TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE
At Marseilles, while waiting to occupy
the house which he had leased in the suburbs of
that city, Stevenson learned that his old friend and
kind adviser, Mr. James Payn, with whom he had been
intimate as sub-editor of the Cornhill Magazine
under Mr. Leslie Stephen in the ’70’s,
had been inadvertently represented in the columns of
the New York Tribune as a plagiarist of R. L. S.
In order to put matters right, he at once sent
the following letter both to the Tribune and to
the London Athenæum:
Terminus Hotel, Marseilles,
October 16, 1882.
SIR, It has come to my
ears that you have lent the authority of your columns
to an error.
More than half in pleasantry and
I now think the pleasantry ill-judged I
complained in a note to my New Arabian Nights
that some one, who shall remain nameless for me, had
borrowed the idea of a story from one of mine.
As if I had not borrowed the ideas of the half of my
own! As if any one who had written a story ill
had a right to complain of any other who should have
written it better! I am indeed thoroughly ashamed
of the note, and of the principle which it implies.
But it is no mere abstract penitence
which leads me to beg a corner of your paper it
is the desire to defend the honour of a man of letters
equally known in America and England, of a man who
could afford to lend to me and yet be none the poorer;
and who, if he would so far condescend, has my free
permission to borrow from me all that he can find
worth borrowing.
Indeed, sir, I am doubly surprised
at your correspondent’s error. That James
Payn should have borrowed from me is already a strange
conception. The author of Lost Sir Massingberd
and By Proxy may be trusted to invent his own
stories. The author of A Grape from a Thorn
knows enough, in his own right, of the humorous and
pathetic sides of human nature.
But what is far more monstrous what
argues total ignorance of the man in question is
the idea that James Payn could ever have transgressed
the limits of professional propriety. I may tell
his thousands of readers on your side of the Atlantic
that there breathes no man of letters more inspired
by kindness and generosity to his brethren of the
profession, and, to put an end to any possibility of
error, I may be allowed to add that I often have recourse,
and that I had recourse once more but a few weeks
ago, to the valuable practical help which he makes
it his pleasure to extend to younger men.
I send a duplicate of this letter
to a London weekly; for the mistake, first set forth
in your columns, has already reached England, and my
wanderings have made me perhaps last of the persons
interested to hear a word of it. I am,
etc.,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO R. A. M. STEVENSON
Terminus Hotel, Marseille,
Saturday [October 1882].
MY DEAR BOB, We have found
a house! at Saint Marcel, Banlieue
de Marseille. In a lovely valley between
hills part wooded, part white cliffs; a house of a
dining-room, of a fine salon one side lined
with a long divan three good bedrooms (two
of them with dressing-rooms), three small rooms (chambers
of bonne and sich), a large kitchen, a
lumber room, many cupboards, a back court, a large
olive yard, cultivated by a resident paysan,
a well, a berceau, a good deal of rockery, a little
pine shrubbery, a railway station in front, two lines
of omnibus to Marseille.
£48 per annum.
It is called Campagne Defli! query
Campagne Debug? The Campagne Demosquito goes
on here nightly, and is very deadly. Ere we can
get installed, we shall be beggared to the door, I
see.
I vote for separations; F.’s
arrival here, after our separation, was better fun
to me than being married was by far. A separation
completed is a most valuable property; worth piles. Ever
your affectionate cousin,
R. L. S.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
Terminus Hotel, Marseille,
lé 17th October 1882.
MY DEAR FATHER, We grow,
every time we see it, more delighted with our house.
It is five miles out of Marseilles, in a lovely spot,
among lovely wooded and cliffy hills most
mountainous in line far lovelier, to my
eyes, than any Alps. To-day we have been out inventorying;
and though a mistral blew, it was delightful in an
open cab, and our house with the windows open was
heavenly, soft, dry, sunny, southern. I fear
there are fleas it is called Campagne Defli and
I look forward to tons of insecticide being employed.
I have had to write a letter to the
New York Tribune and the Athenæum. Payn
was accused of stealing my stories! I think I
have put things handsomely for him.
Just got a servant!!! Ever affectionate
son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
Our servant is a Muckle Hash of a Weedy!
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
The next two months’ letters
had perforce to consist of little save
bulletins of back-going health,
and consequent disappointment and
incapacity for work.
Campagne Defli, St.
Marcel,
Banlieue de Marseille,
November 13, 1882.
