ness at the Sign of
the Ship. Indeed I feel convinced I could never have managed that; it
takes a gift to do it. Here is lunch.--Yours afftly.,

R. L. S.

TO HENRY JAMES

[_Saranac Lake, March 1888._]

MY DEAR DELIGHTFUL JAMES,--To quote your heading to my wife, I think no
man writes so elegant a letter, I am sure none so kind, unless it be
Colvin, and there is more of the stern parent about him. I was vexed at
your account of my admired Meredith: I wish I could go and see him; as
it is I will try to write; and yet (do you understand me?) there is
something in that potent, _genialisch_ affectation that puts one on the
strain even to address him in a letter. He is not an easy man to be
yourself with: there is so much of him, and veracity and the high
athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.[26] I read with
indescribable admiration your _Emerson_. I begin to long for the day
when these portraits of yours shall be collected: do put me in. But
Emerson is a higher flight. Have you a _Tourgueneff_? You have told me
many interesting things of him, and I seem to see them written, and
forming a graceful and _bildend_ sketch. (I wonder whence comes this
flood of German--I haven't opened a German book since I teethed.) My
novel is a tragedy; four parts out of six or seven are written, and gone
to Burlingame. Five parts of it are sound, human tragedy; the last one
or two, I regret to say, not so soundly designed; I almost hesitate to
write them; they are very picturesque, but they are fantastic; they
shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning. I wish I knew; that was how the
tale came to me however. I got the situation; it was an old taste of
mine: The older brother goes out in the '45, the younger stays; the
younger, of course, gets title and estate and marries the bride
designate of the elder--a family match, but he (the younger) had always
loved her, and she had really loved the elder. Do you see the situation?
Then the devil and Saranac suggested this _denouement_, and I joined the
two ends in a day or two of constant feverish thought, and began to
write. And now--I wonder if I have not gone too far with the fantastic?
The elder brother is an INCUBUS: supposed to be killed at Culloden, he
turns up again and bleeds the family of money; on that stopping he comes
and lives with them, whence flows the real tragedy, the nocturnal duel
of the brothers (very naturally, and indeed, I think, inevitably
arising),