I have just had a note from Rex, asking me, with characteristic precision, if I can produce a play in the style of Maeterlinck by 6.50 this afternoon, or words to that effect. The idea is full of humour. He remarks, as a matter of fact that there is just a remote chance of his getting the Stage Society to act my play of The Wild Knight. This opens to me a vista of quite new ambition. Why only at the Stage Society?—I see a visionary programme.
The Wild Knight . . . . . . . . . . . . Mr. Charles Hawtree
Captain Redfeather . . . . . . . . . . Mr. Penley
Olive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miss Katie Seymour
Priest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sir Henry Irving
Lord Orm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mr. Arthur Roberts
I am working and must get on with my work. I do not feel any despondency about it because I know it is good and worth doing. It is extraordinary how much more moral one is than one imagines. At school I never minded getting into a row if it were really not my fault. Similarly, I have never cared a rap for rejections or criticisms, since I had got a point of view to express which I was certain held water. Some people think it holds water—on the brain. But I don't mind. Bless them.
I am afraid, darling, that this doctrine of patience is hard on you. But really it's a grand thing to think oneself right. It's what this whole age is starving for. Something to suffer for and go mad and miserable over—that is the only luxury of the mind. I wish I were a convinced Pro-Boer and could stare down a howling mob. But I am right about the Cosmos, and Schopenhauer and Co. are wrong. . . .
Two interesting points in this letter are the remark about wishing to be a convinced Pro-Boer—which he certainly became—and the suggestion of a possible performance of The Wild Knight. Perhaps the letter was written before he had finally taken his stand (it has no dating postmark), or perhaps it merely means that his convictions on the cosmos are more absolute than on the war. As to The Wild Knight: it was never acted and its publication was made possible only by the generosity of Gilbert's father. For a volume of comic verse, Greybeards at Play, which appeared earlier in the same year (1900), he could find a publisher, but serious poetry has never been easy to launch.
The letter that follows has a more immediate bearing on their own future:
11, Warwick Gardens,
Good Friday. 1900.
. . . As you have tabulated your questions with such alarming
precision I must really endeavour to answer them categorically.
(1) How am I? I am in excellent health. I have an opaque cold in my head, cough tempestuously and am very deaf. But these things I count as mere specks showing up the general blaze of salubrity. I am getting steadily better and I don't mind how slowly. As for my spirits a cold never affects them: for I have plenty to do and think about indoors. One or two little literary schemes—trifles doubtless—claim my attention.
(2) Am I going away at Easter? The sarcastic might think it a characteristic answer, but I can only reply that I had banished the matter from my mind, a vague problem of the remote future until you asked it: but since this is Easter and we are not gone away I suppose we are not going away.