<|entry|><|mansfield|>
5 February 1922.
Wrote at my story, read Shakespeare. Read Goethe, thought, prayed.

The day was cold and fine. But I felt ill and could do nothing but lie still all day. This going to Paris has been so much more important than it seemed. Now I begin to see it as the result, the ending of all that reading. I mean that even Cosmic Anatomy is involved. Something has been built, a raft, frail and not very seaworthy; but it will serve. Before, I was cast into the water when I was ' alone ' — I mean during my illness — and now something supports me. But much is to be done. Much discipline and meditation is needed. Above all, it is important to get work done. Heard from Pinker that Cassells have taken " A Cup of Tea."

Thought about French women and their impudent confidence in the power of sex.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|mansfield|>
6 February 1922.
Letters from B. and J. B's letter was the most beautiful I have ever received. It gave me a strange shock to find J. never even asked how things were going. A boyish letter like so many I have had, but absolutely impersonal. It might have been written to anyone. True, he was anxious for the post. But . . . that was because he is alone. Do I make J. up? Is he thankful to sink into himself again? I feel relief in every line. There's no strain — nothing that binds him. Then let it continue so. But I will not take a house anywhere. I, too, will be free. (I write exactly as I feel.) I do not want to see J. again just now. I shall beg him not to come here. He is at present just like a fish that has escaped from the hook.

A bad day. I feel ill, in an obscure way — horrible pains and so on, and weakness. I could do nothing. The weakness was not only physical. I must heal my Self before I will be well.

Yes, that is the important thing. No attention is needed here. This must be done alone and at once. It is at the root of my not getting better. My mind is not controlled. I idle, I give way, I sink into despair.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|mansfield|>
9 February 1922.
A miserable day. In the night I thought for hours of the evils of uprooting. Every time one leaves anywhere, something precious, which ought not to be killed, is left to die.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
27 January 1667.
(Lord’s day). Up betimes, and leaving my wife to go by coach to hear Mr. Frampton preach, which I had a mighty desire she should, I down to the Old Swan, and there to Michell and staid while he and she dressed themselves, and here had a ‘baiser’ or two of her, whom I love mightily; and then took them in a sculler (being by some means or other disappointed of my own boat) to White Hall, and so with them to Westminster, Sir W. Coventry, Bruncker and I all the morning together discoursing of the office business, and glad of the Controller’s business being likely to be put into better order than formerly, and did discourse of many good things, but especially of having something done to bringing the Surveyor’s matters into order also. Thence I up to the King’s closet, and there heard a good Anthem, and discoursed with several people here about business, among others with Lord Bellasses, and so from one to another after sermon till the King had almost dined, and then home with Sir G. Carteret and dined with him, being mightily ashamed of my not having seen my Lady Jemimah so long, and my wife not at all yet since she come, but she shall soon do it. I thence to Sir Philip Warwicke, by appointment, to meet Lord Bellasses, and up to his chamber, but find him unwilling to discourse of business on Sundays; so did not enlarge, but took leave, and went down and sat in a low room, reading Erasmus “de scribendis epistolis,” a very good book, especially one letter of advice to a courtier most true and good, which made me once resolve to tear out the two leaves that it was writ in, but I forebore it. By and by comes Lord Bellasses, and then he and I up again to Sir P. Warwicke and had much discourse of our Tangier business, but no hopes of getting any money. Thence I through the garden into the Park, and there met with Roger Pepys, and he and I to walk in the Pell Mell. I find by him that the House of Parliament continues full of ill humours, and he seems to dislike those that are troublesome more than needs, and do say how, in their late Poll Bill, which cost so much time, the yeomanry, and indeed two-thirds of the nation, are left out to be taxed, that there is not effectual provision enough made for collecting of the money; and then, that after a man his goods are distrained and sold, and the overplus returned, I am to have ten days to make my complaints of being over-rated if there be cause, when my goods are sold, and that is too late. These things they are resolved to look into again, and mend them before they rise, which they expect at furthest on Thursday next. Here we met with Mr. May, and he and we to talk of several things, of building, and such like matters; and so walked to White Hall, and there I skewed my cozen Roger the Duchesse of York sitting in state, while her own mother stands by her; he had a desire, and I shewed him my Lady Castlemayne, whom he approves to be very handsome, and wonders that she cannot be as good within as she is fair without. Her little black boy came by him; and, a dog being in his way, the little boy called to the dog: “Pox of this dog!”--“Now,” says he, blessing himself, “would I whip this child till the blood come, if it were my child!” and I believe he would. But he do by no means like the liberty of the Court, and did come with expectation of finding them playing at cards to-night, though Sunday; for such stories he is told, but how true I know not.

After walking up and down the Court with him, it being now dark and past six at night, I walked to the Swan in the Palace yard and there with much ado did get a waterman, and so I sent for the Michells, and they come, and their father Howlett and his wife with them, and there we drank, and so into the boat, poor Betty’s head aching. We home by water, a fine moonshine and warm night, it having been also a very summer’s day for warmth. I did get her hand to me under my cloak.... So there we parted at their house, and he walked almost home with me, and then I home and to supper, and to read a little and to bed. My wife tells me Mr. Frampton is gone to sea, and so she lost her labour to-day in thinking to hear him preach, which I am sorry for.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
17 November 1665.
Sailed all night, and got down to Quinbrough water, where all the great ships are now come, and there on board my Lord, and was soon received with great content. And after some little discourse, he and I on board Sir W. Pen; and there held a council of Warr about many wants of the fleete, but chiefly how to get slopps and victuals for the fleete now going out to convoy our Hambro’ ships, that have been so long detained for four or five months for want of convoy, which we did accommodate one way or other, and so, after much chatt, Sir W. Pen did give us a very good and neat dinner, and better, I think, than ever I did see at his owne house at home in my life, and so was the other I eat with him. After dinner much talke, and about other things, he and I about his money for his prize goods, wherein I did give him a cool answer, but so as we did not disagree in words much, and so let that fall, and so followed my Lord Sandwich, who was gone a little before me on board the Royall James. And there spent an houre, my Lord playing upon the gittarr, which he now commends above all musique in the world, because it is base enough for a single voice, and is so portable and manageable without much trouble. That being done, I got my Lord to be alone, and so I fell to acquaint him with W. Howe’s business, which he had before heard a little of from Captain Cocke, but made no great matter of it, but now he do, and resolves nothing less than to lay him by the heels, and seize on all he hath, saying that for this yeare or two he hath observed him so proud and conceited he could not endure him. But though I was not at all displeased with it, yet I prayed him to forbear doing anything therein till he heard from me again about it, and I had made more enquiry into the truth of it, which he agreed to. Then we fell to publique discourse, wherein was principally this: he cleared it to me beyond all doubt that Coventry is his enemy, and has been long so. So that I am over that, and my Lord told it me upon my proposal of a friendship between them, which he says is impossible, and methinks that my Lord’s displeasure about the report in print of the first fight was not of his making, but I perceive my Lord cannot forget it, nor the other think he can. I shewed him how advisable it were upon almost any terms for him to get quite off the sea employment. He answers me again that he agrees to it, but thinks the King will not let him go off: He tells me he lacks now my Lord Orrery to solicit it for him, who is very great with the King. As an infinite secret, my Lord tells me, the factions are high between the King and the Duke, and all the Court are in an uproare with their loose amours; the Duke of Yorke being in love desperately with Mrs. Stewart. Nay, that the Duchesse herself is fallen in love with her new Master of the Horse, one Harry Sidney, and another, Harry Savill. So that God knows what will be the end of it. And that the Duke is not so obsequious as he used to be, but very high of late; and would be glad to be in the head of an army as Generall; and that it is said that he do propose to go and command under the King of Spayne, in Flanders. That his amours to Mrs. Stewart are told the King. So that all is like to be nought among them. That he knows that the Duke of Yorke do give leave to have him spoken slightly of in his owne hearing, and doth not oppose it, and told me from what time he hath observed this to begin. So that upon the whole my Lord do concur to wish with all his heart that he could with any honour get from off the imployment. After he had given thanks to me for my kind visit and good counsel, on which he seems to set much by, I left him, and so away to my Bezan againe, and there to read in a pretty French book, “La Nouvelle Allegorique,” upon the strife between rhetorique and its enemies, very pleasant. So, after supper, to sleepe, and sayled all night, and came to Erith before break of day.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|pepys|>
19 November 1665.
(Lord’s day). Up, and after being trimmed, alone by water to Erith, all the way with my song book singing of Mr. Lawes’s long recitative song in the beginning of his book. Being come there, on board my Lord Bruncker, I find Captain Cocke and other company, the lady not well, and mighty merry we were; Sir Edmund Pooly being very merry, and a right English gentleman, and one of the discontented Cavaliers, that think their loyalty is not considered. After dinner, all on shore to my Lady Williams, and there drank and talked; but, Lord! the most impertinent bold woman with my Lord that ever I did see. I did give her an account again of my business with my Lord touching W. Howe, and she did give me some more information about it, and examination taken about it, and so we parted and I took boat, and to Woolwich, where we found my wife not well of them, and I out of humour begun to dislike her paynting, the last things not pleasing me so well as the former, but I blame myself for my being so little complaisant. So without eating or drinking, there being no wine (which vexed me too), we walked with a lanthorne to Greenwich and eat something at his house, and so home to bed.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|pepys|>
20 November 1665.
Up before day, and wrote some letters to go to my Lord, among others that about W. Howe, which I believe will turn him out, and so took horse for Nonesuch, with two men with me, and the ways very bad, and the weather worse, for wind and rayne. But we got in good time thither, and I did get my tallys got ready, and thence, with as many as could go, to Yowell, and there dined very well, and I saw my Besse, a very well-favoured country lass there, and after being very merry and having spent a piece I took horse, and by another way met with a very good road, but it rained hard and blew, but got home very well. Here I find Mr. Deering come to trouble me about business, which I soon dispatched and parted, he telling me that Luellin hath been dead this fortnight, of the plague, in St. Martin’s Lane, which much surprised me.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|mansfield|>
[Prompt: What do you want?]
15 October 1916.
Later Now I've eaten one of the omelettes and one of the oranges. The sun has gone in; it's beginning to thunder. There's a little bird on a tree outside this window not so much singing as sharpening a note. He's getting a very fine point on it; I expect you would know his
"The Idiot"
name. . . . Write to me again when everything is not too bunkum. Good-bye for now !

