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, ineffective, it is a constant and a

weary effort. And what is more, I dislike sympathy. I would rather bear

a thing in solitude and silence. I have no self-pity, and it is

humiliating and weakening to be pitied. Yet of course Maud knows that I

am unhappy; and the wretchedness of it is that it has introduced a

strain into our relations which I have never felt before. I sit

reading, trying to pass the hours, trying to stifle thought. I look up

and see her eyes fixed on me full of compassion and love--and I do not

want compassion. Maud knows it, divines it all; but she can no more

keep her compassion hidden than I can keep my unrest hidden. I have

grown irritable, suspicious, hard to live with. Yet with all my heart

and soul I desire to be patient, tolerant, kindly, sweet-tempered.

FitzGerald said somewhere that ill-health makes all of us villains.

This is the worst of it, that for all my efforts I get weaker, more

easily vexed, more discontented. I do not and cannot trace the smallest

benefit which results to me or any one else from my unhappiness. The

shadow of it has even fallen over my relations with the children, who

are angelically good. Maggie, with that divine instinct which women

possess--what a perfectly beautiful thing it is!--has somehow contrived

to discern that things are amiss with me, and I can perceive that she

tries all that her little heart and mind can devise to please, soothe,

interest me. But I do not want to be ministered to, exquisite as the

instinct is in the child; and all the time I am as far off my object as

ever. I cannot work, I cannot think. I have said fine things in my

books about the discipline of reluctant suffering; and now my feeling

is that I could bear any other kind of trial better. It seems to be

given to me with an almost demoniacal prescience of what should most

dishearten me.

"It would not school the shuddering will

To patience, were it sweet to bear,"

says an old poet; and it is true, I have no doubt; but, good God, to

think that a man, so richly dowered as I am with every conceivable

blessing, should yet have so small a reserve of faith and patience!

Even now I can frame epigrams about it. "To learn to be content not to

be content"--that is the secret--but meanwhile I stumble in dark paths,

through the grove nullo penetrabilis astro, where men have wandered

before now. It seems fine and romantic enough, when one thinks of

another soul in torment. One remembers the old sage, reading quietly at

a sunset hour, who had a sudden vision of the fate that should befall

him. His book falls from his hands, he sits there, a beautiful and

venerable figure enough, staring heavily into the void. It makes me

feel that I shall never dare to draw the picture of a man in the grip

of suffering again; I have had so little of it in my life, and I have

drawn it with a luxurious artistic emotion. I remember once saying of a

friend that his work was light and trivial, because he had never

descended into hell. Now that I have myself set foot there, I feel art

and love, and life itself, shrivel in the relentless chill--for it is

icy cold and drearily bright in hell, not dark and fiery, as poets have

sung! I feel that I could wrestle better with the loss of health, of

wealth, of love, for there would be something to bear, some burden to

lift. Now there is nothing to bear, except a blank purposelessness

which eats the heart out of me. I am in the lowest place, in the

darkness and the deep.

January 8, 1889.

Snow underfoot this morning; and a brown blink on the horizon which

shows that more is coming. I have the odd feeling that I have never

really seen my house before, the snow lights it all up so strangely,

tinting the ceilings a glowing white, touching up high lights on the

top of picture-frames, and throwing the lower part of the rooms into a

sort of pleasant dusk.

Maud and the children went off this afternoon to an entertainment. I

accompanied them to the door; what a pretty effect the snow background

gives to young faces; it lends a pretty morbidezza to the colouring, a

sort of very delicate green tinge to the paler shades. That does not

sound as if it would be beautiful in a human face, but it is; the faces

look like the child-angels of Botticelli, and the pink and rose flush

of the cheeks is softly enriched and subdued; and then the soft warmth

of fair and curly hair is delicious. I was happy enough with them, in a

sort of surface happiness. The little waves at the top of the mind

broke in sunlight; but down below, the cold dark water sleeps still

enough. I left them, and took a long trudge among the valleys. Oh me!

how beautiful it all was; the snowy fields, with the dark copses and

leafless trees among them; the rich clean light everywhere, the world

seen as through a dusky crystal. Then the sun went down in state, and

the orange sky through the dark tree-stems brought me a thrill of that

strange yearning desire for something--I cannot tell what--that seems

so near and yet so far away. Yet I was sad enough too; my mind works

like a mill with no corn to grind. I can devise nothing, think of

nothing. There beats in my head a verse of a little old Latin poem, by

an unhappy man enough, in whose sorrowful soul the delight of the

beautiful moment was for ever poisoned by the thought that it was

passing, passing; and that the spirit, whatever joy might be in store

for it, could never again be at the same sweet point of its course. The

poem is about a woodcock, a belated bird that haunted the hanging

thickets of his Devonshire home. "Ah, hapless bird," he says, "for you

to-day King December is stripping these oaks; nor any hope of food do

the hazel-thickets afford." That is my case. I have lingered too late,

trusting to the ease and prodigal wealth of the summer, and now the

woods stand bare about me, while my comrades have taken wing for the

South. The beady eye, the puffed feathers grow sick and dulled with

hunger. Why cannot I rest a little in the beauty all about me? Take it

home to my shivering soul? Nay, I will not complain, even to myself.

I came back at sundown, through the silent garden, all shrouded and

muffled with snow. The snow lay on the house, outlining the cornices,

cresting the roof-tiles, crusted sharply on the cupola, whitening the

tall chimney-stacks. The comfortable smoke went up into the still air,

and the firelight darted in the rooms. What a sense of beautiful

permanence, sweet hopefulness, fireside warmth it all gave; and it is

real as well. No life that I could have devised is so rich in love and

tranquillity as mine; everything to give me content, except the

contented mind. Why cannot I enter, seat myself in the warm firelight,

open a book, and let the old beautiful thoughts flow into my mind, till

the voices of wife and children return to gladden me, and I listen to

all that they have seen and done? Why should I rather sit, like a

disconsolate child among its bricks, feebly and sadly planning new

combinations and fantastic designs? I have done as much and more than

most of my contemporaries; what is this insensate hunger of the spirit

that urges me to work that I cannot do, for rewards that I do not want?

