Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/646

"You know my play Hassan is going to be played in London this autumn if all goes well; I've got an excellent collaborator. Goschens shall print it—but only after it's played and that's a long way off yet.

Otherwise I try to revise another older play of mine and when not sufficiently inspired for that I do the Virgil, which Gilbert Murray has pronounced to be the best translation of him in English.

I can't work much, and haven't at present any original ideas in my head. I'm only just now managing to get up to lunch after three months' illness. Hope to go to Locarno soon—will send you address if I move. As for poems I've only written four since Samarkand and they be small ones. . . .

I owe you many thanks for having introduced me to Goschens. Threy are certainly advertising excellently. I shall be not only disappointed but astonished if the King of Alsander don't move. . . .

That Poetry and Drama do irritate me (I don't refer to your excellent review) with its childish anti-God rubbish (We're about two hundred years ahead of these asses on the Continent, in the middle of a Catholic reaction, and leave that sort of vulgarity to the plebs) and its ridiculous abuse of Tennyson and other Victorians. Do they really imagine ——— writes as well as Tennyson or Kipling? It's astonishing!

Do write again. Do you ever see ———? If so remember me fondly."

The last three of his letters which I have preserved were sent from Davos Platz and make unutterably sad reading. In the first of them he writes: "I am so damned ill I'm almost in despair," and speaks of his disappointment at having lost the Polignac prize—recording the fact that Professor Gilbert Murray and Mr. W. B. Yeats voted for him. The second is dated June 1st.

"My dear Goldring,

(1) Do send me any news there is going.

(2) No, my dear fellow, don't ask me if I can write a book about Greece—descriptive tour. I can only preserve the rotten remnants of my life by lying in bed here for years—in the ugliest hole God ever created.

(3) But I do intend to publish my great ode to Greece sepa-