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Title: The Altar Fire

Author: Arthur Christopher Benson

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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 a 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 quest, 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 he
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 Carlyle and
Mrs. Carlyle's Letters take the wind out of one's imaginative
faculties altogether, because one is confronted with the real stuff
of life in them. Life, that hard, stubborn, inconclusive,
inconsistent, terrible thing! It is, of course, that very hardness
and inconclusiveness that makes one turn to fiction. In fiction,
one can round off the corners, repair mistakes, comfort, idealise,
smooth things down, make error and weakness bear good fruit,
choose, develop as one pleases. Not so with life, where things go
from bad to worse, misunderstandings grow and multiply, suffering
does not purge, sorrow does not uplift. That is the worst of
fiction, that it deludes one into thinking that one can deal gently
with life, finish off the picture, arrange things on one's own
little principles; and then, as in my own case, life brings one up
against some monstrous, grievous, intolerable fact, that one can
neither look round or over, and the scales fall from one's eyes.
With what courage, tranquillity or joy is one to meet a thoroughly
disagreeable situation? The more one leans on the hope that it may
amend, the weaker one grows; the thing to realise is that it is
bad, that it is inevitable, that it has arrived, and to let the
terror and misery do their worst, soak into the soul and not run
off it. Only then can one hope to be different; only so can one
climb the weary ladder of patience and faith.



March 28, 1889.


Low-hung ragged grey skies, heaven smeared with watery vapours
fleeting, broken and mournful, from the west--these above me, as I
stand by the old lichened gate of the high wind-swept field at the
top of the wold. In front a stretch of rough common, the dark-brown
heather, the young gorse, bluish-green, the rusty red of soaked
bracken, the pale ochre-coloured grass, all blent into a rich tint
that pleases the eye with its wild freshness. To the left, the wide
flat level of the plain, with low hills rising on its verge; to the
right, a pale pool of water at the bottom of a secret valley,
reflecting the leafless bushes that fringe it, catches the sunset
gleam that rises in the west; and then range after range of wolds,
with pale-green pastures, dark copses, fawn-coloured ploughland,
here and there an emerald patch of young wheat. The air is fresh,
soft and fragrant, laden with rain; the earth smells sweet; and the
wild woodland scent comes blowing to me out of the heart of the
spinney. In front of me glimmer the rough wheel-tracks of a grassy
road that leads out on to the heath, and two obscure figures move
slowly nearer among the tufted gorse. They seem to me, those two
figures, charged with a grave significance, as though they came to
bear me tidings, messengers bidden to seek and find me, like the
men who visited Abraham at the close of the day.

As I linger, the day grows darker, the colour fading from leaf and
blade; bright points of light flash out among the dark ridges from
secluded farms, where the evening lamp is lit.

Sometimes on days like this, when the moisture hangs upon the
hedges, when the streams talk hoarsely to themselves in grassy
channels, when the road is full of pools, one is weary, unstrung
and dissatisfied, faint of purpose, tired of labour, desiring
neither activity nor rest; the soul sits brooding, like the black
crows that I see in the leafless wood beneath me, perched silent
and draggled on the tree-tops, just waiting for the sun and the dry
keen airs to return; but to-day it is not so; I am full of a quiet
hope, an acquiescent tranquillity. My heart talks gently to itself,
as to an unseen friend, telling its designs, its wishes, its
activities. I think of those I hold dear, all the world over; I am
glad that they are alive, and believe that they think of me. All
the air seems full of messages, thoughts and confidences and
welcomes passing to and fro, binding souls to each other, and all
to God. There seems to be nothing that one needs to do to-day
except to live one's daily life; to be kind and joyful. To-day the
road of pilgrimage lies very straight and clear between its fences,
in an open ground, with neither valley nor hill, no by-path, no
turning. One can even see the gables and chimneys of some grave
house of welcome, "a roof for when the dark hours begin," full of
pious company and smiling maidens. And not, it seems, a false
security; one is not elated, confident, strong; one knows one's
weakness; but I think that the Lord of the land has lately passed
by with a smile, and given command that the pilgrims shall have a
space of quiet. These birds, these branching trees, have not yet
lost the joy of His passing. There, along the grassy tracks, His
patient footsteps went, how short a time ago! One does not hope
that all the journey will be easy and untroubled; there will be
fresh burdens to be borne, dim valleys full of sighs to creep
through, dark waters to wade across; these feet will stumble and
bleed; these knees will be weary before the end; but to-day there
is no doubt about the pilgrimage, no question of the far-off goal.
The world is sad, perhaps, but sweet; sad as the homeless clouds
that drift endlessly across the sky from marge to marge; sweet as
the note of the hidden bird, that rises from moment to moment from
the copse beside me, again and yet again, telling of a little heart
that is content to wait, and not ill-pleased to be alone with its
own soft thoughts.



April 4, 1889.


Down in the valley which runs below the house is a mill. I passed
it to-day at dusk, and I thought I had never seen so
characteristically English a scene. The wheel was silent, and the
big boarded walls, dusted with flour, loomed up solemnly in the
evening light. The full leat dashed merrily through the sluice,
making holiday, like a child released from school. Behind was the
stack-yard, for it is a farm as well as a mill; and in the byre I
heard the grunting of comfortable pigs, and the soft pulling of the
hay from the big racks by the bullocks. The fowls were going to
roost, fluttering up every now and then into the big elder-bushes;
while high above, in the apple-trees, I saw great turkeys settled
precariously for the night. The orchard was silent, except for the
murmur of the stream that bounds it. In the mill-house itself
lights gleamed in the windows, and I saw a pleasant family-party
gathered at their evening meal. The whole scene with its background
of sloping meadows and budding woods so tranquil and contented--a
scene which William Morris would have loved--for there is a
pleasant grace of antiquity about the old house, a sense of homely
and solid life, and of all the family associations that have gone
to the making of it, generation after generation leaving its mark
in the little alterations and additions that have met a need, or
even satisfied a pleasant fancy.

The miller is an elderly man now, fond of work, prosperous, good-
humoured. His son lives with him, and the house is full of
grandchildren. I do not say that it puzzles me to divine what is
the miller's view of life, because I think I know it. It is to make
money honestly, to bring up his grandchildren virtuously and
comfortably, to enjoy his daily work and his evening leisure. He is
never idle, never preoccupied. He enjoys getting the mill started,
seeing the flour stream into the sacks, he enjoys going to market,
he enjoys going prosperously to church on Sundays, he enjoys his
paper and his pipe. He has no exalted ideas, and he could not put a
single emotion into words, but he is thoroughly honest, upright,
manly, kind, sensible. A perfect life in many ways; and yet it is
inconceivable to me that a man should live thus, without an aim,
without a hope, without an object. He would think my own life even
more inconceivable--that a man could deliberately sit down day
after day to construct a story about imaginary people; and such
respect as he feels for me, is mainly due to the fact that my
writings bring me in a larger income than he could ever make from
his mill. But of course he is a man who is normally healthy, and
such men as he are the props of rural life. He is a good master, he
sees that his men do their work, and are well housed. He is not
generous exactly, but he is neighbourly. The question is whether
such as he is the proper type of humanity. He represents the simple
virtues at their high-water mark. He is entirely contented, and his
desires are perfectly proportioned to their surroundings. He seems
indeed to be exactly what the human creature ought to be. And yet
his very virtues, his sense of justice and honesty, his sensible
kindliness, are the outcome of civilisation, and bear the stamp, in
reality, of the dreams of saints and sages and idealists--the men
who felt that things could be better, and who were made miserable
by the imperfections of the world. I cannot help wondering, in a
whimsical moment, what would have been the miller's thoughts of
Christ, if he had been confronted with Him in the flesh. He would
have thought of Him rather contemptuously, I think, as a
bewildering, unpractical, emotional man. The miller would not have
felt the appeal of unselfishness and unworldliness, because his
ideal of life is tranquil prosperity. He would have merely wondered
why people could not hold their tongues and mind their business:
and yet he is a model citizen, and would be deeply annoyed if he
were told he were not a sincere Christian. He accepts doctrinal
statements as he would accept mathematical formulae, and he takes
exactly as much of the Christian doctrine as suits him. Now when I
compare myself with the miller, I feel that, as far as human
usefulness goes, I am far lower in the scale. I am, when all is
said and done, a drone in the hive, eating the honey I did not
make. I do not take my share in the necessary labour of the world,
I do not regulate a little community of labourers with uprightness
and kindness, as he does. But still I suppose that my more
sensitive organisation has a meaning in the scale of things. I
cannot have been made and developed as I am, outside of the purpose
of God. And yet my work in the world is not that of the passionate
idealist, that kindles men with the hope of bettering and amending
the world. What is it that my work does? It fills a vacant hour for
leisurely people, it gives agreeable distraction, it furnishes some
pleasant dreams. The most that I can say is that I have a wife whom
I desire to make happy, and children whom I desire to bring up
innocently, purely, vigorously.

Must one's hopes and beliefs be thus tentative and provisional?
Must one walk through life, never fathoming the secret? I have
myself abundance of material comfort, health, leisure. I know that
for one like myself, there are hundreds less fortunate. Yet
happiness in this world depends very little upon circumstances; it
depends far more upon a certain mixture of selfishness,
tranquillity, temperance, bodily vigour, and unimaginativeness. To
be happy, one must be good-humouredly indifferent to the sufferings
of others, and indisposed to forecast the possibilities of
disaster. The sadness which must shadow the path of such as myself,
is the sadness which comes of the power to see clearly the
imperfections of the world, coupled with the inability to see
through it, to discern the purpose of it all. One comforts oneself
by the dim hope that the desire will be satisfied and the dream
fulfilled; but has one any certainty of that? The temptation is to
acquiesce in a sort of gentle cynicism, to take what one can get,
to avoid as far as possible all deep attachments, all profound
hopes, to steel oneself in indifference. That is what such men as
my miller do instinctively; meanwhile one tries to believe that the
melancholy that comes to such as Hamlet, the sadness of finding the
world unintelligible, and painful, and full of shadows, is a noble
melancholy, a superior sort of madness. Yet one is not content to
bear, to suffer, to wait; one clutches desperately at light and
warmth and joy, and alas, in joy and sorrow alike, one is ever and
insupportably alone.



April 9, 1889.


I have been reading Rousseau lately, and find him a very
incomprehensible figure. The Confessions, it must be said, is a
dingy and sordid book. I cannot quite penetrate the motive which
induced him to write them. It cannot have been pure vanity, because
he does not spare himself; he might have made himself out a far
more romantic and attractive character, if he had suppressed the
shadows and heightened the lights. I am inclined to think that it
was partly vanity and partly honesty. Vanity was the motive force,
and honesty the accompanying mood. I do not suppose there is any
document so transparently true in existence, and we ought to be
thankful for that. It is customary to say that Rousseau had the
soul of a lackey, by which I suppose is meant that he had a gross
and vulgar nature, a thievish taste for low pleasures, and an ill-
bred absence of consideration for others. He had all these
qualities certainly, but he had a great deal more. He was upright
and disinterested. He had a noble disregard of material advantages;
he had an enthusiasm for virtue, a passionate love of humanity, a
deep faith in God. He was not an intellectual man nor a
philosopher; and yet what a ridiculous criticism is that which is
generally made upon him, that his reasoning is bad, his knowledge
scanty, and that people had better read Hobbes! The very reason
which made Rousseau so tremendous an influence was that his point
of view was poetical rather than philosophical; he was not too far
removed from the souls to which he prophesied. What they needed was
inspiration, emotion, and sentimental dogma; these he could give,
and so he saved Europe from the philosophers and the cynics. Of
course it is a deplorable life, tormented by strong animal passion,
ill-health, insanity; but one tends to forget the prevalent
coarseness of social tone at that date, not because Rousseau made
any secret of it, but because none of his contemporaries dared to
be so frank. If Rousseau had struck out a dozen episodes from the
Confessions the result would have been a highly poetical,
reflective, charming book. I can easily conceive that it might have
a very bad effect upon an ingenuous mind, because it might be
argued from what he says that moral lapses do not very much matter,
and that emotional experience is worth the price of some animalism.
Still more perniciously it might induce one to believe that a man
may have a deep sense of religion side by side with an unbridled
sensuality, and that one whose life is morally infamous may yet be
able to quicken the moral temperature of great nations.

Some of the critics of Rousseau speak as though a man whose moral
code was so loose, and whose practice was so libidinous, ought
almost to have held his tongue on matters of high moral import. But
this is a very false line of argument. A man may see a truth
clearly, even if he cannot practise it; and an affirmation of a
passionate belief in virtue is emphasised and accentuated when it
comes from the lips of one who might be tempted rather to excuse
his faults by preaching the irresistible character of evil.

To any one who reads wisely, and not in a censorious and
Pharisaical spirit, this sordid record, which is yet interspersed
with things so fragrant and beautiful, may have a sobering and
uplifting effect. One sees a man hampered by ill-health, by a
temperament childishly greedy of momentary pleasure, by
irritability, suspicion, vanity and luxuriousness, again and again
expressing a deep belief in unselfish emotion, a passionate desire
to help struggling humanity onward, a child-like confidence in the
goodness and tenderness of the Father of all. Disgust and
admiration struggle strangely together. One cannot sympathise and
yet one dare not condemn. One feels a horrible suspicion that there
are dark and slimy corners, vile secrets. ugly memories, in the
minds of hundreds of seemingly respectable people; the book brings
one face to face with the mystery of evil; and yet through the
gloom there steals a silvery radiance, a far-off hope, an infinite
compassion for all weakness and imperfection. One can hardly love
Rousseau, though one does not wonder that there were many found to
do so; and instead of judging him, one cries out with horror at the
slime of the pit where he lay bound.



April 14, 1889.


A delusion of which we must beware is the delusion that we can have
a precise and accurate knowledge of spiritual things. This is a
delusion into which the exponents of settled religions are apt to
fall. The Roman Catholic, with his belief in the infallible Church,
as the interpreter of God's spirit, which is nothing more than a
belief in the inspiration of the majority, or even a belief in the
inspiration of a bureaucracy, is the prey of this delusion. The
Protestant, too, with his legal creed, built up of texts and
precedents, in which the argumentative dicta of Apostles and
Evangelists are as weighty and important as the words of the
Saviour Himself, falls under this delusion. I read the other day a
passage from a printed sermon of an orthodox type, an acrid outcry
against Liberalism in religion, which may illustrate what I mean.

"To St. Paul and St. John," said the preacher, "the natural or
carnal man is hopelessly remote from God; the same Lord who came to
make possible for man this intimate communion with God is careful
to make it clear that this communion is only possible to redeemed,
regenerate man; prior to new birth into the Kingdom of God, far
from being a son of God, man is, according to the Lord Himself, a
child of the devil, however potentially capable of being translated
from death into life."

Such teaching is so horrible and abominable that it is hard to find
words to express one's sense of its shamefulness. To attribute it
to the Christ, who came to seek and save what is lost, is an act of
traitorous wickedness. If Christ had made it His business to
thunder into the ears of the outcasts, whom He preferred to the
Scribes and Pharisees, this appalling message, where would His
teaching be? What message of hope would it hold for the soul? Such
a view of Christianity as this insults alike the soul and the mind
and the heart; it deliberately insults God; the message of Christ
to the vilest human spirit is that it is indeed, in spite of all
its corruption, its falls, its shame, in very truth God's own
child; it calls upon the sinner to recognise it, it takes for
granted that he feels it. The people whom Christ denounced with
indignation so fiery, so blasting, that it even seems inconsistent
with His perfect gentleness, were the people who thus professed to
know and interpret the mind of God, who bade the sinner believe
that He was a merciless judge, extreme to mark what is done amiss,
when the one secret was that He was the tenderest and most loving
of Fathers. But according to this preacher's terrible doctrine God
pours into the world a stream of millions of human beings, all
children of the devil, with instincts of a corrupt kind, hampered
by dreadful inheritances, doomed, from their helpless and reluctant
birth, to be sinful here and lost hereafter, and then prescribes to
them a hard and difficult path, beset by clamorous guides, pointing
in a hundred different directions, bidding them find the intricate
way to His Heart, or perish. The truth is the precise opposite. The
divine voice says to every man: "Hampered and sore hindered as you
are, you are yet My dearly beloved son and child; only turn to Me,
only open your heart to Me, only struggle, however faintly, to be
what you can desire to be, and I will guide and lead you to Myself;
all that is needed is that your heart should be on My side in the
battle. Even your sins matter little, provided that you can say
sincerely, 'If it were mine to choose and ordain, I would never
willingly do evil again.' I know, better even than you yourself
know, your difficulties, your temptations, your weaknesses; the
sorrow they bring upon you is no dreary and vindictive punishment,
it is the loving correction of My hand, and will bring you into
peace yet, if only you will trust Me, and not despair."

The world is full of dreadful things, pains and sorrow and
miseries, but the worst of all are the dreary wretchednesses of our
own devising. The old detestable doctrine of Hell, the idea that
the stubborn and perverse spirit can defy God, and make its black
choice, is simply an attempt to glorify the strength of the human
spirit and to belittle the Love of God. It denies the truth that
God, if He chose, could show the darkest soul the beauty of
holiness in so constraining a way that the frail nature must yield
to the appeal. To deny this, is to deny the omnipotence of the
Creator. No man would deliberately reject peace and joy, if he
could see how to find them, in favour of feverish evil and
ceaseless suffering. If we believe that God is perfect love, it is
inconceivable that He should make a creature capable of defying His
utmost tenderness, unless He had said to Himself, "I will make a
poor wretch who shall defy Me, and he shall suffer endlessly and
mercilessly in consequence." The truth is that God's Omnipotence is
limited by His Omnipotence; He could not, for instance, abolish
Himself, nor create a power that should be greater than He. But if
He indeed can give to evil such vitality that it can defy Him for
ever, then He is creating a power that is stronger than Himself.

While the mystery of evil is unexplained, we must all be content to
know that we do not know; for the thing is insoluble by human
thought. If God be all-pervading, all-in-all, it is impossible to
conceive anything coming into being alien to Himself, within
Himself. If He created spirits able to choose evil, He must have
created the evil for them to choose, for a man could not choose
what did not exist; if man can defy God, God must have given him
the thought of defiance, for no thought can enter the mind of man
not permitted by God.

With this mystery unsolved, we cannot pretend to any knowledge of
spiritual things; all that we can do is to recognise that the
principle of Love is stronger than the principle of evil, and cling
so far as we can cling to the former. But to set ourselves up to
guide and direct other men, as the preacher did whose words I have
quoted, is to set oneself in the place of God, and is a detestable
tyranny. Only by our innate sense of Justice and Love can we
apprehend God at all; and thus we are safe in this, that whenever
we find any doctrine preached by any human being which insults our
sense of justice and love, we may gladly reject it, saying that at
least we will not believe that God gives us the power, on the one
hand, to recognise our highest and truest instincts, and on the
other directs us to outrage them. Such teaching as this we can
infallibly recognise as a human perversion and not as a divine
message; and we may thankfully and gratefully believe that the
obstacles and difficulties, the temptations and troubles, which
seem to be strewn so thickly in our path, are to develop rather
than to thwart our strivings after good, and assuredly designed to
minister to our ultimate happiness, rather than to our ultimate
despair.



April 25, 1889.


I found to-day on a shelf a Manual of Preparation for Holy
Communion, which was given me when I was confirmed. I stood a long
time reading it, and little ghosts seemed to rustle in its pages.
How well I remember using it, diligently and carefully, trying to
force myself into the attitude of mind that it inculcated, and
humbly and sincerely believing myself wicked, reprobate, stony-
hearted, because I could not do it successfully. Shall I make a
curious confession? From quite early days, the time of first waking
in the morning has been apt to be for me a time of mental
agitation; any unpleasant and humiliating incident, any
disagreeable prospect, have always tended to dart into my brain,
which, unstrung and weakened by sleep, has often been disposed to
view things with a certain poignancy of distress at that hour--a
distress which I always knew would vanish the moment I felt my feet
on the carpet. I used to take advantage of this to use my Manual at
that hour, because by that I secured a deeper intensity of
repentance, and I have often succeeded in inducing a kind of
tearful condition by those means, which I knew perfectly well to be
artificial, but which yet seemed to comply with the rules of the
process.

The kind of repentance indicated in the book as appropriate was a
deep abasement, a horror and hatred of one's sinful propensities;
and the language used seems to me now not only hollow and
meaningless, but to insult the dignity of the soul, and to be
indeed a profound confession of a want of confidence in the methods
and purposes of God. Surely the right attitude is rather a manly,
frank, and hopeful co-operation with God, than a degraded kind of
humiliation. One was invited to contemplate God's detestation of
sin, His awful and stainless holiness. How unreal, how utterly
false! It is no more reasonable than to inculcate in human beings a
sense of His hatred of weakness, of imperfection, of disease, of
suffering. One might as well say that God's courage and beauty were
so perfect that He had an impatient loathing for anything timid or
ugly. If one said that being perfect He had an infinite pity for
imperfection, that would be nearer the truth--but, even so, how far
away! To believe in His perfect love and benevolence, one must also
believe that all shortcomings, all temptations, all sufferings,
somehow emanate from Him; that they are educative, and have an
intense and beautiful significance--that is what one struggles,
how hardly, to believe! Those childish sins, they were but the
expression of the nature one received from His hand, that wilful,
pleasure-loving, timid, fitful nature, which yet always desired the
better part, if only it could compass it, choose it, love it. To
hate one's nature and temperament and disposition, how impossible,
unless one also hated the God who had bestowed them! And then, too,
how inextricably intertwined! The very part of one's soul that made
one peace-loving, affectionate, trustful was the very thing that
led one into temptation. The very humility and diffidence that made
one hate to seem or to be superior to others was the occasion of
falling. The religion recommended was a religion of scrupulous
saints and self-torturing ascetics; and the result of it was to
make one, as experience widened and deepened, mournfully
indifferent to an ideal which seemed so utterly out of one's reach.
It is very difficult to make the right compromise. On the one hand,
there is the sense of moral responsibility and effort, which one
desires to cultivate; on the other hand, truth compels us to
recognise our limitations, and to confess boldly the fact that
moral improvement is a very difficult thing. The question is
whether, in dealing with other people, we will declare what we
believe to be the truth, or whether we will tamper with the truth
for a good motive. Ought we to pretend that we think a person
morally responsible and morally culpable, when we believe that he
is neither, for the sake of trying to improve him?

My own practice now is to waste as little time as possible in
ineffectual regrets, but to keep alive as far as I can in my heart
a hope, a desire, that God will help to bring me nearer to the
ideal that I can perceive and cannot reach. To-day, turning over
the pages of the old Manual, with its fantastic strained phrases
staring at me from the page, I cannot help wishing that some wise
and tender person had been able to explain to me the conditions as
I now see them. Probably the thing was incommunicable; one must
learn for oneself both one's bitterness and one's joy.



May 2, 1889.


It sometimes happens to me--I suppose it happens to every one--to
hear some well-meaning person play or sing at a party. Last night,
at the Simpsons', a worthy young man, who was staying there, sang
some Schubert songs in a perfectly correct, weak, inexpressive
voice, accompanying himself in a wooden and inanimate fashion--the
whole thing might have been turned out by a machine. I was, I
suppose, in a fretful mood. "Good God!" I thought to myself, "what
is the meaning of this woeful performance?--a party of absurd
dressed-up people, who have eaten and drunk too much, sitting in a
circle in this hot room listening gravely to this lugubrious
performance! And this is the best that Schubert can do! This is the
real Schubert! Here have I been all my life pouring pints of
subjective emotion into this dreary writer of songs, believing that
I was stirred and moved, when it was my own hopes and aspirations
all along, which I was stuffing into this conventional vehicle,
just as an ecclesiastical person puts his emotion into the
grotesque repetitions of a liturgy." I thought to myself that I had
made a discovery, and that all was vanity. Well, we thanked the
singer gravely enough, and went on, smiling and grimacing, to talk
local gossip. A few minutes later, a young girl, very shy and
painfully ingenuous, was hauled protesting to the piano. I could
see her hands tremble as she arranged her music, and the first
chords she struck were halting and timid. Then she began to sing--
it was some simple old-fashioned song--what had happened? the world
was somehow different; she had one of those low thrilling voices,
charged with utterly inexplicable emotion, haunted with old
mysterious echoes out of some region of dreams, so near and yet so
far away. I do not think that the girl had any great intensity of
mind, or even of soul, neither was she a great performer; but there
was some strange and beautiful quality about the voice, that now
rose clear and sustained, while the accompaniment charged and
tinged the pure notes with glad or mournful visions, like wine
poured into water; now the voice fell and lingered, like a clear
stream among rocks, pathetic, appealing, stirring a deep hunger of
the spirit, and at the same time hinting at a hope, at a secret
almost within one's grasp. How can one find words to express a
thing so magical, so inexpressible? But it left me feeling as
though to sing thus was the one thing worth doing in the world,
because it seemed to interpret, to reveal, to sustain, to console--
it was as though one opened a door in a noisy, dusty street, and
saw through it a deep and silent glen, with woodlands stooping to a
glimmering stream, with a blue stretch of plain beyond, and an
expanse of sunny seas on the rim of the sky.

I have had similar experiences before. I have looked in a gallery
at picture after picture--bright, soulless, accomplished things--
and asked myself how it was possible for men and women to spend
their time so elaborately to no purpose; and then one catches sight
of some little sketch--a pool in the silence of high summer, the
hot sun blazing on tall trees full of leaf, and rich water-plants,
with a single figure in a moored boat, musing dreamily; and at once
one is transported into a region of thrilled wonder. What is it all
about? What is this sudden glimpse into a life so rich and strange?
In what quiet country is it all enacted, what land of sweet
visions? What do the tall trees and the sleeping pool hide from me,
and in what romantic region of joy and sadness does the dreamer
muse for ever, in the long afternoon, so full of warmth and
fragrance and murmurous sound? That is the joy of art, of the
symbol--that it remains and rests within itself, in a world that
seems, for a moment, more real and true than the clamorous and
obtrusive world we move in.

It is so all along the line--the hard and soulless art of technique
and rule, of tradition and precept, however accomplished, however
perfect it is, is worth nothing; it is only another dreary form of
labour, unless through some faculty of the spirit, some vital
intensity, or even some inexplicable felicity, not comprehended,
not designed, not intended by the artist, it has this remote and
suggestive quality. And thus suddenly, in the midst of this weary
beating of instruments, this dull laying of colour by colour, of
word by word, there breaks in the awful and holy presence; and then
one feels, as I have said, that this thrill, this message, this
oracle, is the one thing in the world worth striving after, and
that indeed one may forgive all the dull efforts of those who
cannot attain it, because perhaps they too have felt the call, and
have thrown themselves into the eternal quest.

And it is true too of life; one is brought near to many people, and
one asks oneself in a chilly discomfort what is the use of it all,
living thus in hard and futile habits, on dull and conventional
lines; and then again one is suddenly confronted by some
personality, rich in hope and greatness, touching the simplest acts
of life with an unearthly light, making them gracious and
beautiful, and revealing them as the symbols of some pure and high
mystery. Sometimes this is revealed by a word, sometimes by a
glance; perfectly virtuous, capable, successful people may miss it;
humble, simple, quiet people may have it. One cannot analyse it or
describe it; but one has instantaneously a sense that life is a
thing of large issues and great hopes; that every action and
thought, however simple or commonplace, may be touched with this
large quality of interest, of significance. It is a great happiness
to meet such a person, because one goes in the strength of that
heavenly meat many days and nights, knowing that life is worth
living to the uttermost, and that it can all be beautiful and lofty
and gracious; but the way to miss it, to lose that fine sense, is
to have some dull and definite design of one's own, which makes one
treat all the hours in which one cannot pursue it, but as the dirt
and debris of a quarry. One must not, I see, wait for the golden
moments of life, because there are no moments that are not golden,
if one can but pierce into their essence. Yet how is one to realise
this, to put it into practice? I have of late, in my vacuous mood,
fallen into the dark error of thinking of the weary hours as of
things that must be just lived through, and endured, and beguiled,
if possible, until the fire again fall. But life is a larger and a
nobler business than that; and one learns the lesson sooner, if one
takes the suffering home to one's soul, not as a tedious interlude,
but as the very melody and march of life itself, even though it
crash into discords, or falter in a sombre monotony.

