BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [22 JAN. 1914]
BRACERS 18120. ALS. Morrell papers #974, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.

Thursday mg.1^, 2

My Darling Love

When I said I wouldn’t write to Paris again I was in a muddle — I thought it was Thursday. I was so glad of your dear letter this morning. — It seemed happy again, whereas yesterday’s didn’t.

I have written to Conrad — parts of Chance are very good indeed, but the beginning is too slow, and I don’t like the end. The two principal characters are very poignant but he hasn’t quite made the most of them. I quite agree with you about his having got discouraged. A man with any strongly individual view of the world requires an immense courage of self-assertion to persist through indifference and criticism.

Yes, I dare say Billy is better than I think; it was chiefly the letter you showed me that gave me such a bad impression.

Yesterday I had a visit from a man named Robb — a wild Irishman, who wrote a book called A theory of time and space, not yet published, which I read for the Univ. Press and thought very highly of. It comes out of reflections on physics, but all the physicists think him mad, and he has never had any success of any sort or kind. I think my praise was the first he ever had. He is a man of about 35. He was terribly shy and nervous, and was not made any happier by Littlewood’s treading on his hat. I put a reference to his unpublished book in my paper on “Sense-Data and Physics”; it was this that led me to write to him and so to his coming. I sketched his theory to Littlewood, who agreed that it seemed admirable. Physicists are the wrong milieu for him — they have no philosophy and no care for Logic — one might as well expect people in the French Revolution to have a passion for balanced and judicious statement. People who fail to get appreciation through being in the wrong surroundings are pathetic. Robb is full of bad ideas as well as good ones — he might easily spend his life pursuing a will-o-the-wisp. He is fat and absurd to look at.

I will try to beware of my own cries of “wolf”. But I must dry up some day, and to judge by others it should be pretty soon. However, it hasn’t come yet. I can still play with sciences as if they were hay on a pitch-fork. They want tossing and scattering and then binding up differently. Habit is the enemy — it is mental death. One has to have habit in one’s life, to leave the mind free, but it has to be kept out of one’s thoughts as long as possible.

This really is my last letter to Paris. I hope the journey hasn’t tired you too much. It will be heaven to be with you Darling. Goodbye Dearest. I send you a thousand kisses.

Your
B

• 1

  [document] Document 000974. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.

• 2

  [envelope] A circled “974”.