Chapter LVI: WOODBRIDGE: May 18, 1879

MY DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,

By this Post you ought to receive my Crabbe Book, about which I want your Opinion--not as to your own liking, which I doubt not will be more than it deserves: but about whether it is best confined to Friends, who will like it, as you do, more or less out of private prejudice--Two points in particular I want you to tell me;

(1) Whether the Stories generally seem to you to be curtailed so much that they do not leave any such impression as in the Original. That is too long and tiresome; but (as in Richardson) its very length serves to impress it on the mind:--My Abstract is, I doubt not, more readable: but, on that account partly, leaving but a wrack behind. What I have done indeed is little else than one of the old Review Articles, which gave a sketch of the work, and let the author fill in with his better work.

Well then I want to know--(2) if you find the present tense of my Prose Narrative discordant with the past tense of the text. I adopted it partly by way of further discriminating the two: but I may have misjudged: Tell me: as well as any other points that strike you. You can tell me if you will--and I wish you would--whether I had better keep the little _Opus_ to ourselves or let it take its chance of getting a few readers in public. You may tell me this very plainly, I am sure; and I shall be quite as well pleased to keep it unpublished. It is only a very, very, little Job, you see: requiring only a little Taste, and Tact: and if they have failed me--_Voila_! I had some pleasure in doing my little work very dexterously, I thought; and I did wish to draw a few readers to one of my favourite Books which nobody reads. And, now that I look over it, I fancy that I may have missed my aim--only that my Friends will like, etc. Then, I should have to put some Preface to the Public: and explain how many omissions, and some transpositions, have occasioned the change here and there of some initial particle where two originally separated paragraphs are united; some use made of Crabbe's original MS. (quoted in the Son's Edition;) and all such confession to no good, either for my Author or me. I wish you could have just picked up the Book at a Railway Stall, knowing nothing of your old Friend's hand in it. But that cannot be; tell me then, divesting yourself of all personal Regard: and you may depend upon it you will--save me some further bother, if you bid me let publishing alone. I don't even know of a Publisher: and won't have a favour done me by 'ere a one of them,' as Paddies say. This is a terrible Much Ado about next to Nothing. 'Parlons,' etc.

Blanche Donne wrote me you had been calling in Weymouth Street: that you had been into Hampshire, and found Mrs. Sartoris better--Dear Donne seems to have been pleased and mended by his Children coming about him. I say but little of my Brother's Death. {149} We were very good friends, of very different ways of thinking; I had not been within side his lawn gates (three miles off) these dozen years (no fault of his), and I did not enter them at his Funeral--which you will very likely--and properly--think wrong. He had suffered considerably for some weeks: but, as he became weaker, and (I suppose) some narcotic Medicine--O blessed Narcotic!--soothed his pains, he became dozily happy. The Day before he died, he opened his Bed-Clothes, as if it might be his Carriage Door, and said to his Servant 'Come--Come inside--I am going to meet them.'

Voila une petite Histoire. Et voila bien assez de mes Egoismes. Adieu, Madame; dites-moi tout franchement votre opinion sur ce petit Livre; ah! vous n'en pouvez parler autrement qu'avec toute franchise--et croyez moi, tout aussi franchement aussi,

Votre ami devoue E. F.G.