George Meredith.
The third letter is from Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton:
The Pines, Putney Hill,
Jan. 8, 1886.
My dear Sharp,
I sent off the proofs by Wednesday afternoon’s post. I had no idea that the arrangement of the sonnets would give bother and took care to write to you to ask. The matter was not at all important, and I shall be vexed, indeed, if the printers are put to trouble. The printers would, unless the snow storms interfered, get my verses by Thursday morning’s first post.
My theory of the sonnet is exactly expressed in the sonnet on the sonnet. It is that, in the octave, the emotion flows out in a rhythmic billow: that the solidarity of this billow is maintained by knitting the two quatrains together by means of two rhyme sounds only: that in the sestet the billow ebbs back to “Life’s tumultuous sea” and that like the ebb of an ocean-billow it moves backward, not solidly, but broken up into wavelets. This is only the arrangement of the rhymes in the sestet, that not only need not be based upon any given system but that should not be based on any given system, and should be perceived entirely by emotional demands.
Yours affectly,
Theo. Watts.
The fourth letter is from Oscar Wilde: