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.