With reference to the following, it must be explained that the first
draft of the first part of the _Amateur Emigrant_, when it reached me
about Christmas, had seemed to me, compared to his previous travel
papers, a somewhat wordy and spiritless record of squalid
experiences, little likely to advance his still only half-established
reputation; and I had written to him to that effect, inopportunely
enough, with a fuller measure even than usual of the frankness which
always marked our intercourse.
_608 Bush Street, San Francisco, California [January 1880]._
MY DEAR COLVIN,--I received this morning your long letter from Paris.
Well, God's will be done; if it's dull, it's dull; it was a fair fight,
and it's lost, and there's an end. But, fortunately, dulness is not a
fault the public hates; perhaps they may like this vein of dulness. If
they don't, damn them, we'll try them with another. I sat down on the
back of your letter, and wrote twelve Cornhill pages this day as ever
was of that same despised _Emigrant_; so you see my moral courage has
not gone down with my intellect. Only, frankly, Colvin, do you think it
a good plan to be so eminently descriptive, and even eloquent in
dispraise? You rolled such a lot of polysyllables over me that a better
man than I might have been disheartened.--However, I was not, as you
see, and am not. The _Emigrant_ shall be finished and leave in the
course of next week. And then, I'll stick to stories. I am not
frightened. I know my mind is changing; I have been telling you so for
long; and I suppose I am fumbling for the new vein. Well, I'll find it.
The _Vendetta_ you will not much like, I dare say: and that must be
finished next; but I'll knock you with _The Forest State: A Romance_.
I'm vexed about my letters; I know it is painful to get these
unsatisfactory things; but at least I have written often enough. And not
one soul ever gives me any _news_, about people or things; everybody
writes me sermons; it's good for me, but hardly the food necessary for a
man who lives all alone on forty-five cents a day, and sometimes less,
with quantities of hard work and many heavy thoughts. If one of you
could write me a letter with a jest in it, a letter like what is written
to real people in this world--I am still flesh and blood--I should enjoy
it. Simpson did, the other day, and it did me as much good as a bottle
of wine. A lonely man gets to feel like a pariah after awhile--or no,
not that, but like a saint and martyr, or a kind of macerated clergyman
with pebbles in his boots, a pillared Simeon, I'm damned if I know what,
but, man alive, I want gossip.
My health is better, my spirits steadier, I am not the least cast down.
If the _Emigrant_ was a failure, the _Pavilion_, by your leave, was not:
it was a story quite adequately and rightly done, I contend; and when I
find Stephen, for whom certainly I did not mean it, taking it in, I am
better pleased with it than before. I know I shall do better work than
ever I have done before; but, mind you, it will not be like it. My
sympathies and interests are changed. There shall be no more books of
travel for me. I care for nothing but the moral and the dramatic, not a
jot for the picturesque or the beautiful, other than about people. It
bored me hellishly to write the _Emigrant_; well, it's going to bore
others to read it; that's only fair.
I should also write to others; but indeed I am jack-tired, and must go
to bed to a French novel to compose myself for slumber.--Ever your
affectionate friend,