Chapter 7

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."