1896-04-01 to Edmund Gosse

Autograph letter signed, New York Public Library, 558 words

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

92 Victoria Street

Wednesday [1 April 1896]

My dear Gosse,

There is something very remarkable in your last book, yet I did not like to write to you for fear of not saying the right thing. But you know me well enough to know that that is impossible and will forgive. I must utter the thought that urges me.

Well, the truth is that I like one side of your book much better than the other; one side I esteem and the other I admire. You have read so much literature that literature has become something of a pack horse in you. All you say is very good; I can find no fault with your appreciations, only they don't thrill me. There is little adventure in your criticisms; no book could stir you now as it could stir me, for instance, who has read very little and to whom a book is an event. The current of your criticism flows too smoothly; you never whirl along in the rapture of an idea.

If I were to die tomorrow and you were compelled by some editor to write about Esther Waters, I can imagine the judicious pages you would produce, the comparison, full of reserve, which you would draw between it and Tess. But dear Gosse there would not be a thrill in it.

But if instead of troubling about the book, which means nothing to you, except a thing to be classified, you were to write a portrait of the man you know, who has talked long hours with you, you would do something quite wonderful, something as startlingly lifelike as a drawing by Holbein.

In a word, my dear Gosse, you seem to me to be an infinitely greater writer when you are writing about life than when you are writing about literature. Your portraits of Walt Whitman, of Lord de Tabley, fill me with admiration and envy. They are like drawings by Holbein. Even the sketch of Christina Rossetti, how good it is! and how it lives in its Whistlerian slightness!

Clearly the book for you to do, if you want to do a book that will live, is a book of Kit Kat portraits in which man shall be the subject and literature the background. I can imagine your doing in this style something wonderful.

Landor could not link his scenes together, had he been able to do so he would have been Shakespeare. He could not develop his characters; and you cannot (for the sake of argument I assume that you cannot) develop a character by means of dramatic incidents. In other words let us assume that you cannot write a novel, but you can paint marvellous portraits, then go and paint portraits.

Your portrait of Pater is wonderful, quite wonderful. Do more, keeping the literature still more in the background; treat it cursively as something not worth troubling about and you will do an extraordinary book. For this particular genre you have genius.

Now I have told you exactly how your book affected me. I hope you will not misunderstand and think I do not admire your book. I admire it exceedingly only after my own fashion.

Most sincerely yours

George Moore