The notary, Jean Rossignol, had been summoned to the top of a great
house in the Isle St. Louis to make a will; and now, his duties
finished, wrapped in a warm roquelaure and with a lantern swinging from
one hand, he issued from the mansion on his homeward way. Little did
he think what strange adventures were to befall him!—
That is how stories should begin. And I am offered HUSKS instead.
What should be: What is:
The Filibuster’s Cache. Aunt Anne’s Tea Cosy.
Jerry Abershaw. Mrs. Brierly’s Niece.
Blood Money: A Tale. Society: A Novel
R. L. S.
TO THE REV. PROFESSOR LEWIS CAMPBELL
[_Wensleydale_, _Bournemouth_, _November_ 1884.]
MY DEAR CAMPBELL,—The books came duly to hand. My wife has occupied the
translation {330} ever since, nor have I yet been able to dislodge her.
As for the primer, I have read it with a very strange result: that I find
no fault. If you knew how, dogmatic and pugnacious, I stand warden on
the literary art, you would the more appreciate your success and my—well,
I will own it—disappointment. For I love to put people right (or wrong)
about the arts. But what you say of Tragedy and of Sophocles very amply
satisfies me; it is well felt and well said; a little less technically
than it is my weakness to desire to see it put, but clear and adequate.
You are very right to express your admiration for the resource displayed
in Œdipus King; it is a miracle. Would it not have been well to mention
Voltaire’s interesting onslaught, a thing which gives the best lesson of
the difference of neighbour arts?—since all his criticisms, which had
been fatal to a narrative, do not amount among them to exhibit one flaw
in this masterpiece of drama. For the drama, it is perfect; though such
a fable in a romance might make the reader crack his sides, so imperfect,
so ethereally slight is the verisimilitude required of these
conventional, rigid, and egg-dancing arts.
I was sorry to see no more of you; but shall conclude by hoping for
better luck next time. My wife begs to be remembered to both of
you.—Yours sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO ANDREW CHATTO
_Wensleydale_, _Bournemouth_, _October_ 3, 1884.
DEAR MR. CHATTO,—I have an offer of £25 for _Otto_ from America. I do
not know if you mean to have the American rights; from the nature of the
contract, I think not; but if you understood that you were to sell the
sheets, I will either hand over the bargain to you, or finish it myself
and hand you over the money if you are pleased with the amount. You see,
I leave this quite in your hands. To parody an old Scotch story of
servant and master: if you don’t know that you have a good author, I know
that I have a good publisher. Your fair, open, and handsome dealings are
a good point in my life, and do more for my crazy health than has yet
been done by any doctor.—Very truly yours,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO W. H. LOW
_Bonallie Towers_, _Branksome Park_, _Bournemouth_, _Hants_,
_England_, _First week in November_, _I guess_, 1884.
MY DEAR LOW,—Now, look here, the above is my address for three months, I
hope; continue, on your part, if you please, to write to Edinburgh, which
is safe; but if Mrs. Low thinks of coming to England, she might take a
run down from London (four hours from Waterloo, main line) and stay a day
or two with us among the pines. If not, I hope it will be only a
pleasure deferred till you can join her.
My Children’s Verses will be published here in a volume called _A Child’s
Garden_. The sheets are in hand; I will see if I cannot send you the
lot, so that you might have a bit of a start. In that case I would do
nothing to publish in the States, and you might try an illustrated
edition there; which, if the book went fairly over here, might, when
ready, be imported. But of this more fully ere long. You will see some
verses of mine in the last _Magazine of Art_, with pictures by a young
lady; rather pretty, I think. If we find a market for _Phasellulus
loquitur_, we can try another. I hope it isn’t necessary to put the
verse into that rustic printing. I am Philistine enough to prefer clean
printer’s type; indeed, I can form no idea of the verses thus transcribed
by the incult and tottering hand of the draughtsman, nor gather any
impression beyond one of weariness to the eyes. Yet the other day, in
the _Century_, I saw it imputed as a crime to Vedder that he had not thus
travestied Omar Khayyàm. We live in a rum age of music without airs,
stories without incident, pictures without beauty, American wood
engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-point etchings that
ought to have been mezzo-tints. I think of giving ’em literature without
words; and I believe if you were to try invisible illustration, it would
enjoy a considerable vogue. So long as an artist is on his head, is
painting with a flute, or writes with an etcher’s needle, or conducts the
orchestra with a meat-axe, all is well; and plaudits shower along with
roses. But any plain man who tries to follow the obtrusive canons of his
art, is but a commonplace figure. To hell with him is the motto, or at
least not that; for he will have his reward, but he will never be thought
a person of parts.
_January_ 3, 1885.
And here has this been lying near two months. I have failed to get
together a preliminary copy of the Child’s Verses for you, in spite of
doughty efforts; but yesterday I sent you the first sheet of the
definitive edition, and shall continue to send the others as they come.
If you can, and care to, work them—why so, well. If not, I send you
fodder. But the time presses; for though I will delay a little over the
proofs, and though—it is even possible they may delay the English issue
until Easter, it will certainly not be later. Therefore perpend, and do
not get caught out. Of course, if you can do pictures, it will be a
great pleasure to me to see our names joined; and more than that, a great
advantage, as I daresay you may be able to make a bargain for some share
a little less spectral than the common for the poor author. But this is
all as you shall choose; I give you _carte blanche_ to do or not to
do.—Yours most sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
O, Sargent has been and painted my portrait; a very nice fellow he is,
and is supposed to have done well; it is a poetical but very
chicken-boned figure-head, as thus represented.
R. L. S. Go on.
_P.P.S._—Your picture came; and let me thank you for it very much. I am
so hunted I had near forgotten. I find it very graceful; and I mean to
have it framed.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_, _November_ 1884.
MY DEAR FATHER,—I have no hesitation in recommending you to let your name
go up; please yourself about an address; though I think, if we could
meet, we could arrange something suitable. What you propose would be
well enough in a way, but so modest as to suggest a whine. From that
point of view it would be better to change a little; but this, whether we
meet or not, we must discuss. Tait, Chrystal, the Royal Society, and I,
all think you amply deserve this honour and far more; it is not the True
Blue to call this serious compliment a ‘trial’; you should be glad of
this recognition. As for resigning, that is easy enough if found
necessary; but to refuse would be husky and unsatisfactory. _Sic subs._
R. L. S.
My cold is still very heavy; but I carry it well. Fanny is very very
much out of sorts, principally through perpetual misery with me. I fear
I have been a little in the dumps, which, _as you know_, _sir_, is a very
great sin. I must try to be more cheerful; but my cough is so severe
that I have sometimes most exhausting nights and very peevish wakenings.
However, this shall be remedied, and last night I was distinctly better
than the night before. There is, my dear Mr. Stevenson (so I moralise
blandly as we sit together on the devil’s garden-wall), no more
abominable sin than this gloom, this plaguey peevishness; why (say I)
what matters it if we be a little uncomfortable—that is no reason for
mangling our unhappy wives. And then I turn and _girn_ on the
unfortunate Cassandra.—Your fellow culprit,
R. L. S.
TO W. E. HENLEY
_Wensleydale_, _Bournemouth_, _November_ 1884.
DEAR HENLEY,—We are all to pieces in health, and heavily handicapped with
Arabs. I have a dreadful cough, whose attacks leave me _ætat._ 90. I
never let up on the Arabs, all the same, and rarely get less than eight
pages out of hand, though hardly able to come downstairs for twittering
knees.
I shall put in —’s letter. He says so little of his circumstances that I
am in an impossibility to give him advice more specific than a copybook.
Give him my love, however, and tell him it is the mark of the parochial
gentleman who has never travelled to find all wrong in a foreign land.
