Chapter 14

I have just heard of the sudden death of an old friend. Francis Willett was a writer of some distinction, whose acquaintance I made in my first years in London. He was a tall, slim man, dark of complexion, who would have been called very handsome, if it had not been for a rather burdened air that he wore. As it was, people tended rather to pity him, and to speak of him as somewhat of a mystery. I never knew anything about the background of his life. He must have had some small means of his own, and he lived in rooms, in rather an out-of-the-way street near Regent's Park. One used to see him occasionally in London, walking rapidly, almost always alone, and very rarely I encountered him at parties, always wearing a slightly regretful air, as though he were wishing himself away. He wrote a good deal, reviewed books, and, I suppose, contrived to make enough to live on by his pen. He once spoke of himself as being in the happy position of being able to exist without writing, but forced to purchase all small luxuries by work. He published two or three books of short stories and sketches of travel, delicate pieces of work, which had no great sale, but gave him a recognised position among men of letters. I drifted into a kind of friendship with him; we were members of the same club, and he sometimes used to flutter shyly into my rooms like a great moth; but he never asked me to his quarters.

I discovered that he had done well at Oxford, and also that he had once, at all events, had considerable ambitions; but his health was not strong, he was extremely sensitive, and very fastidious about the quality of his work. I realised this on an occasion when he once entrusted me with a MS., and asked me if I would give him an opinion, as it was an experiment, and he did not feel sure of his ground; he added that there was no hurry about it. I put the MS. away in a despatch-box, and having at the time a press of work, I forgot about it. He never asked me for it, and I did not happen to open the box where it lay. Some months after I came upon it. I read it through, and thought it a fine and delicate piece of work. I wrote to him, apologising for my delay and speaking warmly of the piece, which was one of those rather uncomfortable stories, which is not quite long enough to make a book, and yet rather too long to put in a volume with other pieces. He wrote at once, thanking me for my opinion, and it was only by accident at a later date, when I happened to ask him what he was doing with the story, that he told me he had destroyed it. I expressed deep regret that he had done so; and he said with a smile that it was probably rather a foolish impulse that had decided him to make away with it. "The fact is," he said, "that you wrote very kindly about it, but you had had it in your hands so long, that I felt somehow that it could not have interested you--it really doesn't matter," he added, "I don't think it was at all successful." I apologised very humbly, and explained the circumstances. "Oh, please don't blame yourself in any way," he said, "I have not the least shadow of resentment in my mind about it. There is something wrong about my work; it doesn't interest people. I suppose it is that I can't let myself go." An interesting conversation followed, and he told me more than he ever told me before or since about himself. He confessed to being so critical of his own work, that his table-drawers were full of unfinished MSS. His usual experience was to begin a piece of work enthusiastically; to plan it all out, and to work at first with zest. "Then it begins to get all out of shape," he said, "there is no go about it; it all loses itself in subtleties and complexities of motive; one thing trips up another, and at last it all gets so tangled that I put it aside; if I could follow the track of one strong and definite emotion, it would be all right--but I am like the man in the story who changes the cow for the horse, and the horse for the pig, and the pig for the grindstone; and then the grindstone rolls into the river." He seemed to take it all very philosophically, and I ventured to say so. "Yes," he said, "I have learnt at last that that is how I am made; but I have been through a good many agonies of disgust and discouragement about it in old days--it is the same with everything I have touched. The bits of work that I have completed have all been done in a rush--if the mood lasts long enough, I am all right--and once or twice it has just lasted. I am like a swimmer," he went on, "who can only swim a certain distance; and if I judge the distance rightly, I can reach the point I desire to reach; but I generally judge the distance wrong; and half-way across I am seized with a sudden fright, and struggle back in terror."

