Jena, April 20th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--You tell me I do not answer your letters, but
really I think I do quite often enough. I want to make the most of these
weeks of idle getting strong again, and it is a sad waste of time
writing. My step-mother has had such a dose of me sick and incapable, of
doctor's bills and physic and beef-tea and night-lights, that she is
prolonging the convalescent period quite beyond its just limits and will
have me do nothing lest I should do too much. So I spend strange,
glorious days, days strange and glorious to me, with nothing to do for
anybody but myself and a clear conscience to do it with. The single
sanction of my step-mother's approval has been enough to clear my
conscience, from which you will see how illogically consciences can be
cleared; for have I not always been sure she has no idea whatever of
what is really good? Yet just her approval, a thing I know to be faulty
and for ever in the wrong place, is sufficient to prop up my conscience
and make it feel secure. How then, while I am busy reading Jane Austen
and Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth--books foreordained from all time
for the delight of persons getting well--shall I find time to write to
you? And you must forgive me for a certain surprise that you should have
time to write so much to me. What have I done to deserve these long
letters? How many Foreign Office envelopes do you leave ungummed to
write them? _Es ist zu viel Ehre_. It is very good of you. No, I will
not make phrases like that, for I know you do not do it for any reason
whatever but because you happen to want to.
You are going through one of those tiresome soul-sicknesses that
periodically overtake the too comfortable, and you must, apparently,
tell somebody about it. Well, it is a form of _Weltschmerz,_ and only
afflicts the well-fed. Pray do not suppose that I am insinuating that
food is of undue interest to you; but it is true that if you did not
have several meals a day and all of them too nice, if there were doubts
about their regular recurrence, if, briefly, you were a washerwoman or a
plough-boy, you would not have things the matter with your soul.
Washerwomen and ploughboys do not have sick souls. Probably you will say
they have no souls to be sick; but they have, you know. I imagine their
souls thin and threadbare, stunted by cold and hunger, poor and pitiful,
but certainly there. And I don't know that it is not a nicer sort of
soul to have inside one's plodding body than an unwieldy, overgrown
thing, chiefly water and air and lightly changeable stuff, so
unsubstantial that it flops--forgive the word, but it does flop--on to
other souls in search of sympathy and support and comfort and all the
rest of the things washer-women waste no time looking for, because they
know they wouldn't find them.
You are a poet, and I do not take a youthful poet seriously; but if you
were not I would laugh derisively at your comparing the entrance of my
letters into your room at the Foreign Office to the bringing in of a
bunch of cottage flowers still fresh with dew. I don't know that my
pride does not rather demand a comparison to a bunch of hot-house
flowers--a bouquet it would become then, wouldn't it?--or my romantic
sense to a bunch of field flowers, wild, graceful, easily wearied
things, that would not care at all for Foreign Offices. But I expect
cottage is really the word. My letters conjure up homely visions, and I
am sure the bunch you see is a tight posy of
Sweet-Williams, with their homely cottage smell.
It was charming of Matthew Arnold to let Sweet-Williams have such a nice
line, but I don't think they quite deserve it. They have a dear little
name and a dear little smell, but the things themselves might have been
manufactured in a Berlin furniture shop where upholstery in plush
prevails, instead of made in that sweetest corner of heaven from whence
all good flowers come.
Yours sincerely,