to foot with an intense and mysterious rapture. What
did it all mean, this awful and resplendent solemnity, full to brim of
a solitary and unapproachable holiness? What was the secret of the
thing? Perhaps every one of those stars that we had seen fade out of
the night was ringed round by planets such as ours, peopled by forms
undreamed of; doubtless on millions of globes, the daylight of some
central sun was coming in glory over the cold ridges, and waking into
life sentient beings, in lands outside our ken, each with civilisations
and histories and hopes and fears of their own. A stupendous, an
overwhelming thought! And yet, in the midst of it, here was I myself, a
little consciousness sharply divided from it all, permitted to be a
spectator, a partaker of the intolerable and gigantic mystery, and yet
so strangely made that the whole of that vast and prodigious complexity
of life and law counted for less to me than the touch of weariness that
hung, after my long vigil, over limbs and brain. The faculty, the
godlike power of knowing and imagining, all actually less to me than my
own tiny and fragile sensations. Such moods as these are strange
things, because they bring with them so intense a desire to know, to
perceive, and yet paralyse one with the horror of the darkness in which
one moves. One cannot conceive why it is that one is given the power of
realising the multiplicity of creation, and yet at the same time left
so wholly ignorant of its significance. One longs to leap into the arms
of God, to catch some whisper of His voice; and at the same time there
falls the shadow of the prison-house; one is driven relentlessly back
upon the old limited life, the duties, the labours, the round of meals
and sleep, the tiny relations with others as ignorant as ourselves,
and, still worse, with the petty spirits who have a complacent
explanation of it all. Even over love itself the shadow falls. I am as
near to my own dear and true Maud as it is possible to be; but I can
tell her nothing of the mystery, and she can tell me nothing. We are
allowed for a time to draw close to each other, to whisper to each
other our hopes and fears; but at any moment we can be separated. The
children, Alec and Maggie, dearer to me--I can say it honestly--than
life itself, to whom we have given being, whose voices I hear as I
write, what of them? They are each of them alone, though they hardly
know it yet. The little unnamed son, who opened his eyes upon the world
six years ago, to close them in a few hours, where and what is he now?
Is he somewhere, anywhere? Does he know of the joy and sorrow he has
brought into our lives? I would fain believe it . . . these are
profitless thoughts, of one staring into the abyss. Somehow these
bright weeks have been to me a dreary time. I am well in health;
nothing ails me. It is six months since my last book was published, and
I have taken a deliberate holiday; but always before, my mind, the
strain of a book once taken off it, has begun to sprout and burgeon
with new ideas and schemes: but now, for the first time in my life, my
mind and heart remain bare and arid. I seem to have drifted into a
dreary silence. It is not that things have been less beautiful, but
beauty seems to have had no message, no significance for me. The people
that I have seen have come and gone like ghosts and puppets. I have had
no curiosity about them, their occupations and thoughts, their hopes
and lives; it has not seemed worth while to be interested, in a life
which appears so short, and which leads nowhere. It seems morbid to
write thus, but I have not been either morbid or depressed. It has been
an easy life, the life of the last few months, without effort or
dissatisfaction, but without zest. It is a mental tiredness, I suppose.
I have written myself out, and the cistern must fill again. Yet I have
had no feeling of fatigue. It would have been almost better to have had
something to bear; but I am richer than I need be, Maud and the
children have been in perfect health and happiness, I have been well
and strong. I shall hope that the familiar scene, the pleasant
activities of home-life will bring the desire back. I realise how much
the fabric of my life is built upon my writing, and write I must. Well,
I have said enough; the pleasure of these entries is that one can look
back to them, and see the movement of the current of life in a bygone
day. I have an immense mass of arrears to make up, in the form of
letters and business, but I want to survey the ground; and the survey
is not a very happy one this morning; though if I made a list of my
benefits and the reverse, like Robinson Crusoe, the credit side would
be full of good things, and the debit side nearly empty.



September 15, 1888.

It is certainly very sweet to be at home again; to find oneself in
familiar scenes, with all the pretty homely comfortable things waiting
patiently for us to return--pictures, books, rooms, tree, kindly
people. Wright, my excellent gardener, with whom I spent an hour
strolling round the garden to-day, touched me by saying that he was
glad to see me back, and that it had seemed dull without me; he has
done fifty little simple things in our absence, in his tranquil and
faithful way, and is pleased to have them noticed. Alec, who was with
me to-day, delighted me by finding his stolid wooden horse in the
summer-house, rather damp and dishevelled, and almost bursting into
tears at the pathos of the neglect. "Did you think we had forgotten
you?" he said as he hugged it. I suggested that he should have a good
meal. "I don't think he would care about GRASS," said Alec
thoughtfully, "he shall have some leaves and berries for a treat." And
this was tenderly executed. Maud went off to see some of her old
pensioners, and came back glowing with pleasure, with twenty pleasant
stories of welcome. Two or three people came in to see me on business,
and I was glad to feel I was of use. In the afternoon we all went off
on a long ramble together, and we were quite surprised to see that
everything seemed to be in its place as usual. Summer is over, the
fields have been reaped; there is a comfortable row of stacks in the
rickyard; the pleasant humming of an engine came up the valley, as it
sang its homely monotone, now low, now loud. After tea--the evenings
have begun to close in--I went off to my study, took out my notebook
and looked over my subjects, but I could make nothing of any of them. I
could see that there were some good ideas among them; but none of them
took shape. Often I have found that to glance over my subjects thus,
after a holiday, is like blowing soap-bubbles. The idea comes out
swelling and eddying from the bowl; a globe swimming with lucent hues,
reflecting dim moving shapes of rooms and figures. Not so to-day. My
mind winked and flapped and rustled like a burnt-out fire; not in a
depressed or melancholy way, but phlegmatically and dully. Well, the
spirit bloweth as it listeth; but it is strange to find my mind so
unresponsive, with none of that pleasant stir, that excitement that has
a sort of fantastic terror about it, such as happens when a book
stretches itself dimly and mysteriously before the mind--when one has a
glimpse of a quiet room with people talking, a man riding fiercely on
lonely roads, two strolling together in a moonlit garden with the
shadows of the cypresses on the turf, and the fragrance of the sleeping
flowers blown abroad. They stop to listen to the nightingale in the
bush . . . turn to each other . . . the currents of life are
intermingled at the meeting of the lips, the warm shudder at the touch
of the floating tress of fragrant hair. To-day nothing comes to me; I
throw it all aside and go to see the children, am greeted delightfully,
and join in some pretty and absurd game. Then dinner comes; and I sit
afterwards reading, dropping the book to talk, Maud working in her
corner by the fire--all things moving so tranquilly and easily in this
pleasantly ordered home-like house of ours. It is good to be at home;
and how pitiful to be hankering thus for something else to fill the
mind, which should obliterate all the beloved things so tenderly
provided. Maud asks about the reception of the latest book, and
sparkles with pride at some of the things I tell her. She sees
somehow--how do women divine these things?--that there is a little
shadow of unrest over me, and she tells me all the comforting things
that I dare not say to myself--that it is only that the book took more
out of me than I knew, and that the resting-time is not over yet; but
that I shall soon settle down again. Then I go off to smoke awhile; and
then the haunting shadow comes back for a little; till at last I go
softly through the sleeping house; and presently lie listening to the
quiet breathing of my wife beside me, glad to be at home again, until
the thoughts grow blurred, take grotesque shapes, sinking softly into
repose.



September 18, 1888.


I have spent most of the morning in clearing up business, and dealing
with papers and letters. Among the accumulations was a big bundle of
press-cuttings, all dealing with my last book. It comes home to me that
the book has been a success; it began by slaying its thousands, like
Saul, and now it has slain its tens of thousands. It has brought me
hosts of letters, from all sorts of people, some of them very
delightful and encouraging, many very pleasant--just grateful and
simple letters of thanks--some vulgar and impertinent, some strangely
intimate. What is it, I wonder, that makes some people want to tell a
writer whom they have never seen all about themselves, their thoughts
and histories? In some cases it is an unaffected desire for sympathy
from a person whom they think perceptive and sympathetic; in some cases
it proceeds, I think, from a hysterical desire to be thought
interesting, with a faint hope, I fear, of being possibly put into a
book. Some of the letters have been simply unintelligible and
inconceivable on any hypothesis, except for the human instinct to
confess, to bare the heart, to display the secret sorrow. Many of these
letters are intensely pathetic, affecting, heart-rending; an invalid
lady writes to say that she would like to know me, and will I come to
the North of England to see her? A man writes a pretentious letter, to
ask me to go and stay with him for a week. He has nothing to offer, he
says, but plain fare and rather cramped quarters; but he has thought
deeply, he adds, on many of the problems on which I touch, and thinks
that he could throw light upon some of them. Imagine what reserves of
interest and wisdom he must consider that he possesses! Then there are
patronising letters from people who say that I have put into words
thoughts which they have always had, and which they never took the
trouble to write down; then there are requests for autographs, and
"sentiments," and suggestions for new books. A man writes to say that I
could do untold good if I would write a book with a purpose, and
ventures to propose that I should take up anti-vivisection. There are a
few letters worth their weight in gold, from good men and true, writers
and critics, who thank me for a book which fulfils its aim and artistic
purpose, while on the other hand there are some from people who find
fault with my book for not doing what I never even attempted to do.
Here is one that has given me deep and unmitigated pain; it is from an
old friend, who, I am told, is aggrieved because he thinks that I have
put him into my book, in the form of an unpleasant character. The worst
of it is that there is enough truth in it to make it difficult for me
to deny it. My character is, in some superficial ways, habits, and
tricks of speech, like Reginald. Well, on hearing what he felt, I wrote
him a letter of apology for my carelessness and thoughtlessness,
saying, as frankly as I could, that the character was not in any way
drawn from him, but that I undoubtedly had, almost unconsciously, taken
an external trait or two from him; adding that I was truly and heartily
sorry, and hoped that there would be no ill-feeling; and that I valued
his friendship even more than he probably imagined. Here is his reply:


MY DEAR F----,

--If you spit on the head of a man passing in the street, and then
write to him a few days after to say that all is forgiven, and that you
are sorry your aim was so accurate, you don't mend matters.

You express a hope that after what has occurred there may be no
ill-feeling between us. Well, you have done me what I consider an
injury. I have no desire to repay it; if I had a chance of doing you a
good turn, I should do it; if I heard you abused, I should stick up for
you. I have no intention of making a grievance out of it. But if you
ask me to say that I do not feel a sense of wrong, or to express a wish
to meet you, or to trust you any longer as I have hitherto trusted you,
I must decline saying anything of the kind, because it would not be
true.

Of course I know that there cannot be omelettes without breaking eggs;
and I suppose that there cannot be what are called psychological
novels, without violating confidences. But you cannot be surprised,
when you encourage an old friend to trust you and confide in you, and
then draw an ugly caricature of him in a book, if he thinks the worse
of you in consequence. I hear that the book is a great success; you
must be content with the fact that the yolks are as golden as they are.
Please do not write to me again on the subject. I will try to forget
it, and if I succeed, I will let you know.

Yours ----


That is the kind of letter that poisons life for a while. While I am
aware that I meant no treachery, I am none the less aware that I have
contrived to be a traitor. Of course one vows one will never write
another line; but I do not suppose I shall keep the vow. I reply
shortly, eating all the dirt I can collect; and I shall try to forget
it too; though it is a shabby end of an old friendship.

Then I turn to the reviews. I find them gracious, respectful,
laudatory. They are to be taken cum grano, of course. When an
enthusiastic reviewer says that I have passed at one stride into the
very first class of contemporary writers, I do not feel particularly
elated, though I am undeniably pleased. I find my conception, my
structure, my style, my descriptions, my character-drawing, liberally
and generously praised. There is no doubt that the book has been really
successful beyond my wildest hopes. If I were in any doubt, the crop of
letters from editors and publishers asking me for articles and books of
every kind, and offering me incredible terms, would convince me.

Now what do I honestly feel about all this? I will try for my own
benefit to say. Of course I am very much pleased, but the odd thing is
that I am not more pleased. I can say quite unaffectedly that it does
not turn my head in the least. I reflect that if this had happened when
I began to write, I should have been beside myself with delight, full
of self-confidence, blown out with wind, like the fog in the fable.
Even now there is a deep satisfaction in having done what one has tried
to do. But instead of raking in the credit, I am more inclined to be
grateful for my good fortune. I feel as if I had found something
valuable rather than made something beautiful; as if I had stumbled on
a nugget of gold or a pearl of price. I am very fatalistic about
writing; one is given a certain thing to say, and the power to say it;
it does not come by effort, but by a pleasant felicity. After all, I
reflect, the book is only a good story, well told. I do not feel like a
benefactor of the human race, but at the best like a skilful minstrel,
who has given some innocent pleasure. What, after all, does it amount
to? I have touched to life, perhaps a few gracious, tender, romantic
fancies--but, after all, the thoughts and emotions were there to start
with, just as the harmonies which the musician awakes are all dormant
in his throbbing strings. I have created nothing, only perceived and
represented phenomena. I have gained no sensibility, no patience, no
wisdom in the process. I know no more of the secret of life and love,
than before I wrote my book. I am only like a scientific investigator
who has discovered certain delicate processes, subtle laws at work.
They were there all the time; the temptation of the investigator and of
the writer alike is to yield to the delusion that he has made them, by
discerning and naming them. As for the style, which is highly praised,
it has not been made by effort. It is myself. I have never written for
any other reason than because I liked writing. It has been a pleasure
to overcome difficulties, to make my way round obstacles, to learn how
to express the vague an intangible thing. But I deserve no credit for
this; I should deserve credit if I had made myself a good writer out of
a bad one; but I could always write, and I am not a better writer, only
a more practised one. There is no satisfaction there.

And then, too, I find myself overshadowed by the thought that I do not
want to do worse, to go downhill, to decline. I do not feel at all sure
that I can write a better book, or so good a one indeed. I should
dislike failing far more than I like having succeeded. To have reached
a certain standard makes it incumbent on one that one should not fall
below that standard; and no amount of taking pains will achieve that.
It can only be done through a sort of radiant felicity of mood, which
is really not in my power to count upon. I was happy, supremely happy,
when I was writing the book. I lighted upon a fine conception, and it
was the purest joy to see the metal trickle firmly from the furnace
into the mould. Can I make such a mould again? Can I count upon the
ingots piled in the fierce flame? Can I reckon upon the same
temperamental glow? I do not know--I fear not.

Here is the net result--that I have become a sort of personage in the
world of letters. Do I desire it? Yes, in a sense I do, but in a sense
I do not. I do not want money, I do not wish for public appearances. I
have no social ambitions. To be pointed out as the distinguished
novelist is distinctly inconvenient. People will demand a certain
standard of talk, a certain brilliance, which I am not in the least
capable of giving them. I want to sit at my ease at the banquet of
life, not to be ushered to the highest rooms. I prefer interesting and
pleasant people to important and majestic persons. Perhaps if I were
more simple-minded, I should not care about the matter at all; just be
grateful for the increased warmth and amenity of life--but I am not
simple-minded, and I hate not fulfilling other people's expectations. I
am not a prodigal, full-blooded, royal sort of person at all. I am not
conscious of greatness, but far more of emptiness. I do not wish to
seem pretentious. I have got this one faculty; but it has outrun all
the rest of me, and I am aware that it has drained the rest of my
nature. The curious thing is that this sort of fame is the thing that
as a young man I used to covet. I used to think it would be so
sustaining and resplendent. Now that it has come to me, in far richer
measure, I will not say than I hoped, but at all events than I had
expected, it does not seem to be a wholly desirable thing. Fame is only
one of the sauces of life; it is not the food of the spirit at all. The
people that praise one are like the courtiers that bow in the anterooms
of a king, through whom he passes to the lonely study where his life is
lived. I am not feeling ungrateful or ungenerous; but I would give all
that I have gained for a new and inspiring friendship, or for the
certainty that I should write another book with the same happiness as I
wrote my last book. Perhaps I ought to feel the responsibility more! I
do feel it in a sense, but I have never estimated the moral
effectiveness of a writer of fiction very high; one comforts rather
than sustains; one diverts rather than feeds. If I could hear of one
self-sacrificing action, one generous deed, one tranquil surrender that
had been the result of my book, I should be more pleased than I am with
all the shower of compliments. Of course in a sense praise makes life
more interesting; but what I really desire to apprehend is the
significance and meaning of life, that strange mixture of pain and
pleasure, of commonplace events and raptures; and my book brings me no
nearer that. To feel God nearer me, to feel, not by evidence but by
instinct, that there is a Heart that cares for me, and moulded me from
the clay for a purpose--why, I would give all that I have in the world
for that!

Of course Maud will be pleased; but that will be because she believes
that I deserve everything and anything, and is only surprised that the
world has not found out sooner what a marvellous person I am. God knows
I do not undervalue her belief in me; but it makes and keeps me humble
to feel how far she is from the truth, how far from realising the
pitiful weakness and emptiness of her lover and husband.

