"You have l'oreille juste" he would say, "and I value your
literary judgment."
I will here insert some of his letters, beginning with the one he
sent down to our villa at Davos a propos of the essays over which
Lady Londonderry and I had our little breeze:
I am at work upon a volume of essays in art and criticism,
puzzling to my brain and not easy to write. I think I shall ask
you to read them.
I want an intelligent audience before I publish them. I want to
"try them on" somebody's mind--like a dress--to see how they fit.
Only you must promise to write observations and, most killing
remark of all, to say when the tedium of reading them begins to
overweigh the profit of my philosophy.
I think you could help me.
After the publication he wrote:
I am sorry that the Essays I dedicated to you have been a failure
--as I think they have been--to judge by the opinions of the
Press. I wanted, when I wrote them, only to say the simple truth
of what I thought and felt in the very simplest language I could
find.
What the critics say is that I have uttered truisms in the
baldest, least attractive diction.
Here I find myself to be judged, and not unjustly. In the pursuit
of truth, I said what I had to say bluntly--and it seems I had
nothing but commonplaces to give forth. In the search for
sincerity of style, I reduced every proposition to its barest form
of language. And that abnegation of rhetoric has revealed the
nudity of my commonplaces.
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