’I read scarcely anything but newspapers—­it is I who write the words.  Newspapers at morning, newspapers at night.  Yes, one exception; I have spent a good deal of time of late over Walt Whitman (you know him, of course, by name, though I dare say you have never looked into his works), and I expect that I shall spend a good deal more; I suspect, indeed, that he will in the end come to mean much to me.  But I cannot write of him yet; I am struggling with him, struggling with myself as regards him; in a month or so I shall have more to say.  It is perfectly true, then, that till quite recently I have read but newspapers.  The people about me scarcely by any chance read anything else, and the influence of surroundings has from the first been very strong upon me.  You have complained frequently that I say nothing to you about my self; it is one of the signs of my condition that with difficulty I think of that self, and to pen words about it has been quite impossible.  I long constantly for the old world and the old moods, but I cannot imagine myself back into them.  I would give anything to lock my door at night, and take down my Euripides; if I get as far as the shelf, my hand drops.

’I begin to see a meaning in this phase of my life.  I have been learning something about the latter end of the nineteenth century, its civilisation, its possibilities, and the subject has a keen interest for me.  Is it new, then? you will ask.  To tell you the truth, I knew nothing whatever about it until I came and began to work in America.  I am in the mood for frankness, and I won’t spare myself.  All my so-called study of modern life in former days was the merest dilettantism, mere conceit and boyish pedantry.  I travelled, and the fact that wherever I went I took a small classical library with me was symbolical of my state of mind.  I saw everything through old-world spectacles.  Even in America I could not get rid of my pedantry, as you will recognise clearly enough if you look back to the letters I wrote you at that time.  I came then with theories in my head of what American civilisation must be, and everything that I saw I made fit in with my preconceptions.  This time I came with my mind a blank.  I was ill, and had not a theory left in me on any subject in the universe.  For the first time in my life I was suffering all that a man can suffer; when the Atlantic roared about me, I scarcely cared whether it engulfed me or not.  Getting back my health, I began to see with new eyes, and have since been looking my hardest.  And I have still not a theory on any subject in the universe.

’In fact, I believe that for me the day of theories has gone by.  I note phenomena, and muse about them, and not a few interest me extremely.  The interest is enough.  I am not a practical man; I am not a philosopher.  I may, indeed, have a good deal of the poet’s mind, but the poet’s faculty is denied to me.  It only remains to me to study the word in its relations to my personality, that I may henceforth avoid the absurdities to which I have such a deplorable leaning.