In all this I do not neglect the physical side. They can ride and swim.
They go out in all weathers and get wholesomely wet, dirty, and tired.
Games are a difficulty, but I want them to be able, if necessary, to do without games. We botanise, we look for nests, we geologise, we study birds through gla.s.ses, we garden. It is all very unscientific, but they observe, they perceive, they love the country. Moreover, Maud has a pa.s.sion for knowing all the village people, and takes the children with her, so that they really know the village-folk all round; they are certainly tremendously happy and interested in everything. Of course they are volatile in their tastes, but I rather encourage that. I know that in the little old moral books the idea was that nothing should be taken up by children, unless it was done thoroughly and perseveringly; but I had rather that they had a wide experience; the time to select and settle down upon a pursuit is not yet, and I had rather that they found out for themselves what they care about, than practise them in a premature patience. The only thing I object to is their taking up something which they have tried and dropped; then I do require a pledge that they shall stick to it. I say to them, "I don"t mind how many things you try, and if you find you don"t care about one, you may give it up when you have given it a trial; but it is a bad thing to be always changing, and everybody can"t do everything; so don"t take up this particular thing again, unless you can give a good reason for thinking you will keep to it."
One of the things I insist upon their doing, whether they like it or not, is learning to play the piano. There are innumerable people, I find, who regret not having been made to overcome the initial difficulties of music; and the only condition I make is, that they shall be allowed to stop when they can play a simple piece of music at sight correctly, and when they have learnt the simple rules of harmony.
For teaching them geography, I have a simple plan; my own early geography lessons were to my recollection singularly dismal. I used, as far as I can remember, to learn lists of towns, rivers, capes, and mountains. Then there were horrible lists of exports and imports, such as hides, jute, and hardware. I did not know what any of the things were, and no one explained them to me. What we do now is this. I read up a book of travels, and then we travel in a country by means of atlases, while I describe the sort of landscape we should see, the inhabitants, their occupations, their religion, and show the children pictures. I can only say that it seems to be a success. They learn arithmetic with their governess, and what is aimed at is rapid and accurate calculations. As for religious instruction, we read portions of the Bible, striking scenes and stories, carefully selected, and the Gospel story, with plenty of pictures. But here I own I find a difficulty. With regard to the Old Testament, I have frankly told them that many of the stories are legends and exaggerations, like the legends of other nations. That is not difficult; I say that in old days when people did not understand science, many things seemed possible which we know now to be impossible; and that things which happened naturally, were often thought to have happened supernaturally; moreover, that both imagination and exaggeration crept in about famous people. I am sure that there is a great danger in teaching intelligent children that the Bible is all literally true. And then the difficulty comes in, that they ask artlessly whether such a story as the miracle of Cana, or the feeding of the five thousand, is true. I reply frankly that we cannot be sure; that the people who wrote it down believed it to be true, but that it came to them by hearsay; and the children seem to have no difficulty about the matter. Then, too, I do not want them to be too familiar, as children, with the words of Christ, because I am sure that it is a fact that, for many people, a mechanical familiarity with the Gospel language simply blurs and weakens the marvellous significance and beauty of the thought. It becomes so crystallised that they cannot penetrate it. I have treated some parts of the Gospel after the fashion of Philochristus, telling them a story, as though seen by some earnest spectator. I find that they take the deepest interest in these stories, and that the figure of Christ is very real and august to them. But I teach them no doctrine except the very simplest--the Fatherhood of G.o.d, the Divinity of Christ, the indwelling voice of the Spirit; and I am sure that religion is a pure, sweet, vital force in their lives, not a harsh thing, a question of sin and punishment, but a matter of Love, Strength, Forgiveness, Holiness. The one thing I try to show them is that G.o.d was not, as I used to think, the property, so to speak, of the Jews; but that He is behind and above every race and nation, slowly leading them to the light. The two things I will not allow them to think of are the Doctrines of the Fall and the Atonement; the doctrine of the Fall is contrary to all true knowledge, the doctrine of the Atonement is inconsistent with every idea of justice.
