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An absence of several days from the city has interfered with my answering your letter returning the MS. of "Rena Walden", which came duly to hand. I thank you very much for sending me Mr. Gilder's letter which I do accept as a "faithful, wise word of friendly counsel." Its faithfulness is obvious, its wisdom I cannot question, though I shall have to study both the letter and the story to avail myself of it, for while there is something lacking, Mr. Gilder only very vaguely intimates what it may be. I do not think I am deficient in humor, though I dare say the sentiment of the story is a little bit "amorphous". It was written under the ever-present consciousness, so hard for me to get rid of, that a very large class of people consider the class the story treats of as meapersonal disabilities, like poverty or ugliness for instance. These writers seem to find nothing extraordinary in a talented, well-bred colored man, nothing amorphous in a pretty, gentle-spirited colored girl.
But our American writers are different. Maurice Thompson's characters are generally an old, vulgar master, who, when not drunk or asleep, is amusing himself by beating an old negro. Thos. N. Page and H.S. Edwardsnot make his colored characters think no less of themselves s despise them on account of it.
But I am wandering. Mr. Gilder finds that I either lack humor, or that my characters have "a brutality, a lack of mellowness, a lack of spontaneous imaginative life, lack of outlook." I fear, alas! that those are exactly the things that do characterize them, and just
I cannot find words to thank you for your expressions of kindness and confidence in my as yet almost untried powers, I have felt the same thing obscurely. Self-confidence is a good thing, but recognition is a better; and next to an accepted MS. there is nothing so encouraging as the recognition of those who have proved their right to
I will go right to work on Rena Walden, and send you a draft when completed. I would not personally send the same story twice to an editor, unless so requested by him; but I will follow your advice in regard to the disposition of this one. I am grateful to Mr. Gilder for his interest in me, which the letter sufficiently attests. I fear I cannot acquire his fine discernment of all ingenuinenesses; that is perhaps the quality of genuine or of genius which gives his genius its individuality; but I will do my best.
Is the authorship of "Justice & Jurisprudence" a secret? I have read the book, and infer that it is written by a colored man, as it really purports to be. It shows a great deal of research and industry; I have not yet had time to read it so thoroughly as to
P.S. I enclose Mr. Gilder's letter, of which I have taken a copy.