RUNNING WATER.

IN a short story by Nicholas Gogol, one of the characters

expatiates on a state or frame of mind which, he says,

is sweeter to a Russian than anything conceivable—when you just think, that is, of nothing, while ideas come into being of themselves, each in turn pleasanter than that which has gone before, and without the labour of your hastening them on, or even of looking for them.

Such minds as Aksakov's, Tchekov's—and Turgenev's, too--seem to have been able to relapse at will into this state of serene, receptive quiescence, wherein consciousness resembles a pool of water in some green corner of the meadows, wild flowers on its margin—dragon-fly, thistledown and popping fish, clouds floating in the blue, an occasional zephyr rippling the surface, and a naiad venturing down out of the woods with other timid wild things to sip of its coolness.

In England, however, though complete vacuity of mind is not unknown among us, this pastime is called day-dreaming, and is frowned at by the serious and the active and the practical as a mere indulgence. The busy bee, the nursery assured us, improves the shining hour—and needs to in this climate. Life in these Western parts is not only real, but earnest. Nevertheless, here is a book, and a book by a serious, active, practical writer (" not unfamiliar " to readers of the Spectator), which positively parades the joys of this haphazard, go-as-you-please, I'd-be-a-butterfly Tom-Tiddler- ism. And " by all above," he exclaims on his title-page, " these blenches gave my heart another youth."

But how net in and weave together things of the mind so wayward and capricious ? There could hardly be a more accommodating means of lying in wait for them than that which Mr. Strachey has actually chosen : a " Diary "—a diary desultory as the pollen-bearing wind, the sport of time and place and inclination. It is a diary packed and volu- minous, even though it represents, with varying intervals between the entries, no more than about two years in all, verging so close at last on the dreadful Now, as July the 5th, 1924.

It was begun, the author explains, in the hope of amusing and interesting in illness the son to whom it is dedicated. But soon other readers, in an ever-expanding circle, loomed into view. And since " in literature, even more than on the stage, those who live to please must please to live," that insidious ideal, " good copy," began to creep into mind. And then at length, and almost in bravado : " At sea, 13th of August, 1923.—This morning we saw whales. . . . I am writing this diary to please myself," and shall " print it to please my publisher."

• A " great " book, says Mr. Strachey in one of his entries, is good throughout : " good in the whole, good in the part, good in general structure, good in details : one which exactly accomplished its author's aim." For illustration he cites The Tale of a Tub. And then—though not till then—one hesitates. For, whatever Euclid may say, are not parts of The Tate of a Tub greater than the whole—those rich, raw, racy, abominable dialogues, for example. And does it for any reader with the least claim to sensibility and "- good nature " exactly accomplish Swift's aim ?

Whether or not, it may, at any rate, be generally agreed that the most endearing, enkindling, animating and provoca- tive books nary in goodness. They afford lulls from any abstract excellence, and even from their own best—for rest, reaction, contrast and foil. And they were written, as probably even the Book of Lamentations was written, and

as Wordsworth maintained that poetry is written, with, if not necessarily for, pleasure ; though it may not always

follow that the reader shares that pleasure. When Mr. Strachey, for example, discusses which is the most depressing fragment of poetry in the English language, the fragment that instantly occurred to one of his readers was not one of the Duddon Sonnets (for he has never read them), but a passage in the Ode on Immortality.

As for a diary, the pleasure to be derived from that depends, of course, on the kind of diarist. Diaries are not usually

" great books." Pepys' (though inexhaustibly good in all its parts) is not ; Evelyn's is not ; though The Diary of a Nobody (and that is fiction) skirts the margin.

But since Mr. Strachey's was written to please his son, himself, the general reader and his publisher, it could hardly fail to find a place in our more amiable, if less perfect, category.

And fail it does not. On the other hand, though its " ideas " seem to have come into being of themselves, without effort or hindrance, the diary seldom recalls the Russians. It is idiosyncratic rather than temperamental. It is active rather than passive : and far more intellectual in range than imaginative. It draws a covert, routs out a Theme, and then it's tally-ho, and away over hill and dale, in sure and certain hope of a kill. Nor does it always " stand on quillets how to slay him : Be it by gins, by snares, by subtlety . . • Sleeping or waking, 'tis no matter how,"

so he be, up to the coup de grace, very much alive. Its

course is restless, galvanic, zigzag. Its thoughts, scenes, hobbies, speculations rapidly, kaleidoscopically succeed one another ; it is seldom the expression of mere moods, of reverie. There is little protracted " brooding."

