_To William James._
The project guardedly referred to in this letter was that of
writing a series of plays. He had already finished the
dramatisation of _The American_.
Hotel de la Ville, Milan.
May 16th, 1890.
My dear William,
...I have been both very busy and very bent on getting away this year
without fail, for a miracle, from the oppressive London season. I have
just accomplished it; I passed the St. Gotthard day before yesterday,
and I hope to find it possible to remain absent till August 1st. After
that I am ready to pay cheerfully and cheaply for my journey by staying
quietly in town for August and September, in the conditions in which you
saw me last year. I shall take as much as possible of a holiday, for I
have been working carefully, consecutively and unbrokenly for a very
long time past--turning out one thing (always "highly finished") after
another. However, I _like_ to work, thank heaven, and at the end of a
month's privation of it I sink into gloom and discomfort--so that I
shall probably not wholly "neglect my pen".... I hope you will have
received promptly a copy of _The Tragic Muse_, though I am afraid I sent
my list to the publishers a little late. I don't in the least know,
however, when the book is supposed to come out. I have no opinion or
feeling about it now--though I took long and patient and careful trouble
(which no creature will recognise) with it at the time: too much, no
doubt: for my mind is now a muddled, wearied blank on the subject. I
have shed and ejected it--it's void and dead--and my feeling as to what
may become of it is reduced to the sordid hope it will make a little
money--which it won't.... The matter you expressed a friendly hope about
the success of, and which for all sorts of reasons I desire to be
extremely secret, silent and mysterious about--I mean the enterprise I
covertly mentioned to you as conceived by me with a religious and
deliberate view of gain over a greater scale than the Book (my Books at
least) can ever approach bringing in to me: this matter is on a good and
promising footing, but it is too soon to say anything about it, save
that I am embarked in it seriously and with rather remarkably good
omens. By which I mean that it is not to depend on a single attempt, but
on half a dozen of the most resolute and scientific character, which I
find I am abundantly capable of making, but which, alas, in the light of
this discovery, I become conscious that I ought to have made ten years
ago. I was then discouraged all round, while a single word of
encouragement would have made the difference. Now it is late. But on the
other hand the thing would have been then only an experiment more or
less like another--whereas now it's an absolute necessity, imposing
itself without choice if I wish a loaf on the shelf for my old age.
Fortunately as far as it's gone it announces itself well--but I can't
tell you yet how far that is. The only thing is to do a great lot.
By the time this reaches you I suppose your wife and children will have
gone to recline under the greenwood tree. I hope their gentle outlawry
will be full of comfort for them. It's poor work to me writing about
them without ever seeing them. But my interest in them is deep and
large, and please never omit to give my great love to them: to Alice
first in the lump, to be broken up and distributed by her. May you
squeeze with a whole skin through the tight weeks of the last of the
term--may you live to rest and may you rest to live. I shall not, I
think, soon again write to you so rarely as for the last year. This will
be partly because _The Tragic Muse_ is to be my last long novel. For the
rest of my life I hope to do lots of short things with irresponsible
spaces between. I see even a great future (ten years) of such. But they
won't make money. Excuse (you probably rather will esteem) the sordid
tone of your affectionate