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Letter ReferenceHRC/OliveSchreinerLetters/OS-JohnHodgson/78
ArchiveHarry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin
Epistolary TypeLetter
Letter DateJune 1915
Address FromKensington Palace Mansions, De Vere Gardens, Kensington, London
Address To
Who ToJohn Hodgson
Other Versions
PermissionsPlease read before using or citing this transcription
Legend
The Project is grateful to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The month and year been written on this letter in an unknown hand. The letter is written on printed headed notepaper.
1Telephone: 3675 Kensington.
2Telegrams: Apartment, London.
3
4Kensington Palace Mansions & Hotel,
5De Vere Gardens, W.
6
7Dear Mr Hodgson
8
9I return your letter to Miss Wickam. I haven’t read it. Don’t you
10see your views don’t interest me in the least. It’s your
11personality your youthfulness your boy-like enjoyment of life, thats
12interesting. As to the play my feeling is that all art should be the
13expression of the individual soul. Let it be great art or small art it
14is real, when it is that.
15
16If you want to write a play write one out of your own substance – &
17if any man or woman criticizes you say “Be damned to you! What I say
18I say, & what I feel I feel!” – then it would be real. Even after
19your work is done it doesn’t matter a straw what others say – It
20was real, the one thing possible to you, & what others feel about it
21is nothing
. If they don’t understand well so much the worse for them.
22 It only shows the needs of your nature & theirs are different.
23
24I’d love to go up the River some time. That & riding on the tops of
25omnibuses as the only things that do me any good.
26
27That play of Irving’s the other night was very interesting – it
28remains more clearly in my mind than any play I’ve seen since I came
29to England. Its not the play but Irving shining through it, that gives
30it individuality. When I read Euripides it’s not the people he
31writes about give me joy, it’s his mind, which I sympathize with
32more than any other writer, which I come into contact with.
33
34Yours ever
35Olive Schreiner
36