By one of the strange coincidences that sometimes happen in this world, I took an unknown lady in to dinner a few days afterwards, and happened to mention Willett's name. "Do you know him?" she said. "Oh yes, of course you do!" she went on; "you are the Mr. S---- of whom he has spoken to me." I found that my neighbour was a distant relation of Willett's, and she told me a good deal about him. He was absolutely alone in the world; he had been left an orphan at an early age, and had spent his holidays with guardians and relations, with any one who would take pity on him. "He was a clever kind of boy," she said, "melancholy and diffident, always thinking that people disliked him. He used to give me the air of a person who was trying to find something, and who did not quite know where to look for it. He had a time of expansion at Oxford, where he made friends and did well; and then he came to London, and began to write. But the real tragedy of his life is this," she said. "He really fell in love, or as nearly as he could, with a very pretty and high-spirited girl, who took a great fancy to him, and pitied him from the bottom of her heart. For five years the thing went on. She would have married him at any time if he had asked her. But he did not. I suppose he could not face the idea of being married. He always seemed to be on the point of proposing to her, and then he would lose heart at the last minute. At last she got tired of waiting, and, I suppose, began to care for some one else; but she was very good to Francis, and never lost patience with him. At last she told him one day quietly that she was engaged, and hoped that they would always remain friends. I think, do you know, that it was almost more a relief to him than otherwise. I did my best to help him--marriage was the one thing he wanted; if he could only have been pushed into it, he would have made a perfect husband, because not only is he very much of a gentleman, but he could never bear to fail any one who depended on him; but he has got the unhappiest mind I know; the moment that he has formed a plan, and sees his way clear, he at once begins to think of all the reasons against it--not the selfish reasons, by any means; in this case he reflected, I am sure, how little he had to offer; he could not bring himself to feel that any one could really care for him; and then, too, he never really cared for anything quite enough himself. Or if he did, he found all sorts of refined reasons why he ought not to do so. If only he had been a little more selfish, it would have been all right. Indeed," said Mrs. T----, with a smile, "he is the only person of whom I could truthfully say that if he had only been a little more vulgar, he would have been a much happier person."

I saw a good deal of Willett after that, and he interested me increasingly. I verified Mrs. T----'s judgment about him, and found it true in every particular. I suppose there was some lack of vitality about him, because the more I knew of him the more I found to admire. He was an exquisitely delicate person, affectionate, responsive, with a fine sense of humour--indeed, the most disconcerting thing was that he saw to the full the humour of his own position. But none of the robust motives that spur men to action affected him. He was ambitious, but he would not make any sacrifices to gain the objects of his ambition. He could not use his powers on conventional lines. He was, I think, deeply desirous of confidence and affection, but he could never believe that he deserved either, or that it was possible for him to be interesting to others. He was laborious, pure-minded, transparently honest, and had a shrewd and penetrating judgment of other people; but he seemed to labour under a sense of shame at his deficiencies, and to feel that he had no claims or rights in the world. He existed on sufferance. The smallest shadow of disapproval caused him to abandon any design, not resentfully but eagerly, as though he was fully aware of his own incompetence.

I grew to feel a strong affection for him, and tried in many ways to help and encourage him. But he always discounted encouragement, and it is a clumsy business trying to help a man who does not demand or desire help.

He seemed to me to have schooled himself into a kind of tender patience; and this attitude, I am ashamed to say, used to irritate me considerably, because it seemed to me to be so much power wasted on accepting defeat, which might have ensured victory.

He was with me a few weeks ago. I was up in town, and he dined with me by appointment. He told me, with a gentle philosophy, a story which made my blood boil. He had been asked to write a book by a publisher, and the lines had been laid down for him. "It was such a comfort to me," he said, "because it supplied just the stimulus I could not myself originate. My book was really rather a good piece of work; but a week ago I sent it to the publisher, and he returned it, saying it was not the least what he wanted--he suggested my retaining about a third of it, and rewriting the rest. Of course I could do nothing of the kind." "What have you done with it?" I asked. "Oh, I have destroyed it." "But didn't you see him," I said, "or do something--or at all events insist on payment?" "Oh no," he said, "I could not do that--the man was probably right--he wanted a particular kind of book, and mine was not what he wanted. I did say that I wished he had explained to me more clearly what he wanted--but after all it doesn't very much matter. I can get along all right, if I am careful."

"Well," I said, "you are really a very aggravating person. If I could not have got my book published elsewhere, I would certainly have had a row--I would have taken out my money's worth in vituperation."

Willett smiled; "I dare say you would have had some fun," he said, "but that is not my line. I have told you before that I can't interest people--I don't think it is wholly my fault."

We sate late, talking; and for the only time in his life he spoke to me, with a depth of emotion of which I should hardly have suspected him, of the value he set upon my friendship, and his gratitude for my sympathy.

