This continuous preoccupation with self sickens me—as I look back over these entries. It is inconceivable that I should be here steadily writing up my ego day by day in the middle of this disastrous war. … Yesterday I had a move on. Today life wearies me. I am sick of myself and life. This beastly world with its beastly war and hate makes me restless, dissatisfied, and full of a longing to be quit of it. I am as full of unrest as an autumn Swallow. “My soul,” I said to them at breakfast with a sardonic grin, “is like a greyhound in the slips. I shall have to wear heavy boots to prevent myself from soaring. I have such an uplift on me that I could carry a horse, a dog, a cat, if you tied them on to my homing spirit and so transformed my Ascension into an adventure out of Baron Munchausen.” With a gasconade of contempt, I should like to turn on my heel and march straight out of this wretched world at once.
We all like to dramatise ourselves. Byron was dramatising himself when, in a fit of rhetorical self-compassion, he wrote:
“Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept o’er many a vanished scene.”
Shelley, too, being an artist could not stand insensible to his own tragedy and Francis Thompson suggests that he even anticipated his own end from a passage in “Julian and Maddalo,” “… if you can’t swim, Beware of Providence.” “Did no earthly dixisti,” Thompson asks, “sound in his ears as he wrote it?”
In any event, it was an admirable ending from the dramatic point of view; Destiny is often a superb dramatist. What more perfect than the death of Rupert Brooke at Skyros in the Aegean?31 The lives of some men are works of art, perfect in form, in development and in climax. Yet how frequently a life eminently successful or even eminently ruinous is also an unlovely, sordid, ridiculous or vulgar affair! Everyone will concede that it must be a hard thing to be commonplace and vulgar even in misfortune, to discover that the tragedy of your own precious life has been dramatically bad, that your life even in its ruins is but a poor thing, and your own miseries pathetic from their very insignificance; that you are only Jones with chronic indigestion rather than Guy de Maupassant mad, or Coleridge with a great intellect being slowly dismantled by opium.
If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In short, if life were an art and not a lottery! In the lives of all of us, how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts, blind—how many lost days—and man’s life is but a paltry three score years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.
Sometimes, as I lean over a five-barred gate or gaze stupidly into the fire, I garner a bittersweet contentment in making ideal reconstructions of my life, selecting my parents, the date and place of my birth, my gifts, my education, my mentors and what portions out of the infinity of knowledge shall gain a place within my mind—that sacred glebe-land to be zealously preserved and enthusiastically cultivated. Whereas, my mind is now a wilderness in which all kinds of useless growths have found an ineradicable foothold. I am exasperated to find I have by heart the long addresses of a lot of dismal business correspondents and yet can’t remember the last chapters of Ecclesiastes: what a waste of mind-stuff there! It irks me to be acquainted even to nausea with the spot in which I live, I whose feet have never traversed even so much as this little island much less carried me in triumph to Timbuktu, Honolulu, Rio, Rome.
Gibbon’s Autobiography
This book makes me of all people (and especially just now) groan inwardly. “I am at a loss,” he says, referring to the Decline and Fall, “how to describe the success of the work without betraying the vanity of the writer. … My book was on every table and almost on every toilette.” It makes me bite my lips. Rousseau and his criticism of “I sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son,” and Gibbon on his dignity in reply make one of the most ludicrous incidents in literary history. “… that extraordinary man whom I admire and pity, should have been less precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a stranger!” Oh my giddy Aunt! Isn’t this rich? Still, I am glad you did not marry her: we could ill spare Madam de Staël, Madam Necker’s daughter, that wonderful, vivacious and warmhearted woman.
“After the morning has been occupied with the labours of the library, I wish to unbend rather than exercise my mind; and in the interval between tea and supper, I am far from disdaining the innocent amusement of a game of cards.” How Jane Austen would have laughed at him! The passage reminds me of the Rev. Mr. Collins saying:
“Had I been able I should have been only too pleased to give you a song, for I regard music as a harmless diversion and perfectly compatible with the profession of a clergyman.”
“When I contemplate the common lot of mortality,” Gibbon writes, “I must acknowledge I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life,” and he goes on to count up all his blessings