Let him hold on, and he will find one country as good as another; and in
the meanwhile let him resist the fatal British tendency to communicate
his dissatisfaction with a country to its inhabitants. ’Tis a good idea,
but it somehow fails to please. In a fortnight, if I can keep my spirit
in the box at all, I should be nearly through this Arabian desert; so can
tackle something fresh.—Yours ever,
R. L. S.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
_Bonallie Towers_, _Branksome Park_, _Bournemouth_
(_The three B’s_) [_November_ 5, 1884].
MY DEAR FATHER,—Allow me to say, in a strictly Pickwickian sense, that
you are a silly fellow. I am pained indeed, but how should I be
offended? I think you exaggerate; I cannot forget that you had the same
impression of the _Deacon_; and yet, when you saw it played, were less
revolted than you looked for; and I will still hope that the _Admiral_
also is not so bad as you suppose. There is one point, however, where I
differ from you very frankly. Religion is in the world; I do not think
you are the man to deny the importance of its rôle; and I have long
decided not to leave it on one side in art. The opposition of the
Admiral and Mr. Pew is not, to my eyes, either horrible or irreverent;
but it may be, and it probably is, very ill done: what then? This is a
failure; better luck next time; more power to the elbow, more discretion,
more wisdom in the design, and the old defeat becomes the scene of the
new victory. Concern yourself about no failure; they do not cost lives,
as in engineering; they are the _pierres perdues_ of successes. Fame is
(truly) a vapour; do not think of it; if the writer means well and tries
hard, no failure will injure him, whether with God or man.
I wish I could hear a brighter account of yourself; but I am inclined to
acquit the _Admiral_ of having a share in the responsibility. My very
heavy cold is, I hope, drawing off; and the change to this charming house
in the forest will, I hope, complete my re-establishment.—With love to
all, believe me, your ever affectionate,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO CHARLES BAXTER
_Bonallie Towers_, _Branksome Park_, _Bournemouth_,
_November_ 11, [1884].
MY DEAR CHARLES,—I am in my new house, thus proudly styled, as you
perceive; but the deevil a tower ava’ can be perceived (except out of
window); this is not as it should be; one might have hoped, at least, a
turret. We are all vilely unwell. I put in the dark watches imitating a
donkey with some success, but little pleasure; and in the afternoon I
indulge in a smart fever, accompanied by aches and shivers. There is
thus little monotony to be deplored. I at least am a _regular_ invalid;
I would scorn to bray in the afternoon; I would indignantly refuse the
proposal to fever in the night. What is bred in the bone will come out,
sir, in the flesh; and the same spirit that prompted me to date my letter
regulates the hour and character of my attacks.—I am, sir, yours,
THOMSON.
TO CHARLES BAXTER
_Postmark_, _Bournemouth_, 13_th_ _November_ 1884.
MY DEAR THOMSON,—It’s a maist remarkable fac’, but nae shüner had I
written yon braggin’, blawin’ letter aboot ma business habits, when bang!
that very day, ma hoast {337} begude in the aifternune. It is really
remaurkable; it’s providenshle, I believe. The ink wasnae fair dry, the
words werenae weel ooten ma mouth, when bang, I got the lee. The mair ye
think o’t, Thomson, the less ye’ll like the looks o’t. Proavidence (I’m
no’ sayin’) is all verra weel _in its place_; but if Proavidence has nae
mainners, wha’s to learn’t? Proavidence is a fine thing, but hoo would
you like Proavidence to keep your till for ye? The richt place for
Proavidence is in the kirk; it has naething to do wi’ private
correspondence between twa gentlemen, nor freendly cracks, nor a wee bit
word of sculduddery {338} ahint the door, nor, in shoart, wi’ ony
_hole-and-corner wark_, what I would call. I’m pairfec’ly willin’ to
meet in wi’ Proavidence, I’ll be prood to meet in wi’ him, when my time’s
come and I cannae dae nae better; but if he’s to come skinking aboot my
stair-fit, damned, I micht as weel be deid for a’ the comfort I’ll can
get in life. Cannae he no be made to understand that it’s beneath him?
Gosh, if I was in his business, I wouldnae steir my heid for a plain,
auld ex-elder that, tak him the way he taks himsel,’ ‘s just aboot as
honest as he can weel afford, an’ but for a wheen auld scandals, near
forgotten noo, is a pairfec’ly respectable and thoroughly decent man. Or
if I fashed wi’ him ava’, it wad be kind o’ handsome like; a pun’-note
under his stair door, or a bottle o’ auld, blended malt to his bit
marnin’, as a teshtymonial like yon ye ken sae weel aboot, but mair
successfu’.
Dear Thomson, have I ony money? If I have, _send it_, for the loard’s
sake.
JOHNSON.
TO MISS FERRIER
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_, _November_ 12, 1884.
MY DEAR COGGIE,—Many thanks for the two photos which now decorate my
room. I was particularly glad to have the Bell Rock. I wonder if you
saw me plunge, lance in rest, into a controversy thereanent? It was a
very one-sided affair. I slept upon the field of battle, paraded, sang
Te Deum, and came home after a review rather than a campaign.
Please tell Campbell I got his letter. The Wild Woman of the West has
been much amiss and complaining sorely. I hope nothing more serious is
wrong with her than just my ill-health, and consequent anxiety and
labour; but the deuce of it is, that the cause continues. I am about
knocked out of time now: a miserable, snuffling, shivering,
fever-stricken, nightmare-ridden, knee-jottering, hoast-hoast-hoasting
shadow and remains of man. But we’ll no gie ower jist yet a bittie.
We’ve seen waur; and dod, mem, it’s my belief that we’ll see better. I
dinna ken ‘at I’ve muckle mair to say to ye, or, indeed, onything; but
jist here’s guid-fallowship, guid health, and the wale o’ guid fortune to
your bonny sel’; and my respecs to the Perfessor and his wife, and the
Prinshiple, an’ the Bell Rock, an’ ony ither public chara’ters that I’m
acquaunt wi’.
R. L. S.
TO EDMUND GOSSE
_Bonallie Towers_, _Branksome Park_, _Bournemouth_, _Nov._ 15, 1884.
MY DEAR GOSSE,—This Mr. Morley {339} of yours is a most desperate fellow.
He has sent me (for my opinion) the most truculent advertisement I ever
saw, in which the white hairs of Gladstone are dragged round Troy behind
my chariot wheels. What can I say? I say nothing to him; and to you, I
content myself with remarking that he seems a desperate fellow.
All luck to you on your American adventure; may you find health, wealth,
and entertainment! If you see, as you likely will, Frank R. Stockton,
pray greet him from me in words to this effect:—
My Stockton if I failed to like,
It were a sheer depravity,
For I went down with the _Thomas Hyke_
And up with the _Negative Gravity_!
I adore these tales.
I hear flourishing accounts of your success at Cambridge, so you leave
with a good omen. Remember me to _green corn_ if it is in season; if
not, you had better hang yourself on a sour apple tree, for your voyage
has been lost.—Yours affectionately,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO AUSTIN DOBSON
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_ [_December_ 1884?].
DEAR DOBSON,—Set down my delay to your own fault; I wished to acknowledge
such a gift from you in some of my inapt and slovenly rhymes; but you
should have sent me your pen and not your desk. The verses stand up to
the axles in a miry cross-road, whence the coursers of the sun shall
never draw them; hence I am constrained to this uncourtliness, that I
must appear before one of the kings of that country of rhyme without my
singing robes. For less than this, if we may trust the book of Esther,
favourites have tasted death; but I conceive the kingdom of the Muses
mildlier mannered; and in particular that county which you administer and
which I seem to see as a half-suburban land; a land of holly-hocks and
country houses; a land where at night, in thorny and sequestered bypaths,
you will meet masqueraders going to a ball in their sedans, and the
rector steering homeward by the light of his lantern; a land of the
windmill, and the west wind, and the flowering hawthorn with a little
scented letter in the hollow of its trunk, and the kites flying over all
in the season of kites, and the far away blue spires of a cathedral city.
