1898-06-20 to Edmund Gosse

Autograph letter signed, British Library, 301 words

[Edited for paragraph breaks, capitalization, spelling and punctuation.]

92 Victoria Street

Monday [20 June 1898]

My dear Gosse,

I started to go to you yesterday but met with adventures on the way and was turned from my path.

The able critic of the able article herself blunders. Evelyn does not go back to virture because she was brought up a Roman Catholic (I am incapable of such sectarian bigotry), but because it is her nature. We do not become mad we are born mad and Evelyn was born what she is.

I showed the germ of the disease in the third chapter. Couch has an article in this week's Speaker which perfectly explains the idea, so the idea must have got on to the paper. Of course nothing is commoner than for a writer to fail to get his idea on to the paper, but this cannt be the case, my case, since Couch states the idea formally.

But all the other critics except you and he have so entirely understood little more than the external facts — a young girl with a beautiful voice elopes with a baronet, gets bitten by religion and repents. The book might have been written in Arabic for all they understood of it.

But a young man on the stock exchange wrote, "but you seem to make happiness impossible without belief." Was it not clever of him to have understood so well?

I daresay the book is not a very good book. Even so, that is no reason for seeing nothing but the surface. And truth to tell, the reviewing has depressed me dreadfully.

I have composed my epitaph 'He discovered his own limitations and the limitless stupidity of the world.'

As ever

George Moore