Is it good thus to have the veils of life rent asunder?  If life, the world’s life, activity, work, be the end of existence, then it is not good.  It breaks the spring of energy, so that one goes heavily and sorely.  But what if that be not the end?  What then?

May 16, 1890.

At present the new countryside is a great resource.  I walk far among the wolds; I find exquisite villages, where every stone-built house seems to have style and quality; I come down upon green water-meadows, with clear streams flowing by banks set with thorn-bushes and alders.  The churches, the manor-houses, of grey rubble smeared with plaster, with stone roof-tiles, are a feast for eye and heart.  Long days in the open air bring me a dull equable health of body, a pleasant weariness, a good-humoured indifference.  My mind becomes grass-grown, full of weeds, ruinous; but I welcome it as at least a respite from suffering.  It is strange to think of myself at what ought, I suppose, to be the busiest and fullest time of my life, living here like a tree in lonely fields.  What would be the normal life?  A little house in a London street, I suppose, with a lot of white paint and bookshelves.  Luncheons, dinners, plays, music, clubs, week-end visits to lively houses, a rush abroad, a few country visits in the winter.  Very harmless and pleasant if one enjoyed it, but to me inconceivable and insupportable.  Perhaps I should be happier and brisker, perhaps the time would go quicker.  Ought one to make up one’s mind that this would be the normal life, and that therefore one had better learn to accommodate oneself to it?  Does one pay penalties for not submitting oneself to the ordinary laws of human intercourse?  Doubtless one does.  But then, made as I am, I should have to pay penalties which would seem to be even heavier for the submission.  It is there that the puzzle lies; that a man should be created with the strong instinct that I feel for liberty and independence and solitude and the quiet of the country, and then that he should discover that the life he so desires should be the one that develops all the worst side of him—­ morbidity, fastidiousness, gloom, discontent.  This is the shadow of civilisation; that it makes people intellectual, alert, craving for stimulus, and yet sucks their nerves dry of the strength that makes such things enjoyable.

And still, as I go in and out, the death of Alec seems the one absolutely unintelligible and inexplicable thing, a gloom penetrated by no star.  It was the one thing that might have made me unselfish, tender-hearted, the anxious care of some other than myself.  “Perhaps,” says an old friend writing to me with a clumsy attempt at comfort, “perhaps he was taken mercifully away from some evil to come.”  A good many people say that, and feel it quite honestly.  But what an insupportable idea of the ways of Providence, that God had planned a prospect for the child so dreadful that even his swift removal should be tolerable by