In the career of the most unliterary of writers,in the sense that literary ambition had never entered the world of his imagination,the coming into existence of the first book is quite an inexplicable event.In my own case I cannot trace it back to any mental or psychological cause which one could point out and hold to.The greatest of my gifts being a consummate capacity for doing nothing,I cannot even point to boredom as a rational stimulus for taking up a pen.The pen,at any rate,was there,and there is nothing wonderful in that.Everybody keeps a pen (the cold steel of our days)in his rooms,in this enlightened age of penny stamps and halfpenny post-cards.In fact,this was the epoch when by means of postcard and pen Mr.Gladstone had made the reputation of a novel or two.And I,too,had a pen rolling about somewhere--the seldom-used,the reluctantly taken-up pen of a sailor ashore,the pen rugged with the dried ink of abandoned attempts,of answers delayed longer than decency permitted,of letters begun with infinite reluctance,and put off suddenly till next day--till next week,as like as not!The neglected,uncared-for pen,flung away at the slightest provocation,and under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm,in a perfunctory,grumpy worry,in the "Where the devil IS the beastly thing gone to?"ungracious spirit.
Where,indeed!It might have been reposing behind the sofa for a day or so.My landlady's anemic daughter (as Ollendorff would have expressed it),though commendably neat,had a lordly,careless manner of approaching her domestic duties.Or it might even be resting delicately poised on its point by the side of the table-leg,and when picked up show a gaping,inefficient beak which would have discouraged any man of literary instincts.But not me!"Never mind.This will do."
O days without guile!If anybody had told me then that a devoted household,having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and importance,would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the fuss I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had touched my sacrosanct pen of authorship,I would have never deigned as much as the contemptuous smile of unbelief.There are imaginings too unlikely for any kind of notice,too wild for indulgence itself,too absurd for a smile.Perhaps,had that seer of the future been a friend,I should have been secretly saddened."Alas!"I would have thought,looking at him with an unmoved face,"the poor fellow is going mad."
I would have been,without doubt,saddened;for in this world where the journalists read the signs of the sky,and the wind of heaven itself,blowing where it listeth,does so under the prophetical management of the meteorological office,but where the secret of human hearts cannot be captured by prying or praying,it was infinitely more likely that the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than that I should turn into a writer of tales.
To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a fascinating pursuit for idle hours.The field is so wide,the surprises so varied,the subject so full of unprofitable but curious hints as to the work of unseen forces,that one does not weary easily of it.I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs who rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit--who really never rest in this world,and when out of it go on fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last habitation,where all men must lie in obscure equality.Neither am I thinking of those ambitious minds who,always looking forward to some aim of aggrandizement,can spare no time for a detached,impersonal glance upon them selves.
And that's a pity.They are unlucky.These two kinds,together with the much larger band of the totally unimaginative,of those unfortunate beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great French writer has put it)"the whole universe vanishes into blank nothingness,"miss,perhaps,the true task of us men whose day is short on this earth,the abode of conflicting opinions.The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions,where the last vestiges of faith,hope,charity,and even of reason itself,seem ready to perish,that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular:a spectacle for awe,love,adoration,or hate,if you like,but in this view--and in this view alone--never for despair!Those visions,delicious or poignant,are a moral end in themselves.The rest is our affair--the laughter,the tears,the tenderness,the indignation,the high tranquillity of a steeled heart,the detached curiosity of a subtle mind--that's our affair!And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth--a task in which fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience,gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder,the haunting terror,the infinite passion,and the illimitable serenity;to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle.
Chilosa?It may be true.In this view there is room for every religion except for the inverted creed of impiety,the mask and cloak of arid despair;for every joy and every sorrow,for every fair dream,for every charitable hope.The great aim is to remain true to the emotions called out of the deep encircled by the firmament of stars,whose infinite numbers and awful distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the Walrus or the Carpenter,in the poem,who "wept to see such quantities of sand"?),or,again,to a properly steeled heart,may matter nothing at all.
