He grew up, therefore, a shy, awkward boy, who was intellectually so highly precocious that he could write the first volume of ‘Modern Painters’ before he was twenty-four, but was emotionally so stunted that, desperately susceptible as he was, he did not know how to amuse a lady for an evening. His efforts to ingratiate himself with the first of those enchanting girls who made havoc of his life reminded him, he said, of the efforts of a skate in an aquarium to get up the glass. Adèle was Spanish-born, Paris-bred and Catholic-hearted, he notes, yet he talked to her of the Spanish Armada, the Battle of Waterloo and the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Some such pane of glass or other impediment was always to lie between him and the freedom of ordinary intercourse. Partly the boyish days of anxious supervision were to blame. He had much rather go away alone and look at things, he said, than stay at home and be looked at. He did not want friends; he marvelled that anyone should be fond of a creature as impersonal and self-contained as a camera lucida or an ivory foot-rule. And then he was still further withdrawn from the ordinary traffic of life by Nature who, to most people only the background, lovely or sympathetic to their own activities, was to him a presence mystic, formidable, sublime, dominating the little human figure in the foreground. But though she thus rapt him from his fellows. Nature did not console him. The cataract and the mountain did not take the place of the hearth and lamplight and children playing on the rug; the beauty of the landscape only made more terrible to him the wickedness of man. The rant and fury and bitterness of his books seem to spring, not merely from the prophetic vision, but from a sense of his own frustration. More eloquent they could hardly be; but we cannot help guessing that had little John cut his knees and run wild like the rest of us, not only would he have been a happier man, but instead of the arrogant scolding and preaching of the big books, we should have had more of the clarity and simplicity of ‘Praeterita’.
For in ‘Praeterita’, happily, there is little left of these old rancours. At last Ruskin was at peace; his pain was no longer his own, but everybody’s pain; and when Ruskin is at peace with the world, it is surprising how humorously, kindly, and observantly he writes of it. Never were portraits more vividly drawn than those of his father and mother; the father, upright, able, sensitive, yet vain, too, and glad that his clerk’s incompetence should prove his own capacity; the mother, austere and indomitably correct, but with a dash of ‘the Smollettesque’ in her, so that when a maid toppled backwards over a railing in full view of a monastery, she laughed for a full quarter of an hour. Never was there a clearer picture of English middle-class life when merchants were still princes and suburbs still sanctuaries. Never did any auto-biographer admit us more hospitably and generously into the privacy of his own experience. That he should go on for ever talking, and that we should still listen, is all we ask, but in vain. Before the book is finished the beautiful stream wanders out of his control and loses itself in the sands. Limpid as it looks, that pure water was distilled from turmoil; and serenely as the pages run, they resound with the echoes of thunder and are lit with the reflections of lightning. For the old man who sits now babbling of his past was a prophet once and had suffered greatly.
Mr Kipling’s Notebook.
Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, speaking roughly, every writer keeps a large note book devoted entirely to landscape. Words must be found for a moonlit sky, for a stream, for plane-trees after rain. They ‘must’ be found. For the plane-tree dries very quickly, and if the look as of a sea-lion sleek from a plunge is gone, and nothing found to record it better than those words, the wet plane-tree does not properly exist. Nothing can exist unless it is properly described. Therefore the young writer is perpetually on the stretch to get the thing expressed before it is over and the end of the day finds him with a larder full of maimed objects - half-realized trees, streams that are paralytic in their flow, and leaves that obstinately refuse to have that particular - what was the look of them against the sky, or, more difficult still to express, how did the tree erect its tent of green layers above you as you lay flat on the ground beneath? Early in the twenties this incessant matching and scrutiny of nature is relaxed, perhaps in despair, more probably because the attention has been captured by the usual thing - the human being. He wanders into the maze. When once more he can look at a tree it seems to him quite unnecessary to consider whether the bark is like a wet seal, or the leaves are jagged emeralds. The truth of the tree is not in that kind of precision at all. Indeed the old notebooks, with their trees, streams, sunsets, Piccadilly at dawn, Thames at midday, waves on the beach, are quite unreadable. And for the same reason so is much of Mr Kipling - quite unreadable.
A fat carp in a pond sucks at a fallen leaf with just the sound of a wicked little worldly kiss. Then the earth steams and steams in silence, and a gorgeous butterfly, full six inches from wing to wing, cuts through the steam in a zigzag of colour and flickers up to the forehead of the god.