Why cannot I be content to dream and drowse a little?

"Rest, then, and rest

And think of the best,

'Twixt summer and spring,

When no birds sing."

That is what I desire to do, and cannot. It is as though some creeper

that had enfolded and enringed a house with its tendrils, creeping

under window-ledges and across mellow brickwork, had been suddenly cut

off at the root, and hung faded and lustreless, not even daring to be

torn away. Yet I am alive and well, my mind is alert and vigorous, I

have no cares or anxieties, except that my heart seems hollow at the

core.

January 12, 1889.

I have had a very bad time of late. It seems futile to say anything

about it, and the plain man would rub his eyes, and wonder where the

misery lay. I have been perfectly well, and everything has gone

smoothly; but I cannot write. I have begun half-a-dozen books. I have

searched my notes through and through. I have sketched plots, written

scenes. I cannot go on with any of them. I have torn up chapters with

fierce disgust, or have laid them quietly aside. There is no vitality

in them. If I read them aloud to any one, he would wonder what was

wrong--they are as well written as my other books, as amusing, as

interesting. But it is all without energy or invention, it is all worse

than my best. The people are puppets, their words are pumped up out of

a stagnant reservoir. Everything I do reminds me of something I have

done before. If I could bring myself to finish one of these books, I

could get money and praise enough. Many people would not know the

difference. But the real and true critic would see through them; he

would discern that I had lost the secret. I think that perhaps I ought

to be content to work dully and faithfully on, to finish the poor dead

thing, to compose its dead limbs decently, to lay it out. But I cannot

do that, though it might be a moral discipline. I am not conscious of

the least mental fatigue, or loss of power--quite the reverse. I hunger

and thirst to write, but I have no invention.

The worst of it is that it reveals to me how much the whole of my life

was built up round the hours I gave to writing. I used to read, write

letters, do business in the morning, holding myself back from the

beloved task, not thinking over it, not anticipating the pleasure, yet

aware that some secret germination was going on among the cells of the

brain. Then came the afternoon, the walk or ride, and then at last

after tea arrived the blessed hour. The chapter was all ready to be

written, and the thing flowed equably and clearly from the pen. The

passage written, I would turn to some previous chapter, which had been

type-written, smooth out the creases, enrich the dialogue, retouch the

descriptions, omit, correct, clarify. Perhaps in the evening I would

read a passage aloud, if we were alone; and how often would Maud, with

her perfect instinct, lay her finger on a weak place, show me that

something was abrupt or lengthy, expose an unreal emotion, or, best of

all, generously and whole-heartedly approve. It seems now, looking back

upon it, that it was all impossibly happy and delightful, too good to

be true. Yet I have everything that I had, except my unhappy writing;

and the want of it poisons life. I no longer seem to lie pleasantly in

ambush for pretty traits of character, humorous situations, delicate

nuances of talk. I look blankly at garden, field, and wood, because I

cannot draw from them the setting that I want. Even my close and

intimate companionship with Maud seems to have suffered, for I was like

a child, bringing the little wonders that it finds by the hedgerow to

be looked at by a loving eye. Maud is angelically tender, kind, sweet.

She tells me only to wait; she draws me on to talk; she surrounds me

with love and care. And in the midst of it all I sit, in dry misery,

hating myself for my feebleness and cowardice, keeping as far as

possible my pain to myself, brooding, feverishly straining, struggling

hopelessly to recover the clue. The savour has gone out of life; I feel

widowed, frozen, desolate. How often have I tranquilly and

good-humouredly contemplated the time when I need write no more, when

my work should be done, when I should have said all I had to say, and

could take life as it came, soberly and wisely. Now that the end has

come of itself, I feel like a hopeless prisoner, with death the only

escape from a bitter and disconsolate solitude.

Can I not amuse myself with books, pictures, talk? No, because it is

all a purposeless passing of dreary hours. Before, there was always an

object ahead of me, a light to which I made my way; and all the

pleasant incidents of life were things to guide me, and to beguile the

plodding path. Now I am adrift; I need go neither forwards nor

backwards; and the things which before were gentle and quiet

occupations have become duties to be drearily fulfilled.

I have put down here exactly what I feel. It is not cowardice that

makes me do it, but a desire to face the situation, exactly as it is.

Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit! And in any case nothing can be

done by blinking the truth. I shall need all my courage and all my

resolution to meet it, and I shall meet it as manfully as I can. Yet

the thought of meeting it thus has no inspiration in it. My only desire

is that the frozen mind may melt at the touch of some genial ray, and

that the buds may prick and unfold upon the shrunken bough.

January 15, 1889.