As between the two kinds, this is the difference between leaving one's door ajar and sitting in the darkening twilight in hope of a visitor, preferably strange and possibly not quite earthly ; and leaping out of bed to pull up the blinds to look at the new morning's weather before descending to breakfast, eggs and bacon, lively company and talk. The title of this

diary, too, is The River of Life—not the pool, or mere, or tarn,

or even ocean.

The pleasure its readers will derive from it, then, will be also of this sort. It will vary in kind and intensity. In sheer material the diary never flags ; but the interest is not always at the same pitch. Who could doubt, for example, that the diarist intensely enjoyed writing the pages on " desperate sayings "—such little solacing sops in the pan as " It is not good that many men should know how bad men are " ; or Douglas Jerrold's facetious aside in the socialistic 'forties " Ah yes, we arc all brothers now ; all Cains and Abels." Goethe's too—sovereign axiom for every editor—" The public must be treated like women : they must be told absolutely nothing but what they like to hear." Or take the charming bubbling fragment that describes the

little palazzo in the main street of Sestri Levante ; or that on the Barca ; or that on the art of story-telling ; or on Disraeli's aphorisms ; or on Shakespeare's haunted and haunting asides ; or on the Englishman—as apt spiritually

to convert abuse into flattery as physically to turn starch into sugar ; or that on Cats—though what of the dreadful

indictment " Female cats are not usually very psychic." Away goes the pack in full cry, too (even though it may now be hunting a mere will-o'-the-wisp), across that sombre morass in which it is so curiously fascinating to flounder—

the morass known as the Subconscious. Here, oddly enough, the M.F.H. plucked two curious and delightful flowers : the first, a poem entitled " Brother or Stranger," almost as alien and arresting in its busy, animated context as the apparition of a nun would be in the House of Commons :— " . . . Ho frames my future, as ho is my past, And I in him behold the first and last.

But kind he can be, and keeps close at hand— Save when I want him most ; thon he will stand Dark, secret, dumb, and turn the deafest ears To all my calls to help me still my fears . . ,

If I refrain from frightening him away By too much asking, he will turn to play Old games and tell old tales in such strange guise, I laugh aloud in wonder and surprise. . . . "

The second, also a poem, even more philosophical in kind, entitled " The Present, the Future, and the Past," itself as conspicuous in turn as the gentle, evocative twangling of a harp in the lull of an orchestra :-

" . . Man's body and man's brain, man's senses fine,

That to report on all they find combine, Make not the Man. Note now that subtle Lute.

The instrument lies lifeless, cold, and mute,

Without a player. Yet, when he comes, its strings

Break into music, are creative things. While he is there the music to prolong, He rules the Soundboard and commands the Song. . • ."

In the prose also extremes reveal themselves. For what entirely different things in kind are the attacks on Aristotle's Polities (generously alleviated a few pages later) and on Horace as a poet (chiefly with a view perhaps to his admirers)

and those shining pages on Donne, whose poems Mr. Strachey professes never to have understood, even though they have

from boyhood filled him with a consuming joy—a joy, moreover, which is none the less apparent when by quotation he entirely disproves the first part of his statement !

It would be an odd diary, however, which, even though it attempted to treat the public like women, pleased everybody all the time. What, one speculates, would Mr. Conrad have thought and felt about " All the same, sea-faring men are ` dears' : mild and muddle-headed and quite delirious in their notions about ordinary things. But they have vision" ? What would Keats's retort have been to " And so Spenser

remains the Poet's poet, which is a polite way of saying, nobody's poet. And yet he might have been anything. For example, he had in him the seeds of a supreme form of satire" ? But even if—with an eye fixed on the average

landsman—one refuses to dismiss a sea-faring man as a mere dear ; even if Spenser is of all poets one of the most faithful in service to his own ideal and paradise, even if satire is in essence unworthy of the name of poetry—these statements are still at least open to controversy.

