We expect you, remember that.
* * * * *
SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH,
November 1st, 1885.
DEAR MR. ARCHER,—You will see that I had already had a sight of your
article and what were my thoughts.
One thing in your letter puzzles me. Are you, too, not in the witness
box? And if you are, why take a wilfully false hypothesis? If you knew I
was a chronic invalid, why say that my philosophy was unsuitable to such
a case? My call for facts is not so general as yours, but an essential
fact should not be put the other way about.
The fact is, consciously or not, you doubt my honesty; you think I
am making faces, and at heart disbelieve my utterances. And this I am
disposed to think must spring from your not having had enough of pain,
sorrow, and trouble in your existence. It is easy to have too much;
easy also or possible to have too little; enough is required that a
man may appreciate what elements of consolation and joy there are in
everything but absolutely overpowering physical pain or disgrace, and
how in almost all circumstances the human soul can play a fair part. But
perhaps my hypothesis is as unlike the truth as the one you chose. Well,
if it be so, if you have had trials, sickness, the approach of death,
the alienation of friends, poverty at the heels, and have not felt your
soul turn round upon these things and spur them under—you must be very
differently made from me, and I earnestly believe from the majority of
men. But at least you are in the right to wonder and complain.
To 'say all'? Stay here. All at once? That would require a word from the
pen of Gargantua. We say each particular thing as it comes up, and 'with
that sort of emphasis that for the time there seems to be no other.'
Words will not otherwise serve us; no, nor even Shakespeare, who could
not have put _As You Like It_ and _Timon_ into one without ruinous loss
both of emphasis and substance. Is it quite fair then to keep your face
so steadily on my most light-hearted works, and then say I recognise no
evil? Yet in the paper on Burns, for instance, I show myself alive to
some sorts of evil. But then, perhaps, they are not your sorts.
And again: 'to say all'? All: yes. Everything: no. The task were endless,
the effect nil. But my all, in such a vast field as this of life, is what
interests me, what stands out, what takes on itself a presence for my
imagination or makes a figure in that little tricky abbreviation which
is the best that my reason can conceive. That I must treat, or I shall
be fooling with my readers. That, and not the all of some one else.
And here we come to the division: not only do I believe that literature
should give joy, but I see a universe, I suppose, eternally different
from yours: a solemn, a terrible, but a very joyous and noble universe;
where suffering is not at least wantonly inflicted, though it falls
with dispassionate partiality, but where it may be and generally is
nobly borne; where above all (this I believe: probably you don't: I
think he may, with cancer) _any brave man may make_ out a life which
shall be happy for himself, and, by so being, beneficent to those about
him. And if he fails, why should I hear him weeping? I mean if I fail,
why should I weep? why should _you_ hear _me_? Then to me morals, the
conscience, the affections, and the passions are, I will own frankly and
sweepingly, so infinitely more important than the other parts of life,
that I conceive men rather triflers who become immersed in the latter;
and I will always think the man who keeps his lip stiff, and makes 'a
happy fireside clime,' and carries a pleasant face about to friends
and neighbours, infinitely greater in the abstract than an atrabilious
Shakespeare or a backbiting Kant or Darwin. No offence to any of these
gentlemen: two of whom probably (one for certain) came up to my standard.
And now enough said: it were hard if a poor man could not criticise
another without having so much ink shed against him. But I shall still
regret you should have written on an hypothesis you knew to be untenable,
and that you should thus have made your paper, for those who do not
know me, essentially unfair. The rich, foxhunting squire speaks with
one voice; the sick man of letters with another.—Yours very truly,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
(_Prometheus-Heine in minimis._)
_P.S._—Here I go again. To me, the medicine bottles on my chimney and
the blood on my handkerchief are accidents; they do not colour my view
of life, as you would know, I think, if you had experience of sickness;
they do not exist in my prospect; I would as soon drag them under the
eyes of my readers as I would mention a pimple I might chance to have
(saving your presence) on my ——. What does it prove? what does it
change? it has not hurt, it has not changed me in any essential part;
and I should think myself a trifler and in bad taste if I introduced
the world to these unimportant privacies.
But again there is this mountain-range between us: _that you do not
believe me_. It is not flattering, but the fault is probably in my
literary art.
* * * * *
SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH,
October 28, 1885.
MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,—At last, my wife being at a concert, and a story
being done, I am at some liberty to write and give you of my views. And
first, many thanks for the works that came to my sickbed. And second,
and more important, as to the _Princess_ [Cazamassima]. Well, I think
you are going to do it this time; I cannot, of course, foresee, but
these two first numbers seem to me picturesque and sound and full of
lineament, and very much a new departure. As for your young lady, she
is all there; yes, sir, you can do low life, I believe. The prison was
excellent; it was of that nature of touch that I sometimes achingly miss
from your former work; with some of the grime, that is, and some of the
emphasis of skeleton there is in nature. I pray you to take grime in a
good sense; it need not be ignoble: dirt may have dignity; in nature it
usually has; and your prison was imposing.
And now to the main point, why do we not see you? Do not fail us. Make
an alarming sacrifice, and let us see "Henry James's chair" properly
occupied. I never sit in it myself (though it was my grandfather's);
it has been consecrated to guests by your approval, and now stands at
my elbow gaping. We have a new room, too, to introduce to you: our
last baby, the drawing-room: it never cries, and has cut its teeth.
Likewise, there is a cat now. It promises to be a monster of laziness
and self-sufficiency.
Pray see, in the November _Time_ (a dread name for a magazine of light
reading), a very clever fellow, W. Archer, stating his views of me: the
rosy-gilled "athletico-æsthete": and warning me in a fatherly manner that
a rheumatic fever would try my philosophy (as indeed it would), and that
my gospel would not do for "those who are shut out from the exercise of
any manly virtue save renunciation." To those who know that rickety and
cloistered spectre, the real R. L. S., the paper, besides being clever
in itself, presents rare elements of sport. The critical parts are in
particular very bright and neat and often excellently true. Get it by
all manner of means.
I hear on all sides I am to be attacked as an immoral writer; this is
painful. Have I at last got, like you, to the pitch of being attacked?
'Tis the consecration I lack—and could do without. Not that Archer's
paper is an attack, or what either he or I, I believe, would call one;
'tis the attacks on my morality (which I had thought a gem of the first
water) I referred to.—Yours affectionately,