_Apia_, _December_ 1893.
MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,—The mail has come upon me like an armed man three
days earlier than was expected; and the Lord help me! It is impossible I
should answer anybody the way they should be. Your jubilation over
_Catriona_ did me good, and still more the subtlety and truth of your
remark on the starving of the visual sense in that book. ’Tis true, and
unless I make the greater effort—and am, as a step to that, convinced of
its necessity—it will be more true I fear in the future. I _hear_ people
talking, and I _feel_ them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction.
My two aims may be described as—
1_st_. War to the adjective.
2_nd_. Death to the optic nerve.
Admitted we live in an age of the optic nerve in literature. For how
many centuries did literature get along without a sign of it? However,
I’ll consider your letter.
How exquisite is your character of the critic in _Essays in London_! I
doubt if you have done any single thing so satisfying as a piece of style
and of insight.—Yours ever,