MORE OF KILVERT Kilvert's Diary. Vol. H. Edited by William
Plomer. (Cape. rzs. 6d.) THOSE who served in the Great War can remember—for it was the common experience of all—how distant, how unreal,
were the happy and irrecoverable days of peace. It seemed as though we lived in a dislocated state of being, deprived of every bond and association with earlier life; or perhaps we were in a vacuum between two identities, unable to give our- selves the assurance of the one or the other. All the affairs of peace had receded into a dim, peripheral existence, revolv- ing and remote on the outer edges of memory. We gazed at the relics of our previous world, our books, our pictures, with a curiously demagnetised affection, as a cold antiquary may gaze upon the relics of an obscure though interesting epoch. I am reminded rather grimly of our new recession as I read
this delightful book: the second volume of Kilvert's Diary.
For we are not living in peace any longer. We are living within a great arena, and we are in some doubt as to the nature of the performance which is now being so rapidly prepared. Our continuum is broken, and our past is receding with a strange, independent velocity. When I reviewed the
first volume of Kilvert's Diary last year I said that we dis-
covered a melancholy joy in reading the quiet records of the past. No doubt my observation applies equally well to the present volume, but the joy of such reading has now the added qualities of mysterious detachment and of a more in- tense retrospective envy.
Kilvert was a happy clergyman of the later Victorian period. He accepted a curacy in the parish of Clyro on the Radnor- shire border in 1865, when he was twenty-five years old. Here he worked for seven years under his dashing rector, Venables. In 1872 he assisted his father, the rector of Langley Burrell in Wiltshire. He then received a living in Radnorshire, re- moving soon afterwards to the more comfortable rectory of Bredwardine. Not long after his marriage in 1879 he died of peritonitis. Kilvert was a conscientious, popular man; he wore the trimmed ecclesiastical whiskers of the period and he delighted in picnics and rural excursions, though he delighted also in the noble solitude of the hills. Like other men of his type and age he diluted his passions in the warm and easy flow of a rather maundering sentimentality. Dried flowers are neatly fixed on the pages of his journal, and he was per- petually enamoured of little girls. From serious temptation he was preserved always by the reassuring complexity of his religious ideas, and it is impossible to say to what extent he himself was aware of the sensual motive in his own attitude. His observation of landscape and of the beauty of the external world is peculiarly sensitive and is often revealed in passages of memorable charm. Too gentle to use the sharper darts of wit, he can still write of his neighbours with a vivacity which
is occasionally brilliant and always entertaining. He was
attracted perversely, as often happens in the cases of the sen- sitive, by the macabre and sepulchral, nor•is he averse to the recital and evocation of horrors. In the unpublished parts of the diary there are many references, also, to the details of disease. But the man who has here depicted himself is essentially a delightful person. His journal has the great value of immediacy and of sincerity; it is a social document of no small importance, and a personal history presenting in
clear co:ours the individual and his period. Kilvert's Diary is indeed a book which is to be commended heartily and with- out reserve to every sort of reader, except the incurably obtuse.
It has been my privilege to see some of the manuscript volumes of the Diary, and I am able to speak of the great
skill with which Mr. Plomer has edited his material and of the industry and intelligence of those who undertook the work of transcription on the typewriter. This volume is somewhat larger than the first. About half of it deals with Kilvert's life on the Welsh border; thereafter we follow him in various duties and various little tours. Those who have already met this amiable clergyman will eagerly hasten to renew their acquaintance, and those who now discover him
for the first time will undoubtedly wish to peruse the earlier volume as well. Kilvert exhibits on every page his gentle, observant and sentimental nature. He admires innocently one of the most audacious of Etty's nudes (" The Deluge "), and he looks with awe at the great canvases of Gustave Dore. He twitters in a little storm of inhibited emotions when a child of three sits on his lap in a railway carriage (" no ordin- ary child," he says), and he dangles after Daisy Thomas with a coyness nearly as great as her own. He is delighted by the sublimation of the erotic in such a picture as " Cling- ing to the Cross." He sits up late, so that he may gush in verse over " Emmeline's Grave." With " one long lingering loving look " he parts for ever, in Hay, from his darling Florence Hill. There are moments, we have to admit, when he is extremely silly. But you cannot read this Diary with- out feeling an immediate affection for the author. His very silliness, after all, is due to a confusion of excellent principles and of resolute integrity. When he looks at the fine figure of the lady who clings to the cross in her clammy and revealing draperies he is only conscious of his joy in her salvation. There are many. anecdotes in the book, including stories of the Crimea and of the Sepoy Mutiny, and innumerable vivid pic- tures of country life in the eighteen-seventies. My original reference to Kilvert's Diary as a possible " minor classic
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