BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [23 JULY 1913]
BRACERS 17973. Morrell papers #833, Texas
Proofread by A.G. Bone et al.

in the train1^, 2
Wed. mg.

My Darling

Your dear letter this morning makes me so happy. It brings back all the happiness of our walk. It was delightful feeling at home with each other. It was funny I should have felt so depressed last night. I quite see there is no ground for it, so evidently fatigue is the trouble. I put myself to sleep last night by Vittoz’s “one”. It seems an admirable dodge. All that Vittoz says about depression and over-excitement is very familiar to me.

You are wrong about your flame being such a tiny one. And also about what people see in you. Lucy Silcox for example saw it at once. And I am sure ever so many people do, or anyhow feel it. Even those who have a very great and burning flame don’t have it except at rare moments — but if one can find the right expression for it, the expression fixes it, and revives it, and makes it seem much more — it is like putting a light between two mirrors, the little point is repeated and multiplied indefinitely. It may be that I don’t really know you, but my feeling is that what is rare and wonderful in you is just what one would gather from your appearance — a high and noble passion for the really great things, a power of mystic feeling, and a divine tenderness. But although your tenderness is greater than any I have ever known, I should say I have known manya people more unselfish than you are. In small ways you are very unselfish, but you are careful of your soul and rather greedy of affection (I don’t mean only love). I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me to be the case, and often to prevent that entire self-surrender from which peace comes. I don’t say this in a critical or hostile way, and I dare say it is not true. But I have thought it was true, and that in that way you have more the morality of the producer than of the saint.b I don’t know that I want it different, because I could not bear to think of your making any sacrifice that would really injure your soul. Your sympathy too is of the Irish kind: it is only where your imagination is touched, as with the people in the Playboy. That is to say, it doesn’t include other people’s standards — it won’t overcome disgust. In that way it seems to me to fail to see the world from other people’s standpoints, except when they are more or less congenial to you, and — as in all Irish natures I have ever known well — it is liable to be interrupted by sudden cruelty if there is any feeling that imagination has been tricked and that sympathy has not been deserved. It is this at bottom that makes me feel uneasy with you. One might say that it is not the actual human beings that you love, but the God in them. And when the God abandons them, if they care for your love, they feel lost. In this too, I may be wrong — and I am not saying it with any animus. But it is what prevents me from feeling you a comrade — I think of you as my Star, or as the moon sometimes descending from heaven to bring moments of unearthly unquiet joy to Endymion on the cold hill-side. I know you will say it is simply my possessiveness that is unsatisfied, but that is really a mistake. I feel exactly the same thing in your attitude to others. But in this too, I am not at all sure that I wish for any change — what you give has a quality which it would not have if you were different — it is what makes my love for you like my love of the central mystery of the world — a thing of striving and pain and then moments of a joy that comes from that other world that seems to make our daily world of no account.

Dearest don’t mind anything in this letter. I am really very happy today and very full of love, and not feeling at all critical. What I really am trying to say is that your flame, which you think so tiny, is really much greater than you think, and is what is great in you.

I quite agree that Dante’s definiteness cuts out some of the greatest things — the things one gets in Shakspeare’s songs for instance. But expression is not quite the same as definiteness, as Shakspeare shows.

Please don’t think anything in this letter unkind. It is a comfort and a help to me to express it and get it clear, but it doesn’t go with any unkind feeling or demand for impossibilities.

Goodbye Darling. I feel happier than I have done for a long time.

Your
B.

I think I shall go to Cambridge for the week-end. I must fetch some things there.

• 1

  [document] Document 000833. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.

• 2

  [envelope] A circled “833”.

Textual Notes

• a

  many after deleted very

• b

  saint after deleted art