TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, July, 1885.
My dear O’Connor,—Your kind little surprise came to me while I was very ill, and, I believe, helped me to get better; for everything which cheers one during an attack of swamp-fever aids convalescence. As you know, I made a sojourn in East Florida; and I exposed myself a good deal, in the pursuit of impressions. The wonderful water especially tempted me. I am a good swimmer, and always crazy to enjoy a dive, so I yielded to the seduction of Silver Spring. It was a very hot day; but the flood was cold as the grip of old Death. I didn’t feel the effect right away; but when I got back home found I had a fever that quinine would take no effect upon. Now I am getting all right, and will be off to the sea soon to recruit.
Well, I thought I would wait to write until I could introduce myself to you, as you so delicately divined that I wanted you to do to me; but I delayed much longer than I wished or intended. Photographs are usually surprises;—your face was not exactly what I had imagined, but it pleased me more—I had fancied you a little stern, very dark, with black eyes,—partly, perhaps, because others of your name whom I knew had that purplish black hair and eyes which seems a special race-characteristic,—partly perhaps from some fantastic little idea evolved by the effort to create a person from a chirography, as though handwriting constituted a sort of track by which individuality could be recognized. I know now that I should feel a little less timid in meeting you; for I seem to know you already very well,—for a long time,—intimately and without mystery.
I send a couple of little clippings which may interest you for the moment,—one, a memory of Saint Augustine; the other, a translation which, though clumsy, preserves something of a great poet’s weird fancy.
I am sorry that I have so little to tell you in a literary way. As you seem to see the T.-D. very often, you watch me tolerably closely, I suppose. I have been trying to complete a little volume of impressions, but the work drags on very, very slowly: I fear I shan’t finish it before winter. Then I have a little Chinese story accepted for Harper’s Bazar, which I will send you, and which I think you will like. Otherwise my plans have changed. With the expansion of my private study, I feel convinced that I know too little to attempt anything like a serious volume of Oriental essays; but my researches have given me a larger fancy in some directions, and new colours, which I can use hereafter. Fiction seems to be the only certain road to the publishers’ hearts, and I shall try it, not in a lengthy, but a brief compass,—striving as much as possible after intense effects. I think you would like my library if you could see it,—it is one agglomeration of exotics and eccentricities.
And you do not now write much?—do you? I would like to have read the paper you told me of; but I fear the Manhattan is dead beyond resurrection—and, by the way, Richard Grant White has departed to that land which is ruled by absolute silence, and in which a law of fair play, unrecognized by our publishers, doth prevail. Do you never take a vacation? If you could visit our Grande Isle in the healthy season, you would enjoy it so much! An old-fashioned, drowsy, free-and-easy Creole watering-place in the Gulf,—where there is an admirable beach, fishing extraordinary, and subjects innumerable for artistic studies—a hybrid population from all the ends of heaven, white, yellow, red, brown, cinnamon-colour, and tints of bronze and gold. Basques, Andalusians, Portuguese, Malays, Chinamen, etc. I hope to make some pen drawings there.
Have you seen the revised Old Testament? How many of our favourite and beautiful texts have been marred! I almost prefer the oddity of Wickliffe.... And, by the way, I must tell you that Palmer’s Koran is a fine book! (“Sacred Books of the East,” Macmillan.) Sale is now practically obsolete.
Hoping I will be able, one of these days, to write something that I can worthily dedicate to you,
Believe me