Following Darkness/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
What is there in this house, in these surroundings, so utterly different from those I was born amongst, that revives a swarm of memories of my childhood and youth? My notes are piled up on the table before me, they have been there for several days, and I have not touched them, though I came here to work. A warm Italian sun floods the stiff and formal garden stretching from my window, with its pale paved walks, its fountain, and dark cypress-trees; but when I shut my eyes, it is quite another garden that I see, and now, when I have at last taken up my pen to write, it is not to fulfil the task I had set myself, but to chatter idly of a boyhood passed under other skies, grayer, softer, and colder. The odd fact is that ever since my arrival here, in spite of my being upon "classic soil," in a district rich in historical suggestion, and full, too, of the colour and odour of the south, I have been communing daily, hourly almost, with my own youth. I should like to set down simply what that youth was, without embroidery, without suppression, though, on the other hand, a mere bald enumeration of the outward facts will be little to my purpose. The facts in themselves are nothing. Unless I can recapture the spirit that hovered behind them, my task will have been fruitless, and even though in my effort to do so I shall probably accentuate it, alter it, clip its wings and make it heavy, yet that must be my aim if I am to write at all. I have little eloquence, and perhaps no power of evocation, but the whole great, soft, time-toned picture is before me at this moment, and I cannot resist the temptation to linger over it. If I linger over it pen in hand, what matter?
In the foreground there must be the portrait of a boy, but painted in the manner of Rembrandt rather than Bronzino. By this I mean there will be less of a firm, clear outline, than of light and shadow. The danger is that in the end there may be too much shadow; but at least I shall not, in the manner of a writer of fiction, have sacrificed my subject for the sake of gaining an additional brightness and vivacity. The spirit of youth is not merely bright and vivacious; above all, it is not merely thoughtless and noisy. It is melancholy, dreamy, passionate; it is admirable, and it is base; it is full of curiosity; it is healthy, and it is morbid; it is animal, and it is spiritual; sensual, yet filled with vague half-realised yearnings after an ideal—that is to say, it is the spirit of life itself, which can never be adequately indicated by the description of a fight or of a football match.