_Kinnaird Cottage, Pitlochry, July 1881._
MY DEAR HENLEY,--I hope, then, to have a visit from you. If before
August, here; if later, at Braemar. Tupe!
And now, _mon bon_, I must babble about _The Merry Men_, my favourite
work. It is a fantastic sonata about the sea and wrecks. Chapter I.
"Eilean Aros"--the island, the roost, the "merry men," the three people
there living--sea superstitions. Chapter II. "What the Wreck had brought
to Aros." Eh, boy? what had it? Silver and clocks and brocades, and what
a conscience, what a mad brain! Chapter III. "Past and Present in Sandag
Bay"--the new wreck and the old--so old--the Armada treasure-ship,
Sant^ma Trini^d--the grave in the heather--strangers there. Chapter IV.
"The Gale"--the doomed ship--the storm--the drunken madman on the
head--cries in the night. Chapter V. "A Man out of the Sea." But I must
not breathe to you my plot. It is, I fancy, my first real shoot at a
story; an odd thing, sir, but, I believe, my own, though there is a
little of Scott's _Pirate_ in it, as how should there not? He had the
root of romance in such places. Aros is Earraid, where I lived lang
syne;[40] the Ross of Grisapol is the Ross of Mull; Ben Ryan, Ben More.
I have written to the middle of Chapter IV. Like enough, when it is
finished I shall discard all chapterings; for the thing is written
straight through. It must, unhappily, be re-written--too well written
not to be.
The chair is only three months in summer; that is why I try for it. If I
get it, which I shall not, I should be independent at once. Sweet
thought. I liked your Byron well; your Berlioz better. No one would
remark these cuts; even I, who was looking for it, knew it not at all to
be a torso. The paper strengthens me in my recommendation to you to
follow Colvin's hint. Give us an 1830; you will do it well, and the
subject smiles widely on the world:--
1830: _A Chapter of Artistic History_, by William Ernest Henley (or _of
Social and Artistic History_, as the thing might grow to you). Sir, you
might be in the Athenaeum yet with that; and, believe me, you might and
would be far better, the author of a readable book.--Yours ever,