The following is in reply to a letter Stevenson had received on some
questions connected with his proposed Life of Hazlitt from the
veteran critic and bibliographer since deceased, Mr. Alexander
Ireland. At the foot is to be found the first reference to his new
amusement of wood engraving for the Davos Press:--
[_Chalet am Stein, Davos, March 1882._]
MY DEAR SIR,--This formidable paper need not alarm you; it argues
nothing beyond penury of other sorts, and is not at all likely to lead
me into a long letter. If I were at all grateful it would, for yours has
just passed for me a considerable part of a stormy evening. And speaking
of gratitude, let me at once and with becoming eagerness accept your
kind invitation to Bowdon. I shall hope, if we can agree as to dates
when I am nearer hand, to come to you sometime in the month of May. I
was pleased to hear you were a Scot; I feel more at home with my
compatriots always; perhaps the more we are away, the stronger we feel
that bond.
You ask about Davos; I have discoursed about it already, rather sillily
I think, in the _Pall Mall_, and I mean to say no more, but the ways of
the Muse are dubious and obscure, and who knows? I may be wiled again.
As a place of residence, beyond a splendid climate, it has to my eyes
but one advantage--the neighbourhood of J. A. Symonds--I dare say you
know his work, but the man is far more interesting. It has done me, in
my two winters' Alpine exile, much good; so much, that I hope to leave
it now for ever, but would not be understood to boast. In my present
unpardonably crazy state, any cold might send me skipping, either back
to Davos, or further off. Let us hope not. It is dear; a little dreary;
very far from many things that both my taste and my needs prompt me to
seek; and altogether not the place that I should choose of my free will.
I am chilled by your description of the man in question, though I had
almost argued so much from his cold and undigested volume. If the
republication does not interfere with my publisher, it will not
interfere with me; but there, of course, comes the hitch. I do not know
Mr. Bentley, and I fear all publishers like the devil from legend and
experience both. However, when I come to town, we shall, I hope, meet
and understand each other as well as author and publisher ever do. I
liked his letters; they seemed hearty, kind, and personal. Still--I am
notedly suspicious of the trade--your news of this republication alarms
me.
The best of the present French novelists seems to me, incomparably,
Daudet. _Les Rois en Exil_ comes very near being a masterpiece. For Zola
I have no toleration, though the curious, eminently bourgeois, and
eminently French creature has power of a kind. But I would he were
deleted. I would not give a chapter of old Dumas (meaning himself, not
his collaborators) for the whole boiling of the Zolas. Romance with the
smallpox--as the great one: diseased anyway and blackhearted and
fundamentally at enmity with joy.
I trust that Mrs. Ireland does not object to smoking; and if you are a
teetotaller, I beg you to mention it before I come--I have all the
vices; some of the virtues also, let us hope--that, at least, of being a
Scotchman, and yours very sincerely,