MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
Jan. 23, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have just heard the disheartening news, and I write
to say that I am sorry toto corde. I don't yet know the full extent of
the calamity, the length of your exile, the place, or the conditions
under which you will have to live. Perhaps you or Nelly can find time
to let me have a few lines about it all? But I suppose there is a good
side to it. I imagine that when the place is once fixed, you will be
able to live a much freer life than you have of late been obliged to
live in England, with less risk and less overshadowing of anxiety. If
you can find the right region, renovabitur ut acquila juventus tua; and
you will be able to carry out some of the plans which have been so
often interrupted here. Of course there will be drawbacks. Books,
society, equal talk, the English countryside which you love so well,
and, if I may use the expression, so intelligently; they will all have
to be foregone in a measure. But fortunately there is no difficulty
about money, and money will give you back some of these delights. You
will still see your real friends; and they will come to you with the
intention of giving and getting the best of themselves and of you, not
in the purposeless way in which one drifts into a visit here. You will
be able, too, to view things with a certain detachment--and that is a
real advantage; for I have sometimes thought that your literary work
has suffered from the variety of your interests, and from your being
rather too close to them to form a philosophical view. Your love of
characteristic points of natural scenery will help you. When you have
once grown familiar with the new surroundings, you will penetrate the
secret of their charm, as you have done here. You will be able, too, to
live a more undisturbed life, not fretted by all the cross-currents
which distract a man in his own land, when he has a large variety of
ties. I declare I did not know I was so good a rhetorician; I shall end
by convincing myself that there is no real happiness to be found except
in expatriation!
Seriously, my dear Herbert, I do understand the sadness of the change;
but one gets no good by dwelling on the darker side; there are and will
be times, I know, of depression. When one lies awake in the morning,
before the nerves are braced by contact with the wholesome day; when
one has done a tiring piece of work, and is alone, and in that frame of
mind when one needs occupation but yet is not brisk enough to turn to
the work one loves; in those dreary intervals between one's work, when
one is off with the old and not yet on with the new--well I know all
the corners of the road, the shadowy cavernous places where the demons
lie in wait for one, as they do for the wayfarer (do you remember?), in
Bewick, who, desiring to rest by the roadside, finds the dingle all
alive with ambushed fiends, horned and heavy-limbed, swollen with the
oppressive clumsiness of nightmare. But you are not inexperienced or
weak. You have enough philosophy to wait until the frozen mood thaws,
and the old thrill comes back. That is one of the real compensations of
middle age. When one is young, one imagines that any depression will be
continuous; and one sees the dreary, uncomforted road winding ahead
over bare hills, till it falls to the dark valley. But later on one can
believe that "the roadside dells of rest" are there, even if one cannot
see them; and, after all, you have a home which goes with you; and it
would seem to be fortunate, or to speak more truly, tenderly prepared,
that you have only daughters--a son, who would have to go back to
England to be educated, would be a source of anxiety. Yet I find myself
even wishing that you had a son, that I might have the care of him over
here. You don't know the heart-hunger I sometimes have for young things
of my own to watch over; to try to guard their happiness. You would say
that I had plenty of opportunities in my profession; it is true in a
sense, and I think I am perhaps a better schoolmaster for being
unmarried. But these boys are not one's own; they drift away; they come
back dutifully and affectionately to talk to their old tutor; and we
are both of us painfully conscious that we have lost hold of the
thread, and that the nearness of the tie that once existed exists no
more.
Well, I did not mean in this letter to begin bemoaning my own sorrows,
but rather to try and help you to bear your own. Tell me as soon as you
can what your plans are, and I will come down and see you for the last
time under the old conditions; perhaps the new will be happier. God
bless you, my old friend! Perhaps the light which has hitherto shone
(though fitfully) ON your life will now begin to shine THROUGH it
instead; and let me add one word. My assurance grows firmer, from day
to day, that we are in stronger hands than our own. It is true that I
see things in other lives which look as if those hands were wantonly
cruel, hard, unloving; but I reflect that I cannot see all the
conditions; I can only humbly fall back upon my own experience, and
testify that even the most daunting and humiliating things have a
purifying effect; and I can perceive enough at all events to encourage
me to send my heart a little farther than my eyes, and to believe that
a deep and urgent love is there.--Ever affectionately yours,