A Writer's Notebook (22 page)

There are people who say: quite well, thank you, when you say, how d'you do, to them. How vain they must be to think you can possibly care!

One of the most difficult things for a man to do is to realise that he does not stand at the centre of things, but at the circumference.

Scotchmen seem to think it's a credit to them to be Scotch.

End of a life. It
is
like reading a book at close of day; one reads on, not seeing that the light is failing, and then suddenly as one pauses for a moment, one finds the light has gone; it is quite dark and looking down again at the book one cannot see, and the page is meaningless.

Carbis Water. The furze was saffron and green. Someone had gathered a bunch of heather and then let it fall; and it lay on the grass dying, a faded purple, like a symbol of the decay of an imperial power.

The Monument. It was on a hill overlooking the valley and the sea; and Hale, with its placid river, was like an old Italian town, coloured and gay even under the sombre heaven. Around the monument lay the dead ferns, brown as the earth, and they deadened the footfall; they, the first of the summer plants to go, chilled to death by the mild wind of September.

Joannes Knill, 1782. Who was he? One can imagine some splenetic, melancholy character such as the eighteenth century produced in reaction from the formalism of the age. It was an
age that was withering for lack of fresh air. It drank of that cup in which the Elizabethans had found a multi-coloured joy of life, and a later generation a passion which fired the soul to freedom; but the wine in the cup had gone thin, and in its dregs was nothing but weariness.

The dead trees had seemed incongruous in the summer, a patch of darkness that had no business with the joyous colours of the Cornish June; but now the whole of Nature was drawing into harmony with them, and they stood, gnarled and leafless, with a placid silence as though they felt a contented sense of the eternity of things: the green leaves and the flowers were dainty, ephemeral as the butterflies and the light breeze of April, but
they
were changeless and constant. The silence was so great that one seemed to hear the wings of the rooks as they beat the air, flying overhead from field to field. And in the stillness, curiously, I thought I heard the song of London calling.

The sky was overcast, and the clouds, pregnant with rain, swept over the hilltops; and with the closing day the rain began to fall; it was very fine, a Cornish drizzle that hovered over the earth like a mist, and it was all-penetrating, like human sorrow. The country sank into darkness.

The wind sang to himself like a strong-limbed ploughboy as he marches easily through the country.

The earth was enswathed in vapours, opalescent, and they had a curious impenetrable transparency.

Jeremy Taylor. Of no one, perhaps, can it be said with greater truth that the style is the very man himself. When you read
Holy Dying
, with its leisurely gait, its classical spirit, its
fluent, facile poetry, you can imagine what sort of a man was Jeremy Taylor; and from a study of his life and circumstances you could hazard a guess that he would write exactly as he does. He was a Caroline prelate. His life was easy, moderately opulent and gently complacent. And such was his style. It reminds one, not, like Milton's, of a tumultuous torrent breaking its way through obstacles almost insurmountable, but of a rippling brook meandering happily through a fertile meadow carpeted with the sweet-smelling flowers of spring. Jeremy Taylor is no juggler with words, but well content to use them in their ordinary sense. His epithets are seldom subtle, and seldom discover in the object a new or striking quality; he uses them purely as decoration, and he repeats them over and over again, as if they were not living, necessary things, but merely conventional adjuncts of a noun. Consequently, notwithstanding his extreme floridity, he gives an impression of simplicity. He seems to use the words that come most naturally to the mouth, and his phrases, however nicely turned, have a colloquial air. Perhaps, also, the constant repetition of
and
adds to this sensation of naïveté. The long clauses, tacked on to one another in a string that appears interminable, make you feel that the thing has been written without effort. It seems like the conversation of a good-natured, rather long-winded, elderly cleric. Often, it is true, the endless phrases, clause after clause joined together with little regard to the meaning, with none at all to the construction of the sentence, depend merely upon looseness of punctuation, and by a rearrangement of this can be made into compact and well composed periods. Jeremy Taylor, when he likes, can put together his words as neatly as anyone, and then writes a sentence of perfect music. “He that desires to die well and happily above all things must be careful that he do not live a soft, a delicate, and voluptuous life; but a life severe, holy and under the discipline of the Cross, under the conduct of prudence and observation, a life of warfare and sober counsels, labour and watchfulness.” On the other hand, sometimes his phrases run away with him, then
and
is heaped
upon
and
, idea upon idea, till one cannot make head or tail of the meaning; and the sentence at last tails off obscurely, unfinished, incomplete and ungrammatical. On occasion, however, these tremendous sentences are managed with astonishing skill; and in a long string of clauses the arrangement of epithets, the form and order of the details, will be varied with skill and elegance.