suppose, deserve to be torn to pieces; but there was all
that good work lying useless, and I had to finish it!

All your news of your family is pleasant to hear. My wife has been very
ill, but is now better; I may say I am ditto, _The Ebb Tide_ having left
me high and dry, which is a good example of the mixed metaphor. Our
home, and estate, and our boys, and the politics of the island, keep us
perpetually amused and busy; and I grind away with an odd, dogged, down
sensation--and an idea _in petto_ that the game is about played out. I
have got too realistic, and I must break the trammels--I mean I would if
I could; but the yoke is heavy. I saw with amusement that Zola says the
same thing; and truly the _Debacle_ was a mighty big book, I have no
need for a bigger, though the last part is a mere mistake in my opinion.
But the Emperor, and Sedan, and the doctor at the ambulance, and the
horses in the field of battle, Lord, how gripped it is! What an epical
performance! According to my usual opinion, I believe I could go over
that book and leave a masterpiece by blotting and no ulterior art. But
that is an old story, ever new with me. Taine gone, and Renan, and
Symonds, and Tennyson, and Browning; the suns go swiftly out, and I see
no suns to follow, nothing but a universal twilight of the
demi-divinities, with parties like you and me and Lang beating on toy
drums and playing on penny whistles about glow-worms. But Zola is big
anyway; he has plenty in his belly; too much, that is all; he wrote the
_Debacle_ and he wrote _La Bete humaine_, perhaps the most
excruciatingly silly book that I ever read to an end. And why did I read
it to an end, W. E. G.? Because the animal in me was interested in the
lewdness. Not sincerely, of course, my mind refusing to partake in it;
but the flesh was slightly pleased. And when it was done, I cast it from
me with a peal of laughter, and forgot it, as I would forget a Montepin.
Taine is to me perhaps the chief of these losses; I did luxuriate in his
_Origines_; it was something beyond literature, not quite so good, if
you please, but so much more systematic, and the pages that had to be
"written" always so adequate. Robespierre, Napoleon, were both excellent
good.

_June 18th, '93._--Well, I have left fiction wholly, and gone to my
Grandfather, and on the whole found peace. By next month my Grandfather
will begin to be quite grown up. I have already three chapters about as
good as done; by wh