wring the necks of the cocks who disturbed
Carlyle's sleep; and sometimes, alas, to rap the old man's fingers for
his blind inconsiderateness and selfishness. I came the other day upon
a passage in a former book of my own, where I said something sneering
and derisive about the pair, and I felt deep shame and contrition for
having written it--and, more than that, I felt a sort of disgust for
the fact that I have spent so much time in writing fiction. Books like
the Life of Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle's Letters take the wind out of
one's imaginative faculties altogether, because one is confronted with
the real stuff of life in them. Life, that hard, stubborn,
inconclusive, inconsistent, terrible thing! It is, of course, that very
hardness and inconclusiveness that makes one turn to fiction. In
fiction, one can round off the corners, repair mistakes, comfort,
idealise, smooth things down, make error and weakness bear good fruit,
choose, develop as one pleases. Not so with life, where things go from
bad to worse, misunderstandings grow and multiply, suffering does not
purge, sorrow does not uplift. That is the worst of fiction, that it
deludes one into thinking that one can deal gently with life, finish
off the picture, arrange things on one's own little principles; and
then, as in my own case, life brings one up against some monstrous,
grievous, intolerable fact, that one can neither look round or over,
and the scales fall from one's eyes. With what courage, tranquillity or
joy is one to meet a thoroughly disagreeable situation? The more one
leans on the hope that it may amend, the weaker one grows; the thing to
realise is that it is bad, that it is inevitable, that it has arrived,
and to let the terror and misery do their worst, soak into the soul and
not run off it. Only then can one hope to be different; only so can one
climb the weary ladder of patience and faith.

March 28, 1889.

Low-hung ragged grey skies, heaven smeared with watery vapours
fleeting, broken and mournful, from the west--these above me, as I
stand by the old lichened gate of the high wind-swept field at the top
of the wold. In front a stretch of rough common, the dark-brown
heather, the young gorse, bluish-green, the rusty red of soaked
bracken, the pale ochre-coloured grass, all blent into a rich tint that
pleases the eye with its wild freshness. To the left, the wide flat
level of the plain, with low hills rising on its verge; to the right, a
pal