With my strictly relative love

K.M.

Notes on Dostoevsky March. Nastasya Filipovna Barashkov ("The Idiot").

Page 7. She is first mentioned by Rogozhin in the train and she is immediately 'recognised' by a man with a red nose and a pimpled face who 'knows all about her.'

"Armance and Coralie and Princess Patsy and Nastasya Filipovna."
<|/entry|><|entry|><|mansfield|>
11 January 1916.
"We'll go and see Nastasya Filipovna." Prophetic words.

Page 9. Why did she accept the ear-rings from a man she had never seen? She was not greedy for jewels. She had plenty, and she was extremely particular in her conduct towards other men. Is that a kind of Russian custom? To accept the ear-rings as a kind of recognition of her beauty?

Pages 26, 27. The Portrait: "Dark and deep, passionate and disdainful."

Page 33. "Her face is cheerful, but she has passed through terrible suffering, hasn't she? . . . It's a proud face, awfully proud, but I don't know whether she is good-hearted. Ah! If she were! That would redeem it all."

Page 37. The Story of Nastasya. That change in her when she appears in Petersburg — her knowledge, almost 'technical,' of how things are done in the world, is not at all impossible. With such women it seems to be a kind of instinct. (Maata was just the same. She simply knew these things from nowhere.) Her action, that Dostoevsky says is 'from spite,' is to shew her power, and that when he has jerked out the weapon with which he wounded her she feels the dreadful smart.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|mansfield|>
26 April 1916.
Having read the whole of "The Idiot" through again, and fairly carefully, I feel slightly more bewildered than I did before as regards Nastasya Filipovna's character. She is really not well done. She is badly done. And there grows up as one reads on a kind of irritation, a balked fascination, which almost succeeds finally in blotting out those first and really marvellous 'impressions' of her. What was Dostoevsky really aiming at?

Shatov and his Wife ("The Possessed") There is something awfully significant about the attitude of Shatov to his wife, and it is amazing how, when Dostoevsky at last turns a soft but penetrating and full light upon him, we have managed to gather a great deal of knowledge of his character from the former vague side-lights and shadowy impressions. He is just what we thought him; he behaves just as we would expect him to do. There is all that crudity and what you might call *shock-headedness* in his nature
<|/entry|><|entry|><|mansfield|>
27 February 1916.
"The Possessed"

— and it is wonderfully tragic that he who is so soon to be destroyed himself should suddenly realise — and through a third person — through a little squealing baby — the miracle just being alive is.

Every time I read those chapters about his newborn happiness I cherish a kind of tiny hope that this time he will escape — he will be warned, he won't die.

How did Dostoevsky know about that extraordinary vindictive feeling, that relish for little laughter

— that comes over women in pain? It is a very secret thing, but it's profound, profound. They don't want to spare the one whom they love. If that one loves them with a kind of blind devotion as Shatov did Marie, they long to torment him, and this tormenting gives them real positive relief. Does this resemble in any way the tormenting that one observes so often in his affairs of passion? Are his women ever happy when they torment their lovers? No, they too are in the agony of labour. They are giving birth to their new selves. And they never believe in their deliverance.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
13 April 1914.
The remaining material of which the Journal is composed is of various kinds — brief (and sometimes difficult) notes for stories, fragments of diaries, unposted letters, comments and confessions scattered through her manuscripts. To these I have added a minimum of necessary words of explanation.

= xvi =

Introduction

Save for a single entry the Journal begins in 1914. The " huge complaining diaries " of which Katherine Mansfield speaks (February 16, 1916) were all destroyed. She was ruthless with her own past, and I have little doubt that what has survived is almost wholly that which, for some reason or other, she wished to survive.

John Middleton Murry.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
8 December 1887.
You can tell G. quite frankly that my decided opinion is that in his own interests as well as in the interests of the firm, his prices were ludicrous. After all that has happened, R. must either pay handsomely or the artists must shut the door in his face. I have seen enough of that sort of thing already, and after mature consideration that is my opinion. With a price of 300 francs one spoils one’s subsequent sales, and that is a thousand pities.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
15 November 1667.
Up, and to Alderman Backewell’s

and there discoursed with him about the remitting of this L6000 to Tangier, which he hath promised to do by the first post, and that will be by Monday next, the 18th, and he and I agreed that I would take notice of it that so he may be found to have done his best upon the desire of the Lords Commissioners. From this we went to discourse of his condition, and he with some vain glory told me that the business of Sheernesse did make him quite mad, and indeed might well have undone him; but yet that he did the very next day pay here and got bills to answer his promise to the King for the Swedes Embassadors (who were then doing our business at the treaty at Breda) L7000, and did promise the Bankers there, that if they would draw upon him all that he had of theirs and L10,000 more, he would answer it. He told me that Serjeant Maynard come to him for a sum of money that he had in his hands of his, and so did many others, and his answer was, What countrymen are you? And when they told him, why then, says he, here is a tally upon the Receiver of your country for so , and to yours for so much, and did offer to lay by tallies to the full value of all that he owed in the world, and L40,000 more for the security thereof, and not to touch a penny of his own till the full of what he owed was paid, which so pleased every body that he hath mastered all, so that he hath lent the Commissioners of the Treasury above L40,000 in money since that business, and did this morning offer to a lady who come to give him notice that she should need her money L3000, in twenty days, he bid her if she pleased send for it to-day and she should have it. Which is a very great thing, and will make them greater than ever they were, I am apt to think, in some time. Thence to Westminster, and there I walked with several, and do hear that there is to be a conference between the two Houses today; so I stayed: and it was only to tell the Commons that the Lords cannot agree to the confining or sequestring of the Earle of Clarendon from the Parliament, forasmuch as they do not specify any particular crime which they lay upon him and call Treason. This the House did receive, and so parted: at which, I hear, the Commons are like to grow very high, and will insist upon their privileges, and the Lords will own theirs, though the Duke of Buckingham, Bristoll, and others, have been very high in the House of Lords to have had him committed. This is likely to breed ill blood. Thence I away home, calling at my mercer’s and tailor’s, and there find, as I expected, Mr. Caesar and little Pelham Humphreys, lately returned from France, and is an absolute Monsieur, as full of form, and confidence, and vanity, and disparages everything, and everybody’s skill but his own. The truth is, every body says he is very able, but to hear how he laughs at all the King’s musick here, as Blagrave and others, that they cannot keep time nor tune, nor understand anything; and that Grebus, the Frenchman, the King’s master of the musick, how he understands nothing, nor can play on any instrument, and so cannot compose: and that he will give him a lift out of his place; and that he and the King are mighty great! and that he hath already spoke to the King of Grebus would make a man piss. I had a good dinner for them, as a venison pasty and some fowl, and after dinner we did play, he on the theorbo. Mr. Caesar on his French lute, and I on the viol, but made but mean musique, nor do I see that this Frenchman do so much wonders on the theorbo, but without question he is a good musician, but his vanity do offend me. They gone, towards night, I to the office awhile, and then home and to my chamber, where busy till by and by comes Mr. Moore, and he staid and supped and talked with me about many things, and tells me his great fear that all things will go to ruin among us, for that the King hath, as he says Sir Thomas Crew told him, been heard to say that the quarrel is not between my Lord Chancellor and him, but his brother and him; which will make sad work among us if that be once promoted, as to be sure it will, Buckingham and Bristoll being now the only counsel the King follows, so as Arlington and Coventry are come to signify little. He tells me they are likely to fall upon my Lord Sandwich; but, for my part, sometimes I am apt to think they cannot do him much harm, he telling me that there is no great fear of the business of Resumption! By and by, I got him to read part of my Lord Cooke’s chapter of treason, which is mighty well worth reading, and do inform me in many things, and for aught I see it is useful now to know what these crimes are. And then to supper, and after supper he went away, and so I got the girl to comb my head, and then to bed, my eyes bad. This day, Poundy, the waterman, was with me, to let me know that he was summonsed to bear witness against me to Prince Rupert’s people (who have a commission to look after the business of prize-goods) about the business of the prize-goods I was concerned in: but I did desire him to speak all he knew, and not to spare me, nor did promise nor give him any thing, but sent him away with good words, to bid him say all he knew to be true. This do not trouble me much.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
28 February 1664.
(Lord’s day). Up and walked to Paul’s; and by chance it was an extraordinary day for the Readers of the Inns of Court and all the Students to come to church, it being an old ceremony not used these twenty-five years, upon the first Sunday in Lent. Abundance there was of Students, more than there was room to seat but upon forms, and the Church mighty full. One Hawkins preached, an Oxford man. A good sermon upon these words: “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable.” Both before and after sermon I was most impatiently troubled at the Quire, the worst that ever I heard. But what was extraordinary, the Bishop of London, who sat there in a pew, made a purpose for him by the pulpitt, do give the last blessing to the congregation; which was, he being a comely old man, a very decent thing, methought. The Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir J. Robinson, would needs have me by coach home with him, and sending word home to my house I did go and dine with him, his ordinary table being very good, and his lady a very high-carriaged but comely big woman; I was mightily pleased with her. His officers of his regiment dined with him. No discourse at table to any purpose, only after dinner my Lady would needs see a boy which was represented to her to be an innocent country boy brought up to towne a day or two ago, and left here to the wide world, and he losing his way fell into the Tower, which my Lady believes, and takes pity on him, and will keep him; but though a little boy and but young, yet he tells his tale so readily and answers all questions so wittily, that for certain he is an arch rogue, and bred in this towne; but my Lady will not believe it, but ordered victuals to be given him, and I think will keep him as a footboy for their eldest son. After dinner to chappell in the Tower with the Lieutenant, with the keyes carried before us, and the Warders and Gentleman-porter going before us. And I sat with the Lieutenant in his pew, in great state, but slept all the sermon. None, it seems, of the prisoners in the Tower that are there now, though they may, will come to prayers there. Church being done, I back to Sir John’s house and there left him and home, and by and by to Sir W. Pen, and staid a while talking with him about Sir J. Minnes his folly in his office, of which I am sicke and weary to speak of it, and how the King is abused in it, though Pen, I know, offers the discourse only like a rogue to get it out of me, but I am very free to tell my mind to him, in that case being not unwilling he should tell him again if he will or any body else. Thence home, and walked in the garden by brave moonshine with my wife above two hours, till past 8 o’clock, then to supper, and after prayers to bed.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|vangogh|>
23 March 1887.
To refer to my work once more: to-day I painted a picture on a canvas about 25½ in. by 19 in.[32] It represents a drawbridge across which a small cart is being drawn, that stands out distinctly against the blue sky. The river is also blue, the banks are orange, and there is much green vegetation about them. A group of washerwomen are standing on the bank with corsets and caps of many colours. I have also painted another landscape with a small rustic bridge and some more washerwomen, and in addition to this, a grove of plane-trees close to the station. Since I have been here I have painted, in all, twelve studies.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|maclane|>
17 March 1917.
No resonance
My life, myself, I know are nothing noble, nothing constructive.

