The Diary Habit
For seven years I have kept my diary scrupulously, without missing a day, and now, at the beginning of a new twelvemonth, I am wondering whether I should maintain or renounce it. There are certain good habits, it would seem, as hard to break as bad ones, and if the practice of keeping a daily journal is a praiseworthy one, it derives no little of its virtue from sheer inertia. The half-filled book tempts one on; there is a pleasure in seeing the progress of the volume, leaf by leaf; like sentimental misers, we hoard our store of memories. We end each day with a definite statement of fact or fancy, and it grows harder and harder to abstain from the self-enforced duty. Yet it is seldom a pleasure, when one is fatigued with excitement or work, to transmit our affairs to writing. Some, it is true, love it for its own sake, or as a relief for pent-up emotions, but, in one way or another, most autobiographical journalists consider the occupation as a prudent depositor regards his frugal savings in the bank. Some time, somehow, they think, these coined memories will prove useful.
Does this time ever come, I wonder? For me it has not come yet, though I still picture a late reflective age when I shall enjoy recalling the past, and live again my old sensations. But life is more strenuous than of yore, and even at seventy or eighty, nowadays, no one need consider himself too old for a fresh, active interest in the world about him. Your old gentleman of today does not sit in his own corner of the fireplace and dote over the lost years; he reads the morning papers, and insists upon going to the theatre with his nieces on wet evenings. Have I, then, been laying up honey for a winter of discontent that shall never come?
Besides this distrust of my diaries, I am awakening after seven years to the fact that, as autobiography, the books are strangely lacking in interest. They are not convincing. I thought, as I did my clerkly task, that I should always be I, but a cursory glance at these naïve pages shows that they were written by a thousand different persons, no one of whom speaks the language of the emotions as I know it today. It is true, then, my diary has convinced me, that we do become different persons every seven years. Here is written down rage, hate, delight, affection and yearning, no word of which is comprehensible to me now; they leave me quite cold. I am reading the adventures of some one else, not my own. Who was it? I have forgotten the dialect of my youth. Ah, indeed, the boy is father of the man! I will be indulgent, as a son should, to paternal indiscretions!
And yet, for the bare skeleton of my history, these volumes are useful enough. The pages which, while still wet with ink and tears I considered lyric essays, have fallen to a merely utilitarian value. I am thankful, on that account, for them, and for the fact that my bookkeeping was well systematized and indexed. As outward form goes, my diaries are models of manner. So for those still under the old-fashioned spell, who would adopt a plan of entry, let me describe them.
The especial event of each day, if the day held anything worthy of remark or remembrance, was boldly noted at the top of the page over the date. Whirring the leaves I catch many suggestive phrases: "Dinner at Mme. Qui Vive's" (it was there I first tasted champagne), "Henry Irving in 'Macbeth'" (but it was not the actor that made that night famous--I took Kitty Carmine home in a hansom!), "Broke my arm" (or else I would never have read Marlowe, I fear), and "Met Sally Reynard" (this was an event, it seemed at that time, worthy of being chronicled in red ink). So they go. They are the chapter headings in the book of my life.
In the lower left-hand corner of each page I noted the receipt of letters, the initials of the writers inscribed in little squares, and in the opposite right-hand corner a complementary hieroglyph kept account of every reply sent. So, by running over the pages I can note the fury of my correspondence. (What an industrious scribbler "S.R." was to be sure! I had not thought we went it quite so hard--and "K.C."--how often she appears in the lower left, and how seldom in the lower right! I was a brute, no doubt, and small wonder she married Flemingway!)
Perpendicularly, along the inner margin, I wrote the names of those to whom I had been introduced that day, and on a back page I kept a chronological list of the same. (I met Kitty, it seems, on a Friday--perhaps that accounts for our not hitting it off!) Most of these are names, and nothing more, now, and it gives my heart a leap to come across Sally in that list of nonentities. (To think that there was ever a time when I did not know her!)
Besides all this, the books are extra-illustrated in the most significant manner. There is hardly a page that does not contain some trifling memento; here, a theatre coupon pasted in, or a clipping from the programme, an engraved card or a pencilled note; there a scrap of a photograph worn out in my pocket-book, somebody's sketched profile, or, at rare intervals, a wisp of some one's hair! (This reddish curl--was it Kitty's or from Dora's brow? Oh, I remember, it was Myrtle gave it me! No, I am wrong; I stole it from Nettie!) I pasted them in with eager trembling fingers, but I regard them now without a tremour. There are other pages being filled which interest me more.
Occasionally I open a book, 1895 perhaps, and consult a date to be sure that Millicent's birthday is on November 12th, or to determine just who was at Kitty's coming-out dinner. Here is a diagram of the table with the places of all the guests named. (So I sat beside Nora, did I? And who was Nora? I have forgotten her name! Now she is Mrs. Alfred Fortunatus!)