_To Miss Grace Norton._
_Dictated._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Christmas Day, 1897.
My dear Grace,
Is it really a year? I have been acutely conscious of its getting to be
a horrible time, but it hadn't come home to me that it was taking on
quite that insolence. Well, you see what the years--since years _il y
a_--are making of me: I don't write to you for a hideous age, and then,
when at last I do, I take the romantic occasion of this particular day
to write in this _un_sympathetic ink. But that is exactly what, as I
say, the horrid time has made of me. The use of my hand, always
difficult, has become impossible to me; and since I am reduced to
dictation, this form of dictation is the best. May its distinctness make
up for its indirectness....
I dare say that, from time to time, you hear something of me from
William; and you know, by that flickering light, that my life has had,
for a long time past, a very jog-trot sort of rhythm. I have ceased
completely to "travel." It is going on into four years since I have
crossed the Channel; and the day is not yet. This will give you a
ghastly sense of the insular object that I must have become; however, I
shall break out yet, perhaps, and surprise you. Meanwhile, none the
less, I was unable, these last days, to break the spell of immobility
even to the extent of going over to Paris to poor Daudet's funeral. I
felt that, la-bas--by which I mean in the immediate house--a certain
expectation rested on me, but I looked it straight in the face and
cynically budged not. I dislike, more and more, the terrific organized
exploitation, in Paris, on the occasion of death and burial, of every
kind of personal privacy and every kind of personal hysterics. It is
newspaperism and professionalism gone mad--in a way all its own; and I
felt as if _I_ should go mad if I even once more, let alone twenty times
more, heard Daudet personally compared (more especially _facially_
compared, eyeglass and all) to Jesus Christ. Not a French notice of him
that I have seen but has plumped it coquettishly out. I had not seen
him, thanks to my extreme recalcitrance, since the month he spent more
than two years ago in London. His death was not unhappy--was indeed too
long delayed, for all his later time has been sadly (by disease, borne
with wonderful patience and subtlety) blighted and sterilized. Yet it is
a wonderful proof of what a success his life had been that it had
remained a success in spite of that. It was the most _worked_ thing that
ever was--I mean his whole career. His talent was so great that I feel,
as to his work, that the best of it will quite intensely remain. But he
was a queer combination of a great talent with an absence of the greater
mind, as it were--the greater feeling.
...Well, my dear Grace, I can't tell you the comfort and charm it is to
be talking with you even by this horrid machinery, and to squeeze the
little round golden orange of your note dry of every testimony to your
honoured tranquillity that I can gouge out of it. My metaphors are
mixed, but my fidelity is pure. How is the mighty Montaigne? I don't
read him a millionth part as much as I ought, for of all the horrors of
London almost the worst horror is the way it conspires against the
evening book under the evening lamp. I don't "go out"--and yet, far too
much of the time, I _am_ out. The main part of the rest I devote to
wondering how I got there. A propos of which, as much as anything, do
you read Maurice Barres? If you do, his last thing, Les Deracines, is
very curious and serious, but a gruesome picture of young France. If it
didn't sound British and Pharisaic I would almost risk saying that, on
all the more and more showing, young and old France both seem to me to
be in a strange state of moral and intellectual decomposition. But this
isn't worth saying without going into the detail of the evidence--and
that would take me too far. Then there is Leslie Stephen and the little
Kiplings. Leslie seems to be out-weathering his woes in the most
extraordinary way. His health is literally better than it was in his
wife's lifetime, and is perhaps, more almost than anything else, a proof
of what a life-preserver in even the wildest waves is the perfect
possession of a _metier_. His admirable habit and knowledge of work have
saved him.... Rudyard and his wife and offspring depart presently for
South Africa. They have settled upon a small propriete at Rottingdean
near the [Burne-Jones's], and the South Africa is but a parenthetic
family picnic. It would do as well as anything else, perhaps, if one
still felt, as one used to, that everything is grist to his mill. I
don't, however, think that everything is, as the affair is turning out,
at all; I mean as to the general complexity of life. His _Ballad_ future
may still be big. But my view of his prose future has much shrunken in
the light of one's increasingly observing how little of life he can make
use of. Almost nothing civilised save steam and patriotism--and the
latter only in verse, where I _hate_ it so, especially mixed up with
God and goodness, that that half spoils my enjoyment of his great
talent. Almost nothing of the complicated soul or of the female form or
of any question of _shades_--which latter constitute, to my sense, the
real formative literary discipline. In his earliest time I thought he
perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have quite given
that up in proportion as he has come steadily from the less simple in
subject to the more simple--from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from
the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the
quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws....
Goodbye, my dear Grace. Believe that through all fallacious appearances
of ebb and flow, of sound and silence, of presence and absence, I am
always constantly yours,