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Some way back I have defined this book as an attempt to compose an outline of my mental history. That sounds safe and comfortable enough, and can be kept moderately plausible while the said history is unfolding itself through actual episodes such as were made use of in the preceding chapter. For it is seldom difficult to talk about one’s own behaviour, mental or otherwise.

But when it comes to investigating the gradual development of the mind itself, then one can’t avoid wondering whether any definable outline existed at all—especially in a mind so dreamy and undisciplined in its workings.

In addition it seems reasonable to ask how a mind which understood so little of itself at the time can be analysed and explained by its owner thirty years afterwards! The problem is indeed profoundly perplexing, and suggests much heavy work in store for the reader of the present chapter.

Let me therefore assure that reader of my intention to handle the matter as unfatiguingly as possible. All that appears to be needed is a simple chart of my mental climate in relation to a few of the writers by whom I was being influenced.

One must take for granted, of course, a fair amount of overlapping in my hasty and unsettled enthusiasms; but it can be assumed that by the beginning of 1908 I was no longer wholly swayed by the ‘multiform circumfluence manifold’ of Tennyson, Swinburne, and Rossetti, and that for the next couple of years I was exploring a medley of poetry, both good and inferior, in a desultory and unchartable manner.

The outcome of this, when surveyed in my own writings, was not altogether reassuring, as was demonstrated by the destruction of Sonnets and Verses. After that I resolved to resist the temptation to write in a loosely uplifting way on outdoor subjects, which was what I’d been in the habit of doing when feeling most ‘inspired’. During the next twelve months, therefore, I aimed at refinement rather than vigour. Perfection, I felt, could only be achieved through a distillation of imagination which was strangely and exquisitely remote from everyday experience. The result was that pseudo-archaic preciosities invaded my vocabulary. Sunsets became like stained-glass windows, and the moon took to coming up in a mystification of Celtic twilight. Poetry was a dream world into which I escaped through an esoteric door in my mind.

When Wirgie was staying at Weirleigh in the summer of 1910 I showed her a few of my latest productions in verse, and once again she hinted that I was moving in a wrong direction. Wouldn’t it be better if I were to put some solid thought into my poems, and go in for more honest everyday words? Somehow she felt that I ought to be writing in a more physical way. And what had happened to my admiration for George Meredith?

She had come slowly up the Studio stairs with my manuscript in her hand, and I had seen by her face that she didn’t quite know what to say about it. I had hoped that she would be more encouraging, for the sonnets had been written in a fine frenzy of aureate unreality, and I had copied them out again with gloating satisfaction. Anyhow I silently slipped the manuscript into a drawer of my writing-table, and she went back to her long chair on the lawn without another word.

Her question about my admiration for Meredith made very little impression on me at the time; but I see now that she could hardly have said anything more significant. Before coming to that, however, I must explain that Meredith had been her hero long before I had so much as learnt to read; she had exalted him above all other living writers, and had known him personally. She had therefore been highly delighted when—about two years before—I began reading him, and even went so far as to buy the library edition of his complete works. Disregarding her warning against gobbling too much of him at once, I galloped through a great deal of his poetry, most of which I was unable to digest, though its sometimes undecipherable condensations provided a vicarious sense of intellectual importance. But I returned afterwards to his few lyrical masterpieces, and was very properly thrilled by their exultant energy and descriptive loveliness. The only thing I found to complain of in them was that they were written with a technical ingenuity altogether impossible to echo or imitate. The magnetism of Meredith also carried me through several of his earlier novels. These I contrived to enjoy in a perplexedly assiduous way—their characterization and exhibition of high comedy being beyond my immature and untrained intelligence.

When Wirgie asked me what I had got from my strenuous perusal of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Evan Harrington, and Harry Richmond, which were the ones I liked best, I probably spoke of them in a tone of evasive omniscience, for like many young people I wasn’t fond of admitting that I had found anything difficult to understand. I can be certain however that I made no secret of having been strongly moved by the chapters describing first love between Richard and Lucy—a rapt generalization unsurpassed by anything of its kind which I have read since. But the ultimate beauty of that idyllic meeting ‘above green-flashing plunges of a weir’ is not what I have been leading up to. My point is that by using the word physical Wirgie had given me the clue that I needed, though I was unconscious of it at the time. She meant, as I now see it, that the feeling I put into my poetry was derived from delight in word-music and not from observation and experience of what I wrote about. And she realized that the only thing I had genuinely absorbed from Meredith was his sensuous perception of nature—the way he felt and described what I now know to have been certain parts of Hampshire and Surrey. She saw that my verbal imagery was becoming exclusively literary, while the opportunity for writing poetry was waiting for me all the time, as it were, in that view across the Weald from our garden. The vaguely instinctive nature-worship which I had sometimes tried to put into words needed to be expressed in a definite form.

