[_Saranac_, _Winter_ 1887–8.]
MY DEAR ARCHER,—What am I to say? I have read your friend’s book with
singular relish. If he has written any other, I beg you will let me see
it; and if he has not, I beg him to lose no time in supplying the
deficiency. It is full of promise; but I should like to know his age.
There are things in it that are very clever, to which I attach small
importance; it is the shape of the age. And there are passages,
particularly the rally in presence of the Zulu king, that show genuine
and remarkable narrative talent—a talent that few will have the wit to
understand, a talent of strength, spirit, capacity, sufficient vision,
and sufficient self-sacrifice, which last is the chief point in a
narrator.
As a whole, it is (of course) a fever dream of the most feverish. Over
Bashville the footman I howled with derision and delight; I dote on
Bashville—I could read of him for ever; _de Bashville je suis le
fervent_—there is only one Bashville, and I am his devoted slave;
_Bashville est magnifique_, _mais il n’est guère possible_. He is the
note of the book. It is all mad, mad and deliriously delightful; the
author has a taste in chivalry like Walter Scott’s or Dumas’, and then he
daubs in little bits of socialism; he soars away on the wings of the
romantic griffon—even the griffon, as he cleaves air, shouting with
laughter at the nature of the quest—and I believe in his heart he thinks
he is labouring in a quarry of solid granite realism.
It is this that makes me—the most hardened adviser now extant—stand back
and hold my peace. If Mr. Shaw is below five-and-twenty, let him go his
path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic, and
pursue romance with his eyes open;—or perhaps he knows it;—God knows!—my
brain is softened.
It is HORRID FUN. All I ask is more of it. Thank you for the pleasure
you gave us, and tell me more of the inimitable author.
(I say, Archer, my God, what women!)—Yours very truly,