SARANAC LAKE, March, 1888.
MY DEAR, DELIGHTFUL JAMES,—To quote your heading to my
wife, I think no man writes so elegant a letter, I am sure
none so kind, unless it be Colvin, and there is more of the
stern parent about him. I was vexed at your account of my
admired Meredith; I wish I could go and see him, as it is I
will try to write. I read with indescribable admiration your
_Emerson_. I begin to long for the day when these portraits
of yours shall be collected; do put me in. But Emerson is a
higher flight. Have you a _Tourgueneff_? You have told me many
interesting things of him, and I seem to see them written,
and forming a graceful and _bildend_ sketch. My novel is a
tragedy, four parts out of six or seven are written, and gone
to Burlingame. Five parts of it are sound, human tragedy; the
last one or two, I regret to say, are not so soundly designed;
I almost hesitate to write them; they are very picturesque,
but they are fantastic; they shame, perhaps degrade, the
beginning. I wish I knew; that was how the tale came to me
however. I got the situation; it was an old taste of mine:
The older brother goes out in the '45, the younger stays;
the younger, of course, gets title and estate and marries
the bride designate of the elder—a family match, but he (the
younger) had always loved her, and she had really loved the
elder. Do you see the situation? Then the devil and Saranac
suggested this _dénouement_, and I joined the two ends in
a day or two of constant feverish thought, and began to
write. And now—I wonder if I have not gone too far with the
fantastic. The elder brother is an _Incubus_; supposed to be
killed at Culloden, he turns up again and bleeds the family of
money; on that stopping he comes and lives with them, whence
flows the real tragedy, the nocturnal duel of the brothers
(very naturally, and indeed, I think, inevitably arising),
and second supposed death of the elder. Husband and wife now
really make up, and then the cloven hoof appears. For the
third supposed death and the manner of the third reappearance
is steep; steep, sir. It is even very steep, and I fear
it shames the honest stuff so far; but then it is highly
pictorial, and it leads up to death of the elder brother at
the hands of the younger in a perfectly cold-blooded murder,
of which I wish (and mean) the reader to approve. You see how
daring is the design. There are really but six characters,
and one of these episodic, and yet it covers eighteen years,
and will be, I imagine, the longest of my works.—Yours ever,