_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
Lamb House, Rye.
Wednesday night.
[Oct. 3, 1901.]
Dearest Lucy C.
I have waited to welcome you, to thank you for your dear and brilliant
Vienna letter, because you stayed my hand (therein) from writing--for
want of an address; and because I've believed that not till now (if even
now) would you be disengaged from the tangled skein of your adventures.
And even at this hour (of loud-ticking midnight stillness,) I don't
pretend to do more than greet you affectionately on the threshold of
home; promise you a better equivalent (for your so interesting, so
envy-squeezing, so vivid record of adventure) at some very near date;
and, above all, renew my jubilation at your having made so good and
brave a thing of it all--especially as _full_ and unstinted a one as you
desired. Never mind the money, I handsomely say--you will get it all
back and much more--in the refreshment and renewal and general
intellectual ventilation your six weeks will have been to you. I'm sure
the effect will go far--I want details so much that I wish I were to see
you soon--but, alas, I don't quite see when. I'm just emerging from a
domestic cyclone that has, in one way and another, cost me so much time,
that, pressed as I am with a woefully backward book, I can only for the
present hug my writing-table with convulsive knees. The figure doesn't
fit--but the postponement of all joy, alas, does. My two old
man-and-wife servants (who had been with me sixteen years) were, a few
days ago, shot into space (thank heaven at last!) by a whirlwind of but
48 hours duration; and though the absolute rupture came and went in
that time, the horrid accompaniments and upheaved neighbourhoods have
represented a woeful interruption. But it's over, and I have plunged
again (and am living, blissfully, for the present, with a house-maid and
a charwoman, and immensely enjoying my simplified state and my relief
from what I see now was a long nightmare).
I read your play in the Nineteenth Century, as you invited me, but I
can't _write_ of it now beyond saying that I was greatly struck by the
care and finish you had given it. If I must tell you categorically,
however, I don't think it a scenic subject _at all_; I think it bears
all the mark of a subject selected for a tale and done as a play as an
after-thought. I don't see, that is, what the scenic form does, or _can_
do, for it, that the narrative couldn't do better--or what it, in turn,
does for the scenic form. The inwardness is a kind of inwardness that
doesn't become an outwardness--effectively--theatrically; and the part
played in the whole by the painting of the portrait seems to me the kind
of thing for which the play is a non-conductor. And here I am _douching_
you on your doorstep with cold water. We must _talk_, we must colloquise
and compare and _renew_ the first moment we can, and I am all the while
and ever your affectionate old friend,