Hundreds and Thousands (20 page)

Just come from the last lecture on art. This afternoon there was a tea for the lecturer — old women like me, very dull — refreshments drab and uninteresting. After the lecture tonight there was a reception at the Business and Professional Women’s Club — mixed ages, vivacious old and stodgy young — peppy sandwiches and snappy cakes — lots of chatter. What’s it all about, this art? We’ve had the
reason
for the way each man worked. We’ve had the viewpoint of each man. We’ve had the thoughts of each man. We’ve had the man turned inside out and the work turned outside in, and how much of it is true? Who of us
knows
just
why
we do what we do, much less another’s
whys,
or
what
we’re after? Art is not like that; cut and dried and hit-at like a bull’s eye and done for a reason and explained away by this or that motive. It’s a climbing and a striving for something always beyond, not a bundle of “rules” or a bundle of feels nor a taking of this man’s ideas and tacking them on to that man’s ideas and making a mongrel idea and calling it “my own.” It’s a seeing dimly beyond and with eyes straight ahead in a beeline, marching right up to the dim thing. You’ll never quite catch up. There will
always
be a beyond. It would be terrible to catch up — the end of everything. Oh God, let me never catch up till I die. Let me be always feeling up and out, beyond and beyond into eternity.

A FRIEND DROVE ME
out to the Lagoon to look, really to tread on and to measure up the camp ground for the van. I think it will do quite well, in an unfenced property near a stream, near the beach, near the road, near the woods. My friend and two boys and my sister and I went. One boy was bilious and miserable, the other boy greedy and dull. My friend and my sister and I chattered surfacely.

It was not a pretty day — fine, but hard and cold. Everything was dressed in its glorious new spring green but seemed to say, “I’m in my new spring finery. Keep at a distance. Don’t soil me.” The sky was hard and the mountains peaked and clear-cut and the sea steely blue and cold. It was an “English” day, high-brow and haughty. The Lagoon needs the mellow light of sunset to make it human — no — make it God-like. The old longing
will
come. Oh, if there was only a really kindred spirit to
share
it with, that we might keep each other warm in spirit, keep step and tramp uphill together. I’m a bit ashamed of being a little depressed again. Perhaps it is reading the autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — all the artists there in Paris, like all the artists in the East, jogging along, discussing, condemning, adoring, fighting, struggling, enthusing,
seeking
together, jostling each other, instead of solitude, no shelter, exposed to all the “winds” like a lone old tree with no others round to strengthen it against the buffets with no waving branches to help keep time. B-a-a-a, old sheep, bleating for fellows. Don’t you know better by now? It must be my fault somewhere, this repelling of mankind and at the same time rebelling at having no one to shake hands with but myself and the right hand weary of shaking the left. Stop this yowl and go to your story and enter the joy of the birds. Wake the old sail up, hoist it up in the skies on lark songs. Lay the foundations strong
and flat and coarse on the croaks of the crows and the jays and the rooks. Fill it with thrush songs and blackbirds, and when the day is petering out wrap the great white owl’s silent wings round it and let the nightingale sing it to sleep.

I feel I have “sat under” Mr. W. for the last time. I have done with the loud music, or rather noise (about ten or twelve hymns and a horrible solo by a wretched little man with no voice and a bucketful of affectation and a woollen sweater under his jacket which showed all down the front), and Mr. W.’s monotonous voice, and that queer, hard stare from under his eyebrows out of eyes with no lashes, and the same endless anecdotes I have heard for two years, and the smother of flowers in the junk vases standing on assorted stools, and the pianist in violent blue beating out violent noises, and the long stupid explanation about the silver bowl at the entrance for the collection. The whole thing disgusted me and seemed hard-set and unspiritual. I must not go again. It is not good to feel that way. I feel that Mr. W. has grown pompous and smug and that it isn’t what I want and it doesn’t get me any nearer to God. Why do all these parsons lay things so dogmatically before the people? They’re all alike, all
sure
that theirs is the only way. The road is the same but some tread it in shoes, some in sandals, some in slippers, some in gumboots and some barefoot. Some run and some walk and some sit a lot to rest. God, God, God, we all want to get to the journey’s end in time. Fit us with boots to suit our own feet and make us tolerant of the footgear of the rest. I’ve read “The Snack” over again. It’s perfectly
awful
— meaning not clarified, sentences clippy and rough, sense twisted. I’ll never, never, never be able to express them. I looked at my six
beach sketches, just heavy with paint and expressionless. It is wilting to find yourself out now and again. Your short-comings all jump out at one and b-a-a-a. Maybe if it’s true about reincarnation everyone goes through this stage just to prepare for the next, sort of a priming for next time’s fruit, and the fellows who are ahead this trip are the ones who get deep priming last.