Is this, I wonder, how all successful people feel about fame? The
greatest of all have often never enjoyed the least touch of it in their
lifetime; and they are happier so. Some few rich and generous natures,
like Scott and Browning, have neither craved for it nor valued it. Some
of the greatest have desired it, slaved for it, clung to it. Yet when
it comes, one realises how small a part of life and thought it
fills--unless indeed it brings other desirable things with it; and this
is not the case with me, because I have all I want. Well, if I can but
set to work at another book, all these idle thoughts will die away; but
my mind rattles like a shrunken kernel. I must kneel down and pray, as
Blake and his wife did, when the visions deserted them.



September 25, 1888.

Here is a social instance of what it means to become "quite a little
man," as Stevenson used to say. Some county people near here,
good-natured, pushing persons, who have always been quite civil but
nothing more, invited themselves to luncheon here a day or two ago,
bringing with them a distinguished visitor. They throw in some nauseous
compliments to my book, and say that Lord Wilburton wishes to make my
acquaintance. I do not particularly want to make his, though he is a
man of some not. But there was no pretext for declining. Such an
incursion is a distinct bore; it clouds the morning--one cannot settle
down with a tranquil mind to one's work; it fills the afternoon. They
came, and it proved not uninteresting. They are pleasant people enough,
and Lord Wilburton is a man who has been everywhere and seen everybody.
The fact that he wished to make my acquaintance shows, no doubt, that I
have sailed into his ken, and that he wishes to add me to his
collection. I felt myself singularly unrewarding. I am not a talker at
the best of times, and to feel that I am expected to be witty and
suggestive is the last straw. Lord Wilburton discoursed fluently and
agreeably. Lady Harriet said that she envied me my powers of writing,
and asked how I came to think of my last brilliant book, which she had
so enjoyed. I did not know what to say, and could not invent anything.
They made a great deal of the children. They walked round the garden.
They praised everything ingeniously. They could not say the house was
big, and so they called in convenient. They could not say that the
garden was ample, but Lord Wilburton said that he had never seen so
much ground go to the acre. That was neat enough. They made a great
point of visiting my library, and carried away my autograph, written
with the very same pen with which I wrote my great book. This they
called a privilege. They made us promise to go over to the Castle,
which I have no great purpose of doing. We parted with mutual goodwill,
and with that increase of geniality on my own part which comes on me at
the end of a visit. Altogether I did not dislike it, though it did not
seem to me particularly worth while. To-day my wife tells me that they
told the Fitzpatricks that it was a great pleasure seeing me, because I
was so modest and unaffected. That is a courteous way of concealing
their disappointment that I was not more brilliant. But, good heavens,
what did they expect? I suppose, indeed I have no doubt, that if I had
talked mysteriously about my book, and had described the genesis of it,
and my method of working, they would have preferred that. Just as in
reminiscences of the Duke of Wellington, the people who saw him in
later life seem to have been struck dumb by a sort of tearful
admiration at the sight of the Duke condescending to eat his dinner, or
to light a guest's bedroom candle. Perhaps if I had been more
simple-minded I should have talked frankly about myself. I don't know;
it seems to me all rather vulgar. But my visitors are kindly and
courteous people, and felt, I am sure, that they were both receiving
and conferring benefits. They will like to describe me and my house,
and they will feel that I am pleased at being received on equal terms
into county society. I don't put this down at all cynically; but they
are not people with whom I have anything in common. I am not of their
monde at all. I belong to the middle class, and they are of the upper
class. I have a faint desire to indicate that I don't want to cross the
border-line, and that what I desire is the society of interesting and
congenial people, not the society of my social superior. This is not
unworldliness in the least, merely hedonism. Feudalism runs in the
blood of these people, and they feel, not consciously but quite
instinctively, that the confer a benefit by making my acquaintance. "No
doubt but ye are the people," as Job said, but I do not want to rise in
the social scale. It would be the earthen pot and the brazen pot at
best. I am quite content with my own class, and life is not long enough
to change it, and to learn the habits of another. I have no quarrel
with the aristocracy, and do not in the least wish to level them to the
ground. I am quite prepared to acknowledge them as the upper class.
They are, as a rule, public-spirited, courteous barbarians, with a
sense of honour and responsibility. But they take a great many things
as matters of course which are to me simply alien. I no more wish to
live with them than Wright, my self-respecting gardener, wishes to live
with me--though so deeply rooted are feudal ideas in the blood of the
race, that Wright treats me with a shade of increased deference because
I have been entertaining a party of Lords and Ladies; and the Vicar's
wife said to Maud that she heard we had been giving a very grand party,
and would soon be quite county people. The poor woman will think more
of my books than she has ever thought before. I don't think this is
snobbish, because it is so perfectly instinctive and natural.

But what I wanted to say was that this is the kind of benefit which is
conferred by success; and for a quiet person, who likes familiar and
tranquil ways, it is no benefit at all; indeed, rather the reverse;
unless it is a benefit that the stationmaster touched his hat to me
to-day, which he has never done before. It is a funny little world.
Meanwhile I have no ideas, and my visitors to-day haven't given me any,
though Lord Wilburton might be a useful figure in a book; so perfectly
appointed, so quiet, so deferential, so humorous, so deliciously
insincere!



October 4, 1888.

I have happened to read lately, in some magazines, certain illustrated
interviews with prominent people, which have given me a deep sense of
mental and moral nausea. I do not think I am afflicted with a strong
sense of the sacredness of a man's home life--at least, if it is sacred
at all, it seems to me to be just as much profaned by allowing visitors
or strangers to see it and share it as it is by allowing it to be
written about in a periodical. If it is sacred in a peculiar sense,
then only very intimate friends ought to be allowed to see it, and
there should be a tacit sense that they ought not to tell any one
outside what it is like; but if I am invited to luncheon with a
celebrated man whom I do not know, because I happen to be staying in
the neighbourhood, I do not think I violate his privacy by describing
my experience to other people. If a man has a beautiful house, a happy
interior, a gifted family circle, and if he is himself a remarkable
man, it is a privilege to be admitted to it, it does one good to see
it; and it seems to me that the more people who realise the beauty and
happiness of it the better. The question of numbers has nothing to do
with it. Suppose, for instance, that I am invited to stay with a great
man, and suppose that I have a talent for drawing; I may sketch his
house and his rooms, himself and his family, if he does not object--and
it seems to me that it would be churlish and affected of him to
object--I may write descriptive letters from the place, giving an
account of his domestic ways, his wife and family, his rooms, his
books, his garden, his talk. I do not see that there is any reasonable
objection to my showing those sketches to other people who are
interested in the great man, or to the descriptive letters or diary
that I write being shown or read to others who do not know him. Indeed
I think it is a perfectly natural and wholesome desire to know
something of the life and habits of great men; I would go further, and
say that it is an improving and inspiring sort of knowledge to be
acquainted with the pleasant details of the well-ordered, contented,
and happy life of a high-minded and effective man. Who, for instance,
considers it to be a sort of treachery for the world at large to know
something of the splendid and affectionate life of the Kingsley circle
at Eversley Rectory, or of the Tennyson circle at Freshwater? to look
at pictures of the scene, to hear how the great men looked and moved
and spoke? And if it is not profanation to hear and see this in the
pages of a biography, why is it a profanation to read and see it in the
pages of a magazine? To object to it seems to me to be a species of
prudish conventionality.

Only you must be sure that you get a natural, simple, and unaffected
picture of it all; and what I object to in the interviews which I have
been reading is that one gets an unnatural, affected, self-conscious,
and pompous picture of it all. To go and pose in your favourite seat in
a shrubbery or a copse, where you think out your books or poems, in
order that an interviewer may take a snap-shot of you--especially if in
addition you assume a look of owlish solemnity as though you were the
prey of great thoughts--that seems to me to be an infernal piece of
posing. But still worse than that is the kind of conversation in which
people are tempted to indulge in the presence of an interviewer. A man
ought not to say to a wandering journalist whom he has never seen
before, in the presence of his own wife, that women are the inspirers
and magnetisers of the world, and that he owes all that has made him
what he is to the sweet presence and sympathetic tenderness of his
Bessy. This, it seems to me, is the lowest kind of melodrama. The thing
may be perfectly true, the thought may be often in his mind, but he
cannot be accustomed to say such things in ordinary life; and one feels
that when he says them to an interviewer he does it in a thoroughly
self-conscious mood, in order that he may make an impressive figure
before the public. The conversations in the interviews I have been
reading give me the uncomfortable sense that they have been thought out
beforehand from the dramatic point of view; and indeed one earnestly
hopes that this is the solution of the situation, because it would make
one feel very faint if one thought that remarks of this kind were the
habitual utterances of the circle--indeed, it would cure one very
effectually of the desire to know anything of the interiors of
celebrated people, if one thought that they habitually talked like the
heroes of a Sunday-school romance. That is why the reading of these
interviews is so painful, because, in the first place, one feels sure
that one is not realising the daily life of these people at all, but
only looking on at a tableau vivant prepared by them for the occasion;
and secondly, it makes one very unhappy to think that people of real
eminence and effectiveness can condescend to behave in this affected
way in order to win the applause of vulgar readers. One vaguely hopes,
indeed, that some of the dismal platitudes that they are represented as
uttering may have been addressed to them in the form of questions by
the interviewer, and that they have merely stammered a shamefaced
assent. It makes a real difference, for instance, whether as a matter
of fact a celebrated authoress leads her golden-haired children up to
an interviewer, and says, "These are my brightest jewels;" or whether,
when she tells her children to shake hands, the interviewer says, "No
doubt these are your brightest jewels?" A mother is hardly in a
position to return an indignant negative to such a question, and if she
utters an idiotic affirmative, she is probably credited with the
original remark in all its unctuousness!

It is a difficult question to decide what is the most simple-minded
thing to do, if you are in the unhappy position of being requested to
grant an interview for journalistic purposes. My own feeling is that if
people really wish to know how I live, what I wear, what I eat and
drink, what books I read, what kind of a house I live in, they are
perfectly welcome to know. It does not seem to me that it would detract
from the sacredness of my home life, if a picture of my dining-room,
with the table laid for luncheon in a very cramped perspective, or if a
photogravure of the scrap of grass and shrubbery that I call my garden,
were to be published in a magazine. All that is to a certain extent
public already. I should not wish to have a photograph of myself in
bed, or shaving, published in a magazine, because those are not moments
when I am inclined to admit visitors. Neither do I particularly want my
private and informal conversation taken down and reproduced, because
that often consists of opinions which are not my deliberate and
thought-out utterances. But I hope that I should be able to talk simply
and courteously to an interviewer on ordinary topics, in a way that
would not discredit me it is was made public; and I hope, too, that
decency would restrain me from making inflated and pompous remarks
about my inner beliefs and motives, which were not in the least
characteristic of my usual method of conversation.

The truth is that what spoils these records is the desire on the part
of worthy and active people to appear more impressive in ordinary life
than they actually are; it is a well-meant sort of hypocrisy, because
it is intended, in a way, to influence other people, and to make them
think that celebrated people live habitually on a higher tone of
intellect and emotion than they do actually live upon. My on experience
of meeting great people is that they are, as a rule, disappointingly
like ordinary people, both in their tastes and in their conversation.
Very few men or women, who are extremely effective in practical or
artistic lines, have the energy or the vitality to expend themselves
very freely in talk or social intercourse. They do not save themselves
up for their speeches or their books; but they give their best energies
to them, and have little current coin of high thought left for ordinary
life. The mischief is that these interviews are generally conducted by
inquisitive and rhetorical strangers, not distinguished for social tact
or overburdened with good taste; and so the whole occasion tends to
wear a melodramatic air, which is fatal both to artistic effect as well
as to simple propriety.



October 9, 1888.

Let me set against my fashionable luncheon-party of a few weeks ago a
visit which I owe no less to my success, and which has been a true and
deep delight to me. I had a note yesterday from a man whom I hold in
great and deep reverence, a man who I have met two or three times, a
poet indeed, one of our true and authentic singers. He writes that he
is in the neighbourhood; may he come over for a few hours and renew our
acquaintance?

He came, in the morning. One has only to set eyes upon him to know that
one is in the presence of a hero, to feel that his poetry just streams
from him like light from the sun; that it is not the central warmth,
but the flying rippling radiance of the outward-bound light, falling in
momentary beauty on the common things about his path. He is a great big
man, carelessly dressed, like a Homeric king. I liked everything about
him from head to foot, his big carelessly-worn clothes, the bright tie
thrust loosely through a cameo ring; his loose shaggy locks, his strong
beard. His face, with its delicate pallor, and purely moulded features,
had a youthful air of purity and health; yet there was a dim trouble of
thought on his brow, over the great, smiling, flashing grey eyes. He
came in with a sort of royal greeting, he flung his big limbs on a
sofa; he talked easily, quietly, lavishly, saying fine things with no
effort, dropping a subject quickly if he thought it did not interest
me; sometimes flashing out with a quick gesture of impatience or gusto,
enjoying life, every moment and every detail. His quick eyes, roving
about, took in each smallest point, not in the weary feverish way in
which I apprehend a new scene, but as though he liked everything new
and unfamiliar, like an unsated child. He greeted Maud and the children
with a kind of chivalrous tenderness and intimacy, as though he loved
all pretty and tender things, and took joy in their nearness. He held
Alec between his knees, and played with him while he talked. The
children took possession of him, as if they had known him all their
lives. And yet there was no touch of pose, no consciousness of
greatness or vigour about him. He was as humble, grateful, interested,
as though he were a poor stranger dependent on our bounty. I asked him
in a quiet moment about his work. "No, I am writing nothing," he said
with a smile, "I have said all I have got to say,"--and then with a
sudden humorous flash, "though I believe I should be able to write more
if I could get decent paper and respectable type to print my work." I
ventured to ask if he did not feel any desire to write? "No," he said,
"frankly I do not--the world is so full of pleasant things to do and
hear and see, that I sometimes think myself almost a fool for having
spent so much time in scribbling. Do you know," he went on, "a
delicious story I picked up the other day? A man was travelling in some
God-forsaken out-of-the-way place--I believe it was the Andes--and he
fell in with an old podgy Roman priest who was going everywhere, in a
state of perpetual fatigue, taking long expeditions every day, and
returning worn-out in the evening, but perfectly content. The man saw a
good deal of the priest, and asked him what he was doing. The priest
smiled and said, 'Well, I will tell you. I had an illness some time ago
and believed that I was going to die. One evening--I was half
unconscious--I thought I saw some one standing by my bed. I looked, and
it was a young man with a beautiful and rather severe face, whom I knew
to be an angel, who was gazing at me rather strangely. I thought it was
the messenger of death, and--for I was wishing to be gone and have done
with it all--I said something to him about being ready to depart--and
then added that I was waiting hopefully to see the joys of Paradise,
the glory of the saints in light. He looked at me rather fixedly, and
said, "I do not know why you should say that, and why you should expect
to take so much pleasure in the beauty of heaven, when you have taken
so little trouble to see anything of the beauty of earth;" and then he
left me; and I reflected that I had always been doing my work in a dull
humdrum way, in the same place all my life; and I determined that, if I
got well, I would go about and see something of the glory that IS
revealed to us, and not expect only the glory that SHALL BE revealed to
us.' It is a fine story," he went on, "and makes a parable for us
writers, who are inclined to think too much about our work, and
disposed to see that it is very good, like God brooding over the
world." He sate for a little, smiling to himself. And then I plied him
with questions about his writing, how his thoughts came to him how he
worked them out. He told me as if he was talking about some one else,
half wondering that there could be anything to care about. I have heard
many craftsmen talk about their work, but never one who talked with
such detachment. As a rule, writers talk with a secret glee, and with a
deprecating humility that deceives no one; but the great man talked,
not as if he cared to think about it, but because it happened to
interest me. He strolled with me, he lunched; and he thanked us when he
went away with an earnest and humble thankfulness, as though we had
extended our hospitality to an obscure and unworthy guest. And then his
praise of my own books--it was all so natural; not as if he had come
there with fine compliments prepared, with incense to burn; but
speaking about them as though they were in his mind, and he could not
help it. "I read all you write," he said; "ah, you go deep--you are a
lucky fellow, to be able to see so far and so minutely, and to bring it
all home to our blind souls. He must be a terrible fellow to live
with," he said, smiling at my wife. "It must be like being married to a
doctor, and feeling that he knows so much more about one than one knows
oneself--but he sees what is best and truest, thank God; and says it
with the voice of an angel, speaking softly out of his golden cloud."

