He came, in the morning. One has only to set eyes upon him to know that one is in the presence of a hero, to feel that his poetry just streams from him like light from the sun; that it is not the central warmth, but the flying rippling radiance of the outward-bound light, falling in momentary beauty on the common things about his path. He is a great big man, carelessly dressed, like a Homeric king. I liked everything about him from head to foot, his big carelessly-worn clothes, the bright tie thrust loosely through a cameo ring; his loose shaggy locks, his strong beard. His face, with its delicate pallor, and purely moulded features, had a youthful air of purity and health; yet there was a dim trouble of thought on his brow, over the great, smiling, flashing grey eyes. He came in with a sort of royal greeting, he flung his big limbs on a sofa; he talked easily, quietly, lavishly, saying fine things with no effort, dropping a subject quickly if he thought it did not interest me; sometimes flashing out with a quick gesture of impatience or gusto, enjoying life, every moment and every detail. His quick eyes, roving about, took in each smallest point, not in the weary feverish way in which I apprehend a new scene, but as though he liked everything new and unfamiliar, like an unsated child. He greeted Maud and the children with a kind of chivalrous tenderness and intimacy, as though he loved all pretty and tender things, and took joy in their nearness. He held Alec between his knees, and played with him while he talked. The children took possession of him, as if they had known him all their lives. And yet there was no touch of pose, no consciousness of greatness or vigour about him. He was as humble, grateful, interested, as though he were a poor stranger dependent on our bounty. I asked him in a quiet moment about his work. "No, I am writing nothing," he said with a smile, "I have said all I have got to say,"—and then with a sudden humorous flash, "though I believe I should be able to write more if I could get decent paper and respectable type to print my work." I ventured to ask if he did not feel any desire to write? "No," he said, "frankly I do not—the world is so full of pleasant things to do and hear and see, that I sometimes think myself almost a fool for having spent so much time in scribbling. Do you know," he went on, "a delicious story I picked up the other day? A man was travelling in some God-forsaken out-of-the-way place—I believe it was the Andes—and he fell in with an old podgy Roman priest who was going everywhere, in a state of perpetual fatigue, taking long expeditions every day, and returning worn-out in the evening, but perfectly content. The man saw a good deal of the priest, and asked him what he was doing. The priest smiled and said, 'Well, I will tell you. I had an illness some time ago and believed that I was going to die. One evening—I was half unconscious—I thought I saw some one standing by my bed. I looked, and it was a young man with a beautiful and rather severe face, whom I knew to be an angel, who was gazing at me rather strangely. I thought it was the messenger of death, and—for I was wishing to be gone and have done with it all—I said something to him about being ready to depart—and then added that I was waiting hopefully to see the joys of Paradise, the glory of the saints in light. He looked at me rather fixedly, and said, "I do not know why you should say that, and why you should expect to take so much pleasure in the beauty of heaven, when you have taken so little trouble to see anything of the beauty of earth;" and then he left me; and I reflected that I had always been doing my work in a dull humdrum way, in the same place all my life; and I determined that, if I got well, I would go about and see something of the glory that IS revealed to us, and not expect only the glory that SHALL BE revealed to us.' It is a fine story," he went on, "and makes a parable for us writers, who are inclined to think too much about our work, and disposed to see that it is very good, like God brooding over the world." He sate for a little, smiling to himself. And then I plied him with questions about his writing, how his thoughts came to him how he worked them out. He told me as if he was talking about some one else, half wondering that there could be anything to care about. I have heard many craftsmen talk about their work, but never one who talked with such detachment. As a rule, writers talk with a secret glee, and with a deprecating humility that deceives no one; but the great man talked, not as if he cared to think about it, but because it happened to interest me. He strolled with me, he lunched; and he thanked us when he went away with an earnest and humble thankfulness, as though we had extended our hospitality to an obscure and unworthy guest. And then his praise of my own books—it was all so natural; not as if he had come there with fine compliments prepared, with incense to burn; but speaking about them as though they were in his mind, and he could not help it. "I read all you write," he said; "ah, you go deep—you are a lucky fellow, to be able to see so far and so minutely, and to bring it all home to our blind souls. He must be a terrible fellow to live with," he said, smiling at my wife. "It must be like being married to a doctor, and feeling that he knows so much more about one than one knows oneself—but he sees what is best and truest, thank God; and says it with the voice of an angel, speaking softly out of his golden cloud."