There is no resonance in this analysis, but all Dissonance.

Something lives, lives muscularly in me that constantly betrays me, destroys me against all my own convictions, against all my own knowledge, against all my own desire.

It may be true of Everybody.

I don’t know. I think about it but get nowhere.

It seems someway unlike God to make each person a something all of cross-purpose.

But I doubt that I am different from Everybody.

I doubt if I am anyway abnormal.

I am very sane.

A match-flame burns me the same as it burns Everybody: pins prick me and hurt.

Yet I look in myself and see, through harmonic details, the massed Dissonance.

I am dying in a pit.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|maclane|>
3 February 1917.
Black-browed Wednesdays
All my life I’ve liked the Back of a magazine.

Some black-browed Wednesday I purchase a magazine, a fifteen-cent one, and read it through. I read the stories and they deeply engage or lightly interest me. I read the ‘special articles’ and if they tell about flying machines or wild birds or hospitals or woman-prisoners in penitentiaries they charm or absorb my thoughts. I look at the illustrations and try to decide whether they are art or science or mechanism. I read the verse and if it’s poetry it exhilarates me as if closed shutters were opened to let Day into a gloomy Room.

Then I read the advertisements in the Back and they do all of those things to me in comforting life-giving oxygen-furnishing ways. Each advertisement is a short story with an eerie little ‘plot’ in it: each is a special article full of purpose: each is fruitful poetry: and in my two hands I all-but have and hold those wonderful Things they exploit.

They make me feel it’s my birthday and I’m presented a wealth of lavish gifts.

They make me feel it’s all a world of playthings.

They make me feel like a baby with a rattle, a ball and a hoop of bells.

I like everything in the Back of a magazine.

I like the Revolvers, handsome plausible short-barreled Revolvers with pictures of ordinary people in dim-lit midnight bedrooms, and ordinary expected-looking burglars climbing in windows--Revolvers of ten shots and of six, and of different calibers, and all of them gleamingly mystically desirable: I like the Soaps, smooth amorous appetizing Soaps, some in luxurious Paris packets, and others spread out in blue water and rosy foam, splashed in by athletic Archimedesque young men and fat creamy babies and slim beautiful ladies--Mary Garden Soap of pungent delicious scent, tar Soap for the long lovely hair of girls, austere Ivory Soap--It floats: I like the Rubber Heels of resilient charm so tellingly pictured and described that at once I desire them beneath my spirit-heels--springy and solid and thick and firm: I like the Tooth-pastes and Tooth-powders and Tooth-lotions in tubes and tins and bottles, each bearing beneficent messages to the human white teeth of this world--one unfailing kind coming lyrically out like a ribbon and lying flat on the brush: I like the foods--of miraculous spotless purity and enticement--Biscuits and Chocolate and Figs, and Foie-gras in thick glossy little pots, so richly pictured and sung that merely to let my thoughts graze in their pasturage fattens my Heart: I like the men’s very thin Watches, and men’s Garters--no metal can touch you--, and men’s fluffy-lathered shaving sticks, and men’s trim smart flawless tailored Suits, in none of which I have use or interest until I find them in the Back of a magazine--where at once they grow charming and romantic: I like the jars and boxes and tubes and glasses of Cold Cream, Cold Cream fit for skins of goddesses, fit for elves to feed on--a soft satiny scented snow-white elysium of wax and vaseline and almond paste, pictured in forty alluring shapes till it feels pleasantly ecstatic just to be living in the same world with bewitching vases of Cold Cream, Cold Cream, Cold Cream--always bewitching and lovely but never so notably and festively as in the Back of a magazine: and I like the Pencils: and Book-cases: and Silver: and Jewels: and Glass: and Gloves: and Shoes--beautiful Shoes: and Fountain-pens: and Leather things: and Paint--silkish salubrious Paints, house-Paints, and the panegyrics with them--they make me long to own a spirit-house and paint it liberally: and Rugs: and Varnish: and Clothes--wonderful Clothes: and Bungalows: and Phonographs--his master’s voice: and Paper--fine-wrought Paper to write on--bond and linen and hand-pressed, pale-tinted--a vast virgin treasure: and Oranges: and Cigarettes--a shilling in London a quarter here: and Water-Bottles of powdery rubber: and Stockings--patrician Stockings which take me into realms of silk-looms and delicate dyes and slim ankles: and Candle-Shades: and Candle-Sticks: and countless Cosmetics--Cosmetics of tender colors for the outer women: and Sealingwax indescribably useless and attractive: and Tennis-Racquets: and Ivory--smooth Vantine Ivory toys and trinkets polished softly bright as moonlight--and their lily-worded descriptions like restrained sonnets: and Washing Powders--let the Gold Dust twins do your work: and Shower-baths: and Evans’ Ale: and Flying Boats: and Umbrellas: and Cameras--if it isn’t an Eastman it isn’t a kodak: and boxes of Candy--sweet wilderness of chocolates--their very makers’ names have a melting gust--Allegretti, Huyler, Clarence Crane, Maillard--cloying courtiers all: and Diamond Dyes--a child can use them: and Veranda Screens--she can look out but he can’t look in: and Cedar Chests: and Chartreuse from Carthusian monasteries: and Perfumes--Perfumes in their maddening-sweet pride, Perfumes from Paris, Perfumes bottled in thick crystal, enchantingly costly--each American dollar added to their price-by-the-ounce making them fragranter to my thoughts: and boxes of benevolent Matches, and captivating Brooms, and fascinating Scouring-powders--a Dutch girl on the can chasing dirt--all three luscious tempting things in the Back of a magazine: and Automobiles--ask the man who owns one: and Rifles--simple and formidable and fine: and restful Rat-poison--they die in the open air seeking water: and sacks of Flour--eventually why not now--flour unusual and piquant in the Back of a magazine, flour novel and endearing: and Type-writers: and Mushrooms: and Monkey-Wrenches: and Rosaries: and Rock-salt--

the Back, the Back, the Back of a magazine--

There’s no sadness and no terror in the Back of a magazine.

And it is for Everybody, Everybody.

A million people read a story in the middle of the magazine and half the million readily miss its point. But a single tin of Talcum Powder in the Back--the whole million note that and miss nothing in it: it gets to them both on and under their skin.

Some of the million read a ten-line poem in vers libre in the front of the magazine--and nine-tenths of their number are hard-put to it: the mentalities of this human race being mostly shops shut down. It is something pregnant and prophetic to a poet, merely musical to a plain prose writer, arrant folly to a telephone girl, amusing nonsense to a butcher, a comic fantasy to a milliner, a form of insanity to a plumber, an unknown tongue to a milk-man, a kind of sin to a Baptist minister. But to each of those a Can of Soup in the Back of the same magazine has easily, exactly the same ox-tail-ish meanings: it reaches them where they live.

A thousand persons agree with an article about atavism in orang-outangs and ten thousand more quite refute it. But they all harmoniously commit suicide with the same make of Revolver--hammer the hammer--or get rousing drunk to the same degree with the same brand of high-powered whiskey--Wilson, that’s all.

A countess, a courtesan and a convict-woman summarily pass over the front and middle of the magazine as containing nothing to their purpose. But like jungle denizens at their drinking pool the three of them meet hostilely on the common ground of a popular Cigarette featured in the Back--a blend to suit every taste--wherewith they unwittingly smoke away half their generic differentiations. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady anoint themselves nightly into a state of shining invisible kinship from separated twin jars of the same bewitching Cold Cream.

I’m not sure myself and Miss Lily Walker of the Broadway chorus regard similarly a beauteous box of Rice Powder: she perchance would at once dash madly into it and powder herself o’er with it, whereas I would fain ponder about it awhile as a tiny be-violeted adventure. But pondering or powdering, equally exciting to each of us is its delicate pale lilac blazonment in the Back of a magazine.

The front of the magazine may mean little to you and the middle of the magazine may mean nothing to me: the Back of it none of us escapes.

It is for Everybody, Everybody.

Even Senegambians: they can look at the pictures and marvel over them.

I can there meet a Senegambian on the common ground of it might be a delicate transparent oval of Pears’ Soap, pretty as a jewel of price: perchance we would each unconsciously feel we wouldn’t be happy till we got it.

It’s only as playthings I want the Things in the Back of a magazine.

To me they are toys, lyrics of matter, food of the senses.

