A Writer's Notebook Read online

  A square white house of stucco, with two great bow windows and a veranda overgrown with honeysuckle and the monthly rose. Nature could do little to beautify the hideous structure, a bastard product of Georgian architecture and merciless common-sense. Yet it had an air of comfort and of solidity. It was surrounded by fine-grown trees, and the garden in summer was rich with a dozen varieties of rose. It was separated by a low hedge from the green where in the long evenings the village boys played cricket. Opposite, in convenient propinquity, stood the village church and the village public-house.

  The sky was slate grey, and so drab and melancholy was its colour that it seemed a work of man. It was a colour of infinite sorrow.

  St. James’s Park.

  The sky was grey, even and low; and the sun, a narrow circle of white shining through uncertainly, cast a rippling gleam on the dark waters. The trees, in the dingy day, had lost their verdure; an infinitely subtle mist obscured their massive foliage. Beyond, half hidden by the poplars, in uneven outlines, were the Government offices and the heavy roofs of Trafalgar Square.

  The water, reflecting the grey sky and the sombre trees, was dark and restful; and the moist, stagnant odour that arose from it made one faint and sick.

  In the sun, the valley, all green and wooded, was pleasant and cool; but when the clouds rolled up from the west, heavy and grey, brushing the surrounding hills, the aspect was so circumscribed that I could have cried out as with physical pain. The primness of the scene was insufferable. The sombre, well-ordered elms, the meadows so carefully kept. When the massive clouds joined with the hills, I felt myself shut in. Then to get out of that little circle seemed a task impossible, and all power of flight seemed to abandon me. It was a scene so ordered and arranged that it made me feel that my life cast amid such surroundings could never escape its thraldom. The past centuries of people, living in a certain way, actuated by certain standards, influenced by certain emotions, were too strong for me. I felt myself like a foolish bird, a bird born in a cage without power to attain freedom. My lust for a free life was futile, for I knew myself devoid of the power it needed. I walked along the fields, by the neat iron railing with which they were enclosed. All about me was visible the care of man. Nature herself seemed under the power of the formal influence, and flourished with rigidity and decorum. Nothing was left wild. The trees were lopped into proper shape, cut down here where their presence seemed inelegant and planted there to complete the symmetry of a group.

  The sky after the storm, swept clean by the howling wind, had the terrible inhumanity of justice.

  Over the past swept a light mist, a painted haze which enveloped my memories, subduing their harshness so that they had something of an exotic charm; they were like a city or a harbour that you see from a distance through a veil of evening light, its contours indistinct and its flaming colours softened into a more delicate and subtler harmony. But the mist crept up from that deep sea of eternity, unrelenting and unrelieved, and the years at last hid my recollections in a grey, unfathomable night.

  The passing years are like a mist sweeping up from the sea of time so that my memories acquire new aspects; their harshness seems less harsh and the brutal facts less brutal. But then, by chance, as a sudden wind on the coast will dispel the mist that has rolled up from the sullen waters, a word, a gesture, a tune will destroy the fancy that the treachery of time has occasioned so that I see again with a fresh, with a more piercing distinctness, the events of my youth in all their cruel reality. And I find myself unaffected by the sight. I am like the unconcerned spectator of a play, like an old actor watching a part which he had himself created, wondering, perhaps, at the old-fashioned shoddiness of it. I look at my past self with astonishment and with a certain contemptuous amusement.

  The happy rain of April.

  The patient night.

  In the heat a heavy silence sank upon the country.

  The rich death-colours of autumn were like an infinitely sad melody, like a sad song of unavailing regret; but in those passionate tints, in the red and the gold of the apples, in the varied hue of the fallen leaves, there was still something which forbade one to forget that in the death and decay of nature there is always the beginning of other life.

  The ardent, starlit night.

  The changing, rosy light of dawn.

  The wind, sinister and ghostly, rustled like a sightless animal through the topmost, leafless branches.

  To the lover waiting for his love no sound is sadder than the tardy striking of the hours.

  The lamp flickered like the last wandering glance of a man at the point of death.

  A dawn would follow the long and weary night, but no light would come to his wretched heart; his soul must wander for ever in darkness, for ever in darkness, for ever.

  In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.

  The morning crept out of a dark cloud like an unbidden guest uncertain of his welcome.

  C. G. and I looked at the sunset and he remarked that he considered sunsets rather vulgar. I, who was impressed with what I saw, felt humiliated. He told me contemptuously that I was very English. I had thought the fact rather praiseworthy. He informed me that his spirit was French; I thought it a pity in that case that he spoke it with such a British accent.