Will you forgive me, then, for my delay and accept my thanks not only for
your present, but for the letter which followed it, and which perhaps I
more particularly value, and believe me to be, with much admiration,
yours very truly,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO HENRY JAMES
_Bonallie Towers_, _Branksome Park_, _Bournemouth_,
_December_ 8, 1884.
MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,—This is a very brave hearing from more points than
one. The first point is that there is a hope of a sequel. For this I
laboured. Seriously, from the dearth of information and thoughtful
interest in the art of literature, those who try to practise it with any
deliberate purpose run the risk of finding no fit audience. People
suppose it is ‘the stuff’ that interests them; they think, for instance,
that the prodigious fine thoughts and sentiments in Shakespeare impress
by their own weight, not understanding that the unpolished diamond is but
a stone. They think that striking situations, or good dialogue, are got
by studying life; they will not rise to understand that they are prepared
by deliberate artifice and set off by painful suppressions. Now, I want
the whole thing well ventilated, for my own education and the public’s;
and I beg you to look as quick as you can, to follow me up with every
circumstance of defeat where we differ, and (to prevent the flouting of
the laity) to emphasise the points where we agree. I trust your paper
will show me the way to a rejoinder; and that rejoinder I shall hope to
make with so much art as to woo or drive you from your threatened
silence. I would not ask better than to pass my life in beating out this
quarter of corn with such a seconder as yourself.
Point the second—I am rejoiced indeed to hear you speak so kindly of my
work; rejoiced and surprised. I seem to myself a very rude, left-handed
countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by a man so
accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you. You will happily never
have cause to understand the despair with which a writer like myself
considers (say) the park scene in Lady Barberina. Every touch surprises
me by its intangible precision; and the effect when done, as light as
syllabub, as distinct as a picture, fills me with envy. Each man among
us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine; but when we come to speak of
performance, I recognise myself, compared with you, to be a lout and
slouch of the first water.
Where we differ, both as to the design of stories and the delineation of
character, I begin to lament. Of course, I am not so dull as to ask you
to desert your walk; but could you not, in one novel, to oblige a sincere
admirer, and to enrich his shelves with a beloved volume, could you not,
and might you not, cast your characters in a mould a little more abstract
and academic (dear Mrs. Pennyman had already, among your other work, a
taste of what I mean), and pitch the incidents, I do not say in any
stronger, but in a slightly more emphatic key—as it were an episode from
one of the old (so-called) novels of adventure? I fear you will not; and
I suppose I must sighingly admit you to be right. And yet, when I see,
as it were, a book of Tom Jones handled with your exquisite precision and
shot through with those side-lights of reflection in which you excel, I
relinquish the dear vision with regret. Think upon it.
As you know, I belong to that besotted class of man, the invalid: this
puts me to a stand in the way of visits. But it is possible that some
day you may feel that a day near the sea and among pinewoods would be a
pleasant change from town. If so, please let us know; and my wife and I
will be delighted to put you up, and give you what we can to eat and
drink (I have a fair bottle of claret).—On the back of which, believe me,
yours sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
_P.S._—I reopen this to say that I have re-read my paper, and cannot
think I have at all succeeded in being either veracious or polite. I
knew, of course, that I took your paper merely as a pin to hang my own
remarks upon; but, alas! what a thing is any paper! What fine remarks
can you not hang on mine! How I have sinned against proportion, and with
every effort to the contrary, against the merest rudiments of courtesy to
you! You are indeed a very acute reader to have divined the real
attitude of my mind; and I can only conclude, not without closed eyes and
shrinking shoulders, in the well-worn words
Lay on, Macduff!
TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_, _December_ 9, 1884.
MY DEAR PEOPLE,—The dreadful tragedy of the _Pall Mall_ has come to a
happy but ludicrous ending: I am to keep the money, the tale writ for
them is to be buried certain fathoms deep, and they are to flash out
before the world with our old friend of Kinnaird, ‘The Body Snatcher.’
When you come, please to bring—
(1) My _Montaigne_, or, at least, the two last volumes.
(2) My _Milton_ in the three vols. in green.
(3) The _Shakespeare_ that Babington sent me for a wedding-gift.
(4) Hazlitt’s _Table Talk and Plain Speaker_.
If you care to get a box of books from Douglas and Foulis, let them be
_solid_. _Croker Papers_, _Correspondence of Napoleon_, _History of
Henry IV._, Lang’s _Folk Lore_, would be my desires.
I had a charming letter from Henry James about my _Longman_ paper. I did
not understand queries about the verses; the pictures to the Seagull I
thought charming; those to the second have left me with a pain in my poor
belly and a swimming in the head.
About money, I am afloat and no more, and I warn you, unless I have great
luck, I shall have to fall upon you at the New Year like a hundredweight
of bricks. Doctor, rent, chemist, are all threatening; sickness has
bitterly delayed my work; and unless, as I say, I have the mischief’s
luck, I shall completely break down. _Verbum sapientibus_. I do not
live cheaply, and I question if I ever shall; but if only I had a
halfpenny worth of health, I could now easily suffice. The last
breakdown of my head is what makes this bankruptcy probable.
Fanny is still out of sorts; Bogue better; self fair, but a stranger to
the blessings of sleep.—Ever affectionate son,
R. L. S.
TO W. E. HENLEY
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_, [_December_ 1884].
DEAR LAD,—I have made up my mind about the P. M. G., and send you a copy,
which please keep or return. As for not giving a reduction, what are we?
Are we artists or city men? Why do we sneer at stock-brokers? O nary; I
will not take the £40. I took that as a fair price for my best work; I
was not able to produce my best; and I will be damned if I steal with my
eyes open. _Sufficit_. This is my lookout. As for the paper being
rich, certainly it is; but I am honourable. It is no more above me in
money than the poor slaveys and cads from whom I look for honesty are
below me. Am I Pepys, that because I can find the countenance of ‘some
of our ablest merchants,’ that because—and—pour forth languid twaddle and
get paid for it, I, too, should ‘cheerfully continue to steal’? I am not
Pepys. I do not live much to God and honour; but I will not wilfully
turn my back on both. I am, like all the rest of us, falling ever lower
from the bright ideas I began with, falling into greed, into idleness,
into middle-aged and slippered fireside cowardice; but is it you, my bold
blade, that I hear crying this sordid and rank twaddle in my ear?
Preaching the dankest Grundyism and upholding the rank customs of our
trade—you, who are so cruel hard upon the customs of the publishers? O
man, look at the Beam in our own Eyes; and whatever else you do, do not
plead Satan’s cause, or plead it for all; either embrace the bad, or
respect the good when you see a poor devil trying for it. If this is the
honesty of authors—to take what you can get and console yourself because
publishers are rich—take my name from the rolls of that association.
’Tis a caucus of weaker thieves, jealous of the stronger.—Ever yours,
THE ROARING R. L. S.
You will see from the enclosed that I have stuck to what I think my dues
pretty tightly in spite of this flourish: these are my words for a poor
ten-pound note!
TO W. E. HENLEY
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_, [_Winter_, 1884].
MY DEAR LAD,—Here was I in bed; not writing, not hearing, and finding
myself gently and agreeably ill used; and behold I learn you are bad
yourself. Get your wife to send us a word how you are. I am better
decidedly. Bogue got his Christmas card, and behaved well for three days
after. It may interest the cynical to learn that I started my last
hæmorrhage by too sedulous attentions to my dear Bogue. The stick was
broken; and that night Bogue, who was attracted by the extraordinary
aching of his bones, and is always inclined to a serious view of his own
ailments, announced with his customary pomp that he was dying. In this
case, however, it was not the dog that died. (He had tried to bite his
mother’s ankles.) I have written a long and peculiarly solemn paper on
the technical elements of style. It is path-breaking and epoch-making;
but I do not think the public will be readily convoked to its perusal.