I can't say what words like these have meant to me; but the visit
itself, the sight of this strong, equable, good-humoured man, with no
feverish ambitions, no hankering after fame or recognition, has done
even more. I have heard it said that he is indolent, that he has not
sufficient sense of responsibility for his gifts. But the man has done
a great work for his generation; he has written poetry of the purest
and finest quality. Is not that enough? I cannot understand the mere
credit we give to work, without any reference to the object of the
work, or the spirit in which it is done. We think with respect of the
man who makes a fortune, or who fills an official post, the duties of
which do nothing in particular for any one. It is a kind of obsession
with us practical Westerners; of course a man ought to contribute to
the necessary work of the world; but many men spend their lives in work
which is not necessary; and, after all, we are sent into the world to
live, and work is only a part of life. We work to live, we do not live
to work. Even if we were all socialists, we should, I hope, have the
grace to dig the gardens and make the clothes of our poets and
prophets, so as to give them the leisure they need.

I do not question the instinct of my hero in the matter; he lives
eagerly and peacefully; he touches into light the spirits of those who
draw near to him; and I admire a man who knows how to stop when he has
done his best work, and does not spur and whip his tired mind into
producing feebler, limper, duller work of the same kind; how few of our
great writers have known when to hold their hand!

God be praised for great men! My poet to-day has made me feel that life
is a thing to be lived eagerly and high-heartedly; that the world is
full of beautiful, generous, kindly things, of free air and sunshine;
and that we ought to find leisure to drink it all in, and to send our
hearts out in search of love and beauty and God--for these things are
all about us, if we could but feel and hear and see them.



October 12, 1888.

How absurd it is to say that a writer could not write a large, wise,
beautiful book unless he had a great soul--is it almost like saying
that an artist could not paint a fine face unless he had a fine face
himself. It is all a question of seeing clearly, and having a skilled
hand. There is nothing to make one believe that Shakespeare had a
particularly noble or beautiful character; and some of our greatest
writers have been men of unbalanced, childish, immature temperaments,
full of vanity and pettiness. Of course a man must be interested in
what he is describing; but I think that a man of a naturally great,
wise, and lofty spirit is so disposed as a rule to feel that his
qualities are instinctive, and so ready to credit other people with
them, that it does not occur to him to depict those qualities. I am not
sure that the best equipment for an artist is not that he should see
and admire great and noble and beautiful things, and feel his own
deficiency in them acutely, desiring them with the desire of the moth
for the star. The best characters in my own books have been, I am sure,
the people least like myself, because the creation of a character that
one whole-heartedly admires, and that yet is far out of one's reach, is
the most restful and delightful thing in the world. If one is unready
in speech, thinking of one's epigrams three hours after the occasion
for them has arisen, how pleasant to draw the man who says the neat,
witty, appropriate, consoling thing! If one suffers from timidity, from
meanness, from selfishness, what a delight to depict the man who is
brave, generous, unselfish! Of course the quality of a man's mind flows
into and over his work, but that is rather like the varnish of the
picture than its tints--it is the medium rather than the design. The
artistic creation of ideal situations is often a sort of refuge to the
man who knows that he makes a mess of the beautiful and simple
relations of life. The artist is fastidious and moody, feeling the
pressure of strained nerves and tired faculties, easily discouraged,
disgusted by the superficial defect, the tiny blot that spoils alike
the noble character, the charming prospect, the attractive face. He
sees, let us say, a person with a beautiful face and an ugly hand. The
normal person thinks of the face and forgets the hand. The artist
thinks with pain of the hand and forgets the face. He desires an
impossible perfection, and flies for safety to the little world that he
can make and sway. That is why artists, as a rule, love twilight hours,
shaded rooms, half-tones, subdued hues, because what is common,
staring, tasteless, is blurred and hidden. Men of rich vitality are
generally too much occupied with life as it is, its richness, its
variety, its colour and fragrance, to think wistfully of life as it
might be. The unbridled, sensuous, luxurious strain, that one finds in
so many artists, comes from a lack of moral temperance, a snatching at
delights. They fear dreariness and ugliness so much that they welcome
any intoxication of pleasure. But after all, it is clearness of vision
that makes the artist, the power of disentangling the central feature
from the surrounding details, the power of subordinating accessories,
of seeing which minister to the innermost impression, and which
distract and blur. An artist who creates a great character need not
necessarily even desire to attain the great qualities which he
discerns; he sees them, as he sees the vertebrae of the mountain ridge
under pasture and woodland, as he sees the structure of the tree under
its mist of green; but to see beauty is not necessarily to desire it;
for, as in the mountain and the tree, it may have no ethical
significance at all, only a symbolical meaning. The best art is
inspired more by an intellectual force than by a vital sympathy. Of
course to succeed as a novelist in England to-day, one must have a dash
of the moralist, because an English audience is far more preoccupied
with moral ideals than with either intellectual or artistic ideals. The
reading public desires that love should be loyal rather than
passionate; it thinks ultimate success a more impressive thing than
ultimate failure; it loves sadness as a contrast and preface to
laughter. It prefers that the patriarch Job should end by having a nice
new family of children and abundant flocks, rather than that he should
sink into death among the ashes, refusing to curse God for his
reverses. Its view of existence after death is that Dives should join
Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. To succeed, one must compromise with this
comfortable feeing, sacrificing, if needs be, the artistic conscience,
because the place of the minstrel in England is after the banquet, when
the warriors are pleasantly tired, have put off the desire of meat and
drink, and the fire roars and crackles in the hearth. When Ruskin
deserted his clouds and peaks, his sunsets and sunrises, and devoured
his soul over the brutalities and uglinesses and sordid inequalities of
life, it was all put down to the obscure pressure of mental disease.
Ophelia does not sob and struggle in the current, but floats dreamily
to death in a bed of meadow-flowers.



October 21, 1888.

Let me try to recollect for my own amusement how it was that my last
book grew up and took shape. How well I remember the day and the hour
when the first thought came to me! Some one was dining here, and told a
story about a friend of his, and an unhappy misunderstanding between
him and a girl whom he loved, or thought he loved. A figure, two
figures, a scene, a conversation, came into my head, absolutely and
perfectly life-like. I lay awake half the night, I remember, over it.
How did those people come to be in exactly that situation? how would it
develop? At first it was just the scene by itself, nothing more; a room
which filled itself with furniture. There were doors--where did they
lead to? There were windows--where did they look out? The house was
full, too, of other people, whose quiet movements I heard. One person
entered the room, and then another; and so the story opened out. I saw
the wrong word spoken, I saw the mist of doubt and distress that filled
the girl's mind; I felt that I would have given anything to intervene,
to explain; but instead of speaking out, the girl confided in the wrong
person, who had an old grudge against the man, so old that it had
become instinctive and irrational. So the thing evolved itself. Then at
one time the story got entangled and confused. I could go no further.
The characters were by this time upon the scene, but they could not
speak. I then saw that I had made a mistake somewhere. The scaffolding
was all taken down, spar by spar, and still the defect was not
revealed. I must go, I saw, backwards; and so I felt my way, like a man
groping in the dark, into what had gone before, and suddenly came out
into the light. It was a mistake far back in the conception. I righted
it, and the story began to evolve itself again; this time with a
delicate certainty, that made me feel I was on the track at last. An
impressive scene was sacrificed--it was there that my idea had gone
wrong! As to the writing of it, I cannot say it was an effort. It wrote
itself. I was not creating; I was describing and selecting. There was
one scene in particular, a scene which has been praised by all the
reviewers. How did I invent it? I do not know. I had no idea what the
characters were to say when I began to write it, but one remark grew
inevitably and surely out of the one before. I was never at a loss; I
never stuck fast; indeed the one temptation which I firmly and
constantly resisted was the temptation to write morning, noon, and
night. Sometimes I had a horrible fear that I might not live to set
down what was so clear in my mind; but there is a certain freshness
which comes of self-restraint. Day after day, as I strolled, and read,
and talked, I used to hug myself at the thought of the beloved evening
hours that were coming, when I should fling myself upon the book with a
passionate zest, and feel it grow under my hand. And then it was done!
I remember writing the last words, and the conviction came upon me that
it was the end. There was more to be told; the story stretched on into
the distance; but it was as though the frame of the picture had
suddenly fallen upon the canvas, and I knew that just so much and no
more was to be seen. And then, as though to show me plainly that the
work was over, the next day came an event which drew my mind off the
book. I had had a period of unclouded health and leisure, everything
had combined to help me, and then this event, of which I need not
speak, came and closed the book at the right moment.

What wonder if one grows fatalistic about writing; that one feels that
one can only say what is given one to say! And now, dry and arid as my
mind is, I would give all I have for a renewal of that beautiful glow,
which I cannot recover. It is misery--I can conceive no greater--to be
bound hand and foot in this helpless silence.



November 6, 1888.

It is a joy to think of the way in which the best, most beautiful, most
permanent things have stolen unnoticed into life. I like to think of
Wordsworth, an obscure, poor, perverse, absurd man, living in the
corner of the great house at Alfoxden, walking in the moonlight with
Coleridge, living on milk and eggs, utterly unaccountable and puerile
to the sensible man of affairs, while the two planned the Lyrical
Ballads. I like to think of Keats, sitting lazily and discontentedly in
the villa garden at Hampstead, with his illness growing upon him and
his money melting away, scribbling the "Ode to the Nightingale," and
caring so little about the fate of it that it was only by chance, as it
were, that the pencil scraps were rescued from the book where he had
shut them. I love to think of Charlotte Bronte, in the bare kitchen of
the little house in the grey, wind-swept village on the edge of the
moorland, penning, in sickness and depression, the scenes of Jane Eyre,
without a thought that she was doing anything unusual or lasting. We
surround such scenes with a heavenly halo, born of the afterglow of
fame; we think them romantic, beautiful, thrilled and flushed by
passionate joy; but there was little that was delightful about them at
the time.

The most beautiful of all such scenes is the tale of the maiden-wife in
the stable at Bethlehem, with the pain and horror and shame of the
tragic experience, in all its squalid publicity, told in those simple
words, which I never hear without a smile that is full of tears,
BECAUSE THERE WAS NO ROOM FOR THEM IN THE INN. We poor human souls,
knowing what that event has meant for the race, make the bare, ugly
place seemly and lovely, surrounding the Babe with a tapestry of
heavenly forms, holy lights, rapturous sounds; taking the terror and
the meanness of the scene away, and thereby, by our clumsy handling,
losing the divine seal of the great mystery, the fact that hope can
spring, in unstained and sublime radiance, from the vilest, lowest,
meanest, noisiest conditions that can well be conceived.



November 20, 1888.

I wonder aimlessly what it is that makes a book, a picture, a piece of
music, a poem, great. When any of these things has become a part of
one's mind and soul, utterly and entirely familiar, one is tempted to
think that the precise form of them is inevitable. That is a great
mistake.

Here is a tiny instance. I see that in the "Lycidas" Milton wrote:--

    "Who would not sing for Lycidas? He WELL knew
     Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme."


The word "well" occurs in two MSS., and it seems to have been struck
out in the proof. The introduction of the word seems barbarous,
unmetrical, an outrage on the beauty of the line. Yet Milton must have
thought that it was needed, and have only decided by an after-thought
that it was better away. If it had been printed so, we should equally
have thought its omission barbarous and inartistic.

And thus, to an artist, there must be many ways of working out a
conception. I do not believe in the theory that the form is so
inevitable, because what great artist was ever perfectly content with
the form? The greater the artist, the more conscious he probably is of
the imperfection of his work; and if it could be bettered, how is it
then inevitable? It is only our familiarity with it that gives it
inevitableness. A beautiful building gains its mellow outline by a
hundred accidents of wear and weather, never contemplated by the
designer's mind. We love it so, we would not have it otherwise; but we
should have loved it just as intensely if it had been otherwise. Only a
small part, then, of the greatness of artistic work is what we
ourselves bring to it; and it becomes great, not only from itself, but
from the fact that it fits our minds as the dagger fits the sheath. The
greatness of a conception depends largely upon its being near enough to
our own conceptions, and yet a little greater, just as the vault of a
great church gives one a larger sense of immensity than the sky with
its sailing clouds. Indeed it is often the very minuteness of a
conception rather than its vastness that makes it great. It must not be
outside our range. As to the form, it depends upon some curious
felicity of hand, and touch, and thought. Suppose that a great painter
gave a rough pencil-sketch of a picture to a hundred students, and told
them all to work it out in colour. Some few of the results would be
beautiful, the majority would be still uninteresting and tame.

Thus I am somewhat of a fatalist about art, because it seems to depend
upon a lucky union of conception and technical instinct. The saddest
proof of which is that many good and even great artists have not
improved in greatness as their skill improved. The youthful works of
genius are generally the best, their very crudities and stiffnesses
adorable.

The history of art and literature alike seems to point to the fact that
each artistic soul has a flowering period, which generally comes early,
rarely comes late; and therefore the supreme artist ought also to know
when the bloom is over, when his good work is done. And then, I think,
he ought to be ready to abjure his art, to drown his book, like
Prospero, and set himself to live rather than to produce. But what a
sacrifice to demand of a man, and how few attain it! Most men cannot do
without their work, and go on to the end producing more feeble, more
tired, more mannerised work, till they cloud the beauty of their prime
by masses of inferior and uninspired production.



November 24, 1888.

Soft wintry skies, touched with faintest gleams of colour, like a
dove's wing, blue plains and heights, over the nearer woodland;
everywhere fallen rotting leaf and oozy water-channel; everything, tint
and form, restrained, austere, delicate; nature asleep and breathing
gently in the cool airs; a tranquil and sober hopefulness abroad.

I walked alone in deep woodland lanes, content for once to rest and
dream. The country seemed absolutely deserted; such labour as was going
forward was being done in barn and byre; beasts being fed, hurdles made.

I passed in a solitary road a draggled ugly woman, a tramp, wheeling an
old perambulator full of dingy clothes and sordid odds and ends; she
looked at me sullenly and suspiciously. Where she was going God knows:
to camp, I suppose, in some dingle, with ugly company; to beg, to lie,
to purloin, perhaps to drink; but by the perambulator walked a little
boy, seven or eight years old, grotesquely clothed in patched and
clumsy garments; he held on to the rim, dirty, unkempt; but he was
happy too; he was with his mother, of whom he had no fear; he had been
fed as the birds are fed; he had no anxious thoughts of the future, and
as he went, he crooned to himself a soft song, like the piping of a
finch in a wayside thicket. What was in his tiny mind and heart? I do
not know; but perhaps a little touch of the peace of God.



November 26, 1888.

Another visitor! I am not sure that his visit is not a more
distinguished testimonial than any I have yet received. He is a young
Don with a very brilliant record indeed. He wrote to ask if he might
have the honour of calling, and renewing a very slight acquaintance. He
came and conquered. I am still crushed and battered by his visit. I
feel like a land that has been harried by an invading army. Let me see
if, dizzy and unmanned as I am, I call recall some of the incidents of
his visit. He has only been gone an hour, yet I feel as though a month
had elapsed since he entered the room, since I was a moderately happy
man. He is a very pleasant fellow to look at, small, trim,
well-appointed, courteous, friendly, with a deferential air. His eyes
gleam brightly through his glasses, and he has brisk dexterous
gestures. He was genial enough till he settled down upon literature,
and since then what waves and storms have gone over me! I have or had a
grovelling taste for books; I possess a large number, and I thought I
had read them. But I feel now, not so much as if I had read the wrong
ones, but as if those I had read were only, so to speak, the anterooms
and corridors which led to the really important books--and of them, it
seems, I know nothing. Epigrams flowed from his tongue, brilliant
characterisations, admirable judgments. He had "placed" every one, and
literature to him seemed like a great mosaic in which he knew the
position of every cube. He knew all the movements and tendencies of
literature, and books seemed to him to be important, not because they
had a message for the mind and heart, but because they illustrated a
tendency, or were a connecting link in a chain. He quoted poems I had
never heard of, he named authors I had never read. He did it all
modestly and quietly enough, with no parade, (I want to do him full
justice) but with an evidently growing disappointment to find that he
had fallen among savages. I am sure that his conclusion was that
authors of popular novels were very shallow, ill-informed people, and I
am sure I wholly agreed with him. Good heavens, what a mind the man
had, how stored with knowledge! how admirably equipped! Nothing that he
had ever put away in his memory seemed to have lost its colour or
outline; and he knew, moreover, how to lay his hand upon everything.
Indeed, it seemed to me that his mind was like an emporium, with
everything in the world arranged on shelves, all new and varnished and
bright, and that he knew precisely the place of everything. I became
the prey of hopeless depression; when I tried to join in, I confused
writers and dates; he set me right, not patronisingly but paternally.
"Ah, but you will remember," he said, and "Yes, but we must not
overlook the fact that"--adding, with admirable humility, "Of course
these are small points, but it is my business to know them." Now I find
myself wondering why I disliked knowledge, communicated thus, so much
as I did. It may be envy and jealousy, it may be humiliation and
despair. But I do not honestly think that it is. I am quite sure I do
not want to possess that kind of knowledge. It is the very sharpness
and clearness of outline about it all that I dislike. The things that
he knows have not become part of his mind in any way: they are stored
away there, like walnuts; and I feel that I have been pelted with
walnuts, deluged and buried in walnuts. The things which my visitor
knows have undergone no change, they have not been fused and blended by
his personality; they have not affected his mind, nor has his mind
affected them. I don't wish to despise or to decry his knowledge; as a
lecturer, he must be invaluable; but he treats literature as a purveyor
might--it has not been food to him, but material and stock-in-trade.
Some of the poetry we talked about--Elizabethan lyrics--grow in my mind
like flowers in a copse; in his mind they are planted in rows, with
their botanical names on tickets. The worst of it is that I do not even
feel encouraged to fill up my gaps of knowledge, or to master the
history of tendency. I feel as if he had rather trampled down the
hyacinths and anemones in my wild and uncultivated woodlands. I should
like, in a dim way, to have his knowledge as well as my own
appreciation, but I would not exchange my knowledge for his. The value
of a lyric or a beautiful sentence, for me, is its melody, its charm,
its mysterious thrill; and there are many books and poems, which I know
to be excellent of their kind, but which have no meaning or message for
me. He seems to think that it is important to have complete texts of
old authors, and I do not think that he makes much distinction between
first-rate and second-rate work. In fact, I think that his view of
literature is the sociological view, and he seems to care more about
tendencies and influences than about the beauty and appeal of
literature. I do not go so far as to say or to think that literature
cannot be treated scientifically; but I feel as I feel about the doctor
in Balzac, I think, who, when his wife cried upon his shoulder, said,
"Hold, I have analysed tears," adding that they contained so much
chlorate of sodium and so much mucus. The truth is that he is a
philosopher, and that I am an individualist; but it leaves me with an
intense desire to be left alone in my woodland, or, at all events, not
to walk there with a ruthless botanist!



