I am always reacting to other people, but never exactly in the same way to any two of them. I possess a different mask for each of them. Also I have become as skillful as an actor at changing these masks when the need arises. Yet none of my masks are able to hide my entire countenance. There is always some tiny part of it which is not covered and, strangely enough, a different part is revealed beneath each different mask. Furthermore, all these unconcealed portions of my countenance have something in common other than that they belong to the same face, for they each represent my real self, as most certainly none of my masks do. But since these exposed tidbits of me are constantly being altered as each of my masks is changed, there can never be any agreement among people who think they know me as I really am.

*
Each man must have his own convictions to which he is as much attached as the air he breathes. Those who do not have convictions are searching for them, even if unconsciously. Their dissatisfaction with themselves is manifest in the act of their pursuit. One should never attempt to shake anyone from his convictions, for they are among his most precious possessions, unless there is an absolute certainty of their evilness.
*
I acknowledge a certain weakness in myself at failing to keep those promises I make to myself whereas those I make to others I do all in my power to fulfill. I think if I were to honestly examine the causes of my unhappiness I would find them linked very closely to this general effect.
*
How I long to tap profundities within the souls of certain people instead of being satisfied with saying clever things about them which shed only a very dim light on the true aspects of their personality.
*
Too much praise sometimes frightens me as much as its equivalence of blame. Adulation can actually warp one’s performance by producing overconfidence and hence self-satisfaction. Others might laugh at my fanaticism, but others are not responsible for the quality of my work.
*
I think Alice Meynell was a little taken-back by her husband’s enthusiasm for Francis Thompson’s poetry. Wilfrid was completely overwhelmed, in fact, mesmerized. The effect was so strong that feelings of jealousy might even have been aroused. I know, but being possessed of such noble qualities far and above most people, one need not fret at assigning, or better I say, suspecting a single weakness in connection with a particular circumstance. After all, she herself was a poet and to have the man she loved more than anyone else in the world fall into a life-long swoon over the work of one of her contemporaries was understandably grating. Her own admiration for Thompson’s poetry while enthusiastic, was nevertheless encumbered with certain reservations. Writing of Thompson’s use of imagery, she said, “…imagery so beautiful as almost to persuade us that imagery is the end and goal of poetry….” But it seems she felt more convinced by the odes of Coventry Patmore and thought Thompson gained in his later work through submission to Patmore’s influence. Actually his earlier poems are his best (including “Hound Of Heaven” and “Ode To The Setting Sun”). And from what I’ve tasted of Patmore, I find it difficult to understand how anyone could say he benefited Thompson’s poetry. Patmore is mere humdrum except for a few inspired instances when compared with Thompson.
*
The Meynell household was a paragon of domesticity, something that one can hardly believe ever existed anywhere at any time. But the evidence contained in family letters and reminiscences is irrefutable, and thus reading about the active harmony of Place Court delights the more precisely because such a condition is so rare in the experience of most men. Life within the Meynell home was so rich and absorbing, so much so in fact that nothing alien to its atmosphere from the outside world could disrupt it. The occasional outbursts of affection amidst the reigning aura of busyness prove how constant and unwavering were the links of love which bound the members of this illustrious family together. Even the two most prominent outsiders who gained admittance to this inner circle, Coventry Partmore and Francis Thompson, have left testimony which supports this conviction.
*
Anyone who has ever been intimately related to anyone else and has attempted to recreate that intimacy in words knows how inadequate words can be. Even poetry is something closer to an approximation rather than a mirror of accurate reflections pertaining to a general feeling. This is why the modern critical idea that a work of art needs no justification for its existence other than itself is a sound principle. It induces a variety of vibrations traveling to and from a whole host of related objects beyond itself and yet is not an imitation of any of these objects. It merely uses them to arrive at its own independent existence.
*
When Viola Meynell says her mother’s daily stints as a newspaper columnist make livelier reading than her most probing essays, she has expressed what might almost be accepted as a general truth, namely, that great and even less than great writers are often at their best when most unguarded.