The octroi would have no sympathy with my loiterings among their wares. It is a fête of my own, indolent and fanciful, unrecognized in commerce. Any article I may put to its forthright use in actuality becomes an idyllic toy when I find it in the Back of a magazine. The desirable Revolvers are not firearms with which to shoot myself and burglars, but only bijous to have and handle and caress. The luxuriant vervain- and violet-scented Soaps are not for my toilet, but something to eat, for my astral body to feed on--nourishing food they make. The lush Cold Creams have no massaging possibilities in them--they are for my thoughts to gambol among, for my meddlesome spirit-fingers to touch and fuss with deliciously, blissfully, transcending all vulgar use. The men’s thin Watches mean nothing to me as Watches: and their Garters--what’s it to me whether no-metal-can-touch-you or no-metal-at-all? My thoughts merely revel and juggle with them, picture and legend--they are pastimes of my child-self. The cream-woven Note Papers are not to write on but wherewithal to imagine how cool and smooth they would feel drawn slowly across my flushed cheek. A sack of Flour--I feel only how I’d like to have it spilled out--eventually-why-not-now--in a thick warm-tinted heap on the blue-velvety floor of my room that I might roll and bathe in it and feel it feathery-fluffy on my skin.

So I play with my toys on black-browed Wednesdays.

Some Wednesdays even fail to be black-browed because there are Backs to magazines.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|maclane|>
9 February 1917.
The conscious analyst
I don’t know whether I write this because I wear two plain dresses or whether I wear two plain dresses because I write it.

My life fell into a lowering mood which calls for but two dresses: which mood compels me to write out these things that are in me as inevitably as heavy gathered clouds come raining to the ground. The mood having overtaken me I can not keep from writing this day after day, more than I can keep from brushing my hair every day, and eating lumps of food every day, and picking up tiny white specks from my blue rug.

I love this book and I fear and hate it. I love the writing of it though it is a finical unobvious task--more so than it looks. And often I fear to read it over lest I hurt my own feelings. And I hate it in ways. I am a particularly sane woman when all’s said. And many things I come to in me are grating and inexplicable and incongruous.

But also I love it. It is my companion ‘when the world is gone.’ I am as solitary as if I had no human place in this earth. My days are as silent as if I lived in it alone. The few voices that bespeak me in a day or a week stop at my ear-drums and are immensely alien. At times, for weeks on end, I am quite alone in this house and the silence then has a depth and a hollowness. From it I feel not alone in a house but alone in a world: and more when the family is in the house.

And it is what-should-I-do if I had not a writing talent to expend me upon from day to day, and so rest me. I feel God around some corner but that feeling is no rest, but only an odd terror which wants the dignity of terror.

Times I wonder if I shall have this published afterward for all to read and if so what colors it will paint on my world--and what else may befall.

But it’s an aspect dim and remote now. I wearing but two nunlike dresses and face to face with me, have nothing to do with publishing books and with the beautiful noisy world and its befallings. It is easy to believe I shall never again have to do with any of that. This may be my death-mood. I am very tired. The weight of being a person is heavy on me as weights of lead. And still I know if I suddenly bloomed with beautiful frocks and went out to-morrow to lose myself among people, people, people I should at once achieve a veneer of the utmost frivol. I have an odd frivolous quality full of an ardor and strength, with all of my mental mettle in it. Also I know if I did that now it would be but postponing this analytic reckoning. Which would confront me again with the more rancor, the more futileness gathered into it from having been put off.

This book and the two dresses are my present portion. If I could escape them (I am not quite sure I want to--but--hell!)--it would be of no use. They would come back again in an unexpected ripeness of time and demand a hearing: an exquisite nervous tragic hearing.

They are such stuff as the conscious analyst is made of.

But though I’m the conscious analyst I can’t quite tell whether I write the book because I wear two plain black dresses or I wear those because I write it.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|mansfield|>
1 July 1915.
Later

I went into J.'s room just now to put a book there
— and turned down the pink bed cover to see if he had
enough blankets. As I did so I thought of J. as a boy
of about 17. I had a sort of prophetic vision of doing
just the same thing for my son ... in years to come. The moment had no emotional value at all — especially as it was all drowned in the smell of roast mutton. There goes the gong : it sounds like a timid fire alarm. But I wait until the first course is done. I wait until the chimpanzees have lapped up their little pool before I start a-nut-cracking wiv 'em.

Later
The table was laid for two. I dined opposite a white serviette — shaped like a hand with spread fingers. Now I have dressed and am waiting for the motor. I rubbed some genet fleuri on my collar just now: I look different — as though I were meant to be played on and not just to lie in a corner, with the bow in that slot opposite which fastens with two buttons. No! Now the bow is hanging from the peg — at least.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
27 April 1669.
Up, and to the Office, where all the morning. At noon home to dinner, and then to the Office again, where the afternoon busy till late, and then home, and got my wife to read to me in the Nepotisme,

which is very pleasant, and so to supper and to bed. This afternoon was brought to me a fresh Distringas upon the score of the Tangier accounts which vexes me, though I hope it will not turn to my wrong.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
[Prompt: What happened today?]
24 May 1668.
(Lord’s day). I up, at between two and three in the morning, and, calling up my boy, and father’s boy, we set out by three o’clock, it being high day; end so through the water with very good success, though very deep almost all the way, and got to Brampton, where most of them in bed, and so I weary up to my wife’s chamber, whom I find in bed, and pretended a little not well, and indeed she hath those upon her, but fell to talk and mightily pleased both of us, and upgot the rest, Betty Turner and Willet and Jane, all whom I was glad to see, and very merry, and got me ready in my new stuff clothes that I send down before me, and so my wife and they got ready too, while I to my father, poor man, and walked with him up and down the house--it raining a little, and the waters all over Portholme and the meadows, so as no pleasure abroad. Here I saw my brothers and sister Jackson, she growing fat, and, since being married, I think looks comelier than before: but a mighty pert woman she is, and I think proud, he keeping her mighty handsome, and they say mighty fond, and are going shortly to live at Ellington of themselves, and will keep malting, and grazing of cattle. At noon comes Mr. Phillips and dines with us, and a pretty odd-humoured man he seems to be; but good withal, but of mighty great methods in his eating and drinking, and will not kiss a woman since his wife’s death. After dinner my Lady Sandwich sending to see whether I was come, I presently took horse, and find her and her family at chapel; and thither I went in to them, and sat out the sermon, where I heard Jervas Fullwood, now their chaplain, preach a very good and seraphic kind of sermon, too good for an ordinary congregation. After sermon, I with my Lady, and my Lady Hinchingbroke, and Paulina, and Lord Hinchingbroke, to the dining-room, saluting none of them, and there sat and talked an hour or two, with great pleasure and satisfaction, to my Lady, about my Lord’s matters; but I think not with that satisfaction to her, or me, that otherwise would, she knowing that she did design tomorrow, and I remaining all the while in fear, of being asked to lend her some money, as I was afterward, when I had taken leave of her, by Mr. Shepley, L100, which I will not deny my Lady, and am willing to be found when my Lord comes home to have done something of that kind for them, and so he riding to Brampton and supping there with me he did desire it of me from my Lady, and I promised it, though much against my will, for I fear it is as good as lost. After supper, where very merry, we to bed, myself very weary and to sleep all night.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
10 October 1663.
Up, and not in any good ease yet, but had pain in making water, and some course. I see I must take besides keeping myself warm to make myself break wind and go freely to stool before I can be well, neither of which I can do yet, though I have drank the other bottle of Mr. Hollyard’s against my stomach this morning. I did, however, make shift to go to the office, where we sat, and there Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Batten did advise me to take some juniper water, and Sir W. Batten sent to his Lady for some for me, strong water made of juniper. Whether that or anything else of my draught this morning did it I cannot tell, but I had a couple of stools forced after it.... but whether I shall grow better upon it I cannot tell. Dined at home at noon, my wife and house in the dirtiest pickle that ever she and it was in almost, but in order, I hope, this night to be very clean. To the office all the afternoon upon victualling business, and late at it, so after I wrote by the post to my father, I home. This evening Mr. Hollyard sends me an electuary to take (a walnut quantity of it) going to bed, which I did. ‘Tis true I slept well, and rose in a little ease in the morning.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|pepys|>
22 October 1663.
Up to the office, where we sat till noon and then I home to dinner, and after dinner with my wife to her study and there read some more arithmetique, which she takes with great ease and pleasure. This morning, hearing that the Queen grows worse again, I sent to stop the making of my velvet cloake, till I see whether she lives or dies. So a little abroad about several businesses, and then home and to my office till night, and then home to supper, teach my wife, and so to bed.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
28 April 1883.
Degas’ painting is manly and impersonal simply because, for his part, he was content to be a simple _bourgeois_ who did not wish to have anything to do with the enjoyment of life. All around him he saw human animals ... living and enjoying themselves, and he painted them well, because, unlike Rubens, he made no pretensions of being a good cavalier or a society man....

Yes, yes, Balzac, that great and powerful artist, said quite rightly that the modern artist is strengthened by being, relatively speaking, chaste. The Dutchmen were married and begat themselves children. That is a fine, in fact a very fine way of filling a life, and quite a natural way too!... One swallow does not make a summer. There may be a good deal of virility in your new Brittany studies; but I am unable to judge as I have not yet seen them. However, I have already seen virile works of yours--the portrait of your grandmother and the still-life. To judge from the drawings I have a slight suspicion that your new Brittany studies do not possess the same power, regarded precisely from the standpoint of virility.

The studies which I mentioned first constitute the spring of your artistic life. If we wish to keep all our strength for our life-work, we must only have very little to do with women and according as our temperament demands, live either like soldiers or monks. For the Dutchmen led a peaceful, quiet and well-ordered life. Delacroix--ah! he was a fine fellow--he used to say: “I discovered the art of painting when I no longer had any more teeth or breath.” And those who had seen him painting said: “When Delacroix paints, he looks like a lion devouring a piece of flesh.” He had very little to do with women, and indulged only in loose love affairs{H} so as not to waste any of the time consecrated to his life’s task. To judge from the opinions expressed in this letter, it would appear to be less in keeping than I should like it to be with our correspondence and friendship of former years; but if from its contents you gather that I am rather anxious about your health, you are right. I know that the study of the Dutchmen must be beneficial; for their works are so full of virility, power and health.

