漏 Copyright 2001 R. G. Harrison Letter 332 Drenthe, 12 October 1883
Dear Theo,
I just received your letter. I read it over and over again with the greatest interest, and one thing is becoming clear to me, which I have often thought about without getting very far.
That is to say, you have in common with me a time of secretly drawing the most impossible castles in the air, etc., which drawings stand in a curious relation to the throng of thoughts and aspirations 鈥?useless because nobody who might lend a helping hand takes any notice of them (only painters could show the right way then, but they have their thoughts elsewhere). That is a great inner struggle, which ends in discouragement, or in giving up the ideas as impracticable, and just about the age of twenty-one is very eager to do so.
What I may have said then, which was bound to contribute to that casting things overboard, at that moment my thoughts were perhaps the same as yours, that is to say, I regarded it as impossible. But as to that despairing struggle without getting any light anywhere, I know how awful it is too 鈥?with all one鈥檚 energy one cannot do anything, and thinks oneself crazy, or Heaven knows what. In London how often I stood drawing on the Thames Embankment, on my way home from Southampton Street in the evening, and it came to nothing. If there had been someone then to tell me what perspective was, how much misery I should have been spared, how much further I should have been now! Well, let bygones be bygones. It has not been so. I spoke once or twice to Thijs Maris. I dared not speak to Boughton because his presence overawed me; but I did not find it there either, that help with the very first things, the A B C.
Let me repeat now that I believe in you as an artist, and that you may become so still, yes, that in a very short time you would think over in all calmness whether you are an artist or not, whether you succeed in producing something or not, if you learned to spell the above-mentioned A B C and if at the same time you wandered through the cornfields and the moors, to renew what you yourself express as 鈥淚 used to feel myself part of nature; now I do not feel that way any longer.鈥?p style="line-height:25px;text-indent:32px"> Let me tell you, brother, that I myself experienced so deeply, so very deeply what you say there. That I have been through a period of nervous, arid overstraining 鈥?there were days when I could not see anything in the most beautiful landscape just because I did not feel myself part of it. It is the street and the office and the care and the nerves that make it so.
Do not be angry with me when I say that at this moment your soul is sick 鈥?it is true, you know; it is not right for you not to feel yourself part of nature, and I think the most important thing is to restore that. I must look into my own past to find why I lived in that stony, arid mood for years, and why it became worse instead of better, though I tried to remedy it.
Not only did I feel hardened instead of sensitive toward nature, but, much worse still, I felt exactly the same toward people.
They said I was out of my mind, but I knew myself that it was not true, for the very reason that I felt my own disease deep within me, and tried to remedy it. I exhausted myself with hopeless, unsuccessful efforts,
it is true, but because of that fixed idea of reaching a normal point of view again, I never mistook my own desperate doings, worryings and drudgings for my real innermost self. At least I always felt, 鈥淛ust let me do something, be somewhere, and it must redress itself. I will rise above it, let me keep hold of patience to redress things.鈥?p style="line-height:25px;text-indent:32px"> I do not believe somebody like 鈥斺