The point is that when one seems to be playing a part to one's own
satisfaction, when one appears to oneself to be brilliant,
suggestive, inspiriting, and genial, one is not necessarily
ministering to other people; while, on the other hand, when one is
dull, troubled, and anxious, out of heart and discontented, one may
have the chance of making others happier. Here is a whimsical
instance; in one of my dreariest days--I was in London on business--
I sate next to an old friend, generally a very lively, brisk, and
cheerful man, who appeared to me strangely silent and depressed. I
led him on to talk freely, and he told me a long tale of anxieties
and cares; his health was unsatisfactory, his plans promised ill.
In trying to paint a brighter picture, to reassure and encourage
him, I not only forgot my own troubles, but put some hope into him.
We had met, two tired and dispirited men, we went away cheered and
encouraged, aware that we were not each of us the only sufferer in
the world and that there were possibilities still ahead of us all,
nay, in our grip, if we only were not blind and forgetful.



May 8, 1889.


I saw the other day a great artist working on a picture in its
initial stages. There were a few lines of a design roughly traced,
and there was a little picture beside him, where the scheme was
roughly worked out; but the design itself was covered with strange
wild smears of flaring, furious colour, flung crudely upon the
canvas. "I find it impossible to believe," I said,--"forgive me for
speaking thus--that these ragged stains and splashes of colour can
ever be subdued and harmonised and co-ordinated." The great man
smiled. "What would you have said, I wonder," he replied, "if you
had seen, as I did once, a picture of Rossetti's in an early stage,
with the face and arms of one of his strange and mysterious figures
roughly painted in in the brightest ultramarine? Many of these
fantastic scraps of colour will disappear altogether from the eye,
just lending tone to something which is to be superimposed upon
them."

I have since reflected that this makes a beautiful parable of our
lives. Some element comes into our experience, some suffering, some
anxiety, and we tend to say impatiently: "Well, whatever happens,
this at least can never appear just or merciful." But God, like a
wise and perfect artist, foresees the end in the beginning. We, who
live in time and space, can merely see the rough, crude tints flung
fiercely down, till the thing seems nothing but a frantic patchwork
of angry hues; but God sees the blending and the softening; how the
soft tints of face and hand, of river and tree, will steal over the
coarse background, and gain their strength and glory from the
hidden stains. Perhaps we have sometimes the comfort of seeing how
some old and ugly experience melted into and strengthened some
soft, bright quality of heart or mind. Staring mournfully as we do
upon the tiny circumscribed space of life, we cannot conceive how
the design will work itself out; but the day will come when we
shall see it too; and perhaps the best moments of life are those
when we have a secret inkling of the process that is going so
slowly and surely forward, as the harsh lines and hues become the
gracious lineaments of some sweet face, and from the glaring patch
of hot colour is revealed the remote and shining expanse of a
sunlit sea.



May 14, 1889.


There used to be a favourite subject for scholastic disputation:
WHETHER HERCULES IS IN THE MARBLE. The image is that of the
sculptor, who sees the statue lie, so to speak, imbedded in the
marble block, and whose duty is so to carve it, neither cutting too
deep or too shallow, so that the perfect form is revealed. The idea
of the disputation is the root-idea of idealistic philosophy. That
each man is, as it were, a block of marble in which the ideal man
is buried. The purpose of the educator ought to be to cut the form
out, perikoptein, as Plato has it.

What a lofty and beautiful thought! To feel about oneself that the
perfect form is there, and that the experience of life is the
process of cutting it out--a process full of pain, perhaps, as the
great splinters and flakes fly and drop--a rough, brutal business
it seems at first, the hewing off great masses of stone, so firmly
compacted, fused and concreted together. At first it seems
unintelligible enough; but the dints become minuter and minuter,
here a grain and there an atom, till the smooth and shapely limbs
begin to take shape. At first it seems a mere bewildered loss, a
sharp pang as one parts with what seems one's very self. How long
before the barest structure becomes visible! but when one once gets
a dim inkling of what is going on, as the stubborn temper yields,
as the face takes on its noble frankness, and the shapely limbs
emerge in all the glory of free line and curve, how gratefully and
vehemently one co-operates, how little a thing the endurance of
mere pain becomes by the side of the consciousness that one is
growing into the likeness of the divine.



May 23, 1889.


when Goethe was writing Werther he wrote to his friend Kestner, "I
am working out my own situation in art, for the consolation of gods
and men." That is a fine thing to have said, proceeding from so
sublime an egoism, so transcendent a pride, that it has hardly a
disfiguring touch of vanity about it. He did not add that he was
also working in the situation of his friend Kestner, and Kestner's
wife, Charlotte; though when they objected to having been thus used
as material, Goethe apologised profusely, and in the same breath
told them, somewhat royally, that they ought to be proud to have
been thus honoured. But that is the reason why one admires Goethe
so much and worships him so little. One admires him for the way in
which he strode ahead, turning corner after corner in the
untravelled road of art, with such insight, such certainty,
interpreting and giving form to the thought of the world; but one
does not worship him, because he had no tenderness or care for
humanity. He knew whither he was bound, but he did not trouble
himself about his companions. The great leaders of the world are
those who have said to others, "Come with me--let us find light and
peace together!"--but Goethe said, "Follow me if you can!" Some
one, writing of that age, said that it was a time when men had
immense and far-reaching desires, but feeble wills. They lost
themselves in the melancholy of Hamlet, and luxuriated in their own
sorrows. That was not the case with Goethe himself; there never was
an artist who was less irresolute.

One of the reasons, I think, why we are weak in art, at the present
time, is because we refer everything to conventional ethical
standards. We are always arraigning people at the bar of morality,
and what we judge them mainly by is their strength or weakness of
will. Blake thought differently. He always maintained that men
would be judged for their intellectual and artistic perception, by
their good or bad taste.

But surely it is all a deep-seated mistake; one might as well judge
people for being tall or short, ugly or beautiful. The only thing
for which I think most people would consent to be judged, which is
after all what matters, is whether they have yielded consciously to
mean, prudent, timid, conventional motives in life. It is not a
question of success or failure; it is rather whether one has acted
largely, freely, generously, or whether one has acted politely,
timidly, prudently.

In the Gospel, the two things for which it seems to be indicated
that men will be judged are, whether they have been kind, and
whether they have improved upon what has been given them. And
therefore the judgment seems to depend rather upon what men desire
than upon what they effect, upon attitude rather than upon
performance. But it is all a great mystery, because no amount of
desiring seems to give us what we desire. The two plain duties are
to commit ourselves to the Power that made us, and to desire to
become what He would have us become; and one must also abstain from
any attempt to judge other people--that is the unpardonable sin.

In art, then, a man does his best if, like Goethe, he works his own
situation into art for the consolation of gods and men. His own
situation is the only thing he can come near to perceiving; and if
he draws it faithfully and beautifully, he consoles and he
encourages. That is the best and noblest thing he can do, if he can
express or depict anything which may make other men feel that they
are not alone, that others are treading the same path, in sunshine
or cloud; anything which may help others to persevere, to desire,
to perceive. The worst sorrows in life are not its losses and
misfortunes, but its fears. And when Goethe said that it was for
the consolation of gods as well as of men, he said a sublime thing,
for if we believe that God made and loved us, may we not sympathise
with Him for our blindness and hopelessness, for all the sad sense
of injustice and perplexity that we feel as we stumble on our way;
all the accusing cries, all the despairing groans? Do not such
things wound the heart of God? And if a man can be brave and
patient, and trust Him utterly, and bid others trust Him, is He not
thereby consoled?

In these dark months, in which I have suffered much, there rises at
times in my heart a strong intuition that it is not for nothing
that I suffer. I cannot divine whom it is to benefit, or how it is
to benefit any one. One thing indeed saddens me, and that is to
reflect that I have often allowed the record of old sadnesses to
heighten my own sense of luxurious tranquillity and security. Not
so will I err again. I will rather believe that a mighty price is
being paid for a mightier joy, that we are not astray in the
wilderness out of the way, but that we are rather a great and
loving company, guided onward to some far-off city of God, with
infinite tenderness, and a love so great that we cannot even
comprehend its depth and its intensity.

I sit, as I write, in my quiet room, the fragrant evening air
floating in, surrounded by all the beloved familiar things that
have made my life sweet, easy, and delightful--books and pictures,
that have brought me so many messages of beauty. I hear the voice
of Maud overhead--she is telling the children a story, and I hear
their voices break out every now and then into eager questions. Yet
in the midst of all this peace and sweetness, I walk in loneliness
and gloom, hardly daring, so faithless and despairing I am, to let
my heart go out to the love and goodness round me, for fear of
losing it all, for fear that those souls I love may be withdrawn
from me or I from them. In this I know that I am sadly and darkly
wrong--the prudent coldness, the fear of sorrow pulls me back;
irresolute, cowardly, base! Yet even so I must trust the Hand that
moulded me, and the Will that bade me be, just so and not
otherwise.



June 4, 1889.


It is a melancholy reflection how very little the highest and most
elaborate culture effects in the direction of producing creative
and original writing. Very few indeed of our great writers have
been technically cultivated men. How little we look to the
Universities, where a lifetime devoted to the study of the nuances
of classical expression is considered well spent, for any
literature which either raises the intellectual temperature or
enriches the blood of the world! The fact is that the highly-
cultivated man tends to find himself mentally hampered by his
cultivation, to wade in a sea of glue, as Tennyson said. It is
partly that highly-cultivated minds grow to be subservient to
authority, and to contemn experiment as rash and obstreperous.
Partly also the least movement of the mind dislodges such a pile of
precedents and phrases and aphorisms, stored and amassed by
diligent reading, that the mind is encumbered by the thought that
most things worth saying have been so beautifully said that
repetition is out of the question. Partly, too, a false and
fastidious refinement lays hold of the mind; and an intellect
trained in the fine perception of ancient expression is unable to
pass through the earlier stages through which a writer must pass,
when the stream flows broken and turbid, when it appears impossible
to capture and define the idea which seems so intangible and
indefinable.

What an original writer requires is to be able to see a subject for
himself, and then to express it for himself. The only cultivation
he needs is just enough to realise that there are differences of
subject and differences of expression, just enough to discern the
general lines upon which subjects can be evolved, and to perceive
that lucidity, grace, and force of expression are attainable. The
overcultivated man, after reading a masterpiece, is crushed and
flattened under his admiration; but the effect of a masterpiece
upon an original spirit, is to make him desire to say something
else that rises in his soul, and to say it in his own words; all he
needs in the way of training is just enough for him to master
technique. The highly-cultivated man is as one dazzled by gazing
upon the sun; he has no eyes for anything else; a bright disc,
imprinted upon his eyes, floats between him and every other object.

The best illustration of this is the case of the great trio,
Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge. All three started as poets.
Coleridge was distracted from poetry into metaphysics, mainly, I
believe, by his indulgence in opium, and the torturing
contemplation of his own moral impotence. He turned to philosophy
to see if he could find some clue to the bewildering riddle of
life, and he lost his way among philosophical speculations.
Southey, on the other hand, a man of Spartan virtue, became a
highly-cultivated writer; he sate in his spacious library of well-
selected books, arranged with a finical preciseness, apportioning
his day between various literary pursuits. He made an income; he
wrote excellent ephemeral volumes; he gained a somewhat dreary
reputation. But Wordsworth, with his tiny bookshelf of odd tattered
volumes, with pages of manuscript interleaved to supply missing
passages, alone kept his heart and imagination active, by
deliberate leisure, elaborate sauntering, unashamed idleness.

The reason why very few uneducated persons have been writers of
note, is because they have been unable to take up the problem at
the right point. A writer cannot start absolutely afresh; he must
have the progress of thought behind him, and he must join the
procession in due order. Therefore the best outfit for a writer is
to have just enough cultivation to enable him to apprehend the
drift and development of thought, to discern the social and
emotional problems that are in the air, so that he can interpret--
that is the secret--the thoughts that are astir, but which have not
yet been brought to the birth. He must know enough and not too
much; he must not dim his perception by acquainting himself in
detail with what has been said or thought; he must not take off the
freshness of his mind by too much intellectual gymnastic. It is a
race across country for which he is preparing, and he will learn
better what the practical difficulties are by daring excursions of
his own, than by acquiring a formal suppleness in prescribed
exercises.

The originality and the output of the writer are conditioned by his
intellectual and vital energy. Most men require all their energy
for the ordinary pursuits of life; all creative work is the result
of a certain superabundance of mental force. If this force is used
up in social duties, in professional business, even in the pursuit
of a high degree of mental cultivation, originality must suffer;
and therefore a man whose aim is to write, ought resolutely to
limit his activities. What would be idleness in another is for him
a storing of forces; what in an ordinary man would be malingering
and procrastination, is for the writer the repose necessary to
allow his energies to concentrate themselves upon his chosen work.



June 8, 1889.


I have been looking at a catalogue, this morning, of the
publications of a firm that is always bringing out new editions of
old writers. I suppose they find a certain sale for these books, or
they would not issue them; and yet I cannot conceive who buys them
in their thousands, and still less who reads them. Teachers,
perhaps, of literature; or people who are inspired by local
lectures to go in search of culture? It is a great problem, this
accumulation of literature; and it seems to me a very irrational
thing to do to republish the complete works of old authors, who
perhaps, in the midst of a large mass of essentially second-rate
work, added half-a-dozen lyrics to the literature of the world. But
surely it is time that we began to select? Whatever else there is
time for in this world, there certainly is not time to read old
half-forgotten second-rate work. Of course people who are making a
special study of an age, a period, a school of writers, have to
plough through a good deal that is not intrinsically worth reading;
but, as a rule, when a man has done this, instead of saying boldly
that the greater part of an author's writings may be wisely
neglected and left alone, he loses himself in the critical
discrimination and the chronological arrangement of inferior
compositions; perhaps he rescues a few lines of merit out of a mass
of writing; but there is hardly time now to read long ponderous
poems for the sake of a few fine flashes of emotion and expression.
What, as a rule, distinguishes the work of the amateur from the
work of the great writer is that an amateur will retain a poem for
the sake of a few good lines, whereas a great writer will
relentlessly sacrifice a few fine phrases, if the whole structure
and texture of the poem is loose and unsatisfactory. The only
chance of writing something that will live is to be sure that the
whole thing--book, essay, poem--is perfectly proportioned, firm,
hammered, definite. The sign and seal of a great writer is that he
has either the patience to improve loose work, or the courage to
sacrifice it.

But most readers are so irrational, so submissive, so deferential,
that they will swallow an author whole. They think dimly that they
can arrive at a certain kind of culture by knowledge; but knowledge
has nothing to do with it. The point is to have perception,
emotion, discrimination. This is where education fails so
grievously, that teachers of this independent and perceptive
process are so rare, and that teaching too often falls into the
hands of conscientious people, with good memories, who think that
it benefits the mind to load it with facts and dates, and forget,
or do not know, that what is needed is a sort of ardent inner fire,
that consumes the debris and fuses the ore.

In that dry, ugly, depressing book, Harry and Lucy, which I used to
read in my youth, there is a terrible father, kind, virtuous,
conscientious, whose one idea seems to be to encourage the children
to amass correct information. The party is driving in a chaise
together, and Lucy begins to tell a story of a little girl, Kitty
Maples by name, whom she has met at her Aunt Pierrepoint's; it
seems as if the conversation is for once to be enlightened by a ray
of human interest, but the name is hardly out of her lips, when the
father directs her attention to a building beside the road, and
adds, "Let us talk of things rather than of people." The building
turns out to be a sugar-refinery, or some equally depressing
place, and the unhappy children are initiated into its mysteries.
What could be more cheerless and dispiriting? Lucy is represented
as a high-spirited and somewhat giddy child, who is always being
made aware of her moral deficiencies.

One looks forward sadly to the time when nature has been resolutely
expelled by a knowledge of dynamics and statics, and when Lucy,
with children of her own, will be directing their attention away
from childish fancies, to the fact that the poker is a lever, and
that curly hair is a good hygrometer.

Plenty of homely and simple virtues are inculcated in Harry and
Lucy; but the attitude of mind that must inevitably result from
such an education is hard, complacent, and superior. The children
are scolded out of superficial vanities, and their place is
occupied by a satanical sort of pride--the pride of possessing
correct information.

What does one want to make of one's own children? One wants them to
be generous, affectionate, simple-minded, just, temperate in the
moral region. In the intellectual region, one desires them to be
alert, eager, independent, perceptive, interested. I like them to
ask a hundred questions about what they see and hear. I want them
to be tender and compassionate to animals and insects. As for
books, I want them to follow their own taste, but I surround them
only with the best; but even so I wish them to have minds of their
own, to have preferences, and reasons for their preferences. I do
not want them to follow my taste, but to trust their own. I do not
in the least care about their amassing correct information. It is
much better that they should learn how to use books. It is very
strange how theories of education remain impervious to development.
In the days when books were scarce and expensive, when knowledge
was not formulated and summarised, men had to depend largely on
their own stores. But now, what is the use of books, if one is
still to load one's memory with details? The training of memory is
a very unimportant part of education nowadays; people with accurate
memories are far too apt to trust them, and to despise
verification. Indeed, a well-filled memory is a great snare,
because it leads the possessor of it to believe, as I have said,
that knowledge is culture. A good digestion is more important to a
man than the possession of many sacks of corn; and what one ought
rather to cultivate nowadays is mental digestion.



June 14, 1889.


It is comforting to reflect how easy it is to abandon habits, and
how soon a new habit takes the place of the old. Some months ago I
put writing aside in despair, feeling that I was turning away from
the most stable thing in life; yet even now I have learned largely
to acquiesce in silence; the dreary and objectless mood visits me
less and less frequently. What have I found to fill the place of
the old habit? I have begun to read much more widely, and recognise
how very ill-educated I am. In my writing days, I used to read
mainly for the purposes of my books, or, if I turned aside to
general reading at all, it was to personal, intime, subjective
books that I turned, books in which one could see the development
of character, analyse emotion, acquire psychological experience;
but now I find a growing interest in sociological and historical
ideas; a mist begins to roll away from my mental horizon, and I
realise how small was the circle in which I was walking. I
sometimes find myself hoping that this may mean the possibility of
a wider flight; but I do not, strange to say, care very much about
the prospect. Just at present, I appear to myself to have been like
a botanist walking in a great forest, looking out only for small
typical specimens of certain classes of ground-plants, without any
eyes for the luxurious vegetation, the beauty of the rich opening
glade, the fallen day of the dense underwood.

Then too I have begun to read regularly with the children; I did it
formerly, but only fitfully, and I am sorry to say grudgingly. But
now it has become a matter of intense interest to me, to see how
thoughts strike on eager and ingenuous minds. I find my trained
imagination a great help here, because it gives me the power of
clothing a bare scene with detail, and of giving vitality to an
austere figure. I have made all sorts of discoveries, to me
astonishing and delightful, about my children. I recognise some of
their qualities and modes of thought; but there are whole ranges of
qualities apparent, of which I cannot even guess the origin. One
thinks of a child as deriving its nature from its parents, and its
experience from its surroundings; but there is much beside that,
original views, unexpected curiosities, and, strangest of all,
things that seem almost like dim reminiscences floated out of other
far-off lives. They seem to infer so much that they have never
heard, to perceive so much that they have never seen, to know so
much that they have never been told. Bewildering as this is in the
intellectual region, it is still more marvellous in the moral
region. They scorn, they shudder at, they approve, they love, as by
some generous instinct, qualities of which they have had no
experience. "I don't know what it is, but there is something wrong
about Cromwell," said Maggie gravely, when we had been reading the
history of the Commonwealth. Now Cromwell is just one of those
characters which, as a rule, a child accepts as a model of rigid
virtue and public spirit. Alec, whose taste is all for soldiers and
sailors just now, and who might, one would have thought, have been
dazzled by military glory, pronounced Napoleon "rather a common
man." This arose purely in the boy's own mind, because I am very
careful not to anticipate any judgments; I think it of the highest
importance that they should learn to form their own opinions, so
that we never attempt to criticise a character until we have
mastered the facts of his life.

Another thing I am doing with them, which seems to me to develop
intelligence pleasurably and rapidly, is to read them a passage or
an episode, and then to require them to relate it or write it in
their own words. I don't remember that this was ever done for me in
the whole course of my elaborate education; and the speed with
which they have acquired the art of seizing on salient points is to
me simply marvellous. I have my reward in such remarks as these
which Maud repeated to me yesterday. "Lessons," said Alec gravely,
"have become ever so much more fun since we began to do them with
father." "Fun!" said Maggie, with indignant emotion; "they are not
lessons at all now!" I certainly do not observe any reluctance on
their part to set to work, and I do see a considerable reluctance
to stop; yet I don't think there is the least strain about it. But
it is true that I save them all the stupid and irksome work that
made my own acquisition of knowledge so bitter a thing. We read
French together; my own early French lessons were positively
disgusting, partly from the abominable little books on dirty paper
and in bad type that we read, and partly from the absurd character
of the books chosen. The Cid and Voltaire's Charles XII.! I used to
wonder dimly how it was ever worth any one's while to string such
ugly and meaningless sentences together. Now I read with the
children Sans Famille and Colomba; and they acquire the language
with incredible rapidity. I tell them any word they do not know;
and we have a simple system of emulation, by which the one who
recollects first a word we have previously had, receives a mark;
and the one who first reaches a total of a hundred marks gets
sixpence. The adorable nature of women! Maggie, whose verbal memory
is excellent, went rapidly ahead, and spent her sixpence on a
present to console Alec for the indignity of having been beaten.
Then, too, they write letters in French to their mother, which are
solemnly sent by post. It is not very idiomatic French, but it is
amazingly flexible; and it is delicious to see the children at
breakfast watching Maud as she opens the letters and smiles over
them.

Perhaps this is not a very exalted type of education; it certainly
seems to fulfil its purpose very wonderfully in making them alert,
inquisitive, eager, and without any shadow of priggishness. It is
established as a principle that it is stupid not to know things,
and still more stupid to try and make other people aware that you
know them; and the apologies with which Maggie translated a French
menu at a house where we stayed with the children the other day
were delightful to behold.

I am very anxious that they should not be priggish, and I do not
think they are in any danger of becoming so. I suppose I rather
skim the cream of their education, and leave the duller part to the
governess, a nice, tranquil person, who lives in the village, the
daughter of a previous vicar, and comes in in the mornings. I don't
mean that their interest and alertness does not vary, but they are
obedient and active-minded children, and they prefer their lessons
with me so much that it has not occurred to them to be bored. If
they flag, I don't press them. I tell them a story, or show them
pictures. While I write these words in my armchair, they are
sitting at the table, writing an account of something I have told
them. Maggie lays down her pen with a sigh of satisfaction. "There,
that is beautiful! But I dare say it is not as good as yours,
Alec." "Don't interrupt me," says Alec sternly, "and don't push
against me when I'm busy." Maggie looks round and concludes that I
am busy too. In a minute, Alec will have done, and then I shall
read the two pieces aloud; then we shall criticise them
respectfully. The aim is to make them frankly recognise the good
points of each other's compositions as well as the weak points, and
this they are very ready to do.

In all this I do not neglect the physical side. They can ride and
swim. They go out in all weathers and get wholesomely wet, dirty,
and tired. Games are a difficulty, but I want them to be able, if
necessary, to do without games. We botanise, we look for nests, we
geologise, we study birds through glasses, we garden. It is all
very unscientific, but they observe, they perceive, they love the
country. Moreover, Maud has a passion for knowing all the village
people, and takes the children with her, so that they really know
the village-folk all round; they are certainly tremendously happy
and interested in everything. Of course they are volatile in their
tastes, but I rather encourage that. I know that in the little old
moral books the idea was that nothing should be taken up by
children, unless it was done thoroughly and perseveringly; but I
had rather that they had a wide experience; the time to select and
settle down upon a pursuit is not yet, and I had rather that they
found out for themselves what they care about, than practise them
in a premature patience. The only thing I object to is their taking
up something which they have tried and dropped; then I do require a
pledge that they shall stick to it. I say to them, "I don't mind
how many things you try, and if you find you don't care about one,
you may give it up when you have given it a trial; but it is a bad
thing to be always changing, and everybody can't do everything; so
don't take up this particular thing again, unless you can give a
good reason for thinking you will keep to it."

One of the things I insist upon their doing, whether they like it
or not, is learning to play the piano. There are innumerable
people, I find, who regret not having been made to overcome the
initial difficulties of music; and the only condition I make is,
that they shall be allowed to stop when they can play a simple
piece of music at sight correctly, and when they have learnt the
simple rules of harmony.

For teaching them geography, I have a simple plan; my own early
geography lessons were to my recollection singularly dismal. I
used, as far as I can remember, to learn lists of towns, rivers,
capes, and mountains. Then there were horrible lists of exports and
imports, such as hides, jute, and hardware. I did not know what any
of the things were, and no one explained them to me. What we do now
is this. I read up a book of travels, and then we travel in a
country by means of atlases, while I describe the sort of landscape
we should see, the inhabitants, their occupations, their religion,
and show the children pictures. I can only say that it seems to be
a success. They learn arithmetic with their governess, and what is
aimed at is rapid and accurate calculations. As for religious
instruction, we read portions of the Bible, striking scenes and
stories, carefully selected, and the Gospel story, with plenty of
pictures. But here I own I find a difficulty. With regard to the
Old Testament, I have frankly told them that many of the stories
are legends and exaggerations, like the legends of other nations.
That is not difficult; I say that in old days when people did not
understand science, many things seemed possible which we know now
to be impossible; and that things which happened naturally, were
often thought to have happened supernaturally; moreover, that both
imagination and exaggeration crept in about famous people. I am
sure that there is a great danger in teaching intelligent children
that the Bible is all literally true. And then the difficulty comes
in, that they ask artlessly whether such a story as the miracle of
Cana, or the feeding of the five thousand, is true. I reply frankly
that we cannot be sure; that the people who wrote it down believed
it to be true, but that it came to them by hearsay; and the
children seem to have no difficulty about the matter. Then, too, I
do not want them to be too familiar, as children, with the words of
Christ, because I am sure that it is a fact that, for many people,
a mechanical familiarity with the Gospel language simply blurs and
weakens the marvellous significance and beauty of the thought. It
becomes so crystallised that they cannot penetrate it. I have
treated some parts of the Gospel after the fashion of
Philochristus, telling them a story, as though seen by some earnest
spectator. I find that they take the deepest interest in these
stories, and that the figure of Christ is very real and august to
them. But I teach them no doctrine except the very simplest--the
Fatherhood of God, the Divinity of Christ, the indwelling voice of
the Spirit; and I am sure that religion is a pure, sweet, vital
force in their lives, not a harsh thing, a question of sin and
punishment, but a matter of Love, Strength, Forgiveness, Holiness.
The one thing I try to show them is that God was not, as I used to
think, the property, so to speak, of the Jews; but that He is
behind and above every race and nation, slowly leading them to the
light. The two things I will not allow them to think of are the
Doctrines of the Fall and the Atonement; the doctrine of the Fall
is contrary to all true knowledge, the doctrine of the Atonement is
inconsistent with every idea of justice. But it is a difficult
matter. They will hear sermons, and Alec, at school, may have
dogmatic instruction given him; but I shall prepare him for
Confirmation here, and have him confirmed at home, and thus the
main difficulty will be avoided; neither do I conceal from them
that good people think very differently on these points. It is
curious to remember that, brought up as I was on strict Evangelical
lines, I was early inculcated into the sin of schism, with the
result that I hurried with my Puritan nurse swiftly and violently
by a Roman Catholic chapel and a Wesleyan meeting-house which we
used to pass in our walks, with a sense of horror and wickedness in
the air. Indeed, I remember once asking my mother why God did not
rain down fire and brimstone on these two places of worship, and
received a very unsatisfactory answer. To develop such a spirit
was, it seems to me, a monstrous sin against Christian charity, and
my children shall be saved from that.

Meantime my own hours are increasingly filled. It takes me a long
time to prepare for the children's lessons; and I have my reward
abundantly in the delight of seeing their intelligence, their
perception, their interest grow. I am determined that the
beginnings of knowledge shall be for them a primrose path; I
suppose there will have to be some stricter mental discipline
later; but they shall begin by thinking and expecting things to be
interesting and delightful, before they realise that things can
also be hard and dull.



June 20, 1889.