A short time ago I discovered a small etching by Rembrandt and I bought it. It was of a nude figure of a man, realistic and simple. He stands leaning against a door or a pillar, in a dark room, and a ray of sunshine from above strikes the bowed head and its abundant red locks. The body is conceived with so much truth, and is so vigorous,{I} that it almost reminds me of Degas.

I say, have you carefully studied “The Ox,” or “The Inside of a Butcher’s Shop” at the Louvre? I doubt it. I should really greatly enjoy spending a morning with you in the Dutch Galleries. These things are hard to describe; but in front of the actual pictures I could call your attention to such splendid and wonderful things, that beside them the very Primitives themselves take a second place in my admiration. But then I have such a very slight strain of eccentricity in my composition!

A Greek statue, a peasant by Millet, a Dutch portrait, a naked woman by Courbet or Degas; it is beside the serene and elaborate perfection of these things that the works of the Primitives and the Japanese seem only like written characters as compared with painting. It really interests me immensely, but a complete work of art, a piece of perfection enables us to conceive infinity; and to enjoy beauty to the full{J} gives one a feeling of eternity.... Do you know a painter called Jan van der Meer? He painted a very distinguished and beautiful Dutch woman, in pregnancy. The scale of colours of this strange artist consists of blue, lemon-yellow, pearl-grey, black and white. It is true, in the few pictures he painted the whole range of the palette is to be found; but it is just as characteristic of him to place lemon-yellow, a dull blue, and light grey together, as it is of Velasquez to harmonize black, white, grey and pink. Of course the Dutch painters are too widely distributed over the Museums and collections of the world for us to be able to form any adequate idea of their work, and this is still more difficult when one knows only the Louvre. And yet it is precisely the Frenchmen, Ch. Blanc, Thoré and Fromentin, who have written the best things about them.

The Dutchmen had no imagination, but they had tremendous taste and an unerring sense of composition; they painted no pictures of the Saviour or of the Saints.... Rembrandt did! That is true; but he is the only one, and even with him pictures containing a genuine Biblical feeling are comparatively rare occurrences;{K} he was the only one to paint pictures of Christ, etc. But his pictures resemble no other kind of religious painting; in his case it is a sort of metaphysical sorcery.

This is how he painted angels: He made a portrait of himself, toothless and with a cotton cap on his head.

The first picture he painted from nature, by means of a looking glass. He dreamt and dreamt, and his hand painted his portrait once again, but from imagination, and the impression became more harrowed and more harrowing.

Second picture. He continued to dream and dream and, how it happened I do not know, but just as Socrates and Muhammed had their guardian spirits, behind the hoary patriarch who is not unlike himself, Rembrandt painted an angel with the enigmatical smile of a head by Leonardo....[25]{L} But now I am calling your attention to an artist who dreams and works from his imagination, after having declared that the characteristic feature of the Dutch painters is that they have no inventive genius and no imagination. Am I therefore illogical? No! Rembrandt invented nothing; he knew and felt this angel and these peculiar saints perfectly well.

Delacroix painted a crucified Christ for us, by setting, quite unexpectedly, a light lemon-yellow tone on the canvas. This vivid note of colour lent the picture that indescribable and mysterious charm as of a solitary star in a dark evening sky. Rembrandt works with values in the same way as Delacroix does with colours. A long distance, however, separates Delacroix’ and Rembrandt’s methods from those of all the rest of religious painting.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
20 January 1901.
I have said that I am alone.

I am not quite, quite alone.

I have one friend--of that Friendship that is real and is inlaid with the beautiful thing Truth. And because it has the beautiful thing Truth in it, this my one Friendship is somehow above and beyond me; there is something in it that I reach after in vain--for I have not that divinely beautiful thing Truth. Have I not said that I am a thief and a liar? But in this Friendship nevertheless there is a rare, ineffably sweet something that is mine. It is the one tender thing in this dull dreariness that wraps me round.

Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?

My one friend is a woman some twelve or thirteen years older than I. She is as different from me as is day from night. She believes in God--that God that is shown in the Bible of the Christians. And she carries with her an atmosphere of gentleness and truth. The while I am ready and waiting to dedicate my life to the Devil in exchange for Happiness--or some lesser thing. But I love Fannie Corbin with a peculiar and vivid intensity, and with all the sincerity and passion that is in me. Often I think of her, as I walk over the sand in my Nothingness, all day long. The Friendship of her and me is a fair, dear benediction upon me, but there is something in it--deep within it--that eludes me. In moments when I realize this, when I strain and reach vainly at a thing beyond me, when indeed I see in my mind a vision of the personality of Fannie Corbin, it is then that it comes on me with force that I am not good.

But I can love her with all the ardor of a young and passionate heart.

Yes, I can do that.

For a year I have loved my one friend. During the eighteen years of my life before she came into it I loved no one, for there was no one.

It is an extremely hard thing to go through eighteen years with no one to love, and no one to love you--the first eighteen years.

But now I have my one friend to love and to worship.

I have named my friend the “anemone lady,” a name beautifully appropriate.

The anemone lady used to teach me literature in the Butte High School. She used to read poetry in the class-room in a clear, sweet voice that made one wish one might sit there forever and listen to it.

But now I have left the high school, and the dear anemone lady has gone from Butte. Before she went she told me she would be my friend.

Think of it--to live and have a friend!

My friend does not fully understand me; she thinks much too well of me. She has not a correct idea of my soul’s depths and shallows. But if she did know them she would still be my friend. She knows the heavy weight of my unrest and unhappiness. She is tenderly sympathetic. She is the one in all the world who is dear to me.

Often I think, if only I could have my anemone lady and go and live with her in some little out-of-the-world place high up on the side of a mountain for the rest of my life--what more would I desire? My friendship would constitute my life. The unrest, the dreariness, the Nothingness of my existence now is so dull and gray by contrast that there would be Happiness for me in that life, Happiness softly radiant, if quiet--redolent of the fresh, thin fragrance of the dear blue anemone that grows in the winds and rains of spring.

But Miss Corbin would doubtless look somewhat askance at the idea of spending the rest of her life with me on a mountain. She is very fond of me, but her feeling for me is not like mine for her, which indeed is natural. And her life is made up mostly of sacrifices--doing for her fellow-creatures, giving of herself. She never would leave this.

And so, then, the mountainside and the solitude and the friend with me are, like every good thing, but a vision.

“Thy friend is always thy friend; not to have, nor to hold, nor to love, nor to rejoice in: but to remember.”

And so do I remember my one friend, the anemone lady--and think often about her with passionate love.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
22 December 1662.
Six or seven o’clock and so up, and by the fireside read a good part of “The Advice to a Daughter,” which a simple coxcomb has wrote against Osborne, but in all my life I never did nor can expect to see so much nonsense in print Thence to my Lord’s, who is getting himself ready for his journey to Hinchingbroke. And by and by, after eating something, and talking with me about many things, and telling me his mind, upon my asking about Sarah (who, it seems, only married of late, but is also said to be turned a great drunkard, which I am ashamed of), that he likes her service well, and do not love a strange face, but will not endure the fault, but hath bade me speak to her and advise her if she hath a mind to stay with him, which I will do. My Lord and his people being gone, I walked to Mr. Coventry’s chamber, where I found him gone out into the Park with the Duke, so the boy being there ready with my things, I shifted myself into a riding-habitt, and followed him through White Hall, and in the Park Mr. Coventry’s people having a horse ready for me (so fine a one that I was almost afeard to get upon him, but I did, and found myself more feared than hurt) and I got up and followed the Duke, who, with some of his people (among others Mr. Coventry) was riding out. And with them to Hide Park. Where Mr. Coventry asking leave of the Duke, he bid us go to Woolwich. So he and I to the waterside, and our horses coming by the ferry, we by oars over to Lambeth, and from thence, with brave discourse by the way, rode to Woolwich, where we eat and drank at Mr. Peat’s, and discoursed of many businesses, and put in practice my new way of the Call-book, which will be of great use. Here, having staid a good while, we got up again and brought night home with us and foul weather. So over to Whitehall to his chamber, whither my boy came, who had staid in St. James’s Park by my mistake all day, looking for me. Thence took my things that I put off to-day, and by coach, being very wet and cold, on my feet home, and presently shifted myself, and so had the barber come; and my wife and I to read “Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” which I brought her home from Paul’s Churchyard to-night, having called for it by the way, and so to bed,
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
28 March 1914.
Put my clothes in order. The crocuses in Battersea reminded me of autumn in Bavaria. The ground is wet, and it looks as though winter were going— the grass long and green among the trampled flowers. Birds are far more savage-looking than the wildest beasts. Thinking of a forest of wild birds — or if the birds ' turned ' even here. I want to get alone. The magnolia conspicua is in bud.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
10 March 1901.
My genius is an element by itself, and it is not a thing that I can tell in so many words. But it makes itself felt in every point of my life. This book would be a very different thing if I were not a genius--though I am not a literary genius. Often people who come in contact with me and hear me utter a few commonplace remarks feel at once that I am extraordinary.

I am extraordinary.

I have tried longingly, passionately, to think that even this sand and barrenness is mine. But I can not. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it, like all good things, is beyond me. It has something that I also have. In that is our bond of sympathy.

But the sand and barrenness itself is not mine.

Always I think there is but one picture in the world more perfect in its art than the picture of me in my sand and barrenness. It is the picture of the Christ crucified with two thieves. Nothing could be more divinely appropriate. The art in it is ravishingly perfect. It is one of the few perfect pictures set before the world for all time. As I see it before my mind I can think only of its utter perfectness. I can summon no feeling of grief at the deed. The deed and the art are perfect. Its perfectness ravishes my senses.