I can't say what words like these have meant to me; but the visit itself, the sight of this strong, equable, good-humoured man, with no feverish ambitions, no hankering after fame or recognition, has done even more. I have heard it said that he is indolent, that he has not sufficient sense of responsibility for his gifts. But the man has done a great work for his generation; he has written poetry of the purest and finest quality. Is not that enough? I cannot understand the mere credit we give to work, without any reference to the object of the work, or the spirit in which it is done. We think with respect of the man who makes a fortune, or who fills an official post, the duties of which do nothing in particular for any one. It is a kind of obsession with us practical Westerners; of course a man ought to contribute to the necessary work of the world; but many men spend their lives in work which is not necessary; and, after all, we are sent into the world to live, and work is only a part of life. We work to live, we do not live to work. Even if we were all socialists, we should, I hope, have the grace to dig the gardens and make the clothes of our poets and prophets, so as to give them the leisure they need.
I do not question the instinct of my hero in the matter; he lives eagerly and peacefully; he touches into light the spirits of those who draw near to him; and I admire a man who knows how to stop when he has done his best work, and does not spur and whip his tired mind into producing feebler, limper, duller work of the same kind; how few of our great writers have known when to hold their hand!
God be praised for great men! My poet to-day has made me feel that life is a thing to be lived eagerly and high-heartedly; that the world is full of beautiful, generous, kindly things, of free air and sunshine; and that we ought to find leisure to drink it all in, and to send our hearts out in search of love and beauty and God—for these things are all about us, if we could but feel and hear and see them.
October 12, 1888.
How absurd it is to say that a writer could not write a large, wise, beautiful book unless he had a great soul—is it almost like saying that an artist could not paint a fine face unless he had a fine face himself. It is all a question of seeing clearly, and having a skilled hand. There is nothing to make one believe that Shakespeare had a particularly noble or beautiful character; and some of our greatest writers have been men of unbalanced, childish, immature temperaments, full of vanity and pettiness. Of course a man must be interested in what he is describing; but I think that a man of a naturally great, wise, and lofty spirit is so disposed as a rule to feel that his qualities are instinctive, and so ready to credit other people with them, that it does not occur to him to depict those qualities. I am not sure that the best equipment for an artist is not that he should see and admire great and noble and beautiful things, and feel his own deficiency in them acutely, desiring them with the desire of the moth for the star. The best characters in my own books have been, I am sure, the people least like myself, because the creation of a character that one whole-heartedly admires, and that yet is far out of one's reach, is the most restful and delightful thing in the world. If one is unready in speech, thinking of one's epigrams three hours after the occasion for them has arisen, how pleasant to draw the man who says the neat, witty, appropriate, consoling thing! If one suffers from timidity, from meanness, from selfishness, what a delight to depict the man who is brave, generous, unselfish! Of course the quality of a man's mind flows into and over his work, but that is rather like the varnish of the picture than its tints—it is the medium rather than the design. The artistic creation of ideal situations is often a sort of refuge to the man who knows that he makes a mess of the beautiful and simple relations of life. The artist is fastidious and moody, feeling the pressure of strained nerves and tired faculties, easily discouraged, disgusted by the superficial defect, the tiny blot that spoils alike the noble character, the charming prospect, the attractive face. He sees, let us say, a person with a beautiful face and an ugly hand. The normal person thinks of the face and forgets the hand. The artist thinks with pain of the hand and forgets the face. He desires an impossible perfection, and flies for safety to the little world that he can make and sway. That is why artists, as a rule, love twilight hours, shaded rooms, half-tones, subdued hues, because what is common, staring, tasteless, is blurred and hidden. Men of rich vitality are generally too much occupied with life as it is, its richness, its variety, its colour and fragrance, to think wistfully of life as it might be. The unbridled, sensuous, luxurious strain, that one finds in so many artists, comes from a lack of moral temperance, a snatching at delights. They fear dreariness and ugliness so much that they welcome any intoxication of pleasure. But after all, it is clearness of vision that makes the artist, the power of disentangling the central feature from the surrounding details, the power of subordinating accessories, of seeing which minister to the innermost impression, and which distract and blur. An artist who creates a great character need not necessarily even desire to attain the great qualities which he discerns; he sees them, as he sees the vertebrae of the mountain ridge under