_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_ [_Spring_ 1886].
MY DEAR SYMONDS,—If we have lost touch, it is (I think) only in a
material sense; a question of letters, not hearts. You will find a warm
welcome at Skerryvore from both the lightkeepers; and, indeed, we never
tell ourselves one of our financial fairy tales, but a run to Davos is a
prime feature. I am not changeable in friendship; and I think I can
promise you you have a pair of trusty well-wishers and friends in
Bournemouth: whether they write or not is but a small thing; the flag may
not be waved, but it is there.
Jekyll is a dreadful thing, I own; but the only thing I feel dreadful
about is that damned old business of the war in the members. This time
it came out; I hope it will stay in, in future.
Raskolnikoff {20} is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years; I
am glad you took to it. Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish
it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an
illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff
was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on
further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of
to-day, which prevents them from living _in_ a book or a character, and
keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I
suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a
room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured
and purified. The Juge d’Instruction I thought a wonderful, weird,
touching, ingenious creation: the drunken father, and Sonia, and the
student friend, and the uncircumscribed, protaplasmic humanity of
Raskolnikoff, all upon a level that filled me with wonder: the execution
also, superb in places. Another has been translated—_Humiliés et
Offensés_. It is even more incoherent than _Le Crime et le Châtiment_,
but breathes much of the same lovely goodness, and has passages of power.
Dostoieffsky is a devil of a swell, to be sure. Have you heard that he
became a stout, imperialist conservative? It is interesting to know. To
something of that side, the balance leans with me also in view of the
incoherency and incapacity of all. The old boyish idea of the march on
Paradise being now out of season, and all plans and ideas that I hear
debated being built on a superb indifference to the first principles of
human character, a helpless desire to acquiesce in anything of which I
know the worst assails me. Fundamental errors in human nature of two
sorts stand on the skyline of all this modern world of aspirations.
First, that it is happiness that men want; and second, that happiness
consists of anything but an internal harmony. Men do not want, and I do
not think they would accept, happiness; what they live for is rivalry,
effort, success—the elements our friends wish to eliminate. And, on the
other hand, happiness is a question of morality—or of immorality, there
is no difference—and conviction. Gordon was happy in Khartoum, in his
worst hours of danger and fatigue; Marat was happy, I suppose, in his
ugliest frenzy; Marcus Aurelius was happy in the detested camp; Pepys was
pretty happy, and I am pretty happy on the whole, because we both
somewhat crowingly accepted a _via media_, both liked to attend to our
affairs, and both had some success in managing the same. It is quite an
open question whether Pepys and I ought to be happy; on the other hand,
there is no doubt that Marat had better be unhappy. He was right (if he
said it) that he was _la misère humaine_, cureless misery—unless perhaps
by the gallows. Death is a great and gentle solvent; it has never had
justice done it, no, not by Whitman. As for those crockery chimney-piece
ornaments, the bourgeois (_quorum pars_), and their cowardly dislike of
dying and killing, it is merely one symptom of a thousand how utterly
they have got out of touch of life. Their dislike of capital punishment
and their treatment of their domestic servants are for me the two
flaunting emblems of their hollowness.
God knows where I am driving to. But here comes my lunch.
Which interruption, happily for you, seems to have stayed the issue. I
have now nothing to say, that had formerly such a pressure of twaddle.
Pray don’t fail to come this summer. It will be a great disappointment,
now it has been spoken of, if you do.—Yours ever,