No, nothing has happened. That is the worst of it. When one reaches my age nothing ever does happen unless one makes it happen. When one is young adventures, excitements, thrills, come suddenly out of the void, thus adding to the ordinary joy of them the throb of the unexpected. But when one is older one has to fare forth out into the void and seek diligently adventures, excitements, thrills; and if one has one’s living to earn, and a whole lot of little things to see after, why then one hasn’t much time for excursions into the void.
This is a purely selfish letter. It is written to relieve my mind; by way of getting down in black and white some thoughts that have been twisting and twirling about like maggots in my brain all the afternoon. In that respect, at least, I am an artist, Alexa, and, forgive me, my daughter, in that same respect, you are not.
The artistic temperament is not, as fools of novelists appear to think, an itching to be singular or noticeable in any way, an inclination to wear ridiculous neck-ties, to omit to wash behind the ears, or to live with people to whom one is not married; and to quarrel with them. It is the desire, the invincible desire, to externalise and express in paint or pencil, in clay or marble, in musical sounds or in written words, one’s emotions, one’s thoughts, one’s aspirations, one’s dreams.
You, for instance, draw. For a girl of your years and training you draw rather well. But when you see a thing that appeals to you—a face, a landscape, a little bit of an interior, you do not ache and ache until you have got it down in pencil upon paper. You are quite content to keep it within you. I, when I get ever such a stupid idea in my head, am miserable until I see it before me in words, in words arranged as well as I know how to arrange them. I would rather, far rather, keep an aching tooth in my jaw than an aching idea in my head. And so, though my neck-ties are ever the correctest of their kind that Bond Street knows, and though I never do any of those other things peculiar to the artistic temperament of rubbishy fiction, I do claim to belong to the great company of artists.
By the way, I have often wondered what the author of the Te Deum was about not to have added another line to it:—
“The great Brotherhood of Artists, throughout all the world: Praise Thee.”
Every artist, in every bit of honest work he does, though he may not mean it or know it, praises God. How supremely well Kipling expressed the gist of our creed when he wrote in that exquisite Envoi to “Life’s Handicap”; you remember it:—
“One instant’s toil to Thee denied
Stands all Eternity’s offence.”
And now to come down from the heights to the valley—I never could breathe freely on mountain tops, Alexa; that’s why I hate Switzerland so cordially. It is not the touring Anglican clergy and their impossible wives I object to so much; it is those appalling Alps. But, as I was going to say, I write this letter because I spent a whole half-hour this morning reading a woman’s paper. At least, I’m not sure it called itself a woman’s paper, it might have been a woman’s page in an ordinary paper. I don’t know where the thing has got to now, so I can’t refer to it. I found it on the hall table when I came down to breakfast.