Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	Karl Pearson 840/4/4/3-8
Archive	University College London Library, Special Collections, UCL, London
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Sunday 30 January 1887
Address From	Hotel Roth, Clarens, Lake Geneva, Montreux, Switzerland
Address To	2 Harcourt Buildings, Temple, London
Who To	Karl Pearson
Other Versions	Rive 1987: 120-4

The manuscript of this letter by Olive Schreiner belongs to the Archive referenced above; its ownership of the original should be acknowledged by referencing the letter as indicated: Copyright transcription: © Olive Schreiner Letters Project. This transcription can be freely used as long as copyright is acknowledged and it is referenced using the following citation: ‘Olive Schreiner to Karl Pearson, 30 January 1887, University College London Library, Special Collections, UCL, London, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to University College London (UCL) and its Library Services for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Special Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  Hotel Roth
2:  Clarens
3:  Lake of Geneva,
4:  Sunday night
5:  Jan 30th 1887
6: 
7:  My dear Mr Pearson
8: 
9:  I read this morning, for the first time your letter to Dr Donkin. I
10:  have thought it over carefully today. The conclusion I have arrived at
11:  is that it is my duty to write telling you & Mrs Cobb how entirely I
12:  feel myself wrong. If you will kindly neither of you reply to this
13:  letter I should feel it a great favour.
14: 
15:  More than a year ago when the Pall Mall letters came out & again with
16:  regard to Miss Haddon if I thought Mrs Cobb acting wrongly & screening
17:  herself behind her husband it was my place then to have spoken when
18:  the matter was impersonal. I simply kept away. When at last ^I thought^
19:  she touched me personally, when she said what might have divided
20:  between me & Mr Ellis & in other small ways hurt my feelings then I
21:  became suddenly virtuous & posed as the defender of abstract truth!
22:  All the time it was my own tiny feelings I was defending. I have had a
23:  curious kind of feeling attracting me to Mrs Cobb, such as I have not
24:  felt for another woman, I had defended her fiercely when a friendship
25:  of hers which I knew to be noble & pure was called into question. I
26:  had taken care that neither Carpenter nor Mrs Brown nor any friend of
27:  mine whose opinion she would value should guess that my ideal of her
28:  was touched. When she acted as I thought untruly to me I was fiercely
29:  bitter against her, I did not for a moment realize that she could not
30:  possibly know how I ^had^ felt to her. The night of the club meeting
31:  when you & Parker came up, I had been talking to her about Ellis, & I
32:  acted to you with positive rudeness. There was no excuse for my doing
33:  so. The bitterness one feels when one is trying to lose oneself in
34:  abstract work & is violently brought back to personalities is no
35:  excuse. If the price of abstract work is antisocial action, then one
36:  is simply not fit for it! I did not write to Ellis or Miss Haddon
37:  about Mrs Cobb. I simply sent them the copy of my letter to her. To
38:  Miss Haddon I have not since written. Ellis wrote simply, "Let Mrs
39:  Cobb say what she will. Let us do our work", showing the larger spirit
40:  of the man & his superiority over me.
41: 
42:  I was absolutely unjustified in writing to you about Mrs Cobb at all.
43:  I had no right to take your time, nor run the risk of touching your
44:  friendship for her for an hour, ^a friendship I had felt to be nearer
45:  the ideal than any other I knew between a man & a woman.^ I could
46:  perfectly have explained to Mrs Cobb what my feeling to her was
47:  with-out mentioning you. Were I to show you the copies of my letters
48:  to her you would see how absolutely nothing you had to do with my
49:  feeling. I have nothing to say in justification.
50: 
51:  //Further I was unjust to Mrs Cobb. She came twice in one day to see
52:  me when I was very ill. I had asked her not to come, & had said all I
53:  could. I thought she came to torture me. When she sent me a letter to
54:  me I sent it back unopened. Now I find from your letter she did not
55:  come on her own account that it was you what who sent her: You would
56:  have been perfectly justified in doing so if my illness had been as
57:  you thought ^it was^ merely caused by some imaginary sorrow; I had been
58:  underfed at the convent, over worked in London, & fifteen days of
59:  bronchitis had reduced me to drivelling weakness; but weakness is no
60:  excuse for anti social action it may bring out the evil that is in us
61:  it cannot put it there. Robert Parker holds all anti-social action as
62:  the result of muddle headedness - this is true, but how often at the
63:  root of muddle headedness lies selfishness & passion! This has been my
64:  case. Had I turned to Mrs Cobb with love & wide impersonal sympathy,
65:  her sweet sympathetic nature would have been the first to turn to mine.
