_Monterey, December 11th, 1879._
MY DEAR HENLEY,--Many, many thanks for your long letter. And now to
rectifications:--
1. You are wrong about the _Lie_, from choosing a wrong standard.
Compare it with my former stories, not with Scott, or Fielding, or
Balzac, or Charles Reade, or even Wilkie Collins; and where will you
find anything half or a tenth part as good as the Admiral, or even Dick,
or even the Squire, or even Esther. If you had thought of that, you
would have complimented me for advance. But you were not quite sincere
with yourself: you were seeking arguments to make me devote myself to
plays, unbeknown, of course, to yourself.
2. Plays, dear boy, are madness for me just now. The best play is
hopeless before six months, and more likely eighteen for outsiders like
you and me. And understand me, I have to get money _soon_, or it has no
further interest for me; I am nearly through my capital; with what pluck
I can muster against great anxieties and in a very shattered state of
health, I am trying to do things that will bring in money soon; and I
could not, if I were not mad, step out of my way to work at what might
perhaps bring me in more but months ahead. Journalism, you know well, is
not my forte; yet if I could only get a roving commission from a paper,
I should leap at it and send them goodish (no more than that) goodish
stuff.
As for my poor literature, dear Henley, you must expect for a time to
find it worse and worse. Perhaps, if God favours me a little at last, it
will pick up again. Now I am fighting with both hands, a hard battle,
and my work, while it will be as good as I can make it, will probably be
worth twopence. If you despised the _Donkey_, dear boy, you should have
told me so at the time, not reserved it for a sudden revelation just now
when I am down in health, wealth, and fortune. But I am glad you have
said so at last. Never, please, delay such confidences any more. If they
come quickly, they are a help; if they come after long silence, they
feel almost like a taunt.
Now, to read all this, any one would think you had written unkindly,
which is not so, as God who made us knows. But I wished to put myself
right ere I went on to state myself. Nothing has come but the volume of
Labiche; the _Burns_ I have now given up; the P.O. authorities plainly
regard it as contraband; make no further efforts in that direction. But,
please, if anything else of mine appears, _see that my people have a
copy_. I hoped and supposed my own copy would go as usual to the old
address, and, let me use Scotch, I was fair affrontit when I found this
had not been done.
You have not told me how you are and I heard you had not been well.
Please remedy this.
The end of life? Yes, Henley, I can tell you what that is. How old are
all truths, and yet how far from commonplace; old, strange, and
inexplicable, like the Sphinx. So I learn day by day the value and high
doctrinality of suffering. Let me suffer always; not more than I am able
to bear, for that makes a man mad, as hunger drives the wolf to sally
from the forest; but still to suffer some, and never to sink up to my
eyes in comfort and grow dead in virtues and respectability. I am a bad
man by nature, I suppose; but I cannot be good without suffering a
little. And the end of life, you will ask? The pleasurable death of
self: a thing not to be attained, because it is a thing belonging to
Heaven. All this apropos of that good, weak, feverish, fine spirit, ----
----. We have traits in common; we have almost the same strength and
weakness intermingled; and if I had not come through a very hot
crucible, I should be just as feverish. My sufferings have been
healthier than his; mine have been always a choice, where a man could be
manly; his have been so too, if he knew it, but were not so upon the
face; hence a morbid strain, which his wounded vanity has helped to
embitter.
I wonder why I scratch every one to-day. And I believe it is because I
am conscious of so much truth in your strictures on my damned stuff. I
don't care; there is something in me worth saying, though I can't find
what it is just yet; and ere I die, if I do not die too fast, I shall
write something worth the boards, which with scarce an exception I have
not yet done. At the same time, dear boy, in a matter of vastly more
importance than Opera Omnia Ludovici Stevenson, I mean my life, I have
not been a perfect cad; God help me to be less and less so as the days
go on.
The _Emigrant_ is not good, and will never do for P.M.G., though it must
have a kind of rude interest. R. L. S.