_To Paul Bourget._
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
19th August, 1898.
Mon cher Ami,
I have hideously delayed to acknowledge your so interesting letter from
Paris, and now the manner of my response does little to repair the
missing grace of my silence. I trust, however, to your general
confidence not to exact of me the detail of the reasons why I am more
and more _asservi_ to this benevolent legibility, which I so delight in
on the part of others that I find it difficult to understand their
occasional resentment of the same on my own--a resentment that I know
indeed, from generous licence already given, you do not share. I have
promised myself each day to attack you pen in hand, but the overpowering
heat which, I grieve to say, has reigned even on my balmy hilltop, has,
by really sickening me, taken the colour out of all my Gallo-latin,
leaving very blanched as well the paler idiom in which I at last
perforce address you.
I have been entering much more than my silly silence represents into the
sequel of your return to London, and not less into the sequel of _that_.
Please believe in my affectionate participation as regards the Bezly
Thorne consultation and whatever emotion it may have excited in either
of you. To that emotion I hope the healing waters have already applied
the most cooling, soothing, softening douche--or administered a not less
beneficent draught if the enjoyment of them has had in fact to be more
inward. I congratulate you on the decision you so speedily took and,
with your usual Napoleonic celerity when the surface of the globe is in
question, so energetically acted upon. I trust you are, in short, really
settled for a while among rustling German woods and plashing German
waters. (Those are really, for the most part, my own main impressions of
Germany--the memory of ancient summers there at more or less bosky
Baeder, or other Kur-orten, involving a great deal of open air strolling
in the shade and sitting under trees.) This particular dose of
Deutschland will, I feel, really have been more favourable to you than
your having had to swallow the Teuton-element in the form of the
cookery, or of any other of the manifold attributes, of the robust
fausse anglaise whom I here so confoundingly revealed to you. Let it
console you also a little that you would have had to bear, as well, with
that burden, a temperature that the particular conditions of the house
I showed you would not have done much to minimise. I have been grilled,
but I have borne it better for not feeling that I had put you also on
the stove. Rye goes on baking, this amazing summer, but, though I
suppose the heat is everywhere, you have a more refreshing regimen. I
pray for the happiest and most marked results from it.
I have received the _Duchesse Bleue_, and also the Land of Cockaigne
from Madame Paul, whom I thank very kindly for her inscription. I had
just read the Duchess, but haven't yet had leisure to attack the great
Matilda. The Duchess inspires me with lively admiration--so close and
firm, and with an interest so nourished straight from the core of the
subject, have you succeeded in keeping her. I never read you sans
vouloir me colleter with you on what I can't help feeling to be the
detrimental parti-pris (unless it be wholly involuntary) of some of your
narrative, and other technical, processes. These questions of art and
form, as well as of much else, interest me deeply--really much more than
any other; and so, not less, do they interest you: yet, though they
frequently come up between us, as it were, when I read you, I nowadays
never seem to see you long enough at once to thresh them comfortably out
with you. Moreover, after all, what does threshing-out avail?--that
conviction is doubtless at the bottom of my disposition, half the time,
to let discussion go. Each of us, from the moment we are worth our salt,
writes as he can and only as he can, and his writing at all is
conditioned upon the very things that from the standpoint of another
method most lend themselves to criticism. And we each know much better
than anyone else can what the defect of our inevitable form may appear.
So, though it does strike me that your excess of anticipatory analysis
undermines too often the reader's curiosity--which is a gross, loose
way of expressing one of the things I mean--so, probably, I really
understand better than anyone except yourself why, to do the thing at
all, you must use your own, and nobody's else, trick of presentation. No
two men in the world have the same idea, image and measure of
presentation. All the same, I must some day read one of your books with
you, so interesting would it be to me--if not to _you_!--to put, from
page to page and chapter to chapter, your finger on certain places,
showing you just where and why (selon moi!) you are too prophetic, too
exposedly constructive, too disposed yourself to swim in the thick
reflective element in which you set your figures afloat. All this is a
clumsy notation of what I mean, and, on the whole, mal apropos into the
bargain, inasmuch as I find in the Duchess plenty of the art I most like
and the realisation of an admirable subject. Beautifully done the whole
episode of the actress's intervention in the rue Nouvelle, in which I
noted no end of superior touches. I doubt if any of your readers lose
less than I do--to the fiftieth part of an intention. All this part of
the book seems to me thoroughly handled--except that, I think, I should
have given Molan a different behaviour after he gets into the cab with
the girl--not have made him act so _immediately_ "in character." He
takes there no line--I mean no deeper one--which is what I think he
would have done. In fact I think I see, myself, positively what he would
have done; and in general he is, to my imagination, as you give him, too
much in character, too little mysterious. So is Mme. de Bonnivet--so
too, even, is the actress. Your love of intellectual daylight,
absolutely your pursuit of complexities, is an injury to the patches of
ambiguity and the abysses of shadow which really are the clothing--or
much of it--of the _effects_ that constitute the material of our trade.
Basta!
I ordered my year-old "Maisie" the other day to be sent to you, and I
trust she will by this time have safely arrived--in spite of some
ambiguity in the literation of the name of your villa as, with your
letter in my hand, I earnestly meditate upon it. I have also despatched
to Madame Paul myself a little volume just published--a poor little
pot-boiling study of nothing at all, qui ne tire pas a consequence. It
is but a monument to my fatal technical passion, which prevents my ever
giving up anything I have begun. So that when something that I have
supposed to be a subject turns out on trial really to be none, je m'y
acharne d'autant plus, for mere superstition--superstitious fear, I
mean, of the consequences and omens of weakness. The small book in
question is really but an exercise in the art of not appearing to one's
self to fail. You will say it is rather cruel that for such exercises
the public also should have to pay. Well, Madame Paul and you get your
exemplaire for nothing.
I have not seen La Femme et le Pantin--I see nothing in the way of books
here; but what you tell me disposes me to send for it--as well as my
impression of the only other thing that I have read by the same hand.
Only, on the question of talent and of effect produced, don't you
forget, too much, with such people, that talent and effect are
comparatively easy things with the licence of such gros moyens? They are
a great short-cut--the extremities to which all these people proceed,
and anyone can--no matter who--be more or less striking with them. But I
am writing you an interminable letter. Do let me know--sans m'en vouloir
for the quantity and quality of it--how Nauheim turns out, and receive
my heartiest wishes for all sorts of comfortable results. Yours both
always constantly,