Chapter 3

Now what do I honestly feel about all this? I will try for my own benefit to say. Of course I am very much pleased, but the odd thing is that I am not more pleased. I can say quite unaffectedly that it does not turn my head in the least. I reflect that if this had happened when I began to write, I should have been beside myself with delight, full of self-confidence, blown out with wind, like the fog in the fable. Even now there is a deep satisfaction in having done what one has tried to do. But instead of raking in the credit, I am more inclined to be grateful for my good fortune. I feel as if I had found something valuable rather than made something beautiful; as if I had stumbled on a nugget of gold or a pearl of price. I am very fatalistic about writing; one is given a certain thing to say, and the power to say it; it does not come by effort, but by a pleasant felicity. After all, I reflect, the book is only a good story, well told. I do not feel like a benefactor of the human race, but at the best like a skilful minstrel, who has given some innocent pleasure. What, after all, does it amount to? I have touched to life, perhaps a few gracious, tender, romantic fancies--but, after all, the thoughts and emotions were there to start with, just as the harmonies which the musician awakes are all dormant in his throbbing strings. I have created nothing, only perceived and represented phenomena. I have gained no sensibility, no patience, no wisdom in the process. I know no more of the secret of life and love, than before I wrote my book. I am only like a scientific investigator who has discovered certain delicate processes, subtle laws at work. They were there all the time; the temptation of the investigator and of the writer alike is to yield to the delusion that he has made them, by discerning and naming them. As for the style, which is highly praised, it has not been made by effort. It is myself. I have never written for any other reason than because I liked writing. It has been a pleasure to overcome difficulties, to make my way round obstacles, to learn how to express the vague an intangible thing. But I deserve no credit for this; I should deserve credit if I had made myself a good writer out of a bad one; but I could always write, and I am not a better writer, only a more practised one. There is no satisfaction there.

And then, too, I find myself overshadowed by the thought that I do not want to do worse, to go downhill, to decline. I do not feel at all sure that I can write a better book, or so good a one indeed. I should dislike failing far more than I like having succeeded. To have reached a certain standard makes it incumbent on one that one should not fall below that standard; and no amount of taking pains will achieve that. It can only be done through a sort of radiant felicity of mood, which is really not in my power to count upon. I was happy, supremely happy, when I was writing the book. I lighted upon a fine conception, and it was the purest joy to see the metal trickle firmly from the furnace into the mould. Can I make such a mould again? Can I count upon the ingots piled in the fierce flame? Can I reckon upon the same temperamental glow? I do not know--I fear not.

Here is the net result--that I have become a sort of personage in the world of letters. Do I desire it? Yes, in a sense I do, but in a sense I do not. I do not want money, I do not wish for public appearances. I have no social ambitions. To be pointed out as the distinguished novelist is distinctly inconvenient. People will demand a certain standard of talk, a certain brilliance, which I am not in the least capable of giving them. I want to sit at my ease at the banquet of life, not to be ushered to the highest rooms. I prefer interesting and pleasant people to important and majestic persons. Perhaps if I were more simple-minded, I should not care about the matter at all; just be grateful for the increased warmth and amenity of life--but I am not simple-minded, and I hate not fulfilling other people's expectations. I am not a prodigal, full-blooded, royal sort of person at all. I am not conscious of greatness, but far more of emptiness. I do not wish to seem pretentious. I have got this one faculty; but it has outrun all the rest of me, and I am aware that it has drained the rest of my nature. The curious thing is that this sort of fame is the thing that as a young man I used to covet. I used to think it would be so sustaining and resplendent. Now that it has come to me, in far richer measure, I will not say than I hoped, but at all events than I had expected, it does not seem to be a wholly desirable thing. Fame is only one of the sauces of life; it is not the food of the spirit at all. The people that praise one are like the courtiers that bow in the anterooms of a king, through whom he passes to the lonely study where his life is lived. I am not feeling ungrateful or ungenerous; but I would give all that I have gained for a new and inspiring friendship, or for the certainty that I should write another book with the same happiness as I wrote my last book. Perhaps I ought to feel the responsibility more! I do feel it in a sense, but I have never estimated the moral effectiveness of a writer of fiction very high; one comforts rather than sustains; one diverts rather than feeds. If I could hear of one self-sacrificing action, one generous deed, one tranquil surrender that had been the result of my book, I should be more pleased than I am with all the shower of compliments. Of course in a sense praise makes life more interesting; but what I really desire to apprehend is the significance and meaning of life, that strange mixture of pain and pleasure, of commonplace events and raptures; and my book brings me no nearer that. To feel God nearer me, to feel, not by evidence but by instinct, that there is a Heart that cares for me, and moulded me from the clay for a purpose--why, I would give all that I have in the world for that!

