I have just finished a book and despatched it to the press. It is
rather a dreary moment that! At first one has a sense of relief at
having finished a task and set down a burden, but that elation lasts
only for a day or two, and then one begins to miss one's true and
faithful companion. This particular book has been in a special sense a
companion to me, because it has been a book out of my own mind and
heart, not a book undertaken for the sake of diffusing useful
information, but a book of which I conceived the idea, planned the
structure, and filled up the detail. It has almost assumed a
personality. It has hardly been absent from my thoughts for the last
six months. It has darted into my mind when I awoke; it has stood
looking over my shoulder as I read, pointing with airy finger at the
lines, "There is a thought for you; here is an excellent illustration
of that point you could not make clear." It has walked with me as close
or closer than my shadow, until it has become a real thing, a being, a
friend, like myself but yet not quite myself.
And then my book, as I read it through for the last time, is all full
of gentle and tender associations. This chapter brings back to me a day
of fierce wind and blustering rain, when I walked by sodden roads and
whistling hedges in my oldest clothes, till they hung heavily about me
and creaked as I moved; the thought of the chapter came to me, I
remember, when I decided that I had been far enough for health and even
for glory, and when I fled back before the hooligan wind; then followed
a long, quiet, firelit evening when I abandoned myself in luxurious
case to my writing, till the drowsy clock struck the small hours of the
morning. Then another chapter is all scented with the breath of roses,
that stole into my windows on a still summer evening; at another point
the page is almost streaked and stained for me with the sorrowful
tidings which came to me in the middle of a sentence; when I took up my
writing again some days after, it seemed as though there was a deep
trench between me and my former self. And again another chapter was
written in all the glow of a beautiful and joyful experience, in a day
of serene gladness which made me feel that it was worth while to have
lived, even if the world should hold nothing else that was happy for
me.
Thus, then, and thus has my life transferred itself to these pages,
till they are all full for me of joy and sorrow, of experience and
delight, I suppose that a painter or a musician have the same
tenderness about their work, though it seems to me impossible that
their life can have so flowed into picture or song as my life has
flowed into my book. The painter has had to transcribe what he sees,
the musician to capture the delicate intervals that have thrilled his
inner ear--but if the painter's thought has been absorbed in the forms
that he is depicting, if the musician has lost himself among the airy
harmonies, the sweet progressions, these things must have drawn them
away from life, and secluded them in a paradise of emotion; but with me
it has been different; for it is life itself that has palpitated in my
pages, my very heart's blood has been driven by eager pulsations
through sentence and phrase; and the book is thus a part of myself in a
way in which no picture and no melody can be. I have something, I
think, of the joy of the mother over her child, the child that has lain
beneath her bosom and been nourished from her heart; and now that my
book is to leave me, it is a part of myself that goes into the world of
men.
And now I shall pass vague and dreary days, until the seed of life
again quickens within me, and till I know again that I have conceived
another creature of the mind. Dreary days, because the mind, relieved
of its sweet toil, flaps loose and slack like a drooping sail. I am
weary, too, not with a pleasant physical weariness, but with the
weariness of one who has spent a part of life too swiftly. For the joy
of such work as mine is so great that there seems nothing like it in
the world; and the hours are vain and listless that are not so
comforted. Now I shall make a dozen beginnings, not foreseeing the end,
and I shall abandon them in despair. The beauties of the earth, the
golden sunlight, the crimson close of day, the leaping streams, the
dewy grass will call in vain. Books and talk alike will seem trivial
and meaningless tattle, ministering to nothing.
And then my book will begin to return to me in printed pages. Sometimes
that is a joy, when it seems better than one knew; sometimes it is a
disgust, if one has passed swiftly out of the creative mood; and then
it will be lost to me for a time while it is drest and adorned, to walk
abroad; till it comes back like a stranger in its new guise.
And then comes what is the saddest experience of all; it will pass into
the hands of friends and readers; echoes of it will come back to me, in
talk and print; but it will no longer be the book I knew and loved,
only a part of my past. And this is the hardest thing of all for a
writer, that when others read one's book they take it for the flash of
a present mood, while the writer of it will only see in it a pale
reflection of a time long past, and will feel perhaps even farther away
from his book than those who criticise it, however severely. If my book
is criticised as I write it, or directly after I have written it, it is
as though I were myself maltreated; but when it appears so belatedly,
I am often the harshest critic of all, because my whole point of view
may perhaps have shifted, and I may be no longer the man who wrote the
book, but a man of larger experience, who can judge perhaps more
securely than any one else how far behind life the book lags. There is
no season in the world in which the mind travels faster from its
standpoint than when it has finished a book, because during all the
writing of it one has kept, as it were, tensely and constrainedly at a
certain point; and so when freedom comes, the thought leaps hurriedly
forward, like a weight lifted by an elastic cord that has been
stretched almost to breaking. "Can I ever have thought or felt so?" the
mind says to itself, scanning the pages; and thus a book, which is
mistaken for the very soul of a man, is often no more like the man
himself than a dusty, sunburnt picture that represents what he was long
years before.
But to-day my only thought is that the little companion whom I loved so
well, who has walked and sate, eaten and drunk, gone in and out with
me, silent and smiling, has left me and departed to try his fortune in
the rough world. How will he fare? how will he be greeted? And yet I
know that when he returns to me, saying, "I am a part of yourself," I
shall be apt to deny it. For whereas now, if my child is lame, or
feeble or pitiful or blind, I love him the better that he is not strong
and active; when he returns I shall have a clear eye for his faults and
weaknesses, and shall wish him other than he will be.
Sometimes I have talked with the writers of books, and they have told
me of the misery and agony that the composition of a book has brought
them. They speak of hot and cold fits; of times when they write
fiercely and eagerly, and of times when they cannot set down a line to
their mind; days of despair when they hate and despise the book; days
when they cannot satisfy themselves about a single word: all this is
utterly unknown to me; once embarked upon a book, I have neither
hesitation nor fear. To sit down to it, day after day, and to write, is
like sitting down to talk with one's nearest friend, where no
concealment or diplomacy is necessary, but where one can say exactly
what comes into the mind, with no fear of being misunderstood. I have
not the smallest difficulty about expressing exactly as I wish to
express it, whatever is in my mind. When I fail, it is because the
thought itself is incomplete, imperfect, obscure; yet as I write,
weariness and dissatisfaction are unknown. I cannot imagine how anyone
can write a book without loving the toil, such as it is. Probably that
is because I am indolent or pleasure-loving. I do not see how work of
this kind can be done at all in a spirit of heaviness, it may be a fine
moral discipline to do a dreaded thing heavily and faithfully; but what
hope is there of the work being tinged with delight? It is as though a
tired man set out to make a butterfly out of cardboard and gum and
powdered silks; it would be nothing when it was made. A book must,
before all things, have vigour; and vigour cannot be germinated by a
sense of duty; it can only spring from hope and confidence and desire.
But now, to-day, my darling has gone from me; he is jolting in some
dusty van, or he is propelled through muddy streets in a red box on
wheels; or perhaps he is already in the factory among the rattle of
type and the throb of the printing-press. I feel like a father whose
boy has gone to school, and who sits wondering how the child may be
faring in the big, unfamiliar place. Well, I will not grieve; but
rather I will thank the Father of all things living, the inspirer of
all sweet and delicate thoughts, all pleasant fancies, all glowing
words, for the joy that I have had.