21 North Bank, 15 August.
My dear Mr Harrison
I HAVE read several times your letter of the nineteenth which I found awaiting me on my return, and I shall read it many times again. Pray do not ever say, or inwardly suspect, that anything you take the trouble to write to me will not be valued. On the contrary, please to imagine as well as you can the experience of a mind morbidly desponding, of a consciousness tending more and more to consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a strengthening sense of achievement – and then consider how such a mind must need the support of sympathy and approval from those who are capable of understanding its aims. I assure you your letter is an evidence of a fuller understanding than I have ever had expressed to me before. And if I needed to give emphasis to this simple statement, I should suggest to you all the miseries one’s obstinate egoism endures from the fact of being a writer of novels – books which the dullest and silliest reader thinks himself competent to deliver an opinion on. But I despise myself for feeling any annoyance at these trivial things.
That is a tremendously difficult problem which you have laid before me, and I think you see its difficulties, though they can hardly press upon you as they do on me, who have gone through again and again the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit. I think aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely æsthetic – if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram – it becomes the most offensive of all teaching. Avowed Utopias are not offensive, because they are understood to have a scientific and expository character: they do not pretend to work on the emotions, or couldn’t do it if they did pretend. I am sure, from your own statement, that you see this quite clearly. Well, then, consider the sort of agonizing labour to an English-fed imagination to make art a sufficiently real background, for the desired picture, to get breathing, individual forms, and group them in the needful relations, so that the presentation will lay hold on the emotions as human experience – will, as you say, ‘flash’ conviction on the world by means of aroused sympathy.
I took unspeakable pains in preparing to write Romola – neglecting nothing I could find that would help me to what I may call the ‘Idiom’ of Florence, in the largest sense one could stretch the word to. And there I was only trying to give some out of the normal relations. I felt that the necessary idealization could only be attained by adopting the clothing of the past. And again, it is my way (rather too much so perhaps) to urge the human sanctities through tragedy – through pity and terror as well as admiration and delights.
I only say all this to show the tenfold arduousness of such a work as the one your problem demands. On the other hand, my whole soul goes with your desire that it should be done, and I shall at least keep the great possibility (or impossibility) perpetually in my mind, as something towards which I must strive, though it may be that I can do so only in a fragmentary way.
At present I am going to take up again a work which I laid down before writing Felix.3 It is – but please let this be a secret between ourselves – an attempt at a drama, which I put aside at Mr Lewes’s request, after writing four acts, precisely because it was in that stage of Creation, or Werden, in which the idea of the characters predominates over the incarnation. Now I read it again, I find it impossible to abandon it: the conceptions move me deeply, and they have never been wrought out before. There is not a thought or symbol that I do not long to use: but the whole requires recasting, and as I never recast anything before, I think of the issue very doubtfully. When one has to work out the dramatic action for one’s self under the inspiration of an idea, instead of having a grand myth or an Italian novel ready to one’s hand, one feels anything but omnipotent. Not that I should have done any better if I had had the myth or the novel, for I am not a good user of opportunities. I think I have the right locus and historic conditions, but much else is wanting.
I have almost read through the International Essays.4 I hope they are selling enough to serve as leaven. We shall be very glad if you can spare us a sight of you before you go away. I have not, of course, said half what I want to say, but I hope opportunities of exchanging thoughts will not be wanting between us.
Always yours sincerely
M. E. Lewes