‘What has become of your admiration for Meredith?’ she had inquired, and might well have added—‘And what about the laurel wreath you sent him when he died?’ For my mother and I had sent a really noble wreath, made from the big bay tree at the top of the peony walk; and Wirgie, who had been at Meredith’s funeral, wrote afterwards to tell me that it was the only one worthy of him. She was also very much up in arms against the Westminster Abbey authorities who had refused to allow him to be buried there. I have her letter still. After describing the portrait of him by G. F. Watts as ‘a complete failure’, she ends with a fine declaration that ‘age could not alter his inexpressible charm of voice, manner, and look; he never disappointed one in any way’. Her question—as I said before—was left unanswered when she went down the Studio stairs on that blue summer morning in 1910. The reply, however, was silently manifesting itself behind the glass doors of my biggest book-case. A whole shelf was filled by the stylish sequence of Meredith’s complete works—minus one volume of The Egoist, which my mother was re-reading with rich enjoyment of its epigrammatic humour. But on the shelf above stood the elegant édition de luxe of Walter Pater, by whom Meredith had been pervasively superseded in the capricious microcosm of my mind.

Meredith, of course, was a robustly inspiriting influence. He affirmed his faith in courage, gloried in physical activity, called humour the sword of common-sense, and refused to be downhearted about the iron-featured facts of human existence. For a while I had responded to his heroic attitude; he seemed to be the sort of man one ought to try and emulate. I had felt much the same about Browning. Meredith was the spirit of earth in autumn; he trod the hill-tops and shouted his jubilate to the north-west wind; clouds towered above him transfigured like Olympus, making evanescence permanent ‘and life—the thing at heart—his endless own’.

Then came Pater, with his Imaginary Portraits and their atmosphere of life treated as an ‘act of recollection’, subdued to the stately movement and lulling cadences of his style. The reclusive tendency in my nature found in him its cloister and its abbey-church. Here was the bowed head overhearing consolation in the long chantings of distant choirs; here the rich renunciation of folded hands and of feet whose final wayfaring was toward enhaloed altars: here, too, the receptive nose, whereon the customary and aromatic oblation of incense and thurible could produce an effect almost of vehemence.

Thus having visited the rose-windowed sanctuary of his discreet and splendid prose, I became such a devotee of Pater that for the time being I could read no-one else. His fastidious erudition I accepted in a superficial way. My essential interest was for the romantic and enigmatic elements in his studies of sensitive temperaments in the picturesque past. It was rather as if I were attending a service in some cathedral where one didn’t quite know what would happen next.... That verger who had demurely conducted me to my pew, for instance—where had I seen him before? Not in the quiet streets of Barchester, surely, but rather in a Graeco-Roman sculptured relief; from the plastic rhythms of some marble Bacchanalia in a museum those now unaccessoried eyes, it seemed, had met with mine. In the faces of the cathedral clergy, also, I was to detect elusive resemblances to mediaeval or monkish types which suggested affinity not only with the historic past, but with a past that had afforded them curious and uncanonical experiences which might at any moment be paralleled. And the Bishop himself, who is even now mounting the pulpit steps to deliver his Trinity Sunday sermon (another big storm gathering, while the nave grows duskier every moment), can one feel certain that with the first peal of thunder he will not violently discard mitre and vestments, to stand revealed as the veritable incarnation of Dionysus or Apollo? ... In other words, Pater’s writings contained episodes and conceptions of pagan supernaturalism which appealed very potently to my imagination. And let me add that my clumsy imitations of his style are offered as a testimony of my continued enjoyment of almost everything he wrote.

Meanwhile the ‘simple chart of my mental climate’ has become a diffused adumbration rather than an outline. All we know so far is that by the middle of 1910 I was writing with more artificiality and less unpremeditated art than in the two or three years previous. Documentary evidence seems to be needed. But none is available for analysis except those poems which have survived through being privately-printed, and a fortuitously-preserved 1907 note-book full of rough drafts and casual scribblings. Let us then examine the twenty-four sonnets dating from before 1910, with the object of finding out what I had been writing about. For the sonnet was the form in which (like so many people) I felt most comfortable, though I used it somewhat loosely, seldom adhering to the strict Italian model and often indulging in irregular schemes of rhyming.

It must be borne in mind that there were not many things about which I found it possible to feel poetical. In addition to this—as will already have become obvious—my contact with human affairs had been narrow and unenterprising. It is therefore no shock to discover that I had only two favourite subjects. Investigation reveals that the two things about which I wrote with most fullness of feeling were music and the early morning. In ten of the sonnets there are references to music and musical instruments, and the theme of daybreak recurs even oftener. For me, music was the handmaid of the muse, and all roads led toward sunrise. Sunset had to play second fiddle.

