[1418 East 63d St., Seattle]
Your dear letter of the 22nd arrived quickly and surprisingly this morning: and I am always walking on air when I have had a letter on Friday and again on Monday. I am very glad and happy if my letter about yourself was of any use to you; for I am too aware of my own shortcomings and grave faults to feel very confident of helping another. But I should like to send you a good kiss instead of the smack of another kind which I felt like giving you at the time.
As for your subsequent letter, you may be quite sure – in fact, I am quite sure that you must be sure – that no questions of yours would ever seem to me inquisitive or inquisitorial. I want you to know all there is to be known; it is only the difficulties of expression, and particularly of explaining irrational behaviour, that frighten me; I am so anxious to make everything clear. So please keep on asking until I have made things clear; because I always have a feeling of dissatisfaction, thinking that perhaps my explanations have only muddled things further. I think however that from what I have said you may begin to understand why I did not write to you; and to understand that I did not myself understand why I did not write to you, until after fifteen months afterwards. The power of the human mind to deceive itself is immense … But the point at the moment is that I want you to know that my happiness lies in the prospect of more and more complete understanding between you and me, and it is worth infinite trouble. I feel in a way that we always have understood each other, fundamentally; and that the process is merely one of coming to understand that we do understand; and that details have to be examined and discussed, and accounts and histories given, merely in order that they shall be cleared away as irrelevant. I know that I should feel in your presence that which is different from either solitude or company, as one knows solitude and company.
IHale, Emilywritings;x4'An Etching';b1 do like your poem1 (please may I keep this copy) and also I am glad to see you finding the leisure for a little writing again. Criticisms: first I don’t think the variation between regular blank verse, irregular blank verse, and vers libres was quite under control.
I can show what I mean better next time, when I will make a typed copy of your poem for you (you see I do not mean to part with the original even if you demand it). A minor point: I do not quite understand the last line. A more important point; the subject is almost impossible. I mean that a picture is a picture, and cannot be translated into verse by description; the only way to write a poem about a picture is to use the picture as the starting point or rather as the pretext for writing a poem. You have I think been too conscientious to the picture, subduing yourself to it, so to speak; so that all you do and can do is to make the reader want to see the picture! whereas you should really be talking about yourself and your own feelings, not merely your appreciation of the picture.
We have not talked about pictures and painting at all yet, have we. I shall try to get some copies of things that I know you like, to send you. ButAmericaBoston, Massachusetts;d1its Museum collection remembered;a3 there are wonderful things in the Boston Gallery andGardner, Isabella Stewarther art collection;a2 at Mrs Gardner’s;2 and when you get back I shall dare to ask you to go and look at some of the things there; and if you are ever in New Haven the University has a wonderful collection of Italian canvases.
IFaber, Geoffrey;b1 have had to stop and have a long talk with Faber, who has just come up from Wales for a few days, about business and politics; and a young man is waiting; and I must go home to lunch and then some of my cousins whom I have not seen for 30 years – these, from Berkeley California – are coming to tea. So, though I have much more to say, that I thought of before I went to sleep last night, must wait till Thursday to write more. Good bye, my dear, my dear.
1.EnclosedHale, Emilywritings;x4'An Etching';b1 is a typescript sonnet entitled ‘“An Etching” – an ekphrasis –’:
‘Instant comprehension’ implies that the artist has actually witnessed such a scene: perhaps this is what you mean. But I don’t see how you can be sure from an etching, which is a slow kind of work, whether the author’s comprehension was instantaneous.
Drawn with a skilful hand, inspired with the mind and eye
Of instant comprehension, a picture stabs my memory
And leaves it spent for pity. The figures face me from the walls,
A man and woman – humble children of an ancient eastern race.
He sits, grey bearded, powerfully limbed and tall,
Mute and motionless, beside a form whose face
Is covered, lest yellow scavengers along the street
Should sniff and paw this strange thing at their feet,
Which once outran the swiftest in a laughing village race.
The hands that gently placed the pall, are caught
In a steel-like grip of self control. The hand is bent
As if in prayer. ‘Allah is good, Allah is –’ over and over he sought
To say. Against the full companionable years they went
Together – he sets tomorrow’s empty earth, and firmament.
2.The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
11.GeoffreyFaber, Geoffrey Faber (1889–1961), publisher and poet: see Biographical Register.
9.IsabellaGardner, Isabella Stewart Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), socialite, art collector, philanthropist; friend of artists and writers including John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler and Henry James; wife of John Lowell Gardner II (1837–98), businessman and patron of the arts. Founder of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (modelled after a Venetian palazzo), which opened in 1903. TSE came to know her well enough to exchange a few letters with her, written from England in 1915–17: see Letters 1, 100–3.