And within me I feel that the picture of me in my sand and barrenness--knowing that even the sand and barrenness is not mine--is only second to it.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
26 June 1665.
Up and to White Hall with Sir J. Minnes, and to the Committee of Tangier, where my Lord Treasurer was, the first and only time he ever was there, and did promise us L15,000 for Tangier and no more, which will be short. But if I can pay Mr. Andrews all his money I care for no more, and the bills of Exchange. Thence with Mr. Povy and Creed below to a new chamber of Mr. Povy’s, very pretty, and there discourse about his business, not to his content, but with the most advantage I could to him, and Creed also did the like. Thence with Creed to the King’s Head, and there dined with him at the ordinary, and good sport with one Mr. Nicholls, a prating coxcombe, that would be thought a poet, but would not be got to repeat any of his verses. Thence I home, and there find my wife’s brother and his wife, a pretty little modest woman, where they dined with my wife. He did come to desire my assistance for a living, and, upon his good promises of care, and that it should be no burden to me, I did say and promise I would think of finding something for him, and the rather because his wife seems a pretty discreet young thing, and humble, and he, above all things, desirous to do something to maintain her, telling me sad stories of what she endured with him in Holland, and I hope it will not be burdensome. So down by water to Woolwich, walking to and again from Greenwich thither and back again, my business being to speak again with Sheldon, who desires and expects my wife coming thither to spend the summer, and upon second thoughts I do agree that it will be a good place for her and me too. So, weary, home, and to my office a while, till almost midnight, and so to bed. The plague encreases mightily, I this day seeing a house, at a bitt-maker’s over against St. Clement’s Church, in the open street, shut up; which is a sad sight.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
23 January 1917.
My neat blue chair
I suppose there’s nothing quite peculiar to even my inmost self in what I ponder and what I experience and what I feel.

My only elemental ‘differentness’ is that I find it and write it.

But I used to think at eighteen--those thrice-fired adolescent moments--that only I suffered, only I reached achingly out into the mists, only I tasted new-bloomed life-petals intolerably sweet and bitter on my lips.

The egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable. Youth plays on itself as one plays on a little dulcimer, with music as sweet, but with a crude cruel recklessness which jerks and breaks the strings.

I have got by that stage of egotism. But I’ve entered on another wilder, more lawless--farther-seeing if less be-visioned.

While I sit here this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this Butte-Montana for what I know a legion-women of my psychic breed may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat any-colored chairs--in Wichita-Kansas and South Bend-Indiana and Red Wing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-New York and Waco-Texas and La Crosse-Wisconsin and Bowling Green-Kentucky: each feeling Herself set in a wrong niche, caught in a tangle of little vapidish cross-purpose: each waiting, waiting always--waiting all her life--not hopeful and passionate like Eighteen but patient or blasphemous or scornful or volcanic like Early-Thirty: the waiting-sense giving to each a personal quality big and suggestive and nurturing--and with it a long-accustomed feeling like a thin bright blade stuck deep in her breast: each more or less roundly hating Waco-Texas and Portland-Maine and Red Wing-Minnesota and the other places: and each beset by hot unquiet humannesses inside her and an old yearn of sex and the blood warring with myriad minute tenets dating from civilization’s dawn-times.

But though I am of that psychic breed no little tenets war in me.

It’s as if a prelate and a wood-nymph had fathered and mothered me: making me of a ridiculous poignant conscience and of no human traditions.

I am free of innate conventionalities, free as a wildcat on a twilight hill. I am free of them as I sit here, quiet-looking in my plain black dress. The virile Scotch-Canadian curl is brushed and brushed out of my hair to make it lie smooth and discreet over my ears and forehead. My feet are shod daintily like a charming girl’s. My nails are pinkly polishedly pointed. My narrow black eyebrows look nearly patrician in their sereneness. My lips are stilly sad. My eyelids droop like the sucking dove’s. But my gray eyes beneath the lids--when I raise them to the glass, my own Essence looks out of them, tiredly vivid. It seems made of languor and barbaricness and despair: and vague guiltiness, and some pure disastrous heathen religion, and lust: and lurid consciousness of everyday things and smouldering melancholy and blazing loving hatred of life.

My gray eyes out-look the wildcat’s on a twilight hill.

But--so far as the Sitting goes--I sit here in my Neat Blue Chair the same as they all sit in any-colored chairs in their Wichitas and La Crosses.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
18 February 1917.
Slyly garbling and cross-purposing
At rarish intervals comes my Soul to visit me.

My Soul is light sheer Being.

My Soul is like a young most beautiful girl marked and worn by long cycles of time but not anyway aged. She comes dressed in something like gray-white de-soie muslin or fine-grained crêpe silk, a loose-belted frock reaching to her ankles.

My Soul is unmoved by the world and the flesh and their feeling, as befits a Soul. She looks on me with a chill faëry-ish contempt, as also befits a Soul. The quality of her contempt is of weary understanding and is like a caress.

In the dusk of yesterday came my Soul to visit me--a dusk of a deep beauty. The last glow of the sun lay along the earth, and all was gentian blue.

I leaned against my window-pane watching it, and beside me sat her Presence. Her Presence makes me feel wonderfully gifted: it is mine, this Soul all Golden-Silk and Silken-Gold!

We talk on many topics, of many things: I in worldly nervous ignorance and with a wishfulness to reach and compass and know: the Soul with poise and surety of attitude, a wearied patience and the chill sweet contempt.

She answers me from her cool old tranquil viewpoint, which is near me yet remote.

We talked last of some bygone persons I have been, some shapes she wore.

Said the Soul: ‘Early in the sixteenth century you were a ragged Russian peasant girl living in ignorance and filth in a hut by a swamp-edge. You had parents both of whom beat your body black-and-blue from your babyhood. And at eighteen you were a coarsened hardy wench tending a drove of pigs and goats on the sunny steppe. I was there with you as presently as now--as sentient, as perceptive. But it is a question whether you or the little beasts you drove were the more beastly stupid. You and they were equal in outer quality, equal in uncleanliness, equally covered with vermin.’

I have no ghost-memory of that time, but as the Soul told of it a nascent feeling came on me, as if some part of my Mind felt its way back to that. I warmed to the thought of the Peasant Girl. I was quiescent to her filth and ignorance.

Said I: ‘Was she brave and fairly honest?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were a ready liar--you lied your way out of many a beating. But you were brave enough. You faced the roughnesses of your life uncringing, and you died game.’

Said I: ‘How did I die?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were run neatly through the body by the short sword of a soldier whose lust-desire you had had the hardihood to refuse--and I fled away upon the instant.’

Said I: ‘I half-knew it--she died a violent death. You--were you glad to be quit of her filthy flesh, her surroundings, her ignorance?’

Said the Soul: ‘Glad? Such things mean nothing to me. Your body, be it sweet or foul, has no bearing on my long journey. Motives--motif--back of your human acts make me glad or sorry at leaving you.’

Said I: ‘Tell me about a time when I seemed someway fine, humanly fine.’

Said the Soul: ‘In London, near the end of the seventeenth century, before and during the period of the Gordon Riots, you lived in a way of peace. From when you were fourteen until you were twenty-nine you lived alone with your little lame half-sister whom you cared for very devotedly, very tenderly.’

My little half-sister-- Until the Soul spoke of her there was no vision, no image like her. Then something of me remembered.

Said I: ‘What was she like? Who were our parents?’

Said the Soul: ‘Your mother died at your birth, hers at her birth. Your father was hanged at Tyburn for forgery. The sister was pale, large-eyed, long-haired, crippled from a dislocated shoulder and hip. When you were twenty-five she was eleven, a beautiful frail child. You lived in two rooms above a linen-draper’s and you supported the two of you by weaving and calendering cloths for the shop-keeper, and by illuminating missals and manuscripts when you could get that work. For a very poor wage, but living was cheap. All the time you took zealous care of your sister. Your heart was bound up in her--you adored her.’

Said I: ‘I know that. Tell me what we did--how we lived--how we loved each other.’

Said the Soul: ‘In the summer evenings you often walked out along quiet London streets--the sister sometimes with a crutch and your arm about her, sometimes in a rolling chair, whilst you walked beside her pushing it. Your father had educated you in an erratic fashion. You had a deal of desultory knowledge--what is called knowledge--and you educated the young sister in the same manner. Often it was of the poets--Latin, English, Italian, and of histories and sciences and arts--what odd comprehensive bits you knew--that you two talked as you sauntered in the bright late English sunlight. Or you talked of the little details of your joint life. Sometimes you sat together--you holding her close in your arms--by a window in your darkening front room, and watched the children at play in the common opposite, and conversed and were quietly happy. You were maternal and the child was a mature old-fashioned yet childish innocent child.’

My little sister--sweet--long gone-- Would that I had her now!

Said I: ‘Tell me what we said.’

Said the Soul: ‘You said to her, “Our poverty and even our deprivations, dearest, which for your sake I feel deeply would not matter, not the least, to me if I could see you well and strong.” And the child replied, “Sweet, just to rest like this in your arms each twilight makes me rich, rich--as rich as the smartest ladies in Piccadilly.” And you said, “Rich reminds me, Darling, we shall have four extra shillings--four bright silver shillings--at the end of this week from the book-seller. So what shall we purchase for a treat? There’ll be, if you like, prawns and crumpets for tea, for days to come--or if my Child prefers oranges or pineapples once--” And the child replied with her cheeks quite pink at the thought, “O Sister-love, let us have the pines, just one day, and let us make-believe to be ladies that day, and comport ourselves like ladies, and take our tea--all like ladies.” And you pressed her close to your breast--you both wore caps and kerchiefs and stuff-gowns in the fashion of the lower-middle artisan class--and showered gentle kisses on her cheeks and eyelids, and promised her the pineapples and the tea like ladies.’