*
There are any number of human characteristics which may be regarded as being the most annoying, but at the moment I can think of none that is more despicable than selfishness. If you want to keep yourself surrounded by friends on whom you like to feel you can really depend, it is always best to avoid testing them for their selfishness content, for invariably that test will prove so positive as to be absolutely disillusioning. In fact, for those whose friends are as necessary as the food they eat, such a revelation is likely to have disastrous results. But if you are composed of more solid stuff, this sudden awareness may arouse philosophic repercussions that extend the range of vision to a point where new, unheard of planets swim into your private galaxy. You may begin with one person and after you satisfy yourself that your man is very far from being what you had supposed him to be and hence no longer worthy of your companionship. You can relegate him to some lower rung on your human ladder and move on to the next friend.
*
Edward Thomas’s essays are like a rare delicacy. I do not sit and read them for hours at a time but dip into them every so often whenever I feel the need for his kind of pleasure. At most, I spend a half hour with him roaming amidst an emerald woods at sunset or making mental notes on his tastes among books, then return to that world from which I entered his pages a half hour before, much refreshed and perhaps even in a frame of mind to set about my own writing. If there is one thing I have learned about myself during the past few years it is that writing, whether poetry or prose, is extremely difficult. Has it always been? I think that whenever I cared about what I was writing the going has always been hard.
*
Despite Hazlitt’s adulatory remarks, Edmund Spencer has little appeal today. Admittedly, however, he was in a sense the unofficial father of the Romantics. But his poetry is not personal poetry such as we find in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. Certainly he was a superior versifier, probably superior to any nineteenth century poet, but because of his impersonal quality he seems bloodless and yes, dare I say it, rather dull. Perhaps a closer, more attentive reading of his works will disclose new delights I have never been conscious of before. Skelton and Wyatt have more appeal even though they are surely inferior poets. And did not Pope throw up his arms exclaiming, “Who reads Spencer nowadays!”?
*
It is difficult to sympathize with people who are perpetually sympathizing with themselves. Yet many of these people deserve our compassion because their suffering is genuine. However, when they persist too long in exhibiting their intolerable whine, the hurt which they do to our nervous system soon exceeds their own lamented ache and consequently makes us wish to fly from their grating voices. Once out of earshot we can resume our compassion for their predicament.
*
If all men are truly brothers then they are brothers in suffering. But those who insist on beating their own drum without pause and without permitting their comforters to enter even the slightest complaint of their own are people who are the least capable of grasping this idea of brotherhood, for they are convinced that they and only they are the only ones being trodden upon. Surely we need each other, but when the need becomes naturally one-sided the person who thinks himself the only real sufferer is likely to eventually find himself without anyone to turn to.
*
The artist’s responsibility to himself must predominate. It’s almost as Adam Smith said, in another context of course, that each man pursuing his own selfish ends to the best of his ability and unhampered by any unnecessary external forces makes for the ideal society. The artist who begins with society in mind is bound to get into trouble because in such a frame of mind it is unlikely that he will do his best work. The world will admire and love him only for what he does and not for what he intended to do.
*
In his heart the poet must truly wish to make the world a better place to live in and yet he knows he can accomplish this only by composing the best poems he is capable of conceiving. He does not say to himself before sitting down to write a poem that he must write it about such and such a subject because those who read the poem will thereby be led to a better understanding of some facet of life. Nevertheless this is exactly what poems can contribute to any grand scheme for improving the world. The larger purpose of the poem, however, must remain in some remote corner of the poet’s brain while he is actually engaged in the process of writing. Otherwise it might get between himself and the poem. This is why most deliberately contrived social conscious poetry fails.