MY DEAR MOTHER, Your delightful
letters duly arrived this morning. They were
the only good feature of the day, which was not a success.
Fanny was in bed she begged I would not
split upon her, she felt so guilty; but as I believe
she is better this evening, and has a good chance to
be right again in a day or two, I will disregard her
orders. I do not go back, but do not go forward or
not much. It is, in one way, miserable for
I can do no work; a very little wood-cutting, the
newspapers, and a note about every two days to write,
completely exhausts my surplus energy; even Patience
I have to cultivate with parsimony. I see, if
I could only get to work, that we could live here
with comfort, almost with luxury. Even as it is,
we should be able to get through a considerable time
of idleness. I like the place immensely, though
I have seen so little of it I have only
been once outside the gate since I was here!
It puts me in mind of a summer at Prestonpans and
a sickly child you once told me of.
Thirty-two years now finished!
My twenty-ninth was in San Francisco, I remember rather
a bleak birthday. The twenty-eighth was not much
better; but the rest have been usually pleasant days
in pleasant circumstances.
Love to you and to my father and to Cummy.
From me and Fanny and Wogg.
R. L. S.
TO TREVOR HADDON
Campagne Defli, St.
Marcel, Deth, 1882.
DEAR SIR, I am glad you
sent me your note, I had indeed lost your address,
and was half thinking to try the Ringstown one; but
far from being busy, I have been steadily ill.
I was but three or four days in London, waiting till
one of my friends was able to accompany me, and had
neither time nor health to see anybody but some publisher
people. Since then I have been worse and better,
better and worse, but never able to do any work and
for a large part of the time forbidden to write and
even to play Patience, that last of civilised amusements.
In brief, I have been “the sheer hulk”
to a degree almost outside of my experience, and I
desire all my friends to forgive me my sins of omission
this while back. I only wish you were the only
one to whom I owe a letter, or many letters.
But you see, at least, you had done
nothing to offend me; and I dare say you will let
me have a note from time to time, until we shall have
another chance to meet. Yours sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
An excellent new year to you, and many of them.
If you chance to see a paragraph in
the papers describing my illness, and the “delicacies
suitable to my invalid condition” cooked in copper,
and the other ridiculous and revolting yarns, pray
regard it as a spectral illusion, and pass by.
[MRS. R. L. STEVENSON TO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
I intercalate here Mrs. Stevenson’s
extremely vivid and characteristic account of the
weird misadventures that befell the pair during
their retreat from St. Marcel in search of a healthier
home.
[Campagne Defli,
St. Marcel, January 1883.]
MY DEAR MR. SYMONDS, What
must you think of us? I hardly dare write to
you. What do you do when people to whom you have
been the dearest of friends requite you by acting
like fiends? I do hope you heap coals of fire
on their heads in the good old Christian sense.
Louis has been very ill again.
I hasten to say that he is now better. But I
thought at one time he would never be better again.
He had continual hemorrhages and became so weak that
he was twice insensible in one day, and was for a
long time like one dead. At the worst fever broke
out in this village, typhus, I think, and all day the
death-bells rang, and we could hear the chanting whilst
the wretched villagers carried about their dead lying
bare to the sun on their coffin-lids, so spreading
the contagion through the streets. The evening
of the day when Louis was so long insensible the weather
changed, becoming very clear and fine and greatly
refreshing and reviving him. Then I said if it
held good he should start in the morning for Nice
and try what a change might do. Just at that
time there was not money enough for the two of us,
so he had to start alone, though I expected soon to
be able to follow him. During the night a peasant-man
died in a house in our garden, and in the morning
the corpse, hideously swollen in the stomach, was lying
on its coffin-lid at our gates. Fortunately it
was taken away just before Louis went, and he didn’t
see it nor hear anything about it until afterwards.
I had been back and forth all the morning from the
door to the gates, and from the gates to the door,
in an agony lest Louis should have to pass it on his
way out.
I was to have a despatch from Toulon
where Louis was to pass the night, two hours from
St. Marcel, and another from Nice, some few hours
further, the next day. I waited one, two, three,
four days, and no word came. Neither telegram
nor letter. The evening of the fourth day I went
to Marseilles and telegraphed to the Toulon and Nice
stations and to the bureau of police. I had been
pouring out letters to every place I could think of.
The people at Marseilles were very kind and advised
me to take no further steps to find my husband.
