and I have had many
hours of depression at the thought of some unpleasant anticipation or
disagreeable contingency, and I can honestly say that nothing has ever
been so bad, when it actually occurred, as it had represented itself to
me beforehand. There are a few incidents in my life, the recollection
of which I deliberately shun; but they have always been absolutely
unexpected and unanticipated calamities. Yet even these have never been
as bad as I should have expected them to be. The strange thing is that
experience never comes to one's aid, and that one never gets patience
or courage from the thought that the reality will be in all probability
less distressing than the anticipation; for the simple reason that the
fertile imagination is always careful to add that this time the
occasion will be intolerable, and that at all events it is better to be
prepared for the worst that may happen. Moreover, one wastes force in
anticipating perhaps half-a-dozen painful possibilities, when, after
all, they are alternatives, and only one of them can happen. That is
what makes my present situation so depressing, that I instinctively
clothe it in its worst horrors, and look forward to a long and dreary
life, in which my only occupation will be an attempt to pass the weary
hours. Faithless? yes, of course it is faithless! but the rational
philosophy, which says that it will all probably come right, does not
penetrate to the deeper region in which the mind says to itself that
there is no hope of amendment.

Can one acquire, by any effort of the mind, this kind of patience? I do
not think one can. The most that one can do is to behave as far as
possible like one playing a heavy part upon the stage, to say with
trembling lips that one has hope, when the sick mind beneath cries out
that there is none.

Perhaps one can practise a sort of indifference, and hope that
advancing years may still the beating heart and numb the throbbing
nerve. But I do not even desire to live life on these terms. The one
great article of my creed has been that one ought not to lose zest and
spirit, or acquiesce slothfully in comfortable and material conditions,
but that life ought to be full of perception and emotion. Here again
lies my mistake; that it has not been perception or emotion that I have
practised, but the art of expressing what I have perceived and felt. Of
course, I wish with all my heart and soul that it were otherwise; but
it seems that I have