Right and rare

Tuesday, January 12th., Victoria Grove, Chelsea.

Reading George Moore's "Mike Fletcher" I felt inclined to give up my new project of taking a house, and instead to take rooms in Grays Inn or the Temple, and cultivate carefully the art of being a bachelor in comfort ... to dine regularly at the same secluded, excellent restaurant, to know the byways of town life, to accomplish slowly the right and rare furnishings of one's rooms, to have occasional 'adventures' with persons of the fair sex, to be utterly independent ... The sound of these words is atractive, and such employments might give content 'til one was say 45; but afterwards? Forty five seems an age away at present and I feel now that I will then be old, but of course I won't be.

I took up my neglected novel "Sis Tellwright", and sketched out a chapter, with difficulty recreating the atmosphere. The preliminary title is clumsy. I shall have to think of another. The portions already drafted seem good, more than satisfactory as the result of the 'first process' in the manufacture of my fiction. The 'first process' (imagine the building of a house on a hill) is to get the materials, pell-mell, intermixed, anyhow, to a certain height. Having carried them there, I have found that what remains to be done is somewhat less difficult, at any rate requires less brute power of brain. My character Ephraim Tellwright is, I think, a genuinely original and powerful creation, so much so that he may, if I am not careful, dominate the novel as he dominates his daughters, which is not my intention. I am working up to a great revival scene in the Bursley Wesleyan Methodist Chapel which is to beat Harold Frederic in his own chosen field.

I have been acting as a sort of agent for George Sturt in his efforts to get his book "A Year's Exile" published by John Lane. I think progress is being made. George is rather too prickly and self-aware to push himself forward in the way he needs to if he is ever going to make his literary name. Not much use being a writer if nothing you write gets published, and books don't publish themselves.