ny good after all.

6th. The collection of more serious poems of which I spoke to you.
You shall have a hand in the selection of these when you get back.

7th. The Novel--which though I have put it aside for the present,
yet has become too much a part of me not to be constantly having
chapters written--or rather growing out of the others.

And all these things, with the exception of the last one, are
supposed to be really urgent, and to be done immediately. . . . Now I
hope I have sickened you forever of wanting to know the details of my
dull affairs. But I hope it may give you some notion of how hard it
really is to get time for writing just now. For you see they are none
of them even mechanical things: they all require some thinking about.

I am afraid . . . that if you really want to know what I do, you
must forgive me for seeming egoistic. That is the tragedy of the
literary person: his very existence is an assertion of his own mental
vanity: he must pretend to be conceited even if he isn't. . . .

Beginning to publish, beginning to write, and still developing
mentally at a frantic rate--this is a summary of the years 1895-8.

As the Notebook shows, Gilbert was reflecting deeply at this time on
the relations both between God and man and between man and his fellow
man. The realisation that their relations had gone very far wrong was
necessarily followed--for Gilbert's _mind_ was an immensely practical
one--by the question of what the proposed remedies were worth. He has
told us that he became a Socialist at this time only because it was
intolerable not to be a Socialist. The Socialists seemed the only
people who were looking at conditions as they were and finding them
unendurable. Christian Socialism seemed at first sight, for anyone
who admired Christ, to be the obvious form of Socialism, and, in a
fragment of this period, G.K. traces the resemblance of modern
collectivism to early Christianity.

The points in which Christian and Socialistic collectivism are at
one are simple and fundamental. As, however, we must proceed
carefully in this matter, we may state these points of resemblance
under three heads.

(1) Both rise from the deeps of an emotion, the emotion of compassion
for misfortune, as such. This is really a very important point.
Collectivism is not an intellectual fad, even if erroneous, but a
passionate protest and aspiration: it