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: