Living in luxury BOOKS
J. W. M. THOMPSON
One November day in 1874, when the Reverend Francis Kilvert had spent a happy morning walking across the country- side to view a beech forest in its autumn colours, he sat down to describe the outing in his diary; and then he abruptly asked himself a question. 'Why'—he wrote---'do I keep this voluminous journal? I can hardly tell. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it almost seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me.' It seems to have been the only reference to his motives throughout the twenty-two thick notebooks, spanning the years 1870 to 1879, from which the published text of Kilverls Diary (now reissued in three volumes, Jonathan Cape, 147s) has been taken.
If the pleasure of posterity was really his aim, then his wish has been fulfilled. In William Plomer's admirable edition, Kilvert has come to be seen as a major recruit to the band of English diarists who will always 'amuse and interest' readers with a sense of the past. But the tireless diary-writing of a Kilvert or, for that matter, of a Pepys, must also spring from another source. Such a man has to be in some degree a creative artist in need of self-expression. The great diarist is simply a writer who happens to find, in this private and flexible form of literature, the perfect vessel into which to distil his observation of the world and his discoveries about himself.
Francis Kilvert in fact produced one of the most interesting and entertaining diaries in the English language, and as it has been unobtainable for some years in its extended form, its reissue now is a welcome event. The life it depicts is im- mensely remote, although it was written less than a hundred years ago; yet because of Kilvert's rare visual sense and his gift for the re-creation of what he saw, his distant world lives on the page with astonishing freshness. The diary is, as Dr Plomer fairly claims, a unique record of English country life in the last century.
It first appeared in print between 1938 and 1940. In that time of war, &ome readers were tempted to find in it an escape to a cosy imaginary world, where idyllic rural scenes were still unthreatened either by Armageddon or by the internal combustion engine. Paradoxically, much of the diary's lasting value lies in the opposite direction. Kilvert marvellously anatomises a social scene which, while indeed set in an arcadian countryside, possessed a roughness and rigour that contrast starkly with the com- fortable urban culture of today, founded upon full employment, television and the parked car outside the calmed house,. One feels something of the same trbout the full-length self-portrait which the diarist presents. It appears on the far side of a great gulf in human life. There he stands in his beard and plain attire: a man very much of his time, sentimental and vigorous, pious and sensual, solemn and larkish. And the course of his short life seems quintessentially Victorian, as the obscure country clergyman, cultivated, leisured, but too hopelessly poor to marry a suitable wife, evolves over the years into the stock period figure of an ageing bachelor bedevilled by his own frustrated sexuality.
Kilvert died when he was thirty-eight; as he records, he fell in love with a succession of eligible young ladies, but each affair came to nothing when stern parents inquired into his means. He went in for playfully passionate friendships with little girls, and not until shortly before his death did he cease to be a curate and so become able to take to himself a wife; but he was unlucky in love to the end. He died of peritonitis a month after his wedding.
Not unnaturally, then, there are signs of melancholy in his self-portrait, the melan- choly of a Victorian man paying the price of the social system of which in many other ways he was a grateful beneficiary. Indeed, he lived his later years in a state of almost continual emotional upheaval. And yet the altogether unexpected thing, by modern values, is that the quality which distin- guishes his writing above all is that of sheer enjoyment. His pleasure in life was intense. `It is a positive luxury to be alive,' he exclaims on one day. Most of his life was spent in beautiful places. but wherever he went he used his eyes unceasingly and took delight in what he saw; and he was eager to put it down on paper at the end of each day.
'The little town looked bright, busy and happy in the morning sunshine, one boy carrying a bundle of white osiers and an- other standing on a green mount playing a concertina'—at times Kilvert used words much as the Impressionists at the time were using paint. Again: 'The lurid copper smoke hung in a dense cloud over Swan- sea, and the great fleet of oyster boats under the cliff was heaving in the greenest sea I ever saw.' Kilvert's affairs with women may have gone amiss, but few men have been more satisfactorily in love with their own environment.
All this is best seen in the major section of the diary which covers his years as curate at Clyro, a secluded village in the valley of the river Wye. Here, too, his re- creation of the society around him is meticulous and vivid. Whether he was playing a flirtatious game of croquet in the twilight, or sitting beside the bed of a dying villager in a freezing shack where 'a small and filthy child knelt or crouched
in the ashes of the hearth before a black grate and cold cinders', his observation was always needle-eyed. Through him we see a community in which sharp contrast was everywhere. The fortunate few lived out their lives on little islands of comfort in a sea of toil and hardship. Almost everyone was poor and the horizons of people's lives were very close. 'There is a general belief,' he noted, 'that I cannot travel from Radnorshire to Wiltshire without going over the sea.'
Clearly this kindly and sympathetic man had the gift of getting on famously with the country people. Perhaps this was be- cause he found them endlessly interesting. And his country people, perversely no doubt since the welfare state had not yet been invented, were conspicuously jolly. They were prepared to meet hardship or disaster round every corner: but a village fair, or a rent-day, or even the birth of a daughter to the vicar's wife, plunged them into strenuous merry-making. The dis- reputable drank uproariously, the genteel had garden parties or picnics and sang in the drawing rooms. Denied the blessings of television, they were entertained by each other's singularities instead. Far from the bland and comfortable domesticity of to- day. they knew a harder condition of life and were shaped by it into spiky individu- ality. Within the rigid social stratification nonconformity flourished, and Kilvert's pages are filled with quirky individualists and rural eccentrics. There was a great deal of light and shade. Suicides and scandals and deathbed scenes came thick and fast. Rustic life was, as you might say, all go.
There is no fuzziness in Kilvert's pictures: reading him is like gazing into one of those Victorian stereoscopic gadgets at past scenes preserved for ever. He succeeds in both of the roles which pos- terity requires of a diarist, those of self- portraitist and observant spectator, and the two sides of him fuse when he writes, as he often does, of his beloved country- side in Wiltshire or by the Wye. He could paint a scene with economy and exactness and at the same time explore his own overflowing feelings. 'I could have cried with the excitement of the overwhelming spectacle,' he wrote after a brilliant even- ing when the snow lay on the Black Mountains above Hay-on-Wye. 'I wanted someone to admire the sight with me.' His diary, waiting for him in his bachelor room, had to serve as that person.
No twentieth-century man could respond so rapturously to natural beauty, and on occasion his emotion led him into lush adjectival swamps; but more often his landscapes are done with a passionate clarity. He trod in the footsteps of the Romantics. The sun breaking through storm clouds above the Wye valley aroused in him much the same emotions as the Wordsworths felt upon Kirkstone Pass. He had a sense of living in a kind of Eden. while always aware of the evidences of man's -fall all about him.
Today his world has almost wholly vanished; we have abolished most of the human hardships which moved him to com- passion, and most of the natural glories which stirred him to now unfashionable awe. We are the more in the debt of this strange little parson for his luminous record of what has gone. As his epitaph in Bredwardine churchyard announces, with mysterious prescience, 'He being dead, yet speaketh.'
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