November 29, 1888.

I have heard this morning of the suicide of an old friend. Is it
strange to say that I have heard the news with an unfeigned relief,
even gladness? He was formerly a charming and brilliant creature, full
of enthusiasm and artistic impulses, fitful, wayward, wilful. Somehow
he missed his footing; he fell into disreputable courses; he did
nothing, but drifted about, planning many things, executing nothing.
The last time I saw him was exquisitely painful; we met by appointment,
and I could see that he had tried to screw himself up for the interview
by stimulants. The ghastly feigning of cheerfulness, the bloated face,
the trembling hands, told the sad tale. And now that it is all over,
the shame and the decay, the horror of his having died by his own act
is a purely conventional one. One talks pompously about the selfishness
of it, but it is one of the most unselfish things poor Dick has ever
done; he was a burden and a misery to all those who cared for him.
Recovery was, I sincerely believe, impossible. His was a fine,
uplifted, even noble spirit in youth, but there were terrible
hereditary influences at work, and I cannot honestly say that I think
he was wholly responsible for his sins. If I could think that this act
was done reasonably, in a solemn and recollected spirit, and was not a
mere frightened scurrying out of life, I should be, I believe, wholly
glad. I do not see that any one had anything to gain by his continuing
to live; and if reason is given us to use, to guide our actions by, it
seems to me that we do right to obey it. Suicide may, of course, be a
selfish and a cowardly thing, but the instinct of self-preservation is
so strong that a man must always manifest a certain courage in making
such a decision. The sacrifice of one's own life is not necessarily and
absolutely an immoral thing, because it is always held to be justified
if one's motive is to save another. It is purely, I believe, a question
of motive; whatever poor Dick's motives were, it was certainly the
kindest and bravest thing that he could do; and I look upon his life as
having been as naturally ended as if he had died of disease or by an
accident. There is not a single one of his friends who would not have
been thankful if he had died in the course of nature; and I for one am
even more thankful as it is, because it seems to me that his act
testifies to some tenderness, some consideration for others, as well as
to a degree of resolution with which I had not credited him.

Of course such a thing deepens the mystery of the world; but such an
act as this is not to me half as mysterious as the action of an
omnipotent Power which allowed so bright and gracious a creature as
Dick was long ago to drift into ugly, sordid, and irreparable misery.
Yet it seems to me now that Dick has at last trusted God completely,
made the last surrender, and put his miserable case in the Father's
hands.



December 2, 1888.

As I came home to-night, moving slowly westward along deserted roads,
among wide and solitary fields, in the frosty twilight, I passed a
great pale fallow, in the far corner of which, beside a willow-shaded
stream, a great heap of weeds was burning, tended by a single lonely
figure raking in the smouldering pile. A dense column of thick smoke
came volleying from the heap, that went softly and silently up into the
orange-tinted sky; some forty feet higher the smoke was caught by a
moving current of air; much of it ascended higher still, but the thin
streak of moving wind caught and drew out upon itself a long weft of
aerial vapour, that showed a delicate blue against the rose-flushed
west. The long lines of leafless trees, the faint outlines of the low
distant hills, seemed wrapped in meditative silence, dreaming
wistfully, as the earth turned her broad shoulder to the night, and as
the forlorn and chilly sunset faded by soft degrees on the horizon. As
the day thus died, the frost made itself felt, touching the hedgerows
with rime, and crisping the damp road beneath my feet. The end drew on
with a mournful solemnity; but the death of the light seemed a
perfectly natural and beautiful thing, not an event to be grieved over
or regretted, but all part of a sweet and grave progress, in which
silence and darkness seemed, not an interruption to the eager life of
the world, but a happy suspension of activity and life. I was haunted,
as I often am at sunset, by a sense that the dying light was trying to
show me some august secret, some gracious mystery, which would silence
and sustain the soul could it but capture it. Some great and wonderful
presence seemed to hold up a hand, with a gesture half of invitation,
half of compassion for my blindness. Down there, beyond the lines of
motionless trees, where the water gleamed golden in the reaches of the
stream, the secret brooded, withdrawing itself resistlessly into the
glowing west. A wistful yearning filled my soul to enter into that
incommunicable peace. Yet if one could take the wings of the morning,
and follow that flying zone of light, as swiftly as the air, one could
pursue the same sunset all the world over, and see the fiery face of
the sun ever sinking to his setting, over the broad furrows of moving
seas, over tangled tropic forests, out to the shapeless wintry land of
the south. Day by day has the same pageant enacted itself, for who can
tell what millions of years. And in that vast perspective of weltering
aeons has come the day when God has set me here, a tiny sentient point,
conscious, in a sense, of it all, and conscious too that, long after I
sleep in the dust, the same strange and beautiful thing will be
displayed age after age. And yet it is all outside of me, all without.
I am a part of it, yet with no sense of my unity with it. That is the
marvellous and bewildering thing, that each tiny being like myself has
the same sense of isolation, of distinctness, of the perfectly rounded
life, complete faculties, independent existence. Another day is done,
and leaves me as bewildered, as ignorant as ever, as aware of my small
limitations, as lonely and uncomforted.

Who shall show me why I love, with this deep and thirsty intensity, the
array of gold and silver light, these mist-hung fields with their soft
tints, the glow that flies and fades, the cold veils of frosty vapour?
Thousands of men and women have seen the sunset pass, loving it even as
I love it. They have gone into the silence as I too shall go, and no
hint comes back as to whether they understand and are satisfied.

And now I turn in at the well-known gate, and see the dark gables of my
house, with the high elms of the grove outlined against the pale sky.
The cheerful windows sparkle with warmth and light, welcoming me, fresh
from the chilly air, out of the homeless fields. With such array of
cheerful usages I beguile my wondering heart, and chase away the wild
insistent thoughts, the deep yearnings that thrill me. Thus am I bidden
to desire and to be unsatisfied, to rest and marvel not, to stay, on
this unsubstantial show of peace and security, the aching and wondering
will.



December 4, 1888.

Writing, like music, ought to have two dimensions--a horizontal
movement of melody, a perpendicular depth of tone. A person unskilled
in music can only recognise a single horizontal movement, an air. One
who is a little more skilled can recognise the composition of a chord.
A real musician can read a score horizontally, with all its contrasting
and combining melodies. Sometimes one gets, in writing, a piece of
horizontal structure, a firm and majestic melody, with but little
harmony. Such are the great spare, strong stories of the old world.
Modern writing tends to lay much more emphasis upon depth of colour,
and the danger there is that such writing may become a mere
structureless modulation, The perfect combination is to get firm
structure, sparingly and economically enriched by colour, but colour
always subordinated to structure. When I was young I undervalued
structure and overvalued colour; but it was a good training in a way,
because I learned to appreciate the vital necessity of structure, and I
learnt the command of harmony. What is it that gives structure? It is
firm and clear intellectual conception, the grasp of form and
proportion; while colour is given by depth and richness of personality,
by power of perception, and still more by the power of fusing
perception with personality. The important thing here is that the thing
perceived and felt should not simply be registered and pigeon-holed,
but that it should become a cell of the writer's soul, respond to his
pulse, be animated by his vital forces.

Now, in my present state, I have lost my hold on melody in some way or
other; my creative intellectual power has struck work; and when I try
to exercise it, I can only produce vague textures of modulated
thoughts--things melodious in themselves, but ineffective because they
are isolated effects, instead of effects emphasising points, crises,
climaxes. I have strained some mental muscle, I suppose; but the
unhappy part of the situation is that I have not lost the desire to use
it.

It would be a piece of good fortune for me now if I could fall in with
some vigorous mind who could give me a lead, indicate a subject. But
then the work that resulted would miss unity, I think. What I ought to
be content to do is to garner more impressions; but I seem to be
surfeited of impressions.



December 10, 1888.

To-day I stumbled upon one of my old childish books--Grimm's Household
Stories. I am ashamed to say how long I read it. These old tales, which
I used to read as transcripts of marvellous and ancient facts, have,
many of them, gained for me, through experience of life, a beautiful
and symbolical value; one in particular, the tale of Karl Katz.

Karl used to feed his goats in the ruins of an old castle, high up
above the stream. Day after day one of his herd used to disappear,
coming back in the evening to join the homeward procession, very fat
and well-liking. So Karl set himself to watch, and saw that the goat
slipped in at a hole in the masonry. He enlarged the hole, and
presently was able to creep into a dark passage. He made his way along,
and soon heard a sound like a falling hailstorm. He groped his way
thither, and found the goat, in the dim light, feeding on grains of
corn which came splashing down from above. He looked and listened, and,
from the sounds of stamping and neighing overhead, he became aware that
the grain was failing through the chinks of a paved floor from a stable
inside the hill. I forget at this moment what happened next--the story
is rich in inconsequent details--but Karl shortly heard a sound like
thunder, which he discerned at last to be persons laughing and shouting
and running in the vaulted passages. He stole on, and found, in an
open, grassy place, great merry men playing at bowls. He was welcomed
and set down in a chair, though he could not even lift one of the bowls
when invited to join in the game. A dwarf brought him wine in a cup,
which he drank, and presently he fell asleep.

When he woke, all was silent and still; he made his way back; the goats
were gone, and it was the early morning, all misty and dewy among the
ruins, when he squeezed out of the hole.

He felt strangely haggard and tired, and reached the village only to
find that seventy years had elapsed, and that he was an old and
forgotten man, with no place for him. He had lost his home, and though
there were one or two old grandfathers, spent and dying, who remembered
the day when he was lost, and the search made for him, yet now there
was no room for the old man. The gap had filled up, life had flowed on.
They had grieved for him, but they did not want him back. He disturbed
their arrangements; he was another useless mouth to feed.

The pretty old story is full of parables, sad and sweet. But the kernel
of the tale is a warning to all who, for any wilfulness or curiosity,
however romantic or alluring the quest, forfeit their place for an
instant in the world. You cannot return. Life accommodates itself to
its losses, and however sincerely a man may be lamented, yet if he
returns, if he tries to claim his place, he is in the way, de trop. No
one has need of him.

An artist has most need of this warning, because he of all men is
tempted to enter the dark place in the hill, to see wonderful things
and to drink the oblivious wine. Let him rather keep his hold on the
world, at whatever sacrifice. Because by the time that he has explored
the home of the merry giants, and dreamed his dream, the world to which
he tries to tell the vision will heed it not, but treat it as a
fanciful tale.

All depends on the artist being in league with his day; if he is born
too early or too late, he has no hold on the world, no message for it.
Either he is a voice out of the past, an echo of old joys, piping a
forgotten message, or he is fanciful, unreal, visionary, if he sees and
tries to utter what shall be. By the time that events confirm his
foresight, the vitality of his prophecy is gone, and he is only looked
at with a curious admiration, as one that had a certain clearness of
vision, but no more; he is called into court by the historian of
tendency, but he has had no hold on living men.

One sees men of great artistic gifts who suffer from each of these
disadvantages. One sees poets, born in a prosaic age, who would have
won high fame if they had been born in an age of poets. And one sees,
too, men who seem to struggle with big, unintelligible thoughts,
thoughts which do not seem to fit on to anything existing. The happy
artist is the man who touches the note which awakens a responsive echo
in many hearts; the man who instinctively uses the medium of the time,
and who neither regrets the old nor portends the new.

Karl Katz must content himself, if he can find a corner and a crust,
with the memory of the day when the sun lay hot among the ruins, with
the thought of the pleasant coolness of the vault, the leaping shower
of corn, the thunder of the imprisoned feet, the heroic players, the
heady wine. That must be enough for him. He has had a taste, let him
remember, of marvels hidden from common eyes and ears. Let it be for
him to muse in the sun, and to be grateful for the space of
recollection given him. If he had lived the life of the world, he would
but have had a treasure of simple memories, much that was sordid, much
that was sad.

But now he has his own dreams, and he must pay the price in heaviness
and dreariness!



December 14, 1888.

The danger of art as an occupation is that one uses life, looks at
life, as so much material for one's art. Life becomes a province of
art, instead of art being a province of life. That is all a sad
mistake, perhaps an irreparable mistake! I walked to-day on the crisp
frozen snow, down the valley, by field-paths, among leafless copses and
wood-ends. The stream ran dark and cold, between its brambly banks; the
snow lay pure and smooth on the high-sloping fields. It made a heart of
whiteness in the covert, the trees all delicately outlined, the hazels
weaving an intricate pattern. All perfectly and exquisitely beautiful.
Sight after sight of subtle and mysterious beauty, vignette after
vignette, picture after picture. If I could but sing it, or say it,
depict or record it, I thought to myself! Yet I could not analyse what
the desire was. I do not think I wished to interpret the sight to
others, or even to capture it for myself. No matter at what season of
the year I pass through the valley, it is always filled from end to end
with beauty, ever changing, perishing, ever renewing itself. In spring
the copse is full of tender points of green, uncrumpling and uncurling.
The hyacinths make a carpet of steely blue, the anemones weave their
starred tapestry. In the summer, the grove hides its secret, dense with
leaf, the heavy-seeded grass rises in the field, the tall flowering
plants make airy mounds of colour; in autumn, the woods blaze with
orange and gold, the air is heavy with the scent of the dying leaf. In
winter, the eye dwells with delight upon the spare low tints; and when
the snow falls and lies, as it does to-day, the whole scene has a still
and mournful beauty, a pure economy of contrasted light and gloom. Yet
the trained perception of the artist does not dwell upon the thought of
the place as upon a perpetual feast of beauty and delight. Rather, it
shames me to reflect, one dwells upon it as a quarry of effects, where
one can find and detach the note of background, the sweet symbol that
will lend point and significance to the scene that one is labouring at.
Instead of being content to gaze, to listen, to drink in, one thinks
only what one can carry away and make one's own. If one's art were
purely altruistic, if one's aim were to emphasise some sweet aspect of
nature which the careless might otherwise overlook or despise; or even
if the sight haunted one like a passion, and fed the heart with hope
and love, it would be well. But does one in reality feel either of
these purposes? Speaking candidly, I do not. I care very little for my
message to the world. It is true that I have a deep and tender love for
the gracious things of earth; but I cannot be content with that. One
thinks of Wordsworth, rapt in contemplation, sitting silent for a whole
morning, his eyes fixed upon the pool of the moorland stream, or the
precipice with the climbing ashes. It was like a religion to him, a
communion with something holy and august which in that moment drew near
to his soul. But with me it is different. To me the passion is to
express it, to embalm it, in phrase or word, not for my pride in my
art, not for any desire to give the treasure to others, but simply, so
it seems, in obedience to a tyrannous instinct to lend the thought, the
sight, another shape. I despair of defining the feeling. It is partly a
desire to arrest the fleeting moment, to give it permanence in the
ruinous lapse of things, the same feeling that made old Herrick say to
the daffodils, "We weep to see you haste away so soon." Partly the joy
of the craftsman in making something that shall please the eye and ear.
It is not the desire to create, as some say, but to record. For when
one writes an impassioned scene, it seems no more an act of creation
than one feels about one's dreams. The wonder of dreams is that one
does not make them; they come upon one with all the pleasure of
surprise and experience. They are there; and so, when one indulges
imagination, one does not make, one merely tells the dream. It is this
that makes art so strange and sad an occupation, that one lives in a
beautiful world, which does not seem to be of one's own designing, but
from which one is awakened, in terror and disgust, by bodily pain,
discomfort, anxiety, loss. Yet it seems useless to say that life is
real and imagination unreal. They are both there, both real. The danger
is to use life to feed the imagination, not to use imagination to feed
life. In these sad weeks I have been like a sleeper awakened. The world
of imagination, in which I have lived and moved, has crumbled into
pieces over my head; the wind and rain beat through the flimsy
dwelling, and I must arise and go. I have sported with life as though
it were a pretty plaything; and I find it turn upon me like a wild
beast, gaunt, hungry, angry. I am terrified by its evil motions, I
sicken at its odour. That is the deep mystery and horror of life, that
one yields unerringly to blind and imperious instincts, not knowing
which may lead us into green and fertile pastures of hope and happy
labour, and which may draw us into thorny wildernesses. The old fables
are true, that one must not trust the smiling presences, the beguiling
words. Yet how is one to know which of the forms that beckon us we may
trust. Must we learn the lesson by sad betrayals, by dark catastrophes?
I have wandered, it seems, along a flowery path--and yet I have not
gathered the poisonous herbs of sin; I have loved innocence and
goodness; but for all that I have followed a phantom, and now that it
is too late to retrace my steps, I find that I have been betrayed. I
feel

   "As some bold seer in a trance
    Seeing all his own mischance."


