22 December 1930 – 28 December 1930

It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard’s final speech and end with the words O solitude: thus making him absorb all those scenes and having no further break. This is also to show that the theme effort, effort, dominates: not the waves: and personality: and defiance: but I am not sure of the effect artistically; because the proportions may need the intervention of the waves finally so as to make a conclusion.

But what’s the use of talking about Bernard’s final speech? We came down on Tuesday and next day my cold was the usual influenza and I am in bed with the usual temperature and can’t use my wits or, as is visible, form my letters. I daresay two days will see me normal; but then the sponge behind my forehead will be dry and pale—and so my precious fortnight of exaltation and concentration is snatched; and I shall go back to the racket and Nelly without a thing done. I clear myself by thinking that I may evolve some thoughts. Meanwhile it rains; Annie’s child is ill; the dogs next door yap and yap; all the colours are rather dim and the pulse of life dulled. I moon torpidly through book after book: Defoe’s Tour; Rowan’s autobiography; Benson’s Memoirs; Jeans: in the familiar way. The parson—Skinner—who shot himself emerges like a bloody sun in a fog: a book worth, perhaps, looking at again in a clearer mood. He shot himself in the beechwoods above his house; he spent a life digging up stones and reducing all places to Camelodunum; quarrelled; bickered; yet loved his sons; yet turned them out of doors—a clear hard picture of one type of human life—the exasperated, unhappy, struggling, intolerably afflicted. Oh and I’ve read Q. V.’s* letters; and wonder what would happen had Ellen Terry been born Queen. Complete disaster to the Empire? Q. V. entirely unaesthetic; a kind of Prussian competence and belief in herself her only prominences; material; brutal to Gladstone; like a mistress with a dishonest footman. Knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace, only its inherited force and cumulative sense of power making it remarkable. Diary of a Somerset rector.