Part 11

Now, everybody who lives in fogs and rainy places will fail to understand anything of these last deplorable pages. But if they go to the thin clear air of Alps in winter, they will know that this sort of thing (given you have the luck to see a clergyman sitting in the snow) is invested with supreme importance. When the hot sun shines on ice, it produces some kindly confusion of the brain; there is no longer any point in trying to be clever or well-informed, or witty, or any of those things that are supposed to convey distinction down below to their fortunate possessors: you go back to mere existence and joy of life. It is a trouble to be consecutive or conduct a reasonable argument; instead, you open your mouth and say anything that happens to come out of it. Most frequently what issues is laughter, but apart from that, the only conversation you can indulge in is preposterous and the only behaviour possible is childish. That is why I love these roofs of the world. The intoxication of interstellar space is in the air. Everything is so light--you, your body, your mind, your tongue, your aims and objects. The only things that you take seriously are the things that do not matter: the snow-sitter was one, the _cache_ was another. But as we got nearer the _cache_, we became even more solemn than on the question of the snow-sitter. There was no telling what we should find there, even if we found the place at all. The tree might have been cut down since last year; the whole _cache_ might have been rifled by some imperceptive hand. There was no end to the list of untoward circumstances that might have despoiled us.

And so we went through the wood: we came to the end of it, and there was a tree--‘of many one,’ as Mr. Wordsworth prophetically remarked. On its roots were cut my humble initials: it was certainly The Tree.

‘Oh, quick, quick!’ said Helen; ‘let us know the worst!’

The root had arched a little since I saw it last. Moss and snow were plastered on it in a manner scarcely natural. I plucked the bandage away with hands that trembled. We found:

1. A pencil.

2. Something sticky, which I believe to have been the caramels.

3. An empty potted-meat tin, with a wisp of paper inside it, on which was written: ‘I ate it. Quite excellent.’

4. A candle-end.

5. The famous poem on the Wetterhorn done up in canvas. (How laudable!)

6. A Jock-Scot, salmon-trout size.

7. A paper on which was written: ‘What’s the point?’

8. A cigarette, very sloppy.

9. A five-franc piece, wrapped up in paper, on which was written: ‘I took 4.50 away.’

10. A little wooden pill-box containing a very small moonstone.

I think we were very moderate in our exchanges, which is right, since you must always leave the _cache_ richer for your presence, and we merely took away the pencil and the poem on the Wetterhorn, leaving our handkerchief, the reel of cotton, and the copy of ‘Shirley.’ Below the question ‘What’s the point?’ we wrote, ‘None, if you can’t see it,’ and added, ‘The founder and his wife visited the _cache_ on January 12, 1907. They saw a clergyman sitting in the snow. Selah.’

Then an awful thing happened. Even while these treasures were openly and sumptuously spread round us, down the path there came a merry Swiss peasant about a hundred years old. He looked at us and the treasures with curiosity and contempt, and then burst into a perfect flood of speech, of which neither of us understood one single word. When he stopped, I said politely, ‘Ich weiss nicht,’ just like Parsifal, and he began it, or something like it, all over again, with gesticulations added, and in a rather louder tone, as if he was talking to a deaf man. Until this torrent of gibberish was let loose on me, I had no idea how much there was in the world that I did not know; so with the desire to reduce _his_ opinion of himself also, I addressed him in English. I said ‘God save the King’ right through, as much as I could remember of ‘To be or not to be’ from the play called ‘Hamlet,’ and had just begun on ‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,’ when he suddenly turned pale, crossed himself (though it was a Protestant canton), and fairly fled down the path. I make no doubt that he thought he had met the devil. Anyhow, he had met his match at unintelligible conversation.

But it was clearly no use running risks, for more of the merry Swiss might come down the path, who, it was conceivable, might not be so much impressed by unintelligible sounds, and we hurriedly reburied the treasure, ate our lunch, and turned the bow of the toboggan homewards, since we proposed to skate all afternoon. It was a year since I had been shod with steel. I burned for the frozen surface. But it was right to see to the _cache_ first. There are some things you cannot wait for.

