It is true, I think, what you say:  that I have been getting more nervous and less elaborate in style of late years.  This is very natural.  One starts in life with sensuous susceptibilities to beauty, with a strong feeling for colour and for melodious cadence, and also with an impulsive enthusiastic way of expressing oneself.  This causes young work to seem decorated and laboured, whereas it very often is really spontaneous and hasty, more instructive and straightforward than the work of middle life.  I write now with much more trouble and more slowly, and with much less interest in my subject than I used to do.  This gives me more command over the vehicle, language, than I used to have.  I write what pleases myself less, but what probably strikes other people more.

This is a long discourse; but not so much about myself as appears.  I was struck with your insight, and I wanted to tell you how I analyse the change of style which you point out, and which results, I think, from colder, more laborious, duller effort as one grows in years.

The artist ought never to be commanded by his subject, or his vehicle of expression.  But until he ceases to love both with a blind passion, he will probably be so commanded.  And then his style will appear decorative, florid, mixed, unequal, laboured.  It is the sobriety of a satiated or blunted enthusiasm which makes the literary artist.  He ought to remember his dithyrambic moods, but not to be subject to them any longer, nor to yearn after them.

Do you know that I have only just now found the time, during my long days and nights in bed with influenza and bronchitis, to read Marie Bashkirtseff? (Did ever name so puzzling grow upon the Ygdrasil of even Russian life?)

By this time you must be quite tired of hearing from your friends how much Marie Bashkirtseff reminds them of you.

I cannot help it.  I must say it once again.  I am such a fossil that I permit myself the most antediluvian remarks—­if I think they have a grain of truth in them.  Of course, the dissimilarities are quite as striking as the likenesses.  No two leaves on one linden are really the same.  But you and she, detached from the forest of life, seem to me like leaves plucked from the same sort of tree.

It is a very wonderful book.  If only messieurs les romanciers could photograph experience in their fiction as she has done in some of her pages!  The episode of Pachay, short as that is, is masterly—­above the reach of Balzac; how far above the laborious, beetle—­flight of Henry James!  Above even George Meredith.  It is what James would give his right hand to do once.  The episode of Antonelli is very good, too, but not so exquisite as the other.

There is something pathetic about both “Asolando” and “Demeter,” those shrivelled blossoms from the stout old laurels touched with frost of winter and old age.  But I find little to dwell upon in either of them.  Browning has more sap of life—­Tennyson more ripe and mellow mastery.  Each is here in the main reproducing his mannerism.