But it is a difficult matter. They will hear sermons, and Alec, at school, may have dogmatic instruction given him; but I shall prepare him for Confirmation here, and have him confirmed at home, and thus the main difficulty will be avoided; neither do I conceal from them that good people think very differently on these points. It is curious to remember that, brought up as I was on strict Evangelical lines, I was early inculcated into the sin of schism, with the result that I hurried with my Puritan nurse swiftly and violently by a Roman Catholic chapel and a Wesleyan meeting-house which we used to pa.s.s in our walks, with a sense of horror and wickedness in the air. Indeed, I remember once asking my mother why G.o.d did not rain down fire and brimstone on these two places of worship, and received a very unsatisfactory answer. To develop such a spirit was, it seems to me, a monstrous sin against Christian charity, and my children shall be saved from that.
Meantime my own hours are increasingly filled. It takes me a long time to prepare for the children"s lessons; and I have my reward abundantly in the delight of seeing their intelligence, their perception, their interest grow. I am determined that the beginnings of knowledge shall be for them a primrose path; I suppose there will have to be some stricter mental discipline later; but they shall begin by thinking and expecting things to be interesting and delightful, before they realise that things can also be hard and dull.
June 20, 1889.
When I read books on education, when I listen to the talk of educational theorists, when I see syllabuses and schedules, schemes and curricula, a great depression settles on my mind; I feel I have no interest in education, and a deep distrust of theoretical methods.
These things seem to aim at missing the very thing of which we are in search, and to lose themselves in a sort of childish game, a marshalling of processions, a l.u.s.t for organisation. I care so intensely for what it all means, I loathe so deeply the motives that seem at work. I suppose that the ordinary man considers a species of success, a bettering of himself, the acquisition of money and position and respectability, to be the end of life; and such as these look upon education primarily as a means of arriving at their object. Such was the old education given by the sophists, which aimed at turning out a well-balanced, effective man. But all this, it seems to me, has the wrong end in view. The success of it depends upon the fact that every one is not so capable of rising, that the rank and file must be in the background, forming the material out of which the successful man makes his combinations, and whom he contrives to despoil.
The result of it is that the well-educated man becomes hard, brisk, complacent, contemptuous, knowing his own worth, using his equipment for precise and definite ends.
My idea would rather be that education should aim at teaching people how to be happy without success; because the shadow of success is vulgarity, and vulgarity is the one thing which education ought to extinguish. What I desire is that men should learn to see what is beautiful, to find pleasure in homely work, to fill leisure with innocent enjoyment. If education, as the term is generally used, were widely and universally successful, the whole fabric of a nation would collapse, because no one thus educated would acquiesce in the performance of humble work. It is commonly said that education ought to make men dissatisfied, and teach them to desire to improve their position. It is a pestilent heresy. It ought to teach them to be satisfied with simple conditions, and to improve themselves rather than their position--the end of it ought to be to produce content. Suppose, for an instant--it sounds a fantastic hypothesis--that a man born in the country, in the labouring cla.s.s, were fond of field-work, a lover of the sights of nature in all her aspects, fond of good literature, why should he seek to change his conditions? But education tends to make boys and girls fond of excitement, fond of town sociabilities and amus.e.m.e.nts, till only the dull and unambitious are content to remain in the country. And yet the country work will have to be done until the end of time.
It is a dark problem; but it seems to me that we are only saved from disaster, in our well-meant efforts, by the simple fact that we cannot make humanity what we so short-sightedly desire to make it; that the dull, uninspired, unambitious element has an endurance and a permanence which we cannot change if we would, and which it is well for us that we cannot change; and that in spite of our curricula and schedules, mankind marches quietly upon its way to its unknown goal.
June 28, 1889.
An old friend has been staying with us, a very interesting man for many reasons, but princ.i.p.ally for the fact that he combines two sets of qualities that are rarely found together. He has strong artistic instincts; he would like, I think, to have been a painter; he has a deep love of nature, woodland places and quiet fields; he loves old and beautiful buildings with a tenderness that makes it a real misery to him to think of their destruction, and even their renovation; and he has, too, the poetic pa.s.sion for flowers; he is happiest in his garden.
But beside all this, he has the Puritan virtues strongly developed; he loves work, and duty, and simplicity of life, with all his heart; he is an almost rigid judge of conduct and character, and sometimes flashes out in a half Pharisaical scorn against meanness, selfishness, and weakness. He is naturally a pure Ruskinian; he would like to destroy railways and machinery and manufactories; he would like working-men to enjoy their work, and dance together on the village green in the evenings; but he is not a faddist at all, and has the healthiest and simplest power of enjoyment. His severity has mellowed with age, while his love of beauty has, I think, increased; he does not care for argument, and is apt to say pathetically that he knows that his fellow-disputant is right, but that he cannot change his opinions, and does not desire to. He is pa.s.sing, it seems to me, into a very gracious and soft twilight of life; he grows more patient, more tender, more serene. His face, always beautiful, has taken on an added beauty of faithful service and gracious sweetness.
