I mean to do a good many odd jobs--we have no
trap, and there will be a good deal of fetching and carrying to be
done. We shall resume our lessons, Maggie and I; there will be reading,
gardening, walking. One ought to be able to live philosophically
enough. What would I not give to be able to write now! but the instinct
seems wholly and utterly dead and gone. I cannot even conceive that I
ever used, solemnly and gravely, to write about imaginary people, their
jests and epigrams, their sorrows and cares. Life and Art! I used to
suppose that it was all a softly moulded, rhythmic, sonorous affair,
strophe and antistrophe; but the griefs and sorrows of art are so much
nearer each other, like major and minor keys, than the griefs and
sorrows of life. In art, the musician smiles and sighs alternately, but
his sighing is a balanced, an ordered mood; the inner heart is content,
as the pool is content, whether it mirrors the sunlight or the lonely
star; but in life, joy is to grief what music is to aching silence,
dumbness, inarticulate pain--though perhaps in that silence one hears a
deeper, stranger sound, the buzz of the whirring atom, the soft thunder
of worlds plunging through the void, joyless, gigantic, oblivious
forces.

Is it good thus to have the veils of life rent asunder? If life, the
world's life, activity, work, be the end of existence, then it is not
good. It breaks the spring of energy, so that one goes heavily and
sorely. But what if that be not the end? What then?

May 16, 1890.

At present the new countryside is a great resource. I walk far among
the wolds; I find exquisite villages, where every stone-built house
seems to have style and quality; I come down upon green water-meadows,
with clear streams flowing by banks set with thorn-bushes and alders.
The churches, the manor-houses, of grey rubble smeared with plaster,
with stone roof-tiles, are a feast for eye and heart. Long days in the
open air bring me a dull equable health of body, a pleasant weariness,
a good-humoured indifference. My mind becomes grass-grown, full of
weeds, ruinous; but I welcome it as at least a respite from suffering.
It is strange to think of myself at what ought, I suppose, to be the
busiest and fullest time of my life, living here like a tree in lonely
fields. What would be the normal life? A little house in a London
street, I suppose, with a lot of white paint and bookshelves.
Luncheons, dinners, plays, music, clubs, week-