We spent three weeks in these divine futilities, if anything so utterly enjoyable can be considered futile. For my part, I do not believe it can, since, as I have already said, to enjoy a thing very much, supposing always that it does not injure anybody else, is a gilt-edged investment of your time; for enjoyment is not (as is falsely supposed) finished with when the thing itself is done and over, for it is just then that the high interest of it (though gilt-edged) begins to be paid. Until one forgets about it (and by a merciful dispensation one remembers what is pleasant far longer and far more keenly than what is painful), subsequent days and hours are all enriched, and therefore made more productive, by these pleasurable memories. It is here, I think, that a wonderfully fresh and vivid student of the human mind--namely, R. L. Stevenson--goes all wrong when he says that the past is all of one texture. It seems to me--one is only responsible for one’s own experience--to be of two textures, one strong and the other weak; and the strong one is the memory of things you have enjoyed, of happy days; the other of times when, for some reason or other--pain, or anxiety, or fear--the lights have been low, and the sound of the grinding not low, but loud. The human mind, in fact, is more retentive of its pleasures than of its pain. In the moment of the happening either may seem the top note of acuteness, but the echoes of the one indisputably live longer than the echoes of the other; and though our consciousness, if you care to look at it that way, is largely a haunted house of the dead hours, yet happy ghosts are in preponderance, and seem solider than the shadows of its dark places; also (and this, I think, too, is indubitable) the anticipation of happiness is more acute than the anticipation of a corresponding pain. In the future there are two textures also, as in the past.

Since our return this contrast has been rather markedly brought before me. There are many things I much look forward to; at the same time, there is something ahead which I am dreading. What it is I do not know. I think I should dread it less if I did. But it is, though quite certain, quite vague. I connect it, however, with that evening in September when I heard my name called, and when Legs saw something which has since been expunged from his memory. And here is the contrast: the happiness that lies stored for me in the hive of the future is more potent than the bitterness that is there. Both are coming--of that I am sure--and among the many very happy things which I know and expect, I feel there is something I do not yet know which is happier than any. It is futile to guess at it. One might make a hundred guesses, and each would seem feasible of accomplishment. But there, at the back of my mind, are these two transparencies, so to speak--one sunlit, the other stormy--and it is through them that the events of the day are seen by me. They colour--both of them--all I do; but the happy one is the predominant one. They do not neutralize each other; they are both there to their full. But I despair at giving coherently so elusive a picture as they make in my own mind. But, though elusive, it is intensely real, and for the first time I neither can, nor do I desire to, speak to Helen about this thing which is so often in my mind. It is incommunicable.

But after these Swiss weeks there was not much time for me to think about this, as it was imperatively demanded, by reasons over which I have no control, that I should exercise my mind on the extremely difficult art of the composition of English prose, which incidentally implies doing two things at once; for not only have you to invent your lively and inspiring tale, but you have to tell it in a certain way. You may choose at the beginning any way of the hundreds that there are of telling it; but in the key in which it is originally pitched, in that key it has to remain all the time. As a matter of fact, it probably does not, and goes wandering about in other modes and scales; but every book ought to be in the one key in which it opens, just as a picture ought to be in one key. It is within the writer’s liberties, of course, to write other books in other keys, and I think he is perfectly justified in largely contradicting in one work what he has unhesitatingly affirmed in another, but in each his point of view has to be consistent throughout.

The thing is not quite so easy as it sounds, and it is further complicated by a very real difficulty. Every story that is worth reading at all is bound to record change in the characters and general attitude of the people with whom it deals. The jaded author has to keep his eye on each, and see that he behaves after some atrocious battering with which fate has visited him in a different manner than before this visitation took place. If he is living in any sense of the word, the event will have altered him. He will view things differently, and therefore behave differently. Yet all the time he is the same personality. It were better for him that he should be as adamant to the blows of circumstance than that the inner essence which is individuality should be uncertainly rendered; and, like the dexterous Mr. Maskelyne with his spinning-plates, the scribe has to keep his eye on all his puppets to see that none lapse into stagnation, and to poke them up with his industrious pen.

It is here that the complicated question of consistency comes in which just now is worrying me to bewilderment. Dreadful and stinging events are happening to a most favourite puppet of mine. Providence is dealing with her in a cruelly ironical manner, in a way that makes the poor distracted lady take quite fresh views of a world she thought so warm and kindly. Yet it must be the same personality which has to be shown sitting behind these changed feelings and directing them all. That is the consistency that has to be observed. Otherwise it ceases to be one story, but becomes a series of really unconnected short stories, with the technical absurdity that the heroine in each has the same name.

Yet there is this also: it takes all sorts to make a world (at least, a world otherwise constructed would be an extremely dull one), but It, It itself, Life, lies somewhere in the middle of us all, and is the centre to which we approach. We, the all sorts which make the world, view it very differently, though we are all looking at the same object. And here a simile, a thing usually unconvincing, may assist. What if in the centre there is something like a great diamond, blazing in the rays of the sun? I, from the south, see soft blue lights in it; you, from the west, see a great ruby ray coming out of the heart of it; another on the north says, ‘This diamond is emerald green’; while from the east it seems of transcendent orange. So far, it is quite certain that we are all right, for the world, so to speak, refracts God, making Him many-hued, even as white light is refracted by the triangle of a prism. And then let us suppose circumstances enter and shift me, who have been on the south, where I saw blue, to the west, where I see red. The whole colour of the world is changed to me, and yet there is no inconsistency. The same Ego honestly sees a changed colour. There would, on the other hand, when my place was shifted by circumstance, be grave inconsistency if I continued to declare that I still saw blue. I do not. My eyes tell me it is red. Just now my eyes told me it was blue. But _I_ have not changed, nor has the great diamond changed; it is merely that the refracted light has taken another colour.

