People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always
seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils
from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous
but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for
exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything
so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never
gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million
times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to
meet him in real life. The Yellow Pressman seems to have no power of
catching the first fresh fact about a man that dominates all after
impressions. For instance, before I met Bernard Shaw I heard that
he spoke with a reckless desire for paradox or a sneering hatred of
sentiment; but I never knew till he opened his mouth that he spoke with
an Irish accent, which is more important than all the other criticisms
put together.
Journalism is not personal enough. So far from digging out private
personalities, it cannot even report the obvious personalities on the
surface. Now there is one vivid and even bodily impression of this kind
which we have all felt when we met great poets or politicians, but which
never finds its way into the newspapers. I mean the impression that
they are much older than we thought they were. We connect great men with
their great triumphs, which generally happened some years ago, and many
recruits enthusiastic for the thin Napoleon of Marengo must have found
themselves in the presence of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic.
I remember reading a newspaper account of how a certain rising
politician confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of
boyhood. It described how his “brave young voice” rang in the rafters.
I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably
older than my own father. I mention this truth for only one purpose: all
this generalisation leads up to only one fact--the fact that I once met
a great man who was younger than I expected.
.....
I had come over the wooded wall from the villages about Epsom, and down
a stumbling path between trees towards the valley in which Dorking lies.
A warm sunlight was working its way through the leafage; a sunlight
which though of saintless gold had taken on the quality of evening. It
was such sunlight as reminds a man that the sun begins to set an instant
after noon. It seemed to lessen as the wood strengthened and the road
sank.
I had a sensation peculiar to such entangled descents; I felt that the
treetops that closed above me were the fixed and real things, certain as
the level of the sea; but that the solid earth was every instant failing
under my feet. In a little while that splendid sunlight showed only in
splashes, like flaming stars and suns in the dome of green sky. Around
me in that emerald twilight were trunks of trees of every plain or
twisted type; it was like a chapel supported on columns of every earthly
and unearthly style of architecture.
Without intention my mind grew full of fancies on the nature of the
forest; on the whole philosophy of mystery and force. For the meaning of
woods is the combination of energy with complexity. A forest is not
in the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense with delicacy. Unique
shapes that an artist would copy or a philosopher watch for years if he
found them in an open plain are here mingled and confounded; but it is
not a darkness of deformity. It is a darkness of life; a darkness of
perfection. And I began to think how much of the highest human obscurity
is like this, and how much men have misunderstood it. People will tell
you, for instance, that theology became elaborate because it was dead.
Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate; it
is only the live tree that grows too many branches.
.....
These trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out into
deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the evening was
so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all to
itself. I went along that road according to directions that had been
given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling beyond which the
wood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious courtesy
and fineness of that character I was to meet went out from him upon the
valley; for I felt on all these things the finger of that quality which
the old English called “faërie”; it is the quality which those can never
understand who think of the past as merely brutal; it is an ancient
elegance such as there is in trees. I went through the garden and saw
an old man sitting by a table, looking smallish in his big chair. He
was already an invalid, and his hair and beard were both white; not like
snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even
fierce; rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came up
quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand, and
I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young. He was the one
great man of the old world whom I have met who was not a mere statue
over his own grave.
He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about the
books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked
about the books he had not written. He unrolled a purple bundle of
romances which he had never had time to sell. He asked me to write one
of the stories for him, as he would have asked the milkman, if he had
been talking to the milkman. It was a splendid and frantic story, a sort
of astronomical farce. It was all about a man who was rushing up to the
Royal Society with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying
comet; and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped
up at every other minute by his own weakness and vanities; how he lost
a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling. That is only one
of them; there were ten or twenty more. Another, I dimly remember, was
a version of the fall of Parnell; the idea that a quite honest man might
be secret from a pure love of secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went
out of that garden with a blurred sensation of the million possibilities
of creative literature. The feeling increased as my way fell back into
the wood; for a wood is a palace with a million corridors that cross
each other everywhere. I really had the feeling that I had seen the
creative quality; which is supernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls
the Old Man of the Forest: I had seen an elf. The trees thronged behind
my path; I have never seen him again; and now I shall not see him,
because he died last Tuesday.