We began one evening to discuss a book that has lately been published, a book of very sad, beautiful, wise, intimate letters, written by a woman of great perception, high intellectual gifts and pa.s.sionate affections. These letters were published, not long after her death, by her children, to whom many of them were addressed.
He had read the book, I found, with deep emotion; but he said very decidedly that it ought not to have been published, at all events so soon after the writer"s death. I am inclined to defer greatly to his judgment, and still more to his taste, and I have therefore read the book again to see if I am inclined to alter my mind. I find that my feeling is the exact opposite of his in every way. I feel humbly and deeply grateful to the children who have given the letters to the world. Of course if there had been any idea in the mind of the writer that they would be published, she would probably have been far more reticent; but, as it was, she spoke with a perfect openness and simplicity of all that was in her mind. It is curious to reflect that I met the writer more than once, and thought her a cold, hard, unsympathetic woman. She had to endure many sorrows and bereavements, losing, by untimely death, those whom she most loved; but the revelation of her pain and bewilderment, and the sublime and loving resignation with which she bore it, has been to me a deep, holy, and reviving experience. Here was one who felt grief acutely, rebelliously, and pa.s.sionately, yet whom sorrow did not sear or harden, suffering did not make self-absorbed or morbid, or pain make callous. Her love flowed out more richly and tenderly than ever to those who were left, even though the loss of those whom she loved remained an unfading grief, an open wound. She did not even shun the scenes and houses that reminded her of her bereavements; she did not withdraw from life, she made no parade of her sorrows. The whole thing is so wholesome, so patient, so devoted, that it has shown me, I venture to say, a higher possibility in human nature of bearing intolerable calamities with sweetness and courage, than I had dared to believe. It seems to me that nothing more wise or brave could have been done by the survivors than to make these letters accessible to others. We English people make such a secret of our feelings, are so stubbornly reticent about the wrong things, have so false and stupid a sense of decorum, that I am infinitely grateful for this glimpse of a pure, patient, and devoted heart. It seems to me that the one thing worth knowing in this world is what other people think and feel about the great experiences of life. The writers who have helped the world most are those who have gone deepest into the heart; but the dullest part of our conventionality is that when a man disguises the secrets of his soul in a play, a novel, a lyric, he is supposed to have helped us and ministered to our deepest needs; but if he speaks directly, in his own voice and person, of these things, he is at once accused of egotism and indecorum. It is not that we dislike sentiment and feeling; we value it as much as any nation; but we think that it must be spoken of symbolically and indirectly. We do not consider a man egotistical, if he will only give himself a feigned name, and write of his experiences in the third person. But if he uses the personal p.r.o.noun, he is thought to be shameless. There are even people who consider it more decent to say "one feels and one thinks,"
than to say "I feel and I think." The thing that I most desire, in intercourse with other men and women, is that they should talk frankly of themselves, their hopes and fears, their beliefs and uncertainties.
Yet how many people can do that? Part of our English shyness is shown by the fact that people are often curiously cautious about what they say, but entirely indiscreet in what they write. The only books which possess a real and abiding vitality are those in which personality is freely and frankly revealed. Of course there are one or two authors like Shakespeare who seem to have had a power of penetrating and getting inside any personality, but, apart from them, the books that go on being read and re-read are the books in which one seems to clasp hands with a human soul.
I said many of these things to my friend, and he replied that he thought I was probably right, but that he could not change his opinion.
He would not have had these letters published until all the survivors were dead. He did not think that the people who liked the book were actuated by good motives, but had merely a desire to penetrate behind the due and decent privacies of life; and he would have stopped the publication of such letters if he could, because even if people liked them, it was not good for them to read them. He said that he himself felt on reading the book as if he had been listening at keyholes, or peeping in at windows, and seeing the natural endearments of husband and wife, mother and children.
