It is with a sort of angry helplessness, mixed with an instinctive feeling of self-defence, that one turns from such accumulated, such carefully elaborated horrors, and tries to forget them in whatever little pursuit happens to lie nearest to one’s hand. It is not particularly creditable to one’s humanity that one should succeed in doing so, and there is no denying that one’s attitude is essentially that of a kitten, or other small Unreasonable, which runs after its ball, though disaster may be hovering, or conflagration about to involve, it and everyone else. Happily, we are made so, just as surely as the kitten is so made. We catch at straws, and in nine cases out of ten the straw saves us. Were it not for this same blessed prerogative of being interested in trifles, what, one sometimes asks oneself, would become of all our poor wits? or where on a journey so full of loss and sorrow, shock and trouble, would they have got to before the final goal is reached?

July 14, 1900

WITH a mind full of China, and its abominations, I happened this afternoon to take up The Opium Eater, and opened full upon the passages describing the results of the Malay’s visit. What imagery to be sure! What an amazing rhetorician! Certainly if all life were the feverish dream, the half nightmare, one is tempted sometimes to call it, no greater exponent of its terrors has ever existed than Thomas de Quincey. Take this as a prelude.

“The Malay has been a frightful enemy for months. I have been every night, through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes. I know not whether others share my feelings on this point, but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners, and modes of life and scenery I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common to others. Southern Asia in general is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other reasons.... The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, etc., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed.... It contributes much to these feelings that Southern Asia is and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life. The great officina gentium. Man is a weed in these regions. The vast empires into which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names and images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics, or brute animals.”

Now for the dream proper.

“Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China, or Indostan. From kindred feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, grinned at, hooted at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paraquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas; and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed; I fled from the wrath of Brahma through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me; Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers, at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles, and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.”

July 28, 1900

THE last ten or twelve days have been different from any that I ever remember before. Circumstances have made them so, yet it has seemed as though there were something about themselves that has, as it were, affected those circumstances. For one thing it has been extraordinarily hot, so that we have been thankful for every breath of air that has travelled to us across the downs. The new little water-lily pond has been most kindly, and has contrived to produce an amazing illusion of coolness, while the oaks in whose shadow it lies have provided us with the reality of shade. We two have sat day after day for hours beside it, and the minutes have slipped along, like bubbles upon some very slow stream. There is a strange sense of unreality over everything; a sense that everything is very near its end. The hours of a summer’s day, and the years of a man’s life seem to be much the same thing, and the one hardly longer than the other. The chimes from the clock across the valley are almost the only sounds that break in upon our stillness, for the birds sing very little just now. It has been a most strange fortnight; curiously unreal; extraordinarily dreamy and spectral-like. One by one its days have slipped by, very, very slowly, yet now that they are almost gone I say to myself—“How terribly swiftly!”

August 1, 1900

THERE are times—surely we all know them—when the injustices of life, of the individual destiny, seem more than can be silently endured. “Why should this? and this? and this be?” we ask. “To what end such superfluous happiness heaped upon one head, such equally uncalled-for refusals of it consigned to another? What does it mean? or who is the better for such unendurable partiality?”