Did I tell you that S. C. had risen to the paper on James? At last! O
but I was pleased; he’s (like Johnnie) been lang, lang o’ comin’, but
here he is. He will not object to my future manœuvres in the same field,
as he has to my former. All the family are here; my father better than I
have seen him these two years; my mother the same as ever. I do trust
you are better, and I am yours ever,
R. L. S.
TO H. A. JONES
_Bonallie Towers_, _Branksome Park_,
_Bournemouth_, _Dec._ 30, 1884.
DEAR SIR,—I am so accustomed to hear nonsense spoken about all the arts,
and the drama in particular, that I cannot refrain from saying ‘Thank
you,’ for your paper. In my answer to Mr. James, in the December
_Longman_, you may see that I have merely touched, I think in a
parenthesis, on the drama; but I believe enough was said to indicate our
agreement in essentials.
Wishing you power and health to further enunciate and to act upon these
principles, believe me, dear sir, yours truly,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
_Bonallie Towers_, _Branksome Park_, _Bournemouth_, _Jan._ 4, 1885.
DEAR S. C.,—I am on my feet again, and getting on my boots to do the
_Iron Duke_. Conceive my glee: I have refused the £100, and am to get
some sort of royalty, not yet decided, instead. ’Tis for Longman’s
_English Worthies_, edited by A. Lang. Aw haw, haw!
Now, look here, could you get me a loan of the Despatches, or is that a
dream? I should have to mark passages I fear, and certainly note pages
on the fly. If you think it a dream, will Bain get me a second-hand
copy, or who would? The sooner, and cheaper, I can get it the better.
If there is anything in your weird library that bears on either the man
or the period, put it in a mortar and fire it here instanter; I shall
catch. I shall want, of course, an infinity of books: among which, any
lives there may be; a life of the Marquis Marmont (the Maréchal),
_Marmont’s Memoirs_, _Grevillè’s Memoirs_, _Peel’s Memoirs_, _Napier_,
that blind man’s history of England you once lent me, Hamley’s
_Waterloo_; can you get me any of these? Thiers, idle Thiers also. Can
you help a man getting into his boots for such a huge campaign? How are
you? A Good New Year to you. I mean to have a good one, but on whose
funds I cannot fancy: not mine leastways, as I am a mere derelict and
drift beam-on to bankruptcy.
For God’s sake, remember the man who set out for to conquer Arthur
Wellesley, with a broken bellows and an empty pocket.—Yours ever,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
[_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_,] 14_th_ _January_ 1885.
MY DEAR FATHER,—I am glad you like the changes. I own I was pleased with
my hand’s darg; you may observe, I have corrected several errors which
(you may tell Mr. Dick) he had allowed to pass his eagle eye; I wish
there may be none in mine; at least, the order is better. The second
title, ‘Some new Engineering Questions involved in the M. S. C. Scheme of
last Session of P.’, likes me the best. I think it a very good paper;
and I am vain enough to think I have materially helped to polish the
diamond. I ended by feeling quite proud of the paper, as if it had been
mine; the next time you have as good a one, I will overhaul it for the
wages of feeling as clever as I did when I had managed to understand and
helped to set it clear. I wonder if I anywhere misapprehended you? I
rather think not at the last; at the first shot I know I missed a point
or two. Some of what may appear to you to be wanton changes, a little
study will show to be necessary.
Yes, Carlyle was ashamed of himself as few men have been; and let all
carpers look at what he did. He prepared all these papers for
publication with his own hand; all his wife’s complaints, all the
evidence of his own misconduct: who else would have done so much? Is
repentance, which God accepts, to have no avail with men? nor even with
the dead? I have heard too much against the thrawn, discomfortable dog:
dead he is, and we may be glad of it; but he was a better man than most
of us, no less patently than he was a worse. To fill the world with
whining is against all my views: I do not like impiety. But—but—there
are two sides to all things, and the old scalded baby had his noble
side.—Ever affectionate son,
R. L. S.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_, _January_ 1885.
DEAR S. C.,—I have addressed a letter to the G. O. M., _à propos_ of
Wellington; and I became aware, you will be interested to hear, of an
overwhelming respect for the old gentleman. I can _blaguer_ his
failures; but when you actually address him, and bring the two statures
and records to confrontation, dismay is the result. By mere continuance
of years, he must impose; the man who helped to rule England before I was
conceived, strikes me with a new sense of greatness and antiquity, when I
must actually beard him with the cold forms of correspondence. I shied
at the necessity of calling him plain ‘Sir’! Had he been ‘My lord,’ I
had been happier; no, I am no equalitarian. Honour to whom honour is
due; and if to none, why, then, honour to the old!
These, O Slade Professor, are my unvarnished sentiments: I was a little
surprised to find them so extreme, and therefore I communicate the fact.
Belabour thy brains, as to whom it would be well to question. I have a
small space; I wish to make a popular book, nowhere obscure, nowhere, if
it can be helped, unhuman. It seems to me the most hopeful plan to tell
the tale, so far as may be, by anecdote. He did not die till so
recently, there must be hundreds who remember him, and thousands who have
still ungarnered stories. Dear man, to the breach! Up, soldier of the
iron dook, up, Slades, and at ’em! (which, conclusively, he did not say:
the at ’em-ic theory is to be dismissed). You know piles of fellows who
must reek with matter; help! help!—Yours ever,
R. L. S.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_, _February_ 1885.
MY DEAR COLVIN,—You are indeed a backward correspondent, and much may be
said against you. But in this weather, and O dear! in this political
scene of degradation, much must be forgiven. I fear England is dead of
Burgessry, and only walks about galvanised. I do not love to think of my
countrymen these days; nor to remember myself. Why was I silent? I feel
I have no right to blame any one; but I won’t write to the G. O. M. I do
really not see my way to any form of signature, unless ‘your fellow
criminal in the eyes of God,’ which might disquiet the proprieties.
About your book, I have always said: go on. The drawing of character is
a different thing from publishing the details of a private career. No
one objects to the first, or should object, if his name be not put upon
it; at the other, I draw the line. In a preface, if you chose, you might
distinguish; it is, besides, a thing for which you are eminently well
equipped, and which you would do with taste and incision. I long to see
the book. People like themselves (to explain a little more); no one
likes his life, which is a misbegotten issue, and a tale of failure. To
see these failures either touched upon, or _coasted_, to get the idea of
a spying eye and blabbing tongue about the house, is to lose all privacy
in life. To see that thing, which we do love, our character, set forth,
is ever gratifying. See how my _Talk and Talkers_ went; every one liked
his own portrait, and shrieked about other people’s; so it will be with
yours. If you are the least true to the essential, the sitter will be
pleased; very likely not his friends, and that from _various motives_.
R. L. S.
When will your holiday be? I sent your letter to my wife, and forget.
Keep us in mind, and I hope we shall he able to receive you.
TO J. A. SYMONDS
_Bournemouth_, _February_ 1885.
MY DEAR SYMONDS,—Yes, we have both been very neglectful. I had horrid
luck, catching two thundering influenzas in August and November. I
recovered from the last with difficulty, but have come through this
blustering winter with some general success; in the house, up and down.
My wife, however, has been painfully upset by my health. Last year, of
course, was cruelly trying to her nerves; Nice and Hyères are bad
experiences; and though she is not ill, the doctor tells me that
prolonged anxiety may do her a real mischief.
I feel a little old and fagged, and chary of speech, and not very sure of
spirit in my work; but considering what a year I have passed, and how I
have twice sat on Charon’s pierhead, I am surprising.
My father has presented us with a very pretty home in this place, into
which we hope to move by May. My _Child’s Verses_ come out next week.