One of the miseries of my present situation is that it is all so

intangible, and to the outsider so incomprehensible. There is no

particular reason why I should write. I do not need the money; I

believe I do not desire fame. Let me try to be perfectly frank about

this; I do not at all desire the tangible results of fame, invitations

to banquets, requests to deliver lectures, the acquaintance of notable

people, laudatory reviews. I like a quiet life; I do not want monstrari

digito, as Horace says. I have had a taste of all of these things, and

they do not amuse me, though I confess that I thought they would. I

feel in this rather as Tennyson felt--that I dislike contemptuous

criticism, and do not value praise--except the praise of a very few,

the masters of the craft. And this one does not get, because the great

men are mostly too much occupied in producing their own masterpieces to

have the time or inclination to appraise others. Yet I am sure there is

a vile fibre of ambition lurking in me, interwoven with my nature,

which I cannot exactly disentangle. I very earnestly desire to do good

and fine work, to write great books. If I genuinely and critically

approved of my own work, I could go on writing for the mere pleasure of

it, in the face of universal neglect. But one may take it for granted

that unless one is working on very novel and original lines--and I am

not--the good qualities of one's work are not likely to escape

attention. The reason why Keats, and Shelley, and Tennyson, and

Wordsworth were decried, was because their work was so unusual, so new,

that conventional critics could not understand it. But I am using a

perfectly familiar medium, and there is a large and acute band of

critics who are looking out for interesting work in the region of

novels. Besides I have arrived at the point of having a vogue, so that

anything I write would be treated with a certain respect. Where my

ambition comes in is in the desire not to fall below my standard. I

suppose that while I feel that I do not rate the judgment of the

ordinary critic highly, I have an instinctive sense that my work is

worthy of his admiration. The pain I feel is the sort of pain that an

athlete feels who has established, say, a record in high-jumping, and

finds that he can no longer hurl his stiffening legs and portly frame

over the lath. Well, I have always held strongly that men ought to know

when to stop. There is nothing more melancholy and contemptible than to

see a successful man, who has brought out a brood of fine things,

sitting meekly on addled eggs, or, still worse, squatting complacently

among eggshells. It is like the story of the old tiresome Breton farmer

whose wife was so annoyed by his ineffective fussiness, that she clapt

him down to sit on a clutch of stone eggs for the rest of his life. How

often have I thought how deplorable it was to see a man issuing a

series of books, every one of which is feebler than its predecessor,

dishing up the old characters, the stale ideas, the used-up

backgrounds. I have always hoped that some one would be kind and brave

enough to tell me when I did that. But now that the end seems to have

come to me naturally and spontaneously, I cannot accept my defeat. I am

like the monkey of whom Frank Buckland wrote, who got into the kettle

when the water was lukewarm, and found the outer air so cold whenever

he attempted to leave it, that he was eventually very nearly boiled

alive. The fact that my occupation is gone leaves life hollow to the

core. Perhaps a wise man would content himself with composing some

placid literary essays, selecting some lesser figure in the world of

letters, collecting gossip, and what are called "side-lights," about

him, visiting his birthplace and early haunts, criticising his

writings. That would be a harmless way of filling the time. But any one

who has ever tried creative work gets filled with a nauseating disgust

for making books out of other people's writings, and constructing a

kind of resurrection-pie out of the shreds. Moreover I know nothing

except literature; I could only write a literary biography; and it has

always seemed to me a painful irony that men who have put into their

writings what other people put into deeds and acts should be the very

people whose lives are sedulously written and rewritten, generation

after generation. The instinct is natural enough. The vivid memories of

statesmen and generals fade; but as long as we have the fascinating and

adorable reveries of great spirits, we are consumed with a desire to

reconstruct their surroundings, that we may learn where they found

their inspiration. A great poet, a great imaginative writer, so

glorifies and irradiates the scene in which his mighty thoughts came to

him, that we cannot help fancying that the secret lies in crag and hill

and lake, rather than in the mind that gathered in the common joy. I

have a passion for visiting the haunts of genius, but rather because

they teach me that inspiration lies everywhere, if we can but perceive

it, than because I hope to detect where the particular charm lay. And

so I am driven back upon my own poor imagination. I say to myself, like

Samson, "I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself," and

then the end of the verse falls on me like a shadow--"and he wist not

that the Lord was departed from him."

January 18, 1889.

Nothing the matter, and yet everything the matter! I plough on drearily

enough, like a vessel forging slowly ahead against a strong, ugly,

muddy stream. I seem to gain nothing, neither hope, patience, nor

strength. My spirit revolted at first, but now I have lost the heart

even for that: I simply bear my burden and wait. One tends to think, at

such times, that no one has ever passed through a similar experience

before; and the isolation in which one moves is the hardest part of it

all. Alone, and cut off even from God! If one felt that one was

learning something, gaining power or courage, one could bear it

cheerfully; but I feel rather as though all my vitality and moral

strength was being pressed and drained from me. Yet I do not desire

death and silence. I rather crave for life and light.

No, I am not describing my state fairly. At times I have a sense that

something, some power, some great influence, is trying to communicate

with me, to deliver me some message. There are many hours when it is

not so, when my nerveless brain seems losing its hold, slipping off

into some dark confusion of sense. Yet again there are other moments,

when sights and sounds have an overpowering and awful significance;

when the gleams of some tremendous secret seemed flashed upon my mind,

at the sight of the mist-hung valley with its leafless woods and level

water-meadows; the flaring pomp of sunset hung low in the west over the

bare ploughland or the wide-watered plain; the wailing of the wind

round the firelit house; the faint twitter of awakening birds in the

ivy; the voice and smile of my children; the music breaking the silence

of the house at evening. In a moment the sensation comes over me, that

the sound or sight is sent not vaguely or lightly, but deliberately

shown to me, for some great purpose, if I could but divine it; an

oracle of God, if I could but catch the words He utters in the darkness

and the silence.

February 1, 1889.

My dissatisfaction and depression begin to tell on me. I grow nervous

and strained; I am often sleepless, or my sleep is filled by vivid,

horrible, intolerable dreams. I wake early in the clutch of fear. I

wrestle at times with intolerable irritability; social gatherings

become unbearable; I have all sorts of unmanning sensations,

dizzinesses, tremors; I have that dreadful sensation that my

consciousness of things and people around me is slipping away from me,

and that only by a strong effort can one retain one's hold upon them. I

fall into a sort of dull reverie, and come back to the real world with

a shock of surprise and almost horror. I went the other day to consult

a great doctor about this. He reassured me; he laughed at my fears; he

told me that it was a kind of neurasthenia, not fanciful but real; that

my brain had been overworked, and was taking its revenge; that it was

insufficiently nourished, and so forth. He knew who I was, and treated

me with a respectful sympathy. I told him I had taken a prolonged

holiday since my last book, and he replied that it had not been long

enough. "You must take it easy," he said. "Don't do anything you don't

like." I replied that the difficulty was to find anything I did like.

