Spent the afternoon and evening till ten in the woods with Mary ⸻. Had tea in the Haunted House, and after sat in the Green Arbor until dark, when I kissed her. “Achilles was not the worse warrior for his probation in petticoats.”
when it comes to put my books away, to knock out my pipe and say “Good night,” exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.
I hope to goodness she doesn’t think I want to marry her. In the Park in the dark, kissing her. I was testing and experimenting with a new experience.
Last evening, after much mellifluous cajolery, induced her to kiss me. My private opinion about this whole affair is that all the time I have been at least twenty degrees below real love heat. In any case I am constitutionally and emotionally unfaithful. I said things which I did not believe just because it was dark and she was charming.
Read Thomas à Kempis in the train. It made me so angry I nearly flung it out of the window. “Meddle not with things that be too deep for thee,” he says, “but read such things as yield compunction to the heart rather than elevation to the head.” Forsooth! Can’t you see me?
A puzzling afternoon: weather perfect, the earth green and humming like a top, yet a web of dream overlaid the great hill, and at certain moments, which recurred in a kind of pulsation, accompanied by subjective feelings of vague strife and effort, I easily succeeded in letting all I saw—the field and the blackberry bush, the whole valley and the apple orchards—change into something unreal, flimsy, gauzelike, immaterial, and totally unexperienced. Suddenly when the impression was most vivid, the whole of this mysterious tapestry would vanish away and I was back where two and two make four. Oh! Earth! how jealously you guard your secrets!
Sat at the Civil Service Commission in Burlington House for the exam, for the vacancy in the B.M. No luck at all with the papers. The whole of my nine months’ assiduous preparation helped me in only two questions. In fine, I have not succeeded, I shall not obtain the appointment, and in a few weeks I shall be back in the wilds of N⸺ again under the old regime, reporting platitudes from greasy guardians of the poor, and receiving condolences from people not altogether displeased at someone else’s misfortune.
Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the threshold. It was so obviously returning after an unsuccessful flight.
Dissected a Squilla for which I paid 2s. 6d. to the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
Ambition
Am attempting to feel after some practical philosophy of living—something that will enable me to accept disappointment with equanimity and Town Council meetings with a broad and tolerant smile. At present, ambition consumes me. I was ambitious before I was breeched. I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy. Since then I have struggled with this canker for many a day, and as success fails to arrive it becomes more gnawing.
In the morning a Town Council and in the afternoon a Rural Council. With this abominable trash in my notebook waiting to be written up and turned into “copy,” and with the dream pictures of a quiet studious life in Cromwell Road not yet faded from my mind, where can I turn for consolation? That I have done my best? That’s only a mother’s saying to her child.
Perhaps after all it is a narrow life—this diving and delving among charming little secrets, plying diligently scalpel and microscope and then weaving the facts obtained into theoretic finespun. It is all vastly entertaining to the naturalist but it leaves the world unmoved. I sometimes envy the zealot with a definite mission in life. Life without one seems void. The monotonous pursuit of our daily vocations—the soldier, sailor, candlestick-maker—so they go on, never living but only working, never thinking but only hypnotising themselves by the routine and punctuality of their lives into just so many mechanical toys warranted to go for so long and then stop when Death takes them. … It amazes me that men must spend their precious days of existence for the most part in slaving for food and clothing and the bare necessaries of existence.
To sum up my despondency, what’s the good of such a life? Where does it lead? Where am I going? Why should I work? What means this procession of nights and days wherein we are all seen moving along intent and stern as if we had some purpose or a goal? … Of course to the man who believes in the next world and a personal God, it is quite another matter. The Christian is the Egoist par excellence. He does not mind annihilation by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal life. … He is reckless of today, extravagant in the expenditure of his life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he flatters himself that God Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.
The nose-snuffling, cynical man who studies La Rochefoucauld, and prides himself on a knowledge of human motives, is pleased to point out that every action and every motive is selfish, from the philanthropist who advertises himself by his charities to the fanatic who lays down his life for a cause. Even
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