I said that what seemed to me to make a difference was whether the people thus espied were conscious of the espionage or not; and that it was no more improper to have such things revealed IN A BOOK, than to have them described in a novel or shown upon the stage. Moreover, it seemed to me, I said, as though to reveal such things in a book was the perfect compromise. I feel strongly that each home, each circle has a right to its own privacy; but I am not ashamed of my natural feelings and affections, and, by allowing them to appear in a book, I feel that I am just speaking of them simply to those who will understand. I desire communion with all sympathetic and like-minded persons; but one"s actual circle of friends is limited by time and s.p.a.ce and physical conditions. People talk of books as if every one in the world was compelled to read them. My own idea of a book is that it provides a medium by which one may commune confidentially with people whom one may never see, but whom one is glad to know to be alive. One can make friends through one"s books with people with whom one agrees in spirit, but whose bodily presence, modes of life, reticences, habits, would erect a barrier to social intercourse. It is so much easier to love and understand people through their books than through their conversation.
In books they put down their best, truest, most deliberate thoughts; in talk, they are at the mercy of a thousand accidents and sensations.
There were people who objected to the publication of the Browning love-letters. To me they were the sacred and beautiful record of an intensely holy and pa.s.sionate relation between two great souls; and I can afford to disregard and to contemn the people who thought the book strained, unconventional and shameless, for the sake of those whose faith in love and beauty was richly and generously nurtured by it.
It seems to me that the whole progress of life and thought, of love and charity, depends upon our coming to understand each other. The hostile seclusion which some desire is really a savage and almost animal inheritance; and the best part of civilisation has sprung from the generous self-revelation of kindly and honourable souls.
I am not even deterred, in a case of this kind, by wondering whether the person concerned would have liked or disliked the publication of these letters. I feel no sort of doubt that, as far as I am concerned, she would be only too willing that I should thus have read and loved them, and I cannot believe that the disapprobation of a few austere people, or the curiosity of a few vulgar people, would weigh in the balance for a moment against the joy of like-minded spirits.
The worst dissatisfaction of life is the difficulty one has in drawing near to others, the foolish hardness, often only superficial, which makes one hold back from and repudiate intimacies. If I had known and loved a great and worthy spirit, and had been the recipient of his confidences, I should hold it a solemn duty to tell the world what I knew. I should care nothing for the carping of the cold and unsympathetic, but I should base my decision on the approval of all loving and generous souls. This seems to me the highest service that art can render, and if it be said that no question of art comes in, in the publication of such records as these letters, I would reply that they are themselves works of the highest and most instinctive art, because the world, its relations and affections, its loss and grief, its pain and suffering, are here seen patiently mirrored and perfectly expressed by a most perceptive personality. The moment that emotions are depicted and represented, that moment they have felt the holy and transfiguring power of art; and then they pa.s.s out of the region of stuffy conventions and commonplace decorums into a finer and freer air.
I do not deny that there is much vulgar inquisitiveness abroad, but that matters little; and, for myself, I am glad to think that the world is moving in the direction of a greater frankness. I do not mean that a man has not a right to live his life privately, in his own house and his own circle, if he wills. But if that life is lived simply, generously and bravely, I welcome any ripple or ray from it that breaks in light and fragrance upon the harsher and uglier world.
July 1, 1889.
I have just read an interesting sentence. I don"t know where it comes from--I saw it in a book of extracts.
"I am more and more convinced that the cure for sentiment, as for all weakened forms of strong things, is not to refuse to feel it, but to feel more in it. This seems to me to make the whole difference between a true and a false asceticism. The false goes for getting rid of what it is afraid of; the true goes for using and making it serve, the one empties, the other fills; the one abstracts, the other concentrates."
There is a great deal of truth in this, and it is manfully put. Where it fails is, I think, in a.s.suming an amount of will-power and resolution in human character, which I suspect is not there. The system the writer recommends is a system that a strong character instinctively practises, moving through sentiment to emotion, naturally, and by a st.u.r.dy growth. But to tell a man to feel more in a thing, is like telling a man to be intelligent, benevolent, wise. It is just what no one can do. The various grades of emotion are not things like examinations, in which one can successively graduate. They are expressions of temperament. The sentimental man is the man who can go thus far and no farther. How shall one acquire vigour and generosity?
