I have really got some pretty sketches done the last few days. Not finished ones, the weather is not fit for long sitting; but H.H. has given me some "Cox" paper, a rough kind of stuff something like what sugar is wrapped up in, and with a very soft black pencil I have been getting in quick outlines—and then tinting them with thin pure washes of colour. I have been doing one of the Clog-shop. This quaint yard has doors—old doors—which long since have been painted a most charming red. Then the old shop is red-tiled, and an old stone-chimney from which the pale blue smoke of the wood-fire floats softly off against the tender tints of the wood, on the edge of which lie fallen logs with yellow ends, ready for the clog-making, and all the bare brown trees, and the green and yellow sandstone walls, and Jack the Daw hopping about. The old man at the clog-yard was very polite to me to-day. He said, "It's a pratty bit of colour," and "It makes a nicet sketch now you're getting in the dittails." He went some distance yesterday to get me some india-rubber, and then wanted me to keep it! He's a perfect "picter card" himself. I must try and get his portrait.
Ecclesfield. Dec. 23, 1881.
... I cannot tell you the pleasure it gives me that you say what you do of "Daddy Darwin." No; it will not make me overwork. I think, I hope, nothing ever will again. Rather make me doubly careful that I may not lose the gift you help me to believe I have. I have had very kind letters about it, and Mrs. L. sent me a sweet little girl dressed in pink—a bit of Worcester China!—as "Phoebe Shaw."...
Aunt M. sent "Daddy Darwin" to T. Kingdon (he is now Suffragan Bishop to Bishop Medley), and she sent us his letter. I will copy what he says: "'Daddy Darwin' is very charming—directly I read it I took it off to the Bishop—and he read it and cried over it with joy, and then read it again, and it has gone round Fredericton by this time. The story is beautifully told, and the picture is quite what it should be. When I look at the picture I think nothing could beat it, and then when I read the story I think the story is best—till I look again at the picture, and I can only say that together I don't think they could be beaten at all in their line. I have enjoyed them much. There is such a wonderful fragrance of the Old Country about them."
I thought you would like to realize the picture of our own dear old Bishop crying with joy over it! What a young heart! tenderer than many in their teens; and what unfailing affection and sympathy....
January 17, 1882.
Mrs. O'M. is delighted with "Daddy Darwin." I had a most curious letter about it from Mrs. S., a very clever one and very flattering! F.S. too wrote to D., and said things almost exactly similar. It seems odd that people should express such a sense of "purity" with the "wit and wisdom" of one's writing! It seems such an odd reflection on the tone of other people's writings!!! But the minor writers of the "Fleshly school" are perhaps producing a reaction! Though it's marvellous what people will read, and think "so clever!" Some novels lately—Sophy and Mehalah, deeply recommended to me, have made me aghast. I'm not very young, nor I think very priggish; but I do decline to look at life and its complexities solely and entirely from a point of view that (bar Christian names and the English language) would do equally well for a pig or a monkey. If I am no more than a Pig, I'm a fairly "learned" pig, and will back myself to get some small piggish pleasures out of this mortal stye, before I go to the Butcher!! But—IF—I am something very different, and very much higher, I won't ignore my birthright, or sell it for Hog'swash, because it involves the endurance of some pain, and the exercise of some faith and hope and charity! Mehalah is a well-written book, with a delicious sense of local colour in nature. And it is (pardon the sacrilege!) a Love story! The focus point of the hero's (!) desire would at quarter sessions, or assizes, go by the plain names of outrage and murder, and he succeeds in drowning himself with the girl who hates him lashed to him by a chain. In not one other character of the book is there an indication that life has an aim beyond the lusts of the flesh, and the most respectable characters are the tenants whose desires are summed up in the desire of more suet pudding and gravy!! To any one who knows the poor! who knows what faiths and hopes (true or untrue) support them in consumption and cancer, in hard lives and dreary deaths, the picture is as untrue as it is (to me!) disgusting.