Well, at least one may still be bold!



December 22, 1888.

Perhaps my trial comes to me that it may test my faith in art; perhaps
to show me that the artist's creed is a false and shallow one after
all. What is it that we artists do? In a happy hour I should have said
glibly that we discern and interpret beauty. But now it seems to me
that no man can ever live upon beauty. I think I have gone wrong in
busying myself so ardently in trying to discern the quality of beauty
in all things. I seem to have submitted everything--virtue, honour,
life itself--to that test. I appear to myself like an artist who has
devoted himself entirely to the appreciation of colour, who is suddenly
struck colour-blind; he sees the forms of things as clearly as ever,
but they are dreary and meaningless. I seem to have tried everything,
even conduct, by an artistic standard, and the quality which I have
devoted myself to discerning has passed suddenly out of life. And my
mistake has been all the more grievous, because I have always believed
that it was life of which I was in search. There are three great
writers--two of them artists as well--whose personality has always
interested me profoundly--Ruskin, Carlyle, Rossetti. But I have never
been able wholly to admire the formal and deliberate products of their
minds. Ruskin as an art-critic--how profoundly unfair, prejudiced,
unjust he is! He has made up his mind about the merit of an artist; he
will lay down a principle about accuracy in art, and to what extent
imagination may improve upon vision; and then he will abuse Claude for
modifying a scene, in the same breath, and for the same reasons, with
which he will praise Turner for exaggerating one. He will use the same
stick that he throws for one dog to fetch, to beat another dog that he
dislikes. Of course he says fine and suggestive things by the way, and
he did a great work in inspiring people to look for beauty, though he
misled many feeble spirits into substituting one convention for
another. I cannot read a page of his formal writings without anger and
disgust. Yet what a beautiful, pathetic, noble spirit he had! The
moment he writes, simply and tenderly, from his own harrowed heart, he
becomes a dear and honoured friend. In Praeterita, in his diaries and
letters, in his familiar and unconsidered utterances, he is perfectly
delightful, conscious of his own waywardness and whimsicality; but when
he lectures and dictates, he is like a man blowing wild blasts upon a
shrill trumpet. Then Carlyle--his big books, his great tawdry, smoky
pictures of scenes, his loud and clumsy moralisations, his perpetual
thrusting of himself into the foreground, like some obstreperous
showman; he wearies and dizzies my brain with his raucous clamour, his
uncouth convolutions. I saw the other day a little Japanese picture of
a boat in a stormy sea, the waves beating over it; three warriors in
the boat lie prostrate and rigid with terror and misery. Above, through
a rent in the clouds, is visible an ugly grotesque figure, with a
demoniacal leer on his face, beating upon a number of drums. The
picture is entitled "The Thunder-God beats his drums." Well, Carlyle
seems to me like that; he has no pity for humanity, he only likes to
add to its terrors and its bewilderment. He preached silence and
seclusion to men of activity, energy to men of contemplation. He was
furious, whatever humanity did, whether it slept or waked. His message
is the message of the booming gale, and the swollen cataract. Yet in
his diaries and letters, what splendid perception, what inimitable
humour, what rugged emotion! I declare that Carlyle's thumbnail
portraits of people and scenes are some of the most admirable things
ever set down on paper. I love and admire the old furious,
disconsolate, selfish fellow with all my heart; though he was a bad
husband, he was a true friend, for all his discordant cries and groans.
Then there is Rossetti--a man who wrote a few incredibly beautiful
poems, and in whom one seems to feel the inner fire and glow of art.
Yet many of his pictures are to me little but voluptuous and wicked
dreams; and his later sonnets are full of poisonous fragrance--poetry
embroidered and scented, not poetry felt. What a generous, royal
prodigal nature he had, till he sank into his drugged and indulgent
seclusion! Here then are three great souls. Ruskin, the pure lover of
things noble and beautiful, but shadowed by a prim perversity, an
old-maidish delicacy, a petulant despair. Carlyle, a great, rugged, and
tumultuous heart, brutalised by ill-health, morbidity, selfishness.
Rossetti, a sort of day-star in art, stepping forth like an angel, to
fall lower than Lucifer. What is the meaning of these strange
catastrophes, these noble natures so infamously hampered? In the three
cases, it seems to be that melancholy, brooding over a world, so
exquisitely designed and yet so unaccountably marred, drove one to
madness, one to gloom, one to sensuality. We believe or try to believe
that God is pure and loving and true, and that His Heart is with all
that is noble and hopeful and high. Yet the more generous the
character, the deeper is the fall! Can such things be meant to show us
that we have no concern with art at all; and that our only hope is to
cling to bare, austere, simple, uncomforted virtue? Ought we to try to
think of art only as an innocent amusement and diversion for our
leisure hours? As a quest to which no man may vow himself, save at the
cost of walking in a vain shadow all his days? Ought we to steel our
hearts against the temptation, which seems to be implanted as deep as
anything in my own nature--nay, deeper--to hold that what one calls
ugliness and bad taste is of the nature of sin? But what then is the
meaning of the tyrannous instinct to select and to represent, to
capture beauty? Ought it to be enough to see beauty in the things
around us, in flowers and light, to hear it in the bird's song and the
falling stream--to perceive it thus gratefully and thankfully, and to
go back to our simple lives? I do not know; it is all a great mystery;
it is so hard to believe that God should put these ardent, delicious,
sweet, and solemn instincts into our spirits, simply that we may learn
our error in following them. And yet I feel with a sad certainty to-day
that I have somehow missed the way, and that God cannot or will not
help me to find it. Are we then bidden and driven to wander? Or is
there indeed some deep and perfect secret of peace and tranquillity,
which we are meant to find? Does it perhaps lie open to our eyes--as
when one searches a table over and over for some familiar object, which
all the while is there before us, plain to touch or sight?



January 3, 1889.

There is a tiny vignette of Blake's, a woodcut, I think, in which one
sees a ladder set up to the crescent moon from a bald and bare corner
of the globe. There are two figures that seem to be conversing
together; on the ladder itself, just setting his foot to the lowest
rung, is the figure of a man who is beginning to climb in a furious
hurry. "I want, I want," says the little legend beneath. The execution
is trivial enough; it is all done, and not very well done, in a space
not much bigger than a postage-stamp--but it is one of the many cases
in which Blake, by a minute symbol, expressed a large idea. One wonders
if he knew how large an idea it was. It is a symbol for me of all the
vague, eager, intense longing of the world, the desire of satisfaction,
of peace, of fulfilment, of perfection; the power that makes people
passionately religious, that makes souls so much greater and stronger
than they appear to themselves to be. It is the thought that makes us
at moments believe intensely and urgently in the justice, the mercy,
the perfect love of God, even at moments when everything round us
appears to contradict the idea. It is the outcome of that strange right
to happiness which we all feel, the instinct that makes us believe of
pain and grief that they are abnormal, and will be, must be, set right
and explained somewhere. The thought comes to me most poignantly at
sunset, when trees and chimneys stand up dark against the fiery glow,
and when the further landscape lies smiling, lapt in mist, on the verge
of dreams; that moment always seems to speak to me with a personal
voice. "Yes," it seems to say, "I am here and everywhere--larger,
sweeter, truer, more gracious than anything you have ever dreamed of or
hoped for--but the time to know all is not yet." I cannot explain the
feeling or interpret it; but it has sometimes seemed to me, in such
moments, that I am, in very truth, not a child of God, but a part of
Himself--separated from Him for a season, imprisoned, for some strange
and beautiful purpose, in the chains of matter, remembering faintly and
obscurely something that I have lost, as a man strives to recall a
beautiful dream that has visited him. It is then that one most desires
to be strong and free, to be infinitely patient and tender and loving,
to be different. And then one comes back to the world with a sense of
jar and shock, to broken purposes, and dull resentments, to unkindly
thoughts, and people who do not even pretend to wish one well. I have
been trying with all my might in these desolate weeks to be brave and
affectionate and tender, and I have not succeeded. It is easy enough,
when one is happily occupied for a part of the day, but when one is
restless, dissatisfied, impatient, ineffective, it is a constant and a
weary effort. And what is more, I dislike sympathy. I would rather bear
a thing in solitude and silence. I have no self-pity, and it is
humiliating and weakening to be pitied. Yet of course Maud knows that I
am unhappy; and the wretchedness of it is that it has introduced a
strain into our relations which I have never felt before. I sit
reading, trying to pass the hours, trying to stifle thought. I look up
and see her eyes fixed on me full of compassion and love--and I do not
want compassion. Maud knows it, divines it all; but she can no more
keep her compassion hidden than I can keep my unrest hidden. I have
grown irritable, suspicious, hard to live with. Yet with all my heart
and soul I desire to be patient, tolerant, kindly, sweet-tempered.
FitzGerald said somewhere that ill-health makes all of us villains.
This is the worst of it, that for all my efforts I get weaker, more
easily vexed, more discontented. I do not and cannot trace the smallest
benefit which results to me or any one else from my unhappiness. The
shadow of it has even fallen over my relations with the children, who
are angelically good. Maggie, with that divine instinct which women
possess--what a perfectly beautiful thing it is!--has somehow contrived
to discern that things are amiss with me, and I can perceive that she
tries all that her little heart and mind can devise to please, soothe,
interest me. But I do not want to be ministered to, exquisite as the
instinct is in the child; and all the time I am as far off my object as
ever. I cannot work, I cannot think. I have said fine things in my
books about the discipline of reluctant suffering; and now my feeling
is that I could bear any other kind of trial better. It seems to be
given to me with an almost demoniacal prescience of what should most
dishearten me.


   "It would not school the shuddering will
    To patience, were it sweet to bear,"

says an old poet; and it is true, I have no doubt; but, good God, to
think that a man, so richly dowered as I am with every conceivable
blessing, should yet have so small a reserve of faith and patience!
Even now I can frame epigrams about it. "To learn to be content not to
be content"--that is the secret--but meanwhile I stumble in dark paths,
through the grove nullo penetrabilis astro, where men have wandered
before now. It seems fine and romantic enough, when one thinks of
another soul in torment. One remembers the old sage, reading quietly at
a sunset hour, who had a sudden vision of the fate that should befall
him. His book falls from his hands, he sits there, a beautiful and
venerable figure enough, staring heavily into the void. It makes me
feel that I shall never dare to draw the picture of a man in the grip
of suffering again; I have had so little of it in my life, and I have
drawn it with a luxurious artistic emotion. I remember once saying of a
friend that his work was light and trivial, because he had never
descended into hell. Now that I have myself set foot there, I feel art
and love, and life itself, shrivel in the relentless chill--for it is
icy cold and drearily bright in hell, not dark and fiery, as poets have
sung! I feel that I could wrestle better with the loss of health, of
wealth, of love, for there would be something to bear, some burden to
lift. Now there is nothing to bear, except a blank purposelessness
which eats the heart out of me. I am in the lowest place, in the
darkness and the deep.



January 8, 1889.

Snow underfoot this morning; and a brown blink on the horizon which
shows that more is coming. I have the odd feeling that I have never
really seen my house before, the snow lights it all up so strangely,
tinting the ceilings a glowing white, touching up high lights on the
top of picture-frames, and throwing the lower part of the rooms into a
sort of pleasant dusk.

Maud and the children went off this afternoon to an entertainment. I
accompanied them to the door; what a pretty effect the snow background
gives to young faces; it lends a pretty morbidezza to the colouring, a
sort of very delicate green tinge to the paler shades. That does not
sound as if it would be beautiful in a human face, but it is; the faces
look like the child-angels of Botticelli, and the pink and rose flush
of the cheeks is softly enriched and subdued; and then the soft warmth
of fair and curly hair is delicious. I was happy enough with them, in a
sort of surface happiness. The little waves at the top of the mind
broke in sunlight; but down below, the cold dark water sleeps still
enough. I left them, and took a long trudge among the valleys. Oh me!
how beautiful it all was; the snowy fields, with the dark copses and
leafless trees among them; the rich clean light everywhere, the world
seen as through a dusky crystal. Then the sun went down in state, and
the orange sky through the dark tree-stems brought me a thrill of that
strange yearning desire for something--I cannot tell what--that seems
so near and yet so far away. Yet I was sad enough too; my mind works
like a mill with no corn to grind. I can devise nothing, think of
nothing. There beats in my head a verse of a little old Latin poem, by
an unhappy man enough, in whose sorrowful soul the delight of the
beautiful moment was for ever poisoned by the thought that it was
passing, passing; and that the spirit, whatever joy might be in store
for it, could never again be at the same sweet point of its course. The
poem is about a woodcock, a belated bird that haunted the hanging
thickets of his Devonshire home. "Ah, hapless bird," he says, "for you
to-day King December is stripping these oaks; nor any hope of food do
the hazel-thickets afford." That is my case. I have lingered too late,
trusting to the ease and prodigal wealth of the summer, and now the
woods stand bare about me, while my comrades have taken wing for the
South. The beady eye, the puffed feathers grow sick and dulled with
hunger. Why cannot I rest a little in the beauty all about me? Take it
home to my shivering soul? Nay, I will not complain, even to myself.

I came back at sundown, through the silent garden, all shrouded and
muffled with snow. The snow lay on the house, outlining the cornices,
cresting the roof-tiles, crusted sharply on the cupola, whitening the
tall chimney-stacks. The comfortable smoke went up into the still air,
and the firelight darted in the rooms. What a sense of beautiful
permanence, sweet hopefulness, fireside warmth it all gave; and it is
real as well. No life that I could have devised is so rich in love and
tranquillity as mine; everything to give me content, except the
contented mind. Why cannot I enter, seat myself in the warm firelight,
open a book, and let the old beautiful thoughts flow into my mind, till
the voices of wife and children return to gladden me, and I listen to
all that they have seen and done? Why should I rather sit, like a
disconsolate child among its bricks, feebly and sadly planning new
combinations and fantastic designs? I have done as much and more than
most of my contemporaries; what is this insensate hunger of the spirit
that urges me to work that I cannot do, for rewards that I do not want?
Why cannot I be content to dream and drowse a little?


   "Rest, then, and rest
    And think of the best,
    'Twixt summer and spring,
    When no birds sing."


That is what I desire to do, and cannot. It is as though some creeper
that had enfolded and enringed a house with its tendrils, creeping
under window-ledges and across mellow brickwork, had been suddenly cut
off at the root, and hung faded and lustreless, not even daring to be
torn away. Yet I am alive and well, my mind is alert and vigorous, I
have no cares or anxieties, except that my heart seems hollow at the
core.



January 12, 1889.

I have had a very bad time of late. It seems futile to say anything
about it, and the plain man would rub his eyes, and wonder where the
misery lay. I have been perfectly well, and everything has gone
smoothly; but I cannot write. I have begun half-a-dozen books. I have
searched my notes through and through. I have sketched plots, written
scenes. I cannot go on with any of them. I have torn up chapters with
fierce disgust, or have laid them quietly aside. There is no vitality
in them. If I read them aloud to any one, he would wonder what was
wrong--they are as well written as my other books, as amusing, as
interesting. But it is all without energy or invention, it is all worse
than my best. The people are puppets, their words are pumped up out of
a stagnant reservoir. Everything I do reminds me of something I have
done before. If I could bring myself to finish one of these books, I
could get money and praise enough. Many people would not know the
difference. But the real and true critic would see through them; he
would discern that I had lost the secret. I think that perhaps I ought
to be content to work dully and faithfully on, to finish the poor dead
thing, to compose its dead limbs decently, to lay it out. But I cannot
do that, though it might be a moral discipline. I am not conscious of
the least mental fatigue, or loss of power--quite the reverse. I hunger
and thirst to write, but I have no invention.

