The paper has come. May I talk it over a little? And please remember I am nobbut a cabinboy and you are the skipper.

I don't think S. W. brought it off with George Eliot. He never gets under way. The cart wheels want oiling. I think, too, he is ungenerous. She was a deal more than that. Her English warm ruddy quality is hardly mentioned. She was big, even though she was ‘heavy’ too. But think of some of her pictures of country life—the breadth, the sense of sun lying on warm barns, great warm kitchens at twilight when the men came home from the fields, the feeling of beasts, horses and cows, the peculiar passion she has for horses. (When Maggie Tulliver's lover walks with her up and down the lane and asks her to marry, he leads his great red horse, and the beast is foaming—it has been hard ridden and there are dark streaks of sweat on its flanks—the beast is the man, one feels she feels in some queer inarticulate way.) Oh, I think he ought really to have been more generous. And why drag Hardy in?

page 301

Saintsbuiy I like awfully. I wish we could lay down a little piece of excellent vintage. But ours will be dandelion, elderberry, cowslip and blackberry. (Oh, won't it be heaven!) I say: Who did Fisher? Do you altogether approve? I read bits of the book in The Times. He's a presumptuous, self-conscious, high-stomached old roarer. No doubt the Admiralty was at fault, no doubt everybody was a fool—but Fisher could have put nought right. And as for saying he was a great man…. Or are our sea-legs being pulled?? I was a bit sorry to read that.

I like the way Tommy keeps hitching up his trousers as he writes and just not yarning. He's always full of life somehow.

Lewis is extremely interesting, I think. He hurls lumps of sentences at you, but that doesn't matter.

—–frankly disgusts me. Oh, I wish that first paragraph had not appeared in the paper. “Gave herself” in commas! Oh, the unspeakable journalist! Shoo him off! He simply revolts me. Apart from his vulgarity, he's got nothing but a very old newspaper in his head.

The Duhamel is, of course, another eye-opener. The idea that they should surrender something of their personality … that started a terrific excitement bubbling in me. It's true of all artists, isn't it? It gives me another critical point of view about an artist, and quite a new one. I mean—to find out what the man is subduing, to mark that side of him being gradually absorbed (even as it were without his knowing it) into the side of him he has chosen to explore, strengthening it, reinforcing it, even while be thinks it is subdued away. Oh, that's frightfully vague….

It's raining, a heavy, misty rain—most beautiful. I went out to the post in it and after so long, it was thrilling to hear the fine rain sting the stretched silk of my umbrella, the sudden heavy drops drum on it from the gum trees. All the coast is soft, soft colour: the roses hang heavy: the spiders webs are hung with family jewels. Aged men in pale blue trousers are sweeping up the dead leaves, and there is a succession of bonfires—puffs of white, fine smoke, page 302 with the old figures moving in it, sweeping and bending. The sea is still very full—faint to see with dreamy lines upon it, and my two little royal birds are back in the garden.