He smiled at this, and said that I need not be afraid of breaking down;

he sounded me, and said that I was perfectly strong. "Indeed," he

added, "you might go to a dozen doctors to be examined for an insurance

policy, and you would be returned as absolutely robust." In the course

of his investigations, he applied a test, quite casually and as if he

were hardly interested, the point of which he thought (I suppose) that

I should not divine. Unfortunately I knew it, and I need only say that

it was a test for something very bad indeed. That was rather a horrible

moment, when a grim thing out of the shadow slipped forward for a

moment, and looked me in the face. But it was over in an instant, and

he went on to other things. He ended by saying: "Mr. ----, you are not

as bad as you feel, or even as you think. Just take it quietly; don't

overdo it, but don't be bored. You say that you can't write to please

yourself at present. Well, this experience is partly the cause, and

partly the result of your condition. You have used one particular part

of your brain too much, and you must give it time to recover. My

impression is that you will get better very gradually, and I can only

repeat that there is no sort of cause for anxiety. I can't help you

more than that, and I am saying exactly what I feel."

I looked at the worn face and kind eyes of the man whose whole life is

spent in plumbing abysses of human suffering. What a terrible life, and

yet what a noble one! He spoke as though he had no other case in the

world to consider except my own; yet when I went back to the

waiting-room to get my hat, and looked round on the anxious-looking

crowd of patients waiting there, each with a secret burden, I felt how

heavy a load he must be carrying.

There is a certain strength, after all, in having to live by rule; and

I have derived, I find, a certain comfort in having to abstain from

things that are likely to upset me, not because I wish it, but because

some one else has ordered it. So I struggle on. The worst of nerves is

that they are so whimsical; one never knows when to expect their

assaults; the temptation is to think that they attack one when it is

most inconvenient; but this is not quite the case. They spare one when

one expects discomfort; and again when one feels perfectly secure, they

leap upon one from their lair. The one secret of dealing with the

malady is to think of it as a definite ailment, not to regard the

attacks as the vagaries of a healthy mind, but as the symptoms of an

unhealthy one. So much of these obsessions appears to be purely mental;

one finds oneself the prey of a perfectly causeless depression, which

involves everything in its shadow. As soon as one realises that this is

not the result of the reflections that seem to cause it, but that one

is, so to speak, merely looking at normal conditions through coloured

glasses, it is a great help. But the perennial difficulty is to know

whether one needs repose and inaction, or whether one requires the

stimulus of work and activity. Sometimes an unexpected call on one's

faculties will encourage and gladden one; sometimes it will leave one

unstrung and limp. A definite illness is always with one, more or less;

but in nervous ailments, one has interludes of perfect and even buoyant

health, which delude one into hoping that the demon has gone out.

It is a very elaborate form of torture anyhow; and I confess that I

find it difficult to discern where its educative effect comes in,

because it makes one shrink from effort, it makes one timid,

indecisive, suspicious. It seems to encourage all the weaknesses and

meannesses of the spirit; and, worst of all, it centres one's thoughts

upon oneself. Perhaps it enlarges one's sympathy for all secret

sufferers; and it makes me grateful for the fact that I have had so

little ill-health in my life. Yet I find myself, too, testing with some

curiosity the breezy maxims of optimists. A cheerful writer says

somewhere: "Will not the future be the better and the richer for

memories of past pleasure? So surely must the sane man feel." Well, he

must be very sane indeed. It takes a very burly philosopher to think of

the future as being enriched by past gladness, when one seems to have

forfeited it, and when one is by no means certain of getting it back.

One feels bitterly how little one appreciated it at the time; and to

rejoice in reflecting how much past happiness stands to one's credit,

is a very dispassionate attitude. I think Dante was nearer the truth

when he said that "a sorrow's crown of sorrow was remembering happier

things."

February 3, 1889.

To amuse oneself--that is the difficulty. Amusements are or ought to be

the childish, irrational, savage things which a man goes on doing and

practising, in virtue, I suppose, of the noble privilege of reason, far

longer than any other animal--only YOUNG animals amuse themselves; a

dog perhaps retains the faculty longer than most animals, but he only

does it out of sympathy and companionship, to amuse his inscrutable

owner, not to amuse himself. Amusements ought to be things which one

wants to do, and which one is slightly ashamed of doing--enough

ashamed, I mean, to give rather elaborate reasons for continuing them.

If one shoots, for instance, one ought to say that it gets one out of

doors, and that what one really enjoys is the country, and so forth.

Personally I was never much amused by amusements, and gave them up as

soon as I decently could. I regret it now. I wish we were all taught a

handicraft as a regular part of education! I used to sketch, and strum

a piano once, but I cannot deliberately set to work on such things

again. I gave them all up when I became a writer, really, I suppose,

because I did not care for them, but nominally on the grounds of

"resolute limitation," as Lord Acton said--with the idea that if you

prune off the otiose boughs of a tree, you throw the strength of the

sap into the boughs you retain. I see now that it was a mistake. But it

is too late to begin again now; I was reading Kingsley's Life the other

day. He used to overwork himself periodically--use up the grey matter

at the base of his brain, as he described it; but he had a hundred

things that he wanted to do besides writing--fishing, entomologising,

botanising. Browning liked modelling in clay, Wordsworth liked long

walks, Byron had enough to do to keep himself thin, Tennyson had his

pipe, Morris made tapestry at a loom. Southey had no amusements, and he

died of softening of the brain. The happy people are those who have

work which they love, and a hobby of a totally different kind which

they love even better. But I doubt whether one can make a hobby for

oneself in middle age, unless one is a very resolute person indeed.

February 7, 1889.

The children went off yesterday to spend the inside of the day with a

parson hard by, who has three children of his own, about the same age.