When I read books on education, when I listen to the talk of
educational theorists, when I see syllabuses and schedules, schemes
and curricula, a great depression settles on my mind; I feel I have
no interest in education, and a deep distrust of theoretical
methods. These things seem to aim at missing the very thing of
which we are in search, and to lose themselves in a sort of
childish game, a marshalling of processions, a lust for
organisation. I care so intensely for what it all means, I loathe
so deeply the motives that seem at work. I suppose that the
ordinary man considers a species of success, a bettering of
himself, the acquisition of money and position and respectability,
to be the end of life; and such as these look upon education
primarily as a means of arriving at their object. Such was the old
education given by the sophists, which aimed at turning out a well-
balanced, effective man. But all this, it seems to me, has the
wrong end in view. The success of it depends upon the fact that
every one is not so capable of rising, that the rank and file must
be in the background, forming the material out of which the
successful man makes his combinations, and whom he contrives to
despoil.

The result of it is that the well-educated man becomes hard, brisk,
complacent, contemptuous, knowing his own worth, using his
equipment for precise and definite ends.

My idea would rather be that education should aim at teaching
people how to be happy without success; because the shadow of
success is vulgarity, and vulgarity is the one thing which
education ought to extinguish. What I desire is that men should
learn to see what is beautiful, to find pleasure in homely work, to
fill leisure with innocent enjoyment. If education, as the term is
generally used, were widely and universally successful, the whole
fabric of a nation would collapse, because no one thus educated
would acquiesce in the performance of humble work. It is commonly
said that education ought to make men dissatisfied, and teach them
to desire to improve their position. It is a pestilent heresy. It
ought to teach them to be satisfied with simple conditions, and to
improve themselves rather than their position--the end of it ought
to be to produce content. Suppose, for an instant--it sounds a
fantastic hypothesis--that a man born in the country, in the
labouring class, were fond of field-work, a lover of the sights of
nature in all her aspects, fond of good literature, why should he
seek to change his conditions? But education tends to make boys and
girls fond of excitement, fond of town sociabilities and
amusements, till only the dull and unambitious are content to
remain in the country. And yet the country work will have to be
done until the end of time.

It is a dark problem; but it seems to me that we are only saved
from disaster, in our well-meant efforts, by the simple fact that
we cannot make humanity what we so short-sightedly desire to make
it; that the dull, uninspired, unambitious element has an endurance
and a permanence which we cannot change if we would, and which it
is well for us that we cannot change; and that in spite of our
curricula and schedules, mankind marches quietly upon its way to
its unknown goal.



June 28, 1889.


An old friend has been staying with us, a very interesting man for
many reasons, but principally for the fact that he combines two
sets of qualities that are rarely found together. He has strong
artistic instincts; he would like, I think, to have been a painter;
he has a deep love of nature, woodland places and quiet fields; he
loves old and beautiful buildings with a tenderness that makes it a
real misery to him to think of their destruction, and even their
renovation; and he has, too, the poetic passion for flowers; he is
happiest in his garden. But beside all this, he has the Puritan
virtues strongly developed; he loves work, and duty, and simplicity
of life, with all his heart; he is an almost rigid judge of conduct
and character, and sometimes flashes out in a half Pharisaical
scorn against meanness, selfishness, and weakness. He is naturally
a pure Ruskinian; he would like to destroy railways and machinery
and manufactories; he would like working-men to enjoy their work,
and dance together on the village green in the evenings; but he is
not a faddist at all, and has the healthiest and simplest power of
enjoyment. His severity has mellowed with age, while his love of
beauty has, I think, increased; he does not care for argument, and
is apt to say pathetically that he knows that his fellow-disputant
is right, but that he cannot change his opinions, and does not
desire to. He is passing, it seems to me, into a very gracious and
soft twilight of life; he grows more patient, more tender, more
serene. His face, always beautiful, has taken on an added beauty of
faithful service and gracious sweetness.

We began one evening to discuss a book that has lately been
published, a book of very sad, beautiful, wise, intimate letters,
written by a woman of great perception, high intellectual gifts and
passionate affections. These letters were published, not long after
her death, by her children, to whom many of them were addressed.

He had read the book, I found, with deep emotion; but he said very
decidedly that it ought not to have been published, at all events
so soon after the writer's death. I am inclined to defer greatly to
his judgment, and still more to his taste, and I have therefore
read the book again to see if I am inclined to alter my mind. I
find that my feeling is the exact opposite of his in every way. I
feel humbly and deeply grateful to the children who have given the
letters to the world. Of course if there had been any idea in the
mind of the writer that they would be published, she would probably
have been far more reticent; but, as it was, she spoke with a
perfect openness and simplicity of all that was in her mind. It is
curious to reflect that I met the writer more than once, and
thought her a cold, hard, unsympathetic woman. She had to endure
many sorrows and bereavements, losing, by untimely death, those
whom she most loved; but the revelation of her pain and
bewilderment, and the sublime and loving resignation with which she
bore it, has been to me a deep, holy, and reviving experience. Here
was one who felt grief acutely, rebelliously, and passionately, yet
whom sorrow did not sear or harden, suffering did not make self-
absorbed or morbid, or pain make callous. Her love flowed out more
richly and tenderly than ever to those who were left, even though
the loss of those whom she loved remained an unfading grief, an
open wound. She did not even shun the scenes and houses that
reminded her of her bereavements; she did not withdraw from life,
she made no parade of her sorrows. The whole thing is so wholesome,
so patient, so devoted, that it has shown me, I venture to say, a
higher possibility in human nature of bearing intolerable
calamities with sweetness and courage, than I had dared to believe.
It seems to me that nothing more wise or brave could have been done
by the survivors than to make these letters accessible to others.
We English people make such a secret of our feelings, are so
stubbornly reticent about the wrong things, have so false and
stupid a sense of decorum, that I am infinitely grateful for this
glimpse of a pure, patient, and devoted heart. It seems to me that
the one thing worth knowing in this world is what other people
think and feel about the great experiences of life. The writers who
have helped the world most are those who have gone deepest into the
heart; but the dullest part of our conventionality is that when a
man disguises the secrets of his soul in a play, a novel, a lyric,
he is supposed to have helped us and ministered to our deepest
needs; but if he speaks directly, in his own voice and person, of
these things, he is at once accused of egotism and indecorum. It is
not that we dislike sentiment and feeling; we value it as much as
any nation; but we think that it must be spoken of symbolically and
indirectly. We do not consider a man egotistical, if he will only
give himself a feigned name, and write of his experiences in the
third person. But if he uses the personal pronoun, he is thought to
be shameless. There are even people who consider it more decent to
say "one feels and one thinks," than to say "I feel and I think."
The thing that I most desire, in intercourse with other men and
women, is that they should talk frankly of themselves, their hopes
and fears, their beliefs and uncertainties. Yet how many people can
do that? Part of our English shyness is shown by the fact that
people are often curiously cautious about what they say, but
entirely indiscreet in what they write. The only books which
possess a real and abiding vitality are those in which personality
is freely and frankly revealed. Of course there are one or two
authors like Shakespeare who seem to have had a power of
penetrating and getting inside any personality, but, apart from
them, the books that go on being read and re-read are the books in
which one seems to clasp hands with a human soul.

I said many of these things to my friend, and he replied that he
thought I was probably right, but that he could not change his
opinion. He would not have had these letters published until all
the survivors were dead. He did not think that the people who liked
the book were actuated by good motives, but had merely a desire to
penetrate behind the due and decent privacies of life; and he would
have stopped the publication of such letters if he could, because
even if people liked them, it was not good for them to read them.
He said that he himself felt on reading the book as if he had been
listening at keyholes, or peeping in at windows, and seeing the
natural endearments of husband and wife, mother and children.

I said that what seemed to me to make a difference was whether the
people thus espied were conscious of the espionage or not; and that
it was no more improper to have such things revealed IN A BOOK,
than to have them described in a novel or shown upon the stage.
Moreover, it seemed to me, I said, as though to reveal such things
in a book was the perfect compromise. I feel strongly that each
home, each circle has a right to its own privacy; but I am not
ashamed of my natural feelings and affections, and, by allowing
them to appear in a book, I feel that I am just speaking of them
simply to those who will understand. I desire communion with all
sympathetic and like-minded persons; but one's actual circle of
friends is limited by time and space and physical conditions.
People talk of books as if every one in the world was compelled to
read them. My own idea of a book is that it provides a medium by
which one may commune confidentially with people whom one may never
see, but whom one is glad to know to be alive. One can make friends
through one's books with people with whom one agrees in spirit, but
whose bodily presence, modes of life, reticences, habits, would
erect a barrier to social intercourse. It is so much easier to love
and understand people through their books than through their
conversation. In books they put down their best, truest, most
deliberate thoughts; in talk, they are at the mercy of a thousand
accidents and sensations. There were people who objected to the
publication of the Browning love-letters. To me they were the
sacred and beautiful record of an intensely holy and passionate
relation between two great souls; and I can afford to disregard and
to contemn the people who thought the book strained, unconventional
and shameless, for the sake of those whose faith in love and beauty
was richly and generously nurtured by it.

It seems to me that the whole progress of life and thought, of love
and charity, depends upon our coming to understand each other. The
hostile seclusion which some desire is really a savage and almost
animal inheritance; and the best part of civilisation has sprung
from the generous self-revelation of kindly and honourable souls.

I am not even deterred, in a case of this kind, by wondering
whether the person concerned would have liked or disliked the
publication of these letters. I feel no sort of doubt that, as far
as I am concerned, she would be only too willing that I should thus
have read and loved them, and I cannot believe that the
disapprobation of a few austere people, or the curiosity of a few
vulgar people, would weigh in the balance for a moment against the
joy of like-minded spirits.

The worst dissatisfaction of life is the difficulty one has in
drawing near to others, the foolish hardness, often only
superficial, which makes one hold back from and repudiate
intimacies. If I had known and loved a great and worthy spirit, and
had been the recipient of his confidences, I should hold it a
solemn duty to tell the world what I knew. I should care nothing
for the carping of the cold and unsympathetic, but I should base my
decision on the approval of all loving and generous souls. This
seems to me the highest service that art can render, and if it be
said that no question of art comes in, in the publication of such
records as these letters, I would reply that they are themselves
works of the highest and most instinctive art, because the world,
its relations and affections, its loss and grief, its pain and
suffering, are here seen patiently mirrored and perfectly expressed
by a most perceptive personality. The moment that emotions are
depicted and represented, that moment they have felt the holy and
transfiguring power of art; and then they pass out of the region of
stuffy conventions and commonplace decorums into a finer and freer
air. I do not deny that there is much vulgar inquisitiveness
abroad, but that matters little; and, for myself, I am glad to
think that the world is moving in the direction of a greater
frankness. I do not mean that a man has not a right to live his
life privately, in his own house and his own circle, if he wills.
But if that life is lived simply, generously and bravely, I welcome
any ripple or ray from it that breaks in light and fragrance upon
the harsher and uglier world.



July 1, 1889.


I have just read an interesting sentence. I don't know where it
comes from--I saw it in a book of extracts.

"I am more and more convinced that the cure for sentiment, as for
all weakened forms of strong things, is not to refuse to feel it,
but to feel more in it. This seems to me to make the whole
difference between a true and a false asceticism. The false goes
for getting rid of what it is afraid of; the true goes for using
and making it serve, the one empties, the other fills; the one
abstracts, the other concentrates."

There is a great deal of truth in this, and it is manfully put.
Where it fails is, I think, in assuming an amount of will-power and
resolution in human character, which I suspect is not there. The
system the writer recommends is a system that a strong character
instinctively practises, moving through sentiment to emotion,
naturally, and by a sturdy growth. But to tell a man to feel more
in a thing, is like telling a man to be intelligent, benevolent,
wise. It is just what no one can do. The various grades of emotion
are not things like examinations, in which one can successively
graduate. They are expressions of temperament. The sentimental man
is the man who can go thus far and no farther. How shall one
acquire vigour and generosity? By behaving as if one was vigorous
and generous, when one is neither? I do not think it can be done in
that way. One can do something to check a tendency, very little to
deepen it. What the writer calls false asceticism is the only brave
and wholesome refuge of people, who know themselves well enough to
know that they cannot trust themselves. Take the case of one's
relations with other people. If a man drifts into sentimental
relations with other people, attracted by charm of any kind, and
knowing quite well that the relation is built on charm, and that he
will not be able to follow it into truer regions, I think he had
probably better try to keep himself in check, not embrace a
sentimental relation with a mild hope that it may develop into a
real devotion. The strong man may try experiments, even though he
burns his fingers. The weak man had better not meddle with the
instruments and fiery fluids at all.

I am myself just strong enough to dislike sentiment, to turn faint
in the sickly, mawkish air. But I am not strong enough to charge it
with vivid life. Moreover, the danger of a strong character taking
up the anti-ascetic position is that he is apt to degenerate into a
man like Goethe, who plucked the fragrant blooms on every side, and
threw them relentlessly away when he had inhaled their sweetness.
That is a cruel business, unless there is a very wise and tender
heart behind.

Yet again, reconsidering the whole problem, I am not sure that the
whole suggestion, taken as advice, is not at fault. I think it is
making a melancholy, casuistical, ethical business out of what
ought to be a natural process. I think it is vitiated by a
principle which vitiates so much of the advice of moralists, the
principle that one ought to aim at completeness and perfection. I
don't believe that is the secret of life--indeed I think it is all
the other way. One must of course do one's best to resist immoral,
low, sensuous tendencies; but otherwise I believe that one ought to
drink as much as one's glass can hold of pure and beautiful
influences. If sentiment is the nearest that a man can come to
emotion, I think he had better take it thankfully. It is this
ethical prudence which is always weighing issues, and pulling up
the plant to see how it grows, which is the weakening and the
stunting thing. Of course any principle can be used sophistically;
but I think that many people commit a kind of idolatry by
worshipping their rules and principles rather than by trusting God.
It develops a larger and freer life, if one is not too cautious,
too precise. Of course one must follow what light one has, and all
lights are lit from God; but if one watches the lanterns of
moralists too anxiously, one may forget the stars.



July 8, 1889.


I lose myself sometimes in a dream of misery in thinking of the
baseness and meanness and squalor that condition the lives of so
many of the poor. Not that it is not possible under those
conditions to live lives of simplicity and dignity and beauty. It
is perfectly possible, but only, I think, for strong natures
possessing a combination of qualities--virtue, industry, sense,
prudence, and above all good physical health. There must still be
thousands of lives which could be happy and simple and virtuous
under more secure conditions, which are marred and degraded by the
influences under which they are nurtured. Yet what can the more
fortunate individual do in the matter? If all the rich men in
England were to resign to-morrow all the wealth they possessed,
reserving only a bare modicum of subsistence, the matter could not
be amended. Even that wealth could not be wisely applied; and, if
equally divided, it would hardly make any appreciable difference.
What is worse, it would not alter the baneful influences in the
least; it would give no increased security of material conditions,
and it would not affect the point at issue, namely, the tone and
quality of thought and feeling, where the only hope of real
amelioration lies, and which is really the source and root of our
social evils.

Moreover, the real difficulty is not to see what the classes on
whom the problem presses most grimly NEED, but what they WANT. It
is no use theorising about it, and providing elegant remedies which
will not touch the evil. What one requires to know is what those
natures, who lie buried in this weltering tide, and are
dissatisfied and tormented by it, really desire. It is no use
trying to provide a paradise on the farther bank of the river, till
we have constructed bridges to cross the gulf. What one wants is
that some one from the darkness of the other side should speak
articulately and boldly what they claim, what they could use. It is
not enough to have a wistful cry for help ringing in our ears; one
wants a philosophical or statesmanlike demand--just the very thing
which from the nature of the case we cannot get. It may be that
education will make this possible; but at present education seems
merely to be a ladder let down into the abyss, by which a few
stronger natures can climb out of it, with horror and contempt in
their hearts of what they have left behind. The question that
stares one in the face is, is there honest work for all to do, if
all were strong and virtuous? The answer at present seems to be in
the negative; and the problem seems to be solved only by the fact
that all are not capable of honest work, and that the weaklings
give the strong their opportunity. What, again, one asks oneself,
is the use of contriving more leisure for those who could not use
it well? Then, too, under present conditions, the survival of the
unfittest seems to be assured. Those breed most freely and
recklessly of whom it may be said that, for the interests of
civilisation, it is least desirable that they should perpetuate
their kind. The problem too is so complicated, that it requires a
gigantic faith in a reformer to suggest the sowing of seed of which
he can never hope to see the fruit. The situation is one which
tends to develop vehement and passionate prophets, dealing in vague
and remote generalisations, when what one needs is practical
prudence, and the effective power of foreseeing contingencies. One
who like myself loves security, leisure, beauty and peace, and is
actuated by a vague and benevolent wish that all should have the
same opportunities as myself, feels himself a mere sentimentalist
in the matter, without a single effective quality. I can see the
problem, I can grieve over it, I can feel my faith in God totter
under the weight of it, but that is all.



July 15, 1889.


One of the hardest things to face in the world is the grim fact
that our power of self-improvement is limited. Of some qualities we
do not even possess the germs. Some qualities we have in minute
quantities, but hardly capable of development; some few qualities
we possess in fuller measure, and they are capable of development;
but even so, our total capacity of growth is limited, conditioned
by our vital energy, and we have to face the fact that if we
develop one set of qualities we must neglect another set.

I think of it in a whimsical and fantastic image, the best I can
find. Imagine a box in which there are a number of objects like
puff-balls, each with a certain life of its own, half-filling the
box. Some of the puff-balls are small, hard, sterile; others are
soft and expansive; some grow quickly in warmth and light, others
fare better in cold and darkness. The process of growth begins:
some of them increase in size and press themselves into every
crevice, enclosing and enfolding the others; even so the growth of
the whole mass is conditioned by the size of the box, and when the
box is full, the power of increase is at an end.

The box, to interpret the fable, is our character with its
possibilities. The conditions which develop the various qualities
are the conditions of our lives, our health, our income, our
education, the people who surround us; but even the qualities
themselves have their limitations. Two people may grow up under
almost precisely similar influences, and yet remain different to
the end; two characters may be placed in difficult and bracing
circumstances; the effect upon one character is to train the
quality of self-reliance, on the other to produce a moral collapse.
Some people do their growing early and then stop altogether,
becoming impervious to new opinions and new influences. Some people
go on growing to the end.

If one develops one side of one's nature, as the intellectual or
artistic, one probably suffers on the emotional or moral side. The
pain which the perceptive man feels in surveying this process is
apt to be very acute. He may see that he lacks certain qualities
altogether and yet be unable to develop them. He may find in
himself some patent and even gross fault, and be unable to cure it.
The only hope for any of us is that we do not know the expansive
force of our qualities, nor the size of the box; and therefore it
is reasonable to go on trying and desiring; and as long as one can
do that, it is clear that there is still room for growth. The worst
shadow of all is to find, as one goes on, a certain indifference
creeping over one. One accepts a fault as a part of one's nature;
one ceases to care about what appears unattainable.

It may be said that this is a fatalistic theory, and leads to a
mild inactivity; but the question rather is whether it is true,
whether it is attested by experience. One improves, not by
overlooking facts, in however generous and enthusiastic a spirit,
but by facing facts, and making the best use one can of them. One
must resolutely try to submit oneself to favourable conditions,
fertilising influences. And much more must one do that in the case
of those for whom one is responsible. In the case of my own two
children, for instance, my one desire is to surround them with the
best influences I can. Even there one makes mistakes, no doubt,
because one cannot test the expansive power of their qualities; but
one can observe the conditions under which they seem to develop
best, and apply them. To lavish love and tenderness on some
children serves to concentrate their thoughts upon themselves, and
makes them expect to find all difficulties smoothed away; on other
more generous natures, it produces a glow of responsive gratitude
and affection, a desire to fulfil the hopes formed of them by those
who love them. The most difficult cases of all are the cases of
temperaments without loyal affection, but with much natural charm.
Those are the people who get what is called 'spoilt,' because it is
so much easier to believe in the existence of qualities which are
superficially displayed than in qualities which lie too deep for
facile expression. One comes across cases of children of intense
emotional natures, and very little power of expressing their
feelings, or of showing their affection. Of course, too, example is
far more potent than precept, and it is very difficult for parents
to simulate a high-mindedness and an affectionateness that they do
not themselves possess, even if they are sincerely anxious that
their children should grow up high-minded and affectionate. One of
the darkest shadows of my present condition is the fear that any
revelation of my own weakness and emptiness may discourage and
distort my children's characters; and the watchfulness which this
requires increases the strain under which I suffer, because it is a
hard fact that an example set for a noble and an unselfish motive
is not nearly so potent as an example set naturally, sweetly, and
generously, with no particular consciousness of motive behind it at
all.



July 18, 1889.


I have just heard of the sudden death of an old friend. Francis
Willett was a writer of some distinction, whose acquaintance I made
in my first years in London. He was a tall, slim man, dark of
complexion, who would have been called very handsome, if it had not
been for a rather burdened air that he wore. As it was, people
tended rather to pity him, and to speak of him as somewhat of a
mystery. I never knew anything about the background of his life. He
must have had some small means of his own, and he lived in rooms,
in rather an out-of-the-way street near Regent's Park. One used to
see him occasionally in London, walking rapidly, almost always
alone, and very rarely I encountered him at parties, always wearing
a slightly regretful air, as though he were wishing himself away.
He wrote a good deal, reviewed books, and, I suppose, contrived to
make enough to live on by his pen. He once spoke of himself as
being in the happy position of being able to exist without writing,
but forced to purchase all small luxuries by work. He published two
or three books of short stories and sketches of travel, delicate
pieces of work, which had no great sale, but gave him a recognised
position among men of letters. I drifted into a kind of friendship
with him; we were members of the same club, and he sometimes used
to flutter shyly into my rooms like a great moth; but he never
asked me to his quarters.

I discovered that he had done well at Oxford, and also that he had
once, at all events, had considerable ambitions; but his health was
not strong, he was extremely sensitive, and very fastidious about
the quality of his work. I realised this on an occasion when he
once entrusted me with a MS., and asked me if I would give him an
opinion, as it was an experiment, and he did not feel sure of his
ground; he added that there was no hurry about it. I put the MS.
away in a despatch-box, and having at the time a press of work, I
forgot about it. He never asked me for it, and I did not happen to
open the box where it lay. Some months after I came upon it. I read
it through, and thought it a fine and delicate piece of work. I
wrote to him, apologising for my delay and speaking warmly of the
piece, which was one of those rather uncomfortable stories, which
is not quite long enough to make a book, and yet rather too long to
put in a volume with other pieces. He wrote at once, thanking me
for my opinion, and it was only by accident at a later date, when I
happened to ask him what he was doing with the story, that he told
me he had destroyed it. I expressed deep regret that he had done
so; and he said with a smile that it was probably rather a foolish
impulse that had decided him to make away with it. "The fact is,"
he said, "that you wrote very kindly about it, but you had had it
in your hands so long, that I felt somehow that it could not have
interested you--it really doesn't matter," he added, "I don't think
it was at all successful." I apologised very humbly, and explained
the circumstances. "Oh, please don't blame yourself in any way," he
said, "I have not the least shadow of resentment in my mind about
it. There is something wrong about my work; it doesn't interest
people. I suppose it is that I can't let myself go." An interesting
conversation followed, and he told me more than he ever told me
before or since about himself. He confessed to being so critical of
his own work, that his table-drawers were full of unfinished MSS.
His usual experience was to begin a piece of work enthusiastically;
to plan it all out, and to work at first with zest. "Then it begins
to get all out of shape," he said, "there is no go about it; it all
loses itself in subtleties and complexities of motive; one thing
trips up another, and at last it all gets so tangled that I put it
aside; if I could follow the track of one strong and definite
emotion, it would be all right--but I am like the man in the story
who changes the cow for the horse, and the horse for the pig, and
the pig for the grindstone; and then the grindstone rolls into the
river." He seemed to take it all very philosophically, and I
ventured to say so. "Yes," he said, "I have learnt at last that
that is how I am made; but I have been through a good many agonies
of disgust and discouragement about it in old days--it is the same
with everything I have touched. The bits of work that I have
completed have all been done in a rush--if the mood lasts long
enough, I am all right--and once or twice it has just lasted. I am
like a swimmer," he went on, "who can only swim a certain distance;
and if I judge the distance rightly, I can reach the point I desire
to reach; but I generally judge the distance wrong; and half-way
across I am seized with a sudden fright, and struggle back in
terror."

By one of the strange coincidences that sometimes happen in this
world, I took an unknown lady in to dinner a few days afterwards,
and happened to mention Willett's name. "Do you know him?" she
said. "Oh yes, of course you do!" she went on; "you are the Mr.
S---- of whom he has spoken to me." I found that my neighbour was
a distant relation of Willett's, and she told me a good deal about
him. He was absolutely alone in the world; he had been left an
orphan at an early age, and had spent his holidays with guardians
and relations, with any one who would take pity on him. "He was a
clever kind of boy," she said, "melancholy and diffident, always
thinking that people disliked him. He used to give me the air of a
person who was trying to find something, and who did not quite know
where to look for it. He had a time of expansion at Oxford, where
he made friends and did well; and then he came to London, and began
to write. But the real tragedy of his life is this," she said. "He
really fell in love, or as nearly as he could, with a very pretty
and high-spirited girl, who took a great fancy to him, and pitied
him from the bottom of her heart. For five years the thing went on.
She would have married him at any time if he had asked her. But he
did not. I suppose he could not face the idea of being married. He
always seemed to be on the point of proposing to her, and then he
would lose heart at the last minute. At last she got tired of
waiting, and, I suppose, began to care for some one else; but she
was very good to Francis, and never lost patience with him. At last
she told him one day quietly that she was engaged, and hoped that
they would always remain friends. I think, do you know, that it was
almost more a relief to him than otherwise. I did my best to help
him--marriage was the one thing he wanted; if he could only have
been pushed into it, he would have made a perfect husband, because
not only is he very much of a gentleman, but he could never bear to
fail any one who depended on him; but he has got the unhappiest
mind I know; the moment that he has formed a plan, and sees his way
clear, he at once begins to think of all the reasons against it--
not the selfish reasons, by any means; in this case he reflected, I
am sure, how little he had to offer; he could not bring himself to
feel that any one could really care for him; and then, too, he
never really cared for anything quite enough himself. Or if he did,
he found all sorts of refined reasons why he ought not to do so. If
only he had been a little more selfish, it would have been all
right. Indeed," said Mrs. T----, with a smile, "he is the only
person of whom I could truthfully say that if he had only been a
little more vulgar, he would have been a much happier person."

I saw a good deal of Willett after that, and he interested me
increasingly. I verified Mrs. T----'s judgment about him, and found
it true in every particular. I suppose there was some lack of
vitality about him, because the more I knew of him the more I found
to admire. He was an exquisitely delicate person, affectionate,
responsive, with a fine sense of humour--indeed, the most
disconcerting thing was that he saw to the full the humour of his
own position. But none of the robust motives that spur men to
action affected him. He was ambitious, but he would not make any
sacrifices to gain the objects of his ambition. He could not use
his powers on conventional lines. He was, I think, deeply desirous
of confidence and affection, but he could never believe that he
deserved either, or that it was possible for him to be interesting
to others. He was laborious, pure-minded, transparently honest, and
had a shrewd and penetrating judgment of other people; but he
seemed to labour under a sense of shame at his deficiencies, and to
feel that he had no claims or rights in the world. He existed on
sufferance. The smallest shadow of disapproval caused him to
abandon any design, not resentfully but eagerly, as though he was
fully aware of his own incompetence.

I grew to feel a strong affection for him, and tried in many ways
to help and encourage him. But he always discounted encouragement,
and it is a clumsy business trying to help a man who does not
demand or desire help.

He seemed to me to have schooled himself into a kind of tender
patience; and this attitude, I am ashamed to say, used to irritate
me considerably, because it seemed to me to be so much power wasted
on accepting defeat, which might have ensured victory.

He was with me a few weeks ago. I was up in town, and he dined with
me by appointment. He told me, with a gentle philosophy, a story
which made my blood boil. He had been asked to write a book by a
publisher, and the lines had been laid down for him. "It was such a
comfort to me," he said, "because it supplied just the stimulus I
could not myself originate. My book was really rather a good piece
of work; but a week ago I sent it to the publisher, and he returned
it, saying it was not the least what he wanted--he suggested my
retaining about a third of it, and rewriting the rest. Of course I
could do nothing of the kind." "What have you done with it?" I
asked. "Oh, I have destroyed it." "But didn't you see him," I said,
"or do something--or at all events insist on payment?" "Oh no," he
said, "I could not do that--the man was probably right--he wanted a
particular kind of book, and mine was not what he wanted. I did say
that I wished he had explained to me more clearly what he wanted--
but after all it doesn't very much matter. I can get along all
right, if I am careful."