It is just that which one must perceive in the telling of a story. A person who sees blue all his life probably sees nothing at all, nothing, anyhow, in the least worth recording. He is bound as the wheel of circumstances goes round to see things in other lights. But that is not inconsistency; it is the truly consistent. Who wants, after all, for ever to draw the same conclusion from the same premises? Only fossils, and possibly molluscs.

But pity the sorrows of the story-teller! The _quality_ of the red has to be of the same quality as the blue. The same fire which strikes to the south will indubitably strike to all other points of the compass, and when X is wheeled north, he will not see the same green as Y sees there. He saw it through the alchemy of his own mind; it will be green, but nobody else’s green. Or if it is, he has no individuality to speak of. At least he belongs to a type that sees everything through the eyes of others. That is generally labelled conventional, and there seems no reason to change the name.

How I laboured during those last ten days of January, and how little result there seems to be! Only--I console myself with this--the real labour of writing does not chiefly consist in the effort of putting things down, but in the moral effort of rejecting them. There is nothing easier than to fill pages and pages with improving reflections or inspiring events. But having done that, it is necessary to sound the tuning-fork and see if, as I said at first, the story is in tune, if the key is kept. Usually it is not. On which the fire ought to make to itself a momentary beacon, or the waste-paper basket be replete. But the pile of numbered pages should in any case be starving. That, as a matter of fact, is my sole argument that I have justified my existence during these ten days. I have really worked a great deal, and the waste-paper basket could say how generous has been its diet. I have really left out a very great deal, and I hasten to forestall the critic who will say that I should, in order to act up to this excellent standard, have left out the rest. I do not agree with him.

The key of which I have spoken has to be preserved, not only in matters of consistency in character-drawing, but in style as well. If you lead off with verbiage from the Orient, the East must continue, I submit, to dye your paragraphs till the last page is turned. Though you may have also at your command pure wells of the most limpid simplicity, you will have to reserve them for some other immortal work; they will not mix with the incense and heady draughts from the East. Or should you fancy a mysterious Delphic mode of diction, Delphic you must be to the end. But--as if all this was not so difficult, that, like Dr. Johnson, we almost wish it was frankly impossible--interwoven in your Delphic or Oriental narrative there must be a totally different woof--namely, the thread of the spoken word, the speeches that you put into the mouths of your various characters. And the written word, be it remembered, is never like the spoken word: the two vocabularies, to begin with, are totally distinct, and though I would not go so far as to affirm that the spoken word ought to be ungrammatical, it should, if it is to recall human speech, be colloquial, conversational. In interchange of ideas by means of the mouth real people do not use fine language, especially when their emotions are strongly aroused. Then, instead of becoming high-flown and ornate in their speech, real people go to the opposite extreme, and instinctively use only the very simplest words. When this is stated, it seems natural enough, but you will find it very seldom practised. Novelists have a tendency to let their puppets employ magnificent high-sounding words to express the intensity and splendour of great emotion; in fact, you may gauge the strength of their emotions, as a rule, by the sonorous quality of their adjectives. I believe the very opposite to be the truth of the matter: people in the grip of passion do not use beautiful or highly-coloured words; above all, they do not, like Mr. Wegg, ‘drop into poetry.’ Yet nothing is commoner than to find prose degenerating into blank verse in the spoken records of emotional crises, as if blank verse was a sublime form of prose. Little Nell is continually half-way between prose and poetry, so also is Nicholas Nickleby when his indignation is roused. In fact, in some of his scenes with Ralph they both forget themselves so much in their passion that torrents of decasyllabic lines flow from their lips. But, on the other hand, the language of narrative should undoubtedly grow more coloured, more vivid in such descriptions as are the setting of some very emotional scene. Yet it should not depart from its original key.... Well, as Mr. Tulliver said, ‘It’s puzzling work talking.’

* * * * *

But though the days have been so full, I have seen everything, everything through the two transparencies that seem drawn between external happenings and me.