_Otto_ begins to appear in April; _More New Arabian Nights_ as soon as
possible. Moreover, I am neck deep in Wellington; also a story on the
stocks, _Great North Road_. O, I am busy! Lloyd is at college in
Edinburgh. That is, I think, all that can be said by way of news.
Have you read _Huckleberry Finn_? It contains many excellent things;
above all, the whole story of a healthy boy’s dealings with his
conscience, incredibly well done.
My own conscience is badly seared; a want of piety; yet I pray for it,
tacitly, every day; believing it, after courage, the only gift worth
having; and its want, in a man of any claims to honour, quite
unpardonable. The tone of your letter seemed to me very sound. In these
dark days of public dishonour, I do not know that one can do better than
carry our private trials piously. What a picture is this of a nation!
No man that I can see, on any side or party, seems to have the least
sense of our ineffable shame: the desertion of the garrisons. I tell my
little parable that Germany took England, and then there was an Indian
Mutiny, and Bismarck said: ‘Quite right: let Delhi and Calcutta and
Bombay fall; and let the women and children be treated Sepoy fashion,’
and people say, ‘O, but that is very different!’ And then I wish I were
dead. Millais (I hear) was painting Gladstone when the news came of
Gordon’s death; Millais was much affected, and Gladstone said, ‘Why? _It
is the man’s own temerity_!’ Voilà le Bourgeois! le voilà nu! But why
should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I have held my
peace? Why did I hold my peace? Because I am a sceptic: _i.e._ a
Bourgeois. We believe in nothing, Symonds; you don’t, and I don’t; and
these are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why England stands
before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour. I will
first try to take the beam out of my own eye, trusting that even private
effort somehow betters and braces the general atmosphere. See, for
example, if England has shown (I put it hypothetically) one spark of
manly sensibility, they have been shamed into it by the spectacle of
Gordon. Police-Officer Cole is the only man that I see to admire. I
dedicate my _New Arabs_ to him and Cox, in default of other great public
characters.—Yours ever most affectionately,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO EDMUND GOSSE
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_, _March_ 12, 1885.
MY DEAR GOSSE,—I was indeed much exercised how I could be worked into
Gray; and lo! when I saw it, the passage seemed to have been written with
a single eye to elucidate the—worst?—well, not a very good poem of
Gray’s. Your little life is excellent, clean, neat, efficient. I have
read many of your notes, too, with pleasure. Your connection with Gray
was a happy circumstance; it was a suitable conjunction.
I did not answer your letter from the States, for what was I to say? I
liked getting it and reading it; I was rather flattered that you wrote it
to me; and then I’ll tell you what I did—I put it in the fire. Why?
Well, just because it was very natural and expansive; and thinks I to
myself, if I die one of these fine nights, this is just the letter that
Gosse would not wish to go into the hands of third parties. Was I well
inspired? And I did not answer it because you were in your high places,
sailing with supreme dominion, and seeing life in a particular glory; and
I was peddling in a corner, confined to the house, overwhelmed with
necessary work, which I was not always doing well, and, in the very mild
form in which the disease approaches me, touched with a sort of bustling
cynicism. Why throw cold water? How ape your agreeable frame of mind?
In short, I held my tongue.
I have now published on 101 small pages _The Complete Proof of Mr. R. L.
Stevenson’s Incapacity to Write Verse_, in a series of graduated examples
with table of contents. I think I shall issue a companion volume of
exercises: ‘Analyse this poem. Collect and comminate the ugly words.
Distinguish and condemn the _chevilles_. State Mr. Stevenson’s faults of
taste in regard to the measure. What reasons can you gather from this
example for your belief that Mr. S. is unable to write any other
measure?’
They look ghastly in the cold light of print; but there is something nice
in the little ragged regiment for all; the blackguards seem to me to
smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my ears
freshly; not song, if you will, but a child’s voice.
I was glad you enjoyed your visit to the States. Most Englishmen go
there with a confirmed design of patronage, as they go to France for that
matter; and patronage will not pay. Besides, in this year of—grace, said
I?—of disgrace, who should creep so low as an Englishman? ‘It is not to
be thought of that the flood’—ah, Wordsworth, you would change your note
were you alive to-day!
I am now a beastly householder, but have not yet entered on my domain.
When I do, the social revolution will probably cast me back upon my dung
heap. There is a person called Hyndman whose eye is on me; his step is
beHynd me as I go. I shall call my house Skerryvore when I get it:
SKERRYVORE: _c’est bon pour la poéshie_. I will conclude with my
favourite sentiment: ‘The world is too much with me.’
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
_The Hermit of Skerryvore_.
Author of ‘John Vane Tempest: a Romance,’ ‘Herbert and Henrietta: or the
Nemesis of Sentiment,’ ‘The Life and Adventures of Colonel Bludyer
Fortescue,’ ‘Happy Homes and Hairy Faces,’ ‘A Pound of Feathers and a
Pound of Lead,’ part author of ‘Minn’s Complete Capricious Correspondent:
a Manual of Natty, Natural, and Knowing Letters,’ and editor of the
‘Poetical Remains of Samuel Burt Crabbe, known as the melodious
Bottle-Holder.’
Uniform with the above:
‘The Life and Remains of the Reverend Jacob Degray Squah,’ author of
‘Heave-yo for the New Jerusalem.’ ‘A Box of Candles; or the Patent
Spiritual Safety Match,’ and ‘A Day with the Heavenly Harriers.’
TO W. H. LOW
_Bonallie Towers_, _Bournemouth_, _March_ 13, 1885.
MY DEAR LOW,—Your success has been immense. I wish your letter had come
two days ago: _Otto_, alas! has been disposed of a good while ago; but it
was only day before yesterday that I settled the new volume of Arabs.
However, for the future, you and the sons of the deified Scribner are the
men for me. Really they have behaved most handsomely. I cannot lay my
hand on the papers, or I would tell you exactly how it compares with my
English bargain; but it compares well. Ah, if we had that copyright, I
do believe it would go far to make me solvent, ill-health and all.
I wrote you a letter to the Rembrandt, in which I stated my views about
the dedication in a very brief form. It will give me sincere pleasure,
and will make the second dedication I have received, the other being from
John Addington Symonds. It is a compliment I value much; I don’t know
any that I should prefer.
I am glad to hear you have windows to do; that is a fine business, I
think; but, alas! the glass is so bad nowadays; realism invading even
that, as well as the huge inferiority of our technical resource
corrupting every tint. Still, anything that keeps a man to decoration
is, in this age, good for the artist’s spirit.
By the way, have you seen James and me on the novel? James, I think in
the August or September—R. L. S. in the December _Longman_. I own I
think the _école bête_, of which I am the champion, has the whip hand of
the argument; but as James is to make a rejoinder, I must not boast.
Anyway the controversy is amusing to see. I was terribly tied down to
space, which has made the end congested and dull. I shall see if I can
afford to send you the April _Contemporary_—but I dare say you see it
anyway—as it will contain a paper of mine on style, a sort of
continuation of old arguments on art in which you have wagged a most
effective tongue. It is a sort of start upon my Treatise on the Art of
Literature: a small, arid book that shall some day appear.
With every good wish from me and mine (should I not say ‘she and hers’?)
to you and yours, believe me yours ever,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO P. G. HAMERTON
_Bournemouth_, _March_ 16, 1885.