I listened to this with vivid still pleasure. It felt like endearing fulfilling life--a day of tenderness--. And oddly familiar.

Said I: ‘What were we in the habit of having for our tea--that prawns and crumpets would make us a treat?’

Said the Soul: ‘Your tea was chiefly bran-bread and cress or perhaps lettuce, with a stone mug of milk for the child when you could afford it. The London of that day had no luxuries for the poor. And having had none you missed none. But the populace lived in starveling misery. The rabble rose and rallied to the Gordon as it would have to anyone who urged it to rioting. You were Protestants but you regarded him as a weakling visionary. You watched the rioting in the streets with little fear, but the linen-draper and all other shop-keepers kept barred doors. You two were venturesome and were yourselves of the masses, and when the mob stormed Newgate prison you both stood watching with many other householders on the outskirts of the crowd, in terror but secretly half in sympathy. You were safe enough from the rioters who were intent on wrecking the gaol and freeing the inmates. It was characteristic of you as you were then to be out looking on at a murderous night scene with interest, carefully protecting the child from contact with the throngs.’

Said I: ‘How long did that life last?’

Said the Soul: ‘Four years after that your sister changed from her bare little bed to a coffin and you went on alone achingly suffering her loss for long years. You lived to be seventy, a thin old woman, working latterly as one of the night nurses in a public hospital. You lived an abstemious outwardly self-sacrificing life and died alone, from hardened arteries, one autumn night.’

Said I: ‘And was there an informing beauty for you, for you and for me, in my life then?’

Coldly said the Soul: ‘You were self-centered, for all your self-sacrifice. You reckoned it your duty to care for your sister. It was also your irresistible delight. And after her death you took self-satisfaction in self-sacrifice: smug--smug. For me there was a laming distortion in it all.’

Said I: ‘Tell me some other life.’

Said the Soul: ‘You were once a little thief in the streets of a later London. You picked pockets, you stole bits of food in Covent Garden market, you pilfered shop-tills, you systematically worked the wealthy throngs as they came from the Opera at midnight. You were known to the police as the cleverest child-thief in London.’

It warmed my vanity to think of myself as clever in so theatric a rôle as thief.

Said I: ‘How did that life like you?’

Said the Soul, with a shrug of her delicate shoulders: ‘I had little to do with it and that in a negative way. My part in you was to keep up your heart in hungry hunted days. You were neither a good thing nor a bad thing: perishingly passive. And you were dead in a potter’s field before your sixteenth birthday.’

Said I: ‘How did the little Thief look?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were sufficiently ugly--an undersized form, a gamin face, bastard features.’

Said I: ‘And I daresay ignorant?’

Said the Soul: ‘Ignorant of everything rated useful, but wise to the under-sides of human nature and in the sordid viciousness of London slums. And singularly shrewd--what is called philosophical.’

Said I: ‘Pray tell me another life.’

Said the Soul: ‘An earlier time--Paris, some century before the Terror saw you a slim fille-du-pavè, a prostitute of a low cheap type, but with more brain, more of what is termed character than you have ever possessed. You had wit, will, esprit, determination. From having been at seventeen most obscenely of the streets you were at thirty a wonderfully grand courtesan: no better in what are called morals but possessed of very much inner and outer strength and luster. You were chère-aimèe to men of brain, men of importance to the state, whose acts were shaded by your influence. And you achieved unusual wealth chiefly by the powers and strategies of your character. You lived in the extreme of luxury of that time and of your type--a delicate luxury, almost high-bred. You were wanton in amour, being physically extremely passionate, but admirably straightforward and strong in each matter and aspect of your life.’

Said I: ‘You admired her?’

Said the Soul: ‘I was serene and vividly alive within you. You were in all ways, simply and completely, an honest woman, and for the only time.’

Said I: ‘How could she be honest, since she lived by exchanging treasure of much personal economic value for cheap cheapest gold, trash, and a besmirched name: and all through two sorts of greed?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were honest since you made no pretense of any kind to yourself. You took no gold that you did not logically, humanly or shamefully earn. You were consciously and unconsciously above all subterfuge. You wrought no ruin nor error nor darkness upon your own spirit or any other. You deceived neither yourself nor anyone about you. The tone of your life was of sun-shining simplicity and cleanness. There was no greed in you. You saw your way of life before you and lived it without degradation, with a positiveness of strength.’

It is as if my Soul’s view and mine were infinitely separate from being narrowly paralleled. The portrait was mystically familiar: but not by her light.

Said I: ‘Was she beautiful to look at?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were beautiful in a pallid saintlike French manner--an uncertain type of beauty which fatigue or depression turns to plainness. You had but little light charm of prettiness. But you had what counts for more than beauty: the nerve and verve of attractiveness, the force and fascination of physical being, the fragrance, the flair of the deeply-sexed woman. In one phase you were constantly preying and preyed upon, but with high valors of attack and endurance.’

Said I: ‘Did she live in peace--had she no times of suffering?’

Said the Soul: ‘You had hours of violent bitter suffering. Paris has always accepted without countenancing the properous cocotte. And often you were infamously insulted at street-crossings by soldiers and sergeants-de-ville as you drove out in your small bright-colored carriage. And you were hailed with opprobrious appropriate names by the ragged populace as they picked up silver pieces which you threw among them. Such things were stinging brands and lashes to you. But you bore yourself with entire courage. You gave much money to churches and charities but looked on such acts in yourself rightly as some slight weakness which would, however, be of benefit to the starving poor. I can not describe--so you could grasp it--the peace, the expansion, the freedom for me in that life and in that attitude.’

The exact outlook of the Soul throws over me a veil of wistfulness, bewilderness, freedness, lostness which hides the material moorings of my life and casts me adrift on broad clouded seas.

Said I: ‘What was the end of that--how did she die?’

Said the Soul: ‘You died exquisitely, of syphilitic disorders. You were something past forty, badly broken--your looks were gone, your friends were gone, your money was not gone but it was of little use to you. But you smiled serenely and lived up personally and mentally to your smile. A surgeon and a fat mustached old woman saw you die in the beginning of that bodily rot--the just portion of the passionate whore--one sweet Spring dawn, with birds twittering in green branches outside your window and a great gold sun slowly breaking the mist. Then for once I left you with reluctance. I clung to you. The kiss of me was last on your fainting brain and your fast-cooling heart. For I was leaving, in an agony of my own, an honest person. And I knew not what might be my next petty prison.’

Said I: ‘What was my next life?’

Said the Soul: ‘It was not so petty as were some others. You were next--about seventeen-fifty--a quaint extremely common little person. You were apprenticed as a child to a milliner in Liverpool, England. You grew out of that and became a dancer in a dingy theatre--a cheap bedraggled life. You were a cheap and bedraggled young woman. You wore odd gay tawdry frocks, hideous little shoes, ragged raveled silk hose, surprising bright bonnets. Your mind was a shallow pool filled with tales from shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls in which you believed implicitly. You were mentally degenerate, organically a fool, a wonderful snob. You wanted only wealth and place bitterly to deride and browbeat the low class to which you belonged--not from lack of heart but because you believed it to be the proper aristocratic manner. And what you wanted in mind you made up in temper. You quarreled, you came to blows, with your fellow-dancers in any of a half-score of small selfish daily disputes. Cleverness among you consisted in gaining any possible advantage over the others and in calling each other names. Also in maneuvering bits of money--as much as might be--from unpleasing men who hung about the dingy play-house. On holidays you were invariably half-drunk.’

Said I: ‘And wherein was she not petty?’

Said the Soul: ‘You believed in yourself. You had not a doubt you belonged in worldly high places but were kept down by the malice and depravity of human nature, people about you. And you lived up to your vulgar ideal of ambition. There was a simplicity, an enlightening pathos in you then which was lacking in the linen-draper’s lodger.’

In my flawed way I saw that, but objected to the bygone Liverpool lady from many an angle.

Said I: ‘Had I no life of a sweetness and gentleness and with it something that buoyed and bore you on?’

Said the Soul: ‘Never once. You were many centuries ago a Greek girl of the aristocratic class, bred in an intellectual life. You read the philosophers in the cool retreats of an olive grove. The mental knowledge you have now compared to your learning then is a tangle of ignorance. But the Greek girl had no heart, no human flame, no active blood of personality. Those wanting I starved. The Liverpool dancer in her warming virile vulgarness bore me vastly farther on my way. You were a Greek woman in a still earlier time--of a type which murders all simplicity. Your body and mind were haunted by perfervid imagination and both ached with the weight of it. You were made of twisted fires. I grew in that day: grew burdenedly: grew distortedly.’

Always those Greek visions are my ‘half-familiar ghosts.’--

Said I: ‘Was I sometime a married woman?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were--in four separate ages. Which brought you and me singular solitude.’

Said I: ‘Was I always woman?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were once a young lad of fierce temper and were at twenty a madman. And died mad. No male body and brain could withstand and outface merely the emotional besiegings of you.’

Said I: ‘When I went mad, what of you?’

Said the Soul: ‘I fell asleep, and knew no rest, but dreamed.’

Said I: ‘Of what?’

Said the Soul: ‘Things I always dreamed in your mad lapses--poetry served very conscious and very hot: the material Color of the Sunshine: the musical Softness of the Dawns: the pulsing Thoughts in Girls’ Throats: the Scent of Water-Falls.’

The Soul has an airless voice which tells her meanings, beside her words and in their rhythm.

Said I: ‘What do you, and how do you, with me now?’

Said the Soul: ‘I grow tired with you. Exasperated. Desperate. As if I too wore flesh. You are a deathly prison, a torture chamber. I turn everywhere and nowhere at all. You tire me--you wear me. I wait. I stay. Yet I move.’

She looked lovely, my Soul--and quite in and of this bitter-ish lovely world in its bloody bitter wrappings of bone and flesh. Around her neck was the Necklace she wore in all the ages, showing greenish in a dusk of gentian blue.--

All of it slyly garbles and cross-purposes me a little bit more than usual.

