1890-11-05 to Clara Lanza

Autograph letter signed, Florian Shasky, 460 words

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

8 Kings Bench Walk, Temple

[Wednesday] November 5th 1890

My dear Clara Lanza

I hope you do not think I am growing indifferent or careless because I have not written to you for some little while. A great number of trifling accidents have caused me to miss mail after mail, so I write to you today, Thursday [sic] 5 November, so that there [I] shall make sure that a letter goes to you from me this week.

In your last letter you said that you had made yourself ill writing your play. I know very well indeed the worry of writing a play; I have lived through many months of such worry and shall never write another play.

After interminable hesitations Tree refused my strike play — that is to say he refused it its present form, but he proposed to advance some hundred pounds if I would introduce my characters into another plot — a plot by Montagu Williams, the great criminal lawyer — a plot on the subject of a strike, a plot which according to Tree would be a certain success.

I declined to do this and so ended my career as a play writer. I hope you will be more successful, if you succeed I will go to New York to see you and the play.

I have just arranged to publish a volume of my critical writings under the title of Impressions and Opinions and for the last three weeks I have done nothing but rewrite my articles. Those dolefully bad pages which I published on Balzac in the Fortnightly I have transformed and the new article on Balzac is I think very swell. Had I known how much rewriting the articles required I should not have undertaken the job. Nutt is going to publish the book. Nutt is a very well known and highly respectable bookseller who occasionally issues a book. The book will be divided into three parts — literature, drama and painting. Impressions and Opinions is a characteristic title and on the whole not bad.

Tonight I am going to meet Walter of The Times at dinner. I think he intends to ask me to write. But I find that I cannot do journalism and write my novel. I have half a mind to rush off to that wild western home of mine and continue the book there. I wrote the Mummer’s Wife there.

But tell me why do you not come to London. You have plenty of money — you are, I believe, a rich woman. Why do you not come?

I should be more pleased to see you than you think.

Most sincerely yours

George Moore