[_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_, _April_ 1886.]
MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,—The Book—It is all drafted: I hope soon to send you
for comments Chapters III., IV., and V. Chapter VII. is roughly but
satisfactorily drafted: a very little work should put that to rights.
But Chapter VI. is no joke; it is a _mare magnum_: I swim and drown and
come up again; and it is all broken ends and mystification: moreover, I
perceive I am in want of more matter. I must have, first of all, a
little letter from Mr. Ewing about the phonograph work: _If_ you think he
would understand it is quite a matter of chance whether I use a word or a
fact out of it. If you think he would not: I will go without. Also,
could I have a look at Ewing’s _précis_? And lastly, I perceive I must
interview you again about a few points; they are very few, and might come
to little; and I propose to go on getting things as well together as I
can in the meanwhile, and rather have a final time when all is ready and
only to be criticised. I do still think it will be good. I wonder if
Trélat would let me cut? But no, I think I wouldn’t after all; ’tis so
quaint and pretty and clever and simple and French, and gives such a good
sight of Fleeming: the plum of the book, I think.
You misunderstood me in one point: I always hoped to found such a
society; that was the outside of my dream, and would mean entire success.
_But_—I cannot play Peter the Hermit. In these days of the Fleet Street
journalist, I cannot send out better men than myself, with wives or
mothers just as good as mine, and sisters (I may at least say) better, to
a danger and a long-drawn dreariness that I do not share. My wife says
it’s cowardice; what brave men are the leader-writers! Call it
cowardice; it is mine. Mind you, I may end by trying to do it by the pen
only: I shall not love myself if I do; and is it ever a good thing to do
a thing for which you despise yourself?—even in the doing? And if the
thing you do is to call upon others to do the thing you neglect? I have
never dared to say what I feel about men’s lives, because my own was in
the wrong: shall I dare to send them to death? The physician must heal
himself; he must honestly _try_ the path he recommends: if he does not
even try, should he not be silent?
I thank you very heartily for your letter, and for the seriousness you
brought to it. You know, I think when a serious thing is your own, you
keep a saner man by laughing at it and yourself as you go. So I do not
write possibly with all the really somewhat sickened gravity I feel. And
indeed, what with the book, and this business to which I referred, and
Ireland, I am scarcely in an enviable state. Well, I ought to be glad,
after ten years of the worst training on earth—valetudinarianism—that I
can still be troubled by a duty. You shall hear more in time; so far, I
am at least decided: I will go and see Balfour when I get to London.
We have all had a great pleasure: a Mrs. Rawlinson came and brought with
her a nineteen-year-old daughter, simple, human, as beautiful as—herself;
I never admired a girl before, you know it was my weakness: we are all
three dead in love with her. How nice to be able to do so much good to
harassed people by—yourself! Ever yours,