Chapter 7

I have just finished a book and despatched it to the press. It is rather a dreary moment that! At first one has a sense of relief at having finished a task and set down a burden, but that elation lasts only for a day or two, and then one begins to miss one's true and faithful companion. This particular book has been in a special sense a companion to me, because it has been a book out of my own mind and heart, not a book undertaken for the sake of diffusing useful information, but a book of which I conceived the idea, planned the structure, and filled up the detail. It has almost assumed a personality. It has hardly been absent from my thoughts for the last six months. It has darted into my mind when I awoke; it has stood looking over my shoulder as I read, pointing with airy finger at the lines, "There is a thought for you; here is an excellent illustration of that point you could not make clear." It has walked with me as close or closer than my shadow, until it has become a real thing, a being, a friend, like myself but yet not quite myself.

And then my book, as I read it through for the last time, is all full of gentle and tender associations. This chapter brings back to me a day of fierce wind and blustering rain, when I walked by sodden roads and whistling hedges in my oldest clothes, till they hung heavily about me and creaked as I moved; the thought of the chapter came to me, I remember, when I decided that I had been far enough for health and even for glory, and when I fled back before the hooligan wind; then followed a long, quiet, firelit evening when I abandoned myself in luxurious case to my writing, till the drowsy clock struck the small hours of the morning. Then another chapter is all scented with the breath of roses, that stole into my windows on a still summer evening; at another point the page is almost streaked and stained for me with the sorrowful tidings which came to me in the middle of a sentence; when I took up my writing again some days after, it seemed as though there was a deep trench between me and my former self. And again another chapter was written in all the glow of a beautiful and joyful experience, in a day of serene gladness which made me feel that it was worth while to have lived, even if the world should hold nothing else that was happy for me.

Thus, then, and thus has my life transferred itself to these pages, till they are all full for me of joy and sorrow, of experience and delight, I suppose that a painter or a musician have the same tenderness about their work, though it seems to me impossible that their life can have so flowed into picture or song as my life has flowed into my book. The painter has had to transcribe what he sees, the musician to capture the delicate intervals that have thrilled his inner ear--but if the painter's thought has been absorbed in the forms that he is depicting, if the musician has lost himself among the airy harmonies, the sweet progressions, these things must have drawn them away from life, and secluded them in a paradise of emotion; but with me it has been different; for it is life itself that has palpitated in my pages, my very heart's blood has been driven by eager pulsations through sentence and phrase; and the book is thus a part of myself in a way in which no picture and no melody can be. I have something, I think, of the joy of the mother over her child, the child that has lain beneath her bosom and been nourished from her heart; and now that my book is to leave me, it is a part of myself that goes into the world of men.

And now I shall pass vague and dreary days, until the seed of life again quickens within me, and till I know again that I have conceived another creature of the mind. Dreary days, because the mind, relieved of its sweet toil, flaps loose and slack like a drooping sail. I am weary, too, not with a pleasant physical weariness, but with the weariness of one who has spent a part of life too swiftly. For the joy of such work as mine is so great that there seems nothing like it in the world; and the hours are vain and listless that are not so comforted. Now I shall make a dozen beginnings, not foreseeing the end, and I shall abandon them in despair. The beauties of the earth, the golden sunlight, the crimson close of day, the leaping streams, the dewy grass will call in vain. Books and talk alike will seem trivial and meaningless tattle, ministering to nothing.

And then my book will begin to return to me in printed pages. Sometimes that is a joy, when it seems better than one knew; sometimes it is a disgust, if one has passed swiftly out of the creative mood; and then it will be lost to me for a time while it is drest and adorned, to walk abroad; till it comes back like a stranger in its new guise.

And then comes what is the saddest experience of all; it will pass into the hands of friends and readers; echoes of it will come back to me, in talk and print; but it will no longer be the book I knew and loved, only a part of my past. And this is the hardest thing of all for a writer, that when others read one's book they take it for the flash of a present mood, while the writer of it will only see in it a pale reflection of a time long past, and will feel perhaps even farther away from his book than those who criticise it, however severely. If my book is criticised as I write it, or directly after I have written it, it is as though I were myself maltreated; but when it appears so belatedly, I am often the harshest critic of all, because my whole point of view may perhaps have shifted, and I may be no longer the man who wrote the book, but a man of larger experience, who can judge perhaps more securely than any one else how far behind life the book lags. There is no season in the world in which the mind travels faster from its standpoint than when it has finished a book, because during all the writing of it one has kept, as it were, tensely and constrainedly at a certain point; and so when freedom comes, the thought leaps hurriedly forward, like a weight lifted by an elastic cord that has been stretched almost to breaking. "Can I ever have thought or felt so?" the mind says to itself, scanning the pages; and thus a book, which is mistaken for the very soul of a man, is often no more like the man himself than a dusty, sunburnt picture that represents what he was long years before.