MY DEAR HAMERTON,—Various things have been reminding me of my misconduct:
First, Swan’s application for your address; second, a sight of the sheets
of your _Landscape_ book; and last, your note to Swan, which he was so
kind as to forward. I trust you will never suppose me to be guilty of
anything more serious than an idleness, partially excusable. My
ill-health makes my rate of life heavier than I can well meet, and yet
stops me from earning more. My conscience, sometimes perhaps too easily
stifled, but still (for my time of life and the public manners of the
age) fairly well alive, forces me to perpetual and almost endless
transcriptions. On the back of all this, my correspondence hangs like a
thundercloud; and just when I think I am getting through my troubles,
crack, down goes my health, I have a long, costly sickness, and begin the
world again. It is fortunate for me I have a father, or I should long
ago have died; but the opportunity of the aid makes the necessity none
the more welcome. My father has presented me with a beautiful house
here—or so I believe, for I have not yet seen it, being a cage bird but
for nocturnal sorties in the garden. I hope we shall soon move into it,
and I tell myself that some day perhaps we may have the pleasure of
seeing you as our guest. I trust at least that you will take me as I am,
a thoroughly bad correspondent, and a man, a hater, indeed, of rudeness
in others, but too often rude in all unconsciousness himself; and that
you will never cease to believe the sincere sympathy and admiration that
I feel for you and for your work.
About the _Landscape_, which I had a glimpse of while a friend of mine
was preparing a review, I was greatly interested, and could write and
wrangle for a year on every page; one passage particularly delighted me,
the part about Ulysses—jolly. Then, you know, that is just what I fear I
have come to think landscape ought to be in literature; so there we
should be at odds. Or perhaps not so much as I suppose, as Montaigne
says it is a pot with two handles, and I own I am wedded to the technical
handle, which (I likewise own and freely) you do well to keep for a
mistress. I should much like to talk with you about some other points;
it is only in talk that one gets to understand. Your delightful
Wordsworth trap I have tried on two hardened Wordsworthians, not that I
am not one myself. By covering up the context, and asking them to guess
what the passage was, both (and both are very clever people, one a
writer, one a painter) pronounced it a guide-book. ‘Do you think it an
unusually good guide-book?’ I asked, and both said, ‘No, not at all!’
Their grimace was a picture when I showed the original.
I trust your health and that of Mrs. Hamerton keep better; your last
account was a poor one. I was unable to make out the visit I had hoped,
as (I do not know if you heard of it) I had a very violent and dangerous
hæmorrhage last spring. I am almost glad to have seen death so close
with all my wits about me, and not in the customary lassitude and
disenchantment of disease. Even thus clearly beheld I find him not so
terrible as we suppose. But, indeed, with the passing of years, the
decay of strength, the loss of all my old active and pleasant habits,
there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this
scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an
excellent and pacifying compensation. I trust, if your health continues
to trouble you, you may find some of the same belief. But perhaps my
fine discovery is a piece of art, and belongs to a character cowardly,
intolerant of certain feelings, and apt to self-deception. I don’t think
so, however; and when I feel what a weak and fallible vessel I was thrust
into this hurly-burly, and with what marvellous kindness the wind has
been tempered to my frailties, I think I should be a strange kind of ass
to feel anything but gratitude.
I do not know why I should inflict this talk upon you; but when I summon
the rebellous pen, he must go his own way; I am no Michael Scott, to rule
the fiend of correspondence. Most days he will none of me; and when he
comes, it is to rape me where he will.—Yours very sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO WILLIAM ARCHER
_Bournemouth_, _March_ 29, 1885.
DEAR MR. ARCHER,—Yes, I have heard of you and read some of your work; but
I am bound in particular to thank you for the notice of my verses.
‘There,’ I said, throwing it over to the friend who was staying with me,
‘it’s worth writing a book to draw an article like that.’ Had you been
as hard upon me as you were amiable, I try to tell myself I should have
been no blinder to the merits of your notice. For I saw there, to admire
and to be very grateful for, a most sober, agile pen; an enviable touch;
the marks of a reader, such as one imagines for one’s self in dreams,
thoughtful, critical, and kind; and to put the top on this memorial
column, a greater readiness to describe the author criticised than to
display the talents of his censor.
I am a man _blasé_ to injudicious praise (though I hope some of it may be
judicious too), but I have to thank you for THE BEST CRITICISM I EVER
HAD; and am therefore, dear Mr. Archer, the most grateful critickee now
extant.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
_P.S._—I congratulate you on living in the corner of all London that I
like best. _À propos_, you are very right about my voluntary aversion
from the painful sides of life. My childhood was in reality a very mixed
experience, full of fever, nightmare, insomnia, painful days and
interminable nights; and I can speak with less authority of gardens than
of that other ‘land of counterpane.’ But to what end should we renew
these sorrows? The sufferings of life may be handled by the very
greatest in their hours of insight; it is of its pleasures that our
common poems should be formed; these are the experiences that we should
seek to recall or to provoke; and I say with Thoreau, ‘What right have I
to complain, who have not ceased to wonder?’ and, to add a rider of my
own, who have no remedy to offer.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN
[_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_, _June_ 1885.]
MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,—You know how much and for how long I have loved,
respected, and admired him; I am only able to feel a little with you.
But I know how he would have wished us to feel. I never knew a better
man, nor one to me more lovable; we shall all feel the loss more greatly
as time goes on. It scarce seems life to me; what must it be to you?
Yet one of the last things that he said to me was, that from all these
sad bereavements of yours he had learned only more than ever to feel the
goodness and what we, in our feebleness, call the support of God; he had
been ripening so much—to other eyes than ours, we must suppose he was
ripe, and try to feel it. I feel it is better not to say much more. It
will be to me a great pride to write a notice of him: the last I can now
do. What more in any way I can do for you, please to think and let me
know. For his sake and for your own, I would not be a useless friend: I
know, you know me a most warm one; please command me or my wife, in any
way. Do not trouble to write to me; Austin, I have no doubt, will do so,
if you are, as I fear you will be, unfit.
My heart is sore for you. At least you know what you have been to him;
how he cherished and admired you; how he was never so pleased as when he
spoke of you; with what a boy’s love, up to the last, he loved you. This
surely is a consolation. Yours is the cruel part—to survive; you must
try and not grudge to him his better fortune, to go first. It is the sad
part of such relations that one must remain and suffer; I cannot see my
poor Jenkin without you. Nor you indeed without him; but you may try to
rejoice that he is spared that extremity. Perhaps I (as I was so much
his confidant) know even better than you can do what your loss would have
been to him; he never spoke of you but his face changed; it was—you
were—his religion.
I write by this post to Austin and to the _Academy_.—Yours most
sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN
[_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_, _June_ 1885.]
MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,—I should have written sooner, but we are in a
bustle, and I have been very tired, though still well. Your very kind
note was most welcome to me. I shall be very much pleased to have you
call me Louis, as he has now done for so many years. Sixteen, you say?
is it so long? It seems too short now; but of that we cannot judge, and
must not complain.
I wish that either I or my wife could do anything for you; when we can,
you will, I am sure, command us.
I trust that my notice gave you as little pain as was possible. I found
I had so much to say, that I preferred to keep it for another place and
make but a note in the _Academy_. To try to draw my friend at greater
length, and say what he was to me and his intimates, what a good
influence in life and what an example, is a desire that grows upon me.
It was strange, as I wrote the note, how his old tests and criticisms
haunted me; and it reminded me afresh with every few words how much I owe
to him.
I had a note from Henley, very brief and very sad. We none of us yet
feel the loss; but we know what he would have said and wished.
Do you know that Dew Smith has two photographs of him, neither very bad?
and one giving a lively, though not flattering air of him in
conversation? If you have not got them, would you like me to write to
Dew and ask him to give you proofs?
I was so pleased that he and my wife made friends; that is a great
pleasure. We found and have preserved one fragment (the head) of the
drawing he made and tore up when he was last here. He had promised to
come and stay with us this summer. May we not hope, at least, some time
soon to have one from you?—Believe me, my dear Mrs. Jenkin, with the most
real sympathy, your sincere friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
Dear me, what happiness I owe to both of you!
TO W. H. LOW
_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_, _October_ 22, 1885.