  C. G. He has all the graces and all the virtues (figuratively speaking only, since his morals are none too good) and he prides himself on his sense of humour. To his mind the best argument you can bring in favour of a cause is that it is unpopular. He takes a singular pride in running down his country and this he takes to be an example of his breadth of mind. Ten days in Paris with Cook’s coupons have sufficed to convince him of the superiority of the French. He talks of ideal love, of Hope with a rippling laugh, and buys a harlot off the Strand for ten shillings. He explains his failures by bemoaning the age. What is there to be said for an age and country which refuses to take him at his own estimate? He wishes he had been born in ancient Greece, but he’s the son of a country doctor and there and then he would have been a slave. He despises me because I take a cold bath. He is plucked in all his exams; but he turns every humiliation into a new reason for self-esteem. He writes poetry which lacks only originality to be quite passable. He has no physical courage, and when bathing is terrified at the idea of being out of his depth. But he is proud of being a coward; he says anyone can be brave, it merely shows lack of imagination.

  God goes through all the ways of the earth, ploughing the land and sowing pain and anguish, sowing from East to West.

  The sumptuous gold of a summer evening.

  Like the sword whose fire dried the tears in the desolate eyes of Eve.

  The hothouse beauties of Pater’s style, oppressive with a perfume of tropical decay: a bunch of orchids in a heated room.

  The sun was a roaring furnace, melting the massive clouds into a golden, ardent rain; and the glow was so tremendous that one thought of some giant cataclysm in which might be forged a new and mighty world; and the Eastern clouds were the trailing volumes of smoke from the vast combustion. One could imagine the titan creators of a new world, throwing into the seething cauldron the false gods, the pomps and vanities, the thousand metals, the innumerable works of man; and with an awful silence all living things were sundered and dissipated and resolved into new, invisible, ethereal, mystical substances.

  The young leaves shivering a little, voluptuously, under the quick pressure of the breeze.

  My soul seemed a stringed instrument upon which the Gods were playing a melody of despair.

  My heart was sad for her sake, and though I had ceased to love her, I found no consolation. A painful sense of emptiness had replaced the bitter anguish of before; and it was perhaps even harder to bear. Love may go and memory yet remain, memory may go and relief even then may not come.

  The bitter waves of the sea.
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  The clouds sped across the sky, copper and red against the milky blue.

  The heather rich with the subdued and decorous richness of the amethyst.

  Under the low grey sky the colours of the landscape stood out with singular distinctness; there was a richness in the fields, brown or green, in the sombre tones of the hedges and the trees, unlike the brilliancy of an Italian landscape, but as intense and as opulent, as though composed of elemental colours. It reminded one of those early pictures in which the same luminous quality is obtained by a ground of solid gold.

  When you are in love what use is it to you if all you get in return is kindness, friendship, affection? It is Dead Sea fruit that sticks in your throat.

  In the old days it had been enough to be with——, to walk with her in silence, to talk of the most insignificant things; but now when silence fell upon us, I racked my brain for something to say, and when we talked, our conversation sounded forced and unnatural; I felt it embarrassing to be alone with her.

  What a strange idea is this that change must always be progress! Europeans complain that Chinese workmen use the same implements as they have used for centuries; but if with these rude tools they have been able to work with a delicacy and a sureness unsurpassable by Western artificers, why on earth should they change?

  The three duties of woman. The first is to be pretty, the second is to be well-dressed, and the third is never to contradict.

  The vague low song of London, like the distant hum of a mighty engine.

  As one grows older one becomes more silent. In one’s youth one is ready to pour oneself out to the world; one feels an intense fellowship with other people, one wants to throw oneself in their arms and one feels that they will receive one; one wants to open oneself to them so that they may take one, one wants to penetrate into them; one’s life seems to overflow into the lives of others and become one with theirs as the waters of rivers become one in the sea. But gradually the power one felt of doing all this leaves one; a barrier rises up between oneself and one’s fellows, and one realises that they are strangers to one. Then perhaps one places all one’s love, all one’s faculty of expansion on one person, making, as it were, a final effort to join one’s soul to his; with all one’s might one draws him to one trying to know him and be known by him right down to the bottom of one’s heart. But little by little one finds that it is all impossible, and however ardently one loves him, however intimately one is connected with him, he is always a stranger to one. Not even the most devoted husband and wife know one another. Then one retires into oneself and in one’s silence builds a world of one’s own which one keeps from the eyes of every living soul, even from the person one loves best, knowing he would not understand it.

  Sometimes one feels rage and despair that one should know so little the people one loves. One is heart-broken at the impossibility of understanding them, of getting right down into their heart of hearts. Sometimes, accidentally or under the influence of some emotion, one gets a glimpse of those inner selves of theirs, and one despairs on seeing how ignorant one is of that inner self and how far away from one it is.

  When two people have been talking of some subject and a silence suddenly rises between them, the thoughts of each travel in their own direction, and in a little while, on speaking again, they will find how intensely they have diverged.

  They say that life is short; to those who look back it may seem short enough; but to those who look forward, it is horribly long, endless. Sometimes one feels one cannot endure it. Why cannot one fall asleep and never, never again wake? How happy must be the lives of those who can look forward to eternity! The thought of living for ever is horrible.

  There are so many people in the world that the action of an individual can be of no importance.

  How sententious you are! One feels your observations should be punctuated with pinches of snuff.

  It is terrible to have no means of expressing oneself, always to have to keep one’s feelings a secret.