But to-day my only thought is that the little companion whom I loved so well, who has walked and sate, eaten and drunk, gone in and out with me, silent and smiling, has left me and departed to try his fortune in the rough world. How will he fare? how will he be greeted? And yet I know that when he returns to me, saying, "I am a part of yourself," I shall be apt to deny it. For whereas now, if my child is lame, or feeble or pitiful or blind, I love him the better that he is not strong and active; when he returns I shall have a clear eye for his faults and weaknesses, and shall wish him other than he will be.

Sometimes I have talked with the writers of books, and they have told me of the misery and agony that the composition of a book has brought them. They speak of hot and cold fits; of times when they write fiercely and eagerly, and of times when they cannot set down a line to their mind; days of despair when they hate and despise the book; days when they cannot satisfy themselves about a single word: all this is utterly unknown to me; once embarked upon a book, I have neither hesitation nor fear. To sit down to it, day after day, and to write, is like sitting down to talk with one's nearest friend, where no concealment or diplomacy is necessary, but where one can say exactly what comes into the mind, with no fear of being misunderstood. I have not the smallest difficulty about expressing exactly as I wish to express it, whatever is in my mind. When I fail, it is because the thought itself is incomplete, imperfect, obscure; yet as I write, weariness and dissatisfaction are unknown. I cannot imagine how anyone can write a book without loving the toil, such as it is. Probably that is because I am indolent or pleasure-loving. I do not see how work of this kind can be done at all in a spirit of heaviness, it may be a fine moral discipline to do a dreaded thing heavily and faithfully; but what hope is there of the work being tinged with delight? It is as though a tired man set out to make a butterfly out of cardboard and gum and powdered silks; it would be nothing when it was made. A book must, before all things, have vigour; and vigour cannot be germinated by a sense of duty; it can only spring from hope and confidence and desire.

But now, to-day, my darling has gone from me; he is jolting in some dusty van, or he is propelled through muddy streets in a red box on wheels; or perhaps he is already in the factory among the rattle of type and the throb of the printing-press. I feel like a father whose boy has gone to school, and who sits wondering how the child may be faring in the big, unfamiliar place. Well, I will not grieve; but rather I will thank the Father of all things living, the inspirer of all sweet and delicate thoughts, all pleasant fancies, all glowing words, for the joy that I have had.

XV

In one respect only does the advance of age cast a shadow over my mind; in most matters it is a pure gain. Even though a certain peculiar quality of light-hearted happiness visits me more rarely--a happiness like that of a lark that soars, beats her wings, and trills in the blue sky--yet the loss is more than compensated for by the growth of an equable tranquillity, neither rapturous nor sad, which abides with me for long spaces.

But here is the secret wound--_clausum pectore volnus!_--I am or would be an artist in words. Well, when I look round at the work of the artists whose quality I envy and adore, I am struck by this alarming fact, that in almost every case their earliest work is their best work.

This is almost invariably true in one particular domain, that of purely imaginative poetical work. By which I do not mean poetry only, but poetical prose like Pater's, poetical fiction like Charlotte Brontë's; I think that a narrative writer, a humorous writer, a critical writer, a biographical writer may continue to improve until his faculties begin to decay. He may get a wider, a more penetrating, a more tolerant view of life; his style gain lucidity, impressiveness, incisiveness, pungency; but in the case of the poetical and the reflective writer it seems to me that something evaporates--some quite peculiar freshness, naïveté, indiscreetness, which, can never be recaptured. Take a few typical instances. Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he left his youth behind; Wordsworth wrote all his best poetry in a few early years; Milton lost his pure lyric gift. But the most salient instance of all is Tennyson; in the two earliest volumes there is a perfectly novel charm, a grace, a daring which he lost in later life. He became solemn, mannerised, conscious of responsibility. Sometimes, as in some of the lyrics of _Maud_, he had a flash of the old spirit. But compare the _Idylls of the King_, for all their dignity and lavish art, their sweet cadences, their mellifluous flow, with the early fragment in the same manner, the _Morte d'Arthur_, and you become aware that some exquisite haunted quality has slipped away from the later work which made the _Morte d'Arthur_ one of the most perfect poems of the century. The _Morte d'Arthur_ is seen, the _Idylls_ are laboriously imagined. The _Idylls_, again, are full of an everyday morality--the praise of civic virtues, the evolution of types--and how tiresome they thus become! but in the _Morte d'Arthur_ there is only a prophetic mysticism, which is all the more noble because it is so remote from common things.

