A Writer's Notebook

- William Somerset Maugham

1901

1

End of a life. It is like reading a book at close of day; one reads on, not seeing that the light is failing, and then suddenly as one pauses for a moment, one finds the light has gone; it is quite dark and looking down again at the book one cannot see, and the page is meaningless.

2

Carbis Water. The furze was saffron and green. Someone had gathered a bunch of heather and then let it fall; and it lay on the grass dying, a faded purple, like a symbol of the decay of an imperial power.

3

The Monument. It was on a hill overlooking the valley and the sea; and Hale, with its placid river, was like an old Italian town, coloured and gay even under the sombre heaven. Around the monument lay the dead ferns, brown as the earth, and they deadened the footfall; they, the first of the summer plants to go, chilled to death by the mild wind of September.

Joannes Knill, 1782. Who was he? One can imagine some splenetic, melancholy character such as the eighteenth century produced in reaction from the formalism of the age. It was an age that was withering for lack of fresh air. It drank of that cup in which the Elizabethans had found a multi-coloured joy of life, and a later generation a passion which fired the soul to freedom; but the wine in the cup had gone thin, and in its dregs was nothing but weariness.

4

The dead trees had seemed incongruous in the summer, a patch of darkness that had no business with the joyous colours of the Cornish June; but now the whole of Nature was drawing into harmony with them, and they stood, gnarled and leafless, with a placid silence as though they felt a contented sense of the eternity of things: the green leaves and the flowers were dainty, ephemeral as the butterflies and the light breeze of April, but they were changeless and constant. The silence was so great that one seemed to hear the wings of the rooks as they beat the air, flying overhead from field to field. And in the stillness, curiously, I thought I heard the song of London calling.

The sky was overcast, and the clouds, pregnant with rain, swept over the hilltops; and with the closing day the rain began to fall; it was very fine, a Cornish drizzle that hovered over the earth like a mist, and it was all-penetrating, like human sorrow. The country sank into darkness.

5

The wind sang to himself like a strong-limbed ploughboy as he marches easily through the country.

6

The earth was enswathed in vapours, opalescent, and they had a curious impenetrable transparency.

7

Jeremy Taylor. Of no one, perhaps, can it be said with greater truth that the style is the very man himself. When you read Holy Dying, with its leisurely gait, its classical spirit, its fluent, facile poetry, you can imagine what sort of a man was Jeremy Taylor; and from a study of his life and circumstances you could hazard a guess that he would write exactly as he does. He was a Caroline prelate. His life was easy, moderately opulent and gently complacent. And such was his style. It reminds one, not, like Milton’s, of a tumultuous torrent breaking its way through obstacles almost insurmountable, but of a rippling brook meandering happily through a fertile meadow carpeted with the sweet-smelling flowers of spring. Jeremy Taylor is no juggler with words, but well content to use them in their ordinary sense. His epithets are seldom subtle, and seldom discover in the object a new or striking quality; he uses them purely as decoration, and he repeats them over and over again, as if they were not living, necessary things, but merely conventional adjuncts of a noun. Consequently, notwithstanding his extreme floridity, he gives an impression of simplicity. He seems to use the words that come most naturally to the mouth, and his phrases, however nicely turned, have a colloquial air. Perhaps, also, the constant repetition of and adds to this sensation of naïveté. The long clauses, tacked on to one another in a string that appears interminable, make you feel that the thing has been written without effort. It seems like the conversation of a good-natured, rather long-winded, elderly cleric. Often, it is true, the endless phrases, clause after clause joined together with little regard to the meaning, with none at all to the construction of the sentence, depend merely upon looseness of punctuation, and by a rearrangement of this can be made into compact and well composed periods. Jeremy Taylor, when he likes, can put together his words as neatly as anyone, and then writes a sentence of perfect music. “He that desires to die well and happily above all things must be careful that he do not live a soft, a delicate, and voluptuous life; but a life severe, holy and under the discipline of the Cross, under the conduct of prudence and observation, a life of warfare and sober counsels, labour and watchfulness.” On the other hand, sometimes his phrases run away with him, then and is heaped upon and, idea upon idea, till one cannot make head or tail of the meaning; and the sentence at last tails off obscurely, unfinished, incomplete and ungrammatical. On occasion, however, these tremendous sentences are managed with astonishing skill; and in a long string of clauses the arrangement of epithets, the form and order of the details, will be varied with skill and elegance.

