10 February 1930 – 16 February 1930

To lie on the sofa for a week. I am sitting up today in the usual state of unequal animation. Below normal, with spasmodic desire to write, then to doze. It is a fine cold day and if my energy and sense of duty persist, I shall drive up to Hampstead. But I doubt that I can write to any purpose. A cloud swims in my head. One is too conscious of the body and jolted out of the rut of life to get back to fiction. Once or twice I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head, which comes when I am ill so often—last year for example at this time I lay in bed constructing A Room of One’s Own (which sold 10,000 two days ago). If I could stay in bed another fortnight (but there is no chance of that) I believe I should see the whole of The Waves. Or of course I might go off on something different. As it is I half incline to insist upon a dash to Cassis; but perhaps this needs more determination than I possess; and we shall dwindle on here. Pinker is walking about the room looking for the bright patch—a sign of spring. I believe these illnesses are in my case—how shall I express it?—partly mystical. Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain—as last year; only discomfort this. Then suddenly something springs. Two nights ago Vita was here; and when she went I began to feel the quality of the evening —how it was spring coming: a silver light; mixing with the early lamps; the cabs all rushing through the streets; I had a tremendous sense of life beginning; mixed with that emotion which is the essence of my feeling, but escapes description (I keep on making up the Hampton Court scene in The Waves—Lord how I wonder if I shall pull this book off! It is a litter of fragments so far). Well, as I was saying, between these long pauses, for I am swimming in the head and write rather to stabilise myself than to make a correct statement—I felt the spring beginning; and Vita’s life so full and flush; and all the doors opening; and this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me. I then begin to make up my story whatever it is; ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen. It is no use trying to write at this stage. And I doubt if I can fill this white monster. I would like to lie down and sleep, but feel ashamed. Leonard brushed off his influenza in one day and went about his business feeling ill. Here am I still loafing, undressed, with Elly* coming tomorrow. But as I was saying, my mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way. I am reading Byron: Maurois: which sends me to Childe Harold: makes me speculate. How odd a mixture: the weakest sentimental Mrs. Hemans combined with trenchant bare vigour. How did they combine? And sometimes the descriptions in C.H. are “beautiful”; like a great poet. There are the three elements in Byron: 1. The romantic dark haired lady singing drawing room melodies to the guitar. “Tambourgi! Tambourgi! thy ’larum afar Gives hope to the valiant and promise of war;” “Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote, In his snowy camese and his shaggy capote” —something manufactured; a pose; silliness. 2. Then there is the vigorous rhetorical, like his prose, and good as prose. “Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? By their right arms the conquest must be wrought? Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!” 3. Then what rings to me truer, and is almost poetry. “Dear Nature is the kindest mother still! Though always changing, in her aspect mild; From her bare bosom let me take my fill, Her never-weaned, though not her favoured child. (All in Canto II of C.H.) To me by day or night she ever smiled, Though I have marked her when none other hath, And sought her more and more and loved her best in wrath.” 4. And then there is of course the pure satiric, as in the description of a London Sunday; and 5. Finally (but this makes more than three) the inevitable half assumed half genuine tragic note, which comes as a refrain, about death and the loss of friends. All thou could have of mine, stern Death! thou hast; The parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend: Ne’er yet for me thine arrows flew so fast, And grief with grief continuing still to blend, Hath snatched the little joy that life had yet to lend. These I think make him up; and make much that is spurious, vapid, yet very changeable, and then rich and with greater range than the other poets, could he have got the whole into order. A novelist, he might have been. It is odd however to read in his letters his prose and apparently genuine feeling about Athens: and to compare it with the convention he adopted in verse. (There is some sneer about the Acropolis.) But then the sneer may have been a pose too. The truth may be that if you are charged at such high voltage you can’t fit any of the ordinary human feelings; must pose; must rhapsodise; don’t fit in. He wrote in the Fun Album that his age was 100. And this is true, measuring life by feeling.