And now this morning I have heard of his sudden death. He was found dead in his room, bent over his papers. He must have been writing late at night, as his custom was; and it proved on examination that he must have long suffered from an unsuspected disease of the heart. Perhaps that may explain his failure, if it can be called a failure. There is something to me almost insupportably pathetic to think of his lonely and uncomforted life, his isolation, his sensitiveness. And yet I do not feel sure that it is pathetic, because his life somehow seems to me to have been one of the most beautiful I have ever known. He did nothing much for others, he achieved nothing for himself; but it is only our miserable habit of weighing every one's life, in a hard way, by a standard of performance and success, which makes one sigh over Francis Willett's life. It is very difficult at times to see what it is that life is exactly meant to do for us. Most of the men and women I know--I say this sadly but frankly--seem to me to leave the world worse, in essential respects, than they entered it. There is generally something ingenuous, responsive, eager, sweet, hopeful about a child--but though I admit that one does encounter beautiful natures that seem to flower very generously in the light of experience, yet most people grow dull, dreary, conventional, grasping, commonplace--they grow to think rather contemptuously of emotion and generosity--they think it weak to be amiable, unselfish, kind. They become fond of comfort and position and respect and money. They think such things the serious concerns of life, and sentiment a kind of relaxation. But with Willett it was the precise reverse. He claimed nothing for himself, he never profited at the expense of another; he was utterly humble, gentle, unpretentious, kind, sincere. An hour ago I should have called him "poor fellow," and wished that he had had a more robust kind of fibre; now that I know he is dead, I cannot find it in my heart to wish him any such qualities. His life appears to me utterly beautiful and fragrant. He never incurred any taint of grossness from prosperity or success; he never grew indifferent or hard; and in the light of his last passage, such a failure seems the one thing worth achieving, and to carry with it a hope all alive and rich with possibilities of blessing and glory. He would hardly have called himself a Christian, I think; he would have said that he could not have attained to anything like a vital faith or a hopeful certainty; but the only words and thoughts that haunt my mind about him, echoing sweetly and softly through the ages, are the words in which Christ described the tender spirits of those who were nearest to the Father's heart, and to whom it is given to see God.

July 28, 1889.

Health of body and mind return to me, slowly but surely. I have given up all attempt at writing; I rack my brain no longer for plots or situations. I keep, it is true, my note-book for subjects beside me, and occasionally jot down a point; but I feel entirely indifferent to the whole thing. Meanwhile the flood of letters about my book, invitations from editors, offers from publishers, continues to flow. I reply to these benignantly and courteously, but undertake nothing, promise nothing. I seem to have recovered my balance. I think no more about my bodily complaints, and my nerves no longer sting and thrill. The day is hardly long enough for all I have to do. It may be that when the novelty of the experiment in education wears off, I shall begin to hanker after authorship again. Alec will have to go to school in a year or two, I suppose; but it shall be a day-school at first, if I can find one. As to the question of a public school, I am much exercised. Of course there are nightmare terrors about tone and morals; but I am not really very anxious about the boy, because he is sensible and independent, and has no lack of moral courage. The vigorous barrack-life is good for a boy, the give-and-take, the splendid equality, the manly code, the absence of affectation. But the intellectual tone of schools is low, and the conventionality is great. I don't want Alec to be a conventional man, and yet I want him to accept current conventions instinctively about matters of indifference. I have a horror of the sporting public-school type, the good-humoured, robust fellow, who does his work and fills his spare time with games, and thinks intellectual things, and artistic interests, and emotion, and sympathy, moonshine and rot. Such people live a wholesome enough life; they make good soldiers, good officials, good men of business. But they are woefully complacent and self-satisfied. The schools develop a Spartan type, and I want Alec to be an Athenian. But the experiment will have to be made, because a man is at a disadvantage in ordinary life if he has not the public school bonhomie, courtesy, and common sense. I must try to keep the other side alive, and I don't despair of doing it.

