The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds by Amber K. Regis

Author:Amber K. Regis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

February 9. Keeping a diary is in some respects a bad thing. It gives one a one-sided view of one’s life, and that the morbid side. —For when one is happy one does not write. All this last I wrote at twelve o’clock the other night, because I couldn’t sleep and was miserable, and Johnnie was away in London, and my distempered thought would find vent somewhere. —And I did myself no good by it, only went shivering to bed towards one o’clock, more wide awake and miserable than ever. —And after all my worst dread was imaginary. For the weakness and sickness which I then thought was coming upon me again is not to be, I hope, at least for a season, and I shall have rest in myself. This is comfort. —If we can let our house for a few months, and so get rid of care, and go abroad for a season, how happy we ought to be. —But I wish I could cultivate the home-feeling towards our house in Norfolk Square, instead of longing so intemperately to get rid of it, it would be wiser, more womanly. —Wandering about is very well for a season, but our life has to be lived somewhere, and the home we have chosen to bring up our children in ought to have a different feeling to me from this that I have towards it. —I almost wish I could be forced to live in it for a whole year, never quitting it, so as to be made to feel it inevitable that I should live there always, instead of this endless speculative retrospect, as to what might have been. And Johnnie is so good and patient to me always, and I am no comfort to him, only trouble. How weak I am, when I began life with such real honest earnest determination to be strong and a support to him, and now I am weak, querulous, cowardly, shirking my duties, and hating what ought to be such a happy life. —How unfit I am to be a wife! —and then a mother’s duties are coming too, bye and bye, and those are graver still. How little fitted I am to mould and form my little Janet’s character, if my own is so weak and tottering. Had I never realized the seriousness of life in the old time, that now it is come, I am to break under it, and be useless. —There are so many people, that I used to dislike or despise, who I see now, are better, truer, wiser women in their lives than I. Oh my God, make me better, I cry, I struggle to be strong, and it comes not, I pray to thee, but it is blindly, faithlessly. And all my life is full of good, full of blessing, if I could but get rid of this gnawing, sordid dread of expense and responsibility. I try to hide it from Johnnie, for he hates it, and it is unworthy, but hiding it only makes it worse.

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