They did not want to go, of course, and it was particularly terrible to

them, because neither I nor their mother were to go with them. But I

was anxious they should go: there is nothing better for children than

occasionally to visit a strange house, and to go by themselves without

an elder person to depend upon. It gives them independence and gets rid

of shyness. They end by enjoying themselves immensely, and perhaps

making some romantic friendship. As a child, I was almost tearfully

insistent that I should not have to go on such visits; but yet a few

days of the sort stand out in my childhood with a vividness and a

distinctness, which show what an effect they produced, and how they

quickened one's perceptive and inventive faculties.

When they were gone I went out with Maud. I was at my very worst, I

fear; full of heaviness and deeply disquieted; desiring I knew well

what--some quickening of emotion, some hopeful impulse--but utterly

unable to attain it. We had a very sad talk. I tried to make it clear

to her how desolate I felt, and to win some kind of forgiveness for my

sterile and loveless mood. She tried to comfort me; she said that it

was only like passing through a tunnel; she made it clear to me, by

some unspoken communication, that I was dearer than ever to her in

these days of sorrow; but there was a shadow in her mind, the shadow

that fell from the loneliness in which I moved, the sense that she

could not share my misery with me. I tried to show her that the one

thing one could not share was emptiness. If one's cup is full of

interests, plans, happinesses, even tangible anxieties, it is easy and

natural to make them known to one whom one loves best. But one cannot

share the horror of the formless dark; the vacuous and tortured mind.

It is the dark absence of anything that is the source of my

wretchedness. If there were pain, grief, mournful energy of any kind,

one could put it into words; but how can one find expression for what

is a total eclipse?

It was not, I said, that anything had come between her and me; but I

seemed to be remote, withdrawn, laid apart like some stiffening corpse

in the tomb. She tried to reassure me, to show me that it was mainly

physical, the overstrain of long and actively enjoyed work, and that

all I needed was rest. She did not say one word of reproach, or

anything to imply that I was unmanly and cowardly--indeed, she

contrived, I know not how, to lead me to think that my state was in

ordinary life hardly apparent. Once she asked pathetically if there was

no way in which she could help. I had not the heart to say what was in

my mind, that it would be better and easier for me if she ignored my

unhappiness altogether; and that sympathy and compassion only plunged

me deeper into gloom, as showing me that it was evident that there was

something amiss--but I said "No, there is nothing; and no one can help

me, unless God kindles the light He has quenched. Be your own dear self

as much as possible; think and speak as little of me as you can,"--and

then I added: "Dearest, my love for you is here, as strong and pure as

ever--don't doubt that--only I cannot find it or come near it--it is

hidden from me somewhere--I am like a man wandering in dark fields, who

sees the firelit window of his home; he cannot feel the warmth, but he

knows that it is there waiting for him. He cannot return till he has

found that of which he is in search."

"Could he not give up the search?" said Maud, smiling tearfully. "Ah,

not yet," I said. "You do not know, Maud, what my work has been to

me--no man can ever explain that to any woman, I think: for women live

in life, but man lives in work. Man DOES, woman IS. There is the

difference."

We drew near the village. The red sun was sinking over the plain, a

ball of fire; the mist was creeping up from the low-lying fields; the

moon hung, like a white nail-paring, high in the blue sky. We went to

the little inn, where we had been before. We ordered tea--we were to

return by train--and Maud being tired, I left her, while I took a turn

in the village, and explored the remains of an old manor-house, which I

had seen often from the road. I was intolerably restless. I found a

lane which led to the fields behind the manor. It was a beautiful

scene. To the left of me ran the great plain brimmed with mist; the

manor, with its high gables and chimney-stacks, stood up over an

orchard, surrounded by a high, ancient brick wall, with a gate between

tall gate-posts surmounted by stone balls. The old pasture lay round

the house, and there were many ancient elms and sycamores forming a

small park, in the boughs of which the rooks, who were now streaming

home from the fields, were clamorous. I found myself near a chain of

old fish-ponds, with thorn-thickets all about them; and here the old

house stood up against a pure evening sky, rusty red below, melting

into a pure green above. My heart went out in wonder at the thought of

the unknown lives lived in this place, the past joys, the forgotten

sorrows. What did it mean for me, the incredible and caressing beauty

of the scene? Not only did it not comfort me, but it seemed to darken

the gloom of my own unhappy mind. Suddenly, as with a surge of agony,

my misery flowed in upon me. I clutched the rail where I stood, and

bowed my head down in utter wretchedness. There came upon me, as with a

sort of ghastly hopefulness, the temptation to leave it all, to put my

case back into God's hands. Perhaps it was to this that I was moving?

There might be a new life waiting for me, but it could not well be as

intolerable as this. Perhaps nothing but silence and unconsciousness

awaited me, a sleep unstirred by any dream. Even Maud, I thought, in

her sorrow, would understand. How long I stood there I do not know, but

the air darkened about me and the mist rose in long veils about the

pasture with a deadly chill. But then there came back a sort of grim

courage into my mind, that not so could it be ended. The thought of

Maud and the children rose before me, and I knew I could not leave

them, unless I were withdrawn from them. I must face it, I must fight

it out; though I could and did pray with all my might that God might

take away my life: I thought with what an utter joy I should feel the

pang, the faintness, of death creep over me there in the dim pasture;

but I knew in my heart that it was not to be; and soon I went slowly

back through the thickening gloom. I found Maud awaiting me: and I know

in that moment that some touch of the dark conflict I had been through

had made itself felt in her mind; and indeed I think she read something

of it in my face, from the startled glance she turned upon me. Perhaps

it would have been better if in that quiet hour I could have told her

the thought which had been in my mind; but I could not do that; and

indeed it seemed to me as though some unseen light had sprung up for

me, shooting and broadening in the darkness. I apprehended that I was

no longer to suffer, I was to fight. Hitherto I had yielded to my

misery, but the time was come to row against the current, not to drift

with it.