Meantime we are a very contented household, in spite of the fact that now, if ever, is the time for me to make my mark as a writer, and I have to pass all the opportunities that offer. On the other hand, this is the point at which one sees, in the history of letters, so many writers go to pieces. They suddenly find, after their first great success, that they have arrived, by a tortuous and secret path, at being a sort of public man. They are dazzled by contact with the world. They go into society, they make speeches, they write twaddle, they drain their energy, already depleted by creation, in fifty different ways. Now I am strongly of Ruskin's opinion that the duty of the artist is to make himself fit for the best society, and then to abstain from it. Very fortunately I have no sort of taste for these things, beyond the simple human satisfaction in enjoying consideration. That is natural and inevitable. But I don't value it unduly, and I dislike its penalties more than I love its rewards.

And then, too, I reflect that it is, after all, life that we are here to taste, and life that so many of us pass by. Work is a part of life, perhaps the essence of life; but to be absorbed in work is to be like a man who is absorbed in collecting specimens, and never has time to sort them. I knew of a man who determined, early in life, to write the history of political institutions. He had a great library, and he devoted himself to study. He put in his books, as he read them, slips of paper to indicate passages and chapters that he would have to consult, and as he finished with a book, he put it in a certain place on a certain shelf. He made no other notes or references--he was a man with a colossal memory, and he knew exactly what his markers meant. In the middle of this life of acquisition, while he bored like a worm in a cheese, he died. His library was sold. The markers meant nothing to any one else; and the book-buyers merely took the markers out and threw them away, and that was the end of the history of political institutions.

I feel that, apart from our work, we ought to try and arrive at some solution, to draw some sort of conclusions--to reflect, to theorise; we may not draw nearer to the secret, but our only hope of doing so, the only hope that humanity will do so, is for some at least to try. And thus I think that I have perhaps been saved from a great delusion. I was spending my time in spinning romances, in elaborating plots, in manoeuvring life as I would; and it is not like that! Life is not run on physical lines, nor on emotional, nor social, nor even moral lines. It is not managed in the least as we should manage it; it is a resultant of innumerable forces, or perhaps the same force running in intricate currents. Of course the strange thing is that we men should find ourselves thrust into it, with strong intuitions, vehement preconceptions, as to how it ought to be directed; our happiness seems to depend upon our being, or learning to be, in harmony with it, but it baffles us, it resists us, it contradicts us, it opposes us to the end; sometimes it crushes us; and yet we believe that it means good; and even if we do not so believe, we have to acquiesce, we have to endure; and one thing is certain, we cannot learn the lesson of life by practising indifference or stoical fortitude, or by abandoning ourselves to despair; only by believing that our sufferings are fruitful, our mistakes educative, our sins significant, our sorrows gracious, can we hope to triumph. We go on, many of us, relying on useless defences, beguiling ourselves with fantastic diversions, overlooking, as far as we can, stern realities; stopping our ears, turning away our gaze, shrinking and crying out like children at the prospect of experiences to which we are led by loving presences, that smile as they draw us to the wholesome and bracing incidents that we so weakly dread. We pray for courage, but we know in our souls that courage can only be won by enduring what we fear; and thus preoccupied by hopes and plans and fears, we miss the wholesome sweet and simple stuff of life, its quiet relationships, its tranquil occupations, its beautiful and tender surprises.

And then perhaps, at long intervals, we have a deep and splendid flash of insight, when we can thank God that things have not been as we should have willed and ordered them. We should have lingered, perhaps, in the low rich meadows, the sheltered woodlands of our desire; we should never have set our feet to the hill. In terror and reluctance we have wandered upwards among the steep mountain tracks, by high green slopes, by grim crag-buttresses, through fields of desolate stones. Yet we are aware of a finer, purer air, of wide prospects of hill and plain; we feel that we have gained in strength and vigour, that our perceptions are keener, our very enjoyment nobler; and at last, it may be, we have sight, from some Pisgah-top of hope, of fairer lands yet to which we are surely bound. And then, too, though we have fared on in loneliness and isolation, we see moving forms of friends and comrades converging on our track. It is no dream; it is but a parable of what has happened to many a soul, what is daily happening. What does the sad, stained, weary, fitful past concern us at such a moment as this? It concerns us nothing, save that only through its pains and shadows was it possible for us to climb where we have climbed.

To-day it seems that I have been blessed with such a vision. The mist will close in again, doubtless, wild with wind, chill with rain, sad with the cry of hoarse streams. But I have seen! I shall be weary and regretful and despairing many times; but I shall never wholly doubt again.

August 8, 1889.