By behaving as if one was vigorous and generous, when one is neither? I do not think it can be done in that way. One can do something to check a tendency, very little to deepen it. What the writer calls false asceticism is the only brave and wholesome refuge of people, who know themselves well enough to know that they cannot trust themselves. Take the case of one"s relations with other people. If a man drifts into sentimental relations with other people, attracted by charm of any kind, and knowing quite well that the relation is built on charm, and that he will not be able to follow it into truer regions, I think he had probably better try to keep himself in check, not embrace a sentimental relation with a mild hope that it may develop into a real devotion. The strong man may try experiments, even though he burns his fingers. The weak man had better not meddle with the instruments and fiery fluids at all.
I am myself just strong enough to dislike sentiment, to turn faint in the sickly, mawkish air. But I am not strong enough to charge it with vivid life. Moreover, the danger of a strong character taking up the anti-ascetic position is that he is apt to degenerate into a man like Goethe, who plucked the fragrant blooms on every side, and threw them relentlessly away when he had inhaled their sweetness. That is a cruel business, unless there is a very wise and tender heart behind.
Yet again, reconsidering the whole problem, I am not sure that the whole suggestion, taken as advice, is not at fault. I think it is making a melancholy, casuistical, ethical business out of what ought to be a natural process. I think it is vitiated by a principle which vitiates so much of the advice of moralists, the principle that one ought to aim at completeness and perfection. I don"t believe that is the secret of life--indeed I think it is all the other way. One must of course do one"s best to resist immoral, low, sensuous tendencies; but otherwise I believe that one ought to drink as much as one"s gla.s.s can hold of pure and beautiful influences. If sentiment is the nearest that a man can come to emotion, I think he had better take it thankfully. It is this ethical prudence which is always weighing issues, and pulling up the plant to see how it grows, which is the weakening and the stunting thing. Of course any principle can be used sophistically; but I think that many people commit a kind of idolatry by worshipping their rules and principles rather than by trusting G.o.d. It develops a larger and freer life, if one is not too cautious, too precise. Of course one must follow what light one has, and all lights are lit from G.o.d; but if one watches the lanterns of moralists too anxiously, one may forget the stars.
July 8, 1889.
I lose myself sometimes in a dream of misery in thinking of the baseness and meanness and squalor that condition the lives of so many of the poor. Not that it is not possible under those conditions to live lives of simplicity and dignity and beauty. It is perfectly possible, but only, I think, for strong natures possessing a combination of qualities--virtue, industry, sense, prudence, and above all good physical health. There must still be thousands of lives which could be happy and simple and virtuous under more secure conditions, which are marred and degraded by the influences under which they are nurtured.
Yet what can the more fortunate individual do in the matter? If all the rich men in England were to resign to-morrow all the wealth they possessed, reserving only a bare modic.u.m of subsistence, the matter could not be amended. Even that wealth could not be wisely applied; and, if equally divided, it would hardly make any appreciable difference. What is worse, it would not alter the baneful influences in the least; it would give no increased security of material conditions, and it would not affect the point at issue, namely, the tone and quality of thought and feeling, where the only hope of real amelioration lies, and which is really the source and root of our social evils.
Moreover, the real difficulty is not to see what the cla.s.ses on whom the problem presses most grimly NEED, but what they WANT. It is no use theorising about it, and providing elegant remedies which will not touch the evil. What one requires to know is what those natures, who lie buried in this weltering tide, and are dissatisfied and tormented by it, really desire. It is no use trying to provide a paradise on the farther bank of the river, till we have constructed bridges to cross the gulf. What one wants is that some one from the darkness of the other side should speak articulately and boldly what they claim, what they could use. It is not enough to have a wistful cry for help ringing in our ears; one wants a philosophical or statesmanlike demand--just the very thing which from the nature of the case we cannot get. It may be that education will make this possible; but at present education seems merely to be a ladder let down into the abyss, by which a few stronger natures can climb out of it, with horror and contempt in their hearts of what they have left behind. The question that stares one in the face is, is there honest work for all to do, if all were strong and virtuous? The answer at present seems to be in the negative; and the problem seems to be solved only by the fact that all are not capable of honest work, and that the weaklings give the strong their opportunity.
