_To Charles Eliot Norton._
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
26th December, 1898.
My dear Charles,
...Let me say at once that a great part of the secret of my horrid
prolonged dumbness has been just this ugly fact of my finding myself
reduced, in my declining years, like a banker or a cabinet minister,
altogether to _dictating_ my letters. The effect of this, in turn, has
been to give me a great shyness about them--which has indeed stricken me
with silence just in proportion as the help so rendered has seemed to
myself really to minister to speech. Many people, I find, in these
conservative climes, take it extremely ill to be addressed in
Remingtonese.... Forgive, however, this long descant on my delays, my
doubts and fears, my final jump, rendered thus clumsy by my
nervousness....
The worst of such predicaments is, my dear Charles, that when one does
write, everything one has, at a thousand scattered moments, previously
wanted to say, seems to have dried up with desuetude and neglect. Oh,
all the things that should have been said on the spot if they were ever
to be said at all! This applies, you will immediately recognise--though
it's a stern truth by which I suffer most--very poignantly to all the
utterance I feel myself to have so odiously failed of at the time of
the death of dear Burne-Jones. I can only give you a very partially
lucid account of why on _that_ occasion at least no word from me reached
you. I saw myself, heard myself, felt myself, not write--and yet even
then knew perfectly both that I should be writing now and that I should
now be sorrier than ever for not writing then. It came, the miserable
event, at the very moment I was achieving, very single-handed and
unassisted, a complicated transfer of residence from London to this
place, with all sorts of bewildering material detail (consequent on
renovation, complete preparation of every kind, of old house and garden)
adding its distraction to the acute sense of pressing work fatally
retarded and blighted; so that a postponement which has finally grown to
this monstrous length began with being a thing only of moments and
hours. Then, moreover, it was simply so wretched and odious to feel him,
by a turn of the wheel of fate that had taken but an instant, gone for
ever from sight and sound and touch. I was tenderly attached to him,
with abundant reason for being, and there was something that choked and
angered me beyond what words could trust themselves to express, in the
mere blind betise of the business. So the days and the weeks went. I
went up from here to town, and thence to Rottingdean, for the committal
of his ashes, there, to the earth of the little grey-towered churchyard,
in sight of the sea, that was at the moment all smothered in lovely
spring flowers. It was a day of extraordinary beauty, and in every way a
quite indescribably sincere--I remember I could find at the time no
other word for the impression--little funeral and demonstration. The
people from London were those, almost all, in whose presence there was a
kind of harmony.... I had seen the dear man, to my great joy, only a few
hours before his death: meeting him at a kind of blighted and abortive
wedding-feast (that is a dinner before a marriage that was to take
place on the morrow) from which we were both glad to disembroil
ourselves: so that we drove together home, intimately moralising and
talking nonsense, and he put me, in the grey London midnight, down at my
corner to go on by himself to the Grange. It was the last time I saw
him, and, as one always does, I have taken ever since a pale comfort in
the thought that our parting was explicitly affectionate and such,
almost, as one would have wished it even had one known. I miss him even
here and now. He was one of the most loveable of men and most charming
of friends--altogether and absolutely distinguished. I think his career,
as an artistic one, and speaking quite apart from the degree of one's
sympathy with his work, one of the greatest of boons to our most vulgar
of ages. There was no false note in him, nothing to dilute the strain;
he knew his direction and held it hard--wrought with passion and went as
straight as he could. He was for all this always, to me, a great
comfort. For the rest death came to him, I think, at none so bad a
moment. He had, essentially, to my vision, really _done_. And he was
very tired, and his cup was, with all the mingled things, about as full
as it would hold. It was so good a moment, in short, that I think his
memory is already feeling the benefit of it in a sort of rounded
finished way. I was not at the sale of his pictures and drawings which
took place after his death--I have not stirred from this spot since I
came to it at the end of June; but though I should immensely have
cherished some small scrap, everything went at prices--magnificent for
his estate--that made acquisition a vain dream.... I have had--and
little wonder--scant news of you. I know you've renounced your
professorship. I know you felt strongly on public events. But I am in a
depressed twilight--of discrimination, I mean--that enables me to make
less of these things than I should like to do. So much has come and
gone, these six months, that how can I talk about it? It's strange, the
consciousness possible to an American here to-day, of being in a country
in which the drift of desire--so far as it concerns itself with the
matter--is that we _shall_ swell and swell, and acquire and _re_quire,
to the top of our opportunity. My own feeling, roughly stated, is that
we have not been good enough for our opportunity--vulgar, in a manner,
as that was and is; but it may be the real message of the whole business
to make us as much better as the great grabbed-up British Empire has,
unmistakeably, made the English. But over these abysses--into them
rather--I peer with averted eye. I fear I am too lost in the mere
spectacle for any decent morality. Good-bye, my dear Charles, and
forgive my mechanic volubility. Isn't it better to have ticked and
shocked than never to have ticked at all? I send my love to all your
house....
Your ever, my dear Charles, affectionate old friend,