"Well," I said, "you are really a very aggravating person. If I
could not have got my book published elsewhere, I would certainly
have had a row--I would have taken out my money's worth in
vituperation."

Willett smiled; "I dare say you would have had some fun," he said,
"but that is not my line. I have told you before that I can't
interest people--I don't think it is wholly my fault."

We sate late, talking; and for the only time in his life he spoke
to me, with a depth of emotion of which I should hardly have
suspected him, of the value he set upon my friendship, and his
gratitude for my sympathy.

And now this morning I have heard of his sudden death. He was found
dead in his room, bent over his papers. He must have been writing
late at night, as his custom was; and it proved on examination that
he must have long suffered from an unsuspected disease of the
heart. Perhaps that may explain his failure, if it can be called a
failure. There is something to me almost insupportably pathetic to
think of his lonely and uncomforted life, his isolation, his
sensitiveness. And yet I do not feel sure that it is pathetic,
because his life somehow seems to me to have been one of the most
beautiful I have ever known. He did nothing much for others, he
achieved nothing for himself; but it is only our miserable habit of
weighing every one's life, in a hard way, by a standard of
performance and success, which makes one sigh over Francis
Willett's life. It is very difficult at times to see what it is
that life is exactly meant to do for us. Most of the men and women
I know--I say this sadly but frankly--seem to me to leave the world
worse, in essential respects, than they entered it. There is
generally something ingenuous, responsive, eager, sweet, hopeful
about a child--but though I admit that one does encounter beautiful
natures that seem to flower very generously in the light of
experience, yet most people grow dull, dreary, conventional,
grasping, commonplace--they grow to think rather contemptuously of
emotion and generosity--they think it weak to be amiable,
unselfish, kind. They become fond of comfort and position and
respect and money. They think such things the serious concerns of
life, and sentiment a kind of relaxation. But with Willett it was
the precise reverse. He claimed nothing for himself, he never
profited at the expense of another; he was utterly humble, gentle,
unpretentious, kind, sincere. An hour ago I should have called him
"poor fellow," and wished that he had had a more robust kind of
fibre; now that I know he is dead, I cannot find it in my heart to
wish him any such qualities. His life appears to me utterly
beautiful and fragrant. He never incurred any taint of grossness
from prosperity or success; he never grew indifferent or hard; and
in the light of his last passage, such a failure seems the one
thing worth achieving, and to carry with it a hope all alive and
rich with possibilities of blessing and glory. He would hardly have
called himself a Christian, I think; he would have said that he
could not have attained to anything like a vital faith or a hopeful
certainty; but the only words and thoughts that haunt my mind about
him, echoing sweetly and softly through the ages, are the words in
which Christ described the tender spirits of those who were nearest
to the Father's heart, and to whom it is given to see God.



July 28, 1889.


Health of body and mind return to me, slowly but surely. I have
given up all attempt at writing; I rack my brain no longer for
plots or situations. I keep, it is true, my note-book for subjects
beside me, and occasionally jot down a point; but I feel entirely
indifferent to the whole thing. Meanwhile the flood of letters
about my book, invitations from editors, offers from publishers,
continues to flow. I reply to these benignantly and courteously,
but undertake nothing, promise nothing. I seem to have recovered my
balance. I think no more about my bodily complaints, and my nerves
no longer sting and thrill. The day is hardly long enough for all I
have to do. It may be that when the novelty of the experiment in
education wears off, I shall begin to hanker after authorship
again. Alec will have to go to school in a year or two, I suppose;
but it shall be a day-school at first, if I can find one. As to the
question of a public school, I am much exercised. Of course there
are nightmare terrors about tone and morals; but I am not really
very anxious about the boy, because he is sensible and independent,
and has no lack of moral courage. The vigorous barrack-life is good
for a boy, the give-and-take, the splendid equality, the manly
code, the absence of affectation. But the intellectual tone of
schools is low, and the conventionality is great. I don't want Alec
to be a conventional man, and yet I want him to accept current
conventions instinctively about matters of indifference. I have a
horror of the sporting public-school type, the good-humoured,
robust fellow, who does his work and fills his spare time with
games, and thinks intellectual things, and artistic interests, and
emotion, and sympathy, moonshine and rot. Such people live a
wholesome enough life; they make good soldiers, good officials,
good men of business. But they are woefully complacent and self-
satisfied. The schools develop a Spartan type, and I want Alec to
be an Athenian. But the experiment will have to be made, because a
man is at a disadvantage in ordinary life if he has not the public
school bonhomie, courtesy, and common sense. I must try to keep the
other side alive, and I don't despair of doing it.

Meantime we are a very contented household, in spite of the fact
that now, if ever, is the time for me to make my mark as a writer,
and I have to pass all the opportunities that offer. On the other
hand, this is the point at which one sees, in the history of
letters, so many writers go to pieces. They suddenly find, after
their first great success, that they have arrived, by a tortuous
and secret path, at being a sort of public man. They are dazzled by
contact with the world. They go into society, they make speeches,
they write twaddle, they drain their energy, already depleted by
creation, in fifty different ways. Now I am strongly of Ruskin's
opinion that the duty of the artist is to make himself fit for the
best society, and then to abstain from it. Very fortunately I have
no sort of taste for these things, beyond the simple human
satisfaction in enjoying consideration. That is natural and
inevitable. But I don't value it unduly, and I dislike its
penalties more than I love its rewards.

And then, too, I reflect that it is, after all, life that we are
here to taste, and life that so many of us pass by. Work is a part
of life, perhaps the essence of life; but to be absorbed in work is
to be like a man who is absorbed in collecting specimens, and never
has time to sort them. I knew of a man who determined, early in
life, to write the history of political institutions. He had a
great library, and he devoted himself to study. He put in his
books, as he read them, slips of paper to indicate passages and
chapters that he would have to consult, and as he finished with a
book, he put it in a certain place on a certain shelf. He made no
other notes or references--he was a man with a colossal memory,
and he knew exactly what his markers meant. In the middle of this
life of acquisition, while he bored like a worm in a cheese, he
died. His library was sold. The markers meant nothing to any one
else; and the book-buyers merely took the markers out and threw
them away, and that was the end of the history of political
institutions.

I feel that, apart from our work, we ought to try and arrive at
some solution, to draw some sort of conclusions--to reflect, to
theorise; we may not draw nearer to the secret, but our only hope
of doing so, the only hope that humanity will do so, is for some at
least to try. And thus I think that I have perhaps been saved from
a great delusion. I was spending my time in spinning romances, in
elaborating plots, in manoeuvring life as I would; and it is not
like that! Life is not run on physical lines, nor on emotional, nor
social, nor even moral lines. It is not managed in the least as we
should manage it; it is a resultant of innumerable forces, or
perhaps the same force running in intricate currents. Of course the
strange thing is that we men should find ourselves thrust into it,
with strong intuitions, vehement preconceptions, as to how it ought
to be directed; our happiness seems to depend upon our being, or
learning to be, in harmony with it, but it baffles us, it resists
us, it contradicts us, it opposes us to the end; sometimes it
crushes us; and yet we believe that it means good; and even if we
do not so believe, we have to acquiesce, we have to endure; and one
thing is certain, we cannot learn the lesson of life by practising
indifference or stoical fortitude, or by abandoning ourselves to
despair; only by believing that our sufferings are fruitful, our
mistakes educative, our sins significant, our sorrows gracious, can
we hope to triumph. We go on, many of us, relying on useless
defences, beguiling ourselves with fantastic diversions,
overlooking, as far as we can, stern realities; stopping our ears,
turning away our gaze, shrinking and crying out like children at
the prospect of experiences to which we are led by loving
presences, that smile as they draw us to the wholesome and bracing
incidents that we so weakly dread. We pray for courage, but we know
in our souls that courage can only be won by enduring what we fear;
and thus preoccupied by hopes and plans and fears, we miss the
wholesome sweet and simple stuff of life, its quiet relationships,
its tranquil occupations, its beautiful and tender surprises.

And then perhaps, at long intervals, we have a deep and splendid
flash of insight, when we can thank God that things have not been
as we should have willed and ordered them. We should have lingered,
perhaps, in the low rich meadows, the sheltered woodlands of our
desire; we should never have set our feet to the hill. In terror
and reluctance we have wandered upwards among the steep mountain
tracks, by high green slopes, by grim crag-buttresses, through
fields of desolate stones. Yet we are aware of a finer, purer air,
of wide prospects of hill and plain; we feel that we have gained in
strength and vigour, that our perceptions are keener, our very
enjoyment nobler; and at last, it may be, we have sight, from some
Pisgah-top of hope, of fairer lands yet to which we are surely
bound. And then, too, though we have fared on in loneliness and
isolation, we see moving forms of friends and comrades converging
on our track. It is no dream; it is but a parable of what has
happened to many a soul, what is daily happening. What does the
sad, stained, weary, fitful past concern us at such a moment as
this? It concerns us nothing, save that only through its pains and
shadows was it possible for us to climb where we have climbed.

To-day it seems that I have been blessed with such a vision. The
mist will close in again, doubtless, wild with wind, chill with
rain, sad with the cry of hoarse streams. But I have seen! I shall
be weary and regretful and despairing many times; but I shall never
wholly doubt again.



August 8, 1889.


Alec is ill to-day. He was restless, flushed, feverish, yesterday
evening, and I thought he must have caught cold; we put him to bed,
and this morning we sent for the doctor. He says there is no need
for anxiety, but he does not know as yet what is the matter; his
temperature is high, and we must just keep him quietly in bed, and
wait. I tell myself that it is foolish to be anxious, but I cannot
keep a certain dread out of my mind; there is a weight upon my
heart, which seems unduly heavy. Perhaps it is only that it seems
unusual, for he has never had an illness of any kind. He is not to
be disturbed, and Maggie is not allowed to see him. Maud sate with
him this morning, and he slept most of the time. I looked in once
or twice, but people coming and going tend to make him restless.
Maud herself is a marvel to me. She must be even more anxious than
I am, but she is serene, smiling, strong, with a cheerfulness that
has no effort about it. She laughed tenderly at my fears, and sent
me out for a walk with Maggie. I fear I was a gloomy companion. In
the evening I went to sit with Alec a little. He was wakeful,
large-eyed, and restless. He lay with a book of stories from Homer,
of which he is very fond, in one hand, the other clasping his black
kitten, which slept peacefully on the counterpane. He wanted to
talk, but to keep him quiet I told him a long trivial story, full
of unexciting incidents. He lay musing, his head on his hand; then
he seemed inclined to sleep, so I sate beside him, watching and
wondering at the nearness and the dearness of the child to me,
almost amazed at the revelation which this shadow of fear gives me
of the place which he fills in my heart and life. He tossed about
for some time, and when I asked him if he wanted anything, he only
put his hand in mine; a gesture not quite like him, as he is a boy
who is averse to personal caresses or signs of emotion. So I drew
my chair up to the bed, and sate there with the little hot hand in
my own. Maud came up presently; but as he now seemed sound asleep,
we left him in the care of the old nurse, and went down to dinner.
If we only knew what was the matter! I argue with myself how much
unnecessary misery I give myself by anticipating evil; but I cannot
help it; and the weight on my mind grew heavier; half the night I
lay awake, till at last, from sheer weariness, I fell into a sort
of stupor of the senses, which fled from me in the dismal dawn, and
the unmanning hideous fear leapt on me out of the dark, like a
beast leaping upon its prey.



August 11, 1889.


I cannot and dare not write of these days. The child is very ill;
it is some obscure inflammation of the brain-tissue. I had an
insupportable fear that it might have resulted in some way from
being over-pressed in the matter of work, over-stimulated. I asked
the doctor. If he lied to me, and I do not think he did, he lied
like a man, or an angel. "Not in the least," he said, "it is a
constitutional thing; in fact, I may say that the rational and
healthy life the child has lived will help more than anything to
pull him through."

But I can't write of the days. I sleep, half-conscious of my
misery. I suppose I eat, walk, read. But waking is like the waking
of a prisoner who awakes up to be put on the rack, who hears doors
open and feet approach, and sickens with dread as he lies. God's
hand is heavy upon me day and night. Surely nothing, in the world
or out of it, can obliterate the memory of this suffering; perhaps,
if Alec is given back to us, I shall smile at this time of
suffering. But, if not--



August 12, 1889.


He is losing ground, he is hardly ever conscious now; he sleeps a
good deal, but often he talks quietly to himself of all that we
have done and said; he often supposes himself to be with me, and,
thank God, he never says a word to show that he has ever feared or
misunderstood me. I could not bear that. Yesterday when I was with
him, he opened his eyes on me; I could see that he knew me, and
that he was frightened. I could not speak, but Maud, who was with
me, just took his hand and with her own tranquil smile, said, "It
is all right, Alec; there is nothing to be frightened about; we are
here, and you will soon be well again." The child closed his eyes
and lay smiling to himself. I could not have done that.



August 13, 1889.


He died this morning, just at the dawn. I knew last night that all
hope was over. I was with him half the night, and prayed, knowing
my prayers were in vain. That I could save him no suffering, could
not keep him, could not draw him back. Maud took my place at
midnight; I slept, and in the grey dawn, I woke to find her
standing with a candle by my bed; I knew in a moment, by a glance,
that the end was near. No word passed between us; I found Maggie by
the bed; and we three together waited for the end. I had never seen
any one die. He was quite unconscious, breathing slowly, looking
just like himself, as though flushed with slumber. At last he
stirred, gave a long sigh, and seemed to settle himself for the
last sleep. I do not know when he died, but I became aware that
life had passed, and that the little spirit that we loved had fled,
God knows whither. Maggie sate with her hand in mine; and in my
dumb and frozen grief, almost without a thought of anything but a
deep and cold resentment, a hatred of death and the maker of love
and death alike, I became aware that both she and Maud had me in
their thoughts, that my sorrow was even more to them than their
own--while I was cut off from them; from life and hope alike, in a
place of darkness and in the deep.



August 19, 1889.


I saw Alec no more; I would remember him as he was in life, not the
stiffened waxen mask of my beloved. The days passed in a dull
stupor of grief, mechanically, grimly, in a sort of ghastly
greyness. And I who thought that I had sounded the depths of pain!
I could not realise it, could not believe that all would not
somehow be as before. Maud and Maggie speak of him to each other
and to me . . . it is inconceivable. With a dull heartache I have
collected and put away all the child's things--his books, his toys,
his little possessions. I followed the little coffin to the grave.
The uncontrollable throb of emotion came over me at the words, "I
am the resurrection and the life." It was a grey, gusty day; a
silent crowd waited to see us pass. The great churchyard elms
roared and swayed, and I found myself watching idly how the
clergyman's hood was blown sideways by the wind. I looked into the
deep, dark pit, and saw the little coffin lying there, all in a
dumb dream. The holy words fell vacuously on my ears. "Man walketh
in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain"--that was all I
felt. I seem to believe nothing, to hope nothing. I do not believe
I shall ever see or draw near to the child again, and yet the
thought of him alone, apart, uncomforted, lies cold on my heart.
Maud is wonderful to me; her love does not seem to suffer eclipse;
she does everything, she smiles, she speaks; she feels, she says,
the presence of the child near her and about her; that means
nothing to me; the soul appears to me to have gone out utterly like
a blown flame, mingling with the unseen life, as the little body we
loved will be mingled with the dust.

I cannot say that I endure agony; it is rather as if I had received
a blow so fierce that it drove sensation away; I seem to see the
bruise, watch the blood flow, and wonder why I do not suffer. The
suffering will come, I doubt not; but meanwhile I am only mutely
grateful that I do not feel more, suffer more. It does not even
seem to me to have drawn me nearer to Maud, to Maggie; my power of
loving seems extinguished, like my power of suffering. I do not
know why I write in this book, why I record my blank apathy. It is
a habit, it passes the time; the only thing that gives me any
comfort is the thought that I shall die, too, and close my eyes at
last upon this terrible world, made so sweet and beautiful, and
then slashed and scored across with such cruel stripes, where we
pay so grievous a penalty for feeling and loving. Tennyson found
consolation "when he sorrowed most." But I say deliberately that I
would rather not have loved my child, than lose him thus.



August 28, 1889.


We are to go away. Maggie droops like a faded flower, and for the
first time I realise, in trying to comfort and distract her, that I
have not lost everything. We are much together, and seeing her thus
pine and fade stirs a dread, in the heart that had been so cold,
that I may lose her too. At last we are drawn together. She came to
say good-night to me last night, and a gush of love passed through
me, like the wind stirring the strings of a harp to music. "My
precious darling, my comfort," I said; the words put, it seemed, on
my lips, by some deeper power. She clung to me, crying softly. Yet,
is it strange to say it, that simple utterance seems almost to have
revived her, to have given her pride and courage? But Maud is still
almost a mystery to me. Who can tell how she suffers--I cannot--it
seems to have quickened and enriched her love and tenderness; she
seems to have a secret that I cannot come near to sharing; she does
not repine, rebel, resist; she lives in some region of
unapproachable patience and love. She goes daily to the grave, but
I cannot visit it or think of it. The sight of the church-tower on
my walks gives me a throb of dismay. But now we are going away. We
have been lent a little house in a quiet seaside place; I suppose I
am ill--at least, I am aware of a deep and unutterable fatigue at
times, when I can rouse myself to nothing, but sit unoccupied,
musing, glad to be alone, and only dreading the slightest
interruption, the smallest duty. I know by some subtle sense that I
am seldom absent from Maud's thoughts; but, with her incredible
courage and patience, she betrays nothing by word or glance. She is
absolutely patient, entirely self-forgetful; she quietly relieves
me of anything I have to do; she alters arrangements a dozen times
a day, with a ready smile; and yet it almost seems to me as if I
had lost her too.



August 30, 1889.


Our route lay through Cambridge; we had to change there and wait;
so we drove down to the town to look at my old college. There it
lay, the charming, pretty, quiet place, blinking lazily out of its
deep-set barred windows in the bright sun, just the same, it
seemed, as ever, though perhaps a touch more mellow and more
settled; every corner and staircase haunted with old ghosts for me.
I could put a name to every set of rooms, flash an incident to
every door and window. In my heavy, apathetic mood the memory of my
life there seemed like a memory of some one else, moving in golden
light, talking and laughing in firelit rooms, lingering in moonlit
nights by the bridge, wondering what life was going to bring. It
seemed like turning the pages of some old illuminated book with
bright pictures, where the very sunlight is the purest and stiffest
gold. The men I knew, the friends I lived with, admired, loved--
where are they? scattered to all parts of the earth, parted utterly
from me, some of them dead, alas! and silent. It came over me with
a thrill of sharpest pain to think how I had pictured Alec here,
living the same free and beautiful life, tasting the same innocent
pleasures, with the bright, sweet world opening upon him. In that
calm, sunny afternoon, life seemed a strange phantasmal business,
and I myself a revenant from some thin, unsubstantial world. A door
opened, and an old Don, well known to me in those days, hardly
altered, it seemed, came out and trotted across the court, looking
suspiciously to left and right as he used to do. Had he been doing
the same thing ever since, reading the same books, talking the same
innocent gossip? I had not the heart to greet him, and he passed me
by unrecognising. We peeped into the hall through the screen. I
could see where I used to sit, the same dark pictures looking down.
We went to the chapel, with its noble classical woodwork, the great
carved panels, the angels' heads, the huge, stately reredos. Some
one, thank God, was playing softly on the organ, and we sate to
listen. The sweet music flowed over my sad heart in a healing tide.
Yes, it was not meaningless, after all, this strange life, with the
good years shining in their rainbow halo, even though the path led
into darkness and formless shadow. I seemed to look back on it all,
as the traveller on the hill looks out from the skirts of the cloud
upon the sunny valley beneath him. It all worked together, said the
delicate rising strain, outlining itself above the soft thunder of
the pedals, into something high and grave and beautiful; it all
ended in the peace of God. I sate there, with wife and child, a
pilgrim faring onwards, tasting of love and life and sorrow, weary
of the way, but still--yes, I could say that--still hopeful. In
that moment even my bitter loss had something beautiful about it.
It was THERE, the bright episode of my dear Alec's life, the memory
of the beloved years together. Maggie, seeing something in my face
that she was glad to see, put her hand in mine, and the tears rose
to my eyes, while I smiled at Maud; the burden fell off my shoulder
for a moment, and something seemed as it were to touch me and point
onwards. The music with a dying fall came to a soft close; the rich
light fell on desk and canopy; the old tombs glimmered in the dusty
air. We went out in silence; and then there came back to me, in the
old dark court, with its ivied corners, its trim grass plots, the
sense that I was still a part of it all, that the old life was not
dead, but stored up like a garnered treasure in the rich and
guarded past. Not by detachment or aloofness from happiness and
warmth and life are our victories won. That had been the dark
temptation, the shadow of my loss, to believe that in so sad and
strange an existence the only hope was to stand apart from it all,
not to care too much, not to love too closely. That was false,
utterly false; a bare and grim philosophy, a timid sauntering.
Rather it was better to clasp all things close, to love
passionately, to desire infinitely, to yield oneself gladly and
joyfully to every deep and true emotion; not greedily and
luxuriously, flinging aside the crumpled husk that had given up its
sweetness; but tenderly and gently, holding out one's arms to
everything pure and noble, trusting that behind all there did
indeed beat a great and fatherly heart, that loved one better than
one dreamed.

That was a strange experience, that sunlit afternoon, a mingling of
deepest pain and softest hope, a touch of fire from the very altar
of faith, linking the beautiful past with the dark present, and
showing me that the future held a promise of perfect graciousness
and radiant strength. Did other lives hold the same rich secrets? I
felt that they did; for that day, at least, all mankind, young and
old alike, seemed indeed my brothers and sisters. In the young men
that went lightly in and out, finding life so full of zest,
thinking each other so interesting and wonderful; in the tired face
of the old Professor, limping along the street; in the prosperous,
comfortable contentment of robust men, full of little affairs and
schemes--I saw in all of them the same hope, the same unity of
purpose, the same significance; and we three in the midst, united
by love and loss alike, we were at the centre, as it were, of a
great drama of life and love, in which even death could only shift
the scene and enrich the intensity of the secret hope.



September 5, 1889.


The rapt and exalted mood that I carried away from Cambridge could
not last; I did not hope that it could. We have had a dark and sad
time, yet with gleams of sweetness in it, because we have realised
how closely we are drawn together, how much we depend on each
other. Maud's brave spirit has seemed for a time broken utterly;
and this has done more than anything to bring us nearer, because I
have felt the stronger, realising how much she leant upon me. She
has been filled with self-reproach, I know not for what shadowy
causes. She blames herself for a thousand things, for not having
been more to Alec, for having followed her own interests and
activities, for not having understood him better. It is all unreal,
morbid, overstrained, of course, but none the less terribly there.
I have tried to persuade her that it is but weariness and grief
trying to attach itself to definite causes, but she cannot be
comforted. Meanwhile we walk, stroll, drive, read, and talk
together--mostly of him, for I can do that now; we can even smile
together over little memories, though it is perilous walking, and a
step brings us to the verge of tears. But, thank God, there is not
a single painful memory, not a thing we would have had otherwise in
the whole of that little beautiful life; and I wonder now
wretchedly, whether its very beauty and brightness ought not to
have prepared me more to lose him; it was too good to be true, too
perfectly pure and brave. Yet I never even dreamed that he would
leave us; I should have treasured the bright days better if I had.
There are times of sharpest sorrow, days when I wake and have
forgotten; when I think of him as with us, and then the horror of
my loss comes curdling and weltering back upon me; when I thrill
from head to foot with hopeless agony, rebelling, desiring, hating
the death that parts us.

Maggie seems to feel it differently. A child accepts a changed
condition with perhaps a sharper pang, but with a swift accustoming
to what irreparably IS. She weeps at the thought of him sometimes,
but without the bitter resistance, the futile despair which makes
me agonise. That she can be interested, distracted, amused, is a
great help to me; but nothing seems to minister to my dear Maud,
except the impassioned revival, for it is so, of our earliest first
love. It has come back to bless us, that deep and intimate
absorption that had moved into a gentler comradeship. The old
mysterious yearning to mingle life and dreams, and almost
identities, has returned in fullest force; the years have rolled
away, and in the loss of her calm strength and patience, we are as
lovers again. The touch of her hand, the glance of her eye, thrill
through me as of old. It is a devout service, an eager anticipation
of her lightest wish that possesses me. I am no longer tended; I
tend and serve. There is something soft, appealing, wistful about
her that seems to give her back an almost childlike dependence,
till my grief almost goes from me in joy that I can sustain and aid
her.



September 7, 1889.


Another trouble has fallen upon us. I have had a very grievous
letter from my cousin, who succeeded by arrangement, on my father's
death, to the business. He has been unfortunate in his affairs; he
has thrown money away in speculation. The greater part of my income
came from the business. I suppose the arrangement was a bad one,
but the practice was so sound and secure in my father's life that
it never occurred to me to doubt its stability. The chief part of
my income, some nine hundred a year, came to me from this source.
Apart from that, I have some three or four hundreds from invested
money of my own, and Maud has upwards of two hundred a year. I am
going off to-morrow to L---- to meet my cousin, and go into the
matter. I don't at present understand how things are. His letter is
full of protestations and self-recrimination. We can live, I
suppose, if the worst comes to the worst, but in a very different
way. Perhaps we may even have to sell our pleasant house. The
strange thing is that I don't feel this all more acutely, but I
seem to have lost the power of suffering for any other reason than
because Alec is dead.



September 12, 1889.


I have come back to-night from some weary nightmare days with my
poor cousin. The thing is as bad as it can be. The business will be
acquired by Messrs. F----, the next most leading solicitors. With
the price they will give, and with the sacrifice of my cousin's
savings, and the assets of the firm, the money can just be paid. We
shall have some six hundred a year to live upon; my cousin is to
enter the office of the F---- firm as an ordinary clerk. The origin
of the disaster is a melancholy one; it was not that he himself
might profit, but to increase the income of some clients who had
lost money and desired a higher rate of interest for funds left in
the hands of the firm. If my cousin had resisted the demand, there
would have been some unpleasantness, because the money lost had
been invested on his advice; he could not face this, and proceeded
to speculate with other money, of which he was trustee, to fill the
gap. Good-nature, imprudence, credulousness, a faulty grasp of the
conditions, and not any deliberate dishonesty, have been the cause
of his ruin. It is a fearful blow to him, but he is fortunate,
perhaps, in being unmarried; I have urged him to try and get
employment elsewhere, but he insists upon facing the situation in
the place where he is known, with a fantastic idea, which is at the
same time noble and chivalrous, of doing penance. Of course he has
no prospects whatever; but I am sure of this, that he grieves over
my lost inheritance far more than he grieves over his own ruin. His
great misery is that some years ago he refused an offer from
Messrs. F---- to amalgamate the two firms.

I feared at first that I might have to sacrifice the rest of my
money as well--money slowly accumulated out of my own labours. And
the relief of finding that this will not be necessary is immense.
We must sell our house at once, and find a smaller one. At present
I am not afraid of the changed circumstances; indeed, if I could
only recover my power of writing, we need not leave our home. The
temptation is to get a book written somehow, because I could make
money by any stuff just now. On the other hand, it will almost be
to me a relief to part from the home so haunted with the memory of
Alec--though that will be a dreadful pain to Maud and Maggie. As
far as living more simply goes, that does not trouble me in the
least. I have always been slightly uncomfortable about the ease and
luxury in which we lived. I only wish we had lived more simply all
along, so that I could have put by a little more. I have told Maud
exactly how matters stand, and she acquiesces, though I can see
that, just at this time, the thought of handing over to strangers
the house where we have lived all our married life, the rooms where
Alec and the baby died, is a deep grief to her. To me that is
almost a relief. I have dreaded going back there. To-night I told
Maggie, and she broke out into long weeping. But even so there is
something about the idea of being poor, strange to say, which
touches a sense of romance in the child. She does not realise the
poky restrictions of the new life.

And still stranger to me is the way in which this solid, tangible
trouble seems to have restored my energy and calm. I found myself
clear-headed, able to grasp the business questions which arose,
gifted with a hard lucidity of mind that I did not know I
possessed. It is a relief to get one's teeth into something, to
have hard, definite occupation to distract one; indeed, it hardly
seems to me in the light of a misfortune at present, so much as a
blessed tangible problem to be grappled with and solved. What I
should have felt if all had been lost, and if I had had to resign
my liberty, and take up some practical occupation, I hardly know. I
do not think I should even have dreaded that in my present frame of
mind.



