UPTON,
July 1, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--What you say about forming habits is very interesting.
It is quite true that one gets very little done without a certain
method; and it is equally true that, if one does manage to arrive at a
certain definite programme for one's life and work, it is very easy to
get a big task done. Just reflect on this fact; it would not be
difficult, in any life, to so arrange things that one could write a
short passage every day, say enough to fill a page of an ordinary
octavo. Well, if one stuck to it, that would mean that in the course of
a year one would have a volume finished. Sometimes my colleagues
express surprise that I can find time for so much literary work; and on
the other hand if I tell them how much time I am able to devote to it
they are equally surprised that I can get anything done, because it
seems so little. This is the fact; I can get an hour--possibly two--on
Tuesday, two hours on Thursday, one on Friday, two on Saturday, and one
or two on Sunday--nine hours a week under favourable circumstances, and
never a moment more. But writing being to me the purest pleasure and
refreshment, I never lose a minute in getting to work, and I use every
moment of the time. That does not include reading; but by dint of
having books about, and by working carefully, so that I do not need to
go over the same ground twice, I get through a good deal in the week. I
have trained myself, too, to be able to write at full speed when I am
at work, and I can count on writing three octavo pages in an hour, or
even four. The result is, as you will see, that in a term of twelve
weeks, I can turn out between three and four hundred pages. The curious
thing is that I do better original work in the term-time than in the
holidays. I think the pressure of a good deal of mechanical work, not
of an exhausting kind, clears the brain and makes it vigorous. Of
course it is rather scrappy work; but I lay my plans in the holidays,
make my skeleton, and work up my authorities; and so I can go ahead at
full steam.
But I have strayed away from the subject of habits; and the moral of
the above is only that habits are easy enough if you like the task
enough. If I did not care for writing, I should find abundance of
excellent reasons why I should not do it.
Pater says somewhere that forming habits is failure in life; by which I
suppose he means that if one gets tied down to a petty routine of one's
own, it generally ends in one's becoming petty too--narrow-minded and
conventional. I don't suppose he referred to method, because he was one
of the most methodical of men. He wrote down sentences that came into
his mind, scattered ideas, on small cards; when he had a sufficient
store of these, he sorted them and built up his essay out of them.
But I am equally aware that habit is apt to become very tyrannical
indeed, if it is acquired. In my own case I have got into the habit of
writing only between tea and dinner, owing to its being the only time
at my disposal, so that I can hardly write at any other time; and that
is inconvenient in the holidays. Moreover, I like writing so much,
enjoy the shaping of sentences so intensely, that I tend to arrange my
day in the holidays entirely with a view to having these particular
hours free for writing; and thus for a great part of the year I lose
the best and most enjoyable part of the day, the sweet summer evenings,
when the tired world grows fragrant and cool.
One ought to have a routine for home life certainly; but it is not
wholesome when one begins to grudge the slightest variation from the
programme. I speak philosophically, because I am in the grip of the
evil myself. The reason why I care so little for staying anywhere, and
even for travelling, is because it disarranges my plan of the day, and
I don't feel certain of being able to secure the time for writing which
I love. But this is wrong; it is vivendi perdere causas, and I think we
ought resolutely to court a difference of life at intervals, and to
learn to bear with equanimity the suspension of one's daily habits. You
are certainly wise, if you find it suits you, to secure the morning for
writing. Personally my mind is not at its best then; it is dulled and
weakened by sleep, and it requires the tonic of routine work and bodily
exercise before it expands and flourishes.
Another grievous tendency which grows on me is an incapacity for
idleness. That will amuse you, when you remember the long evenings at
Eton which we used to spend in vacant talk. I remember so well your
saying after tea one evening, in that poky room of yours with the
barred windows at the end of the upper passage, "How delightful to
think that there are four hours with nothing whatever to do!" Do you
remember, too, that night when we sate at tea, blissfully, wholesomely
tired after a college match? John and Ellen, those strange, gruff
beings, came in to wash up, carrying that horrible, steaming can of
tea-dregs in which our cups were plunged: they cleared the table as we
sate; it was over before six, and it was not till the prayer-bell rang
at 9.30 that we became aware we had sate the whole evening with the
table between us. What DID we talk about? I wish to Heaven I could sit
and talk like that now! That is another thing which grows upon me, my
dislike of mere chatting: it is not priggish to say it, because I
regret and abominate my stupidity in that respect. But there is nothing
now which induces more rapid and more desperate physical fatigue than
to sit still and know I have to pump up talk for an hour.
The moral of all this is that YOU must take good care to form habits,
and _I_ must take care to unform them. YOU must resist the temptation
to read the papers, to stroll, to talk to your children; and _I_ must
try to cultivate leisurely propensities. I think that, as a
schoolmaster, one might do very good work as a peripatetic talker. I
have a big garden here--to think that you have never seen it!--with a
great screen of lilacs and some pleasant gravel walks. I never enter
it, I am afraid. But if in the pleasant summer I could learn the art of
sitting there, of having tea there, and making a few boys welcome if
they cared to come, it would be good for all of us, and would give the
boys some pleasant memories. I don't think there is anything gives me a
pleasanter thrill than to recollect the times I spent as a boy in old
Hayward's garden. He told me and Francis Howard that we might go and
sit there if we liked. You were not invited, and I never dared to ask
him. It was a pleasant little place, with a lawn surrounded with trees,
and a summer-house full of armchairs, with an orchard behind it--now
built over. Howard and I used at one time to go there a good deal, to
read and talk. I remember him reading Shakespeare's sonnets aloud,
though I had not an idea what they were all about--but his rich,
resonant voice comes back to me now; and then he showed me a MS. book
of his own poems. Ye Gods, how great I thought them! I copied many of
them out and have them still. Hayward used to come strolling about; I
can see him standing there in a big straw hat, with his hands behind
him, like the jolly old leisurely fellow he was. "Don't get up, boys,"
he used to say. Once or twice he sate with us, and talked lazily about
some book we were reading. He never took any trouble to entertain us,
but I used to feel that we were welcome, and that it really pleased him
that we cared to come. Now he lives in a suburb, on a pension: why do I
never go to see him?
"La, Perry, how yer do run on!" as the homely Warden's wife said to the
voluble Chaplain. I never meant to write you such a letter; but I am
glad indeed to find you really settling down. We must cultivate our
garden, as Voltaire said; and I only wish that the garden of my own
spirit were more full of "shelter and fountains," and less stocked with
long rows of humble vegetables; but there are a few flowers here and
there.--Ever yours,