Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	Karl Pearson 840/4/5/10-16
Archive	University College London Library, Special Collections, UCL, London
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	11 November 1890
Address From	Matjesfontein, Western Cape
Address To
Who To	Karl Pearson
Other Versions	Rive 1987: 177-80

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, 11 November 1890, 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.

1:  Matjesfontein
2:  Cape of Good Hope
3:  Nov 11 / 90
4: 
5:  My dear Karl Pearson
6: 
7:  With all my heart keep the letters if they are of the smallest
8:  interest to you. The reason I asked for them was that before I went to
9:  Switzerland the first time when I thought I was dying, I got a friend
10:  to burn all the letters I had received during my London life. I felt I
11:  had no right to leave in existence letters meant only for my eye
12:  perhaps to fall into the hands of others. I have now no record left of
13:  those long years of wonderful life & human fellowship, but a few
14:  letters over looked in an old desk. Among them is a bundle of yours. I
15:  thought if you set no value on mine to you I would like to kept them.
16:  There is little personal in them; if there were, I would feel still,
17:  they were as safe in your hands as mine. The only thing I am ever
18:  troubled about with regard to anything I have written, is lest I
19:  should have said anything that might hurt a human being or is
20:  ungenerous. I think I never have to you you. Only perhaps of my dear,
21:  pure sweet friend Dr Donkin. I have never seen him since that night
22:  when he went to see you, except once in passing. I have never heard
23:  from him except a couple of notes when I first left, & a beautiful
24:  letter on his marriage; I have never asked him what passed between you,
25:  I have gathered it from your letters to me: I have never wished to
26:  know more. If I ever said anything ungenerous of him to you, please
27:  know, that looking back now on all that life as a thing that no more
28:  touches me & mere history, I find Donkin the most childlikely pure,
29:  (in the world’s sense & the highest!), truthful, transparent nature
30:  with which I have ever come in contact. I have never fully understood
31:  his conduct, any more than I have ever fully understood yours. I have
32:  not wished to understand. The thing is to know a character as a whole;
33:  know it is noble, truthloving, sincere; & then trouble yourself
34:  nothing about details. The eagle is not less the eagle, you do not
35:  doubt it upward tendency & power of flight, because in the dark it
36:  catches its wings in trees, or beats against a night owl & is thrown
37:  to earth: the tendency & the direction are everything: you pity it for
38:  its misfortune in the dark - you never mistake it for a night-owl. The
39:  thought that I may have spoken of him to you ungenerously hurts me
40:  intensely. It was the purity & devotion of his friendship which for
41:  years copied my manuscripts, sought to save me in every little detail,
42:  & drew or thought it drew all its best inspiration for life & work
43:  from me, that angered me, because it seemed to bind me as no selfish
44:  or passionate feeling could have done. He is the only person of all
45:  the men & women I knew in my ten years of English life whom I acted
46:  ungenerously to; because he was my friend & I should never have spoken
47:  of him to a third person. It is all right now, he is married to a
48:  large & noble woman, & as saith the old story "story – "It all came
49:  right at last, & they lived & died happy ever after." But I have felt
50:  I wanted to say this to you. The less we talk of individuals the
51:  better. If we love them they are too sacred to be discussed with
52:  anyone; if we shrink from them, we dare not speak of them lest we
53:  should be unjust to them; if we don’t know enough of them either to
54:  love or hate, then it is foolish to speak of them. I want so when I
55:  lay my pen down for the last time, to lay it down just as pure as when
56:  I took it up the first time to form the first letters when I was a
57:  little child, never to have caused any-thing one moment’s pain with
58:  it.