MY DEAR LOW,—I trust you are not annoyed with me beyond forgiveness; for
indeed my silence has been devilish prolonged. I can only tell you that
I have been nearly six months (more than six) in a strange condition of
collapse, when it was impossible to do any work, and difficult (more
difficult than you would suppose) to write the merest note. I am now
better, but not yet my own man in the way of brains, and in health only
so-so. I suppose I shall learn (I begin to think I am learning) to fight
this vast, vague feather-bed of an obsession that now overlies and
smothers me; but in the beginnings of these conflicts, the inexperienced
wrestler is always worsted, and I own I have been quite extinct. I wish
you to know, though it can be no excuse, that you are not the only one of
my friends by many whom I have thus neglected; and even now, having come
so very late into the possession of myself, with a substantial capital of
debts, and my work still moving with a desperate slowness—as a child
might fill a sandbag with its little handfuls—and my future deeply
pledged, there is almost a touch of virtue in my borrowing these hours to
write to you. Why I said ‘hours’ I know not; it would look blue for both
of us if I made good the word.
I was writing your address the other day, ordering a copy of my next,
_Prince Otto_, to go your way. I hope you have not seen it in parts; it
was not meant to be so read; and only my poverty (dishonourably)
consented to the serial evolution.
I will send you with this a copy of the English edition of the _Child’s
Garden_. I have heard there is some vile rule of the post-office in the
States against inscriptions; so I send herewith a piece of doggerel which
Mr. Bunner may, if he thinks fit, copy off the fly leaf.
Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in my
own dining-room, in my own velveteen jacket, and twisting as I go my own
moustache; at one corner a glimpse of my wife, in an Indian dress, and
seated in a chair that was once my grandfather’s; but since some months
goes by the name of Henry James’s, for it was there the novelist loved to
sit—adds a touch of poesy and comicality. It is, I think, excellent, but
is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife,
in this wild dress, and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other
end; between us an open door exhibits my palatial entrance hall and a
part of my respected staircase. All this is touched in lovely, with that
witty touch of Sargent’s; but, of course, it looks dam queer as a whole.
Pray let me hear from you, and give me good news of yourself and your
wife, to whom please remember me.—Yours most sincerely, my dear Low,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO W. E. HENLEY
[_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_, _Autumn_ 1885.]
DEAR LAD,—If there was any more praise in what you wrote, I think [the
editor] has done us both a service; some of it stops my throat. What, it
would not have been the same if Dumas or Musset had done it, would it
not? Well, no, I do not think it would, do you know, now; I am really of
opinion it would not; and a dam good job too. Why, think what Musset
would have made of Otto! Think how gallantly Dumas would have carried
his crowd through! And whatever you do, don’t quarrel with —. It gives
me much pleasure to see your work there; I think you do yourself great
justice in that field; and I would let no annoyance, petty or
justifiable, debar me from such a market. I think you do good there.
Whether (considering our intimate relations) you would not do better to
refrain from reviewing me, I will leave to yourself: were it all on my
side, you could foresee my answer; but there is your side also, where you
must be the judge.
As for the _Saturday_. Otto is no ‘fool,’ the reader is left in no doubt
as to whether or not Seraphina was a Messalina (though much it would
matter, if you come to that); and therefore on both these points the
reviewer has been unjust. Secondly, the romance lies precisely in the
freeing of two spirits from these court intrigues; and here I think the
reviewer showed himself dull. Lastly, if Otto’s speech is offensive to
him, he is one of the large class of unmanly and ungenerous dogs who
arrogate and defile the name of manly. As for the passages quoted, I do
confess that some of them reek Gongorically; they are excessive, but they
are not inelegant after all. However, had he attacked me only there, he
would have scored.
Your criticism on Gondremark is, I fancy, right. I thought all your
criticisms were indeed; only your praise—chokes me.—Yours ever,
R. L. S.
TO WILLIAM ARCHER
_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_, _October_ 28, 1885.
DEAR MR. ARCHER,—I have read your paper with my customary admiration; it
is very witty, very adroit; it contains a great deal that is excellently
true (particularly the parts about my stories and the description of me
as an artist in life); but you will not be surprised if I do not think it
altogether just. It seems to me, in particular, that you have wilfully
read all my works in terms of my earliest; my aim, even in style, has
quite changed in the last six or seven years; and this I should have
thought you would have noticed. Again, your first remark upon the
affectation of the italic names; a practice only followed in my two
affected little books of travel, where a typographical _minauderie_ of
the sort appeared to me in character; and what you say of it, then, is
quite just. But why should you forget yourself and use these same
italics as an index to my theology some pages further on? This is
lightness of touch indeed; may I say, it is almost sharpness of practice?
Excuse these remarks. I have been on the whole much interested, and
sometimes amused. Are you aware that the praiser of this ‘brave
gymnasium’ has not seen a canoe nor taken a long walk since ’79? that he
is rarely out of the house nowadays, and carries his arm in a sling? Can
you imagine that he is a backslidden communist, and is sure he will go to
hell (if there be such an excellent institution) for the luxury in which
he lives? And can you believe that, though it is gaily expressed, the
thought is hag and skeleton in every moment of vacuity or depression?
Can you conceive how profoundly I am irritated by the opposite
affectation to my own, when I see strong men and rich men bleating about
their sorrows and the burthen of life, in a world full of ‘cancerous
paupers,’ and poor sick children, and the fatally bereaved, ay, and down
even to such happy creatures as myself, who has yet been obliged to strip
himself, one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen
except smoking (and the days of that I know in my heart ought to be
over), I forgot eating, which I still enjoy, and who sees the circle of
impotence closing very slowly but quite steadily around him? In my view,
one dank, dispirited word is harmful, a crime of _lèse-humanité_, a piece
of acquired evil; every gay, every bright word or picture, like every
pleasant air of music, is a piece of pleasure set afloat; the reader
catches it, and, if he be healthy, goes on his way rejoicing; and it is
the business of art so to send him, as often as possible.
For what you say, so kindly, so prettily, so precisely, of my style, I
must in particular thank you; though even here, I am vexed you should not
have remarked on my attempted change of manner: seemingly this attempt is
still quite unsuccessful! Well, we shall fight it out on this line if it
takes all summer.
And now for my last word: Mrs. Stevenson is very anxious that you should
see me, and that she should see you, in the flesh. If you at all share
in these views, I am a fixture. Write or telegraph (giving us time,
however, to telegraph in reply, lest the day be impossible), and come
down here to a bed and a dinner. What do you say, my dear critic? I
shall be truly pleased to see you; and to explain at greater length what
I meant by saying narrative was the most characteristic mood of
literature, on which point I have great hopes I shall persuade you.—Yours
truly,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
_P.S._—My opinion about Thoreau, and the passage in _The Week_, is
perhaps a fad, but it is sincere and stable. I am still of the same mind
five years later; did you observe that I had said ‘modern’ authors? and
will you observe again that this passage touches the very joint of our
division? It is one that appeals to me, deals with that part of life
that I think the most important, and you, if I gather rightly, so much
less so? You believe in the extreme moment of the facts that humanity
has acquired and is acquiring; I think them of moment, but still or much
less than those inherent or inherited brute principles and laws that sit
upon us (in the character of conscience) as heavy as a shirt of mail, and
that (in the character of the affections and the airy spirit of pleasure)
make all the light of our lives. The house is, indeed, a great thing,
and should be rearranged on sanitary principles; but my heart and all my
interest are with the dweller, that ancient of days and day-old infant
man.
R. L. S.
An excellent touch is p. 584. ‘By instinct or design he eschews what
demands constructive patience.’ I believe it is both; my theory is that
literature must always be most at home in treating movement and change;
hence I look for them.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
[_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_,] _October_ 28, 1885.
MY DEAREST FATHER,—Get the November number of _Time_, and you will see a
review of me by a very clever fellow, who is quite furious at bottom
because I am too orthodox, just as Purcell was savage because I am not
orthodox enough. I fall between two stools. It is odd, too, to see how
this man thinks me a full-blooded fox-hunter, and tells me my philosophy
would fail if I lost my health or had to give up exercise!
