I want to thank you³ most heartily for the first understanding review⁴ I have seen of my new book⁵. You seem to be the first person who sees what a different kind of method I tried to use from that which I used in the "Archbishop"⁶. I tried, as you say, to state the mood and the view-point in the title. To me the rock of Quebec⁷ is not only a stronghold on which many strange figures have for a little time cast a shadow in the sun; it is the curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite. There another age persists. There, among the country people and the nuns, I caught something new to me; a kind of feeling about life and human fate that I could not accept, wholly, but that which I could not but admire. It was is hard to state that feeling in language; it was more like an old song, incomplete but uncorrupted, than like a legend. The text was mainly anacolouthon, so to speak, but the meaning was clear. I took the incomplete air and tried to give it what would correspond to a sympathetic musical setting; tried to develop it into a prose composition not too conclusive, not too definite; a series of pictures remembered rather than experienced; a kind of thinking, a mental complexion inherited, left over from the past, lacking in robustness and full of pious resignation.

Now it seemed to me that the mood of the mis-fits among the early settlers( and there were a good many) must have been just that. An orderly little French⁸ household that went on trying to live decently, just as ants begin to rebuild when you kick their house down, interests me more than Indian raids or the wild life in the forests. And, as you alone among my reviewers⁹ seem to recognize, once having adopted a tone so definite, once having taken your seat in the close air by the apothecary's fire, you can't explode into military glory, any more than you can pour champagne into a salad dressing. (I don't believe much in rules, but Stevenson¹⁰ laid down a good one when he said: you can't mix kinds.) And really, a new society begins with the salad dressing more than it does with the destruction of Indian villages. Those people brought a kind of French culture there and somehow kept it alive on that rock, sheltered it and tended it and on occasion died for it, as if it really were a sacred fire——and all this temperately and shrewdly, with emotion always tempered by good sense.

It's very hard for an American to catch that rhythm--- it's so unlike us. But I made an honest try, and I got a great deal of pleasure out of it, if nobody else does! And surely you'll agree with me that outr writers experiment too little, and produce their own special brand too readily.

With deep appreciation of the compliment you pay me in taking the time to review the book, and my friendliest regards always,