I wrote you a scrabbly note from Ravenna a few days since--but I must
follow it up, without delay, with something better. I came on here an
hour afterwards, and shall remain till June 1st or 2nd. I find Rome
deliriously cool and empty, and still very pleasing in spite of the
"ruining" which has been going on so long and of which one has heard so
much, i.e., the redemption and cockneyfication of the ruins. This
"changes" immensely--as everyone says; but I find myself, I am afraid,
so much _more_ changed--since I first knew and rhapsodized over it, that
I am bound in justice to hold Rome the less criminal of the two. I am
thinking a little about going down--if the coolness lasts--for three or
four days to Naples; but I haven't decided. I feel rather hard and
heartless to be prattling about these touristries to you, with the sad
picture I have had these last weeks of your--William's--state of
suffering. But it is only a way of saying that that state makes one feel
it to be the greater duty for me to be as well as I can. Absit omen!
Your so interesting letter of the 6th dictated to Alice speaks of the
possibility of your abscess continuing not to heal--but I trust the
event has long ere this reassured, comforted and liberated you.
Meanwhile may Alice have smoothed your pillow as even she has never
smoothed it before.... As regards the life, the power, the temper, the
humour and beauty and expressiveness of the Diary in itself--these
things were partly "discounted" to me in advance by so much of Alice's
talk during her last years--and my constant association with her--which
led me often to reflect about her extraordinary force of mind and
character, her whole way of taking life--and death--in very much the
manner in which the book does. I find in its pages, for instance, many
things I heard her say. None the less I have been immensely impressed
with the thing as a revelation of a moral and personal picture. It is
heroic in its individuality, its independence--its face-to-face with the
universe for and by herself--and the beauty and eloquence with which she
often expresses this, let alone the rich irony and humour, constitute (I
wholly agree with you) a new claim for the family renown. This last
element--her style, her power to write--are indeed to me a delight--for
I have had many letters from her. Also it brings back to me all sorts of
things I am glad to keep--I mean things that happened, hours, occasions,
conversations--brings them back with a strange, living richness. But it
also puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her
life-time--that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality
really would have made the equal, the reciprocal, life of a "well"
person--in the usual world--almost impossible to her--so that her
disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her
of the practical problem of life--as it suppressed the element of
equality, reciprocity, etc. The violence of her reaction against her
British _ambiente_, against everything English, engenders some of her
most admirable and delightful passages--but I feel in reading them, as I
always felt in talking with her, that inevitably she simplified too
much, shut up in her sick room, exercised her wondrous vigour of
judgment on too small a scrap of what really surrounded her. It would
have been modified in many ways if she had _lived_ with them (the
English) more--seen more of the men, etc. But doubtless it is fortunate
for the fun and humour of the thing that it wasn't modified--as surely
the critical emotion (about them,) the essence of much of their nature,
was never more beautifully expressed. As for her allusions to H.--they
fill me with tears and cover me with blushes.... I find an immense
eloquence in her passionate "radicalism"--her most distinguishing
feature almost--which, in her, was absolutely direct and original (like
everything that was in her,) unreflected, uncaught from entourage or
example. It would really have made her, had she lived in the world, a
feminine "political force." But had she lived in the world and seen
things nearer she would have had disgusts and disillusions. However,
what comes out in the book--as it came out to me in fact--is that she
was really an Irishwoman; transplanted, transfigured--yet none the less
fundamentally national--in spite of her so much larger and finer than
Irish intelligence. She felt the Home Rule question absolutely as only
an Irishwoman (not anglicised) could. It was a tremendous emotion with
her--inexplicable in any other way--but perfectly explicable by
"atavism." What a pity she wasn't born there--and had her health for it.
She would have been (if, always, she had not fallen a victim to
disgust--a large "if") a national glory! But I am writing too much and
my late hindrances have left me with tremendous arrears of
correspondence. I thank you, dear Alice, _caramente_, for your sweet
letter received two or three weeks before William's. I crudely hope you
won't let your house--so as to have it to go to in the summer. Otherwise
what will become of you. I dig my nose into the fleshiest parts of the
young Francis. Tell Peggy I cling to her--and to Harry too, and Billy
not less.... I haven't sent you "The Yellow Book"--on purpose; and
indeed I have been weeks and weeks receiving a copy of it myself. I say
on purpose because although my little tale which ushers it in ("The
Death of the Lion") appears to have had, for a thing of mine, an unusual
success, I hate too much the horrid aspect and company of the whole
publication. And yet I am again to be intimately, conspicuously
associated with the 2d number. It is for gold and to oblige the
worshipful Harland (the editor). Wait and read the two tales in a
volume--with 2 or 3 others. Above all be _debout_ and forgive the long
reticence of your affectionate