London,         3 a Queen's Road, Chelsea, S.W.
November 16, 19—.    
 
You sigh "Poesy and Economics," supplying the cause and admitting the fact. I wish you had shown some to see my meaning, that you had preferred to the matter on the ground of data, that you had been less eager to ferret out the science of the thing. Do you remember how your boy's respect rose for little Barbara whenever she cried when too readily forgiven? "She a double standard," you explained to me with generous heat. You sympathised with her fear lest I demand less of her than of you, honouring her on an equality of duty as well as of privilege. Is the man Herbert less proud than the child Barbara, that you speak of a temperamental difference and ask for a special dispensation?
 
You are not in love (this you say in not my attack on you, and so far I understand), because you are a student of Economics. At the last I stop. What is this about economics and poesy? About your from my sway? The hand of the forces by which you have been moulded cannot detain you from going out upon the love-quest. The fact of your preference for Draper cannot your spirit's need of love. There are many codes, but there is one law, alike on the and poet. It springs out of the common and unappeasable hunger, commanding that love seek love through night to day and through day to night.
 
Yet it is possible to put oneself outside the pale of the law, to refuse the gift of life and snap the tie between time and space and creature. It is possible to be too for interest or feeling. The men and women of the People know neither love nor art because they are too weary. They lie in sleep from great . Their bodies are too much tried with the hungers of the body and their spirits too dimly illumined with the hope of fair chances. It is also possible to fill oneself so full with an interest that all else is crowded out. You have done this. Like the cobbler who is a cobbler typically, the teacher who is a , the physician and the lawyer who are pathologists merely, you are a of a text. You are in the of an idea, the idea of selection, as I well know, and you exploit it like a . When a man finds that he cannot deal in without smelling of it, it is time that he turn to something else. Every man is engaged in the cause of keeping himself whole, in watching himself lest his man turn machine, in watching lest the outside world the inner. Nature spares the type, but the individual must spare himself. He is strong who is sensitive and who responds subtly to everything in his environment, but his response must be characteristic; he must sustain his personality and become more himself through the years. He alone is vital in the social scheme who lets nothing in him and who persists in being from all others in the scale of character to the degree of variability that was his at the beginning.
 
I read in your letter nothing but a decision to stop short and give over, as if you had strength for no more than your book and your theory! You have become slave to a small point of , and you call it the advance to a new time. "The crusade is on," you say. Coronation for the commoners and destruction to . I put my hand out to you in joy. The joy is in unholy worship of a fetish, the pain that there is no joy also to a fetish. Your thunders "Thou shalt not." Love is a thing of yesterday. No room for anything that intimately concerns the self. But what are the apostles of the young thought preaching if it is not the right of men to their own, and what would it avail them to come into their own if life be stripped of romance?
 
I am dissatisfied because you are willing to live as others must live. You should stay . Ferdinand Lassalle dressed with for his working-men audiences, with the hope, he said, of reminding them that there was something better than their shabbiness. You are of the favoured, Herbert. It de............