September 15, 1889.


I have been thinking all day long of my last walk with Alec, the
day before he was taken ill. Maud had gone out with Maggie; and the
little sturdy figure came to my room to ask if I was going out. I
was finishing a book that I was reading for the evening's work; I
had been out in the morning, and I had not intended to go out
again, as it was cold and drizzling. I very nearly said that I
could not go, and I had a shadow of vexation at being interrupted.
But I looked up at him, as he stood by the door, and there was a
tiny shadow of loneliness upon his face; and I thank God now that I
put my book down at once, and consented cheerfully. He brightened
up at this; he fetched my cap and stick, and we went off together.
I am glad to think that I had him to myself that day. He was in a
more confidential mood than usual. Perhaps--who knows?--there was
some shadow of death upon him, some instinct to clasp hands closer
before the end. He asked me to tell him some stories of my
schooldays, and what I used to do as a boy--but he was full of
alertness and life, breaking into my narratives to point out a nest
that we had seen in the spring, and that now hung, wind-dried and
ruinous, among the boughs. Coming back, he flagged a little, and
did what he seldom did, put his arm in my own; how tenderly the
touch of the little hand, the restless fingers on my arm thrilled
me--the hand that lies cold and folded and shrivelled in the dark
ground! He was proud that evening of having had me all to himself,
and said to Maggie that we had talked secrets, "such as MEN talk
when there are no women to ask questions." But thinking that this
had wounded Maggie a little, he went and put his arm round her, and
I heard him say something about its being all nonsense, and that we
had wished for her all the time. . . .

Ah, how can I endure it, the silence, the absence, the lost smile,
the child of my own whom I loved from head to foot, body soul and
spirit all alike! I keep coming across signs of his presence
everywhere, his books, his garden tools in the summerhouse, the
little presents he gave me, on my study chimney-piece, his cap and
coat hanging in the cupboard--it is these little trifling things,
signs of life and joyful days, that sting the heart and pierce the
brain with sorrow. If I could but have one sight of him, one word
with him, one smile, to show that he is, that he remembers, that he
waits for us, I could endure it; but I look into the dark and no
answer comes; I send my wild entreaties pulsating through the
worlds of space, crying, "Are you there, my child?" That his life
is there, hidden with God, I do not doubt; but is it he himself, or
has he fallen back, like the drop of water in the fountain, into
the great tide of life? That is no comfort to me; it is he that I
want, that union of body and mind, of life and love, that was
called my child and is mine no more.



September 20, 1889.


Such a loss as mine passes over the soul like a plough cleaving a
pasture line by line. The true stuff of the spirit is revealed and
laid out in all its bareness. That customary outline, that surface
growth of herb and blade, is all pared away. I have been accustomed
to think myself a religious man--I have never been without the
sense of God over and about me. But when an experience like this
comes, it shows me what my religion is worth. I do not turn to God
in love and hope; I do not know Him, I do not understand Him. I
feel that He must have forgotten me, or that He is indifferent to
me, or that He is incapable of love, and works blindly and sternly.
My reason in vain says that the great and beautiful gift itself of
the child's life and the child's love came from Him. I do not
question His power or His right to take my child from me. But I
endure only because I must, not willingly or loyally or lovingly.
It is not that I feel the injustice of His taking the boy away; it
is a far deeper sense of injustice than that. The injustice lies in
the fact that He made the child so utterly dear and desired; that
He set him so firmly in my heart; this on the one hand; and on the
other, that He does not, if He must rend the little life away and
leave the bleeding gap, send at the same time some love, some
strength, some patience to make the pain bearable. I cannot believe
that the love I bore my boy was anything but a sweet and holy
influence. It gave me the one thing of which I am in hourly need--
something outside of myself and my own interests, to love better
than I loved even myself. It seems indeed a pure and simple loss,
unless the lesson God would have us learn is the stoical lesson of
detachment, indifference, cold self-sufficiency. It is like taking
the crutches away from a lame man, knocking the props away from a
tottering building. An optimistic moralist would say that I loved
Alec too selfishly, and even that the love of the child turned away
my heart from the jealous Heart of God, who demands a perfect
surrender, a perfect love. But how can one love that which one does
not know or understand, a Power that walks in darkness and that
gives us on the one hand sweet, beautiful, and desirable things,
and on the other strikes them from us when we need them most? It is
not as if I did not desire to trust and love God utterly. I should
think even this sorrow a light price to pay, if it gave me a pure
and deep trust in the mercy and goodness of God. But instead of
that it fills me with dismay, blank suspicion, fretful resistance.
I do not feel that there is anything which God could send me or
reveal to me, which would enable me to acquit Him of hardness or
injustice. I will not, though He slay me, say that I trust Him and
love Him when I do not. He may crush me with repeated blows of His
hand, but He has given me the divine power of judging, of testing,
of balancing; and I must use it even in His despite. He does not
require, I think, a dull and broken submissiveness, the
submissiveness of the creature that is ready to admit anything, if
only he can be spared another blow. What He requires, so my spirit
tells me, is an eager co-operation, a brave approval, a generous
belief in His goodness and His justice; and this I cannot give, and
it is He that has made me unable to give it. The wound may heal,
the dull pain may die away, I may forget, the child may become a
golden memory--but I cannot again believe that this is the
surrender God desires. What I think He must desire, is that I
should love the child, miss him as bitterly as ever, feel my day
darkened by his loss, and yet turn to Him gratefully and bravely in
perfect love and trust. It may be that I may be drawn closer to
those whom I love, but the loss must still remain irreparable,
because I might have learned to love my dear ones better through
Alec's presence, and not through his absence. It is His will, I do
not doubt it; but I cannot see the goodness or the justice of the
act, and I will not pretend to myself that I acquiesce.



September 25, 1889.


Yesterday was a warm, delicious, soft day, full of a gentle
languor, the air balmy and sweet, the sunshine like the purest
gold; we sate out all the morning under the cliff, in the warm dry
sand. To the right and left of us lay the blue bay, the waves
breaking with short, crisp sparkles on the shore. We saw headland
after headland sinking into the haze; a few fishing-boats moved
slowly about, and far down on the horizon we watched the smoke of a
great ocean-steamer. We talked, Maud and I, for the first time, I
think, without reserve, without bitterness, almost without grief,
of Alec. What sustains her is the certainty that he is as he was,
somewhere, far off, as brave and loving as ever, waiting for us,
but waiting with a perfect understanding and knowledge of why we
are separated. She dreams of him thus, looking down upon her, and
seeming, in her dream, to wonder what there can be to grieve about.
I suppose that a mother has a sense of oneness with a child that a
father cannot have. It is a deep and marvellous faith, an intuition
that transcends all reason, a radiant certainty. I cannot attain to
it. But in the warmth and light of her belief, I grew to feel that
at least there was some explanation of it all. Not by chance is the
dear gift sent us, not by chance do we learn to love it, not by
chance is it rent from us. Lying thus, talking softly, in so
gracious a world, a world that satisfied every craving of the
senses, I came to realise that the Father must wish us well, and
that if the shadow fell upon our path, it was not to make us cold
and bitter-hearted. Infinite Love! it came near to me in that hour,
and clasped me to a sorrowful, tender, beating Heart. I read Maud,
at her request, "Evelyn Hope," and the strong and patient love,
that dwells so serenely and softly upon the incidents of death, yet
without the least touch of morbidity and gloom, treating death
itself as a quiet slumber of the soul, taught me for a moment how
to be brave.

"You will wake and remember, and understand,"--my voice broke and
tears came, unbidden tears which I did not even desire to conceal--
and in that moment the spirit of my wife came near to me, and soul
looked into the eyes of soul, with a perfect and bewildering joy,
the very joy of God.



October 10, 1889.


We have had the kindest, dearest letters from our neighbours about
our last misfortune. But no one seems to anticipate that we shall
be obliged to leave the place. They naturally suppose that I shall
be able to make as large an income as I want by writing. And so I
suppose I could. I talked the whole matter over with Maud, and said
I would abide by her decision. I confessed that I had an extreme
repugnance to the thought of turning out books for money, books
which I knew to be inferior; but I also said that if she could not
bear to leave the place, I had little doubt that I could, for the
present at all events, make enough money to render it possible for
us to continue to live there. I said frankly that it would be a
relief to me to leave a house so sadly haunted by memory, and that
I should myself prefer to live elsewhere, framing our household on
very simple lines--and to let the power of writing come back if it
would, not to try and force it. It would be a dreadful prospect to
me to live thus, overshadowed by recollection, working dismally for
money; but I suppose it would be possible, even bracing. Maud did
not hesitate: she spoke quite frankly; on the one hand the very
associations, which I dread most, were evidently to her a source of
sad delight; and the thought of strangers living in rooms so
hallowed by grief was like a profanation. Then there was the fact
of all her relations with our friends and neighbours; but she said
quite simply that my feeling outweighed it all, and that she would
far rather begin life afresh somewhere else, than put me in the
position I described. We determined to try and find a small house
in the neighbourhood of her own old home in Gloucestershire; and
this thought, I am sure, gave her real happiness. We determined at
once what we would do; we would let our house for a term of years,
take what furniture we needed, and dispose of the rest; we arranged
to go off to Gloucestershire, as soon as possible, to look for a
house. We both realise that we must learn to retrench at once. We
shall have less than half our former income, counting in what we
hope to get from the old house. I am not at all afraid of that. I
always vaguely disliked living as comfortably as we did--but it
will not be agreeable to have to calculate all our expenses--that
may perhaps mend itself, if I can but begin my writing again.

All this helps me--I am ashamed to say how much--though sometimes
the thought of all the necessary arrangements weighs on me like a
leaden weight, on days when I fall back into a sad, idle, hopeless
repining. Sometimes it seems as if the old happy life was all
broken up and gone for ever; and, so strange a thing is memory and
imagination, that even the months overshadowed by the loss of my
faculty of work seem to me now impossibly fragrant and beautiful,
my sufferings unreal and unsubstantial. Real trouble, real grief,
have at least the bracing force of actuality, and sweep aside with
a strong hand all artificial self-made miseries and glooms.



December 15, 1889.


I have kept no record of these weeks. They have been full of
business, sadness, and yet of hope. We went back home for a time;
we made our farewells, and it moved me strangely to see that our
departure was viewed almost with consternation. It is Maud's loss
that will be felt. I have lived very selfishly and dully myself,
but even so I was half-glad to find that even I should be missed.
At such a time everything is forgotten and forgiven, and such
grudging, peaceful neighbourliness as even I have shown seems
appreciated and valued. It was a heartrending business reviving our
sorrow, and it plunged me for a time into my old dry bitterness of
spirit. But I hardened my heart as best I could, and felt more
deeply than ever, how far beyond my powers of endurance it would
have been to have taken up the old life, and Alec not there. Again
and again it was like a knife plunged into my heart with an almost
physical pain. Not so with Maud and Maggie--it was to them a
treasure of precious memories, and they could dare to indulge their
grief. I can't write of it, I can't think of it. Wherever I turned,
I saw him in a hundred guises--as a tiny child, as a small, sturdy
boy, as the son we lost.

We have let the house to some very kind and reasonable people, who
have made things very easy to us; and to me at least it was a sort
of heavy joy to take the last meal in the old home, to drive away,
to see the landscape fade from sight. I shall never willingly
return. It would seem to me like a wilful rolling among the thorns
of life, a gathering-in of spears into one's breast. I seemed like
a naked creature that had lost its skin, that shrank and bled at
every touch.



February 10, 1890.


I have been house-hunting, and I do not pretend to dislike it. The
sight of unknown houses, high garden walls, windows looking into
blind courts, staircases leading to lofts, dark cupboards, old
lumber, has a very stimulating effect on my imagination. Perhaps,
too, I sometimes think, these old places are full of haunting
spiritual presences, clinging, half tearfully, half joyfully to the
familiar scenes, half sad, perhaps, that they did not make a finer
thing of the little confined life; half glad to be free--as a man,
strong and well, might look with a sense of security into a room
where he had borne an operation. But I have never believed much in
haunted rooms. The Father's many mansions can be hardly worth
deserting for the little, dark houses of our tiny life.

I disliked some of the houses intensely--so ugly and pretentious,
so inconvenient and dull; but even so it is pleasant in fancy to
plan the life one would live there, the rooms one would use. One
house touched me inexpressibly. It was a house I knew from the
outside in a little town where I used to go and spend a few weeks
every year with an old aunt of mine. The name of the little town--I
saw it in an agent's list--had a sort of enchantment for me, a
golden haze of memory. I was allowed a freedom there I was allowed
nowhere else, I was petted and made much of, and I used to spend
most of my time in sauntering about, just looking, watching,
scrutinising things, with the hard and uncritical observation of
childhood. When I got to the place, I was surprised to find that I
knew well the look of the house I went to see, though I had not
ever entered it. Two neat, contented, slightly absurd old maiden
ladies had lived there, who used to walk out together, dressed
exactly alike in some faded fashion. The laurels and yews still
grew thickly in the shrubbery, and shaded the windows of the ugly
little parlours. An old, quiet, respectable maid showed me round;
she had been in service there for twenty years, and she was
tearfully lamenting over the break-up of the home. The old ladies
had lived there for sixty years. One of them had died ten years
before, the other had lingered on to extreme old age. The house was
like a museum, a specimen of a house of the thirties, in which
nothing had ever been touched or changed. The strange wall-papers
and chintzes, the crewel-work chairs, the mirrors, the light maple
furniture, the case of moth-eaten humming-birds, the dull
engravings of historical pictures, the old books--the drawing-room
table was covered with annuals and keepsakes, Moore's poems, Mrs.
Barbauld's works--all had a pathetic ugliness, redeemed by a
certain consistency of quality. And then the poky, comfortable
arrangements, the bath-chair in the coach-house, the four-post
bedsteads, the hand-rail on the stairs, the sandbags for the doors,
all spoke of a timid, invalid life, a dim backwater in the tide of
things. There had been children there at some time, for there were
broken toys, collections of dried plants, curious stones, in an
attic. The little drama of the house shaped itself for me, as I
walked through the frowsy, faded rooms, with a touching insistence.
This bedroom had never been used since Miss Eleanor died--and I
could fancy the poor, little, timid, precise life flitting away
among the well-known surroundings. This had been Miss Jackson's
favourite room--it was so quiet--she had died there, sitting in her
chair, a few weeks before. The leisurely, harmless routine of the
quiet household rose before me. I could imagine Miss Jackson
writing her letters, reading her book, eating her small meals,
making the same humble and grateful remarks, entertaining her old
friends. Year after year it had gone on, just the same, the clock
ticking loud in the hall, the sun creeping round the old rooms, the
birds singing in the garden, the faint footsteps in the road. It
had begun, that gentle routine, long before I had been born into
the world; and it was strange to me to think that, as I passed
through the most stirring experiences of my life, nothing ever
stirred or moved or altered here. Miss Jackson had felt Miss
Eleanor's death very much; she had hardly ever left the house
since, and they had had no company. Yes, what a woefully
bewildering thing death swooping down into that quiet household,
with all its tranquil security, must have been! One wondered what
Miss Eleanor had felt, when she knew she had to die, to pass out
into the unknown dark out of a world so tender, so familiar, so
peaceful; and what had poor Miss Jackson made of it, when she was
left alone? She must have found it all very puzzling, very dreary.
And yet, in the dim past, perhaps one or both of them, had had
dreams of a fuller life, had fancied that something more than
tenderness had looked out of the eyes of a man; well, it had come
to nothing, whatever it might have been; and the two old ladies had
settled down, perhaps with some natural repining, to their
unexciting, contented life, the day filled with little duties and
pleasures, the nights with innocent sleep. It had not been a
selfish life--they had been good to the poor, the maid told me;
and in old days they had often had their nephews and nieces to stay
with them. But those children had grown up and gone out into the
world, and no longer cared to return to the dull little house with
its precise ways, and the fidgety love that had once embraced them.

The whole thing seemed a mysterious mixture of purposelessness and
contentment. Rumours of wars, social convulsions, patriotic hopes,
great ideas, had swept on their course outside, and had never
stirred the drowsy current of life behind the garden walls. The
sisters had lived, sweetly, perhaps, and softly, like trees in some
sequestered woodland, hardly recognising their own gentle lapse of
strength and activity.

And now the whole thing was over for good. Curious and indifferent
people came, tramped about the house, pronounced it old-fashioned
and inconvenient. I could not do that myself; the place was brimful
of the pathetic evidences of what had been. Soon, no doubt, the old
house would wear a different guise--it would be renovated and
restored, the furniture would drift away to second-hand shops, the
litter would be thrown out upon the rubbish-heap. New lives, new
relationships would spring up; children would be born, boys would
play, lovers would embrace, sufferers would lie musing, men and
women would die in those refurbished rooms. Everything would drift
onwards, and the lives to whom each corner, each stair, each piece
of furniture had meant so much, would become a memory first, and
then fade into nothingness. Where and what were the two old ladies
now? Were they gone out utterly, like an extinguished flame? were
they in some new home of tranquil peace? Were they adjusting
themselves with a sense of timid impotence--those slender, tired
spirits--to new and bewildering conditions?

The old, dull house called to me that day with a hundred faint
voices and tremulous echoes. I could make nothing of it; for though
it swept the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to
have no certain message for me, but the message of oblivion and
silence.

I was sorry, as I went away, to leave the poor maidservant to her
lonely and desolate memories. She had to leave her comfortable
kitchen and her easy routine, for new duties and new faces, and I
could see that she anticipated the change with sad dismay.

It seemed to me in that hour as though the cruelty and the
tenderness of the world were very mysteriously blended--there was
no lack of tenderness in the old house with its innumerable small
associations, its sheltered calm. And then suddenly the stroke must
fall, and fall upon lives whose very security and gentleness seemed
to have been so ill a preparation for sterner and darker things. It
would have been more loving, one thought, either to have made the
whole fabric more austere, more precarious from the first; or else
to have bestowed a deep courage and a fertile hope, a firmer
endurance, rather than to have confronted lives so frail and
delicate with the terrors of the vast unknown.



April 8, 1890.


Our new house is charming, beautiful, homelike. It is an old stone
building, formerly a farm; it has a quaint garden and orchard, and
the wooded hill runs up steeply behind, with a stream in front. It
is on the outskirts of a village, and we are within three miles of
Maud's old home, so that she knows all the country round. We have
got two of our old servants, and a solid comfortable gardener, a
native of the place. The house within is quaint and comfortable. We
have a spare bedroom; I have no study, but shall use the little
panelled dining-room. We have had much to do in settling in, and I
have done a great deal of hard physical work myself, in the way of
moving furniture and hanging pictures, inducing much wholesome
fatigue. Maggie, who broke down dreadfully on leaving the old home,
with the wonderful spring that children have, is full of excitement
and even delight in the new house. I rather dread the time when all
our occupations shall be over, and when we shall settle down to the
routine of life. I begin to wonder how I shall occupy myself. I
mean to do a good many odd jobs--we have no trap, and there will be
a good deal of fetching and carrying to be done. We shall resume
our lessons, Maggie and I; there will be reading, gardening,
walking. One ought to be able to live philosophically enough. What
would I not give to be able to write now! but the instinct seems
wholly and utterly dead and gone. I cannot even conceive that I
ever used, solemnly and gravely, to write about imaginary people,
their jests and epigrams, their sorrows and cares. Life and Art! I
used to suppose that it was all a softly moulded, rhythmic,
sonorous affair, strophe and antistrophe; but the griefs and
sorrows of art are so much nearer each other, like major and minor
keys, than the griefs and sorrows of life. In art, the musician
smiles and sighs alternately, but his sighing is a balanced, an
ordered mood; the inner heart is content, as the pool is content,
whether it mirrors the sunlight or the lonely star; but in life,
joy is to grief what music is to aching silence, dumbness,
inarticulate pain--though perhaps in that silence one hears a
deeper, stranger sound, the buzz of the whirring atom, the soft
thunder of worlds plunging through the void, joyless, gigantic,
oblivious forces.

Is it good thus to have the veils of life rent asunder? If life,
the world's life, activity, work, be the end of existence, then it
is not good. It breaks the spring of energy, so that one goes
heavily and sorely. But what if that be not the end? What then?



May 16, 1890.


At present the new countryside is a great resource. I walk far
among the wolds; I find exquisite villages, where every stone-built
house seems to have style and quality; I come down upon green
water-meadows, with clear streams flowing by banks set with thorn-
bushes and alders. The churches, the manor-houses, of grey rubble
smeared with plaster, with stone roof-tiles, are a feast for eye
and heart. Long days in the open air bring me a dull equable health
of body, a pleasant weariness, a good-humoured indifference. My
mind becomes grass-grown, full of weeds, ruinous; but I welcome it
as at least a respite from suffering. It is strange to think of
myself at what ought, I suppose, to be the busiest and fullest time
of my life, living here like a tree in lonely fields. What would be
the normal life? A little house in a London street, I suppose, with
a lot of white paint and bookshelves. Luncheons, dinners, plays,
music, clubs, week-end visits to lively houses, a rush abroad, a
few country visits in the winter. Very harmless and pleasant if one
enjoyed it, but to me inconceivable and insupportable. Perhaps I
should be happier and brisker, perhaps the time would go quicker.
Ought one to make up one's mind that this would be the normal life,
and that therefore one had better learn to accommodate oneself to
it? Does one pay penalties for not submitting oneself to the
ordinary laws of human intercourse? Doubtless one does. But then,
made as I am, I should have to pay penalties which would seem to be
even heavier for the submission. It is there that the puzzle lies;
that a man should be created with the strong instinct that I feel
for liberty and independence and solitude and the quiet of the
country, and then that he should discover that the life he so
desires should be the one that develops all the worst side of him--
morbidity, fastidiousness, gloom, discontent. This is the shadow of
civilisation; that it makes people intellectual, alert, craving for
stimulus, and yet sucks their nerves dry of the strength that makes
such things enjoyable.

And still, as I go in and out, the death of Alec seems the one
absolutely unintelligible and inexplicable thing, a gloom
penetrated by no star. It was the one thing that might have made me
unselfish, tender-hearted, the anxious care of some other than
myself. "Perhaps," says an old friend writing to me with a clumsy
attempt at comfort, "perhaps he was taken mercifully away from some
evil to come." A good many people say that, and feel it quite
honestly. But what an insupportable idea of the ways of Providence,
that God had planned a prospect for the child so dreadful that even
his swift removal should be tolerable by comparison! What a
helpless, hopeless confession of failure! No; either the whole
short life, closed by the premature death, must have been designed,
planned, executed deliberately; or else God is at the mercy of
blank cross-currents, opposing forces, tendencies even stronger
than Himself; and then the very idea of God crumbles away, and God
becomes the blank and inscrutable force working behind a gentle,
good-humoured will, which would be kind and gracious if it could,
but is trammelled and bound by something stronger; that was the
Greek view, of course--God above man, and Fate above God. The worst
of it is that it has a horrible vraisemblance, and seems to lie
even nearer to the facts of life than our own tender-hearted and
sentimental theories and schemes of religion.

But whether it be God or fate, the burden has to be borne. And my
one endeavour must be to bear it myself, consciously and
courageously, and to shift it so far as I can from the gentler and
tenderer shoulders of those whose life is so strangely linked with
mine.



May 25, 1890.


One sees a house, like the house we now live in, from a road as one
passes, from the windows of a train. It seems to be set at the end
of the world, with the earth's sunset distance behind it--it seems
a fortress of quiet, a place of infinite peace; and then one lives
in it, and behold, it is a centre of a little active life, with all
sorts of cross-currents darting to and fro, over it, past it.

Or again one thinks, as one sees such a house in passing, that
there at least one could live in meditation and cloistered calm;
that there would be neither cares nor anxieties; that one would be
content to sit, just looking out at the quiet fields, pacing to and
fro, receiving impressions, musing, selecting, apprehending--and
then one lives there, and the stream of life is as turbid, as
fretful as ever. The strange thing is that such delusions survive
any amount of experience; that one cannot read into other lives the
things that trouble one's own.

A little definite scheme opens before us here; old friends of
Maud's find us out, simple, kindly, tiresome people. There is an
exchange of small civilities, there are duties, activities,
relationships. To Maud these things come by the light of nature; to
her the simplest interchange of definite thoughts is as natural as
to breathe. I hear her calm, sweet, full voice answering, asking.
To me these things are utterly wearisome and profitless. I want
only to speak of the things for which I care, and to people attuned
to the same key of thought; a basis of sympathy and temperamental
differences--that is the perfect union of qualities for a friend.
But these stolid, kindly parsons, with brisk, active wives,
ingenuous daughters, heavy sons--I want either to know them better,
or not to know them at all. I want to enter the house, the
furnished chambers of people's minds; and I am willing enough to
throw my own open to a cordial guest; but I do not want to stand
and chatter in some debatable land of social conventionality. I
have no store of simple geniality. The other night we went to dine
quietly with a parson near here, a worthy fellow, happy and useful.
Afterwards, in the drawing-room, I sate beside my host. I saw Maud
listening, with rapt interest, to the chronicles of all the village
families, robustly and unimaginatively told by the parson's wife;
meanwhile I, tortured by intolerable ennui, pumped up questions,
tried a hundred subjects with my worthy host. He told me long and
prolix stories, he discoursed on rural needs. At last I said that
we must be going; he replied with genuine disappointment that the
night was still young, and that it was a pity to break up our
pleasant confabulation. I saw with a shock of wonder that he had
evidently been enjoying himself hugely; that it was a pleasure to
him, for some unaccountable reason, not to hear a new person talk,
but to say the same things that he had said for years, to a new
person. It is not ideas that most people want; they are satisfied
with mere gregariousness, the sight and sound of other figures.
They like to produce the same stock of ideas, the same conclusions.
"As I always say," was a phrase that was for ever on my
entertainer's lips. I suppose that probably my own range is just as
limited, but I have an Athenian hankering after novelty of thought,
the new mintage of the mind. I loathe the old obliterated coinage,
with the stamp all rounded and faint. Dulness, sameness, triteness,
are they essential parts of life? I suppose it is really that my
nervous energy is low, and requires stimulus: if it were strong and
full, the current would flow into the trivial things. I derive a
certain pleasure from the sight of other people's rooms, the
familiar, uncomfortable, shabby furniture, the drift of pictures,
the debris of ornament--all that stands for difference and
individuality. But one can't get inside most people's minds; they
only admit one to the public rooms. A crushing fatigue and
depression settles down upon me in such hours, and then the old
blank sense of grief and loss comes flowing back--it is old
already, because it seems to have stained all the backward pages of
life; then follows the weary, restless night; and the breaking of
the grey, pitiless dawn.



June 3, 1890.


