BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [16 JULY 1911]
BRACERS 17229. ALS. Morrell papers #149, Texas. SLBR 1: #173
Edited by N. Griffin. Proofread by K. Blackwell and A. Duncan

<letterhead>
Battler’s Green,
Watford,
Herts.
Sunday night.

My Dearest Love

For some reason, I hardly know what, I have suffered all day from rather acute depression. It is connected with your letter, but I find it hard to disentangle. First, you must not wish me to make friendships with women. Mrs Whitehead I have a friendship with which I would not lose for a great deal — indeed could not lose. Lucy Silcox I know well and like greatly; but she is not really important to me. Believe me, I know I am right in saying it is better I should avoid intimacy with other women. You will make a grave mistake if you go against this knowledge. Secondly, I have been troubled all day by a hypothetical jealousy. You were probably thinking you would not stand in my way, but this was a mistaken feeling — it is not the way of salvation for me. But I can’t help feeling that you also think I ought not to stand in your way in some hypothetical future. I hope I shouldn’t. But my nature is not large enough to avoid jealousy. You speak of “affection and love”. I don’t know if you were speaking exactly. If you gave love to anyone else, tho’ I could acquiesce and remain a devoted friend, and not in any way alter my opinion of you, I should not continue to give love. Altogether, you would have a first-class tragedy on your hands. If I gave love myself to some one else, it would be most deeply unfortunate for me — morally I should suffer, and there would be a profound inward damage which would lead to spiritual ruin. All this is ungenerous and not as good as it might be, but I know it is true. It is quite immeasurably more important to my welfare that I should maintain my exclusive love for you than that I should have a child by some one else. If this is not clear to you we must talk of it; you must know it fully. You have great powers of making people enlarge their instincts, but it is impossible to do more than a certain amount. — Lion has talked more about you. She said she was amused to see such a devoted couple as you and Philip, that you and he went about with your arms round each other and that you called him “Philip Darling”. So evidently she will not readily suspect anything. She evidently liked you very much.

I long to be with you — I think then my devils will leave me. For the present everything seems black. I don’t know what has come over me. I am very tired. Lion, whom at first I liked very much, has got on my nerves again; I see her good qualities and like them, but am troubled by her making it so hard to speak sincerely to her. Marie Tempest,1 who is taking this house, came to tea — I disliked her — she seemed hard and shallow. Being with Lion, whom I have known since before I got engaged to Alys, has vividly recalled to me the early days of my love for Alys, when she was young and happy and blooming, and full of simple un-self-distrustful kindness. Now she is broken, tortured, twisted, with no self-confidence, no hope, no purpose. It is all my doing. And so many years have gone, with their fresh hopes, their certainties and simplicities and innocences — and I feel old, and courage and faith seem to leave me. Please don’t tax my instincts more than is necessary. Life has troubled and complicated them, and I long for simplicity; I want a rest from battling with them. I am feeling again what I have almosta not felt these four months, the infinite unendurable weariness of inward mental strife — the feeling of the doomed Titan wearily upholding a world which is ready to slip from his shoulders into chaos. All this is largely the result of having been working again; I find myself tired out, and on the physical side quite dead; but thinking goes on and on, all the more. Darling, you will have to bear with me in depressions. They are not mainly personal; impersonal things are always ready to depress me, but personal happiness holds them at bay except at times. I do not believe the world to be good, I do not believe the universe has a purpose. I think what we value is passing and powerless. And I feel my task of thought just as if it were an order from a superior power — something which must be done, without reasoning about it or caring to know why; and I know that it involves the utmost of my powers, a stretching and goading of my intellect which is curiously painful. — O my Beloved, my soul turns to you out of this strange incomprehensible pain — I know that with you there is peace and rest and joy. I long to lay my head on your breast and feel your soothing touch and know that even during life there is peace, and not only when the brain has ceased to flog my weary thoughts. You are the goddess who raises the storms and then gives healing and comfort to the shipwrecked sailors.

I wonder whether you know and understand the odd sense of dedication that I have towards Philosophy. It has nothing to do with reason, or with any deliberate judgment that Philosophy is important. It is merely what I have to do. I often hate the task, but I cannot escape it — and of course at bottom I don’t wish to.

I have written myself out of the blue devils now, and I hardly know what it was all about. The real root was I think an instinctive conviction that you will get tired of me, due to fatigue and to feeling myself a poor creature — with just a few tunes that come over and over again like a musical box. And the moment anything troubles me about you, it opens the floodgates to all the sorrows of mankind. Living without any religious beliefs is not easy. Darling my love to you is rather terrible really — it is so absorbing and so necessary to my life. And I dread your feeling oppressed by it, and feeling that it is a prison. It shan’t be a prison to you my Dearest if I can help it. Goodnight.

Your
B.

• 1

  Marie Tempest The stage name of Mary Susan Tempest (1866–1942), an actress who started her career playing in musical comedies but switched to dramatic roles later. In 1911 she became a theatrical manager.

Textual Notes

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