Of course Maud will be pleased; but that will be because she believes that I deserve everything and anything, and is only surprised that the world has not found out sooner what a marvellous person I am. God knows I do not undervalue her belief in me; but it makes and keeps me humble to feel how far she is from the truth, how far from realising the pitiful weakness and emptiness of her lover and husband.

Is this, I wonder, how all successful people feel about fame? The greatest of all have often never enjoyed the least touch of it in their lifetime; and they are happier so. Some few rich and generous natures, like Scott and Browning, have neither craved for it nor valued it. Some of the greatest have desired it, slaved for it, clung to it. Yet when it comes, one realises how small a part of life and thought it fills--unless indeed it brings other desirable things with it; and this is not the case with me, because I have all I want. Well, if I can but set to work at another book, all these idle thoughts will die away; but my mind rattles like a shrunken kernel. I must kneel down and pray, as Blake and his wife did, when the visions deserted them.

September 25, 1888.

Here is a social instance of what it means to become "quite a little man," as Stevenson used to say. Some county people near here, good-natured, pushing persons, who have always been quite civil but nothing more, invited themselves to luncheon here a day or two ago, bringing with them a distinguished visitor. They throw in some nauseous compliments to my book, and say that Lord Wilburton wishes to make my acquaintance. I do not particularly want to make his, though he is a man of some not. But there was no pretext for declining. Such an incursion is a distinct bore; it clouds the morning--one cannot settle down with a tranquil mind to one's work; it fills the afternoon. They came, and it proved not uninteresting. They are pleasant people enough, and Lord Wilburton is a man who has been everywhere and seen everybody. The fact that he wished to make my acquaintance shows, no doubt, that I have sailed into his ken, and that he wishes to add me to his collection. I felt myself singularly unrewarding. I am not a talker at the best of times, and to feel that I am expected to be witty and suggestive is the last straw. Lord Wilburton discoursed fluently and agreeably. Lady Harriet said that she envied me my powers of writing, and asked how I came to think of my last brilliant book, which she had so enjoyed. I did not know what to say, and could not invent anything. They made a great deal of the children. They walked round the garden. They praised everything ingeniously. They could not say the house was big, and so they called in convenient. They could not say that the garden was ample, but Lord Wilburton said that he had never seen so much ground go to the acre. That was neat enough. They made a great point of visiting my library, and carried away my autograph, written with the very same pen with which I wrote my great book. This they called a privilege. They made us promise to go over to the Castle, which I have no great purpose of doing. We parted with mutual goodwill, and with that increase of geniality on my own part which comes on me at the end of a visit. Altogether I did not dislike it, though it did not seem to me particularly worth while. To-day my wife tells me that they told the Fitzpatricks that it was a great pleasure seeing me, because I was so modest and unaffected. That is a courteous way of concealing their disappointment that I was not more brilliant. But, good heavens, what did they expect? I suppose, indeed I have no doubt, that if I had talked mysteriously about my book, and had described the genesis of it, and my method of working, they would have preferred that. Just as in reminiscences of the Duke of Wellington, the people who saw him in later life seem to have been struck dumb by a sort of tearful admiration at the sight of the Duke condescending to eat his dinner, or to light a guest's bedroom candle. Perhaps if I had been more simple-minded I should have talked frankly about myself. I don't know; it seems to me all rather vulgar. But my visitors are kindly and courteous people, and felt, I am sure, that they were both receiving and conferring benefits. They will like to describe me and my house, and they will feel that I am pleased at being received on equal terms into county society. I don't put this down at all cynically; but they are not people with whom I have anything in common. I am not of their monde at all. I belong to the middle class, and they are of the upper class. I have a faint desire to indicate that I don't want to cross the border-line, and that what I desire is the society of interesting and congenial people, not the society of my social superior. This is not unworldliness in the least, merely hedonism. Feudalism runs in the blood of these people, and they feel, not consciously but quite instinctively, that the confer a benefit by making my acquaintance. "No doubt but ye are the people," as Job said, but I do not want to rise in the social scale. It would be the earthen pot and the brazen pot at best. I am quite content with my own class, and life is not long enough to change it, and to learn the habits of another. I have no quarrel with the aristocracy, and do not in the least wish to level them to the ground. I am quite prepared to acknowledge them as the upper class. They are, as a rule, public-spirited, courteous barbarians, with a sense of honour and responsibility. But they take a great many things as matters of course which are to me simply alien. I no more wish to live with them than Wright, my self-respecting gardener, wishes to live with me--though so deeply rooted are feudal ideas in the blood of the race, that Wright treats me with a shade of increased deference because I have been entertaining a party of Lords and Ladies; and the Vicar's wife said to Maud that she heard we had been giving a very grand party, and would soon be quite county people. The poor woman will think more of my books than she has ever thought before. I don't think this is snobbish, because it is so perfectly instinctive and natural.

