_The Bottle_ here mentioned is a story that had been some time in
hand called _The Curate of Anstruther's Bottle_; afterwards abandoned
like so many early attempts of the same kind.
[_Menton, January 1874._]
MY DEAR S. C.,--I suppose this will be my last note then. I think you
will find everything very jolly here, I am very jolly myself. I worked
six hours to-day. I am occupied in transcribing _The Bottle_, which is
pleasant work to me; I find much in it that I still think excellent and
much that I am doubtful about; my convention is so terribly difficult
that I have to put out much that pleases me, and much that I still
preserve I only preserve with misgiving. I wonder if my convention is
not a little too hard and too much in the style of those decadent
curiosities, poems without the letter E, poems going with the alphabet
and the like. And yet the idea, if rightly understood and treated as a
convention always and not as an abstract principle, should not so much
hamper one as it seems to do. The idea is not, of course, to put in
nothing but what would naturally have been noted and remembered and
handed down, but not to put in anything that would make a person stop
and say--how could this be known? Without doubt it has the advantage of
making one rely on the essential interest of a situation and not cocker
up and validify feeble intrigue with incidental fine writing and
scenery, and pyrotechnic exhibitions of inappropriate cleverness and
sensibility. I remember Bob once saying to me that the quadrangle of
Edinburgh University was a good thing and our having a talk as to how it
could be employed in different arts. I then stated that the different
doors and staircases ought to be brought before a reader of a story not
by mere recapitulation but by the use of them, by the descent of
different people one after another by each of them. And that the grand
feature of shadow and the light of the one lamp in the corner should
also be introduced only as they enabled people in the story to see one
another or prevented them. And finally that whatever could not thus be
worked into the evolution of the action had no right to be commemorated
at all. After all, it is a story you are telling; not a place you are to
describe; and everything that does not attach itself to the story is out
of place.
This is a lecture not a letter, and it seems rather like sending coals
to Newcastle to write a lecture to a subsidised professor. I hope you
have seen Bob by this time. I know he is anxious to meet you and I am in
great anxiety to know what you think of his prospects--frankly, of
course: as for his person, I don't care a damn what you think of it: I
am case-hardened in that matter.
I wrote a French note to Madame Zassetsky the other day, and there were
no errors in it. The complete Gaul, as you may see.--Ever yours,