That is a perfect note. Every word of it has been matched with the object with such amazing skill that no one could be expected to bury it in a notebook. But when it is printed in a book meant to be read consecutively, and on to it are stitched all the notes that Mr Kipling has made with unfaltering eye, and even increasing skill, it becomes, literally, unreadable. One has to shut the eyes, shut the book, and do the writing over again. Mr Kipling has given us the raw material; but where is this to go, and where that, and what about the distance, and who, after all, is seeing this temple, or God, or desert? All notebook literature produces the same effect of fatigue and obstacle, as if there dropped across the path of the mind some block of alien matter which must be removed or assimilated before one can go on with the true process of reading. The more vivid the note the greater the obstruction. The malady can be traced to Lord Tennyson, who brought the art of taking notes to the highest perfection, and displayed the utmost skill in letting them, almost imperceptibly, into the texture of his poetry. Here is an example:
Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,
Torn from the fringe of spray.
That must have been seen one day on the beach at Freshwater, and preserved for future use; and when we come upon it we detect its bottled origin, and say, ‘Yes, that is exactly like a foam-flake, and I wonder whether Tennyson’s floam-flakes were yellowish, and had that porous look which I myself have thought of comparing to the texture of cork? “Crisp” he calls it. But surely cork...’ and so on through all the old business of word-matching, while the ‘Dream of Fair Women’ wastes in air. But when Keats wanted to describe autumn, he said that he had seen her ‘sitting careless on a granary floor’; which does all the work for us, whether innumerable notes were the basis of it or none at all. Indeed, if we want to describe a summer evening, the way to do it is to set people talking in a room with their backs to the window, and then, as they talk about something else, let someone half turn her head and say, ‘A fine evening,’ when (if they have been talking about the right things) the summer evening is visible to anyone who reads the page, and is for ever remembered as of quite exceptional beauty.
To return to Mr Kipling. Is he then directing us to nothing, and are these brilliant scenes merely pages torn from the copy-book of a prodigy among pupils? No; it is not so simple as that. Just as the railway companies have a motive in hanging their stations with seductive pictures of Ilfracombe and Blackpool Bay, so Mr Kipling’s pictures of places are painted to display the splendours of Empire and to induce young men to lay down their lives on her behalf. And again, it is not so simple as that. It is true that Mr Kipling shouts, ‘Hurrah for the Empire!’ and puts out his tongue at her enemies. But praise as crude as this, abuse as shallow, can be nothing but a disguise rigged up to justify some passion or other of which Mr Kipling is a little ashamed. He has a feeling, perhaps, that a grown man should not enjoy making bridges, and using tools, and camping out as much as he does. But if these activities are pursued in the service of Empire, they are not only licensed, but glorified. Hence the
excuse. Yet it is the passion that gives his writing its merit, and the excuse that vitiates it:
I wonder sometimes whether any eminent novelist, philosopher, dramatist, or divine of today has to exercise half the imagination, not to mention insight, endurance, and self-restraint, which is accepted without comment in what is called ‘the material exploitation’ of a new country... The mere drama of it, the play of the human virtues, would fill a book.
It has, indeed, filled many books, from the travels of Hakluyt to the novels of Mr Conrad, and if Mr Kipling would concentrate upon ‘the mere drama of it, the play of the human virtues’, there would be no fault to find with him. Even as it is, there are pages in the ‘Letters of Travel’ in the contemplation of which the most lily-livered Socialist forgets to brand the labouring and adventuring men with the curse of Empire. There is, for example, an account of a bank failure in Japan. All Mr Kipling’s sympathy with men who work is there displayed, and there, too, much more vividly than by means of direct description, is expressed the excitement and strangeness of the East. Up to a point that is perfectly true; Mr Kipling is a man of sympathy and imagination. But the more closely you watch the more puzzled you become. Why do these men, in the first shock of loss, step there, turn their backs just there, and say precisely that? There is something mechanical about it, as if they were acting; or is it that they are carefully observing the rules of a game?
A man passed stiffly, and some one of a group turned to ask lightly, ‘Hit, old man?’ ‘Like Hell,’ he said, and went on biting his unlit cigar... ‘We’re doing ourselves well this year,’ said a wit grimly. ‘One free-shooting case, one thundering libel case, and a bank smash. Showing off pretty before the globe trotters, aren’t we?’
It is as if they were afraid to be natural. But Mr Kipling ought to have insisted that with him at least they should drop this pose, instead of which the effect of his presence is to make them talk more by rule than ever. Whether grownup people really play this game, or whether, as we suspect, Mr Kipling makes up the whole British Empire to amuse the solitude of his nursery, the result is curiously sterile and depressing.
Emerson’s Journals.
