_To W. E. Norris._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Dec. 23rd, 1896.
My dear Norris,
I respond with joy to your suggestion in your beautiful letter of two
days ago--that I shall enable you to find a word from me on your table
on the darkest a. m. of the year; in the first place because I am much
touched by your attaching to any word of mine any power to comfort or
charm; and in the second because I can well measure--by my own--your
sense of a melancholy from which you must appeal. It is indeed a
lugubrious feast and a miserable merriment. But it is something to spend
the evil season by one's own poor hearthstone (save that yours is
opulent), crouching over the embers and chuckling low over all the
dreadful places where one is not! I've been literally pressed to go to
two or three--one of them in Northumberland! (the cheek of some people!)
and the reflection that I _might_ be there and yet by heaven's mercy am
not, does give a faint blush as of the rose to my otherwise deep
depression. It is a mild, gray, rainless, sunless inoffensive sort of
Xmas here--and the shop fronts look rather prettily pink and green and
golden in the dear dirty old London streets--and I have ventured into
three or four--but _I_ do it, bless you, for nine and sevenpence
half-penny, all told! No wonder you want epistolary balm if you're
already in the fifties! Do you give them diamond necklaces and Arab
horses all round?--But Torquay, I too intensely felt, has gorgeous ways
of its own. Really it isn't bad here, for almost every one has left
town. I have yet had nothing worse to suffer than a first night at the
Lyceum--the too great Irvingism of which--mainly in Ellen Terry's
box--had been, the same day, pleasantly mitigated, in advance, by Tessa
Gosse in Sheridan's _Critic_. Tessa had a play and acted Mr Puff better
than any of her blushing fellow-nymphs acted anything else. And on New
Year's eve I go to her parents for a carouse of some sort, and until
then, thank God! I don't dine out save on Xmas day. Nor in 1897--by all
that's holy! _ever_ again! I have been quite smothered with it these two
months--and it's getting far beyond a joke.... I see no literary fry,
and languish in incorrigible obscurity. I had a fevered dream that _The
Other House_ might reach a second edition--but it declines to do
anything of the sort, and the pauper's grave continues to yawn.
Nevertheless--as it is assured any way--I _may_ go to Italy on April
1st. Meanwhile, my dear Norris, I think of you with a degree of envy
which even the manners of Topper scarce avail to diminish--I mean
because you have a beautiful home and are so many miles nearer than I am
to nature. You are also nearer to Miss Norris, and that is another
advantage, even though it does make a hole in L50! I have nothing better
to offer her on Xmas a.m. than the very friendly handshake of yours and
hers, my dear Norris, affectionately and always,