Seal It Up and Wait Till it is True

[Dennis]

Theodore Bacon to Delia Bacon

(...)I have written this long letter at intervals, snatching a few moments now and then for the purpose of expressing my undiminished brotherly interest in your welfare. Some passages were written with a consciousness that they would be painful to you, but I show you more respect and treat you with more confidence by retaining them, than I could by suppressing them. The friends who humor your delusion and permit you to believe that they think there may be something in it, may have the kindest intentions, but they have less confidence in you than I have shown by speaking frankly what they think would be lost upon you. And having returned to this subject, I will make another suggestion. Your theory about the authorship of Shake-speare’s plays may after all be worth something if published as a fiction. You might introduce such things into a romance, and find readers who would accept it respectfully as a work of imagination, and be gratified with it, when if the same things are brought forward with grave argument, as facts to be believed, they will reject the whole work with contempt. I make this suggestion, not to discourage you, but to encourage you, by showing how all your materials may be turned to good account...I hope to write to you before long. Meanwhile commending you to the watchfulness and covenant love of the God of our father and mother, I am your affectionate brother.

This letter was never answered.

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Delia Bacon to Hawthorne

(...) I do not know but it may have some pecuniary value after all, and if it has, it is properly yours at least until you have been paid for what I owe you. But what I desire is that you should have no more trouble with it. I will not have a novel made out of it as my brother proposed I should. I will not have my monomania converted into never so profitable a speculation, and this life and death earnest of mine is not going to be published either for the amusement or contempt of the world. Seal it up and wait till it is true.
Truly yours, Delia Bacon

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Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative)

...And here be it submitted that apparently going to corroborate the doctrine of man's fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored, it is observable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterate peculiarly characterize anybody in the external uniform of civilization, they will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention, but rather to be out of keeping with these, as if indeed exceptionally transmitted from a period prior to Cain's city and citified man. The character marked by such qualities has to an unvitiated taste an untampered-with flavor like that of berries, while the man thoroughly civilized, even in a fair specimen of the breed, has to the same moral palate a questionable smack as of a compounded wine. To any stray inheritor of these primitive qualities found, like Caspar Hauser, wandering dazed in any Christian capital of our time, the good-natured poet's famous invocation, near two thousand years ago, of the good rustic out of his latitude in the Rome of the Cesars, still appropriately holds: --
"Honest and poor, faithful in word and thought, What has thee, Fabian, to the city brought?"
Though our Handsome Sailor had as much of masculine beauty as one can expect anywhere to see; nevertheless, like the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne's minor tales, there was just one thing amiss in him. No visible blemish, indeed, as with the lady; no, but an occasional liability to a vocal defect. Though in the hour of elemental uproar or peril he was everything that a sailor should be, yet under sudden provocation of strong heart-feeling, his voice otherwise singularly musical, as if expressive of the harmony within, was apt to develop an organic hesitancy, in fact, more or less of a stutter or even worse. In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card, as much as to remind us -- I too have a hand here.
The avowal of such an imperfection in the Handsome Sailor should be evidence not alone that he is not presented as a conventional hero, *but also that the story in which he is the main figure is no romance*.