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.