_Skerryvore_, _Bournemouth_ [_September_ 1886].
DEAR MR. WATTS, The sight of the last _Athenæum_ reminds me of you, and
of my debt, now too long due. I wish to thank you for your notice of
_Kidnapped_; and that not because it was kind, though for that also I
valued it, but in the same sense as I have thanked you before now for a
hundred articles on a hundred different writers. A critic like you is
one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity, and I would
fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance, surely not in
vain.
What you say of the two parts in _Kidnapped_ was felt by no one more
painfully than by myself. I began it partly as a lark, partly as a
pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from the
canvas, and I found I was in another world. But there was the cursed
beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old friend Byles
the butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back door. So it had to
go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one part
merely galvanised: no work, only an essay. For a man of tentative
method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private means, and not too
much of that frugality which is the artist’s proper virtue, the days of
sinecures and patrons look very golden: the days of professional
literature very hard. Yet I do not so far deceive myself as to think I
should change my character by changing my epoch; the sum of virtue in our
books is in a relation of equality to the sum of virtues in ourselves;
and my _Kidnapped_ was doomed, while still in the womb and while I was
yet in the cradle, to be the thing it is.
And now to the more genial business of defence. You attack my fight on
board the _Covenant_: I think it literal. David and Alan had every
advantage on their side—position, arms, training, a good conscience; a
handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first attack, not led at
all in the second, could only by an accident have taken the round-house
by attack; and since the defenders had firearms and food, it is even
doubtful if they could have been starved out. The only doubtful point
with me is whether the seamen would have ever ventured on the second
onslaught; I half believe they would not; still the illusion of numbers
and the authority of Hoseason would perhaps stretch far enough to justify
the extremity.—I am, dear Mr. Watts, your very sincere admirer,