A man came today and he wanted to know all about modern art — every single thing in one sitting and I am sorry I couldn’t explain better. I’m no good at it. I want to give out the little bit I know but I can’t find words. I hauled out quantities of canvases and he went away shaking his head. He said he was too old to learn and too busy and he went back to the old, old ones and said he liked those best because he understood them but he wanted to understand the others and he couldn’t, and his wife sat and tried to squeeze out feelings over the canvases like you squeeze out icing ornaments on a cake and messed herself and left ungainly blobs and I felt so helpless that I couldn’t help them to understand better. Somehow we couldn’t catch on to each other’s understanding and we were unhappy over it and it was all hopeless, like a wrong key turning round and round in a lock and having nothing happen.

Sewing — a necessary evil — and a sketch on the cliffs in the evening. They are very beautiful. It is when the sun has dropped behind the Sooke hills and blobbed yellow and red over everything just before he did it. People generally rave over the red and yellow but I’m in a hurry always for it to get over. Then “it” comes, tender, melting mystery. I love the woods at that hour — no blaring lights and darks to perplex and make you restless with their
shifting and sparkle, but that lovely mellow peace so much deeper and richer than sun glare. I shall love the lagoon in the evenings. The woods will darken quickly because of the hill but the grand expanse of beach and sea will hold the after-glow for long. I showed the crow story to a girl last night, read it to her. She did not think it entirely satisfactory. Some bits of description of the crow she liked very much. It did seem rough and jerky as I read it aloud. It needs a lot of cutting up and smoothing, as the thing I’m chasing in it is abstract and very difficult. I’m a bit of a fool to try that indefinite material before I can do definite stuff but those subjects interest me and I
must
try to get it over even if I fail. The trying is well worth while, only it seems so selfish to just go on trying unless one’s tries amount to something. Lawren has the “Cow Yard” today. Wonder if he feels it or if it is only oddities like me, the “cow-yard child,” who can wallow with delight in cow yards. Even I did not realize all the joy and sorrow of its deeps till I
wrote
the “Cow Yard.” Maybe I’ve used too many
people
in the crow story. I must think into it deeper.

BE CAREFUL THAT
you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don’t know in your own soul. You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself, and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That’s all right; you are feeling your way into the thing. But don’t take what someone else has made sure of and pretend it’s you yourself that have made sure of it till it’s yours absolutely by conviction. It’s stealing to take it and hypocrisy and you’ll fall in a hole. Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn’t always look the same — as the woods are the same, the trees standing in their
places, the rocks and the earth, but they are always different too as lights and shadows and seasons and moods pass through them. Even the expression of our human face changes. So does God’s wonderful infinite face, which is beyond all human picturing or even imagining, which hasn’t any human thoughts big enough to think it even, but is beyond and beyond and beyond.

If you’re going to lick the icing off somebody else’s cake you won’t be nourished and it won’t do you any good, or you might find the cake had caraway seeds and you hate them, but if you make your own cake and know the recipe and stir the thing with your own hand it’s
your
cake. You can ice it or not as you like. Such a lot of folk are licking the icing off the other fellow’s cake.

Am eating today after a fast of seven days and it feels very good inside. I wish I had been brought up to think nothing of food, instead of encouraged to have a palate sensitive to and demanding good eats. I believe those who are reared on short-comings are best off spiritually and bodily. I was reared an earthy child. I remember the spirit in me used to try and look up but the fat earth body sat on it. Now it fights to lift but sixty years of being sat on has flattened it. I have painted today a paper sketch. I tried to say something, to work out last evening’s thought in my sketch on the beach. It spoke a little so I quit for fear of strangling its mite of speech. There’s wonderful things out there on the cliffs and over the sea.

