Easter Sunday, April 20th.
In the idleness which succeeds any long article, and Defoe is the second leader this month, I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; and take no time over this; and forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash and vigour and sometimes hits an unexpected bull’s-eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously and scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time. But looseness quickly becomes slovenly. A little effort is needed to face a character or an incident which needs to be recorded. Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack and untidy like Vernon Lee. Her ligaments are too loose for my taste.
Monday, May 12th.
We are in the thick of our publishing season; Murry, Eliot and myself are in the hands of the public this morning. For this reason, perhaps, I feel slightly but decidedly depressed. I read a bound copy of Kew Gardens through; having put off the evil task until it was complete. The result is vague. It seems to me slight and short; I don’t see how the reading of it impressed Leonard so much. According to him it is the best short piece I have done yet; and this judgment led me to read the Mark on the Wall and I found a good deal of fault with that. As Sydney Waterlow once said, the worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise. I feel rather sure that I shall get none for this story; and I shall mind a little. Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there; Murry and Eliot ordered, and not me; the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art. And these mists of the spirit have other causes, I expect; though they are deeply hidden. There is some ebb and flow of the tide of life which accounts for it; though what produces either ebb or flow I’m not sure.
Tuesday, June 10th.
I must use up the fifteen minutes before dinner in going on again, in order to make up the great gap. We are just in from the Club; from ordering a reprint of the Mark on the Wall at the Pelican Press; and from tea with James. His news is that Maynard in disgust at the peace terms has resigned, kicked the dust of office off him and is now an academic figure at Cambridge. But I must really sing my own praises, since I left off at the point when we came back from Asheham to find the hall table stacked, littered, with orders for Kew Gardens. They strewed the sofa and we opened them intermittently through dinner and quarrelled, I’m sorry to say, because we were both excited, and opposite tides of excitement coursed in us, and they were blown to waves by the critical blast of Charleston. All these orders—150 about, from shops and private people—come from a review in the Lit. Sup. presumably by Logan, in which as much praise was allowed me as I like to claim. And 10 days ago I was stoically facing complete failure! The pleasure of success was considerably damaged, first by our quarrel, and second by the necessity of getting some 90 copies ready, cutting covers, printing labels, glueing backs, and finally despatching, which used up all spare time and some not spare till this moment. But how success showered during those days! Gratuitously, too, I had a letter from Macmillan in New York, so much impressed by The Voyage Out that they want to read Night and Day. I think the nerve of pleasure easily becomes numb. I like little sips, but the psychology of fame is worth considering at leisure. I fancy one’s friends take the bloom off. Lytton lunched here on Saturday with the Webbs, and when I told him my various triumphs, did I imagine a little shade, instantly dispelled, but not before my rosy fruit was out of the sun. Well, I treated his triumphs in much the same way. I can’t feel gratified when he expatiates upon a copy of Eminent Victorians lined and initialled ‘M’ or ‘H’ by Mr or Mrs Asquith. Yet clearly the thought produced a comfortable glow in him. The luncheon was a success. We ate in the garden and Lytton sported very gracefully and yet with more than his old assurance over the conversation. ‘But I’m not interested in Ireland *
Saturday, July 19th.
One ought to say something about Peace day, I suppose, though whether it’s worth taking a new nib for that purpose I don’t know. I’m sitting wedged into the window and so catch almost on my head the steady drip of rain which is pattering on the leaves. In ten minutes or so the Richmond procession begins. I fear there will be few people to applaud the town councillors dressed up to look dignified and march through the streets. I’ve a sense of Holland covers on the chairs; of being left behind when everyone’s in the country. I’m desolate, dusty, and disillusioned. Of course we did not see the procession. We have only marked the bins of refuse on the outskirts. Rain held off till some half hour ago. The servants had a triumphant morning. They stood on Vauxhall Bridge and saw everything. Generals and soldiers and tanks and nurses and bands took two hours in passing. It was they said the most splendid sight of their lives. Together with the Zeppelin raid it will play a great part in the history of the Boxall family. But I don’t know—it seems to me a servants’ festival; something got up to pacify and placate ‘the people’—and now the rain’s spoiling it; and perhaps some extra treat will have to be devised for them. That’s the reason of my disillusionment I think. There’s something calculated and politic and insincere about these peace rejoicings. Moreover they are carried out with no beauty and not much spontaneity. Flags are intermittent; we have what the servants, out of snobbishness, I think, insisted upon buying, to surprise us. Yesterday in London the usual sticky stodgy conglomerations of people, sleepy and torpid as a cluster of drenched bees, were crawling over Trafalgar Square, and rocking about the pavements in the neighbourhood. The one pleasant sight I saw was due rather to the little breath of wind than to decorative skill; some long tongue-shaped streamers attached to the top of the Nelson column licked the air, furled and unfurled, like the gigantic tongues of dragons, with a slow, rather serpentine beauty. Otherwise theatres and music-halls were studded with stout glass pincushions which, rather prematurely, were all radiant within—but surely light might have shone to better advantage. However night was sultry and magnificent so far as that went, and we were kept awake some time after getting into bed, by the explosion of rockets which for a second made our room bright. (And now, in the rain, under a grey brown sky, the bells of Richmond are ringing—but church bells only recall weddings and Christian services.) I can’t deny that I feel a little mean at writing so lugubriously; since we’re all supposed to keep up the belief that we’re glad and enjoying ourselves. So on a birthday, when for some