_To Robert Louis Stevenson._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
October 21st [1893.]
My dear Louis,
The postal guide tells me, disobligingly, that there is no mail to you
via San Francisco this month and that I must confide my few lines to
the precarious and perfidious Hamburg. I do so, then, for the plain
reason that I can no longer repress the enthusiasm that has surged
within me ever since I read _Catriona_. I missed, just after doing so,
last month's post, and I was infinitely vexed that it should not have
conveyed to you the freshness of my rapture. For the said _Catriona_ so
reeks and hums with genius that there is no refuge for the desperate
reader but in straightforward prostration. I'm not sure that it's
magnanimous of you to succeed so inconsiderately--there is a modesty in
easy triumph which your flushed muse perhaps a little neglects.--But
forgive that lumbering image--I won't attempt to carry it out. Let me
only say that I don't despatch these ineffectual words on their too
watery way to do anything but thank you for an exquisite pleasure. I
hold that when a book has the high beauty of that one there's a poor
indelicacy in what simple folk call criticism. The work lives by so
absolute a law that it's grotesque to prattle about what _might_ have
been! I shall express to you the one point in which my sense was
conscious of an unsatisfied desire, but only after saying first how rare
an achievement I think the whole personality and tone of David and with
how supremely happy a hand you have coloured the palpable women. They
are quite too lovely and everyone is running after them. In David not an
error, not a false note ever; he is all of an exasperating truth and
rightness. The one thing I miss in the book is the note of
_visibility_--it subjects my visual sense, my _seeing_ imagination, to
an almost painful underfeeding. The _hearing_ imagination, as it were,
is nourished like an alderman, and the loud audibility seems a slight
the more on the baffled lust of the eyes--so that I seem to myself (I am
speaking of course only from the point of view of the way, as I read,
_my_ impression longs to complete itself) in the presence of voices in
the darkness--voices the more distinct and vivid, the more brave and
sonorous, as voices always are--but also the more tormenting and
confounding--by reason of these bandaged eyes. I utter a pleading moan
when you, e.g., transport your characters, toward the end, in a line or
two from Leyden to Dunkirk without the glint of a hint of all the
ambient picture of the 18th century road. However, stick to your own
system of evocation so long as what you positively achieve is so big.
Life and letters and art all take joy in you.
I am rejoiced to hear that your wife is less disturbed in health and
that your anxieties are somewhat appeased. I don't know how sufficiently
to renew, to both of you, the assurance of all my friendliest sympathy.
You live in conditions so unimaginable and to the tune of experience so
great and so strange that you must forgive me if I am altogether out of
step with your events. I know you're surrounded with the din of battle,
and yet the beauty you produce has the Goethean calm, even like the
beauty distilled at Weimar when the smoke was over Jena. Let me touch
you at least on your bookish side and the others may bristle with
heroics. I pray you be made accessible some day in a talkative armchair
by the fire. If it hadn't been for _Catriona_ we couldn't, this year,
have held up our head. It had been long, before that, since any decent
sentence was turned in English. We grow systematically vulgarer and
baser. The only blur of light is that your books are tasted. I shall try
to see Colvin before I post this--otherwise I haven't seen him for three
months. I've had a summer of the British seaside, the bathing machine
and the German band. I met Zola at luncheon the day before he left
London and found him very sane and common and inexperienced. Nothing,
literally nothing, has ever happened to him but to write the
Rougon-Macquart. It makes that series, I admit, still more curious.
Your tour de force is of the opposite kind. Renew the miracle, my dear
Louis, and believe me yours already gaping,