An excellent touch is p. 584. "By instinct or design he eschews what
demands constructive patience." I believe it is both; my theory is that
literature must always be most at home in treating movement and change;
hence I look for them.
* * * * *
BOURNEMOUTH, October 30th, 1885.
DEAR MR. ARCHER,—It is possible my father may be soon down with me; he
is an old man and in bad health and spirits; and I could neither leave
him alone, nor could we talk freely before him. If he should be here
when you offer your visit, you will understand if I have to say no, and
put you off.
I quite understand your not caring to refer to things of private
knowledge. What still puzzles me is how you ('in the witness box'—ha!
I like the phrase) should have made your argument actually hinge on a
contention which the facts answered.
I am pleased to hear of the correctness of my guess. It is then as
I supposed; you are of the school of the generous and not the sullen
pessimists; and I can feel with you. I used myself to rage when I saw
sick-folk going by in their Bath-chairs; since I have been sick myself
(and always when I was sick myself), I found life, even in its rough
places, to have a property of easiness. That which we suffer ourselves
has no longer the same air of monstrous injustice and wanton cruelty
that suffering wears when we see it in the case of others. So we begin
gradually to see that things are not black, but have their strange
compensations; and when they draw towards their worst, the idea of
death is like a bed to lie on. I should bear false witness if I did not
declare life happy. And your wonderful statement that happiness tends
to die out and misery to continue, which was what put me on the track
of your frame of mind, is diagnostic of the happy man raging over the
misery of others; it could never be written by the man who had tried
what unhappiness was like. And at any rate, it was a slip of the pen:
the ugliest word that silence has to declare is a reserved indifference
to happiness and misery in the individual; it declares no leaning toward
the black, no iniquity on the large scale in fate's doings, rather a
marble equality, dread not cruel, giving and taking away and reconciling.
Why have I not written my _Timon_? Well, here is my worst quarrel with
you. You take my young books as my last word. The tendency to try to say
more has passed unperceived (my fault, that). And you make no allowance
for the slowness with which a man finds and tries to learn his tools. I
began with a neat brisk little style, and a sharp little knack of partial
observation; I have tried to expand my means, but still I can only utter
a part of what I wish to say, and am bound to feel; and much of it will
die unspoken. But if I had the pen of Shakespeare, I have no _Timon_ to
give forth. I feel kindly to the powers that be; I marvel they should
use me so well; and when I think of the case of others I wonder too, but
in another vein, whether they may not, whether they must not, be like
me, still with some compensation, some delight. To have suffered, nay,
to suffer, sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is
a great truth, and has to be learned in the fire.—Yours very truly,