  Am I a minor poet that I should expose my bleeding vitals to the vulgar crowd?

  If it were possible decently to dissolve marriage during the first year not one in fifty couples would remain united.

  Readers do not know that the passage which they read in half an hour, in five minutes, has been evolved out of the heart’s blood of the author. The emotion which strikes them as “so true” he has lived through with nights of bitter tears.

  Human sorrow is as great as human heart.

  There are people who say: quite well, thank you, when you say, how d’you do, to them. How vain they must be to think you can possibly care!

  One of the most difficult things for a man to do is to realise that he does not stand at the centre of things, but at the circumference.

  Scotchmen seem to think it’s a credit to them to be Scotch.

  1901

  End of a life. It is like reading a book at close of day; one reads on, not seeing that the light is failing, and then suddenly as one pauses for a moment, one finds the light has gone; it is quite dark and looking down again at the book one cannot see, and the page is meaningless.

  Carbis Water. The furze was saffron and green. Someone had gathered a bunch of heather and then let it fall; and it lay on the grass dying, a faded purple, like a symbol of the decay of an imperial power.

  The Monument. It was on a hill overlooking the valley and the sea; and Hale, with its placid river, was like an old Italian town, coloured and gay even under the sombre heaven. Around the monument lay the dead ferns, brown as the earth, and they deadened the footfall; they, the first of the summer plants to go, chilled to death by the mild wind of September.

  Joannes Knill, 1782. Who was he? One can imagine some splenetic, melancholy character such as the eighteenth century produced in reaction from the formalism of the age. It was an age that was withering for lack of fresh air. It drank of that cup in which the Elizabethans had found a multi-coloured joy of life, and a later generation a passion which fired the soul to freedom; but the wine in the cup had gone thin, and in its dregs was nothing but weariness.

  The dead trees had seemed incongruous in the summer, a patch of darkness that had no business with the joyous colours of the Cornish June; but now the whole of Nature was drawing into harmony with them, and they stood, gnarled and leafless, with a placid silence as though they felt a contented sense of the eternity of things: the green leaves and the flowers were dainty, ephemeral as the butterflies and the light breeze of April, but they were changeless and constant. The silence was so great that one seemed to hear the wings of the rooks as they beat the air, flying overhead from field to field. And in the stillness, curiously, I thought I heard the song of London calling.

  The sky was overcast, and the clouds, pregnant with rain, swept over the hilltops; and with the closing day the rain began to fall; it was very fine, a Cornish drizzle that hovered over the earth like a mist, and it was all-penetrating, like human sorrow. The country sank into darkness.

  The wind sang to himself like a strong-limbed ploughboy as he marches easily through the country.

  The earth was enswathed in vapours, opalescent, and they had a curious impenetrable transparency.

  Jeremy Taylor. Of no one, perhaps, can it be said with greater truth that the style is the very man himself. When you read Holy Dying, with its leisurely gait, its classical spirit, its fluent, facile poetry, you can imagine what sort of a man was Jeremy Taylor; and from a study of his life and circumstances you could hazard a guess that he would write exactly as he does. He was a Caroline prelate. His life was easy, moderately opulent and gently complacent. And such was his style. It reminds one, not, like Milton’s, of a tumultuous torrent breaking its way through obstacles almost insurmountable, but of a rippling brook meandering happily through a fertile meadow carpeted with the sweet-smelling flowers of spring. Jeremy Taylor is no juggler with words, but well content to use them in their ordinary sense. His epithets are seldom subtle, and seldom discover in the o
bject a new or striking quality; he uses them purely as decoration, and he repeats them over and over again, as if they were not living, necessary things, but merely conventional adjuncts of a noun. Consequently, notwithstanding his extreme floridity, he gives an impression of simplicity. He seems to use the words that come most naturally to the mouth, and his phrases, however nicely turned, have a colloquial air. Perhaps, also, the constant repetition of and adds to this sensation of naïveté. The long clauses, tacked on to one another in a string that appears interminable, make you feel that the thing has been written without effort. It seems like the conversation of a good-natured, rather long-winded, elderly cleric. Often, it is true, the endless phrases, clause after clause joined together with little regard to the meaning, with none at all to the construction of the sentence, depend merely upon looseness of punctuation, and by a rearrangement of this can be made into compact and well composed periods. Jeremy Taylor, when he likes, can put together his words as neatly as anyone, and then writes a sentence of perfect music. “He that desires to die well and happily above all things must be careful that he do not live a soft, a delicate, and voluptuous life; but a life severe, holy and under the discipline of the Cross, under the conduct of prudence and observation, a life of warfare and sober counsels, labour and watchfulness.” On the other hand, sometimes his phrases run away with him, then and is heaped upon and, idea upon idea, till one cannot make head or tail of the meaning; and the sentence at last tails off obscurely, unfinished, incomplete and ungrammatical. On occasion, however, these tremendous sentences are managed with astonishing skill; and in a long string of clauses the arrangement of epithets, the form and order of the details, will be varied with skill and elegance.