What, again, one asks oneself, is the use of contriving more leisure for those who could not use it well? Then, too, under present conditions, the survival of the unfittest seems to be a.s.sured. Those breed most freely and recklessly of whom it may be said that, for the interests of civilisation, it is least desirable that they should perpetuate their kind. The problem too is so complicated, that it requires a gigantic faith in a reformer to suggest the sowing of seed of which he can never hope to see the fruit. The situation is one which tends to develop vehement and pa.s.sionate prophets, dealing in vague and remote generalisations, when what one needs is practical prudence, and the effective power of foreseeing contingencies. One who like myself loves security, leisure, beauty and peace, and is actuated by a vague and benevolent wish that all should have the same opportunities as myself, feels himself a mere sentimentalist in the matter, without a single effective quality. I can see the problem, I can grieve over it, I can feel my faith in G.o.d totter under the weight of it, but that is all.
July 15, 1889.
One of the hardest things to face in the world is the grim fact that our power of self-improvement is limited. Of some qualities we do not even possess the germs. Some qualities we have in minute quant.i.ties, but hardly capable of development; some few qualities we possess in fuller measure, and they are capable of development; but even so, our total capacity of growth is limited, conditioned by our vital energy, and we have to face the fact that if we develop one set of qualities we must neglect another set.
I think of it in a whimsical and fantastic image, the best I can find.
Imagine a box in which there are a number of objects like puff-b.a.l.l.s, each with a certain life of its own, half-filling the box. Some of the puff-b.a.l.l.s are small, hard, sterile; others are soft and expansive; some grow quickly in warmth and light, others fare better in cold and darkness. The process of growth begins: some of them increase in size and press themselves into every crevice, enclosing and enfolding the others; even so the growth of the whole ma.s.s is conditioned by the size of the box, and when the box is full, the power of increase is at an end.
The box, to interpret the fable, is our character with its possibilities. The conditions which develop the various qualities are the conditions of our lives, our health, our income, our education, the people who surround us; but even the qualities themselves have their limitations. Two people may grow up under almost precisely similar influences, and yet remain different to the end; two characters may be placed in difficult and bracing circ.u.mstances; the effect upon one character is to train the quality of self-reliance, on the other to produce a moral collapse. Some people do their growing early and then stop altogether, becoming impervious to new opinions and new influences. Some people go on growing to the end.
If one develops one side of one"s nature, as the intellectual or artistic, one probably suffers on the emotional or moral side. The pain which the perceptive man feels in surveying this process is apt to be very acute. He may see that he lacks certain qualities altogether and yet be unable to develop them. He may find in himself some patent and even gross fault, and be unable to cure it. The only hope for any of us is that we do not know the expansive force of our qualities, nor the size of the box; and therefore it is reasonable to go on trying and desiring; and as long as one can do that, it is clear that there is still room for growth. The worst shadow of all is to find, as one goes on, a certain indifference creeping over one. One accepts a fault as a part of one"s nature; one ceases to care about what appears unattainable.
It may be said that this is a fatalistic theory, and leads to a mild inactivity; but the question rather is whether it is true, whether it is attested by experience. One improves, not by overlooking facts, in however generous and enthusiastic a spirit, but by facing facts, and making the best use one can of them. One must resolutely try to submit oneself to favourable conditions, fertilising influences. And much more must one do that in the case of those for whom one is responsible. In the case of my own two children, for instance, my one desire is to surround them with the best influences I can. Even there one makes mistakes, no doubt, because one cannot test the expansive power of their qualities; but one can observe the conditions under which they seem to develop best, and apply them. To lavish love and tenderness on some children serves to concentrate their thoughts upon themselves, and makes them expect to find all difficulties smoothed away; on other more generous natures, it produces a glow of responsive grat.i.tude and affection, a desire to fulfil the hopes formed of them by those who love them. The most difficult cases of all are the cases of temperaments without loyal affection, but with much natural charm.
Those are the people who get what is called "spoilt," because it is so much easier to believe in the existence of qualities which are superficially displayed than in qualities which lie too deep for facile expression. One comes across cases of children of intense emotional natures, and very little power of expressing their feelings, or of showing their affection. Of course, too, example is far more potent than precept, and it is very difficult for parents to simulate a high-mindedness and an affectionateness that they do not themselves possess, even if they are sincerely anxious that their children should grow up high-minded and affectionate. One of the darkest shadows of my present condition is the fear that any revelation of my own weakness and emptiness may discourage and distort my children"s characters; and the watchfulness which this requires increases the strain under which I suffer, because it is a hard fact that an example set for a n.o.ble and an unselfish motive is not nearly so potent as an example set naturally, sweetly, and generously, with no particular consciousness of motive behind it at all.
July 18, 1889.
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 circ.u.mstances. "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.