An illustrated _Treasure Island_ will be out next month. I have had an
early copy, and the French pictures are admirable. The artist has got
his types up in Hogarth; he is full of fire and spirit, can draw and can
compose, and has understood the book as I meant it, all but one or two
little accidents, such as making the _Hispaniola_ a brig. I would send
you my copy, _but I cannot_; it is my new toy, and I cannot divorce
myself from this enjoyment.
I am keeping really better, and have been out about every second day,
though the weather is cold and very wild.
I was delighted to hear you were keeping better; you and Archer would
agree, more shame to you! (Archer is my pessimist critic.) Good-bye to
all of you, with my best love. We had a dreadful overhauling of my
conduct as a son the other night; and my wife stripped me of my illusions
and made me admit I had been a detestable bad one. Of one thing in
particular she convicted me in my own eyes: I mean, a most unkind
reticence, which hung on me then, and I confess still hangs on me now,
when I try to assure you that I do love you.—Ever your bad son,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO HENRY JAMES
_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_. {368} 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.
Now, my dear James, come—come—come. The spirit (that is me) says, Come;
and the bride (and that is my wife) says, Come; and the best thing you
can do for us and yourself and your work is to get up and do so right
away,—Yours affectionately,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO WILLIAM ARCHER
[_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_,] _October_ 30, 1885.
DEAR MR. ARCHER.—It is possible my father may be soon down with me; he is
an old man and in bad health and spirits; and I could neither leave him
alone, nor could we talk freely before him. If he should be here when
you offer your visit, you will understand if I have to say no, and put
you off.
I quite understand your not caring to refer to things of private
knowledge. What still puzzles me is how you (‘in the witness box’—ha! I
like the phrase) should have made your argument actually hinge on a
contention which the facts answered.
I am pleased to hear of the correctness of my guess. It is then as I
supposed; you are of the school of the generous and not the sullen
pessimists; and I can feel with you. I used myself to rage when I saw
sick folk going by in their Bath-chairs; since I have been sick myself
(and always when I was sick myself), I found life, even in its rough
places, to have a property of easiness. That which we suffer ourselves
has no longer the same air of monstrous injustice and wanton cruelty that
suffering wears when we see it in the case of others. So we begin
gradually to see that things are not black, but have their strange
compensations; and when they draw towards their worst, the idea of death
is like a bed to lie on. I should bear false witness if I did not
declare life happy. And your wonderful statement that happiness tends to
die out and misery to continue, which was what put me on the track of
your frame of mind, is diagnostic of the happy man raging over the misery
of others; it could never be written by the man who had tried what
unhappiness was like. And at any rate, it was a slip of the pen: the
ugliest word that science has to declare is a reserved indifference to
happiness and misery in the individual; it declares no leaning toward the
black, no iniquity on the large scale in fate’s doings, rather a marble
equality, dread not cruel, giving and taking away and reconciling.
Why have I not written my _Timon_? Well, here is my worst quarrel with
you. You take my young books as my last word. The tendency to try to
say more has passed unperceived (my fault, that). And you make no
allowance for the slowness with which a man finds and tries to learn his
tools. I began with a neat brisk little style, and a sharp little knack
of partial observation; I have tried to expand my means, but still I can
only utter a part of what I wish to say, and am bound to feel; and much
of it will die unspoken. But if I had the pen of Shakespeare, I have no
_Timon_ to give forth. I feel kindly to the powers that be; I marvel
they should use me so well; and when I think of the case of others, I
wonder too, but in another vein, whether they may not, whether they must
not, be like me, still with some compensation, some delight. To have
suffered, nay, to suffer, sets a keen edge on what remains of the
agreeable. This is a great truth, and has to be learned in the
fire.—Yours very truly,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
We expect you, remember that.
TO WILLIAM ARCHER
_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_, _November_ 1, 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 over-powering physical pain or disgrace, and how in almost
all circumstances the human soul can play a fair part. You fear life, I
fancy, on the principle of the hand of little employment. 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 spurn 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, fox-hunting 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 posteriors. 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.
TO W. H. LOW
_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_, _December_ 26, 1885.
MY DEAR LOW,—_Lamia_ has not yet turned up, but your letter came to me
this evening with a scent of the Boulevard Montparnasse that was
irresistible. The sand of Lavenue’s crumbled under my heel; and the
bouquet of the old Fleury came back to me, and I remembered the day when
I found a twenty franc piece under my fetish. Have you that fetish
still? and has it brought you luck? I remembered, too, my first sight of
you in a frock coat and a smoking-cap, when we passed the evening at the
Café de Medicis; and my last when we sat and talked in the Parc Monceau;
and all these things made me feel a little young again, which, to one who
has been mostly in bed for a month, was a vivifying change.
Yes, you are lucky to have a bag that holds you comfortably. Mine is a
strange contrivance; I don’t die, damme, and I can’t get along on both
feet to save my soul; I am a chronic sickist; and my work cripples along
between bed and the parlour, between the medicine bottle and the cupping
glass. Well, I like my life all the same; and should like it none the
worse if I could have another talk with you, though even my talks now are
measured out to me by the minute hand like poisons in a minim glass.
A photograph will be taken of my ugly mug and sent to you for ulterior
purposes: I have another thing coming out, which I did not put in the way
of the Scribners, I can scarce tell how; but I was sick and penniless and
rather back on the world, and mismanaged it. I trust they will forgive
me.
I am sorry to hear of Mrs. Low’s illness, and glad to hear of her
recovery. I will announce the coming _Lamia_ to Bob: he steams away at
literature like smoke. I have a beautiful Bob on my walls, and a good
Sargent, and a delightful Lemon; and your etching now hangs framed in the
dining-room. So the arts surround me.—Yours,
R. L. S.
FOOTNOTES
{xv} _Vailima Letters_: Methuen and Co., 1895.
{xxi} Compare _Virginibus Puerisque_: the essay on ‘The English
Admirals.’
{xxx} The fragment called _Lay Morals_, at present only printed in the
Edinburgh edition (_Miscellanies_, vol. iv.), contains the pith of his
mental history on these subjects.
{17} Aikman’s _Annals of the Persecution in Scotland_.
{24} Thomas Stevenson.
{56} See Scott himself in the preface to the Author’s edition.
{67} Compare the paragraph in ‘Ordered South’ describing the state of
mind of the invalid doubtful of recovery, and ending: ‘He will pray for
Medea; when she comes, let here either rejuvenate or slay.’
{144} ‘The Story of a Lie.’
{149} Engraisser, grow fat.
{161} Here follows a long calculation of ways and means.
{185} ‘The whole front of the house was lighted, and there were pipes
and fiddles, and as much dancing and deray within as used to be in Sir
Robert’s house at Pace and Yule, and such high seasons.’—See ‘Wandering
Willie’s Tale’ in _Redgauntlet_, borrowed perhaps from _Christ’s Kirk of
the Green_.
{186} In architecture, a series of piles to defend the pier of a bridge.
{191} Gentleman’s library.
{209} The reference is of course to Wordsworth’s _Song at the Feast of
Brougham Castle_.
{210} At Davos-Platz.
{223} From Landor’s _Gebir_: the line refers to Napoleon Bonaparte.
{263} Fair copy of some of the _Child’s Garden_ verses.
{269} _Silverado Squatters_.
{289} The well-known Scottish landscape painter, who had been a friend
of Stevenson’s in youth.
{290} _Croûtes_: crude studies or daubs from nature.
{303} A favourite Skye terrier. Mr. Stevenson was a great lover of
dogs.
{318} The essay so called. See _Memories and Portraits_.
{330} Of Sophocles.
{337} Cough.
{338} Loose talk.
{339} Mr. Charles Morley, at this time manager or assistant-manager of
the _Pall Mall Gazette_.
{368} _Princess Casamassina_.