The worst of it is that it reveals to me how much the whole of my life
was built up round the hours I gave to writing. I used to read, write
letters, do business in the morning, holding myself back from the
beloved task, not thinking over it, not anticipating the pleasure, yet
aware that some secret germination was going on among the cells of the
brain. Then came the afternoon, the walk or ride, and then at last
after tea arrived the blessed hour. The chapter was all ready to be
written, and the thing flowed equably and clearly from the pen. The
passage written, I would turn to some previous chapter, which had been
type-written, smooth out the creases, enrich the dialogue, retouch the
descriptions, omit, correct, clarify. Perhaps in the evening I would
read a passage aloud, if we were alone; and how often would Maud, with
her perfect instinct, lay her finger on a weak place, show me that
something was abrupt or lengthy, expose an unreal emotion, or, best of
all, generously and whole-heartedly approve. It seems now, looking back
upon it, that it was all impossibly happy and delightful, too good to
be true. Yet I have everything that I had, except my unhappy writing;
and the want of it poisons life. I no longer seem to lie pleasantly in
ambush for pretty traits of character, humorous situations, delicate
nuances of talk. I look blankly at garden, field, and wood, because I
cannot draw from them the setting that I want. Even my close and
intimate companionship with Maud seems to have suffered, for I was like
a child, bringing the little wonders that it finds by the hedgerow to
be looked at by a loving eye. Maud is angelically tender, kind, sweet.
She tells me only to wait; she draws me on to talk; she surrounds me
with love and care. And in the midst of it all I sit, in dry misery,
hating myself for my feebleness and cowardice, keeping as far as
possible my pain to myself, brooding, feverishly straining, struggling
hopelessly to recover the clue. The savour has gone out of life; I feel
widowed, frozen, desolate. How often have I tranquilly and
good-humouredly contemplated the time when I need write no more, when
my work should be done, when I should have said all I had to say, and
could take life as it came, soberly and wisely. Now that the end has
come of itself, I feel like a hopeless prisoner, with death the only
escape from a bitter and disconsolate solitude.

Can I not amuse myself with books, pictures, talk? No, because it is
all a purposeless passing of dreary hours. Before, there was always an
object ahead of me, a light to which I made my way; and all the
pleasant incidents of life were things to guide me, and to beguile the
plodding path. Now I am adrift; I need go neither forwards nor
backwards; and the things which before were gentle and quiet
occupations have become duties to be drearily fulfilled.

I have put down here exactly what I feel. It is not cowardice that
makes me do it, but a desire to face the situation, exactly as it is.
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit! And in any case nothing can be
done by blinking the truth. I shall need all my courage and all my
resolution to meet it, and I shall meet it as manfully as I can. Yet
the thought of meeting it thus has no inspiration in it. My only desire
is that the frozen mind may melt at the touch of some genial ray, and
that the buds may prick and unfold upon the shrunken bough.



January 15, 1889.

One of the miseries of my present situation is that it is all so
intangible, and to the outsider so incomprehensible. There is no
particular reason why I should write. I do not need the money; I
believe I do not desire fame. Let me try to be perfectly frank about
this; I do not at all desire the tangible results of fame, invitations
to banquets, requests to deliver lectures, the acquaintance of notable
people, laudatory reviews. I like a quiet life; I do not want monstrari
digito, as Horace says. I have had a taste of all of these things, and
they do not amuse me, though I confess that I thought they would. I
feel in this rather as Tennyson felt--that I dislike contemptuous
criticism, and do not value praise--except the praise of a very few,
the masters of the craft. And this one does not get, because the great
men are mostly too much occupied in producing their own masterpieces to
have the time or inclination to appraise others. Yet I am sure there is
a vile fibre of ambition lurking in me, interwoven with my nature,
which I cannot exactly disentangle. I very earnestly desire to do good
and fine work, to write great books. If I genuinely and critically
approved of my own work, I could go on writing for the mere pleasure of
it, in the face of universal neglect. But one may take it for granted
that unless one is working on very novel and original lines--and I am
not--the good qualities of one's work are not likely to escape
attention. The reason why Keats, and Shelley, and Tennyson, and
Wordsworth were decried, was because their work was so unusual, so new,
that conventional critics could not understand it. But I am using a
perfectly familiar medium, and there is a large and acute band of
critics who are looking out for interesting work in the region of
novels. Besides I have arrived at the point of having a vogue, so that
anything I write would be treated with a certain respect. Where my
ambition comes in is in the desire not to fall below my standard. I
suppose that while I feel that I do not rate the judgment of the
ordinary critic highly, I have an instinctive sense that my work is
worthy of his admiration. The pain I feel is the sort of pain that an
athlete feels who has established, say, a record in high-jumping, and
finds that he can no longer hurl his stiffening legs and portly frame
over the lath. Well, I have always held strongly that men ought to know
when to stop. There is nothing more melancholy and contemptible than to
see a successful man, who has brought out a brood of fine things,
sitting meekly on addled eggs, or, still worse, squatting complacently
among eggshells. It is like the story of the old tiresome Breton farmer
whose wife was so annoyed by his ineffective fussiness, that she clapt
him down to sit on a clutch of stone eggs for the rest of his life. How
often have I thought how deplorable it was to see a man issuing a
series of books, every one of which is feebler than its predecessor,
dishing up the old characters, the stale ideas, the used-up
backgrounds. I have always hoped that some one would be kind and brave
enough to tell me when I did that. But now that the end seems to have
come to me naturally and spontaneously, I cannot accept my defeat. I am
like the monkey of whom Frank Buckland wrote, who got into the kettle
when the water was lukewarm, and found the outer air so cold whenever
he attempted to leave it, that he was eventually very nearly boiled
alive. The fact that my occupation is gone leaves life hollow to the
core. Perhaps a wise man would content himself with composing some
placid literary essays, selecting some lesser figure in the world of
letters, collecting gossip, and what are called "side-lights," about
him, visiting his birthplace and early haunts, criticising his
writings. That would be a harmless way of filling the time. But any one
who has ever tried creative work gets filled with a nauseating disgust
for making books out of other people's writings, and constructing a
kind of resurrection-pie out of the shreds. Moreover I know nothing
except literature; I could only write a literary biography; and it has
always seemed to me a painful irony that men who have put into their
writings what other people put into deeds and acts should be the very
people whose lives are sedulously written and rewritten, generation
after generation. The instinct is natural enough. The vivid memories of
statesmen and generals fade; but as long as we have the fascinating and
adorable reveries of great spirits, we are consumed with a desire to
reconstruct their surroundings, that we may learn where they found
their inspiration. A great poet, a great imaginative writer, so
glorifies and irradiates the scene in which his mighty thoughts came to
him, that we cannot help fancying that the secret lies in crag and hill
and lake, rather than in the mind that gathered in the common joy. I
have a passion for visiting the haunts of genius, but rather because
they teach me that inspiration lies everywhere, if we can but perceive
it, than because I hope to detect where the particular charm lay. And
so I am driven back upon my own poor imagination. I say to myself, like
Samson, "I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself," and
then the end of the verse falls on me like a shadow--"and he wist not
that the Lord was departed from him."



January 18, 1889.

Nothing the matter, and yet everything the matter! I plough on drearily
enough, like a vessel forging slowly ahead against a strong, ugly,
muddy stream. I seem to gain nothing, neither hope, patience, nor
strength. My spirit revolted at first, but now I have lost the heart
even for that: I simply bear my burden and wait. One tends to think, at
such times, that no one has ever passed through a similar experience
before; and the isolation in which one moves is the hardest part of it
all. Alone, and cut off even from God! If one felt that one was
learning something, gaining power or courage, one could bear it
cheerfully; but I feel rather as though all my vitality and moral
strength was being pressed and drained from me. Yet I do not desire
death and silence. I rather crave for life and light.

No, I am not describing my state fairly. At times I have a sense that
something, some power, some great influence, is trying to communicate
with me, to deliver me some message. There are many hours when it is
not so, when my nerveless brain seems losing its hold, slipping off
into some dark confusion of sense. Yet again there are other moments,
when sights and sounds have an overpowering and awful significance;
when the gleams of some tremendous secret seemed flashed upon my mind,
at the sight of the mist-hung valley with its leafless woods and level
water-meadows; the flaring pomp of sunset hung low in the west over the
bare ploughland or the wide-watered plain; the wailing of the wind
round the firelit house; the faint twitter of awakening birds in the
ivy; the voice and smile of my children; the music breaking the silence
of the house at evening. In a moment the sensation comes over me, that
the sound or sight is sent not vaguely or lightly, but deliberately
shown to me, for some great purpose, if I could but divine it; an
oracle of God, if I could but catch the words He utters in the darkness
and the silence.



February 1, 1889.

My dissatisfaction and depression begin to tell on me. I grow nervous
and strained; I am often sleepless, or my sleep is filled by vivid,
horrible, intolerable dreams. I wake early in the clutch of fear. I
wrestle at times with intolerable irritability; social gatherings
become unbearable; I have all sorts of unmanning sensations,
dizzinesses, tremors; I have that dreadful sensation that my
consciousness of things and people around me is slipping away from me,
and that only by a strong effort can one retain one's hold upon them. I
fall into a sort of dull reverie, and come back to the real world with
a shock of surprise and almost horror. I went the other day to consult
a great doctor about this. He reassured me; he laughed at my fears; he
told me that it was a kind of neurasthenia, not fanciful but real; that
my brain had been overworked, and was taking its revenge; that it was
insufficiently nourished, and so forth. He knew who I was, and treated
me with a respectful sympathy. I told him I had taken a prolonged
holiday since my last book, and he replied that it had not been long
enough. "You must take it easy," he said. "Don't do anything you don't
like." I replied that the difficulty was to find anything I did like.
He smiled at this, and said that I need not be afraid of breaking down;
he sounded me, and said that I was perfectly strong. "Indeed," he
added, "you might go to a dozen doctors to be examined for an insurance
policy, and you would be returned as absolutely robust." In the course
of his investigations, he applied a test, quite casually and as if he
were hardly interested, the point of which he thought (I suppose) that
I should not divine. Unfortunately I knew it, and I need only say that
it was a test for something very bad indeed. That was rather a horrible
moment, when a grim thing out of the shadow slipped forward for a
moment, and looked me in the face. But it was over in an instant, and
he went on to other things. He ended by saying: "Mr. ----, you are not
as bad as you feel, or even as you think. Just take it quietly; don't
overdo it, but don't be bored. You say that you can't write to please
yourself at present. Well, this experience is partly the cause, and
partly the result of your condition. You have used one particular part
of your brain too much, and you must give it time to recover. My
impression is that you will get better very gradually, and I can only
repeat that there is no sort of cause for anxiety. I can't help you
more than that, and I am saying exactly what I feel."

I looked at the worn face and kind eyes of the man whose whole life is
spent in plumbing abysses of human suffering. What a terrible life, and
yet what a noble one! He spoke as though he had no other case in the
world to consider except my own; yet when I went back to the
waiting-room to get my hat, and looked round on the anxious-looking
crowd of patients waiting there, each with a secret burden, I felt how
heavy a load he must be carrying.

There is a certain strength, after all, in having to live by rule; and
I have derived, I find, a certain comfort in having to abstain from
things that are likely to upset me, not because I wish it, but because
some one else has ordered it. So I struggle on. The worst of nerves is
that they are so whimsical; one never knows when to expect their
assaults; the temptation is to think that they attack one when it is
most inconvenient; but this is not quite the case. They spare one when
one expects discomfort; and again when one feels perfectly secure, they
leap upon one from their lair. The one secret of dealing with the
malady is to think of it as a definite ailment, not to regard the
attacks as the vagaries of a healthy mind, but as the symptoms of an
unhealthy one. So much of these obsessions appears to be purely mental;
one finds oneself the prey of a perfectly causeless depression, which
involves everything in its shadow. As soon as one realises that this is
not the result of the reflections that seem to cause it, but that one
is, so to speak, merely looking at normal conditions through coloured
glasses, it is a great help. But the perennial difficulty is to know
whether one needs repose and inaction, or whether one requires the
stimulus of work and activity. Sometimes an unexpected call on one's
faculties will encourage and gladden one; sometimes it will leave one
unstrung and limp. A definite illness is always with one, more or less;
but in nervous ailments, one has interludes of perfect and even buoyant
health, which delude one into hoping that the demon has gone out.

It is a very elaborate form of torture anyhow; and I confess that I
find it difficult to discern where its educative effect comes in,
because it makes one shrink from effort, it makes one timid,
indecisive, suspicious. It seems to encourage all the weaknesses and
meannesses of the spirit; and, worst of all, it centres one's thoughts
upon oneself. Perhaps it enlarges one's sympathy for all secret
sufferers; and it makes me grateful for the fact that I have had so
little ill-health in my life. Yet I find myself, too, testing with some
curiosity the breezy maxims of optimists. A cheerful writer says
somewhere: "Will not the future be the better and the richer for
memories of past pleasure? So surely must the sane man feel." Well, he
must be very sane indeed. It takes a very burly philosopher to think of
the future as being enriched by past gladness, when one seems to have
forfeited it, and when one is by no means certain of getting it back.
One feels bitterly how little one appreciated it at the time; and to
rejoice in reflecting how much past happiness stands to one's credit,
is a very dispassionate attitude. I think Dante was nearer the truth
when he said that "a sorrow's crown of sorrow was remembering happier
things."



February 3, 1889.

To amuse oneself--that is the difficulty. Amusements are or ought to be
the childish, irrational, savage things which a man goes on doing and
practising, in virtue, I suppose, of the noble privilege of reason, far
longer than any other animal--only YOUNG animals amuse themselves; a
dog perhaps retains the faculty longer than most animals, but he only
does it out of sympathy and companionship, to amuse his inscrutable
owner, not to amuse himself. Amusements ought to be things which one
wants to do, and which one is slightly ashamed of doing--enough
ashamed, I mean, to give rather elaborate reasons for continuing them.
If one shoots, for instance, one ought to say that it gets one out of
doors, and that what one really enjoys is the country, and so forth.
Personally I was never much amused by amusements, and gave them up as
soon as I decently could. I regret it now. I wish we were all taught a
handicraft as a regular part of education! I used to sketch, and strum
a piano once, but I cannot deliberately set to work on such things
again. I gave them all up when I became a writer, really, I suppose,
because I did not care for them, but nominally on the grounds of
"resolute limitation," as Lord Acton said--with the idea that if you
prune off the otiose boughs of a tree, you throw the strength of the
sap into the boughs you retain. I see now that it was a mistake. But it
is too late to begin again now; I was reading Kingsley's Life the other
day. He used to overwork himself periodically--use up the grey matter
at the base of his brain, as he described it; but he had a hundred
things that he wanted to do besides writing--fishing, entomologising,
botanising. Browning liked modelling in clay, Wordsworth liked long
walks, Byron had enough to do to keep himself thin, Tennyson had his
pipe, Morris made tapestry at a loom. Southey had no amusements, and he
died of softening of the brain. The happy people are those who have
work which they love, and a hobby of a totally different kind which
they love even better. But I doubt whether one can make a hobby for
oneself in middle age, unless one is a very resolute person indeed.



February 7, 1889.

The children went off yesterday to spend the inside of the day with a
parson hard by, who has three children of his own, about the same age.
They did not want to go, of course, and it was particularly terrible to
them, because neither I nor their mother were to go with them. But I
was anxious they should go: there is nothing better for children than
occasionally to visit a strange house, and to go by themselves without
an elder person to depend upon. It gives them independence and gets rid
of shyness. They end by enjoying themselves immensely, and perhaps
making some romantic friendship. As a child, I was almost tearfully
insistent that I should not have to go on such visits; but yet a few
days of the sort stand out in my childhood with a vividness and a
distinctness, which show what an effect they produced, and how they
quickened one's perceptive and inventive faculties.

When they were gone I went out with Maud. I was at my very worst, I
fear; full of heaviness and deeply disquieted; desiring I knew well
what--some quickening of emotion, some hopeful impulse--but utterly
unable to attain it. We had a very sad talk. I tried to make it clear
to her how desolate I felt, and to win some kind of forgiveness for my
sterile and loveless mood. She tried to comfort me; she said that it
was only like passing through a tunnel; she made it clear to me, by
some unspoken communication, that I was dearer than ever to her in
these days of sorrow; but there was a shadow in her mind, the shadow
that fell from the loneliness in which I moved, the sense that she
could not share my misery with me. I tried to show her that the one
thing one could not share was emptiness. If one's cup is full of
interests, plans, happinesses, even tangible anxieties, it is easy and
natural to make them known to one whom one loves best. But one cannot
share the horror of the formless dark; the vacuous and tortured mind.
It is the dark absence of anything that is the source of my
wretchedness. If there were pain, grief, mournful energy of any kind,
one could put it into words; but how can one find expression for what
is a total eclipse?

