[_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, 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 the 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,