59: 
60:  I have a favour to ask you & your wife, my dear friend. Many years ago
61:  I asked you if I might dedicate a work of mine to you, & you said I
62:  might. I wrote it 12 years ago, & for the first time I am finding time
63:  to revise it now. I will be done soon. What I have to ask is will you
64:  & she let me dedicate it to you together? I would be so grateful if
65:  you. I want to say to you two "God bless you", but we have no modern
66:  way of saying that; it seems to me I would express it if you let me
67:  dedicate the book to you. Will you, my dear friends? There is no need
68:  to write. If I do not hear from you before next March I shall know I
69:  may; & if you think you would rather not, then a card with ‘no’,
70:  will be enough.
71: 
72:  Another thing: the middle of next year I shall be starting to spend
73:  some years in the interior of Africa. I am learning Kaffir which is
74:  the key-language, so that I shall be able to study the people. What I
75:  want to know is if there are any particular points which you will
76:  would like me to investigate which might throw light on your work.
77:  No-where in the world as such vestiges of the primitive human
78:  condition to be found as among them. It would take too long or I would
79:  tell you of the wonderful relics of what you would call "the mother
80:  age" which are to be found among them, in their ceremonies & customs.
81:  I once ran a If you & your wife will read Wood’s Natural History of Man,
82:  you will be surprised if how quite unconsciously he gives much
83:  evidence of that. If there are any special inquiries you would like me
84:  to make, I would be very glad to do so, because I wish to make my
85:  journey of as much use as I can. Please do not mention to anyone that
86:  I am going: it is for you & your wife alone. I unwisely mentioned it,
87:  & I have had two offers of ^from^ women to go with me; I was obliged to
88:  refuse them, & it hurts me so much to repulse people, & y so please
89:  consider what I tell you a secret. There is no need to write, you
90:  could simply send the questions.
91: 
92:  Yes, my dear friend, I have no need of ^personal intercourse with^ you
93:  any more. Don’t you see what the help was you used to be to me? When
94:  you first knew me, & for many years before, I had simply lived at the
95:  beck & call of every woman who chose to make a demand on me. You stopp
96:  I was simply bleeding to death. You stopped that. You were the first &
97:  only person who suggested to me, "Is this moral?" & who gave me
98:  strength to resist. You did it as much, perhaps unconsciously & by
99:  example, ^as by word^ but also there was one letter of yours which
100:  greatly helped me. Do you know that during the last four years when
101:  that little card has hung on my door in London, "Olive Schreiner does
102:  not wish to see anyone; please do not ring" - that there ought to have
103:  been added below, "this is hung in the strength of Karl Pearson"? Do
104:  you know that when I have been living a broad & women have insisted on
105:  following me, & saying they would live with me, I have taken the money
106:  out & said "Now buy your ticket, go to England, I can do nothing for
107:  you", in strength that was yours, not mine. Do you know that I have
108:  sometimes taken a pile of fifty letters, looked through them to see
109:  there was none from anyone who had need of me, & then put them all
110:  into the fire? - in the strength of Karl Pearson! Do you know that I
111:  had reached a stage in which I should have felt it wicked to spend 2d
112:  on an egg for myself - I could give it to some poor person, what right
113:  had I to anything; only once in three years did I go in for any
114:  relaxation. I was going to one of the Richter concerts, to sit in the
115:  back half crown seats as I was walking down one street near Piccadilly
116:  I saw a number of work girls sewing below, an agony came on me that I
117:  was seeking for pleasure while they were in the hot close air working,
118:  & & I fled back to Blandford Square. Why you helped me out of this
119:  state, & just how it would take too long exactly to explain. You did.
120:  Have you ever had unreadable internal haemorrhage, & they give you ice
121:  & the flow stops at once, & you always feel a curious kind of
122:  gratitude to the ice?? You always seemed to me like a lump of ice put
123:  on a wound where from which one was bleeding to death & freezing it up.