66:  We are going to reform the world, to show a nobler form of human life
67:  - & we cannot maintain a sweet human relation with one beautiful
68:  woman-soul! The satire is a little bitter; & there is an aspect of it
69:  which you cannot see. Only I, looking back at my own life see the
70:  cutting sarcasm implied in my standing as a representative of ideal
71:  virtue. The reason I love my fellow-men better than another others &
72:  can come nearer them, is that I have erred more than others, & to the
73:  weak-side of every nature mine answers back. You were quite right to
74:  strike me as hard as you did.
75: 
76:  //As to the much smaller matter between ourselves. From the beginning
77:  of our brief acquaintance when at Portsea Place, you treated me with
78:  something like brutality because the paper I was labouring under had
79:  gone beyond my grasp you have dealt towards me with hard truthfulness,
80:  which I liked. There has been no time when you have suggested to me
81:  that you valued my friendship in any personal sense. You are charging
82:  yourself entirely without cause when you suggest such a thing. I have
83:  valued you because you stimulated me; unreadable you have valued me
84:  because I was an interesting study, differing slightly from the women
85:  among whom your lot was cast. I have never imagined that our
86:  friendship was of a personal kind such as might have existed between
87:  yourself & Parker, unreadable ^for instance.^ You have been interested
88:  in my work & I have been so in yours.
89: 
90:  Looking over our brief intercourse I cannot see what suggested to you
91:  in the last month that I had broken our agreement that no sex element
92:  should enter. Possibly you have not understood one thing. When at
93:  Kilburn you wrote me that you intended experimenting in marriage, that
94:  in six months your position would have changed &c. I regarded this as
95:  a joke. When you spoke further on the matter, & I learnt you were
96:  leaving the Temple & other things matters, I came to the conclusion
97:  you were about to try the experiment. Our brief acquaintance gave me
98:  no right to speak or question you on the subject. With my feeling that
99:  legal marriage is an immorality in the highest members of the race
100:  (not in the lower) that it is their duty to lead in this matter, not
101:  only in speculation but in action, & also feeling that you were
102:  somewhat more than usually likely to make a mis-calculation, I was
103:  somewhat perturbed. Had Mrs Cobb & I been on different terms I might
104:  have written to her, as it was I mentioned the matter to no one. Had I
105:  felt quite sure I might have spoken to you of the matter directly, but
106:  I felt doubtful. I have watched two of the humanbeings nearest me die
107:  slowly in the hands of a pure sweet loving-woman. I have seen her put
108:  her lips to them & suck & suck all their life. You have perhaps not
109:  seen this - but were I or any man-friend about to take this step you
110:  would not be wholly indifferent. Love & friendship are sacred ^to
111:  individuals^ not to be touched by the outer world. Sex-feeling &
112:  sex-relationship on the other hand are matters on which a man should
113:  seek the widest advice from the widest circle of friends, firstly,
114:  because sex-feeling has an aberrant effect on the intellect; secondly,
115:  because the results of sex-relationship, are matters more of social
116:  than private importance. With the brain worker who has anything to
117:  give the world marriage is a peculiarly difficult question, it may
118:  benefit the general health & so lengthen life, but what if while it
119:  makes the flame burn longer it makes it burn duller! I think when you
120:  take into consideration my strong feeling on the subject of unreadable
121:  ^sex relationships^ (I regard marriage as other people regard death. My
122:  feeling of profoundest gratitude is to the woman who once saved me
123:  from it) you will understand my sending you the allegory & anything
124:  which may have appeared uncalled for. In our brief acquaintance there
125:  has been an equal absence of sex feeling on your side & on mine in
126:  other respects our relationship has been very unequal. The life of a
127:  woman like myself is a very solitary one. You have had a succession of
128:  friendships that have answered to the successive stages of your mental.
129:  When I came to England a few years ago, I had once, only, spoken to a
130:  person who knew the names of such books as I loved. Intellectual
131:  friendship was a thing I had only dreamed of. Our brief intellectual
132:  relations & our few conversations have been common-place enough to you,
133:  to me they have been absolutely unique. I have known nothing like it
134:  in my life. You will be generous & consider this when you remember how
135:  I have tortured you with half-fledged ideas, & plans of books that
136:  could never be written.
137: 
138:  //A woman has a great many lovers. When she comes near unreadable to a
139:  man it comes at last, generally, to this – "Will you love me" - ^that is^
140:  "Will you have no object or aim in the world but me. Let me be the
141:  little glass through which you see life. Let me be the wall round you
142:  beyond which you do not grow. You will shall be everything all the
143:  world to me!" This seems a beautiful ideal, & to the woman at the
144:  present day who still wishes to be dependent on the man it may answer.