FEBRUARY

The seasons, according to the literary and artistic view of things, have been rather out of joint this year. The autumn was not a time of mellow fruitfulness at all, because all the green things upon this earth had exhausted themselves in the long hot summer, and had no more spirit left to be fruitful with. Then January in England had been of the usual warm mugginess and mist which poets say are characteristic of autumn, but which in reality characterize winter. Indeed, I doubt if winter was ever a time of hard frosts and sparkling snow, which is the artistic ideal, and I am disposed to believe that that version of it was really brought from Germany by the Prince Consort, and popularized by Charles Dickens. Then after the mists came the mellow fruitfulness, for I myself saw strawberries in flower on February 2, and on February 9 Helen came in saying she had found a real strawberry. That was strange enough, though perhaps the finding of an unreal strawberry would have been stranger still, so I said, ‘Where?’ and she said, ‘On the strawberry beds, silly.’

Therefore I started up, leaving a most important and epoch-making sentence unfinished (and I have never been able to remember what the end of it was going to be), because I wanted to see the strawberry, and write to the _Field_ about it. So she said, ‘Are you going out already?’ and I said, ‘Yes, just to see the strawberry, and write to the _Field_, saying I have.’

Then she pointed to half-way down her person (since we are so abstemious of words that indicate the anatomy below the throat), and said:

‘Would X rays help?’

Being extremely clever that morning, of course I understood, and reviled her for eating an unnatural phenomenon. It was criminal; she might as well have found the sea-serpent or the North Pole, and eaten it. But as usual she was artful, and led the conversation away to daffodils, which were behaving in a manner nearly equal to that of the strawberry-plant. One, indeed, was in bud (a thing incredible, but true), and I supposed she had eaten that, too. That led us back to the strawberry again, which she was not even sorry about, for she said it was far more interesting to be able to write to the _Field_ to say she had eaten a strawberry on February 9 than that I should be able to say I had seen it. So I very kindly gave her my pen, and said:

‘Write quickly.’

She said:

‘Oh, but I am only a woman; I can’t. They wouldn’t put it in.’

‘I wish you hadn’t put the strawberry in,’ said I.

‘I think I shall wish that, too, before long,’ said she.

I only mention this in order to show the utter unreasonableness of my wife. If I want to write to the _Field_, and say there was a strawberry in my garden on February 9, she will allow me to say that though I did not see it, she ate it. (She certainly would not have eaten it if I _had_ seen it.) But she will not write to say she ate it, like a true woman. She says it does not matter, but added with a changed voice that she was afraid it might. It did, for the fruitfulness of the season was not so mellow as might have been wished.

* * * * *

Yes, once again spring has begun to stir in the fiery heart of the world; once again the breath of Life blows the embers that seemed all winter to be but grey and lifeless cinders, and from the centre the glow spreads, till that grey surface of ash is alive with flame again. And as the flames shoot upwards they are like rockets, rising from over the whole face of the world. At present they are but going upwards, those slender lines of flame, which are the sap that is rising through branch and leafless stem until it reaches the very ends of the twigs. Then these rockets will burst in stars of leaf and opening flower, till the vast illumination is again complete. But in the warm soft February morning, though I feel and know that this is so, I cannot help my thoughts going back to the other side of things. What of the illumination of last year? It is quenched dead, and even while the world is getting ready for the next one there still lie broadcast the ashes and fallen sticks of the last rocket-shower. However many more gladden the world, even though to all infinity life was incessantly and beautifully renewed, yet I cannot forgive the perishing of a single flower. I know well that the material is indestructible, that of life and the death of it is born fresh life, so that we are quite right to say that life cannot be destroyed. But what of the individual rose, what of that one purple star of clematis that twinkled on the end of the stem I hold in my hand? Though it may be transformed, and will be transformed, into a myriad other things, so that by its death it is transfused into a hundred other flowers, and courses through the veins of life for ever, yet it, that individual object, will be seen no more. Its individuality is completely lost; it figures in new forms, not its own.

It is quite certain also that the same things happen to our bodies. The grass grows thick on the graves of those we have loved, and the roots of the roses penetrate deep. I saw once on the crumbling, sea-devoured East Coast of England the thing itself under my very eyes, which made it real to me in a way that nothing had ever done before. For a churchyard stood there on the very edge of the sandy cliff, and one night, with noise of huge murmurous thunder, an acre of it slid down into the sea. Next morning I visited the place, and there, sticking out of the cliff, were the bones of the dead that had been buried there. A ruin of roses that had sprawled and trumpeted over the churchyard gate, which had been plucked in half by the fall, lay on the ground, and I wondered how the trees had not slipped with the rest of the landslide, until I saw. Their roots had lain just where the fracture of the earth occurred, and in the exposed face of the new cliff I saw their anchorage. One was wrapped round a thigh-bone, another had made a network among ribs ... it was all horrible and revolting. And that has happened to the million dead who have lived and loved, whose limbs have been swift to move, who have drawn rapturous, long breaths of this keen sea-scented air, whose eyes have been bright and mouths eager when they met, lover and beloved. This is all--this ruin of red roses on the grass.