I do not want, even in my thoughts, to put the contemplative life
above the practical life. Highest of all I would put a combination
of the two--a man of high and clear ideals, in a position where he
was able to give them shape--a great constructive statesman, a
great educator, a great man of business, who was also keenly alive
to social problems, a great philanthropist. Next to these I would
put great thinkers, moralists, poets--all who inspire. Then I would
put the absolutely effective instruments of great designs--
legislators, lawyers, teachers, priests, doctors, writers--men
without originality, but with a firm conception of civic and human
duty. And then I would put all those who, in a small sphere,
exercise a direct, quiet, simple influence--and then come the large
mass of mankind; people who work faithfully, from instinct and
necessity, but without any particular design or desire, except to
live honestly, honourably, and respectably, with no urgent sense of
the duty of serving others, taking life as it comes, practical
individualists, in fact. No higher than these, but certainly no
lower, I should put quiet, contemplative, reflective people, who
are theoretical individualists. They are not very effective people
generally, and they have a certain poetical quality; they cannot
originate, but they can appreciate. I look upon all these
individualists, whether practical or theoretical, as the average
mass of humanity, the common soldiers, so to speak, as
distinguished from the officers. Life is for them a discipline, and
their raison d'etre is that of the learner, as opposed to that of
the teacher. To all of them, experience is the main point; they are
all in the school of God; they are being prepared for something.
The object is that they should apprehend something, and the channel
through which it comes matters little. They do the necessary work
of the world; they support themselves, and they support those who
from infirmity, weakness, age, or youth cannot support themselves.
There is room, I think, in the world for both kinds of
individualist, though the contemplative individualists are in the
minority; and perhaps it must be so, because a certain lassitude is
characteristic of them. If they were in the majority in any nation,
one would have a simple, patient, unambitious race, who would tend
to become the subjects of other more vigorous nations: our Indian
empire is a case in point. Probably China is a similar nation,
preserved from conquest by its inaccessibility and its numerical
force. Japan is an instance of the strange process of a
contemplative nation becoming a practical one. The curious thing is
that Christianity, which is essentially a contemplative,
unmilitant, unpatriotic, unambitious force, decidedly oriental in
type, should have become, by a mysterious transmutation, the
religion of active, inventive, conquering nations. I have no doubt
that the essence of Christianity lies in a contemplative
simplicity, and that it is in strong opposition to what is commonly
called civilisation. It aims at improving society through the
uplifting of the individual, not at uplifting the individual
through social agencies. We have improved upon that in our latter-
day wisdom, for the Christian ought to be inherently unpatriotic,
or rather his patriotism ought to be of an all-embracing rather
than of an antagonistic kind. I do not want to make lofty excuses
for myself; my own unworldliness is not an abnegation at all, but a
deliberate preference for obscurity. Still I should maintain that
the vital and spiritual strength of a nation is measured, not by
the activity of its organisations, but by the number of quiet,
simple, virtuous, and high-minded persons that it contains. And
thus, in my own case, though the choice is made for me by
temperament and circumstances, I have no pricking of conscience on
the subject of my scanty activities. It is not mere activity that
makes the difference. The danger of mere activity is that it tends
to make men complacent, to lead them to think that they are
following the paths of virtue, when they are only enmeshed in
conventionality. The dangers of the quiet life are indolence,
morbidity, sloth, depression, unmanliness; but I think that it
develops humility, and allows the daily and hourly message of God
to sink into the soul. After all, the one supreme peril is that of
self-satisfaction and finality. If a man is content with what he
is, there is nothing to make him long for what is higher. Any one
who looks around him with a candid gaze, becomes aware that our
life is and must be a provisional one, that it has somehow fallen
short of its possibilities. To better it is the best of all
courses; but next to that it is more desirable that men should hope
for and desire a greater harmony of things, than that they should
acquiesce in what is so strangely and sadly amiss.



June 18, 1890.


I have made a new friend, whose contact and example help me so
strangely and mysteriously, that it seems to me almost as though I
had been led hither that I might know him. He is an old and lonely
man, a great invalid, who lives at a little manor-house a mile or
two away. Maud knew him by name, but had never seen him. He wrote
me a courtly kind of note, apologising for being unable to call,
and expressing a hope that we might be able to go and see him. The
house stands on the edge of the village, looking out on the
churchyard, a many-gabled building of grey stone, a long flagged
terrace in front of it, terminated by posts with big stone balls; a
garden behind, and a wood behind that--the whole scene unutterably
peaceful and beautiful. We entered by a little hall, and a kindly,
plain, middle-aged woman, with a Quaker-like precision of mien and
dress, came out to greet us, with a fresh kindliness that had
nothing conventional about it. She said that her uncle was not very
well, but she thought he would be able to see us. She left us for a
moment. There was a cleanness and a fragrance about the old house
that was very characteristic. It was most simply, even barely
furnished, but with a settled, ancient look about it, that gave one
a sense of long association. She presently returned, and said,
smiling, that her uncle would like to see us, but separately, as he
was very far from strong. She took Maud away, and returning, walked
with me round the garden, which had the same dainty and simple
perfection about it. I could see that my hostess had the poetical
passion for flowers; she knew the names of all, and spoke of them
almost as one might of children. This was very wilful and
impatient, and had to be kept in good order; that one required
coaxing and tender usage. We went on to the wood, in all its summer
foliage, and she showed us a little arbour where her uncle loved to
sit, and where the birds would come at his whistle. "They are
looking at us out of the trees everywhere," she said, "but they are
shy of strangers"--and indeed we heard soft chirping and rustling
everywhere. An old dog and a cat accompanied us. She drew my
attention to the latter. "Look at Pippa," she said, "she is
determined to walk with us, and equally determined not to seem to
need our company, as if she had come out of her own accord, and was
surprised to find us in her garden." Pippa, hearing her name
mentioned, stalked off with an air of mystery and dignity into the
bushes, and we could see her looking out at us; but when we
continued our stroll, she flew out past us, and walked on stiffly
ahead. "She gets a great deal of fun out of her little dramas,"
said Miss ----. "Now poor old Rufus has no sense of drama or
mystery--he is frankly glad of our company in a very low and
common way--there is nothing aristocratic about him." Old Rufus
looked up and wagged his tail humbly. Presently she went on to talk
about her uncle, and contrived to tell me a great deal in a very
few words. I learnt that he was the last male representative of an
old family, who had long held the small estate here; that after a
distinguished Oxford career, he had met with a serious accident
that had made him a permanent invalid. That he had settled down
here, not expecting to live more than a few years, and that he was
now over seventy; it had been the quietest of lives, she said, and
a very happy one, too, in spite of his disabilities. He read a
great deal, and interested himself in local affairs, but sometimes
for weeks together could do nothing. I gathered that she was his
only surviving relation, and had lived with him from her childhood.
"You will think," she added, laughing, "that he is the kind of
person who is shown by his friends as a wonderful old man, and who
turns out to be a person like the patriarch Casby, in Little
Dorrit, whose sanctity, like Samson's, depended entirely upon the
length of his hair. But he is not in the least like that, and I
will leave you to find out for yourself whether he is wonderful or
not."

There was a touch of masculine irony and humour about this that
took my fancy; and we went to the house, Miss ---- saying that two
new persons in one afternoon would be rather a strain for her
uncle, much as he would enjoy it, and that his enjoyment must be
severely limited. "His illness," she said, "is an obscure one; it
is a want of adequate nervous force: the doctors give it names, but
don't seem to be able to cure or relieve it; he is strong,
physically and mentally, but the least over-exertion or over-strain
knocks him up; it is as if virtue went out of him; though a partial
niece may say that he has a plentiful stock of the material."

We went in, and proceeded to a small library, full of books, with a
big writing-table in the window. The room was somewhat dark, and
the feet fell softly on a thick carpet. There was no sort of luxury
about the room; a single portrait hung over the mantelpiece, and
there was no trace of ornament anywhere, except a big bowl of roses
on a table.

Here, with a low table beside him covered with books, and a little
reading-desk pushed aside, I found Mr. ---- sitting. He was
leaning forwards in his chair, and Maud was sitting opposite him.
They appeared to be silent, but with the natural silence that comes
of reflection, not the silence of embarrassment. Maud, I could see,
was strangely moved. He rose up to greet me, a tall, thin figure,
dressed in a rough grey suit. There was little sign of physical
ill-health about him. He had a shock of thick, strong hair,
perfectly white. His face was that of a man who lived much in the
open air, clear and ascetic of complexion. He was not at all what
would be called handsome; he had rather heavy features, big, white
eyebrows, and a white moustache. His manner was sedate and
extremely unaffected, not hearty, but kindly, and he gave me a
quick glance, out of his blue eyes, which seemed to take swift
stock of me. "It is very kind of you to come and see me," he said
in a measured tone. "Of course I ought to have paid my respects
first, but I ventured to take the privilege of age; and moreover I
am the obedient property of a very vigilant guardian, whose orders
I implicitly obey--'Do this, and he doeth it.'" He smiled at his
niece as he said it, and she said, "Yes, you would hardly believe
how peremptory I can be; and I am going to show it by taking
Mrs. ---- away, to show her the garden; and in twenty minutes
I must take Mr. ---- away too, if he will be so kind as help me
to sustain my authority."

The old man sate down again, smiling, and pointed me to a chair.
The other two left us; and there followed what was to me a very
memorable conversation. "We must make the best use of our time, you
see," he said, "though I hope that this will not be the last time
we shall meet. You will confer a very great obligation on me, if
you can sometimes come to see me--and perhaps we may get a walk
together occasionally. So we won't waste our time in conventional
remarks," he added; "I will only say that I am heartily glad you
have come to live here, and I am sure you will find it a beautiful
place--you are wise enough to prefer the country to the town, I
gather." Then he went on: "I have read all your books--I did not
read them," he added with a smile, "that I might talk to you about
them, but because they have interested me. May I say that each book
has been stronger and better than the last, except in one case"--he
mentioned the name of a book of mine--"in which you seemed to me to
be republishing earlier work." "Yes," I said, "you are quite right;
I was tempted by a publisher and I fell." "Well," he said, "the
book was a good one--and there is something that we lose as we grow
older, a sort of youthfulness, a courageous indiscretion, a
beautiful freedom of thought; but we can't have everything, and
one's books must take their appropriate colours from the mind. May
I say that I think your books have grown more and more mature,
tolerant, artistic, wise?--and the last was simply admirable. It
entirely engrossed me, and for a blessed day or two I lived in your
mind, and saw out of your eyes. I am sure it was a great book--a
noble and a large-hearted book, full of insight and faith--the
best kind of book." I murmured something; and he said, "You may
think it is arrogant of me to speak like this; but I have lived
among books, and I am sure that I have a critical gift, mainly
because I have no power of expression. You know the best kind of
critics are the men who have tried to write books, and have failed,
as long as their failure does not make them envious and ungenerous;
I have failed many times, but I think I admire good work all the
more for that. You are writing now?" "No," I said, "I am writing
nothing." "Well, I am sorry to hear it," he said, "and may I
venture to ask why?" "Simply because I cannot," I said; and now
there came upon me a strange feeling, the same sort of feeling that
one has in answering the questions of a great and compassionate
physician, who assumes the responsibility of one's case. Not only
did I not resent these questions, as I should often have resented
them, but it seemed to give me a sense of luxury and security to
give an account of myself to this wise and unaffected old man. He
bent his brows upon me: "You have had a great sorrow lately?" he
said. "Yes," I said, "we have lost our only boy, nine years old."
"Ah," he said, "a sore stroke, a sore stroke!" and there was a deep
tenderness in his voice that made me feel that I should have liked
to kneel down before him, and weep at his knee, with his hand laid
in blessing on my head. We sate in silence for a few moments. "Is
it this that has stopped your writing?" he said. "No," I said, "the
power had gone from me before--I could not originate, I could only
do the same sort of work, and of weaker quality than before."
"Well," he said, "I don't wonder; the last book must have been a
great strain, though I am sure you were happy when you wrote it. I
remember a friend of mine, a great Alpine climber, who did a
marvellous feat of climbing some unapproachable peak--without any
sense of fatigue, he told me, all pure enjoyment--but he had a
heart-attack the next day, and paid the penalty of his enjoyment.
He could not climb for some years after that." "Yes," I said, "I
think that has been my case--but my fear is that if I lose the
habit--and I seem to have lost it--I shall never be able to take it
up again." "No, you need not fear that," he replied; "if something
is given you to say, you will be able to say it, and say it better
than ever--but no doubt you feel very much lost without it. How do
you fill the time?" "I hardly know," I said, "not very profitably--
I read, I teach my daughter, I muddle along." "Well," he said,
smiling, "the hours in which we muddle along are not our worst
hours. You believe in God?" The suddenness of this question
surprised me. "Yes," I said, "I believe in God. I cannot
disbelieve. Something has placed me where I am, something urges me
along; there is a will behind me, I am sure of that. But I do not
know whether that will is just or unjust, kind or unkind,
benevolent or indifferent. I have had much happiness and great
prosperity, but I have had to bear also things which are
inconceivably repugnant to me, things which seem almost satanically
adapted to hurt and wound me in my tenderest and innermost
feelings, trials which seem to be concocted with an almost infernal
appropriateness, not things which I could hope to bear with courage
and faith, but things which I can only endure with rebellious
resistance." "Yes," he said, "I understand you perfectly; but does
not their very appropriateness, the satanical ingenuity of which
you speak, help you to feel that they are not fortuitous, but sent
deliberately to you yourself and to none other?" "Yes," I said, "I
see that; but how can I believe in the justice of a discipline
which I could not inflict, I will not say upon a dearly loved
child, but upon the most relentless and stubborn foe." "Ah," said
he, "now I see your heart bare, the very palpitating beat of the
blood. Do you think you are alone in this? Let me tell you my own
story. Over fifty years ago I left Oxford with, I really think I
may say, almost everything before me--everything, that is, which is
open to an instinctively cheerful, temperate, capable, active man--
I was not rich, but I could afford to wait to earn money. I was
sociable and popular; I was endowed with an immense appetite for
variety of experience; I don't think that there was anything which
appeared to me to be uninteresting. But I could persevere too, I
could stick to work, I had taken a good degree. Then an accidental
fall off a chair, on which I was standing to get a book, laid me on
my back for a time. I fretted over it at first, but when I got
about again, I found that I was a man maimed for life. I don't know
what the injury was--some obscure lesion of the spinal marrow or
brain, I believe--some flaw about the size of a pin's head--the
doctors have never made out. But every time that I plunged into
work, I broke down; for a long time I thought I should struggle
through; but at last I became aware that I was on the shelf, with
other cracked jars, for life--I can't tell you what I went through,
what agonies of despair and rebellion. I thought that at least
literature was left me. I had always been fond of books, and was a
good scholar, as it is called; but I soon became aware that I had
no gift of expression, and moreover that I could not hope to
acquire it, because any concentrated effort threw me into illness.
I was an ambitious fellow, and success was closed to me--I could
not even hope to be useful. I tried several things, but always with
the same result; and at last I fell into absolute despair, and just
lived on, praying daily and even hourly that I might die. But I did
not die, and then at last it dawned upon me, like a lightening
sunrise, that THIS was life for me; this was my problem, these my
limitations; that I was to make the best I could out of a dulled
and shattered life; that I was to learn to be happy, even useful,
in spite of it--that just as other people were given activity,
practical energy, success, to learn from them the right balance,
the true proportion of life, and not to be submerged and absorbed
in them, so to me was given a simpler problem still, to have all
the temptations of activity removed--temptations to which with my
zest for experience I might have fallen an easy victim--and to keep
my courage high, my spirit pure and expectant, if I could, waiting
upon God. This little estate fell to me soon afterwards, and I soon
saw what a tender gift it was, because it gave me a home; every
other source of interest and pleasure was removed, because the
simplest visits, the wildest distractions were too much for me--the
jarring of any kind of vehicle upset me. By what slow degrees I
attained happiness I can hardly say. But now, looking back, I see
this--that whereas others have to learn by hard experience, that
detachment, self-purification, self-control are the only conditions
of happiness on earth, I was detached, purified, controlled by God
Himself. I was detached, because my life was utterly precarious, I
was taught purification and control, because whereas more robust
people can defer and even defy the penalties of luxury, comfort,
gross desires, material pleasures, I was forced, every day and
hour, to deny myself the smallest freedom--I was made ascetic by
necessity. Then came a greater happiness still; for years I was
lost in a sort of individualistic self-absorption, with no thoughts
of anything but God and His concern with myself--often hopeful and
beautiful enough--when I found myself drawn into nearer and dearer
relationships with those around me. That came through my niece,
whom I adopted as an orphan child, and who is one of those people
who live naturally and instinctively in the lives of other people.
I got to know all the inhabitants of this little place--simple
country people, you will say--but as interesting, as complex in
emotion and intellect, as any other circle in the world. The only
reason why one ever thinks people dull and limited, is because one
does not know them; if one talks directly and frankly to people,
one passes through the closed doors at once. Looking back, I can
see that I have been used by God, not with mere compassion and
careless tenderness, but with an intent, exacting, momentary love,
of an almost awful intensity and intimacy. It is the same with all
of us, if we can only see it. Our faults, our weaknesses, our
qualities good or bad, are all bestowed with an anxious and
deliberate care. The reason why some of us make shipwreck--and even
that is mercifully and lovingly dispensed to us--is because we will
not throw ourselves on the side of God at every moment. Every time
that the voice says 'Do this,' or 'Leave that undone,' and we reply
fretfully, 'Ah, but I have arranged otherwise,' we take a step
backwards. He knocks daily, hourly, momently, at the door, and when
we have once opened, and He is entered, we have no desire again but
to do His will to the uttermost." He was silent for a moment, his
eyes in-dwelling upon some secret thought; then he said,
"Everything about you, your books, your dear wife, your words, your
face, tell me that you are very near indeed to the way--a step or
two, and you are free!" He sate back for a moment, as though
exhausted, and then said: "You will forgive me for speaking so
frankly, but I feel from hour to hour how short my time may be; and
I had no doubt when I saw you, even before I saw you, that I should
have some message to give you, some tidings of hope and patience."

I despair, as I write, of giving any idea of the impressiveness of
the old man; now that I have written down his talk, it seems abrupt
and even strained. It was neither. The perfect naturalness and
tranquillity of it all, the fatherly smile, the little gestures of
his frail hand, interpreted and filled up the gaps, till I felt as
though I had known him all my life, and that he was to me as a dear
father, who saw my needs, and even loved me for what I was not and
for what I might be.

At this point Miss ---- came in, and led me away. As Maud and I
walked back, we spoke to each other of what we had seen and heard.
He had talked to her, she said, very simply about Alec. "I don't
know how it was," she added, "but I found myself telling him
everything that was in my mind and heart, and it seemed as though
he knew it all before." "Yes, indeed," I said, "he made me desire
with all my heart to be different--and yet that is not true either,
because he made me wish not to be something outside of myself, but
something inside, something that was there all the time: I seem
never to have suspected what religion was before; it had always
seemed to me a thing that one put on and wore, like a garment; but
now it seems to me to be the most natural, simple, and beautiful
thing in the world; to consist in being oneself, in fact." "Yes,
that is exactly it," said Maud, "I could not have put it into
words, but that is how I feel." "Yes," I said, "I saw, in a flash,
that life is not a series of things that happen to us, but our very
selves. It is not a question of obeying, and doing, and acting, but
a question of being. Well, it has been a wonderful experience; and
yet he told me nothing that I did not know. God in us, not God with
us." And presently I added: "If I were never to see Mr. ---- again,
I should feel he had somehow done more for me than a hundred
conversations and a thousand books. It was like the falling of the
spirit at Pentecost."

That strange sense of an uplifted freedom, of willing co-operation
has dwelt with me, with us both, for many days. I dare not say that
life has become easy; that the cloud has rolled away; that there
have not been hours of dismay and dreariness and sorrow. But it is,
I am sure, a turning-point of my life; the way which has led me
downwards, deepening and darkening, seems to have reached its
lowest point, and to be ascending from the gloom; and all from the
words of a simple, frail old man, sitting among his books in a
panelled parlour, in a soft, summer afternoon.



July 10, 1890.


I have been sitting out, this hot, still afternoon, upon the lawn,
under the shade of an old lime-tree, with its sweet scent coming
and going in wafts, with the ceaseless murmur of the bees all about
it; but for that slumberous sound, the place was utterly still; the
sun lay warm on the old house, on the box hedges of the garden, on
the rich foliage of the orchard. I have been lost in a strange
dream of peace and thankfulness, only wishing the sweet hours could
stay their course, and abide with me thus for ever. Part of the
time Maggie sate with me, reading. We were both silent, but glad to
be together; every now and then she looked up and smiled at me. I
was not even visited by the sense that used to haunt me, that I
must bestir myself, do something, think of something. It is not
that I am less active than formerly; it is the reverse. I do a
number of little things here, trifling things they would seem, not
worth mentioning, mostly connected with the village or the parish.
My writing has retired far into the past, like a sort of dream. I
never even plan to begin again. I teach a little, not Maggie only,
but some boys and girls of the place, who have left school, but are
glad to be taught in the evenings. I have plenty of good easy
friends here, and have the blessed sense of feeling myself wanted.
Best of all, a sense of poisonous hurry seems to have gone out of
my life. In the old days I was always stretching on to something,
the end of my book, the next book--never content with the present,
always hoping that the future would bring me the satisfaction I
seemed to miss. I did not always know it at the time, for I was
often happy when I was writing a book--but it was, at best, a
rushing, tortured sort of happiness. My great sorrow--what has that
become to me? A beautiful thing, full of patience and hope. What
but that has taught me to learn to live for the moment, to take the
bitter experiences of life as they come, not crushing out the
sweetness and flinging the rind aside, but soberly, desirously,
only eager to get from the moment what it is meant to bring. Even
the very shrinking back from a bitter duty, the indolent rejection
of the thought that touches one's elbow, bidding one again and
again arise and go, means something; to defer one's pleasure, to
break the languid dream, to take up the tiny task, what strength is
there! Thus no burden seems too heavy, too awkward, too slippery,
too ill-shaped, but one can lift it. The yoke is easy, because one
bears it in quiet confidence, not overtaxing ability or straining
hope. Instead of watching life, as from high castle windows,
feeling it common and unclean, not to be mingled with, I am in it
and of it. And what is become of all my old dreams of art, of the
secluded worship, the lonely rapture! Well, it is all there,
somehow, flowing inside life, like a stream that is added to a
river, not like a leat drawn aside from the current. The force I
spent on art has gone to swell life and augment it; it heightens
perception, it intensifies joy--it was the fevered lust of
expression that drained the vigour of my days and hours.

But am I then satisfied with the part I play? Do I feel that my
faculties are being used, that I am lending a hand to the great sum
of toil? I used to feel that, or thought I felt it, in the old
days, but now I see that I walked in a vain delusion, serving my
own joy, my own self-importance. Not that I think my old toil all
ill-spent; that was my work before, as surely as it is not now; but
the old intentness, the old watching for tone and gesture, for
action and situation, that has all shifted its gaze, and waits upon
God. It may be, nay it is certain, that I have far to go, much to
learn; but now that I may perhaps recover my strength, life spreads
out into sunny shallows, moving slow and clear. It is like a soft
sweet interlude between two movements of fire and glow; for I see
now, what then I could not see, that something in my life was burnt
and shrivelled up in my enforced silence and in my bitter loss--
then, when I felt my energies at their lowest, when mind and bodily
frame alike flapped loose, like a flag of smut upon the bars of a
grate, I was living most intensely, and the soul's wings grew fast,
unfolding plume and feather. It was then that life burnt with its
fiercest heat, when it withdrew me, faintly struggling, away from
all that pleased and caressed the mind and the body, into the
silent glow of the furnace. Strange that I should not have
perceived it! But now I see in all maimed and broken lives, the
lives that seem most idle and helpless, most futile and vain, that
the same fierce flame is burning bright about them; that the reason
why they cannot spread and flourish, like flowers, into the free
air, is because the strong roots are piercing deep, entwining
themselves firmly among the stones, piercing the cold silent
crevices of the earth. Ay, indeed! The coal in the furnace, burning
passively and hotly, is as much a force, though it but lies and
suffers, as the energy that throbs in the leaping piston-rod or the
rushing wheel. Not in success and noise and triumph does the soul
grow; when the body rejoices, when the mind is prodigal of seed,
the spirit sits within in a darkened chamber, like a folded
chrysalis, stiff as a corpse, in a faint dream. But when triumphs
have no savour, when the cheek grows pale and the eye darkens, then
the dark chrysalis opens, and the rainbow wings begin to spread and
glow, uncrumpling to the suns of paradise. My soul has taken wings,
and sits poised and delicate, faint with long travail, perhaps to
hover awhile about the garden blooms and the chalices of honied
flowers, perhaps to take her flight beyond the glade, over the
forest, to the home of her desirous heart. I know not! Yet in these
sunlit hours, with the slow, strong pulse of life beating round me,
it seems that something is preparing for one struck dumb and
crushed with sorrow to the earth. How soft a thrill of hope throbs
in the summer air! How the bird-voices in the thicket, and the
rustle of burnished leaves, and the hum of insects, blend into a
secret harmony, a cadence half-heard! I wait in love and
confidence; and through the trees of the garden One seems ever to
draw nearer, walking in the cool of the day, at whose bright coming
the flowers look upwards unashamed. Shall I be bidden to meet Him!
Will He call me loud or low?



August 25, 1890.


Maud has been ailing of late--how much it is impossible to say,
because she is always cheerful and indomitable. She never
complains, she never neglects a duty; but I have found her, several
times of late, sitting alone, unoccupied, musing--that is unlike
her--and with a certain shadow upon her face that I do not
recognise; but the strange, new, sweet companionship in which we
live seems at the same time to have heightened and deepened. I seem
to have lived so close to her all these years, and yet of late to
have found a new and different personality in her, which I never
suspected. Perhaps we have both changed somewhat; I do not feel the
difference in myself. But there is something larger, stronger,
deeper about Maud now, as if she had ascended into a purer air, and
caught sight of some unexpected, undreamed-of distance; but instead
of giving her remoteness, she seems to be sharing her wider outlook
with me; she was never a great talker--perhaps it was that in old
days my own mind ran like an ebullient fountain, evoking no
definite response, needing no interchange; but she was always a
sayer of penetrating things. She has a wonderful gift of seeing the
firm issue through a cloud of mixed suggestions; but of late there
has been a richness, a generosity, a wisdom about her which I have
never recognised before. I think, with contrition, that I under-
estimated, not her judgment or instinct, but her intellect. I am
sure I lived too much in the intellectual region, and did not guess
how little it really solves, in what a limited region it disports
itself. I see that this wisdom was hers all along, and that I have
been blind to it; but now that I have travelled out of the
intellectual region, I perceive what a much greater thing that
further wisdom is than I had thought. Living in art and for art, I
used to believe that the intellectual structure was the one thing
that mattered, but now I perceive dimly that the mind is but on the
threshold of the soul, and that the artist may, nay does, often
perceive, by virtue of his trained perception, what is going on in
the sanctuary; but he is as one who kneels in a church at some
great solemnity--he sees the movements and gestures of the priests;
he sees the holy rite proceeding, he hears the sacred words;
something of the inner spirit of it all flows out to him; but the
viewless current of prayer, the fiery ray streaming down from God,
that smites itself into the earthly symbol--all this is hidden from
him. Those priests, intent upon the sacred work, feel something
that they not only do not care to express, but which they would not
if they could; it would be a profanation of the awful mystery. The
artist is not profane in expressing what he perceives, because he
can be the interpreter of the symbol to others more remote; but he
is not a real partaker of the mystery; he is a seer of the word and
not a doer. What now amazes me is that Maud, to whom the heart of
the matter, the inner emotion, has always been so real, could fling
herself, and all for love of me, into the outer work of
intellectual expression. I have always, God forgive me, believed my
work to be in some way superior to hers. I loved her truly, but
with a certain condescension of mind, as one loves a child or a
flower; and now I see that she has been serenely ahead of me all
the time, and it has been she that has helped me along; I have been
as the spoilt and wilful child, and she as the sweet and wise
mother, who has listened to its prattle, and thrown herself, with
all the infinite patience of love, into the tiny bounded dreams. I
have told her all this as simply as I could, and though she
deprecated it all generously and humbly, I feel the blessed sense
of having caught her up upon the way, of seeing--how dimly and
imperfectly!--what I have owed her all along. I am overwhelmed with
a shame which it is a sweet pleasure to confess to her; and now
that I can spare her a little, anticipate her wishes, save her
trouble, it is an added joy; a service that I can render and which
she loves to receive. I never thought of these things in the old
days; she had always planned everything, arranged everything,
forestalled everything.

I have at last persuaded her to come up to town and see a doctor.
We plan to go abroad for a time. I would earn the means if I could,
but, if not, we will sacrifice a little of our capital, and I will
replace it, if I can, by some hack-work; though I have a dislike of
being paid for my name and reputation, and not for my best work.

I am not exactly anxious; it is all so slight, what they call a
want of tone, and she has been through so much; even so, my anxiety
is conquered by the joy of being able to serve her a little; and
that joy brings us together, hour by hour.



September 6, 1890.


Again the shadow comes down over my life. The doctor says plainly
that Maud's heart is weak; but he adds that there is nothing
organically wrong, though she must be content to live the life of
an invalid for a time; he was reassuring and quiet; but I cannot
keep a dread out of my mind, though Maud herself is more serene
than she has been for a long time; she says that she was aware that
she was somehow overtaxing herself, and it is a comfort to be
bidden, in so many words, to abstain a little. We are to live
quietly at home for a while, until she is stronger, and then we
shall go abroad.

