5 April 1915 – 11 April 1915

"Why," asks Samuel Butler, "should not chicken be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders not to say already beneficed? The present arrangement is not convenient ... it is not only not perfect but so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes...." As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bathe, dress, shave, breakfast once for all, if we could "cut" these monotonous cycles of routine. If once the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we were immortal!--how much forrarder we should all get--always at the heart of things, working without let or hindrance in a straight line for the millennium! Now we waltz along instead. Even planets die off and new ones come in their place. How infinitely wearisome it seems. When an old man dies what a waste, and when a baby is born what a redundancy of labour in front! Two People I hate in particular The man walking along the pavement in front of me giving me no room to pass under the satisfactory impression that he is the only being on the pavement or in the street, city, country, world, universe: and it all belongs to him even the moon and sun and stars. The woman on the 'bus the other night--pouring out an interminable flow of poisonous chatter into the ear of her man--poor, exhausted devil who kept answering dreamily "Oom" and"Yes" and "Oom"--how I hated her for his sake!

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony If music moves me, it always generates images--a procession of apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude, terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears and arms bent at the elbows--a staring, bulgy-eyed mad-woman such as one sees in Raemakers' cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death passed upon him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the grass. It is the struggle of a man with a steam-hammer--Fate. As tho' thro' the walls of a closed room--some mysterious room, a fearful spot--I crouch and listen and am conscious that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out --there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike blows--melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what has happened), and the pursuit begins again. I see clasped hands and appealing eyes and feel very helpless and mystified outside. An epileptic vision or an opium dream--Dostoievsky or De Quincey set to music. In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to "carry on" for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the child; a greyhound's cold wet nose nozzling into a listless hand, and outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc. In the Third Movement comes the crash by which I know something final and dreadful has happened. Then the resurrection with commotion in Heaven: tempests and human faces, scurryings to and fro, brazen portcullises clanging to, never to open more, the distant roll of drums and the sound of horses' hoofs. From behind the inmost veil of Heaven I faintly catch the huzzas of a great multitude. Then comes a great healing wind, then a few ghost-like tappings on the window pane till gradually the Avenue of Arches into Heaven come into view with a solemn cortege advancing slowly along. Above the great groundswell of woe, Hope is restored and the Unknown Hero enters with all pomp into his Kingdom, etc., etc. I am not surprised to learn that Beethoven was once on the verge of suicide.