It was dark when we left the little inn; the moon had brightened to a

crescent of pale gold; the last dim orange stain of sunset still slept

above the mist. It seemed to me as though I had somehow touched the

bottom. How could I tell? Perhaps the same horrible temptation would

beset me, again and again, deepening into a despairing purpose; the

fertile mind built up rapidly a dreadful vista of possibilities,

terrible facts that might have to be faced. Even so the dark mood

beckoned me again; better to end it, said a hollow voice, better to let

your dear ones suffer the worst, with a sorrow that will lessen year by

year, than sink into a broken shadowed life of separation and

restraint--but again it passed; again a grim resolution came to my aid.

Then, as we sped homewards in the speeding train, there came over me

another thought. Here was I, who had lightly trafficked with human

emotions, who had written with a romantic glow of the dark things of

life, despair, agony, thoughts of self-destruction, insane fears, here

was I at last confronted with them. I could never dare, I felt, to

speak of such things again; were such dark mysteries to be used to

heighten the sense of security and joy, to give a trivial reader a

thrill of pleasure, a sympathetic reader a thrill of luxurious emotion?

No, there was nothing uplifting or romantic about them when they came;

they were dark as the grave, cold as the underlying clay. What a vile

and loathsome profanation, deserving indeed of a grim punishment, to

make a picturesque background out of such things! At length I had had

my bitter taste of grief, and drew in to my trembling spirit the

shuddering chill of despair. I had stepped, like the light-hearted

maiden of the old story, within the forbidden door, and the ugly, the

ghastly reality of the place had burst upon me, the huddled bodies, the

basin filled with blood. One had read in books of men and women whose

life had been suddenly curdled into slow miseries. One had half blamed

them in one's thought; one had felt that any experience, however dark

and deep, must have its artistic value; and one had thought that they

should have emerged with new zest into life. I understood it now, how

life could be frozen at its very source, how one could cry out with Job

curses on the day that gave one birth, and how gladly one would turn

one's face away from the world and all its cheerful noise, awaiting the

last stroke of God.

February 20, 1889.

There is a story of a Cornish farmer who, returning home one dark and

misty night, struck across the moorland, every yard of which he knew,

in order to avoid a long tramp by road. In one place there were a

number of disused mine-shafts; the railing which had once protected

them had rotted away, and it had been no one's business to see that it

was renewed--some few had been filled up, but many of them were

hundreds of feet deep, and entirely unguarded. The farmer first missed

the track, and after long wandering found himself at last among the

shafts. He sate down, knowing the extreme danger of his situation, and

resolved to wait till the morning; but it became so cold that he dared

stay no longer, for fear of being frozen alive, and with infinite

precautions he tried to make his way out of the dangerous region,

following the downward slope of the ground. In spite, however, of all

his care, he found suddenly, on putting his foot down, that he was on

the edge of a shaft, and that his foot was dangling in vacancy. He

threw himself backwards, but too late, and he slid down several feet,

grasping at the grass and heather; his foot fortunately struck against

a large stone, which though precariously poised, arrested his fall; and

he hung there for some hours in mortal anguish, not daring to move,

clinging to a tuft of heather, shouting at intervals, in the hope that,

when he did not return home, a search-party might be sent out to look

for him. At last he heard, to his intense relief, the sound of voices

hailing him, and presently the gleam of lanterns shot through the mist.

He uttered agonising cries, and the rescuers were soon at his side;

when he found that he had been lying in a shaft which had been filled

up, and that the firm ground was about a foot below him; and that, in

fact, if the stone that supported him had given way, he would have been

spared a long period of almost intolerable horror.

It is a good parable of many of our disquieting fears and anxieties; as

Lord Beaconsfield said, the greatest tragedies of his life had been

things that never happened; Carlyle truly and beautifully said that the

reason why the past always appeared to be beautiful, in retrospect, was

that the element of fear was absent from it. William Morris said a

trenchant thing on the same subject. He attended a Socialist Meeting of

a very hostile kind, which he anticipated with much depression. When

some one asked him how the meeting had gone off he said, "Well, it was

fully as damnable as I had expected--a thing which seldom happens." A

good test of the happiness of anyone's life is to what extent he has

had trials to bear which are unbearable even to recollect. I am myself

of a highly imaginative and anxious temperament, and I have had many

hours of depression at the thought of some unpleasant anticipation or

disagreeable contingency, and I can honestly say that nothing has ever

been so bad, when it actually occurred, as it had represented itself to

me beforehand. There are a few incidents in my life, the recollection

of which I deliberately shun; but they have always been absolutely

unexpected and unanticipated calamities. Yet even these have never been

as bad as I should have expected them to be. The strange thing is that

experience never comes to one's aid, and that one never gets patience

or courage from the thought that the reality will be in all probability

less distressing than the anticipation; for the simple reason that the

fertile imagination is always careful to add that this time the

occasion will be intolerable, and that at all events it is better to be

prepared for the worst that may happen. Moreover, one wastes force in

anticipating perhaps half-a-dozen painful possibilities, when, after

all, they are alternatives, and only one of them can happen. That is

what makes my present situation so depressing, that I instinctively

clothe it in its worst horrors, and look forward to a long and dreary

life, in which my only occupation will be an attempt to pass the weary

hours. Faithless? yes, of course it is faithless! but the rational

philosophy, which says that it will all probably come right, does not

penetrate to the deeper region in which the mind says to itself that

there is no hope of amendment.

Can one acquire, by any effort of the mind, this kind of patience? I do

not think one can. The most that one can do is to behave as far as

possible like one playing a heavy part upon the stage, to say with

trembling lips that one has hope, when the sick mind beneath cries out

that there is none.