124:  You may be tender, sympathetic, human - if you are it matters nothing
125:  to me; you helped me through that which the world calls cold, narrow,
126:  selfish: it was your self-consciousness & self concentration that
127:  helped me. You saved my life. Now I do not need you any more. I have
128:  learnt the lesson that to recklessly give yourself to the service of
129:  every ^man or^ woman who makes a demand upon you is gross immorality:
130:  that when I sit here at night writing I serve the prostitute ^much^ more
131:  than when I took her in from the streets & laid her in my bed, & sat
132:  up all night watching her sunken face in terror & agony. She had to go
133:  the next morning, I could do nothing for her, what was the use? I help
134:  the respectable woman more now, than when I gave up afternoons &
135:  evenings, to letting her sit & talk, hour after hour, & unreadable of
136:  her displeasure with life, & then when she went, throw myself in agony
137:  on the floor to cry, because of my wasted life, all given for what!
138:  for what! With no result! And then I would get up & write letters till
139:  two o’clock for fear I should pain some one.
140: 
141:  Mark you, Karl Pearson, I do not regret that life; I am grateful.
142:  Those women taught me what I could not otherwise have learnt. I would
143:  not have those years blotted out. They are my most precious heritage.
144:  But if it had continued a little longer I must have died. I needed
145:  your lesson, "The man or woman who will spend life for his fellows,
146:  must look calmly, widely over life, & say here & here I can best spend
147:  myself, & quietly restrain his sympathys in others." You never said
148:  this, but you taught it me, my dear friend.
149: 
150:  I do not need you to teach it me any more. I have seen that
151:  dis-cretion is the better part of valour, & come here, where I am 100
152:  miles from the nearest village & 200 from the nearest town; where the
153:  English mail comes once a week, & I have the moral courage to resolve
154:  never to write more than 21 letters a week. Where no one could come &
155:  seek me up but the ants & meerkats and it is I who generally go to
156:  seek them!
157: 
158:  In one other way you were of help to me. When ever I had a few moments
159:  free in the night I used to set down hurriedly all the thought on sex
160:  & social questions that had come during the day. I had a vast pile of
161:  these more or less valuable. The fear of my life was that I should die
162:  with these papers all ?unwrought, & my life would have been lived for
163:  nothing. Can you understand? The one thought I clung to was that your
164:  brain was enough like mine to make them understandable by you, & that
165:  if I died you would work them up. I made a will a little more than
166:  four years ago leaving them all to you: it has remained so to the
167:  present; when I go to town next month I shall alter them it: not
168:  because my trust in you is less perfect, but we have drifted to far
169:  apart, there could be no mental understanding, & my physical strength
170:  is so I restored that I may be good for twenty years. When I was ill I
171:  longed very much to see you that I might explain about them.
172: 
173:  Now, Karl Pearson, you understand how it is my need for you has ended
174:  as completely as yours for me.
175: 
176:  Not my friendship.
177: 
178:  You speak of offering me your friendship, as if it it were a thing I
179:  could accept or refuse. It is mine or it is not. If you have believed
180:  in me; if you have accepted no representation of any human being,
181:  dis-cussing me with none but to justify me; if you read all my words &
182:  acts in the light of all that is noblest & most impersonal in yourself;
183:  if you have believed when you could not understand that my motives
184:  were large & generous, & that I was taking the only path open to me;
185:  then you are my friend. If you are not, then you are not & never have
186:  been.
187: 
188:  To dis-cuss this matter would be to exhume what was once very sacred
189:  to me, & show disrespect to its remains.
190: 
191:  I do not wish you to write to me. If you wish to do so write in your
192:  own person or through your wife. She is a woman I respect & have faith
193:  in, & being now so closely & beautifully connected with you I shall
194:  take all words from her as coming from you.
195: 
196:  I am, my dear friends,
197:  Yours affectionately, Olive Schreiner
198: 
199:  This letter is for your wife as well as you.
200: 
201: 
202: 

Notation
The book Schreiner wants to dedicate to Pearson is From Man to Man. The bo'k referred to is: J. G. Wood (1868) The Natural History of Man London: George Routledge & Sons. Rive?s (1987) version of this letter is in a number of respects incorrect.