But what I wanted to say was that this is the kind of benefit which is conferred by success; and for a quiet person, who likes familiar and tranquil ways, it is no benefit at all; indeed, rather the reverse; unless it is a benefit that the stationmaster touched his hat to me to-day, which he has never done before. It is a funny little world. Meanwhile I have no ideas, and my visitors to-day haven't given me any, though Lord Wilburton might be a useful figure in a book; so perfectly appointed, so quiet, so deferential, so humorous, so deliciously insincere!

October 4, 1888.

I have happened to read lately, in some magazines, certain illustrated interviews with prominent people, which have given me a deep sense of mental and moral nausea. I do not think I am afflicted with a strong sense of the sacredness of a man's home life--at least, if it is sacred at all, it seems to me to be just as much profaned by allowing visitors or strangers to see it and share it as it is by allowing it to be written about in a periodical. If it is sacred in a peculiar sense, then only very intimate friends ought to be allowed to see it, and there should be a tacit sense that they ought not to tell any one outside what it is like; but if I am invited to luncheon with a celebrated man whom I do not know, because I happen to be staying in the neighbourhood, I do not think I violate his privacy by describing my experience to other people. If a man has a beautiful house, a happy interior, a gifted family circle, and if he is himself a remarkable man, it is a privilege to be admitted to it, it does one good to see it; and it seems to me that the more people who realise the beauty and happiness of it the better. The question of numbers has nothing to do with it. Suppose, for instance, that I am invited to stay with a great man, and suppose that I have a talent for drawing; I may sketch his house and his rooms, himself and his family, if he does not object--and it seems to me that it would be churlish and affected of him to object--I may write descriptive letters from the place, giving an account of his domestic ways, his wife and family, his rooms, his books, his garden, his talk. I do not see that there is any reasonable objection to my showing those sketches to other people who are interested in the great man, or to the descriptive letters or diary that I write being shown or read to others who do not know him. Indeed I think it is a perfectly natural and wholesome desire to know something of the life and habits of great men; I would go further, and say that it is an improving and inspiring sort of knowledge to be acquainted with the pleasant details of the well-ordered, contented, and happy life of a high-minded and effective man. Who, for instance, considers it to be a sort of treachery for the world at large to know something of the splendid and affectionate life of the Kingsley circle at Eversley Rectory, or of the Tennyson circle at Freshwater? to look at pictures of the scene, to hear how the great men looked and moved and spoke? And if it is not profanation to hear and see this in the pages of a biography, why is it a profanation to read and see it in the pages of a magazine? To object to it seems to me to be a species of prudish conventionality.