But when Mr. Strachey, transported by love and admiration, acclaims with the voice of bugles the beauties of a certain solitary and lovely region in the United Kingdom, and names it, then the judicious may grieve indeed. It is all very well to suggest that the char-a-bane should consume its own waste-paper and beer bottles. But there are more insidious

enemies of such solitudes than this. What of the new rich, the new idle, and their chaste hotels ? Have they very much improved upon the old, regarding whom Mr. Strachey himself quotes from a letter of Matthew Arnold's :—

" More and more I think ill of the great people here [in London] : that is, their two capital faults, stupidity and hardness of heart, become more and more clear to me. . . . The faces of the handsom- est men express either a stupid pride, or the stupidity without the pride ; and the half-alive look of many pretty faces among the women--so different from the Southern languor—points, too, to something very like stupidity. And a proud-looking English woman is the hardest-looking thing I know in the world."

And last, there is that raw little anecdote about the Jesuit priest, which should surely not have found place in a diary containing page 63.

But how tedious a book is that with which one invariably and placidly agrees ! In this, as in everything else, a book

resembles a friend. It needs divination too. For what it

implies, holds in solution, secretes as it were, is of more importance than what it definitely says. This diary expresses in easy,abundant flow its author's interests, his characteristic

lines of thought and speculation, his mental bias, prejudices, enthusiasms. What it confides in relation to the diarist himself is rather by the way ; as as afterthought, or inadver- tently.

None the less, from every line of it we can divine that he is steadily growing younger ; a perfectly natural process, thank God, and leading at last to—heaven alone knows what state of innocence and day-dream. He is generous in his admiration,

mercurial in mood ; impulsive both in attack and in repen- tance, and would rather be boldly wrong than timidly, cau-

tiously correct. He finds this mortal existence endlessly exciting ; inexhaustibly unexpected ; and though he is no stranger to dreaming, life and its activities are apt at times to keep him almost too wide awake. His hatred of the dogmatic does not prevent him from dogmatizing ; but he is no admirer of that gravity which is merely, as Roehefoucauld says, a mystical behaviour in the body intended to set off defects of the mind. " My natural impulse is to be on the side of the humorous, and against the solemn." He. enjoys, as do most prudent men, realizing his shortcomings ; and will on occasion confess to defects and deficiencies that he does not possess—" I have no sense of music," he asserts ; and then in flat contradiction expatiates on the " Wagnerian heaven- of sound " in Parsifal with such abandon that a fellow-amateur—if only in adoration of Bach and in loving loyalty to Mozart—will fairly tremble with indignation.

He is an intense delighter in all kinds of travel—in the world of nature, man and books ; though he prefers the cultivated to the wild. Of authors, Racine, Pope, Dryden and Arnold most frequently share his pages. Racine indeed is comfort enough for Mr. Strachey even when he is prostrated with a bad cold ; and though he is " the least Ciceronian of men," the Letters of that " most lovable " and able of writers, " poor Cicero," is yet another favourite bedside book.

Last, he is " a great eater of beef," yet (if the " yet " is logical) " no man of science," being (though a sedulous trespasser on its borderlands) " somewhat old, and lazy and intellectually unreformed." He can still cry over a book ; never means to apologize for making " so much of a pother " about himself and his feelings, and thinks—while in England- " a good deal of what is going to happen in the House of Commons." -

More than a faint impression haunts the mind, finally, when the last headlong, high-spirited entry has been read, that Mr. Strachey, a little too intent, perhaps, on " commanding the song," has not been as hospitable as he might have been to that other self—that mysterious visitant, " dark, secret," maybe, but, as he has himself revealed, " not always dumb." And his postscript is proof that he is conscious of this, too : " I am well aware that throughout the diary the unseen River of Life was between, and that I could not chronicle it, or play with it, or revel in its current." Here and there is a flying glimpse of those deeper waters. Here and there, not only a vein of the imaginative, but a tinge, a nuance even of the grotesque, even of the macabre. It is then as if some queer inmate of one of the attics in his house of life had suddenly flung open a window.

" And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say or do Is eloquent, is well—but 'tis not true "-

not the whole truth, that is, and perhaps not the profoundest. But then a diary is but a diary, and this one ended so far back as July 5th, 1924. Its sequel may be well on the way, and much of that may prove to be not only in verse, but irradi-