No, indeed, I did not laugh at your experiences. I have had nearly as multiform; but mine were less successful,—I was less fitted for them. I have not your advantages, nor capacities. I never learned German. It is only in America such careers are possible. I wish I could have finished like you, as a physician; for I hold, that with the modern development of medicine as an enormous interbranching system of science and philosophy, the physician is the only perfect man, mentally. Like those old Arabian physicians who affected to treat the soul, the modern knows the mind, the reason of actions, the source of impulses,—which must make him the most generous of men to the faults of others.

I don’t like your plot for a medical novel at all. It involves ugliness. I believe in Théophile Gautier’s idea of art, study only the beautiful;—create only ideals, therefore. You are not a realist, I am sure. Then your plot is too thin. It has not the beauty nor depth of that simple narrative about a famous painter, or writer,—I forget which,—whose imagination rendered it impossible for him to complete his medical studies. Shapes impressed themselves upon his brain as on the brain of an artist: vividly to painfulness. He was in love, engaged to be married; under the peach flesh and behind the velvet gaze, he always saw the outlined skull, the empty darkness of void orbits. He had to abandon medicine for art. A very powerful short sketch might be made of this fact.

I believe in a medical novel,—a wonderful medical novel. We must chat about it. Why not use a fantastic element,—anticipate discoveries hoped for,—anticipate them so powerfully as to make the reader believe you are enunciating realities?

Your objection to my idea is quite correct. I have already abandoned it. It would have to be sexual. Never could you find in the tropics that magnificent type of womanhood, which, in the New England girl, makes one afraid even to think about sex, while absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect natures inspire the love that is a fear. I don’t think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman inspires a love that is half a compassion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy, delusive—pregnant with future pains innumerable.

I don’t know why you hold the work of Spencer, etc., more colourless than those of the other philosophers and scientists whom you have studied—all except beastly Hegel: there is an awful poetry to me in the revelation of which these men are the mouthpieces, as much vaster than the old thoughts as the foam of suns in the via lactea is vaster than the spume of a wave on the sea-beach. Wallace I know only as a traveller and naturalist; is it the same Wallace? I am very fond of him too: he is very human, fraternal: he is not like God the Father as Spencer is. I suppose what we need is God the Holy Ghost. He is not yet come.

Flower, who wrote that interesting little book “Fashion in Deformity” and many other excellent things, could find some good texts here. I am convinced now that most of our fashions are deformities; that grace is savage, or must be savage in order to be perfect; that man was never made to wear shoes; that in order to comprehend antiquity, the secret of Greek art, one must know the tropics a little (so much has fashion invaded the rest of the world), and that the question of more or less liberty in the sex relation is like the tariff question—one of localities and conditions, scarcely to be brought under a general rule.

TO GEORGE M. GOULD
Saint-Pierre, Martinique,
February, 1889.

Dear Gould,—A letter to you has been lying on my desk for months unfinished,—I can only just gum the envelope and let it go as it is. I am obliged at intervals—thank Goodness, only at very long ones—to let all correspondence, even the most important, wait a little or risk the results of interrupting a work which exacts all one’s thinking time during waking hours. This has been partly my case,—having just completed a novelette; but I have also had a good deal of trouble about other matters that left me no chance to do anything until now. I am free again,—I hope for a good long time.