I've been lying here while my dream ebbed away. I never have had such vivid dreams as I do here. Campbell in this came to warn me (we were at ‘some strange hotel’) “Mansfield, I'd lock your door to-night. There are two Chinamen downstairs, and they're very predatory.” He repeated this word while he made some small tentative golf-club-swinging motions, immensely familiar. Campbell belongs to another life, doesn't he? But so does everybody, every single person. I feel they're all quite gone. Even Hampstead and the tapestry in the studio and the sommier. They are not in this world—not for me. What is in this world? Nothing. Just a blank. It's fine this morning, sun and blue sea,—and I don't even care to look out of window. How long was Dostoevsky in prison? Four years, wasn't he? And he came out and did his finest work after. If only one could rid oneself of this feeling of finality, if there were a continuity. That's what is so intolerable. The feeling that one goes on, just as the sea does for hours and days after a storm, presenting an appearance of agitation and activity, but it's really all page 314 over. Could it be possible that I am wrong? I think I'd better not write stories but only my confessions here, and keep them out of letters.

G. B. S. on Butler is very fine indeed. ¹ He has such a grip of his subject. I admire his tenacity as a reviewer and the way in which his mind follows Butler with a steady light—does not waver over him, find him, lose him, travel over him. At the same time it's queer he should be (G. B. S.) so uninspired. There is not the faintest hint of inspiration in that man. This chills me. You know the feeling that a great writer gives you: “My spirit has been fed and refreshed: it has partaken of something new.” One could not possibly feel that about Shaw. It's the clang of the gate that remains with you when all's over.) What it amounts to is that Shaw is anything you like, but he's not an artist. Don't you get when you read his plays a sense of extraordinary flatness? They may be extremely amusing at moments, but you are always laughing at and never with. Just the same in his prose: You may agree as much as you like, but he is writing at not with. There's no getting over it: he's a kind of concierge in the house of literature—sits in a glass case, sees everything, knows everything, examines the letters, cleans the stairs, but has no part, no part in the life that is going on. But as I wrote that, I thought: Yes, but who is living there, living there as we mean life? Dostoevsky, Tchehov and Tolstoy and Hardy. I can't think of anybody else.

Oh God! What wouldn't I give for a Talk. Well, it can't happen.

Don't move my shepherdess if you can help. I see her there so plainly: I'd hate to think it was another dream: she wasn't there at all, only a little carriage clock. She is the gentle little spirit of the room to me. I always, always until I die shall remember how we listened to the tiny bell striking—from a world of faery. Please don't put page 315 her away. Think what she has meant. Put the carriage clock on the writing table, can't you? But she is everything to the room, the poet to the landscape. Have you moved her? Tell me.