Letter from H. G. Wells, Sandgate, to W. E. Henley, 1900 February 4 : autograph manuscript signed.

Expressing his sadness at the illness of Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson and praising Henley's poetry; saying "The Lord God bless & keep you & make you forgive me for not writing before. Excuse I have none. My head is mud & my bowels muddle. Why should I go about pretending to be a Decent Person? I have no excuse whatever. I didn't write 'la tout and R.A.M.S [Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson]. He's not a Decent Person either. He goes & has things that are strokes & ought to be treated as such. Only in some subtle way they are not. They are something with his veins that is practically the same thing. He lies in bed & he cannot talk & I'm damned if I see how it is going to go on. The thing has no point at all. It is one of these disastrous muddy affairs that you cannot take hold of anywhere. It makes me think there is something confoundedly George Gissingish about Almighty God. It's grey & dismal & that's all the point it has. There's nothing to be done. It all rests with R.A.M. The doctors say he has his prospect of getting on a sort of [illegible] better...The best chance for him is to get out to Capri and settle down in a way of life there - - - It's the worst thing I've seen for some time no one sees it end. I don't see where the daughter & the small boy are going to be in fifteen years time. [Illegible] got the N.A.R. [North American Review] for November a few days ago. I like that year all round & some of it is altogether gaudy. You say things I feel & understand and you say them better than I could imagine them said. Theres IV, V, IX, X, XIV, XIX, XXI, XXIII, & XXIV, all to my sense simply & entirely beautiful. There's just a few other gents do that, living or dead. Come to think of it - dead all of them. But then I have deficiencies of appreciation. I understand there are forms in this game of poetry, I haven't mastered. Blethering being tuneful is still blether to me. Most poetry strikes me as unnecessary blethering. I class it with lace at its best - the common poetry. You are in some way out of that trade. This of yours is organic. It is life, singing. Why don't you do some impressions of the war?"