pasture and woodland, as he sees the structure of the tree under its mist of green; but to see beauty is not necessarily to desire it; for, as in the mountain and the tree, it may have no ethical significance at all, only a symbolical meaning. The best art is inspired more by an intellectual force than by a vital sympathy. Of course to succeed as a novelist in England to-day, one must have a dash of the moralist, because an English audience is far more preoccupied with moral ideals than with either intellectual or artistic ideals. The reading public desires that love should be loyal rather than passionate; it thinks ultimate success a more impressive thing than ultimate failure; it loves sadness as a contrast and preface to laughter. It prefers that the patriarch Job should end by having a nice new family of children and abundant flocks, rather than that he should sink into death among the ashes, refusing to curse God for his reverses. Its view of existence after death is that Dives should join Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. To succeed, one must compromise with this comfortable feeing, sacrificing, if needs be, the artistic conscience, because the place of the minstrel in England is after the banquet, when the warriors are pleasantly tired, have put off the desire of meat and drink, and the fire roars and crackles in the hearth. When Ruskin deserted his clouds and peaks, his sunsets and sunrises, and devoured his soul over the brutalities and uglinesses and sordid inequalities of life, it was all put down to the obscure pressure of mental disease. Ophelia does not sob and struggle in the current, but floats dreamily to death in a bed of meadow-flowers.
October 21, 1888.
Let me try to recollect for my own amusement how it was that my last book grew up and took shape. How well I remember the day and the hour when the first thought came to me! Some one was dining here, and told a story about a friend of his, and an unhappy misunderstanding between him and a girl whom he loved, or thought he loved. A figure, two figures, a scene, a conversation, came into my head, absolutely and perfectly life-like. I lay awake half the night, I remember, over it. How did those people come to be in exactly that situation? how would it develop? At first it was just the scene by itself, nothing more; a room which filled itself with furniture. There were doors—where did they lead to? There were windows—where did they look out? The house was full, too, of other people, whose quiet movements I heard. One person entered the room, and then another; and so the story opened out. I saw the wrong word spoken, I saw the mist of doubt and distress that filled the girl's mind; I felt that I would have given anything to intervene, to explain; but instead of speaking out, the girl confided in the wrong person, who had an old grudge against the man, so old that it had become instinctive and irrational. So the thing evolved itself. Then at one time the story got entangled and confused. I could go no further. The characters were by this time upon the scene, but they could not speak. I then saw that I had made a mistake somewhere. The scaffolding was all taken down, spar by spar, and still the defect was not revealed. I must go, I saw, backwards; and so I felt my way, like a man groping in the dark, into what had gone before, and suddenly came out into the light. It was a mistake far back in the conception. I righted it, and the story began to evolve itself again; this time with a delicate certainty, that made me feel I was on the track at last. An impressive scene was sacrificed—it was there that my idea had gone wrong! As to the writing of it, I cannot say it was an effort. It wrote itself. I was not creating; I was describing and selecting. There was one scene in particular, a scene which has been praised by all the reviewers. How did I invent it? I do not know. I had no idea what the characters were to say when I began to write it, but one remark grew inevitably and surely out of the one before. I was never at a loss; I never stuck fast; indeed the one temptation which I firmly and constantly resisted was the temptation to write morning, noon, and night. Sometimes I had a horrible fear that I might not live to set down what was so clear in my mind; but there is a certain freshness which comes of self-restraint. Day after day, as I strolled, and read, and talked, I used to hug myself at the thought of the beloved evening hours that were coming, when I should fling myself upon the book with a passionate zest, and feel it grow under my hand. And then it was done! I remember writing the last words, and the conviction came upon me that it was the end. There was more to be told; the story stretched on into the distance; but it was as though the frame of the picture had suddenly fallen upon the canvas, and I knew that just so much and no more was to be seen. And then, as though to show me plainly that the work was over, the next day came an event which drew my mind off the book. I had had a period of unclouded health and leisure, everything had combined to help me, and then this event, of which I need not speak, came and closed the book at the right moment.
What wonder if one grows fatalistic about writing; that one feels that one can only say what is given one to say! And now, dry and arid as my mind is, I would give all I have for a renewal of that beautiful glow, which I cannot recover. It is misery—I can conceive no greater—to be bound hand and foot in this helpless silence.