I wish I’d been born a Wild Boar.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|mansfield|>
8 September 1920.
a book as much as — as — Dear me! How silly! It's

on the tip of my tongue — Darwin's . . . one moment

— it's coming — Darwin's Decline and Fall. . . . No, no, that wasn't the one. That's not right now. Tchuh! Tchuh! you know how it is — I can see it quite

plainly and yet . . . I've got it! Darwin's Descent of Man! . . . Was that the one — though? Do you know now I'm not certain? I feel it was, and yet it's unfamiliar. This is most extraordinary. And yet I enjoyed it so much. There was a ship. Ah! that's brought it back. Of course, of course! That was the one. Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle!

"La mère de Lao-Tse a conçu son fils rien qu'en regardant filer une étoile."
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|vangogh|>
[Prompt: What is on your mind today?]
3 May 1887.
I painted my last three studies with the help of a view-finder divided into squares{EE}, which, as you know, I often use. I attach some importance to it, because I do not think it unlikely that, sooner or later, more artists will make use of it, just as the old German, Italian, and, I believe, the Flemish painters did. The modern way of using it may differ slightly from the old way; but is it not exactly the same with oil-painting? To-day absolutely different effects are aimed at from those which were sought by J. and H. van Eyck, the inventors of technique. This is to show you that I hope always to work independently and for myself alone. I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour and drawing, as also of the whole of artistic life. And if we work with this strong faith, we may hope that it will not prove to be an illusion.

But what are we hearing from T.? Nothing at all? If I were you I would write him a few short lines, couched in sober language, in order to express your surprise at not having received an answer from him. I say this more particularly for you; for even if he does not reply to me, he must to you. And you must press him to do so, otherwise you would lose your prestige, and this excellent opportunity ought really to be seized.... What you must particularly avoid is to allow yourself to be treated like a dead man or a pariah.

I have received a few lines from G., who complains about the bad weather. He is still unwell, and says that of all the vicissitudes of life, none is more harassing to him than straits for money. And yet he feels that he is to be cursed with this condition for ever.

We have had rain and wind every day of late. I have been working at home upon the study of which I made a sketch in my last letter to Bernard. I have tried to make the colours like that of stained glass windows, and the drawing direct and firm.

I am just reading Guy de Maupassant’s “Pierre et Jean.” It is very fine. Have you read the preface to it, in which he declares the artist free to exaggerate and to create a more beautiful, more simple, and more comforting life in the novel, and explaining what Flaubert wished to express with the words, “talent is a long trial of patience,” and originality an act of will-power and of most intense observation?
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
16 January 1919.
Saturday. Peaceful and gay. The whole house takes the air. Athenaeum is asleep and then awake on the studio sofa. He has a silver spoonful of my cream at lunchtime — then hides under the sofa frill and plays the game of the Darting Paw. I gather the dried leaves from the plant in the big white bowl ; they are powdered with silver. There is nobody in the house, and yet whose is this faint whispering? On the stairs there are tiny spots of gold — tiny footprints. . . .

Geraniums The red geraniums have brought the garden over my head. They are there, established, back in the old home, every leaf and flower unpacked and in its place

— and quite determined that no power on earth will ever move them again. Well, that I don't mind. But why should they make me feel a stranger? Why should they ask me every time I go near : " And what are you doing in a London garden? " They burn with arrogance and pride. And I am the little Colonial walking in the London garden patch — allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger. If I lie on the grass they positively shout at me: " Look at her, lying on our grass, pretending she lives here, pretending this her garden, and that tall back of the house, with the windows open and the coloured curtains lifting, is her house. She is a stranger — an alien. She is nothing but a little girl sitting on the Tinakori hills and dreaming : * I went to London and married an Englishman and we lived in a tall grey house with red geraniums and white daisies in the garden at the back.' Impudence! "
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
14 November 1660.
(Office day). But this day was the first that we do begin to sit in the afternoon, and not in the forenoon, and therefore I went into Cheapside to Mr. Beauchamp’s, the goldsmith, to look out a piece of plate to give Mr. Fox from my Lord, for his favour about the L4,000, and did choose a gilt tankard. So to Paul’s Churchyard and bought “Cornelianum dolium:”

So home to dinner, and after that to the office till late at night, and so Sir W. Pen, the Comptroller, and I to the Dolphin, where we found Sir W. Batten, who is seldom a night from hence, and there we did drink a great quantity of sack and did tell many merry stories, and in good humours we were all. So home and to bed.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
30 January 1661.
(Fast day). The first time that this day hath been yet observed: and Mr. Mills made a most excellent sermon, upon “Lord forgive us our former iniquities;” speaking excellently of the justice of God in punishing men for the sins of their ancestors. Home, and John Goods comes, and after dinner I did pay him L30 for my Lady, and after that Sir W. Pen and I into Moorfields and had a brave talk, it being a most pleasant day, and besides much discourse did please ourselves to see young Davis and Whitton, two of our clerks, going by us in the field, who we observe to take much pleasure together, and I did most often see them at play together. Back to the Old James in Bishopsgate Street, where Sir W. Batten and Sir Wm. Rider met him about business of the Trinity House. So I went home, and there understand that my mother is come home well from Brampton, and had a letter from my brother John, a very ingenious one, and he therein begs to have leave to come to town at the Coronacion. Then to my Lady Batten’s; where my wife and she are lately come back again from being abroad, and seeing of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw hanged and buried at Tyburn. Then I home.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
19 February 1668.
Up, and to the office, where all the morning drawing up an answer to the Report of the Committee for miscarriages to the Parliament touching our paying men by tickets, which I did do in a very good manner I think. Dined with my clerks at home, where much good discourse of our business of the Navy, and the trouble now upon us, more than we expected. After dinner my wife out with Deb., to buy some things against my sister’s wedding, and I to the office to write fair my business I did in the morning, and in the evening to White Hall, where I find Sir W. Coventry all alone, a great while with the Duke of York, in the King’s drawing-room, they two talking together all alone, which did mightily please me. Then I did get Sir W. Coventry (the Duke of York being gone) aside, and there read over my paper, which he liked and corrected, and tells me it will be hard to escape, though the thing be never so fair, to have it voted a miscarriage; but did advise me and my Lord Brouncker, who coming by did join with us, to prepare some members in it, which we shall do. Here I do hear how La Roche, a French captain, who was once prisoner here, being with his ship at Plymouth, hath played some freakes there, for which his men being beat out of the town, he hath put up his flag of defiance, and also, somewhere thereabout, did land with his men, and go a mile into the country, and did some pranks, which sounds pretty odd, to our disgrace, but we are in condition now to bear any thing. But, blessed be God! all the Court is full of the good news of my Lord Sandwich’s having made a peace between Spain and Portugall, which is mighty great news, and, above all, to my Lord’s honour, more than any thing he ever did; and yet I do fear it will not prevail to secure him in Parliament against incivilities there. Thence, took up my wife at Unthanke’s, and so home, and there my mind being full of preparing my paper against to-morrow for the House, with an address from the office to the House, I to the office, very late, and then home to supper and to bed.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|mansfield|>
12 February 1922.
We put the chess-men on the board and began to play. It was an unsettled day. L.M. in and out with no home, — no place — whirled like a leaf along this dark passage and then out into the raw street.

J. read the Tchehov aloud. I had read one of the stories myself and it seemed to me nothing. But read aloud, it was a masterpiece. How was that?

I want to remember the evening before. I was asleep. He came in — thrust his head in at the door and as I woke, I did not know him. I saw a face which reminded me of his mother and Richard. But I felt a kind of immediate dread confusion. I knew I ought to know it and that it belonged to him, yet he was as it were not present. I think this is what people who are going out of their minds must feel about the faces that bend over them and old, old people about the children. And that accounts for the foolish offended look in their faces sometimes. They feel it's not right they should not know.
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21 April 1667.
(Lord’s day). Up, and John, a hackney coachman whom of late I have much used, as being formerly Sir W. Pen’s coachman, coming to me by my direction to see whether I would use him to-day or no, I took him to our backgate to look upon the ground which is to be let there, where I have a mind to buy enough to build a coach-house and stable; for I have had it much in my thoughts lately that it is not too much for me now, in degree or cost, to keep a coach, but contrarily, that I am almost ashamed to be seen in a hackney, and therefore if I can have the conveniency, I will secure the ground at least till peace comes, that I do receive encouragement to keep a coach, or else that I may part with the ground again. The place I like very well, being close to my owne house, and so resolve to go about it, and so home and with my wife to church, and then to dinner, Mercer with us, with design to go to Hackney to church in the afternoon. So after dinner she and I sung “Suo Moro,” which is one of the best pieces of musique to my thinking that ever I did hear in my life; then took coach and to Hackney church, where very full, and found much difficulty to get pews, I offering the sexton money, and he could not help me. So my wife and Mercer ventured into a pew, and I into another. A knight and his lady very civil to me when they come, and the like to my wife in hers, being Sir G. Viner and his lady--rich in jewells, but most in beauty--almost the finest woman that ever I saw. That which we went chiefly to see was the young ladies of the schools,----whereof there is great store, very pretty; and also the organ, which is handsome, and tunes the psalm, and plays with the people; which is mighty pretty, and makes me mighty earnest to have a pair at our church, I having almost a mind to give them a pair, if they would settle a maintenance on them for it. I am mightily taken with them. So, church done, we to coach and away to Kingsland and Islington, and there eat and drank at the Old House, and so back, it raining a little, which is mighty welcome, it having not rained in many weeks, so that they say it makes the fields just now mighty sweet. So with great pleasure home by night. Set down Mercer, and I to my chamber, and there read a great deal in Rycaut’s Turkey book with great pleasure, and so eat and to bed. My sore throat still troubling me, but not so much. This night I do come to full resolution of diligence for a good while, and I hope God will give me the grace and wisdom to perform it.
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