I have read the
thing intimately, and I take off my hat to you as to the very
Balzac of diarists. It is full of life and force and colour, of a
remarkable instinct for getting close to your people and things
and for squeezing, in the case of the resolute portraits of
certain of your eminent characters, especially the last drop of
truth and sense out of them--at least as the originals affected
YOUR singularly searching vision. Happy, then, those who had, of
this essence, the fewest secrets or crooked lives to yield up to
you--for the more complicated and unimaginable some of them
appear, the more you seem to me to have caught and mastered them.
Then I have found myself hanging on your impression in each case
with the liveliest suspense and wonder, so thrillingly does the
expression keep abreast of it and really translate it. This and
your extraordinary fullness of opportunity, make of the record a
most valuable English document, a rare revelation of the human
inwardness of political life in this country, and a picture of
manners and personal characters as "creditable" on the whole (to
the country) as it is frank and acute. The beauty is that you
write with such authority, that you've seen so much and lived and
moved so much, and that having so the chance to observe and feel
and discriminate in the light of so much high pressure, you
haven't been in the least afraid, but have faced and assimilated
and represented for all you're worth.
I have lived, you see, wholly out of the inner circle of political
life, and yet more or less in wondering sight, for years, of many
of its outer appearances, and in superficial contact--though this,
indeed, pretty anciently now--with various actors and figures,
standing off from them on my quite different ground and neither
able nor wanting to be of the craft of mystery (preferring, so to
speak, my own poor, private ones, such as they have been) and yet
with all sorts of unsatisfied curiosities and yearnings and
imaginings in your general, your fearful direction.
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