Maud does not come down in the mornings now, and she is forbidden
to do more than take the shortest stroll. I read to her a good deal
in the mornings; Maggie has proudly assumed the functions of
housekeeper; the womanly instinct for these things is astonishing.
A man would far sooner not have things comfortable, than have the
trouble of providing them and seeing about them. Women do not care
about comforts for themselves; they prefer haphazard meals, trays
brought into rooms, vague arrangements; and yet they seem to know
by instinct what a man likes, even though he does not express it,
and though he would not take any trouble to secure it. What
centuries of trained instincts must have gone to produce this. The
new order has given me a great deal more of Maggie's society. We
are sent out in the afternoon, because Maud likes to be quite alone
to receive the neighbours, small and great, that come to see her,
now that she cannot go to see them. She tells me frankly that my
presence only embarrasses them. And thus another joy has come to
me, one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me
in my life, and which I can hardly find words to express--the
contact with, the free sight of the mind and soul of an absolutely
pure, simple and ingenuous girl. Maggie's mind has opened like a
flower. She talks to me with perfect openness of all she feels and
thinks; to walk thus, hour by hour, with my child's arm through my
own, her wide-opened, beautiful eyes looking in mine, her light
step beside me, with all her pretty caressing ways--it seems to me
a taste of the purest and sweetest love I have ever felt. It is
like the rapture of a lover, but without any shadow of the desirous
element that mingles so fiercely and thirstily with our mortal
loves, to find myself dear to her. I have a poignant hunger of the
heart to save her from any touch of pain, to smooth her path for
her, to surround her with beauty and sweetness. I did not guess
that the world held any love quite like this; there seems no touch
of selfishness about it; my love lavishes itself, asking for
nothing in return, except that I may be dear to her as she to me.

Her fancies, her hopes, her dreams--how inexplicable, how adorable!
She said to me to-day that she could never marry, and that it was a
real pity that she could not have children of her own without. "We
don't want any one else, do we, except just some little children to
amuse us." She is a highly imaginative child, and one of our
amusements is to tell each other long, interminable tales of the
adventures of a family we call the Pickfords. I have lost all count
of their names and ages, their comings and goings; but Maggie never
makes a mistake about them, and they seem to her like real people;
and when I sometimes plunge them into disaster, she is so deeply
affected that the disasters have all to be softly repaired. The
Pickfords must have had a very happy life; the kind of life that
people created and watched over by a tender, patient and detailed
Providence might live. How different from the real world!

But I don't want Maggie to live in the real world yet awhile. It
will all come pouring in upon her, sorrow, anxiety, weariness, no
doubt--alas that it should be so! Perhaps some people would blame
me, would say that more discipline would be bracing, wholesome,
preparatory. But I don't believe that. I had far rather that she
learnt that life was tender, gentle and sweet--and then if she has
to face trouble, she will have the strength of feeling that the
tenderness, gentleness and sweetness are the real stuff of life,
waiting for her behind the cloud. I don't want to. disillusion her;
I want to establish her faith in happiness and love, so that it
cannot be shaken. That is a better philosophy, when all is said and
done, than the stoical fortitude that anticipates dreariness, that
draws the shadow over the sun, that overvalues endurance. One
endures by instinct; but one must be trained to love.



February 6, 1891.


It is months since I have opened this book; it has lain on my table
all through the dreadful hours--I write the word down
conventionally, and yet it is not the right word at all, because I
have merely been stunned and numbed. I simply could not suffer any
more. I smiled to myself, as the man in the story, who was broken
on the wheel, smiled when they struck the second and the third
blow. I knew why he smiled; it was because he had dreaded it so
much, and when it came there was nothing to dread, because he
simply did not feel it.

To-night I just pick up idly the dropped thread. Perhaps it is a
sign, this faint desire to make a little record, of the first
tingling of returning life. Something stirs in me, and I will not
resist it; it may be read by some one that comes after me, by some
one perhaps who feels that his own grief is supreme and unique, and
that no one has ever suffered so before. He may learn that there
have been others in the dark valley before him, that the mist is
full of pilgrims stumbling on, falling, rising again, falling
again, lying stupefied in a silence which is neither endurance nor
patience.

Maud was taken from me first; she went without a word or a sign.
She was better that day, she declared, than she had felt for some
time; she was on the upward grade. She walked a few hundred yards
with Maggie and myself, and then she went back; the last sight I
had of her alive was when she stood at the corner and waved her
hand to us as we went out of sight. I am glad I looked round and
saw her smile. I had not the smallest or faintest premonition of
what was coming; indeed, I was lighter of mood than I had been for
some time. We came in; we were told that she was tired and had gone
up to lie down. As she did not come down to tea, I went up and
found her lying on her bed, her head upon her hand--dead. The
absolute peace and stillness of her attitude showed us that she had
herself felt no access of pain. She had lain down to rest, and she
had rested indeed. Even at my worst and loneliest, I have been able
to be glad that it was even so. If I could know that I should die
thus in joy and tranquillity, it would be a great load off my mind.

But the grief, the shock to Maggie was too much for my dear, love-
nurtured child. A sort of awful and desperate strength came on me
after that; I felt somehow, day by day, that I must just put away
my own grief till a quiet hour, in order that I might sustain and
guard the child; but her heart was broken, I think, though they say
that no one dies of sorrow. She lay long ill--so utterly frail, so
appealing in her grief, that I could think of nothing but saving
her. Was it a kind of selfishness that needed to be broken down in
me? Perhaps it was! Every single tendril of my heart seemed to grow
round the child and clasp her close; she was all that I had left,
and in some strange way she seemed to be all that I had lost too.
And then she faded out of life, not knowing that she was fading,
but simply too tired to live; and my desire alone seemed to keep
her with me. Till at last, seeing her weariness and weakness, I let
my desire go; I yielded, I gave her to God, and He took her, as
though He had waited for my consent.

And now that I am alone, I will say, with such honesty as I can
muster, that I have no touch of self-pity, no rebellion. It is all
too deep and dark for that. I am not strong enough even to wish to
die; I have no wishes, no desires at all. The three seem for ever
about me, in my thoughts and in my dreams. When Alec died, I used
to wake up to the fact, day after day, with a trembling dismay. Now
it is not like that. I can give no account of what I do. The
smallest things about me seem to take up my mind. I can sit for an
hour by the hearth, neither reading nor thinking, just watching the
flame flicker over the coals, or the red heart of the fire eating
its way upwards and outwards. I can sit on a sunshiny morning in
the garden, merely watching with a strange intentness what goes on
about me, the uncrumpling leaf, the snowdrop pushing from the
mould, the thrush searching the lawn, the robin slipping from bough
to bough, the shapes of the clouds, the dying ray. I seem to have
no motive either to live or to die. I retrace in memory my walks
with Maggie, I can see her floating hair, and how she leaned to me;
I can sit, as I used to sit reading. by Maud's side, and see her
face changing as the book's mood changed, her clear eye, her strong
delicate hands. I seem as if I had awaked from a long and beautiful
dream. People sometimes come and see me, and I can see the pity in
their faces and voices; I can see it in the anxious care with which
my good servants surround me; but I feel that it is half
disingenuous in me to accept it, because I need no pity. Perhaps
there is something left for me to do in the world: there seems no
reason otherwise why I should linger here.

Mr. ---- has been very good to me; I have seen him almost daily. He
seems the only person who perfectly understands. He has hardly said
a word to me about my sorrow. He said once that he should not speak
of it; before, he said, I was like a boy learning a lesson with the
help of another boy, but that now I was being taught by the Master
Himself. That may be so; but the Master has a very scared and dull
pupil, alas, who cannot even discern the letters. I care nothing
whether God be pleased or displeased; I bear His will, without
either pain or resistance. I simply feel as if there had been some
vast and overwhelming mistake somewhere; a mistake so incredible
and inconceivable that nothing else mattered; as if--I do not speak
profanely--God Himself were appalled at what He had done, and dared
not smite further one whom He had stunned into silence and apathy.

With Mr. ---- I talk; he talks of simple, quiet things, of old
books and thoughts. He tells me, sometimes, when I am too weary to
speak, long, beautiful, quiet stories of his younger days, and I
listen like a child to his grave voice, only sorry when it comes to
an end. So the days pass, and I will not say I have no pleasure in
them, because I have won back a sort of odd childish pleasure in
small incidents, sights, and sounds. The part of me that can feel
seems to have been simply cut gently away, and I live in the hour,
just glad when the sun is out, sorry when it is dull and cheerless.

I read the other day one of my old books, and I could not believe
it was mine. It seemed like the voice of some one I had once known
long ago, in a golden hour. I was amused and surprised at my own
quickness and inventiveness, at the confidence with which I
interpreted everything so glibly and easily. I cannot interpret any
more, and I do not seem to desire to do so. I seem to wait, with a
half-amused smile, to see if God can make anything out of the
strange tangle of things, as a child peers in within a scaffolding,
and sees nothing but a forest of poles, little rising walls of
chambers, a crane swinging weights to and fro. What can ever come,
he thinks, out of such strange confusion, such fruitless hurry?

Well, I will not write any more; a sense of weariness and futility
comes over me. I will go back to my garden to see what I can see,
only dumbly and mutely thankful that it is not required of me to
perform any dull and monotonous task, which would interrupt my idle
dreams.



February 8, 1891.


I tried this morning to look through some of the old letters and
papers in Maud's cabinet. There were my own letters, carefully tied
up with a ribbon; letters from her mother and father; from the
children when we were away from them. I began to read, and was
seized with a sharp, unreasoning pain, surprised by sudden tears. I
seemed dumbly to resent this, and I put them all away again. Why
should I disturb myself to no purpose? "There shall be no more
sorrow nor crying, for the former things are passed away"--so runs
the old verse, and I had almost grown to feel like that. Why
distrust it? Yet I could not forbear. I got the papers out again,
and read late into the night, like one reading an old and beautiful
story. Suddenly the curtain lifted, and I saw myself alone, I saw
what I had lost. The ineffectual agony I endured, crying out for
very loneliness! "That was all mine," said the melting heart, so
long frozen and dumb. Grief, in waves and billows, began to beat
upon me like breakers on a rock-bound shore. A strange fever of the
spirit came on me, scenes and figures out of the years floating
fiercely and boldly past me. Was my strength and life sustained for
this, that I should just sleep awhile, and wake to fall into the
pit of suffering, far deeper than before?

If they could but come back to me for a moment; if I could feel
Maud's cheek by mine, or Maggie's arms round my neck; if they could
but stand by me smiling, in robes of light! Yet as in a vision I
seem to see them leaning from a window, in a blank castle-wall
rising from a misty abyss, scanning a little stairway that rises
out of the clinging fog, built up through the rocks and ending in a
postern gate in the castle-wall. Upon that stairway, one by one
emerging from the mist, seem to stagger and climb the figures of
men, entering in, one by one, and the three, with smiles and arms
interlaced, are watching eagerly. Cannot I climb the stair? Perhaps
even now I am close below them, where the mist hangs damp on rock
and blade? Cannot I set myself free? No, I could not look them in
the face, they would hide their eyes from me, if I came in hurried
flight, in passionate cowardice. Not so must I come before them, if
indeed they wait for me.

The morning was coming in about the dewy garden, the birds piping
faint in thicket and bush, when I stumbled slowly, dizzied and
helpless, to my bed. Then a troubled sleep; and ah, the bitter
waking; for at last I knew what I had lost.



February 10, 1891.


"All things become plain to us," said the good vicar, pulling on
his gloves, "when we once realise that God is love--Perfect Love!"
He said good-bye; he trudged off to his tea, a trying visit
manfully accomplished, leaving me alone.

He had sate with me, good, kindly man, for twenty minutes. There
were tears in his eyes, and I valued that little sign of human
fellowship more than all the commonplaces he courageously
enunciated. He talked in a soft, low tone, as if I was ill. He made
no allusions to mundane things; and I am grateful to him for
coming. He had dreaded his call, I am sure, and he had done it from
a mixture of affection and duty, both good things.

"Perfect Love, yes--if we could feel that!" I sate musing in my
chair.

I saw, as in a picture, a child brought up in a beautiful and
stately house by a grave strong man, who lavished at first love and
tenderness, ease and beauty, on the child, laughing with him, and
making much of him; all of which the child took unconsciously,
unthinkingly, knowing nothing different; running to meet his
guardian, glad to be with him, sorry to leave him.

Then I saw in my parable that one day, when the child played in the
garden, as he had often played before, he noticed a little green
alley, with a pleasant arch of foliage, that he had never seen
before, leading to some secluded place. The child was dimly aware
that there were parts of the garden where he was supposed not to
go; he had been told he must not go too far from the house, but it
was all vague and indistinct in his mind; he had never been shown
anything precisely, or told the limits of his wanderings. So he
went in joy, with a sense of a sweet mystery, down the alley, and
presently found himself in a still brighter and more beautiful
garden, full of fruits growing on the ground and on the trees,
which he plucked and ate. There was a building, like a pavilion, at
the end, of two storeys; and while he wandered thither with his
hands full of fruits, he suddenly saw his guardian watching him,
with a look he had never seen on his face before, from the upper
windows of the garden-house. His first impulse was to run to him,
share his joy with him, and ask him why he had not been shown the
delicious place; but the fixed and inscrutable look on his
guardian's face, neither smiling nor frowning, the stillness of his
attitude, first chilled the child and then dismayed him; he flung
the fruits on the ground and shivered, and then ran out of the
garden. In the evening, when he was with his guardian, he found him
as kind and tender as ever. But his guardian said nothing to him
about the inner garden of fruits, and the child feared to ask him.

But the next day he felt as though the fruits had given him a new
eagerness, a new strength; he hankered after them long, and at last
went down the green path again; this time the summer-house seemed
empty. So he ate his fill, and this he did for many days. Then one
day, when he was bending down to pluck a golden fruit, that lay
gem-like on the ground among green leaves, he heard a sudden step
behind him, and turning, saw his guardian draw swiftly near, with a
look of anger on his face; the next instant he was struck down,
again and again; lifted from the ground at last, as in a passion of
rage, and flung down bleeding on the earth; and then, without a
word, his guardian left him; at first he lay and moaned, but then
he crawled away, and back to the house. And there he found the old
nurse that tended him, who greeted him with tears and words of
comfort, and cared for his hurts. And he asked her the reason of
his hard usage, but she could tell him nothing, only saying that it
was the master's will, and that he sometimes did thus, though she
thought he was merciful at heart.

The child lay sick many days, his guardian still coming to him and
sitting with him, with gentle talk and tender offices, till the
scene in the garden was like an evil dream; but as his guardian
spoke no word of displeasure to the child, the child still feared
to ask him, and only strove to forget. And then at last he was well
enough to go out a little; but a few days after--he avoided the
inner garden now out of a sort of horror--he was sitting in the
sun, near the house, feebly trying to amuse himself with one of his
old games--how poor they seemed after the fruits of the inner
paradise, how he hankered desirously after the further place, with
its hot, sweet, fragrant scents, its rich juices!--when again his
guardian came upon him in a sudden wrath, and struck him many
times, dashing him down to the ground; and again he crept home, and
lay long ill, and again his guardian was unwearyingly kind; but now
a sort of horror of the man grew up in the mind of the child, and
he feared that his strange anger might break out at any moment in a
storm of blows.

And at last he was well again; and had half forgotten, in the
constant kindness, and even merriment, of his guardian, the horror
of the two assaults. He was out and about again; he still shunned
the paradise of fruits, but wearying of the accustomed pleasaunce,
he went further and passed into the wood; how cool and mysterious
it was among the great branching trees! the forest led him onwards;
now the sun lay softly upon it, and a stream bickered through a
glade, and now the path lay through thickets, which hid the further
woodland from view; and now passing out into a more open space, he
had a thrill of joy and excitement; there was a herd of strange
living creatures grazing there, great deer with branching horns;
they moved slowly forwards, cropping the grass, and the child was
lost in wonder at the sight. Presently one of them stopped feeding,
began to sniff the air, and then looking round, espied the child,
and began slowly to approach him. The child had no terror of the
great dappled stag, and held out his hand to him, when the great
beast suddenly bent his head down, and was upon him with one bound,
striking him with his horns, lifting him up, smiting him with his
pointed hooves. Presently the child, in his terror and faintness,
became aware that the beast had left him, and he began to drag
himself, all bruised as he was, along the glade; then he suddenly
saw his guardian approaching, and cried out to him, holding out his
hands for help and comfort--and his guardian strode straight up to
him, and, with the same fierce anger in his face, struck at him
again and again, and spurned him with his feet. And then, when he
left him, the child at last, with accesses of deadly faintness and
pain, crept back home, to be again tended by the old nurse, who
wept over him; and the child found that his guardian came to visit
him, as kind and gentle as ever. And at last one day when he sate
beside the child, holding his hand, stroking his hair, and telling
him an old tale to comfort him, the child summoned up courage to
ask him a question about the garden and the wood; but at the first
word his guardian dropped his hand, and left him without a word.

And then the child lay and mused with fierce and rebellious
thoughts. He said to himself, "If my guardian had told me where I
might not go; if he had said to me, 'in the inner garden are
unwholesome fruits, and in the wood are savage beasts; and though I
am strong and powerful, yet I have not strength to root up the
poisonous plants and make the place a wilderness; and I cannot put
a fence about it, or a fence about the wood, that no one should
enter; but I warn you that you must not enter, and I entreat you
for the love I bear you not to go thither,'" then the child thought
that he would not have made question, but would have obeyed him
willingly; and again he thought that, if he had indeed ventured in,
and had eaten of the evil fruits, and been wounded by the savage
stag, yet if his guardian had comforted him, and prayed him
lovingly not to enter to his hurt, that then he would have loved
his guardian more abundantly and carefully. And he thought too
that, if his guardian had ever smitten him in wrath, and had then
said to him with tears that it had grieved him bitterly to hurt
him, but that thus and thus only could he learn the vileness of the
place, then he would have not only forgiven the ill-usage, but
would even have loved to endure it patiently. But what the child
could not understand was that his guardian should now be tender and
gracious, and at another time hard and cruel, explaining nothing to
him. And thus the child said in himself, "I am in his power, and he
must do his will upon me; but I neither trust nor love him, for I
cannot see the reason of what he does; though if he would but tell
me the reason, I could obey him and submit to him joyfully." These
hard thoughts he nourished and fed upon; and his guardian came no
more to him for good or for evil; and the child, much broken by his
hard usage and his angry thoughts, crept about neglected and
spiritless, with nothing but fear and dismay in his heart.

So the imagination shaped itself in my mind, a parable of the sad,
strange life of man.

"Perfect Love!" If it were indeed that? Yet God does many things to
His frail children, which if a man did, I could not believe him to
be loving; though if He would but give us the assurance that it was
all leading us to happiness, we could endure His fiercest stroke,
His bitterest decree. But He smites us, and departs; He turns away
in a rage, because we have broken a law that we knew not of. And
again, when we seem most tranquil and blest, most inclined to trust
Him utterly, He smites us down again without a word. I hope, I
yearn to see that it all comes from some great and perfect will, a
will with qualities of which what we know as mercy, justice, and
love are but faint shadows--but that is hidden from me. We cannot
escape, we must bear what God lays upon us. We may fling ourselves
into bitter and dark rebellion; still He spares us or strikes us,
gives us sorrow or delight. My one hope is to cooperate with Him,
to accept the chastening joyfully and courageously. Then He takes
from me joy, and courage alike, till I know not whom I serve, a
Father or a tyrant. Can it indeed help us to doubt whether He be
tyrant or no? Again I know not, and again I sicken in fruitless
despair, like one caught in a great labyrinth of crags and
precipices.



February 14, 1891.


Then the Christian teacher says: "God has given you a will, an
independent will to act and choose; put it in unison with His
will." Alas, I know not how much of my seeming liberty is His or
mine. He seems to make me able to exert my will in some directions,
able to make it effective; and yet in other matters, even though I
see that a course is holy and beautiful, I have no power to follow
it at all. I see men some more, some less hampered than myself.
Some seem to have no desire for good, no dim perception of it. The
outcast child, brought up cruelly and foully, with vile
inheritances, he is not free, as I use the word; sometimes, by some
inner purity and strength, he struggles upwards; most often he is
engulfed; yet it is all a free gift, to me much, to another little,
to some nothing at all. With all my heart do I wish my will to be
in harmony with His. I yield it up utterly to Him. I have no
strength or force, and He withholds them from me. I do not blame, I
only ask to understand; He has given me understanding, and has put
in my heart a high dream of justice and love; why will He not show
me that He satisfies the dream? I say with the old Psalmist, "Lo, I
come," but He comes not forth to meet me; He does not even seem to
discern me when I am yet a long way off, as the father in the
parable discerned his erring son.

Then the Christian teacher says to me that all is revealed in
Christ; that He reconciles, not an angry God to a wilful world, but
a grieved and outraged world to a God who cannot show them He is
love.

Yet Christ said that God was all-merciful and all-loving, and that
He ordered the very falling of a single hair of our heads. But if
God ordered that, then He did not leave unordered the qualities of
our hearts and wills, and our very sins are of His devising.

No, it is all dark and desperate; I do not know, I cannot know; I
shall stumble to my end in ignorance; sometimes glad when a gleam
of sunshine falls on my wearied limbs, sometimes wrapping my
garments around me in cold and drenching rain. I am in the hand of
God; I know that; and I hope that I may dare to trust Him; but my
confidence is shaken as He passes over me, as the reed in the river
shakes in the wind.



February 18, 1891.


A still February day, with a warm, steady sun, which stole in and
caressed me, enveloping me in light and warmth, as I sate reading
this morning. If I could be ashamed of anything, I should be
ashamed of the fact that my body has all day long surprised me by a
sort of indolent contentment, repeating over and over that it is
glad to be alive. The mind and soul crave for death and silence.
Yet all the while my faithful and useful friend, the body, seems to
croon a low song of delight. That is the worst of it, that I seem
built for many years of life. Shall I learn to forget?

I walked long and far among the fields, in the fresh, sun-warmed
air. Ah! the sweet world! Everything was at its barest and
austerest--the grass thin in the pastures, the copses leafless. But
such a sense of hidden life everywhere! I stood long beside the
gate to watch the new-born lambs, whose cries thrilled plaintively
on the air, like the notes of a violin. Little black-faced grey
creatures, on their high, stilt-like legs--a week or two old, and
yet able to walk, to gambol, to rejoice, in their way, to reflect.
The bleating mothers moved about, divided between a deep desire to
eat, and the anxious care of their younglings. One of them stood
over her sleeping lamb, stamping her feet, to dismay me, no doubt,
while the little creature lay like a folded door-mat on the
pasture. Another brutally repelled the advances of a strange lamb,
butting it over whenever it drew near; another chewed the cud,
while its lamb sucked, its eyes half closed in contented joy, just
turning from time to time to sniff at the little creature pressed
close to its side. I felt as if I had never seen the sight before,
this wonderful and amazing drama of life, beginning again year
after year, the same, yet not the same.

The old shepherd came out with his crook, said a few words to me,
and moved off, the ewes following him, the lambs skipping behind.
"He shall feed me in a green pasture, and lead me forth beside the
waters of comfort." How perfectly beautiful and tender the image, a
thing seen how many hundred years ago on the hills of Bethlehem,
and touching the old heart just as it touches me to-day!

And yet, alas, to me to-day the image seems to miss the one thing
needful; how all the images of guide and guardian and shepherd fail
when applied to God! For here the shepherd is but a little wiser, a
little stronger than his flock. He sees their difficulties, he
feels them himself. But with God, He is at once the Guide, and the
Creator of the very dangers past which He would lead us. If we felt
that God Himself were dismayed and sad in the presence of evils
that He could not touch or remedy, we should turn to Him to help us
as He best could. But while we feel that the very perplexities and
sufferings come from His hand, how can we sincerely ask Him to
guard us from things which He originates, or at least permits? Why
should they be there at all, if His concern is to help us past
them; or how can we think that He will lead us past them, when they
are part of His wise and awful design?

And thus one plunges again into the darkness. Can it indeed be that
God, if He be all-embracing, all-loving, all-powerful, can create
or allow to arise within Himself something that is not, Himself,
alien to Him, hostile to Him? How can we believe in Him and trust
Him, if this indeed be so?

And yet, looking upon that little flock to-day, I did indeed feel
the presence of a kind and fatherly heart, of something that
grieved for my pain, and that laid a hand upon my shoulder, saying,
"Son, endure for a little; be not so disquieted!"



March 8, 1891.


Something--far-off, faint, joyful--cried out suddenly in the depths
of my spirit to-day. I felt--I can but express it by images, for it
was too intangible for direct utterance--as a woman feels when her
child's life quickens within her; as a traveller's heart leaps up
when, lost among interminable hills, he is hailed by a friendly
voice; as the river-water, thrust up into creeks and estuaries by
the incoming tide, is suddenly freed by the ebb from that stealthy
pressure, and flows gladly downwards; as the dark garden-ground may
feel when the frozen soil melts under warm winds of spring, and the
flower-roots begin to swell and shoot.

Some such thrill it was that moved in the silence of the soul,
showing that the darkness was alive.

It came upon me as I walked among soft airs to-day. It was no
bodily lightness that moved me, for I was unstrung, listless,
indolent; but it was a sense that it was good to live, lonely and
crushed as I was; that there was something waiting for me which
deserved to be approached with a patient expectation--that life was
enriched, rather than made desolate by my grief and losses; that I
had treasure laid up in heaven. It came upon me as a fancy, but it
was something better than that, that one or other of my dear ones
had perhaps awaked in the other world, and had sent out a thought
in search of me. I had often thought that if, when we are born into
this world of ours, our first years are so dumb and unperceptive,
it might be even so in the world beyond; that we are there allowed
to rest a little, to sleep; and that has seemed to me to be perhaps
the explanation why, in those first sad days of grief, when the
mourner aches to have some communication with the vanished soul,
and when the soul that has passed the bounds of life would be
desiring too, one would think, to send some message back, why, I
say, there is no voice nor hint nor sign. Perhaps the reason why
our grief loses its sting after a season is that the soul we have
loved does contrive to send some healing influence into the
desolate heart.

I know not; but as I stood upon the hill-top to-day at evening, the
setting sun gilding the cloud-edges, and touching the horizon with
a delicate misty azure, my spirit did indeed awake with a smile,
with a murmured word of hope.

If I, who have lost everything that can enrich and gladden life,
can yet feel that inalienable residue of hope, which just turns the
balance on the side of desiring still to live, it must be that life
has something yet in store for me--I do not hope for love, I do
not desire the old gift of expression again; but there is something
to learn, to apprehend, to understand. I have learnt, I think, not
to grasp at anything, not to clasp anything close to my heart; the
dream of possession has fled from me; it will be enough if, as I
learn the lesson, I can ease a few burdens and help frail feet
along the road. Duty, pleasure, work--strange names which we give
to life, perversely separating the strands of the woven thread,
they hold no meaning for me now--I do not expect to be free from
suffering or from grief; but I will no more distinguish them from
other experiences saying, this is joyful, and I will take all I
can, or this is sad, and I will fly from it. I will take life
whole, not divide it into pieces and choose. My grief shall be like
a silent chapel, lit with holy light, into which I shall often
enter, and bend, not to frame mechanical prayers, but to submit
myself to the still influence of the shrine. It is all my own now,
a place into which no other curious eye can penetrate, a guarded
sanctuary. My sorrow seems to have plucked me with a strong hand
out of the swirling drift of cares, anxieties, ambitions, hopes;
and I see now that I could not have rescued myself; that I should
have gone on battling with the current, catching at the river
wrack, in the hopes of saving something from the stream. Now I am
face to face with God; He saves me from myself, He strips my ragged
vesture from me and I stand naked as He made me, unashamed,
nestling close to His heart.



April 3, 1891.


A truth which has come home to me of late with a growing intensity
is that we are sent into the world for the sake of experience, not
necessarily for the sake of immediate happiness. I feel that the
mistake we most of us make is in reaching out after a sense of
satisfaction; and even if we learn to do without that, we find it
very difficult to do without the sense of conscious growth. I say
again that what we need and profit by is experience, and sometimes
that comes by suffering, helpless, dreary, apparently meaningless
suffering. Yet when pain subsides, do we ever, does any one ever
wish the suffering had not befallen us? I think not. We feel
better, stronger, more pure, more serene for it. Sometimes we get
experience by living what seems to be an uncongenial life. One
cannot solve the problem of happiness by simply trying to turn out
of one's life whatever is uncongenial. Life cannot be made into an
Earthly Paradise, and it injures one's soul even to try. What we
can turn out of our lives are the unfruitful, wasteful,
conventional things; and one can follow what seems the true life,
though one may mistake even that sometimes. One of the commonest
mistakes nowadays is that so many people are haunted with a vague
sense that they ought to DO GOOD, as they say. The best that most
people can do is to perform their work and their obvious duties
well and conscientiously.