*
I am almost ready to admit that people who lack ambition generally bore me. Those who are satisfied to merely meet the minimum requirements of life apparently carry dull, unimaginative brains around in their skulls. Yet what type of person can I truthfully say I admire? Let me begin with writers. Writing demands more from the mind than is ordinarily necessary. When a writer is inspired to record his thoughts it can be assumed that these thoughts have formed into a kind of cluster of high concentration on a particular point which at the moment of its greatest intensity descends from that point to land on the person or object in question. This is why great writing is seldom forced. Although we no longer speak of inspiration, it is still as legitimate a term as any for identifying the action that takes place inside the poet’s brain while he is simultaneously making his initial ink strokes. Learning to write has little to do with acquiring skill for arranging words on paper. The main preoccupation with a young man who wants to write poetry should be with seeing the world about him with as much exactness as he can possibly muster. He will soon discover that metaphors are nothing more than instruments for stripping away the haze that usually surrounds objects. The basic idea behind all poetry is the search for truth. And since truth within the limits of man’s powers of penetration can only be realized through an accurate depiction of concrete objects of familiarity, the poet must learn to see clearly where other men are willing to accept illusions.
*
In 1843, not long after he had graduated from Harvard, Henry Thoreau worked as a tutor on Staten Island and in one of his letters mentions watching ships pass through the Narrows on their way to the ocean. This is an experience which I have also enjoyed, more than a hundred years later, and perhaps did my observing from the same little square foot of hillside ground.
*
I think of myself as essentially a man of leisure. This means that whatever I attempt to do in response to some useful purpose will be affected one way or another, and in varying degrees, by this basic character trait. It is one reason why it is virtually impossible to hurry me into accomplishing any task. It is not that I wish to take my own sweet time, but that my nature or pulsebeat is not easily accelerated.
*
B.S. had a breakdown in Sweden. He always gave the impression that he was a hard-bitten coolly calculating rationalist. His inner life apparently could not be so easily resolved. Its conflicts were insoluble regardless of how potent the intellectual solution in which they were submerged. They had gradually battered him to the ground. One can point to uncongenial circumstances as rather obvious causes of his trouble, but I for one cannot quite accept this explanation since I sincerely believe that these negative circumstances exist for every man whose ambitions have yet to be realized. The height of the wall of circumstances, in other words, depends not so much on the wall as on the climber. The state of mind is the mason.
*
Feelings of uneasiness can invariably be found to have their roots in dissatisfactions. The dissatisfactions need not necessarily be deep in order to produce such feelings, for the feelings themselves are generally of a temperate quality. But here I am reaching for a clinical explanation of my present mood. The cause of my melancholia is really simple: I haven’t been writing as much as I want to. And yet, in truth, I have almost never satisfied this desire. All the same, when the well appears to be going dry, I become extremely frustrated which in turn throws my entire world out of whack.
*
G. is brilliant, but his thinking is often clouded by his emotions. Rather than wrestle with a question in his intellect he will immediately jump into his Cadillac of emotions, turn on the ignition, press down on the accelerator and zoom towards the nearest answer. Once he has arrived at his destination nothing less than a keg of dynamite can budge him.

S.’s emotional preoccupations are equally one-sided although he seldom resorts to violent language in order to justify them. S. gives the impression of someone who is desperately doing all in his power to avoid coming to grips with life. The fact of my friendship with him stems from our mutual devotion to a common Muse. Knowing how he dislikes G., whose violence embarrasses or, should I say, annoys him, and how I harbor a sincere fondness for both of them reinforces my belief in my own flexibility in my relations with people. I am able to take under my wing as various a conglomorate of personalities as anyone I have ever met.
*
Some gems from Emerson: “I saw plainly that the great show their legitimate power in nothing more than their power to misguide us.” “It is remarked of Americans that they value dexterity too much, and honor too little; that they think they praise a man more by saying that he is ‘smart’ than by saying that he is right.” “The Universities are not, as in Hobbes’ time, ‘the core of rebellion,’ no, but the seat of inertness.” Emerson is still meaty. His words sting today no less than on the day he penned them. What do they tell us of his times? A certain lack of progression in public affairs, a standing still of the minds of men.