I wish I had your gift of facile and fascinating rhyme: I would turn it to account to thank you for your note and your sympathy. Yes, Ibsen is ugly, common, hard, prosaic, bottomlessly bourgeois--and with his distinction so far _in_, as it were, so behind doors and beyond vestibules, that one is excusable for not pushing one's way to it. And yet of his art he's a master--and I feel in him, to the pitch of almost intolerable boredom, the presence and the insistence of life. On the other hand his mastery, so bare and lean as it is, wouldn't count nearly as much in any medium in which the genus was otherwise represented. In _our_ sandy desert even this translated octopus (excuse my confusion of habitats!!) sits alone, and isn't kept in his place by relativity. "Thanks awfully" for having retained an impression from the few Tales. My intentions are mostly good. I hope to knock at your door this p.m.
An article by H. J. on George du Maurier had appeared in _Harper's Weekly_, April 14, 1894.
Only see, my dear Kikaccio, to what my thick-and-thin espousal of your genius exposes me at the hands of an unknown American female. Guileless, stupid, muddled, distracted, well-meaning, but slightly hypocritical American female!--Don't return, of course, the letter. I haven't seen the little _cochonnerie_ I wrote about you, bothered, preoccupied with other work, more and more incapable of writing _that_ sort of thing gracefully and properly--in the muddle and confusion of my coming abroad; and I hope _you_ haven't, by the trop bons soins of McIlvaine, seen it either. But I bless it in that through arousing the American female my clumsy 'critique' has given me the occasion to salutarvi tutti. Are you on the hill or in the vale? I give it up, only pressing you all to my bosom wherever you are. Trilby goes on with a life and charm and loveability that gild the whole day one reads her. It's most delightfully and vividly talked! And then drawn!--no, it isn't fair. Well, I'm in Venice and you're not--so you've not got quite everything. It has been cold and wet; but Italy is always Italy--and the only thing really to be depended on quand même. I hope you have not returned to Hampstead, if you _have_ returned, without tying your legs somewhere or other to Bayswater. I hope that everything has been well with you all--you yourself most well. It makes me homesick to write to you--but it is the only thing that does. I trust fame and flattery and flowers flow in upon you with the revolving Harpers.... Write me a word--tell me you don't hate me. I seem to remember rather disagreeably what I wrote about you.