With Browning it is the same in a certain degree; there is a charm about _Pauline_, for all its immaturity, which creates an irrepressible, uncalculating mood of undefined longing, utterly absent from his latest work. Perhaps one of the most remarkable instances is that of Rossetti. In the course of the _House of Life_, the dark curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary, voluptuous soul, in its restless passage among perfumed chambers, looked out suddenly from a window upon some forest glade, full of cool winds and winter sunshine, and stood silent awhile. These sonnets will always be found to be the earlier writings transplanted into the new setting.

I suppose it is to a certain extent a physical thing. It is the shadow of experience, of familiarity, of weariness that creeps over the soul. In youth the spirit expands like an opening rose, and things heard and seen strike upon the senses with an incredible novelty and freshness, hinting at all sorts of sweet surprises, joyful secrets, hopeful mysteries. It is the subtle charm of youth that evaporates, the charm that makes a young and eager boy on the threshold of manhood so interesting, so delightful, even though he may be inarticulate and immature and self-absorbed. Who does not remember friends of college days, graceful and winning creatures, lost in the sense of their own significance, who had nothing, it may be, particular to say, no great intellectual grip, no suggestiveness, yet moving about in a mysterious paradise of their own, full of dumb emotion, undefined longing, and with a deep sense of the romantic possibilities of life. Alas, as the days move on and the crisis delays, as life brings the need of labour, the necessity of earning money, as love and friendship lose their rosy glow and settle down into comfortable relations, the disillusionment spreads and widens. I do not say that the nearer view of life is not more just, more wholesome, more manly. It is but the working of some strictly determined law. The dreams fade, become unreal and unsubstantial; though not rarely, in some glimpse of retrospect, the pilgrim turns, ascends a hillock by the road, and sees the far-off lines, the quiet folds, of the blue heights from which he descended in the blithe air of the morning, and knows that they were desirable. Perhaps the happiest of all are those who, as the weary day advances, can catch a sight of some no less beautiful hills ahead of him, their hollows full of misty gold, where the long journey may end; and then, however wearily the sun falls on the dusty road and the hedged fields to left and right, he knows that the secrets of the earlier day are beautiful secrets still, and that the fine wonder of youth has yet to be satisfied. And yet the shadow does undoubtedly fall heavily on the way for me and for such as me, whose one hope is that before they die they may make some delicate thing of beauty and delight which may remind those that come after that the first beauty of opening light and the song of the awakening bird is a real and true thing, not a mere effect of air and sun and buoyant spirit. Experience and fact and hard truth have a beauty of their own, no doubt. Politics and commerce, the growth of social liberty and law, civic duty and responsibility--dull words for noble things--have their place, their value, their significance. But to the poet they seem only the laborious organising of his dreams, the slow and clumsy manufacture of what ought to be instinctive and natural. If the world must grow upon these lines, if men must toil in smoke-stained factories or wrangle in heated Parliaments, then it is well that the framework of life should be made as firm, as compact, as just as it can. But not here does his hope lie; he looks forward to a far different regeneration than can be effected by law and police. He looks forward to a time when the hearts of men shall be so wise and tender and simple that they shall smile at the thought that life needs all this organising and arranging. For those who labour for social good lose sight too often of the end in the means. They think of education as a business of delightful intricacy, and forget that it is but an elaborate device for teaching men to love quiet labour and to enjoy the delight of leisure. They lose themselves in the dry delight of codifying law, and forget that law is only necessary because men are born brutal and selfish. Morality may be imposed from without, or grace may grow from within; and the poet is on the side of the inner grace, because he thinks that if it can be achieved it will outrun the other lightly and easily.

But as we journey through the world, as we become aware of the meanness and selfishness of men, as we learn to fight for our own hand, the high vision is apt to fade. Who then can be more sad than the man who has felt in the depths of his soul the thrill of that opening light, and the further that he journeys, finds more and more weary persons who tell him insistently that it was nothing but a foolish incident of youth, a trick of fancy, a passing mood, and that life must be given to harder and more sordid things? It is well for him if he can resist these ugly voices; if he can continue to discern what there is of generous and pure in the hearts of those about him, if he can persevere in believing that life does hold a holy and sweet mystery, and that it is not a mere dreary struggle for a little comfort, a little respect, a little pleasure by the way. It is upon a man's power of holding fast to undimmed beauty that his inner hopefulness, his power of inspiring others, depends. But though it is sad to see some artist who has tasted of the morning dew, and whose heart has been filled with rapture, trading and trafficking, in conventional expression and laborious seriousness, with the memories of those bright visions, it is sadder far to see a man turn his back cynically upon the first hope, and declare his conviction that he has found the unreality of it all. The artist must pray daily that his view may not grow clouded and soiled; and he must be ready, too, if he finds the voice grow faint, to lay his outworn music by, though he does it in utter sadness of soul, only glad if he can continue sorrowful.

