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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,