For the rest you draw me on with your kindness. It is difficult to get rid of people when you once have given them too much pleasure— that is a fact, and we will not stop for the moral of it. What I was going to say—after a little natural hesitation—is, that if ever you emerge without inconvenient effort from your ‘passive state', and will tell me of such faults as rise to the surface and strike you as important in my poems, (for of course, I do not think of troubling you with criticism in detail) you will confer a lasting obligation on me, and on which I shall value so much, that I covet it at a distance.
I do not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism and it is possible enough that I might not be altogether obedient to yours. But with my high respect for your power in your Art and for your experience as an artist, it would be quite impossible for me to hear a general observation of yours on what appear to you my master?faults without being the better for it hereafter in some way, I ask for only a sentence or two of general observation—and I do not ask even for that, so as to tease you—but in the humble low voice, which is so excellent a thing in women—particularly when they go a begging!
The most frequent general criticism I receive, is, I think, upon the style,—“if I would but change my style!” But that is an objection (isn't it?) to the writer bodily? Buffon says, and every sincere writer must feel, that “Le style c'est l'homme”；a fact, however, scarcely calculated to lessen the objection with certain critics.
Is it indeed true that I was so near to the pleasure and honor of making