uses to read the book.

On one point I must acknowledge that you have proved yourself a master
of the art of fiction. What Hetty and I said to one another that day
when she came upon me in the shrubbery at Alton College was known only
to us two. She never told it to anyone, and I soon forgot it. All
due honor, therefore, to the ingenuity with which you have filled the
hiatus, and shown the state of affairs between us by a discourse on
"surplus value," cribbed from an imperfect report of one of my public
lectures, and from the pages of Karl Marx! If you were an economist I
should condemn you for confusing economic with ethical considerations,
and for your uncertainty as to the function which my father got his
start by performing. But as you are only a novelist, I compliment you
heartily on your clever little pasticcio, adding, however, that as an
account of what actually passed between myself and Hetty, it is the
wildest romance ever penned. Wickens's boy was far nearer the mark.

In conclusion, allow me to express my regret that you can find no
better employment for your talent than the writing of novels. The first
literary result of the foundation of our industrial system upon the
profits of piracy and slave-trading was Shakspere. It is our misfortune
that the sordid misery and hopeless horror of his view of man's destiny
is still so appropriate to English society that we even to-day regard
him as not for an age, but for all time. But the poetry of despair will
not outlive despair itself. Your nineteenth century novelists are only
the tail of Shakspere. Don't tie yourself to it: it is fast wriggling
into oblivion.

I am, dear sir, yours truly,

SIDNEY TREFUSIS.

End of Project Gutenberg's An Unsocial Socialist, by George Bernard Shaw

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