XVI

I have been thinking all to-day, for no particular reason that I can discover, of a house where I spent many of the happiest days of my life. It belonged for some years to an old friend of mine a bachelor, a professional man, who used to go there for his holidays, and delighted to gather round him a few familiar friends. Year after year I used to go there, sometimes twice in the year, for long periods together. The house was in North Wales: it stood somewhat above the plain on a terrace among woods, at the base of a long line of dark crags, which showed their scarped fronts, with worn fantastic outlines, above the trees that clustered at their feet and straggled high up among the shoots of stone. The view from the house was of extraordinary beauty. There was a flat rich plain below, dotted with clumps of trees; a mountain rose at one side, a rocky ridge. Through the plain a slow river broadened to the sea, and at the mouth stood a little town, the smoke of which went up peacefully on still days. Across the sea, shadowy headlands of remote bays stood out one after another to the south. The house had a few sloping fields below it; a lawn embowered in trees, and a pretty old walled garden, where the sun-warmed air was redolent with the homely scent of old-fashioned herbs and flowers. Several little steep paths meandered through the wood, crossing and recrossing tiny leaping streams, and came out on a great tract of tumbled moorland above, with huge broad-backed mountains couched about it.

The house itself was full of low, pleasant rooms, looking out on to a wide verandah. It was almost austerely furnished, and the life was simple and serene. We used to go for vague walks on the moor or by the sea, and sometimes took long driving and walking expeditions among the hills. It was a rainy region, and we were often confined to the house, except for a brisk walk in the soft rain. The climate never suited me; I was always languid in body there, greedy of sleep and food. There was no great brilliance of talk, only a quiet ease of communication such as takes place among people of the same interests. I was ill there, more than once, and often anxious and perplexed. And yet, for all that, my memory persists in investing it all with a singular radiance, and tells me over and over again that I was never so happy in any place in my life. I must say that my friend was an ideal host, quiet, benevolent, anxious that people should enjoy themselves in their own way, and yet with a genial firmness of administration which is the greatest of all luxuries if it co-exists with much liberty. He was not a great talker, though he occasionally uttered a witty epigram, often of a somewhat caustic kind; but the air of serene benevolence with which he used to preside always set people at their ease. There was, too, another friend, who was there less often, but who shared the expense of the house, who was a singularly charming and stimulating talker, full of acute observation and emotional appreciation of character. The combination of the two was perfection.

It is pleasant to recollect the long, vague summer days there, the mornings spent in reading in the verandah, the afternoons in a quiet ramble; not less delightful were the short winter days, when the twilight set in early, and the house was warm and softly lit. One agreeable rule was that after dinner anyone who felt inclined should read rather than talk; and we have often sate in an amiable silence, with the fire rustling in the grate, and the leaves of books being softly turned. The charm was the absence of constraint, and the feeling that one could say exactly what came into one's mind without any danger of being misunderstood. But for all that I cannot quite explain the golden content that seems in retrospect to have overspread the whole house. We were often frankly critical. We did not spare each other's weaknesses; but no resentment, no dissatisfaction, no strife seems to me ever to have clouded the sunny atmosphere.

It all came to an end some years ago; circumstances made it necessary for my friends to give up the house; and one of the most beautiful instances of the spirit of the place was on the occasion of our last visit. We knew that the good days were over, and that our lives could never be quite so pleasantly united again; but the place held us under its spell; and I remember as I drove away through the woods, in a soft moist dawn, I felt nothing but a deep and uncomplaining gratitude for all the happiness that I had enjoyed there; the trees, the crags, the embowered lawn with its smiling flowers, the verandah with its chairs piled up for departure, the dismantled library, all seemed to say farewell with the same tenderness with which they had always welcomed us. It seemed impossible to regret or repine. The house would receive and guard and comfort other pilgrims in their turn. I felt that any sense of sorrowful loss would be somehow like a kind of treachery, a peevish ingratitude, not even to be entertained in thought, much less expressed; to have yielded to any form of repining would have been, it seemed to me, like spending the last few minutes of a visit, where one had been received with a cordial and simple hospitality, in pointing out to one's host the inconvenience of his house.