/# On May 7, 1912, the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature celebrated the centenary of the birth of Robert Browning. H. J. read a paper on "The Novel in _The Ring and the Book_," afterwards included in _Notes on Novelists_. In an appreciative notice of the occasion in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ Mr. Filson Young described his voice as "old." #/
/* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 18th, 1912. */
Your impulse to steep me, and hold me down under water, in the Fountain of Youth, with Charles Boyd muscularly to help you, is no less beautiful than the expression you have given it, by which I am more touched than I can tell you. I take it as one of your constant kindnesses--but I had, all the same, I fear, taken Filson Young's Invidious Epithet (in that little compliment) as inevitable, wholly, though I believe it was mainly applied to my _voice_. My voice _was_ on that Centenary itself Centenarian--for reasons that couldn't be helped--for I really that day wasn't fit to speak. As for one's own sense of antiquity, my own, what is one to say?--it varies, goes and comes; at times isn't there at all and at others is quite sufficient, thank you! I cultivate not thinking about it--and yet in certain ways I like it, like the sense of having had a great deal of life. The young, on the whole, make me pretty sad--the old themselves don't. But the _pretension_ to youth is a thing that makes me saddest and oldest of all; the _acceptance_ of the fact that I am all the while growing older on the other hand decidedly rejuvenates me; I say "what then?" and the answer doesn't come, there doesn't seem to be any, and that quite sets me up. So I am young _enough_--and you are magnificent, simply: I get from you the sense of an inexhaustible vital freshness, and your voice is the voice (so beautiful!) of your twentieth year. Your going to America was admirably young--an act of your twenty-fifth. Don't _be_ younger than that; don't seem a year younger than you do seem; for in that case you will have quite withdrawn from my side. Keep up with me a _little_. I shall come to see you again at no distant day, but the coming week seems to have got itself pretty well encumbered, and on the 24th or 26th I go to Rye for four or five days. After that I expect to be in town quite to the end of June. I am reading the Green Book in bits--as it were--the only way in which I _can_ read (or at least do read the contemporary novel--though I read so very few--almost none.) My only way of reading--apart from that--is to imagine myself _writing_ the thing before me, treating the subject--and thereby often differing from the author and his--or _her_--way. I find G. W. very brisk and alive, but I _have_ to take it in pieces, or liberal sips, and so have only reached the middle. What I feel critically (and I can feel about anything of the sort but critically) is that you don't _squeeze_ your material hard and tight enough, to press out of its ounces and inches what they will give. That material lies too loose in your hand--or your hand, otherwise expressed, doesn't tighten round it. That is the fault of all fictive writing now, it seems to me--that and the inordinate abuse of dialogue--though this but one effect of the not squeezing. It's a wrong, a disastrous and unscientific economy altogether. _I_ squeeze as I read you--but that, as I say, is rewriting! However, I will tell you more when I have eaten all the pieces. And I shall love and stick to you always--as your old, very old, _oldest_ old