London: January 1852.
People who have got at all accustomed to write as authors are so incapable of writing, or even speaking, except ‘in character,’ and will run through a whole list of dramatis personæ as occasion occurs, without giving you a chance of seeing what they really are off the stage; if they try to be sincere, it often makes bad worse. There! that is one of the mischiefs and miseries of authorship which deters me. Ten years hence, perhaps! which would not be at all too late; but if never, no matter. I have myself been rather spoilt by somewhat over-quicksighted men, and thus have got into a perverse habit of hiding. Have you looked at my sometime pamphlet?[15] I should not write it now, you must know, I am wiser; but it meant something at the time.
Pictorial-ness, yes; that, when it becomes a wonderful vision of all things, is the ‘Spirit of the Universe.’ The pictorial attitude is not a good one for one’s continuous life, but for a season it transports one out of reality.
February 21, 1852.
I may perhaps be idle now; but when I was a boy, between fourteen and twenty-two throughout, I may say, you don’t know how much regular drudgery I went through. Holidays after holidays, when I was at school, after a week or so of recreation, which very rarely came in an enjoyable form to me, the whole remaining five or six weeks I used to give to regular work at fixed hours. That wasn’t so very easy for a schoolboy, spending holidays, not at home, but with uncles, aunts, and cousins. All this, and whatever work, less rigorous through pretty regular, that has followed since during the last ten years, has been, so far as external results go, perhaps a mere blank and waste; nothing very tangible has come of it; but still it is some justification to me for being less strict with myself now. Certainly, as a boy, I had less of boyish enjoyment of any kind whatever, either at home or at school, than nine-tenths of boys, at any rate of boys who go to school, college, and the like; certainly, even as a man I think I have earned myself some title to live for some little interval, I do not say in enjoyment, but without immediate devotion to particular objects; on matters as it were of business.
A bad style is as bad as bad manners, and manners you admit do mean something. Things really ill-written it does one a little harm to read. Would you forgive bad music because it was well meant? discord because concordantly intended?
Sunday Morning, London: March 1852.
Shall I begin by recommending patience about all questions, moral, mystical, &c.? It is not perhaps simply one’s business in life to ‘envisager’ the most remarkable problems of humanity and the universe simply for the sole benefit of having so done; still we may be well assured that only time can work out any sort of answer to them for us. ‘Solvitur ambulando.’ Meantime, in defence of silence, I have always an impression that what is taken to talk with is lost to act with; you cannot speak your wisdom and have it.
It is rain, rain, rain, and universal umbrellas travelling churchward. I meant to get another walk to Chelsea to see Mrs. Carlyle: but the waters are covering the face of the New Road, and the omnibuses, doubtless, would be full.
All things become clear to me by work more than by anything else. Any kind of drudgery will help one out of the most uncommon either sentimental or speculative perplexity; the attitude of work is the only one in which one can see things properly. One may be afraid sometimes of destroying the beauty of one’s dreams by doing anything, losing sight of what perhaps one will not be able to recover; it need not be so.