145:  But to the woman who has unreadable to fight for freedom it is exactly
146:  this ideal which is immoral! It is this demand upon her ^intellect unreadable^
147:  unreadable that she has to fight against, as the savage woman had to
148:  resist the physical over-ture of men! It is this demand which women &
149:  men have to teach each other is immoral. Is it ^not^ the anarchist
150:  principle ^of perfect freedom^ cutting through life, dealing not with
151:  private material property, but with ^the^ affections? It is this
152:  spiritual demand that we have to fight against, not now the material.
153:  unreadable The battle ground has changed. (One feels here more clearly
154:  than one sees, one’s hands are still only feeling after the truth!)
155: 
156:  //If a cat were accustomed to regard all boys as unreadable beings
157:  whose aim it was to circumscribe the liberty of all cats & prevent
158:  their free locomotion; if she ^should^ discover unreadable a boy who
159:  showed no inclination in this direction, & who appeared absolutely
160:  oblivious of the possibility of of capturing any cat, can you not
161:  imagine the infinite placid satisfaction with which that cat would
162:  trot at his side. Must men & women in their friendships always stand
163:  on the defensive, not because of any brutal instinct, but because of
164:  subtle desire to circumscribe each other’s liberty? I think not: I
165:  see the hope of the world in the passing away of this.
166: 
167:  The value in which I have held your friendship may have puzzled you,
168:  but have you realized that it is an absolutely unique thing that a man
169:  should try to stimulate a woman, that he should say, "What are you
170:  doing here; why are you squandering your time, why do you not go away
171:  & work?", that he should regard her as a worker & not as a woman?
172:  Edward Carpenter & yourself are the only men I know capable of taking
173:  this view of a woman; Parker might be.
174: 
175:  You will wonder ^that I^ unreadable entering into this trivial detail;
176:  what you or I may think of each other is a very small matter. But
177:  there is an aspect which is not small. A large part of your work ^in life^
178:  deals with the sex questions. Our work on this matter will stand just
179:  in proportion as we have a true grasp on the ultimate facts which
180:  underlie our theories, these facts we cannot get at without an
181:  intimate knowledge of men & women. To do your work rightly you need
182:  the friendship of many women of many differing types. It is absolutely
183:  necessary for you. If the misunderstanding of our relation ^unreadable^
184:  prevents the formation of friendships, & both lessens your faith in
185:  their possibility a permanent injury has been done to your work; & the
186:  world suffers.
187: 
188:  ^Feb 6th.^ The letters I wrote before I left London contained the truth,
189:  possibly an under rather than an over statement; but is that ever
190:  truth which is presented with out limitations or definitions! It is
191:  only truth when rightly interpreted. I cannot do so from lack of
192:  remembrance. I will leave you to do it for me.
193: 
194:  //The I enclosed a letter from Dr Donkin written to me two days before
195:  my illness. unreadable letter about Mrs Cobb. His letter will show you
196:  how entirely he has failed to understand my position, not from any
197:  failure ^want^ in his own beautiful & generous nature but from the
198:  irreconcilable difference in our views of life. unreadable to you
199:  unreadable you after Your letter to him shows me, for the first time,
200:  how complete that misunderstanding was. If his letter does not explain
201:  itself, there is nothing more to be said.
202: 
203:  Neither to Mrs Wilson, nor to any one have I spoken on this matter. M
204:  I asked Mrs Wilson once whether if you had once cared for someone &
205:  you thought them untrue to you & felt very bitter, you had a right to
206:  speak; she replied that as long as you felt bitterness you might know
207:  you were in the wrong. I did not mention Mrs Cobb’s name to her,
208:  then, or at any time. You^r^ have name I have hardly mentioned in the
209:  last year; never personally. I have dis-cussed your intellect, & the
210:  work we might expect from you.
211: 
212:  I shall trust that you & Mrs Cobb have forgiven me.
213: 
214:  You will please not write to me. Life is very short; & we are burning
215:  up.
216: 
217:  I am, yours always faithfully, Olive Schreiner
218: 
219:  You will please not think that this letter requires any answer.
220:  unreadable
221:  unreadable Dr Donkin what passed between him unreadable
222: 
223:  ^Please send this letter to Mrs Cobb as it will save my writing to her.^
224: 
225: 
226: 

Notation
The 'Pall Mall letters' refers to its editor W.T. Stead's four articles under the heading of 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' on prostitution and the age of consent, published in the paper on 6, 7, 8 and 9 July 1885. Rive's (1987) version omits part of this letter and is also in a number of respects incorrect.