tranquillity, temperance, bodily vigour, and unimaginativeness. To
be happy, one must be good-humouredly indifferent to the sufferings
of others, and indisposed to forecast the possibilities of
disaster. The sadness which must shadow the path of such as myself,
is the sadness which comes of the power to see clearly the
imperfections of the world, coupled with the inability to see
through it, to discern the purpose of it all. One comforts oneself
by the dim hope that the desire will be satisfied and the dream
fulfilled; but has one any certainty of that? The temptation is to
acquiesce in a sort of gentle cynicism, to take what one can get,
to avoid as far as possible all deep attachments, all profound
hopes, to steel oneself in indifference. That is what such men as
my miller do instinctively; meanwhile one tries to believe that the
melancholy that comes to such as Hamlet, the sadness of finding the
world unintelligible, and painful, and full of shadows, is a noble
melancholy, a superior sort of madness. Yet one is not content to
bear, to suffer, to wait; one clutches desperately at light and
warmth and joy, and alas, in joy and sorrow alike, one is ever and
insupportably alone.



April 9, 1889.


I have been reading Rousseau lately, and find him a very
incomprehensible figure. The Confessions, it must be said, is a
dingy and sordid book. I cannot quite penetrate the motive which
induced him to write them. It cannot have been pure vanity, because
he does not spare himself; he might have made himself out a far