This is addressed to a favourite cousin of the Balfour clan, married
to a Cambridge colleague of mine, Professor Churchill Babington of
learned and amiable memory, whose home was at the college living of
Cockfield near Bury St. Edmunds. Here Stevenson had visited them in
the previous year. "Mrs. Hutchinson" is, of course, Lucy Hutchinson's
famous _Life_ of her husband the regicide.
[_Swanston Cottage, Lothianburn, Summer 1871._]
MY DEAR MAUD,--If you have forgotten the handwriting--as is like
enough--you will find the name of a former correspondent (don't know how
to spell that word) at the end. I have begun to write to you before now,
but always stuck somehow, and left it to drown in a drawerful of like
fiascos. This time I am determined to carry through, though I have
nothing specially to say.
We look fairly like summer this morning; the trees are blackening out of
their spring greens; the warmer suns have melted the hoarfrost of
daisies of the paddock; and the blackbird, I fear, already beginning to
"stint his pipe of mellower days"--which is very apposite (I can't spell
anything to-day--_one_ p or _two_?) and pretty. All the same, we have
been having shocking weather--cold winds and grey skies.
I have been reading heaps of nice books; but I can't go back so far. I
am reading Clarendon's _Hist. Rebell._ at present, with which I am more
pleased than I expected, which is saying a good deal. It is a pet idea
of mine that one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than
out of a dozen of your sham impartialists--wolves in sheep's
clothing--simpering honesty as they suppress documents. After all, what
one wants to know is not what people did, but why they did it--or
rather, why they _thought_ they did it; and to learn that, you should go
to the men themselves. Their very falsehood is often more than another
man's truth.
I have possessed myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, which, of course, I admire,
etc. But is there not an irritating deliberation and correctness about
her and everybody connected with her? If she would only write bad
grammar, or forget to finish a sentence, or do something or other that
looks fallible, it would be a relief. I sometimes wish the old Colonel
had got drunk and beaten her, in the bitterness of my spirit. I know I
felt a weight taken off my heart when I heard he was extravagant. It is
quite possible to be too good for this evil world; and unquestionably,
Mrs. Hutchinson was. The way in which she talks of herself makes one's
blood run cold. There--I am glad to have got that out--but don't say it
to anybody--seal of secrecy.
Please tell Mr. Babington that I have never forgotten one of his
drawings--a Rubens, I think--a woman holding up a model ship. That woman
had more life in her than ninety per cent. of the lame humans that you
see crippling about this earth.
By the way, that is a feature in art which seems to have come in with
the Italians. Your old Greek statues have scarce enough vitality in them
to keep their monstrous bodies fresh withal. A shrewd country attorney,
in a turned white neckcloth and rusty blacks, would just take one of
these Agamemnons and Ajaxes quietly by his beautiful, strong arm, trot
the unresisting statue down a little gallery of legal shams, and turn
the poor fellow out at the other end, "naked, as from the earth he
came." There is more latent life, more of the coiled spring in the
sleeping dog, about a recumbent figure of Michael Angelo's than about
the most excited of Greek statues. The very marble seems to wrinkle with
a wild energy that we never feel except in dreams.
I think this letter has turned into a sermon, but I had nothing
interesting to talk about.
I do wish you and Mr. Babington would think better of it and come north
this summer. We should be so glad to see you both. _Do_ reconsider
it.--Believe me, my dear Maud, ever your most affectionate cousin,