But the great charm of Holy Dying lies in the general atmosphere of the book, scented and formal, calm and urbane like an old-world garden; and still more in the beautiful poetry of stray phrases. One cannot turn a page without finding some felicitous expression, some new order of simple words which seems to give them a new value; and often enough some picturesque passage, overladen, like that earliest charming rococo in which decoration was exuberant, but notwithstanding kept within the bounds of perfect taste.

Nowadays in looking for an epithet the conscientious writer searches (generally in vain!) for one which shall put the thing to be described in a new light, disclosing some characteristic which has never before been revealed; but Jeremy Taylor never even tries to do anything of the kind. The adjective which comes first to his mind is the one he uses. There are a thousand epithets with which you may describe the sea, the only one which, if you fancy yourself as a stylist, you will scrupulously avoid is blue; yet it is that which most satisfies Jeremy Taylor. He has not the incisive phrase of Milton, the poetic power of putting together nouns and adjectives, adverbs and verbs, in a conjunction which has never been used before. He never surprises. His imagination is without violence or daring. He is content to walk the old road, using phrases and expressions as he finds them; and the chief peculiarity of his style consists in his mild, bucolic outlook upon life. He sees the world amiably and transcribes it exactly, without great art; but with a pleasing desire to put things as picturesquely as he can.

8

The rising sun coloured the mist variously, till it was iridescent as the chalcedony, purple and rosy and green.

9

Terracotta Statuettes. I was enchanted by the facile motion of the little figures, by their bold gestures and nonchalant attitudes. In the folds of their drapery, in their arrested movements, there was all the spirit of that civilisation of the fresh air which was perhaps the chief part of Hellenic existence. A row of figurines from Tanagra fills the imaginative mind with an ardent longing for that freer, simple life of ancient times.

10

The sad, stormy night of eternal damnation.

11

And occasionally, in a break of the rapid clouds, appeared a pale star shivering in the cold.

12

An azure more profound than the rich enamel of an old French jewel.

The ploughed fields gaining in the sunshine the manifold colours of the jasper.

The foliage of the elm trees more sombre than jade.

In the sun the wet leaves glistened like emeralds, meretricious stones which might fitly deck the pompous depravity of a royal courtesan.

Rich with an artificial, elaborate richness like those old gorgeous jewels incrusted with precious stones.

A green like that of the old enamelled jewels which is more translucent than emerald.

The rich profundity of the garnet.

It had the transparent, coloured richness of a scale of agate.

The sky more luminously blue than the lapis lazuli.

Under the dying sun, after the rain, the colours of the country assumed a new, an almost laboured richness, resembling for a moment the opulent hues of Limoges enamel.

Like a Limoges plate sparkling with opulent colours.

The water, in the deep translucent shadow, had the dark, heavy richness of jade.

The reader may well ask himself what these enamels, what these stones, precious and semi-precious, are doing here. I will tell him. At that time, still impressed by the exuberant prose that was fashionable in the nineties and aware that my own was flat, plain and pedestrian, I thought I should try to give it more colour and more ornament. That is why I read Milton and Jeremy Taylor with laborious zeal. One day, my mind upon a florid passage in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, I took pencil and paper and went to the British Museum where, hoping they would come in handy, I made these notes.

13

Piccadilly before dawn. After the stir and ceaseless traffic of the day, the silence of Piccadilly early in the morning, in the small hours, seems barely credible. It is unnatural and rather ghostly. The great street in its emptiness has a sort of solemn broadness, descending in a majestic sweep with the assured and stately ease of a placid river. The air is pure and limpid, but resonant, so that a solitary cab suddenly sends the whole street ringing, and the emphatic trot of the horse resounds with long reverberations. Impressive by reason of their regularity, the electric lights, self-assertive and brazen, flood the surroundings with a harsh and snowy brilliance; with a kind of indifferent violence they cast their glare upon the huge silent houses, and lower down throw into distinctness the long evenness of the park railings and the nearer trees. And between, outshone, like an uneven string of discoloured gems, twinkles the yellow flicker of the gas jets.

There is silence everywhere, but the houses are quiet and still, with a different silence from the rest, standing very white but for the black gaping of the many windows. In their sleep, closed and bolted, they line the pavement, helplessly as it were, disordered and undignified, having lost all significance without the busy hum of human voices and the hurrying noise of persons passing in and out.

14

The autumn too has its flowers, but they are little loved and little praised.

This is such nonsense that I cannot believe it was meant literally, and I have wondered whether this conceit occurred to me because a woman somewhat advanced in years had made a pass on the shy young man I was then.