34 De Vere Gardens, W. October 21st [1893.]
The postal guide tells me, disobligingly, that there is no mail to you via San Francisco this month and that I must confide my few lines to the precarious and perfidious Hamburg. I do so, then, for the plain reason that I can no longer repress the enthusiasm that has surged within me ever since I read _Catriona_. I missed, just after doing so, last month's post, and I was infinitely vexed that it should not have conveyed to you the freshness of my rapture. For the said _Catriona_ so reeks and hums with genius that there is no refuge for the desperate reader but in straightforward prostration. I'm not sure that it's magnanimous of you to succeed so inconsiderately--there is a modesty in easy triumph which your flushed muse perhaps a little neglects.--But forgive that lumbering image--I won't attempt to carry it out. Let me only say that I don't despatch these ineffectual words on their too watery way to do anything but thank you for an exquisite pleasure. I hold that when a book has the high beauty of that one there's a poor indelicacy in what simple folk call criticism. The work lives by so absolute a law that it's grotesque to prattle about what _might_ have been! I shall express to you the one point in which my sense was conscious of an unsatisfied desire, but only after saying first how rare an achievement I think the whole personality and tone of David and with how supremely happy a hand you have coloured the palpable women. They are quite too lovely and everyone is running after them. In David not an error, not a false note ever; he is all of an exasperating truth and rightness. The one thing I miss in the book is the note of _visibility_--it subjects my visual sense, my _seeing_ imagination, to an almost painful underfeeding. The _hearing_ imagination, as it were, is nourished like an alderman, and the loud audibility seems a slight the more on the baffled lust of the eyes--so that I seem to myself (I am speaking of course only from the point of view of the way, as I read, _my_ impression longs to complete itself) in the presence of voices in the darkness--voices the more distinct and vivid, the more brave and sonorous, as voices always are--but also the more tormenting and confounding--by reason of these bandaged eyes. I utter a pleading moan when you, e.g., transport your characters, toward the end, in a line or two from Leyden to Dunkirk without the glint of a hint of all the ambient picture of the 18th century road. However, stick to your own system of evocation so long as what you positively achieve is so big. Life and letters and art all take joy in you.