Emerson’s Journals have little in common with other journals. They might have been written by starlight in a cave if the sides of the rock had been lined with books. In reality they cover twelve most important years - when he was at college, when he was a clergyman, and when he was married for the first time. But circumstances as well as nature made him peculiar. The Emerson family was now threadbare, but it had noble traditions in the past. His widowed mother and his eccentric aunt were possessed with the fierce Puritan pride of family which insisted upon intellectual distinction and coveted with a pride that was not wholly of the other world a high place for their name among the select families of Boston. They stinted themselves and stinted the boys that they might afford learning. The creed of the enthusiastic women was but too acceptable to children ‘born to be educated’. They chopped the firewood, read classics in their spare time, and lay bare in all their sensitiveness to the ‘pressure of I know not how many literary influences’ with which the Emerson household was charged. The influence of Aunt Mary, their father’s sister, was clearly the most powerful. There are general rough sketches of men of genius in the family, and Miss Emerson rudely represented her nephew. She possessed the intense faith of the first Americans, together with a poetic imagination which made her doubt it. Her soul was always in conflict. She did not know whether she could suffer her nephews to reform the precious fabric, and yet was so full of new ideas herself that she could not help imparting them. But, unlike them, she was only self-taught, and her fervour boiled within her, scalding those she loved best. ‘I love to be a vessel of cumbersomeness to society,’ she remarked. But the strange correspondence which she kept up with Ralph, although it is but half intelligible from difficulty of thought and inadequacy of language, shows us what an intense and crabbed business life was to a serious American.
With such voices urging him on Emerson went to school fully impressed with the importance of the intellect. But his journals do not show vanity so much as a painful desire to get the most out of himself and a precocious recognition of ends to be aimed at. His first object was to learn how to write. The early pages are written to the echo of great prose long before he could fit words that gave his meaning into the rhythm. ‘He studied nature with a classical enthusiasm, and the constant activity of his mind endowed him with an energy of thought little short of inspiration.’ Then he began to collect rare words out of the books he read: ‘I’ll conditioned, Caméléon, Zeal, Whordeberry.’ The frigid exercises upon ‘The Drama’, ‘Death’, ‘Providence’ were useful also to decide the anxious question whether he belonged to the society of distinguished men or not. But it was the responsibility and the labour of being great and not the joy that impressed him. His upbringing had early made him conscious that he was exceptional, and school no doubt confirmed him. At any rate he could not share his thoughts with friends. Their arguments and views are never quoted beside his own in the diary. The face of one Freshman attracted him, but ‘it would seem that this was an imaginary friendship. There is no evidence that the elder student ever brought himself to risk disenchantment by active advances’. To make up for the absence of human interest we have the annals of the Pythologian Club. But although they show that Emerson occasionally read and listened to papers comparing love and ambition, marriage and celibacy, town life and country life, they give no impression of intimacy. Compared with the contemporary life of an Englishman at Oxford or Cambridge, the life of an American undergraduate seems unfortunately raw. Shelley took the world seriously enough, but Oxford was so full of prejudices that he could never settle into complacent self-improvement; Cambridge made even Wordsworth drunk. But the great bare building at Harvard, which looks (in an engraving of 1823) like a reformatory in the middle of a desert, had no such traditions; its pupils were profoundly conscious that they had to make them. Several volumes of the Journals are dedicated to ‘America’, as though to a cause.
A weaker mind, shut up with its finger on its pulse, would have used a diary to revile its own unworthiness. But Emerson’s diary merely confirms the impression he made on his friends; he appeared ‘kindly, affable, but self-contained... apart, as if in a tower’; nor was he more emotional writing at midnight for his own eye; but we can guess the reason. It was because he had convictions. His indefatigable brain raised a problem out of every sight and incident; but they could be solved if he applied his intellect. Safe in this knowledge, which time assured, he could live alone, registering the development, relying more and more on his sufficiency, and coming to believe that by close scrutiny he could devise a system. Life at twenty-one made him ponder thoughts like these: ‘Books and Men; Civilization; Society and Solitude; Time; God within.’ Novels, romances, and plays seemed for the most part written for ‘coxcombs and deficient persons’. The only voice that reached him from without was the voice of his Aunt Mary, tumultuous in fear lest he should lose his belief in original sin. Before he had developed his theory of compensation, he was sometimes harassed by the existence of evil; occasionally he accused himself of wasting time. But his composure is best proved by an elaborate essay headed ‘Myself. There one quality is weighed with another, so that the character seems to balance scrupulously. Yet he was conscious of a ‘signal defect’, which troubled him because it could destroy this balance more completely than its importance seemed to justify. Either he was without ‘address’, or there was a ‘levity of the understanding’ or there was an ‘absence of common sympathies’. At any rate, he felt a ‘sore uneasiness in the company of most men and women... even before women and children I am compelled to remember the poor boy who cried, “I told you, Father, they would find me out” ‘. To be a sage in one’s study, and a stumbling schoolboy out of it - that was the irony he had to face.
Instead, however, of slipping into easier views, he went on with his speculations; no
r was he bitter against the world because it puzzled him. What he did was to assert that he could not be rejected because he held the universe within him. Each man, by finding out what he feels, discovers the laws of the universe; the essential thing, therefore, is to be as conscious of yourself as possible.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 502