Perhaps one can practise a sort of indifference, and hope that

advancing years may still the beating heart and numb the throbbing

nerve. But I do not even desire to live life on these terms. The one

great article of my creed has been that one ought not to lose zest and

spirit, or acquiesce slothfully in comfortable and material conditions,

but that life ought to be full of perception and emotion. Here again

lies my mistake; that it has not been perception or emotion that I have

practised, but the art of expressing what I have perceived and felt. Of

course, I wish with all my heart and soul that it were otherwise; but

it seems that I have drifted so far into these tepid, sun-warmed

shallows, the shallows of egoism and self-centred absorption, that

there is no possibility of my finding my way again to the wholesome

brine, to the fresh movement of the leaping wave. I am like one of

those who lingered so long in the enchanted isle of Circe, listening

luxuriously to the melting cadences of her magic song, that I have lost

all hope of extricating myself from the spell. The old free days, when

the heart beat light, and the breeze blew keen against my brow, have

become only a memory of delights, just enabling me to speak deftly and

artfully of the strong joys which I have forfeited.

February 24, 1889.

I have been away for some days, paying a visit to an old friend, a

bachelor clergyman living in the country. The only other occupant of

the house, a comfortable vicarage, is his curate. I am better--ashamed

almost to think how much better--for the change. It is partly the new

place, the new surroundings, the new minds, no doubt. But it is also

the change of atmosphere. At home I am surrounded by sympathy and

compassion; however unobtrusive they are, I feel that they are there. I

feel that trivial things, words, actions, looks are noted, commented

upon, held to be significant. If I am silent, I must be depressed; if I

talk and smile, I am making an effort to overcome my depression. It

sounds unloving and ungracious to resent this: but I don't undervalue

the care and tenderness that cause it; at the same time it adds to the

strain by imposing upon me a sort of vigilance, a constant effort to

behave normally. It is infinitely and deeply touching to feel love all

about me; but in such a state of mind as mine, one is shy of emotion,

one dreads it, one shuns it. I suppose it argues a want of simplicity,

of perfect manfulness, to feel this; but few or no women can

instinctively feel the difference. In a real and deep affliction, one

that could be frankly confessed, the more affection and sympathy that

one can have the better; it is the one thing that sustains. But my

unhappiness is not a real thing altogether, not a FRANK thing; the best

medicine for it is to think as little about it; the only help one

desires is the evidence that one does not need sympathy; and sympathy

only turns one's thoughts inwards, and makes one feel that one is

forlorn and desolate, when the only hope is to feel neither.

At Hapton it was just the reverse; neither Musgrave nor the curate,

Templeton, troubled their head about my fancies. I don't imagine that

Musgrave noticed that anything was the matter with me. If I was silent,

he merely thought I had nothing to say; he took for granted I was in my

normal state, and the result was that I temporarily recovered it.

Then, too, the kind of talk I got was a relief. With women, the real

talk is intime talk; the world of politics, books, men, facts,

incidents, is merely a setting; and when they talk about them, it is

merely to pass the time, as a man turns to a game. At Hapton, Musgrave

chatted away about his neighbours, his boys' club, his new organ, his

bishop, his work. I used to think him rather a proser; how I blessed

his prosing now! I took long walks with him; he asked a few perfunctory

questions about my books, but otherwise he was quite content to prattle

on, like a little brook, about all that was in his mind, and he was

more than content if I asked an occasional question or assented

courteously. Then we had some good talks about the rural problems of

education--he is a sensible and intelligent man enough--and some

excellent arguments about the movement of religion, where I found him

unexpectedly liberal-minded. He left me to do very much what I liked. I

read in the mornings and before dinner; and after dinner we smoked or

even played a game of dummy whist. It is a pretty part of the country,

and when he was occupied in the afternoon, I walked about by myself.

From first to last not a single word fell from Musgrave to indicate

that he thought me in any way different, or suspected that I was not

perfectly content, with the blessed result that I immediately became

exactly what he thought me.

I got on no better with my writing; my brain is as bare as a winter

wood; but I found that I did not rebel against that. Of course it does

not reveal a very dignified temperament, that one should so take colour

from one's surroundings. If I can be equable and good-humoured here, I

ought to be able to be equable and good-humoured at home; at the same

time I am conscious of an intense longing to see Maud and the children.

Probably I should do better to absent myself resolutely from home at

stated intervals; and I think it argued a fine degree of perception in

Maud, that she decided not to accompany me, though she was pressed to

come. I am going home to-morrow, delighted at the thought, grateful to

the good Musgrave, in a more normal frame of mind than I have been for

months.

February 28, 1889.

One of the most depressing things about my present condition is that I

feel, not only so useless, but so prickly, so ugly, so unlovable. Even

Maud's affection, stronger and more tender than ever, does not help me,

because I feel that she cannot love me for what I am, but for what she

remembers me as being, and hopes that I may be again. I know it is not

so, and that she would love me whatever I did or became; but I cannot

realise that now.

A few days ago an old friend came to see me; and I was so futile, so

fractious, so dull, so melancholy with him that I wrote to him

afterwards to apologise for my condition, telling him that I knew that

I was not myself, and hoped he would forgive me for not making more of

an effort. To-day I have had one of the manliest, tenderest, most

beautiful letters I have ever had in my life. He says, "Of course I saw

that you were not in your usual mood, but if you had pretended to be,

if you had kept me at arm's length, if you had grimaced and made

pretence, we should have been no nearer in spirit. I was proud and

grateful that you should so have trusted me, as to let me see into your

heart and mind; and you must believe me when I say that I never loved

and honoured you more. I understood fully what a deep and insupportable

trial your present state of mind must be; and I will be frank--why

should I not be?--and say that I thought you were bearing it bravely,

and what is better still, simply and naturally. I seemed to come closer

to you in those hours than I have ever done before, and to realise

better what you were. 'To make oneself beloved,' says an old writer,

'is to make oneself useful to others'--and you helped me perhaps most,

when you knew it least yourself. I won't tell you not to brood upon or

exaggerate your trouble--you know that well enough yourself. But

believe me that such times are indeed times of growth and expansion,

even when one seems most beaten back upon oneself, most futile, most

unmanly. So take a little comfort, my old friend, and fare onwards

hopefully."