It was not, I said, that anything had come between her and me; but I
seemed to be remote, withdrawn, laid apart like some stiffening corpse
in the tomb. She tried to reassure me, to show me that it was mainly
physical, the overstrain of long and actively enjoyed work, and that
all I needed was rest. She did not say one word of reproach, or
anything to imply that I was unmanly and cowardly--indeed, she
contrived, I know not how, to lead me to think that my state was in
ordinary life hardly apparent. Once she asked pathetically if there was
no way in which she could help. I had not the heart to say what was in
my mind, that it would be better and easier for me if she ignored my
unhappiness altogether; and that sympathy and compassion only plunged
me deeper into gloom, as showing me that it was evident that there was
something amiss--but I said "No, there is nothing; and no one can help
me, unless God kindles the light He has quenched. Be your own dear self
as much as possible; think and speak as little of me as you can,"--and
then I added: "Dearest, my love for you is here, as strong and pure as
ever--don't doubt that--only I cannot find it or come near it--it is
hidden from me somewhere--I am like a man wandering in dark fields, who
sees the firelit window of his home; he cannot feel the warmth, but he
knows that it is there waiting for him. He cannot return till he has
found that of which he is in search."

"Could he not give up the search?" said Maud, smiling tearfully. "Ah,
not yet," I said. "You do not know, Maud, what my work has been to
me--no man can ever explain that to any woman, I think: for women live
in life, but man lives in work. Man DOES, woman IS. There is the
difference."

We drew near the village. The red sun was sinking over the plain, a
ball of fire; the mist was creeping up from the low-lying fields; the
moon hung, like a white nail-paring, high in the blue sky. We went to
the little inn, where we had been before. We ordered tea--we were to
return by train--and Maud being tired, I left her, while I took a turn
in the village, and explored the remains of an old manor-house, which I
had seen often from the road. I was intolerably restless. I found a
lane which led to the fields behind the manor. It was a beautiful
scene. To the left of me ran the great plain brimmed with mist; the
manor, with its high gables and chimney-stacks, stood up over an
orchard, surrounded by a high, ancient brick wall, with a gate between
tall gate-posts surmounted by stone balls. The old pasture lay round
the house, and there were many ancient elms and sycamores forming a
small park, in the boughs of which the rooks, who were now streaming
home from the fields, were clamorous. I found myself near a chain of
old fish-ponds, with thorn-thickets all about them; and here the old
house stood up against a pure evening sky, rusty red below, melting
into a pure green above. My heart went out in wonder at the thought of
the unknown lives lived in this place, the past joys, the forgotten
sorrows. What did it mean for me, the incredible and caressing beauty
of the scene? Not only did it not comfort me, but it seemed to darken
the gloom of my own unhappy mind. Suddenly, as with a surge of agony,
my misery flowed in upon me. I clutched the rail where I stood, and
bowed my head down in utter wretchedness. There came upon me, as with a
sort of ghastly hopefulness, the temptation to leave it all, to put my
case back into God's hands. Perhaps it was to this that I was moving?
There might be a new life waiting for me, but it could not well be as
intolerable as this. Perhaps nothing but silence and unconsciousness
awaited me, a sleep unstirred by any dream. Even Maud, I thought, in
her sorrow, would understand. How long I stood there I do not know, but
the air darkened about me and the mist rose in long veils about the
pasture with a deadly chill. But then there came back a sort of grim
courage into my mind, that not so could it be ended. The thought of
Maud and the children rose before me, and I knew I could not leave
them, unless I were withdrawn from them. I must face it, I must fight
it out; though I could and did pray with all my might that God might
take away my life: I thought with what an utter joy I should feel the
pang, the faintness, of death creep over me there in the dim pasture;
but I knew in my heart that it was not to be; and soon I went slowly
back through the thickening gloom. I found Maud awaiting me: and I know
in that moment that some touch of the dark conflict I had been through
had made itself felt in her mind; and indeed I think she read something
of it in my face, from the startled glance she turned upon me. Perhaps
it would have been better if in that quiet hour I could have told her
the thought which had been in my mind; but I could not do that; and
indeed it seemed to me as though some unseen light had sprung up for
me, shooting and broadening in the darkness. I apprehended that I was
no longer to suffer, I was to fight. Hitherto I had yielded to my
misery, but the time was come to row against the current, not to drift
with it.

It was dark when we left the little inn; the moon had brightened to a
crescent of pale gold; the last dim orange stain of sunset still slept
above the mist. It seemed to me as though I had somehow touched the
bottom. How could I tell? Perhaps the same horrible temptation would
beset me, again and again, deepening into a despairing purpose; the
fertile mind built up rapidly a dreadful vista of possibilities,
terrible facts that might have to be faced. Even so the dark mood
beckoned me again; better to end it, said a hollow voice, better to let
your dear ones suffer the worst, with a sorrow that will lessen year by
year, than sink into a broken shadowed life of separation and
restraint--but again it passed; again a grim resolution came to my aid.

Then, as we sped homewards in the speeding train, there came over me
another thought. Here was I, who had lightly trafficked with human
emotions, who had written with a romantic glow of the dark things of
life, despair, agony, thoughts of self-destruction, insane fears, here
was I at last confronted with them. I could never dare, I felt, to
speak of such things again; were such dark mysteries to be used to
heighten the sense of security and joy, to give a trivial reader a
thrill of pleasure, a sympathetic reader a thrill of luxurious emotion?
No, there was nothing uplifting or romantic about them when they came;
they were dark as the grave, cold as the underlying clay. What a vile
and loathsome profanation, deserving indeed of a grim punishment, to
make a picturesque background out of such things! At length I had had
my bitter taste of grief, and drew in to my trembling spirit the
shuddering chill of despair. I had stepped, like the light-hearted
maiden of the old story, within the forbidden door, and the ugly, the
ghastly reality of the place had burst upon me, the huddled bodies, the
basin filled with blood. One had read in books of men and women whose
life had been suddenly curdled into slow miseries. One had half blamed
them in one's thought; one had felt that any experience, however dark
and deep, must have its artistic value; and one had thought that they
should have emerged with new zest into life. I understood it now, how
life could be frozen at its very source, how one could cry out with Job
curses on the day that gave one birth, and how gladly one would turn
one's face away from the world and all its cheerful noise, awaiting the
last stroke of God.



February 20, 1889.

There is a story of a Cornish farmer who, returning home one dark and
misty night, struck across the moorland, every yard of which he knew,
in order to avoid a long tramp by road. In one place there were a
number of disused mine-shafts; the railing which had once protected
them had rotted away, and it had been no one's business to see that it
was renewed--some few had been filled up, but many of them were
hundreds of feet deep, and entirely unguarded. The farmer first missed
the track, and after long wandering found himself at last among the
shafts. He sate down, knowing the extreme danger of his situation, and
resolved to wait till the morning; but it became so cold that he dared
stay no longer, for fear of being frozen alive, and with infinite
precautions he tried to make his way out of the dangerous region,
following the downward slope of the ground. In spite, however, of all
his care, he found suddenly, on putting his foot down, that he was on
the edge of a shaft, and that his foot was dangling in vacancy. He
threw himself backwards, but too late, and he slid down several feet,
grasping at the grass and heather; his foot fortunately struck against
a large stone, which though precariously poised, arrested his fall; and
he hung there for some hours in mortal anguish, not daring to move,
clinging to a tuft of heather, shouting at intervals, in the hope that,
when he did not return home, a search-party might be sent out to look
for him. At last he heard, to his intense relief, the sound of voices
hailing him, and presently the gleam of lanterns shot through the mist.
He uttered agonising cries, and the rescuers were soon at his side;
when he found that he had been lying in a shaft which had been filled
up, and that the firm ground was about a foot below him; and that, in
fact, if the stone that supported him had given way, he would have been
spared a long period of almost intolerable horror.

It is a good parable of many of our disquieting fears and anxieties; as
Lord Beaconsfield said, the greatest tragedies of his life had been
things that never happened; Carlyle truly and beautifully said that the
reason why the past always appeared to be beautiful, in retrospect, was
that the element of fear was absent from it. William Morris said a
trenchant thing on the same subject. He attended a Socialist Meeting of
a very hostile kind, which he anticipated with much depression. When
some one asked him how the meeting had gone off he said, "Well, it was
fully as damnable as I had expected--a thing which seldom happens." A
good test of the happiness of anyone's life is to what extent he has
had trials to bear which are unbearable even to recollect. I am myself
of a highly imaginative and anxious temperament, and I have had many
hours of depression at the thought of some unpleasant anticipation or
disagreeable contingency, and I can honestly say that nothing has ever
been so bad, when it actually occurred, as it had represented itself to
me beforehand. There are a few incidents in my life, the recollection
of which I deliberately shun; but they have always been absolutely
unexpected and unanticipated calamities. Yet even these have never been
as bad as I should have expected them to be. The strange thing is that
experience never comes to one's aid, and that one never gets patience
or courage from the thought that the reality will be in all probability
less distressing than the anticipation; for the simple reason that the
fertile imagination is always careful to add that this time the
occasion will be intolerable, and that at all events it is better to be
prepared for the worst that may happen. Moreover, one wastes force in
anticipating perhaps half-a-dozen painful possibilities, when, after
all, they are alternatives, and only one of them can happen. That is
what makes my present situation so depressing, that I instinctively
clothe it in its worst horrors, and look forward to a long and dreary
life, in which my only occupation will be an attempt to pass the weary
hours. Faithless? yes, of course it is faithless! but the rational
philosophy, which says that it will all probably come right, does not
penetrate to the deeper region in which the mind says to itself that
there is no hope of amendment.

Can one acquire, by any effort of the mind, this kind of patience? I do
not think one can. The most that one can do is to behave as far as
possible like one playing a heavy part upon the stage, to say with
trembling lips that one has hope, when the sick mind beneath cries out
that there is none.

Perhaps one can practise a sort of indifference, and hope that
advancing years may still the beating heart and numb the throbbing
nerve. But I do not even desire to live life on these terms. The one
great article of my creed has been that one ought not to lose zest and
spirit, or acquiesce slothfully in comfortable and material conditions,
but that life ought to be full of perception and emotion. Here again
lies my mistake; that it has not been perception or emotion that I have
practised, but the art of expressing what I have perceived and felt. Of
course, I wish with all my heart and soul that it were otherwise; but
it seems that I have drifted so far into these tepid, sun-warmed
shallows, the shallows of egoism and self-centred absorption, that
there is no possibility of my finding my way again to the wholesome
brine, to the fresh movement of the leaping wave. I am like one of
those who lingered so long in the enchanted isle of Circe, listening
luxuriously to the melting cadences of her magic song, that I have lost
all hope of extricating myself from the spell. The old free days, when
the heart beat light, and the breeze blew keen against my brow, have
become only a memory of delights, just enabling me to speak deftly and
artfully of the strong joys which I have forfeited.



February 24, 1889.

I have been away for some days, paying a visit to an old friend, a
bachelor clergyman living in the country. The only other occupant of
the house, a comfortable vicarage, is his curate. I am better--ashamed
almost to think how much better--for the change. It is partly the new
place, the new surroundings, the new minds, no doubt. But it is also
the change of atmosphere. At home I am surrounded by sympathy and
compassion; however unobtrusive they are, I feel that they are there. I
feel that trivial things, words, actions, looks are noted, commented
upon, held to be significant. If I am silent, I must be depressed; if I
talk and smile, I am making an effort to overcome my depression. It
sounds unloving and ungracious to resent this: but I don't undervalue
the care and tenderness that cause it; at the same time it adds to the
strain by imposing upon me a sort of vigilance, a constant effort to
behave normally. It is infinitely and deeply touching to feel love all
about me; but in such a state of mind as mine, one is shy of emotion,
one dreads it, one shuns it. I suppose it argues a want of simplicity,
of perfect manfulness, to feel this; but few or no women can
instinctively feel the difference. In a real and deep affliction, one
that could be frankly confessed, the more affection and sympathy that
one can have the better; it is the one thing that sustains. But my
unhappiness is not a real thing altogether, not a FRANK thing; the best
medicine for it is to think as little about it; the only help one
desires is the evidence that one does not need sympathy; and sympathy
only turns one's thoughts inwards, and makes one feel that one is
forlorn and desolate, when the only hope is to feel neither.

At Hapton it was just the reverse; neither Musgrave nor the curate,
Templeton, troubled their head about my fancies. I don't imagine that
Musgrave noticed that anything was the matter with me. If I was silent,
he merely thought I had nothing to say; he took for granted I was in my
normal state, and the result was that I temporarily recovered it.

Then, too, the kind of talk I got was a relief. With women, the real
talk is intime talk; the world of politics, books, men, facts,
incidents, is merely a setting; and when they talk about them, it is
merely to pass the time, as a man turns to a game. At Hapton, Musgrave
chatted away about his neighbours, his boys' club, his new organ, his
bishop, his work. I used to think him rather a proser; how I blessed
his prosing now! I took long walks with him; he asked a few perfunctory
questions about my books, but otherwise he was quite content to prattle
on, like a little brook, about all that was in his mind, and he was
more than content if I asked an occasional question or assented
courteously. Then we had some good talks about the rural problems of
education--he is a sensible and intelligent man enough--and some
excellent arguments about the movement of religion, where I found him
unexpectedly liberal-minded. He left me to do very much what I liked. I
read in the mornings and before dinner; and after dinner we smoked or
even played a game of dummy whist. It is a pretty part of the country,
and when he was occupied in the afternoon, I walked about by myself.
From first to last not a single word fell from Musgrave to indicate
that he thought me in any way different, or suspected that I was not
perfectly content, with the blessed result that I immediately became
exactly what he thought me.

I got on no better with my writing; my brain is as bare as a winter
wood; but I found that I did not rebel against that. Of course it does
not reveal a very dignified temperament, that one should so take colour
from one's surroundings. If I can be equable and good-humoured here, I
ought to be able to be equable and good-humoured at home; at the same
time I am conscious of an intense longing to see Maud and the children.
Probably I should do better to absent myself resolutely from home at
stated intervals; and I think it argued a fine degree of perception in
Maud, that she decided not to accompany me, though she was pressed to
come. I am going home to-morrow, delighted at the thought, grateful to
the good Musgrave, in a more normal frame of mind than I have been for
months.



February 28, 1889.

One of the most depressing things about my present condition is that I
feel, not only so useless, but so prickly, so ugly, so unlovable. Even
Maud's affection, stronger and more tender than ever, does not help me,
because I feel that she cannot love me for what I am, but for what she
remembers me as being, and hopes that I may be again. I know it is not
so, and that she would love me whatever I did or became; but I cannot
realise that now.

A few days ago an old friend came to see me; and I was so futile, so
fractious, so dull, so melancholy with him that I wrote to him
afterwards to apologise for my condition, telling him that I knew that
I was not myself, and hoped he would forgive me for not making more of
an effort. To-day I have had one of the manliest, tenderest, most
beautiful letters I have ever had in my life. He says, "Of course I saw
that you were not in your usual mood, but if you had pretended to be,
if you had kept me at arm's length, if you had grimaced and made
pretence, we should have been no nearer in spirit. I was proud and
grateful that you should so have trusted me, as to let me see into your
heart and mind; and you must believe me when I say that I never loved
and honoured you more. I understood fully what a deep and insupportable
trial your present state of mind must be; and I will be frank--why
should I not be?--and say that I thought you were bearing it bravely,
and what is better still, simply and naturally. I seemed to come closer
to you in those hours than I have ever done before, and to realise
better what you were. 'To make oneself beloved,' says an old writer,
'is to make oneself useful to others'--and you helped me perhaps most,
when you knew it least yourself. I won't tell you not to brood upon or
exaggerate your trouble--you know that well enough yourself. But
believe me that such times are indeed times of growth and expansion,
even when one seems most beaten back upon oneself, most futile, most
unmanly. So take a little comfort, my old friend, and fare onwards
hopefully."

That is a very beautiful and wise letter, and I cannot say how much it
has meant for me. It is a letter that forges an invisible chain, which
is yet stronger than the strongest tie that circumstance can forge; it
is a lantern for one's feet, and one treads a little more firmly in the
dark path, where the hillside looms formless through the shade.



March 3, 1889.

Best of all the psalms I love the Hundred-and-nineteenth; yet as a
child what a weary thing I thought it. It was long, it was monotonous;
it dwelt with a tiresome persistency, I used to think, upon dull
things--laws, commandments, statutes. Now that I am older, it seems to
me one of the most human of all documents. It is tender, pensive,
personal; other psalms are that; but Psalm cxix. is intime and
autobiographical. One is brought very close to a human spirit; one
hears his prayers, his sighs, the dropping of his tears. Then, too, in
spite of its sadness, there is a deep hopefulness and faithfulness
about it, a firm belief in the ultimate triumph of what is good and
true, a certainty that what is pure and beautiful is worth holding on
to, whatever may happen; a nearness to God, a quiet confidence in Him.
It is all in a subdued and minor key, but swelling up at intervals into
a chord of ravishing sweetness.

