It is a very elaborate form of torture anyhow; and I confess that I find it difficult to discern where its educative effect comes in, because it makes one shrink from effort, it makes one timid, indecisive, suspicious.  It seems to encourage all the weaknesses and meannesses of the spirit; and, worst of all, it centres one’s thoughts upon oneself.  Perhaps it enlarges one’s sympathy for all secret sufferers; and it makes me grateful for the fact that I have had so little ill-health in my life.  Yet I find myself, too, testing with some curiosity the breezy maxims of optimists.  A cheerful writer says somewhere:  “Will not the future be the better and the richer for memories of past pleasure?  So surely must the sane man feel.”  Well, he must be very sane indeed.  It takes a very burly philosopher to think of the future as being enriched by past gladness, when one seems to have forfeited it, and when one is by no means certain of getting it back.  One feels bitterly how little one appreciated it at the time; and to rejoice in reflecting how much past happiness stands to one’s credit, is a very dispassionate attitude.  I think Dante was nearer the truth when he said that “a sorrow’s crown of sorrow was remembering happier things.”

February 3, 1889.

To amuse oneself—­that is the difficulty.  Amusements are or ought to be the childish, irrational, savage things which a man goes on doing and practising, in virtue, I suppose, of the noble privilege of reason, far longer than any other animal—­only young animals amuse themselves; a dog perhaps retains the faculty longer than most animals, but he only does it out of sympathy and companionship, to amuse his inscrutable owner, not to amuse himself.  Amusements ought to be things which one wants to do, and which one is slightly ashamed of doing—­enough ashamed, I mean, to give rather elaborate reasons for continuing them.  If one shoots, for instance, one ought to say that it gets one out of doors, and that what one really enjoys is the country, and so forth.  Personally I was never much amused by amusements, and gave them up as soon as I decently could.  I regret it now.  I wish we were all taught a handicraft as a regular part of education!  I used to sketch, and strum a piano once, but I cannot deliberately set to work on such things again.  I gave them all up when I became a writer, really, I suppose, because I did not care for them, but nominally on the grounds of “resolute limitation,” as Lord Acton said—­with the idea that if you prune off the otiose boughs of a tree, you throw the strength of the sap into the boughs you retain.  I see now that it was a mistake.  But it is too late to begin again now; I was reading Kingsley’s Life the other day.  He used to overwork himself periodically—­use up the grey matter at the base of his brain, as he described it; but he had a hundred things that he wanted to do besides writing—­fishing, entomologising, botanising.  Browning liked modelling