If we realise that experience is what we need, and not necessarily
happiness or contentment, the whole value of life is altered. We
see then that we can get as much or even more out of the futile
hour when we are held back from our chosen delightful work, even
out of the dreary or terrified hour, when the sense of some
irrevocable neglect, some base surrender that has marred our life,
sinks burning into the soul, as a hot ember sinks smoking into a
carpet. Those are the hours of life when we move and climb; not the
hours when we work, and eat, and laugh, and chat, and dine out with
a sense of well-merited content.

The value of life is not to be measured by length of days or
success or tranquillity, but by the quality of our experience, and
the degree in which we have profited by it. In the light of such a
truth as this, art seems to fade away as just a pleasant amusement
contrived by leisurely men for leisurely men.

Then, further, one grows to feel that such easy happiness as comes
to us may be little more than the sweetening of the bitter
medicine, just enough to give us courage and heart to live on; that
applies, of course, only to the commoner sorts of happiness, when
one is busy and merry and self-satisfied. Some sorts of happiness,
such as the best kind of affection, are parts of the larger
experience.

Then, if we take hold of such experience in the right way,
welcoming it as far as possible, not resisting it or trying to
beguile it or forget it, we can get to the end of our probation
quicker; if, that is, we let the truth burn into us, instead of
timidly shrinking away from it.

This seems to me the essence of true religion; the people who cling
very close to particular creeds and particular beliefs seem to me
to lose robustness; it is like trying to go to heaven in a bath-
chair! It retards rather than hastens the apprehension of the
truth. Here lies, to my mind, the unreality of mystical books of
devotion and piety, where one is instructed to practise a servile
sort of abasement, and to beg forgiveness for all one's noblest
efforts and aspirations. Neither can I believe that the mystical
absorption, inculcated by such books, in the human personality, the
human sufferings of Christ, is wholesome, or natural, or even
Christian. I cannot imagine that Christ Himself ever recommended
such a frame of mind for an instant. What we want is a much simpler
sort of Christianity. If a man had gone to Christ and expressed a
desire to follow Him, Christ, I believe, would have wanted to know
whether he loved others, whether he hated sin, whether he trusted
God. He would not have asked him to recite the articles of his
belief, and still less have suggested a mystical and emotional sort
of passion for His own Person. As least I cannot believe it, and I
see nothing in the Gospels which would lead me to believe it.

In any case this belief in our experience being sent us for our
far-off ultimate benefit has helped me greatly of late, and will, I
am sure, help me still more. I do not practise it as I should, but
I believe with all my heart that the truth lies there.

After all, the truth IS there; it matters little that we should
know it; it is just so and not otherwise, and what we believe or do
not believe about it, will not alter it; and that is a comfort too.



April 24, 1891.


After I had gone upstairs to bed last night, I found I had left a
book downstairs which I was reading, and I went down again to
recover it. I could not find any matches, and had some difficulty
in getting hold of the book; it is humiliating to think how much
one depends on sight.

A whimsical idea struck me. Imagine a creature, highly intellectual,
but without the power of sight, brought up in darkness, receiving
impressions solely by hearing and touch. Suppose him introduced into
a room such as mine, and endeavouring to form an impression of the
kind of creature who inhabited it. Chairs, tables, even a musical
instrument he could interpret; but what would he make of a
writing-table and its apparatus? How would he guess at the use of a
picture? Strangest of all, what would he think of books? He would
find in my room hundreds of curious oblong objects, opening with a
sort of hinge, and containing a series of laminae of paper, which he
would discern by his delicacy of touch to be oddly and obscurely
dinted. Yet he would probably never be able to frame a guess that
such objects could be used for the communication of intellectual
ideas. What would he suppose them to be?

The thought expanded before me. What if we ourselves, in this world
of ours, which seems to us so complete, may really be creatures
lacking some further sense, which would make all our difficulties
plain? We knock up against all sorts of unintelligible and
inexplicable things, injustice, disease, pain, evil, of which we
cannot divine the meaning or the use. Yet they are undoubtedly
there! Perhaps it is only that we cannot discern the simplicity and
the completeness of the heavenly house of which they are the
furniture. Fanciful, of course; but I am inclined to think not
wholly fanciful.



May 10, 1891.


The question is this: Is there a kind of peace, of tranquillity,
attainable in this world, which is proof against all calamities,
sufferings, sorrows, losses, doubts? Is it attainable for one like
myself, who is sensitive, apprehensive, highly strung, at once
confident and timid, alive to impressions, liable to swift changes
of mood? Or is it a mere matter of mental, moral, and physical
health, depending on some balance of qualities, which may or may
not belong to a man, a balance which hundreds cannot attain to?

By this peace, I do not mean a chilly indifference, or a stoical
fortitude. I do not mean the religious peace, such as I see in some
people, which consists in holding as a certainty a scheme of things
which I believe to be either untrue or uncertain--and about which,
at all events, no certainty is logically and rationally possible.

The peace I mean is a frame of mind which a man would have, who
loved passionately, who suffered acutely, who desired intensely,
who feared greatly; and yet for whom, behind love and pain, desire
and fear, there existed a sort of inner citadel, in which his soul
was entrenched and impregnable.

Such a security could not be a wholly rational thing, because
reason cannot solve the enigmas with which we are confronted; but
it must not be an irrational intuition either, because then it
would be unattainable by a man of high intellectual gifts; and the
peace that I speak of ought to be consistent with any and every
constitution--physical, moral, mental. It must be consistent with
physical weakness, with liability to strong temptations, with an
incisive and penetrating intellectual quality; its essence would be
a sort of vital faith, a unity of the individual heart with the
heart of the world. It would rise like a rock above the sea, like a
lighthouse, where a guarded flame would burn high and steady,
however loudly the surges thundered below upon the reefs, however
fiercely the spray was dashed against the glasses of the casements.

If it is attainable, then it is worth while to do and to suffer
anything to attain it; if it is not attainable, then the best thing
is simply to be as insensible as possible, not to love, not to
admire, not to desire; for all these emotions are channels along
which the bitter streams of suffering can flow.

Prudence bids one close these channels; meanwhile a fainter and
remoter voice, with sweet and thrilling accents, seems to cry to
one not to be afraid, urges one to fling open every avenue by which
impassioned experiences, uplifting thoughts, noble hopes, unselfish
desires, may flow into the soul.

This peace I have seen, or dream that I have seen, in the faces and
voices of certain gracious spirits whom I have known. It seemed to
consist in an unbounded natural gratitude, a sweet simplicity, a
childlike affectionateness, that recognised in suffering the joy of
which it was the shadow, and in desperate catastrophes the hope
that lay behind them.

Such a peace must not be a surrender of anything, a feeble
acquiescence; it must be a strong and eager energy, a thirst for
experience, a large tolerance, a desire to be convinced, a resolute
patience.

It is this and no less that I ask of God.



June 6, 1891.


I had a beautiful walk to-day. I went a short way by train, and
descending at a wayside station, found a little field-path, that
led me past an old, high-gabled, mullioned farmhouse, with all the
pleasant litter of country life about it. Then I passed along some
low-lying meadows, deep in grass, where the birds sang sweetly,
muffled in leaves. The fields there were all full of orchids,
purple as wine, and the gold of buttercups floated on the top of
the rich meadow-grass. Then I passed into a wood, and for a long
time I walked in the green glooms of copses, in a forest stillness,
only the tall trees rustling softly overhead, with doves cooing
deep in the wood. Only once I passed a house, a little cottage of
grey stone, in a clearing, with an air of settled peace about it,
that reminded me of an old sweet book that I used to read as a
child, Phantastes, full of the mysterious romance of deep forests
and haunted glades. I was overshadowed that afternoon with a sense
of the ineffectiveness, the loneliness of my life, walking in a
vain shadow; but it melted out of my mind in the delicate beauty of
the woodland, with its wild fragrances and cool airs, as when one
chafes one's frozen hands before a leaping flame. They told me,
those whispering groves, of the patient and tender love of the
Father, and I drew very near His inmost heart in that gentle hour.
The secret was to bear, to endure, not stoically nor stolidly, but
with a quiet inclination of the will to sorrow and pain, that were
not so bitter after all, when one abode faithfully in them. I
became aware, as I walked, that my heart was with the future after
all. The beautiful dead past, I could be grateful for it, and not
desire that it were mine again. I felt as a man might feel who is
making his way across a wide moor. "Surely," he says to himself,
"the way lies here; this ridge, that dingle mark the track; it lies
there by the rushy pool, and shows greener among the heather." So
he says, persuading himself in vain that he has found the way; but
at last the track, plain and unmistakable, lies before him, and he
loses no more time in imaginings, but goes straight forward. It was
my sorrow, after all, that had shown me that I was in the true
path. I had tried, in the old days, to fancy that I was homeward
bound; sometimes it was in the love of my dear ones, sometimes in
the joy of art, sometimes in my chosen work; and yet I knew in my
heart all the time that I was but a leisurely wanderer; but now at
last the destined road was clear; I was no longer astray; I was no
longer inventing duties and acts for myself, but I had in very
truth a note of the way. It was not the path I should have chosen
in my blindness and easiness. But there could no longer be any
doubt about it. How the false ambitions, the comfortable schemes,
the trivial hopes melted away for me in that serene certainty! What
I had pursued before was the phantom of delight; and though I still
desired delight, with all the passion of my poor frail nature, yet
I saw that not thus could the real joy of God be won. It was no
longer a question of hope and disappointment, of sin and
punishment. It was something truer and stronger than that. The sin
and the suffering alike had been the Will of God for me. I had
never desired evil, though I had often fallen into it; but there
was never a moment when, if I could, I would not have been pure and
unselfish and strong. That was a blessed hour for me, when, in
place of the old luxurious delight, there came, flooding my heart,
an intense and passionate desire that I might accept with a loving
confidence whatever God might send; my wearied body, my tired,
anxious mind, were but a slender veil, rent and ruinous, that hung
between God and my soul, through which I could discern the glory of
His love.



June 20, 1891.


It was on a warm, bright summer afternoon that I woke to the sense
both of what I had lost and what I had gained. I had wandered out
into the country, for in those days I had a great desire to be
alone. I stood long beside a stile in the pastures, a little
village below me, and the gables and chimneys of an old farmhouse
stood up over wide fields of young waving wheat. A cuckoo fluted in
an elm close by, and at the sound there darted into my mind the
memory, seen in an airy perspective, of innumerable happy and
careless days, spent in years long past, with eager and light-
hearted companions, in whose smiling eyes and caressing motions was
reflected one's own secret happiness. How full the world seemed of
sweet surprises then! To sit in an evening hour in some quiet,
scented garden in the gathering dusk, with the sense of a delicious
mystery flashing from the light movements, the pensive eyes, the
curve of arm or cheek of one's companion, how beautiful that was!
And yet how simple and natural it seemed. That was all over and
gone, and a gulf seemed fixed between those days and these. And
then there came first that sad and sweet regret, "the passion of
the past," as Tennyson called it, that suddenly brimmed the eyes at
the thought of the vanished days; and there followed an intense
desire to live in it once again, to have made more of it, a
rebellious longing to abandon oneself with a careless disregard to
the old rapture.

Then on that mood, rising like a star into the blue spaces of the
evening, came the thought that the old days were not dead after
all. That they were assuredly there, just as the future was there,
a true part of oneself, ineffaceable, eternal. And hard on the
heels of that came another and a deeper intuition still, that not
in such delights did the secret really rest; what then was the
secret? It was surely this: that one must advance, led onward like
a tottering child by the strong arm of God. That the new knowledge
of suffering and sorrow was as beautiful as the old, and more so,
and that instead of repining over the vanished joys, one might
continue to rejoice in them and even rejoice in having lost them,
for I seemed to perceive that one's aim was not, after all, to be
lively, and joyful, and strong, but to be wiser, and larger-minded,
and more hopeful, even at the expense of delight. And then I saw
that I would not really for any price part with the sad wisdom that
I had reluctantly learnt, but that though the burden galled my
shoulder, it held within it precious things which I could not throw
away. And I had, too, the glad sense that even if in a childish
petulance I would have laid my burden down and run off among the
flowers, God was stronger than I, and would not suffer me to lose
what I had gained. I might, I assuredly should, wish to be more
free, more light of heart. But I seemed to myself like a woman that
had borne a child in suffering, and that no matter how restless and
vexatious a care that child might prove to be, under no conceivable
circumstances could she wish that she were barren and without the
experience of love. I felt indeed that I had fulfilled a part of my
destiny, and that I might be glad that the suffering was behind me,
even though it separated me from the careless days.

I hope that in after days I may sometimes make a pilgrimage to the
place where that wonderful truth thus dawned upon me. I have made a
tabernacle there in my spirit, like the saints who saw the Lord
transfigured before their eyes; and to me it had been indeed a
transfiguration, in which Love and sorrow and hope had been touched
with an unearthly light of God.



June 24, 1891.


Yesterday I was walking in a field-path through the meadows; it was
just that time in early summer when the grass is rising, when
flowers appear in little groups and bevies. There was a patch of
speedwell, like a handful of sapphires cast down. Why does one's
heart go out to certain flowers, flowers which seem to have some
message for us if we could but read it? A little way from the path
I saw a group of absolutely unknown flower-buds; they were big,
pale things, looking more like pods than flowers, growing on tall
stems. I hate crushing down meadow-grass, but I could not resist my
impulse of curiosity. I walked up to them, and just as I was going
to bend down and look at them, lo and behold, all my flowers opened
before my eyes as by a concerted signal, spread wings of the
richest blue, and fluttered away before my eyes. They were nothing
more than a company of butterflies who, tired of play, had fallen
asleep together with closed wings on the high grass-stems.

There they had sate, like folded promises, hiding their azure
sheen. Perhaps even now my hopes sit motionless and lifeless, in
russet robes. Perhaps as I draw dully near, they may spring
suddenly to life, and dance away in the sunshine, like fragments of
the crystalline sky.



July 8, 1891.


I was in town last week for a few days on some necessary business,
staying with old friends. Two or three people came in to dine one
night, and afterwards, I hardly know how, I found myself talking
with a curious openness to one of the guests, a woman whom I only
slightly knew. She is a very able and cultivated woman indeed, and
it was a surprise to her friends when she lately became a Christian
Scientist. When I have met her before, I have thought her a
curiously guarded personality, appearing to live a secret and
absorbing life of her own, impenetrable, and holding up a shield of
conventionality against the world. To-night she laid down her
shield, and I saw the beating of a very pure and loving heart. The
text of her talk was that we should never allow ourselves to
believe in our limitations, because they did not really exist. I
found her, to my surprise, intensely emotional, with a passionate
disbelief in and yet pity for all sorrow and suffering. She
appealed to me to take up Christian Science--"not to read or talk
about it," she said; "that is no use: it is a life, not a theory;
just accept it, and live by it, and you will find it true."

But there is one part of me that rebels against the whole idea of
Christian Science--my reason. I found, or thought I found, this
woman to be wise both in head and heart, but not wise in mind. it
seems to me that pain and sorrow and suffering are phenomena, just
as real as other phenomena; and that one does no good by denying
them, but only by accepting them, and living in them and through
them. One might as truly, it seems, take upon oneself to deny that
there was any such colour as red in the world, and tell people that
whenever they saw or discerned any tinge of red, it was a delusion;
one can only use one's faculty of perception; and if sorrow and
suffering are a delusion, how do I know that love and joy are not
delusions too? They must stand and fall together. The reason why I
believe that joy and love will in the end triumph, is because I
have, because we all have, an instinctive desire for them, and a no
less instinctive fear and dread of pain and sorrow. We may, indeed
I believe with all my heart that we shall, emerge from them, but
they are no less assuredly there. We triumph over them, when we
learn to live bravely and courageously in them, when we do not seek
to evade them or to hasten incredulously away from them. We fail,
if we spend our time in repining, in regretting, in wishing the
sweet and tranquil hours of untroubled joy back. We are not strong
enough to desire the cup of suffering, even though we may know that
we must drink it before we can discern the truth. But we may
rejoice with a deep-seated joy, in the dark hours, that the Hand of
God is heavy upon us. When our vital energies flag, when what we
thought were our effective powers languish and grow faint, then we
may be glad because the Father is showing us His Will; and then our
sorrow is a fruitful sorrow, and labours, as the swelling seed
labours in the sombre earth to thrust her slender hands up to the
sun and air. . . .

We two sate long in a corner of the quiet lamp-lit room, talking
like old friends--once or twice our conversation was suspended by
music, which fell like dew upon my parched heart; and though I
could not accept my fellow-pilgrim's thought, I could see in the
glance of her eyes, full of pity and wonder, that we were indeed
faring along the same strange road to the paradise of God. It did
me good, that talk; it helped me with a sense of sweet and tender
fellowship; and I had no doubt that God was teaching my friend in
His own fatherly way, even as He was teaching me, and all of us.



July 19, 1891.


In one of the great windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge,
there is a panel the beauty of which used to strike me even as a
boy. I used to wonder what further thing it meant.

It was, I believe--I may be wholly wrong--a picture of Reuben,
looking in an agony of unavailing sorrow into the pit from which
his brothers had drawn the boy they hated to sell him to the
Midianites. I cannot recollect the details plainly, and little
remains but a memory of dim-lit azure and glowing scarlet. Even
though the pit was quaintly depicted as a draw-well, with a solid
stone coping, the pretty absurdity of the thought only made one
love the fancy better. But the figure of Reuben!--even through an
obscuring mist of crossing leads and window-bars and weather
stains, there was a poignant agony wrought into the pose of the
figure, with its clasped hands and strained gaze.

I used to wonder, I say, what further thing it meant. For the deep
spell of art is that it holds an intenser, a wider significance
beneath its symbols than the mere figure, the mere action it
displays.

What was the remorse of Reuben? It was that through his weakness,
his complaisance, he had missed his chance of protecting what was
secretly dear to him. He loved the boy, I think, or at all events
he loved his father, and would not willingly have hurt the old man.
And now, even in his moment of yielding, of temporising, the worst
had happened, the child was gone, delivered over to what baseness
of usage he could not bear to think. He himself had been a traitor
to love and justice and light; and yet, in the fruitful designs of
God, that very traitorous deed was to blossom into the hope and
glory of the race; the deed itself was to be tenderly forgiven, and
it was to open up, in the fulness of days, a prospect of greatness
and prosperity to the tribe, to fling the seed of that mighty
family in soil where it was to be infinitely enriched; it was to
open the door at last to a whole troop of great influences,
marvellous events, large manifestations of God.

Even so, in a parable, the figure came insistently before me all
day, shining and fading upon the dark background of the mind.

It was at the loss of my own soul that I had connived; not at its
death indeed--I had not plotted for that--but I had betrayed
myself, I saw, year by year. I had despised the dreams and visions
of the frail and ingenuous spirit; and when it had come out
trustfully to me in the wilderness, I had let it fall into the
hands of the Midianites, the purloining band that trafficked in all
things, great and small, from the beast of the desert to the bodies
and souls of men.

My soul had thus lain expiring before my eyes, and now God had
taken it away from my faithless hands; I saw at last that to save
the soul one must assuredly lose it; that if it was to grow strong
and joyful and wise, it must be sold into servitude and dark
afflictions. I saw that when I was too weak to save it, God had
rent it from me, but that from the darkness of the pit it should
fare forth upon a mighty voyage, and be made pure and faithful in a
region undreamed of.

To Reuben was left nothing but shame and sorrow of heart and deceit
to hide his sin; unlike him, to me was given to see, beyond the
desert and the dwindling line of camels, the groves and palaces of
the land of wisdom, whither my sad soul was bound, lonely and
dismayed. My heart went out to the day of reconciliation, when I
should be forgiven with tears of joy for my own faltering
treachery, when my soul should be even grateful for my weakness,
because from that very faithlessness, and from no other, should the
new life be born.

And thus with a peaceful hope that lay beyond shame and sorrow
alike, as the shining plain lies out beyond the broken crags of the
weary mountain, I gave myself utterly into the Hands of the Father
of All. He was close beside me that day, upholding, comforting,
enriching me. Not hidden in clouds from which the wrathful trumpet
pealed, but walking with a tender joy, in a fragrance of love, in
the garden, at the cool of the day.



August 18, 1891.


Mr. ---- is dead. He died yesterday, holding my hand. The end was
quite sudden, though not unexpected. He had been much weaker of
late, and he knew he could only live a short time. I have been much
with him these last few days. He could not talk much, but there was
a peaceful glory on his face which made me think of the Pilgrims in
the Pilgrim's Progress whose call was so joyful. I never suspected
how little desire he had to live; but when he knew that his days
were numbered, he allowed something of his delight to escape him,
as a prisoner might who has borne his imprisonment bravely and sees
his release draw nigh. He suffered a good deal, but each pang was
to him only like the smiting off of chains. "I have had a very
happy life," he said to me once with a smile. "Looking back, it
seems as though my later happiness had soaked backwards through the
whole fabric, so that my joy in age has linked itself as by a
golden bridge to the old childish raptures." Then he looked
curiously at me, with a half-smile, and added, "But happy as I have
been, I find it in my heart to envy you. You hardly know how much
you are to be envied. You have no more partings to fear; your
beautiful past is all folded up, to be creased and tarnished no
more. You have had the love of wife and child--the one thing that I
have missed. You have had fame too; and you have drunk far deeper
of the cup of suffering than I. I look upon you," he said
laughingly, "as an old home-keeping captain, who has never done
anything but garrison duty, might look upon a young general who has
carried through a great campaign and is covered with signs of
honour."

A little while after he roused himself from a slumber to say, "You
will be surprised to find yourself named in my will; please don't
have any scruples about accepting the inheritance. I want my niece,
of course, to reign in my stead; but if you outlive her, all is to
go to you. I want you to live on in this place, to stand by her in
her loneliness, as a brother by a sister. I want you to help and
work for my dear people here, to be tender and careful for them.
There are many things that a man can do which a woman cannot; and
your difficulty will be to find a hem for your life. Remember that
there is no one who is injured by this--my niece is my only living
relation; so accept this as your post in life; it will not be a
hard one. It is strange," he added, "that one should cling to such
trifles; but I should like you to take my name, if you will; and
you must find some one to succeed you; I wish it could have been
your own boy, whom I have learnt to love."

Miss ---- came in shortly after, and Mr. ---- said to her, "Yes, I
have told him, and he consents. You do consent, do you not?" I
said, "Yes, dear friend, of course I consent; and consent
gratefully, for you have given me a work in the world." And then I
took Miss ----'s hand across the bed and kissed it; the old man
laid his hands upon our heads very tenderly and said, "Brother and
sister to the end."

I thought he was tired then, and made as if to leave him, but he
said, "Do not go, my son." He lay smiling to himself, as if well
pleased. Then a sudden change came over his face, and I saw that he
was going; we knelt beside him, and his last words were words of
blessing.



October 12, 1891.


This book has been my companion through some very strange, sad,
terrible, and joyful hours; my faithful companion, my silent
friend, my true confessor. I have felt the need of utterance, the
imperative instinct--the most primitive, the most childish of
instincts--to tell my pains and hopes and dreams. I could not utter
them, at the time, to another. I could not let the voice of my
groaning reach the ears of any human being. Perhaps it would have
been better for us both, if I could have said it all to my dearest
Maud. But a sort of courtesy forbade my redoubling my monotonous
lamentations; her burden was heavy enough without that. I can
hardly dignify it with the name of manliness or chivalry, because
my frame of mind during those first months, when I lost the power
of writing, was purely despicable; and then, too, I did not want
sympathy; I wanted help; and help no one but God could give me;
half my time was spent in a kind of dumb prayer to Him, that He
would give me some sort of strength, some touch of courage; for a
helpless cowardice was the note of my frame of mind. Well, He has
sent me strength--I recognise that now--not by lightening the load,
but by making it insupportably heavy and yet showing me that I had
the strength to carry it; I am still in the dark as to why I
deserved so sore a punishment, and I cannot yet see that the
loneliness to which He has condemned me is the help that is
proportioned to my need. But I walk no longer in a vain shadow. I
have known affliction by the rod of His wrath. But the darkness in
which I walk is not the darkness of thickening gloom, but the
darkness of the breaking day.

And then, too, I suppose that writing down my thoughts from day to
day just eased the dumb pain of inaction, as the sick man shifts
himself in his bed. Anyhow it is written, and it shall stand as a
record.

But now I shall write no more. I shall slip gratefully and securely
into the crowd of inarticulate and silent men and women, the vast
majority, after all, of humanity. One who like myself has the
consciousness of receiving from moment to moment sharp and clear
impressions from everything on earth, people, houses, fields,
trees, clouds, is beset by a kind of torturing desire to shape it
all in words and phrases. Why, I know not! It is the desire, I
suppose, to make some record of what seems so clear, so distinct,
so beautiful, so interesting. One cannot bear that one impression
that seems so vivid and strange should be lost and perish. It is
the artistic instinct, no doubt. And then one passes through the
streets of a great city, and one becomes aware that of the
thousands that pass one by, perhaps only one or two have the same
instinct, and even they are bound to silence by circumstance, by
lack of opportunity. The rest--life is enough for them; hunger and
thirst, love and strife, hope and fear, that is their daily meat.
And life, I doubt not, is what we are set to taste. Of all those
thousands, some few have the desire, and fewer still the power, to
stand apart from the throng. These are not content with the humdrum
life of earning a livelihood, of forming ties, of passing the time
as pleasantly as they can. They desire rather to be felt, to
exercise influence, to mould others to their will, to use them for
their convenience. I have had little temptation to do that, but my
life has been poisoned at its source, I now discern, by the desire
to differentiate myself from others. I could not walk faithfully in
the procession; I was as one who likes to sit securely in his
window above the street, noting all that he sees, sketching all
that strikes his fancy, hugging his pleasure at being apart from
and superior to the ordinary run of mortals. Here lay my chiefest
fault, that I could not bear a humble hand, but looked upon my
wealth, my loving circle, as things that should fence me from the
throng. I lived in a paradise of my own devising.

But now I have put that all aside for ever. I will live the life of
a learner; I will be docile if I can. I might indeed have been
stripped of everything, bidden to join the humblest tribe of
workers for daily bread. But God has spared my weakness, and I
should be faithless indeed, if, seeing how intently His will has
dealt with me, I did not recognise the clear guiding of His hand.
He has given me a place and a quiet work to do; these strange
bereavements, one after another, have not hardened me. I feel the
bonds of love for those whom I have lost drawn closer every hour.
They are waiting for me, I am sure of that. It is not reason, it is
not faith which prompts me; it is a far deeper and stronger
instinct, which I could not doubt if I would. What wonder if I look
forward with an eager and an ardent hope to death. I can conceive
no more welcome tidings than the tidings that death was at hand.
But I do not expect to die. My health of body is almost
miraculously preserved. What I dare to hope is that I may learn by
slow degrees to set the happiness of others above my own. I will
listen for any sound of grief or discontent, and I will try to
quiet it. I will spend my time and strength as freely as I can.
That is a far-off hope. One cannot in a moment break through the
self-consideration of a lifetime. But whereas, before, my dim
sense that happiness could not be found by deliberately searching
for ease made me half rebellious, half uncomfortable, I know now
that it is true, and I will turn my back if I can upon that lonely
and unsatisfied quest. I did indeed--I can honestly say that--
desire with a passionate intentness the happiness of Maud and the
children; but I think I desired it most in order that the sunshine
of their happiness should break in warmth and light upon myself. It
will be hard enough--I can see that--not to labour still for the
sake of the ultimate results upon my own peace of mind. But in my
deepest heart I do not desire to do that, and I will not, God
helping me.

And so to-day, having read the whole record once again, with
blinding tears, tears of love, I think, not tears of self-pity, I
will close the book and write no more. But I will not destroy it,
because it may help some soul that may come after me, into whose
hands it may fall, to struggle on in the middle of sorrow and
darkness. To him will I gladly reveal all that God has done for my
soul. That poor, pitiful, shrinking soul, with all its faint
desires after purity and nobleness and peace, all its self-wrought
misery, all its unhappy failures, all its secret faults, its
undiscerned weaknesses, I put humbly and confidently in the hands
of the God who made me. I cannot amend myself, but I can at least
co-operate with His loving Will. I can stumble onwards, with my
hand in His, like a timid child with a strong and loving father. I
may wish to be lifted in His arms, I may wonder why He does not
have more pity on my frailty. But I can believe that He is leading
me home, and that His way is the best and nearest.


THE END
The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Altar Fire
by Arthur Christopher Benson
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End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Altar Fire
by Arthur Christopher Benson