This is in reply to some technical criticisms of his correspondent on
the poem _Our Lady of the Snows_, referring to the Trappist
monastery in the Cevennes so called, and afterwards published in
_Underwoods_.
_Edinburgh [April 1879]._
MY DEAR HENLEY,--Heavens! have I done the like? "Clarify and strain,"
indeed? "Make it like Marvell," no less. I'll tell you what--you may go
to the devil; that's what I think. "Be eloquent" is another of your
pregnant suggestions. I cannot sufficiently thank you for that one.
Portrait of a person about to be eloquent at the request of a literary
friend. You seem to forget, sir, that rhyme is rhyme, sir, and--go to
the devil.
I'll try to improve it, but I shan't be able to--O go to the devil.
Seriously, you're a cool hand. And then you have the brass to ask me
_why_ "my steps went one by one"? Why? Powers of man! to rhyme with
_sun_, to be sure. Why else could it be? And you yourself have been a
poet! G-r-r-r-r-r! I'll never be a poet any more. Men are so d----d
ungrateful and captious, I declare I could weep.
O Henley, in my hours of ease
You may say anything you please,
But when I join the Muse's revel,
Begad, I wish you at the devil!
In vain my verse I plane and bevel,
Like Banville's rhyming devotees;
In vain by many an artful swivel
Lug in my meaning by degrees;
I'm sure to hear my Henley cavil;
And grovelling prostrate on my knees,
Devote his body to the seas,
His correspondence to the devil!
Impromptu poem.
I'm going to Shandon Hydropathic _cum parentibus_. Write here. I heard
from Lang. Ferrier prayeth to be remembered; he means to write, likes
his Tourgenieff greatly. Also likes my _What was on the Slate_, which,
under a new title, yet unfound, and with a new and, on the whole,
kindly _denouement_, is going to shoot up and become a star....
I see I must write some more to you about my Monastery. I am a weak
brother in verse. You ask me to re-write things that I have already
managed just to write with the skin of my teeth. If I don't re-write
them, it's because I don't see how to write them better, not because I
don't think they should be. But, curiously enough, you condemn two of my
favourite passages, one of which is J. W. Ferrier's favourite of the
whole. Here I shall think it's you who are wrong. You see, I did not try
to make good verse, but to say what I wanted as well as verse would let
me. I don't like the rhyme "ear" and "hear." But the couplet, "My
undissuaded heart I hear Whisper courage in my ear," is exactly what I
want for the thought, and to me seems very energetic as speech, if not
as verse. Would "daring" be better than "courage"? _Je me le demande._
No, it would be ambiguous, as though I had used it licentiously for
"daringly," and that would cloak the sense.
In short, your suggestions have broken the heart of the scald. He
doesn't agree with them all; and those he does agree with, the spirit
indeed is willing, but the d----d flesh cannot, cannot, cannot, see its
way to profit by. I think I'll lay it by for nine years, like Horace. I
think the well of Castaly's run out. No more the Muses round my pillow
haunt. I am fallen once more to the mere proser. God bless you.