Searching the sonnets for evidences of mental autobiography, I interpret—from an occasional line or two—something written with seeming unawareness of its significance. But such disclosures are shadowy and inferential, for I was commendably reticent about my inmost feelings. In these pages from the book of youth what is most apparent to me is an utter ingenuousness. Meeting that sonneteer, in his somnambulance of unsophistication, I rediscover simplicities which move me—not deeply, but with a sort of selfless wonder. I am reminded of the magnanimously uncomprehending emotion which accompanied the putting of those words on paper—words that then seemed as though no-one else had ever used them before.

With eager infinite hearts I see them stand

Listening in dimness to the heavenward lark ...

While in the act of composing those lines I probably thought I was saying my final word about life. And why not—when my own heart was so young, so eager, and so infinite? What need was there to worry any more about literary originality when one’s whole being felt like some grand mysterious chord of music?

The Lord of Death and Time is far. Can He behold

One heart that would make Life a lovelier thing than Dream?

There the voice of my vanished self is re-emergent from between the crumpled covers of that 1907 note-book which I mentioned just now. For a moment, the youngness of the helter-skelter handwriting makes my overhearing of it more alive than if it spoke from the unblurred permanence of print. Then the ensilenced years divide us. And I am left to make the only comment which occurs to me—a tag from some forgotten popular song which comes into my head uncalled-for.... ‘ ’E dunno where ’e are.’ ...

★★★

In summer I didn’t often wake early. But when I did, and had the gumption to get up and see the sunrise, I was always glad of it afterwards. In fact a few such ‘getting-ups’ have dwelt in my remembrance ever since.

To be aware of a glimmer of light at my open window; to hear a cock crowing from the farm beyond the wood—his shrill challenge faintly echoed by another one in the distance; to listen for the first thrush or blackbird out in the dewy dimness of the garden: and then to slip on some clothes and creep downstairs, while the grandfather clock in the front hall ticked indulgently toward striking four and the high window by the carved oak linen-cupboard showed a brightening east through leaded panes ... thus to have stood on those life-known stairs with some ordinary day of youth ahead of me—what was there in it to remember long afterwards, when so much that was so much more interesting has become blurred oblivion? ... The house, with its stair-creaking silences, its drowsing stuffiness, and the queerness of its reflections in mirrors and the glass of dark pictures—this was only a vacated residue of the night before. Soon the same happenings would be going on again and the half-light of ghostliness would be gone. I see myself standing there, in that earliest perception of familiar things made unfamiliar by the secrecy and strangeness of the hour, vaguely unsatisfied with the self whose expectancy had experienced so little beyond those walls, whose heart’s journey had so long and so weary a way to go. The house was like an old person resigned to uneventfulness and nothing new, unmindful of my transient immaturity which was haunting it with heart-ache for freedom and fulfilment.

But out on the lawn the Eden freshness was like something never breathed before. In a purified ecstasy I inhaled the smell of dew-soaked grass, and all the goodness of being alive now met me in a moment, as I stood on the door-step outside the drawing-room. In the eastward windows of the Studio the cloud shoals of daybreak were beginning to be reflected, with a deepening flush that broke slowly into streams of gold and fire. The climbing roses on their tall untidy arches were just touched to colour. Innocent, they looked, I thought, like children glad to know night safely behind them.

Near and far, the June landscape was now vocal with the exultant chorus of the birds, here in the terraced garden and away down into the low-misted Weald, where my old friend the milk-train was puffing away from Paddock Wood Station—no, it was much too soon for that, I remembered—it must be night’s last goods-train which was going on its dilatory good-natured journey into the morning with that distant clink of buffers. Somehow the sound of it gave me a comfortable feeling of the world remaining pleasantly unchanged and peaceful.... The white pigeons too were already up and about, sitting idly on the gabled roof above their loft as though they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves after getting up so early.

And now I was beholding the sun himself as his scarlet disc rose inch by inch above the auroral orchards and the level horizon far down the Weald. A very Kentish sun he looked, while I surmised, as had always been my habit, that he must be rising from somewhere just beyond Canterbury or the cliffs of Dover—rising out of the English Channel, in fact—this being as yet the boundary of my earthly adventures in that direction. There he was, anyhow, like some big farmer staring at his hay-fields and hop-gardens. And here was I, unconsciously lifting my arms to welcome the glittering shafts of sunrise that went wide-winged up through the innocent blueness above the east. But with the first rays slanting across the lawn everything somehow became ordinary again. On the tennis-court below, a busy little party of birds was after the worms. And I noticed that I’d forgotten to loosen the net when we’d finished yesterday evening’s game. In the Arcadian cherry orchard across the road a bird-scaring boy had begun his shouting cries and clattering of pans.... I yawned; felt a bit lonely; and then went indoors to see if I could find myself something to eat.