_Vailima_, _April_ 1891.
MY DEAR GOSSE,—I have to thank you and Mrs. Gosse for many mementoes,
chiefly for your _Life_ of your father. There is a very delicate task,
very delicately done. I noted one or two carelessnesses, which I meant
to point out to you for another edition; but I find I lack the time, and
you will remark them for yourself against a new edition. They were two,
or perhaps three, flabbinesses of style which (in your work) amazed me.
Am I right in thinking you were a shade bored over the last chapters? or
was it my own fault that made me think them susceptible of a more
athletic compression? (The flabbinesses were not there, I think, but in
the more admirable part, where they showed the bigger.) Take it all
together, the book struck me as if you had been hurried at the last, but
particularly hurried over the proofs, and could still spend a very
profitable fortnight in earnest revision and (towards the end) heroic
compression. The book, in design, subject, and general execution, is
well worth the extra trouble. And even if I were wrong in thinking it
specially wanted, it will not be lost; for do we not know, in Flaubert’s
dread confession, that ‘prose is never done’? What a medium to work in,
for a man tired, perplexed among different aims and subjects, and spurred
by the immediate need of ‘siller’! However, it’s mine for what it’s
worth; and it’s one of yours, the devil take it; and you know, as well as
Flaubert, and as well as me, that it is _never done_; in other words, it
is a torment of the pit, usually neglected by the bards who (lucky
beggars!) approached the Styx in measure. I speak bitterly at the
moment, having just detected in myself the last fatal symptom, three
blank verses in succession—and I believe, God help me, a hemistich at the
tail of them; hence I have deposed the labourer, come out of hell by my
private trap, and now write to you from my little place in purgatory.
But I prefer hell: would I could always dig in those red coals—or else be
at sea in a schooner, bound for isles unvisited: to be on shore and not
to work is emptiness—suicidal vacancy.
I was the more interested in your _Life_ of your father, because I
meditate one of mine, or rather of my family. I have no such materials
as you, and (our objections already made) your attack fills me with
despair; it is direct and elegant, and your style is always admirable to
me—lenity, lucidity, usually a high strain of breeding, an elegance that
has a pleasant air of the accidental. But beware of purple passages. I
wonder if you think as well of your purple passages as I do of mine? I
wonder if you think as ill of mine as I do of yours? I wonder; I can
tell you at least what is wrong with yours—they are treated in the spirit
of verse. The spirit—I don’t mean the measure, I don’t mean you fall
into bastard cadences; what I mean is that they seem vacant and smoothed
out, ironed, if you like. And in a style which (like yours) aims more
and more successfully at the academic, one purple word is already much;
three—a whole phrase—is inadmissible. Wed yourself to a clean austerity:
that is your force. Wear a linen ephod, splendidly candid. Arrange its
folds, but do not fasten it with any brooch. I swear to you, in your
talking robes, there should be no patch of adornment; and where the
subject forces, let it force you no further than it must; and be ready
with a twinkle of your pleasantry. Yours is a fine tool, and I see so
well how to hold it; I wonder if you see how to hold mine? But then I am
to the neck in prose, and just now in the ‘dark _interstylar_ cave,’ all
methods and effects wooing me, myself in the midst impotent to follow
any. I look for dawn presently, and a full flowing river of expression,
running whither it wills. But these useless seasons, above all, when a
man _must_ continue to spoil paper, are infinitely weary.
We are in our house after a fashion; without furniture, ’tis true,
camping there, like the family after a sale. But the bailiff has not yet
appeared; he will probably come after. The place is beautiful beyond
dreams; some fifty miles of the Pacific spread in front; deep woods all
round; a mountain making in the sky a profile of huge trees upon our
left; about us, the little island of our clearing, studded with brave old
gentlemen (or ladies, or ‘the twa o’ them’) whom we have spared. It is a
good place to be in; night and morning, we have Theodore Rousseaus
(always a new one) hung to amuse us on the walls of the world; and the
moon—this is our good season, we have a moon just now—makes the night a
piece of heaven. It amazes me how people can live on in the dirty north;
yet if you saw our rainy season (which is really a caulker for wind, wet,
and darkness—howling showers, roaring winds, pit-blackness at noon) you
might marvel how we could endure that. And we can’t. But there’s a
winter everywhere; only ours is in the summer. Mark my words: there will
be a winter in heaven—and in hell. _Cela rentre dans les procédés du bon
Dieu_; _et vous verrez_! There’s another very good thing about Vailima,
I am away from the little bubble of the literary life. It is not all
beer and skittles, is it? By the by, my _Ballads_ seem to have been dam
bad; all the crickets sing so in their crickety papers; and I have no
ghost of an idea on the point myself: verse is always to me the
unknowable. You might tell me how it strikes a professional bard: not
that it really matters, for, of course, good or bad, I don’t think I
shall get into _that_ galley any more. But I should like to know if you
join the shrill chorus of the crickets. The crickets are the devil in
all to you: ’tis a strange thing, they seem to rejoice like a strong man
in their injustice. I trust you got my letter about your Browning book.
In case it missed, I wish to say again that your publication of
Browning’s kind letter, as an illustration of _his_ character, was
modest, proper, and in radiant good taste.—In Witness whereof, etc.,
etc.,