Only you must be sure that you get a natural, simple, and unaffected picture of it all; and what I object to in the interviews which I have been reading is that one gets an unnatural, affected, self-conscious, and pompous picture of it all. To go and pose in your favourite seat in a shrubbery or a copse, where you think out your books or poems, in order that an interviewer may take a snap-shot of you--especially if in addition you assume a look of owlish solemnity as though you were the prey of great thoughts--that seems to me to be an infernal piece of posing. But still worse than that is the kind of conversation in which people are tempted to indulge in the presence of an interviewer. A man ought not to say to a wandering journalist whom he has never seen before, in the presence of his own wife, that women are the inspirers and magnetisers of the world, and that he owes all that has made him what he is to the sweet presence and sympathetic tenderness of his Bessy. This, it seems to me, is the lowest kind of melodrama. The thing may be perfectly true, the thought may be often in his mind, but he cannot be accustomed to say such things in ordinary life; and one feels that when he says them to an interviewer he does it in a thoroughly self-conscious mood, in order that he may make an impressive figure before the public. The conversations in the interviews I have been reading give me the uncomfortable sense that they have been thought out beforehand from the dramatic point of view; and indeed one earnestly hopes that this is the solution of the situation, because it would make one feel very faint if one thought that remarks of this kind were the habitual utterances of the circle--indeed, it would cure one very effectually of the desire to know anything of the interiors of celebrated people, if one thought that they habitually talked like the heroes of a Sunday-school romance. That is why the reading of these interviews is so painful, because, in the first place, one feels sure that one is not realising the daily life of these people at all, but only looking on at a tableau vivant prepared by them for the occasion; and secondly, it makes one very unhappy to think that people of real eminence and effectiveness can condescend to behave in this affected way in order to win the applause of vulgar readers. One vaguely hopes, indeed, that some of the dismal platitudes that they are represented as uttering may have been addressed to them in the form of questions by the interviewer, and that they have merely stammered a shamefaced assent. It makes a real difference, for instance, whether as a matter of fact a celebrated authoress leads her golden-haired children up to an interviewer, and says, "These are my brightest jewels;" or whether, when she tells her children to shake hands, the interviewer says, "No doubt these are your brightest jewels?" A mother is hardly in a position to return an indignant negative to such a question, and if she utters an idiotic affirmative, she is probably credited with the original remark in all its unctuousness!

It is a difficult question to decide what is the most simple-minded thing to do, if you are in the unhappy position of being requested to grant an interview for journalistic purposes. My own feeling is that if people really wish to know how I live, what I wear, what I eat and drink, what books I read, what kind of a house I live in, they are perfectly welcome to know. It does not seem to me that it would detract from the sacredness of my home life, if a picture of my dining-room, with the table laid for luncheon in a very cramped perspective, or if a photogravure of the scrap of grass and shrubbery that I call my garden, were to be published in a magazine. All that is to a certain extent public already. I should not wish to have a photograph of myself in bed, or shaving, published in a magazine, because those are not moments when I am inclined to admit visitors. Neither do I particularly want my private and informal conversation taken down and reproduced, because that often consists of opinions which are not my deliberate and thought-out utterances. But I hope that I should be able to talk simply and courteously to an interviewer on ordinary topics, in a way that would not discredit me it is was made public; and I hope, too, that decency would restrain me from making inflated and pompous remarks about my inner beliefs and motives, which were not in the least characteristic of my usual method of conversation.

The truth is that what spoils these records is the desire on the part of worthy and active people to appear more impressive in ordinary life than they actually are; it is a well-meant sort of hypocrisy, because it is intended, in a way, to influence other people, and to make them think that celebrated people live habitually on a higher tone of intellect and emotion than they do actually live upon. My on experience of meeting great people is that they are, as a rule, disappointingly like ordinary people, both in their tastes and in their conversation. Very few men or women, who are extremely effective in practical or artistic lines, have the energy or the vitality to expend themselves very freely in talk or social intercourse. They do not save themselves up for their speeches or their books; but they give their best energies to them, and have little current coin of high thought left for ordinary life. The mischief is that these interviews are generally conducted by inquisitive and rhetorical strangers, not distinguished for social tact or overburdened with good taste; and so the whole occasion tends to wear a melodramatic air, which is fatal both to artistic effect as well as to simple propriety.

October 9, 1888.

Let me set against my fashionable luncheon-party of a few weeks ago a visit which I owe no less to my success, and which has been a true and deep delight to me. I had a note yesterday from a man whom I hold in great and deep reverence, a man who I have met two or three times, a poet indeed, one of our true and authentic singers. He writes that he is in the neighbourhood; may he come over for a few hours and renew our acquaintance?