That is a very beautiful and wise letter, and I cannot say how much it

has meant for me. It is a letter that forges an invisible chain, which

is yet stronger than the strongest tie that circumstance can forge; it

is a lantern for one's feet, and one treads a little more firmly in the

dark path, where the hillside looms formless through the shade.

March 3, 1889.

Best of all the psalms I love the Hundred-and-nineteenth; yet as a

child what a weary thing I thought it. It was long, it was monotonous;

it dwelt with a tiresome persistency, I used to think, upon dull

things--laws, commandments, statutes. Now that I am older, it seems to

me one of the most human of all documents. It is tender, pensive,

personal; other psalms are that; but Psalm cxix. is intime and

autobiographical. One is brought very close to a human spirit; one

hears his prayers, his sighs, the dropping of his tears. Then, too, in

spite of its sadness, there is a deep hopefulness and faithfulness

about it, a firm belief in the ultimate triumph of what is good and

true, a certainty that what is pure and beautiful is worth holding on

to, whatever may happen; a nearness to God, a quiet confidence in Him.

It is all in a subdued and minor key, but swelling up at intervals into

a chord of ravishing sweetness.

There is never the least note of loudness, none of that terrible

patriotism which defaces many of the psalms, the patriotism which makes

men believe that God is the friend of the chosen race, and the foe of

all other races, the ugly self-sufficiency that contemplates with

delight, not the salvation and inclusion of the heathen, but their

discomfiture and destruction. The worst side of the Puritan found

delight in those cruel and militant psalms, revelling in the thought

that God would rain upon the ungodly fire and brimstone, storm and

tempest, and exulting in the blasting of the breath of His displeasure.

Could anything be more alien to the spirit of Christ than all that? But

here, in this melancholy psalm, there breathes a spirit naturally

Christian, loving peace and contemplation, very weary of the strife.

I have said it is autobiographical; but it must be remembered that it

was a fruitful literary device in those early days, to cast one's own

thought in the mould of some well-known character. In this psalm I have

sometimes thought that the writer had Daniel in mind--the surroundings

of the psalm suit the circumstances of Daniel with singular exactness.

But even so, it was the work of a man, I think, who had suffered the

sorrows of which he wrote. Let me try to disentangle what manner of man

he was.

He was young and humble; he was rich, or had opportunities of becoming

so; he was an exile, or lived in an uncongenial society; he was the

member of a court where he was derided, disliked, slandered, plotted

against, and even persecuted. We can clearly discern his own character.

He was timid, and yet ambitious; he was tempted to use deceit and

hypocrisy, to acquiesce in the tone about him; he was inclined to be

covetous; he had sinned, and had learnt something of holiness from his

fall; he was given to solitude and prayer. He was sensitive, and his

sorrows had affected his health; he was sleepless, and had lost the

bloom of his youth.

All this and more we can read of him; but what is the saddest touch of

all is the isolation in which he lived. There is not a word to show

that he met with any sympathy; indeed the misunderstanding, whatever it

was, that overshadowed him, had driven acquaintances, friends, and

lovers away from him; and yet his tender confidence in God never fails;

he feels that in his passionate worship of virtue and truth, his

intense love of purity and justice, he has got a treasure which is more

to him than riches or honour, or even than human love. He speaks as

though this passion for holiness had been the very thing that had cost

him so dear, and that exposed him to derision and dislike. Perhaps he

had refused to fall in with some customary form of evil, and his

resistance to temptation had led him to be regarded as a precisian and

a saint? I have little doubt myself that this was so. He speaks as one

might speak who had been so smitten with the desire for purity and

rightness of life, that he could no longer even seem to condone the

opposite. And yet he was evidently not one who dared to withstand and

rebuke evil; the most he could do was to abstain from it; and the

result was that he saw the careless and evil-minded people about him

prosperous, happy and light-hearted, while he was himself plunged by

his own act in misunderstanding and solitude and tears.

And then how strange to see this beautiful and delicate confession put

into so narrow and constrained a shape! It is the most artificial by

far of all the psalms. The writer has chosen deliberately one of the

most cramping and confining forms that could be devised. Each of the

eight verses that form the separate stanzas begins with the same letter

of the alphabet, and each of the letters is used in turn. Think of

attempting to do the same in English--it could not be done at all. And

then in every single verse, except in one, where the word has probably

disappeared in translation, by a mistake, there is a mention of the law

of God. Infinite pains must have gone to the slow building of this

curious structure; stone by stone must have been carved and lifted to

its place. And yet the art is so great that I know no composition of

the same length that has so perfect a unity of mood and atmosphere.

There is never a false or alien note struck. It is never jubilant or

contentious or assertive--and, best of all, it is wholly free from any

touch of that complacency which is the shadow of virtue. The writer

never takes any credit to himself for his firm adherence to the truth;

he writes rather as one who has had a gift of immeasurable value

entrusted to unworthy hands, who hardly dares to believe that it has

been granted him, and who still speaks as though he might at any time

prove unfaithful, as though his weakness might suddenly betray him, and

who therefore has little temptation to exult in the possession of

anything which his own frail nature might at any moment forfeit.

And thus, from its humility, its sense of weakness and weariness, its

consciousness of sin and failure, combined with its deep apprehension

of the stainless beauty of the moral law, this lyric has found its way

to the hearts of all who find the world and temptation and fear too

strong, all who through repeated failure have learned that they cannot

even be true to what they so pathetically desire and admire; who would

be brave and vigorous if they could, but, as it is, can only hope to be

just led step by step, helped over the immediate difficulty, past the

dreaded moment; whose heart often fails them, and who have little of

the joy of God; who can only trust that, if they go astray, the mercy

of God will yet go out to seek them; who cannot even hope to run in the

way of God's beloved commandments, till He has set their heart at

liberty.

March 8, 1889.

I went to see Darell, my old schoolfellow, a few days ago; he wrote to

say that he would much like to see me, but that he was ill and unable

to leave home--could I possibly come to see him?