Tonight there was the tiniest, delicate new-born moon, needle-sharp at its points and whooped upwards, and the most delicate blue-green-grey sky with warm brownish clouds coming right over the top of you, and cold blue-grey, flat clouds, and the mountain,
and the sea, quiet and low grey. How can a human hand dare to feel into that light and space? Only the soul can feel out into its formless realities, too subtle for forms and mediums. Only the soul can cope with it. Only she can feel her way into its fineness.

I woke to this dream: I was in a wood with lush grass underfoot and I was searching for primroses and a little boy came. I did not see him, only his bare feet and legs among the grass and I saw my own feet there among the grass also. “What are you looking for?” said the boy. “Primroses.” “There are no primroses here,” said the boy, “but there are daisies. Gather them.” Perhaps what I want most is not for me. I am to take “daisies” instead of primroses.

I washed a wall. While it dried I went to the beach and made a sketch. Came home and kalsomined. While that dried I did my big sketch from the small one and went back and did my second coat of kalsomining. My sketch was half good, a certain amount of light, freedom and space, but not sensitive enough. I need much refining away of clumsiness. Christ said, “I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly.” Having Christ in one’s life should waken one to a far bigger sense of life, far bigger than the sense of life that comes through theosophy, that static, frozen awfulness, sort of a cold storage for beautiful thoughts, no connect-up with God by Christ. At one time I was very keenly interested, thought perhaps it was the way. Now it numbs and chills me. It’s so bloodless, so tied up with “states” and laws and dogma, and by what authority?

The beach was sublime this morning — low, low tide that showed things that are most times hidden, great boulders, and little round stones the size of heads, covered with a kind of dried
sea moss and looking like the tops of human heads. The sea urchins squirted at you as you walked and crabs scuttled, and the air and the sea and the earth were on good terms, and made little caressing sounds. The sea kissed the pebbles and the little breeze petted everything and wasn’t cold or annoying. As for the earth, she is beside herself with sprouts and so happy. The air and the earth and the sea seemed to be holding some splendid wonderful secret, folding it up between them and saying to you, “Peep and guess. If you guess right you can have it.” And you’re almost scared to guess for fear of being wrong and not getting it.

I THINK PERHAPS
it’s this way in art. The spirit of the thing calls to your soul. First it hails it in passing and your soul pauses and shouts back, “Coming.” But the soul dwells in your innermost being and it has a lot of courts and rooms and things to pass through, doors and furniture and clutter to go round and through, and she has to pass through and round all this impedimenta before she can get out in the open and catch up and sometimes she can’t go on at all but is all snarled up in obstructions. But sometimes she does go direct and clear and catches up and goes along. Sometimes they can only go a little bit of way together and sometimes quite far, but after a certain distance she always has to drop back. But, oh, if you could only go far enough to see the beauty of the whole complete thought that has called out to you!

Life is so cram-full of disappointments and some are little things that one should not mind at all and often those little brutes seem to cut deepest. I got a letter from Lawren. I did want a good honest
opinion on the “Cow Yard.” All he said in a three-page letter was one-half sentence: “The Cow Yard is fine. Have only read it once. Will read it again later. Have no criticism to offer.” Now what help is that? I know it’s fine because I put all my best into it, but I wanted some helpful hints, comments, suggestions, opinions. Shucks! “Not one can acquire for another, not one can grow for another, not one,” says Whitman. Plow, harrow, seed your own land with your own hand. Fred gives you a cracking hard crit, lances clean to the bone, hurts and helps. I wonder what aeons of time will elapse before I hear from Fred. What an impotent devil I am. If one could see things
clearer.
After all, we all stand so
utterly alone
and our only real critic and judge is our own soul. I suppose if we were absolutely straight and honest with our own selves … but, there you are, everything’s a muddle.