So one ends. Yet, even in the very act of ending, qualms arise. Thinking
of what lies under one’s hand, no longer as a sheaf of familiar
manuscript, but as a full-blown book, printed, bound, stitched, and a’
the lave o’ it, misgivings awake, and are lively. Only yesterday I
sounded the praises of the diary, and I do so still; yet the manifest
destiny of every diary is to live a life of absolute seclusion, and,
when it has served its turn, to feed the fire. It is true that one may
murmur something to oneself about “subjective”; “subjective forms of
literature,” but the words ring hollow, and have little validity. In a
well-known passage Carlyle has described a visit which he paid to the
Sage of Highgate, whom he found sitting in his Dodona oak
grove--otherwise Mr. Gilman’s house and garden--“as a kind of Magus,
girt in mystery and enigma.” “I still recollect,” Carlyle says, “his
‘object,’ and ‘subject,’ and how he sang and snuffled them into
‘om-m-mject’ and ‘sum-m-mject,’ with a kind of solemn shake or quaver,
as he rolled along.” The diarist need not necessarily roll along, and
has no pretensions certainly to be called a sage, yet he too is apt now
and again to murmur “sum-m-mject,” “sum-m-mjective,” with a sound that
even in his own ears rather resembles that of some bumble-bee upon a
summer’s morning; extremely self-important, that is to say, but not
particularly lucid. It is true that so far as self-importance is
concerned he stands absolutely excused, seeing that egotism is his
profession. To cease to be egotistic is to cease to be a diarist
altogether. This is as clear as it is satisfactory, but it can hardly be
said to meet the point. There is nothing odd, of course, about a man or
a woman being confidential with himself or herself; it is when they
proceed to drop their confidences into other, and less indulgent ears,
that the oddity begins.
There are moreover seasons when such outpourings seem even less
appropriate than others, and this year--September to September--appears,
looking back, to be one of these. It has been a black, a despairingly
black, twelve months for thousands; how black, how despairing, few of
those thousands would have credited when it began. Amongst those
incredulous ones, though on somewhat different grounds, the diarist
might have been reckoned. Diary-keeping is not entirely a matter of
egotism and of introspection, of fun, and of frolic, though it may
appear to the non-diarist to be. What a nice innocent-looking book it
seems, when its spaces are all blank, and the days they refer to are not
yet born! yet such a book may come to look like a mere fragment of
malicious destiny, bound in calf or calico. Holding it in his hands the
would-be diarist turns the leaves over one by one with a smile. How will
this, and this, and this space be filled up? he wonders. What odd little
adventures will they have to record? What absurdities of his own, or of
others, to recount? What books read? what expeditions made? what trees
or shrubs planted? So he sets jauntily forth on his self-appointed task,
to be met by--- What? A thought to give the lightest pause.
And yet, and yet. Let the very worst come to pass that can come to pass,
even so an attitude of mere unmitigated despair hardly befits fast
disappearing mortals, whose breath is in their nostrils. Looking
backwards may seem all gloom and pain, and looking forward no better,
possibly rather worse, and yet assuredly it is _not_ all gloom, or all
pain. Enchanting things spring up by thousands in the ugliest of clefts,
and the barest of trees may serve as a perch for some winter-singing
robin. Sorrow itself, carried out into the open air, under the
benignant arch of heaven, changes in some degree its character. It is
Sorrow still, but it is Sorrow with a difference. It seems to merge into
the category of other things; terrible ones, it is true, but still
natural--earthquakes, volcanoes, avalanches, pestilences, and so
forth--things that we shrink from, but that we cannot reasonably resent.
The sense of wrong, of hardship, of bitterness, of personal injustice,
seems by degrees to melt away from it, and therefore it can be better
faced. At least it is well that we should tell ourselves so.