There is never the least note of loudness, none of that terrible
patriotism which defaces many of the psalms, the patriotism which makes
men believe that God is the friend of the chosen race, and the foe of
all other races, the ugly self-sufficiency that contemplates with
delight, not the salvation and inclusion of the heathen, but their
discomfiture and destruction. The worst side of the Puritan found
delight in those cruel and militant psalms, revelling in the thought
that God would rain upon the ungodly fire and brimstone, storm and
tempest, and exulting in the blasting of the breath of His displeasure.
Could anything be more alien to the spirit of Christ than all that? But
here, in this melancholy psalm, there breathes a spirit naturally
Christian, loving peace and contemplation, very weary of the strife.

I have said it is autobiographical; but it must be remembered that it
was a fruitful literary device in those early days, to cast one's own
thought in the mould of some well-known character. In this psalm I have
sometimes thought that the writer had Daniel in mind--the surroundings
of the psalm suit the circumstances of Daniel with singular exactness.
But even so, it was the work of a man, I think, who had suffered the
sorrows of which he wrote. Let me try to disentangle what manner of man
he was.

He was young and humble; he was rich, or had opportunities of becoming
so; he was an exile, or lived in an uncongenial society; he was the
member of a court where he was derided, disliked, slandered, plotted
against, and even persecuted. We can clearly discern his own character.
He was timid, and yet ambitious; he was tempted to use deceit and
hypocrisy, to acquiesce in the tone about him; he was inclined to be
covetous; he had sinned, and had learnt something of holiness from his
fall; he was given to solitude and prayer. He was sensitive, and his
sorrows had affected his health; he was sleepless, and had lost the
bloom of his youth.

All this and more we can read of him; but what is the saddest touch of
all is the isolation in which he lived. There is not a word to show
that he met with any sympathy; indeed the misunderstanding, whatever it
was, that overshadowed him, had driven acquaintances, friends, and
lovers away from him; and yet his tender confidence in God never fails;
he feels that in his passionate worship of virtue and truth, his
intense love of purity and justice, he has got a treasure which is more
to him than riches or honour, or even than human love. He speaks as
though this passion for holiness had been the very thing that had cost
him so dear, and that exposed him to derision and dislike. Perhaps he
had refused to fall in with some customary form of evil, and his
resistance to temptation had led him to be regarded as a precisian and
a saint? I have little doubt myself that this was so. He speaks as one
might speak who had been so smitten with the desire for purity and
rightness of life, that he could no longer even seem to condone the
opposite. And yet he was evidently not one who dared to withstand and
rebuke evil; the most he could do was to abstain from it; and the
result was that he saw the careless and evil-minded people about him
prosperous, happy and light-hearted, while he was himself plunged by
his own act in misunderstanding and solitude and tears.

And then how strange to see this beautiful and delicate confession put
into so narrow and constrained a shape! It is the most artificial by
far of all the psalms. The writer has chosen deliberately one of the
most cramping and confining forms that could be devised. Each of the
eight verses that form the separate stanzas begins with the same letter
of the alphabet, and each of the letters is used in turn. Think of
attempting to do the same in English--it could not be done at all. And
then in every single verse, except in one, where the word has probably
disappeared in translation, by a mistake, there is a mention of the law
of God. Infinite pains must have gone to the slow building of this
curious structure; stone by stone must have been carved and lifted to
its place. And yet the art is so great that I know no composition of
the same length that has so perfect a unity of mood and atmosphere.
There is never a false or alien note struck. It is never jubilant or
contentious or assertive--and, best of all, it is wholly free from any
touch of that complacency which is the shadow of virtue. The writer
never takes any credit to himself for his firm adherence to the truth;
he writes rather as one who has had a gift of immeasurable value
entrusted to unworthy hands, who hardly dares to believe that it has
been granted him, and who still speaks as though he might at any time
prove unfaithful, as though his weakness might suddenly betray him, and
who therefore has little temptation to exult in the possession of
anything which his own frail nature might at any moment forfeit.

And thus, from its humility, its sense of weakness and weariness, its
consciousness of sin and failure, combined with its deep apprehension
of the stainless beauty of the moral law, this lyric has found its way
to the hearts of all who find the world and temptation and fear too
strong, all who through repeated failure have learned that they cannot
even be true to what they so pathetically desire and admire; who would
be brave and vigorous if they could, but, as it is, can only hope to be
just led step by step, helped over the immediate difficulty, past the
dreaded moment; whose heart often fails them, and who have little of
the joy of God; who can only trust that, if they go astray, the mercy
of God will yet go out to seek them; who cannot even hope to run in the
way of God's beloved commandments, till He has set their heart at
liberty.



March 8, 1889.

I went to see Darell, my old schoolfellow, a few days ago; he wrote to
say that he would much like to see me, but that he was ill and unable
to leave home--could I possibly come to see him?

I have never seen very much of him since I left Cambridge; but there I
was a good deal in his company--and we have kept up our friendship ever
since, in the quiet way in which Englishmen do keep up their
friendships, meeting perhaps two or three times in the year, exchanging
letters occasionally. He was not a very intimate friend--indeed, he was
not a man who formed intimacies; but he was a congenial companion
enough. He was a frankly ambitious man. He went to the bar, where he
has done well; he married a wife with some money; and I think his
ultimate ambition has been to enter Parliament. He told me, when I last
saw him, that he had now, he thought, made enough money for this, and
that he would probably stand at the next election. I have always liked
his wife, who is a sensible, good-natured woman, with social ambitions.
They live in a good house in London, in a wealthy sort of way. I
arrived to luncheon, and sate a little while with Mrs. Darell in the
drawing-room. I became aware, while I sate with her, that there was a
sense of anxiety in the air somehow, though she spoke cheerfully enough
of her husband, saying that he had overworked himself, and had to lie
up for a little. When he came into the room I understood. It was not
that he was physically much altered--he is a strongly-built fellow,
with a sanguine complexion and thick curly hair, now somewhat grizzled;
but I knew at the first sight of him that matters were serious. He was
quiet and even cheerful in manner, but he had a look on his face that I
had never seen before, the look of a man whose view of life has been
suddenly altered, and who is preparing himself for the last long
journey. I knew instinctively that he believed himself a doomed man. He
said very little about himself, and I did not ask him much; he talked
about my books, and a good deal about old friends; but all with a
sense, I thought, of detachment, as though he were viewing everything
over a sort of intangible fence. After luncheon, we adjourned to his
study and smoked. He then said a few words about his illness, and added
that it had altered his plans. "I am told," he said, "that I must take
a good long holiday--rather a difficult job for a man who cares a great
deal about his work and very little about anything else;" he added a
few medical details, from which I gathered the nature of his illness.
Then he went on to talk of casual matters; it seemed to interest him to
discuss what had been happening to our school and college friends; but
I knew, without being told, that he wished me to understand that he did
not expect to resume his place in the world--and indeed I divined, by
some dim communication of the spirit, that he thought my visit was
probably a farewell. But he talked with unabated courage and interest,
smiling where he would in old days have laughed, and speaking of our
friends with more tenderness than was his wont. Only once did he half
betray what was in his mind: "It is rather strange," he said, "to be
pushed aside like this, and to have to reconsider one's theories. I did
not expect to have to pull up--the path lay plain before me--and now it
seems to me as if there were a good many things I had lost sight of.
Well, one must take things as they come, and I don't think that if I
had it all to do again I should do otherwise." He changed the subject
rather hurriedly, and began to talk about my work. "You are quite a
great man now," he said with a smile; "I hear your books talked about
wherever I go--I used to wonder if you would have had the patience to
do anything--you were hampered by having no need to earn your living;
but you have come out on the top." I told him something about my own
late experiences and my difficulty in writing. He listened with
undisguised interest. "What do you make of it?" he said. "Well," I
said; "you will think I am talking transcendentally, but I have felt
often of late as if there were two strains in our life, two kinds of
experience; at one time we have to do our work with all our might, to
get absorbed in it, to do what little we can to enrich the world; and
then at another time it is all knocked out of our hands, and we have to
sit and meditate--to realise that we are here on sufferance, that what
we can do matters very little to any one--the same sort of feeling that
I once had when old Hoskyns, in whose class I was, threw an essay, over
which I had taken a lot of trouble, into his waste-paper basket before
my eyes without even looking it over. I see now that I had got all the
good I could out of the essay by writing it, and that the credit of it
mattered very little; but then I simply thought he was a very
disagreeable and idle old fellow."

"Yes," he said, smiling, "there is something in that; but one wants the
marks as well--I have always liked to be marked for my work. I am glad
you told me that story, old man."

We went on to talk of other things, and when I rose to go, he thanked
me rather effusively for my kindness in coming to see him. He told me
that he was shortly going abroad, and that if I could find time to
write he would be grateful for a letter; "and when I am on my legs
again," he said with a smile, "we will have another meeting."

That was all that passed between us of actual speech. Yet how much more
seems to have been implied than was said. I knew, as well as if he had
told me in so many words, that he did not expect to see me again; that
he was in the valley of the shadow, and wanted help and comfort. Yet he
could not have described to me what was in his mind, and he would have
resented it, I think, if I had betrayed any consciousness of my
knowledge; and yet he knew that I knew, I am sure of that.

The interview affected me deeply and poignantly. The man's patience and
courage are very great; but he has lived, frankly and laboriously, for
perfectly definite things. He never had the least sense of what is
technically called religion; he was strong and temperate by nature,
with a fine sense of honour; loving work and the rewards of work,
despising sentiment and emotion--indeed his respect for me, of which I
was fully conscious, is the respect he feels for a sentimental man who
has made sentiment pay. It is very hard to see what part the prospect
of suffering and death is meant to play in the life of such a man. It
must be, surely, that he has something even more real than what he has
held to be realities to learn from the sudden snapping off of life and
activity. I find myself filled with an immense pity for him; and yet if
my faith were a little stronger and purer, I should congratulate rather
than commiserate him. And yet the thought of him in his bewilderment
helps me too, for I see my own life as in a mirror. I have received a
message of truth, the message that the accomplishment of our plans and
cherished designs is not the best thing that can befall us. How easy to
see that in the case of another, how hard to see it in our own case!
But it has helped me too to throw myself outside the morbid
perplexities in which I am involved; to hold out open hands to the gift
of God, even though He seems to give me a stone for bread, a stinging
serpent for wholesome provender. It has taught me to pray--not only for
myself, but for all the poor souls who are in the grip of a sorrow that
they cannot understand or bear.



March 14, 1889.

The question that haunts me, the problem I cannot disentangle, is what
is or what ought our purpose to be? What is our duty in life? Ought we
to discern a duty which lies apart from our own desires and
inclinations? The moralist says that it ought to be to help other
people; but surely that is because the people, whom by some instinct we
deem the highest, have had the irresistible desire to help others? How
many people has one ever known who have taken up philanthropy merely
from a sense of rectitude? The people who have done most to help the
world along have been the people who have had an overwhelming natural
tenderness, an overflowing love for helpless, weak, and unhappy people.
That is a thing which cannot be simulated. One knows quite well, to put
the matter simply, the extent of one's own limitations. There are
courses of action which seem natural and easy; others which seem hard,
but just possible; others again which are frankly impossible. However
noble a life, for instance, I thought the life of a missionary or of a
doctor to be, I could not under any circumstances adopt the role of
either. There are certain things which I might force myself to do which
I do not do, and which I practically know I shall not do. And the
number of people is very small who, when circumstances suggest one
course, resolutely carry out another. The artistic life is a very hard
one to analyse, because at the outset it seems so frankly selfish a
life. One does what one most desires to do, one develops one's own
nature, its faculties and powers. If one is successful, the most one
can claim is that one has perhaps added a little to the sum of
happiness, of innocent enjoyment, that one has perhaps increased or fed
in a few people the perception of beauty. Of course the difficulty is
increased by the conventional belief that any career is justified by
success in that career. And as long as a man attains a certain measure
of renown we do not question very much the nature of his aims.

Then, again, if we put that all aside, and look upon life as a thing
that is given us to teach us something, it is easy to think that it
does not matter very much what we do; we take the line of least
resistance, and think that we shall learn our lesson somehow.

It is difficult to believe that our one object ought to be to thwart
all our own desires and impulses, to abstain from doing what we desire
to do, and to force ourselves continually to do what we have no impulse
to do. That is a philosophical and stoical business, and would end at
best in a patient and courteous dreariness of spirit.

Neither does it seem a right solution to say: "I will parcel out my
energies--so much will I give to myself, so much to others." It ought
to be a larger, more generous business than that; yet the people who
give themselves most freely away too often end by having very little to
give; instead of having a store of ripe and wise reflection, they have
generally little more than an official smile, a kindly tolerance, a
voluble stream of commonplaces.

And then, too, it is hard to see, to speak candidly, what God is doing
in the matter. One sees useful careers cut ruthlessly short, generous
qualities nullified by bad health or minute faults, promise
unfulfilled, men and women bound in narrow, petty, uncongenial spheres,
the whole matter in a sad disorder. One sees one man's influence spoilt
by over-confidence, by too strong a sense of his own significance, and
another man made ineffective by diffidence and self-distrust. The best
things of life, the most gracious opportunities, such as love and
marriage, cannot be entered upon from a sense of duty, but only from an
overpowering and instinctive impulse.

Is it not possible to arrive at some tranquil harmony of life, some
self-evolution, which should at the same time be ardent and generous?
In my own sad unrest of spirit, I seem to be alike incapable of working
for the sake of others and working to please myself. Perhaps that is
but the symptom of a moral disease, a malady of the soul. Yet if that
is so, and if one once feels that disease and, suffering is not a part
of the great and gracious purpose of God--if it is but a failure in His
design--the struggle is hopeless. One sees all around one men and women
troubled by no misgivings, with no certain aim, just doing whatever the
tide of life impels them to do. My neighbour here is a man who for
years has gone up to town every day to his office. He is perfectly
contented, absolutely happy. He has made more money than he will ever
need or spend, and he will leave his children a considerable fortune.
He is kind, respectable, upright; he is considered a thoroughly
enviable man, and indeed, if prosperity and contentment are the sign
and seal of God's approbation, such a man is the highest work of God,
and has every reason to be an optimist. He would think my questionings
morbid and my desires moonshine. He is not necessarily right any more
than I; but his theory of life works out a good deal better for him
than mine for me.

Well, we drift, we drift! Sometimes the sun shines bright on the wave,
and the wheeling birds dip and hover, and our heart is full of song.
But sometimes we plunge on rising billows, with the wind wailing, and
the rain pricking the surface with needle-points; we are weary and
uncomforted; and we do not know why we suffer, or why we are glad.
Sometimes I have a far-off hope that I shall know, that I shall
understand and be satisfied; but sometimes, alas, I fear that my soul
will flare out upon the darkness, and know no more either of weal or
woe.



March 20, 1889.

I am reading a great deal now; but I find that I turn naturally to
books of a sad intimite--books in which are revealed the sorrowful
cares and troubles of sensitive people. Partly, I suppose, it is to get
the sense of comfort which comes from feeling that others have suffered
too; but partly to find, if I can, some medicine for my soul, in
learning how others struggled out of the mire. Thus I have been reading
Froude's Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle's Letters over again, and they have
moved me strangely and deeply. Perhaps it is mostly that I have felt,
in these dark months, drawn to the society of two brave people--she was
brave in her silences, he in the way in which he stuck doggedly to his
work--who each suffered so horribly, so imaginatively, so inexplicably,
and, alas, it would seem, so unnecessarily! Of course Carlyle indulged
his moods, while Mrs. Carlyle fought against hers; moreover, he had the
instinct for translating thoughts, instantaneously and volubly, into
vehement picturesque speech. How he could bite in a picture, an ugly,
ill-tempered one enough very often, as when he called Coleridge a
"weltering" man! Many of his sketches are mere Gillray caricatures of
people, seen through bile unutterable, exasperated by nervous
irritability. And Mrs. Carlyle had a mordant wit enough. But still both
of them had au fond a deep need of love, and a power of lavishing love.
It comes out in the old man's whimsical notes and prefaces; and indeed
it is true to say that if a person once actually penetrated into
Carlyle's inner circle, he found himself loved hungrily and devotedly,
and never forgotten or cast out. And as to Mrs. Carlyle, I suppose it
was impossible to be near her and not to love her! This comes out in
glimpses in her sad pathological letters. There is a scene she
describes, how she returned home after some long and serious bout of
illness, when her cook and housemaid rushed into the street, kissed
her, and wept on her neck; while two of her men friends, Mr. Cooke and
Lord Houghton, who called in the course of the evening, to her surprise
and obvious pleasure, did the very same. The result on myself, after
reading the books, is to feel myself one of the circle, to want to do
something for them, to wring the necks of the cocks who disturbed
Carlyle's sleep; and sometimes, alas, to rap the old man's fingers for
his blind inconsiderateness and selfishness. I came the other day upon
a passage in a former book of my own, where I said something sneering
and derisive about the pair, and I felt deep shame and contrition for
having written it--and, more than that, I felt a sort of disgust for
the fact that I have spent so much time in writing fiction. Books like
the Life of Carlyl

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