He was certainly dead, they said. It was plain
that he stopped at some little station on the road,
speechless and dying, and it was now too late to do
anything; I had much better return at once to my friends.
“Eet ofen ’appens so,” said the
Secretary, and “Oh yes, all right, very well,”
added a Swiss in a sympathetic voice. I waited
all night at Marseilles and got no answer, all the
next day and got no answer; then I went back to St.
Marcel and there was nothing there. At eight
I started on the train with Lloyd who had come for
his holidays, but it only took us to Toulon where again
I telegraphed. At last I got an answer the next
day at noon. I waited at Toulon for the train
I had reason to believe Louis travelled by, intending
to stop at every station and inquire for him until
I got to Nice. Imagine what those days were to
me. I never received any of the letters Louis
had written to me, and he was reading the first he
had received from me when I knocked at his door.
A week afterwards I had an answer from the police.
Louis was much better: the change and the doctor,
who seems very clever, have done wonderful things for
him. It was during this first day of waiting
that I received your letter. There was a vague
comfort in it like a hand offered in the darkness,
but I did not read it until long after.
We have had many other wild misadventures,
Louis has twice (started) actually from Nice under
a misapprehension. At this moment I believe him
to be at Marseilles, stopping at the Hotel du Petit
Louvre; I am supposed to be packing here at St. Marcel,
afterwards we are to go somewhere, perhaps to the
Lake of Geneva. My nerves were so shattered by
the terrible suspense I endured that memorable week
that I have not been fit to do much. When I was
returning from Nice a dreadful old man with a fat
wife and a weak granddaughter sat opposite me and plied
me with the most extraordinary questions. He
began by asking if Lloyd was any connection of mine,
and ended I believe by asking my mother’s maiden
name. Another of the questions he put to me was
where Louis wished to be buried, and whether I could
afford to have him embalmed when he died. When
the train stopped the only other passenger, a quiet
man in a corner who looked several times as if he
wished to interfere and stop the old man but was too
shy, came to me and said that he knew Sidney Colvin
and he knew you, and that you were both friends of
Louis; and that his name was Basil Hammond, and
he wished to stay on a day in Marseilles and help
me work off my affairs. I accepted his offer with
heartfelt thanks. I was extremely ill next day,
but we two went about and arranged about giving up
this house and what compensation, and did some things
that I could not have managed alone. My French
is useful only in domestic economy, and even that,
I fear, is very curious and much of it patois.
Wasn’t that a good fellow, and a kind fellow? I
cannot tell you how grateful I am, words are such
feeble things at least for that purpose.
For anger, justifiable wrath, they are all too forcible.
It was very bad of me not to write to you, we talked
of you so often and thought of you so much, and I
always said “now I will write” and
then somehow I could not....
FANNY V. DE G. STEVENSON.]
TO CHARLES BAXTER
After his Christmas flight to Marseilles
and thence to Nice, Stevenson began to mend quickly.
In this letter to Mr. Baxter he acknowledges the
receipt of a specimen proof, set up for their private
amusement, of Brashiana, the series of burlesque
sonnets he had written at Davos in memory of the
Edinburgh publican already mentioned. It should
be explained that in their correspondence Stevenson
and Mr. Baxter were accustomed to keep up an old play
of their student days by merging their identities
in those of two fictitious personages, Thomson
and Johnson, imaginary types of Edinburgh character,
and ex-elders of the Scottish Kirk.
Grand Hotel, Nice,
12th January ’83.
DEAR CHARLES, Thanks for
your good letter. It is true, man, God’s
trüth, what ye say about the body Stevison. The
deil himsel, it’s my belief, couldnae get the
soul harled oot o’ the creature’s wame,
or he had seen the hinder end o’ they proofs.
Ye crack o’ Mæcenas, he’s naebody
by you! He gied the lad Horace a rax forrit by
all accounts; but he never gied him proofs like yon.
Horace may hae been a better hand at the clink than
Stevison mind, I’m no sayin’
’t but onyway he was never sae weel
prentit. Damned, but it’s bonny! Hoo
mony pages will there be, think ye? Stevison
maun hae sent ye the feck o’ twenty sangs fifteen
I’se warrant. Weel, that’ll can make
thretty pages, gin ye were to prent on ae side only,
whilk wad be perhaps what a man o’ your great
idées would be ettlin’ at, man Johnson.
Then there wad be the Pre-face, an’ prose ye
ken prents oot länger than po’try at the
hinder end, for ye hae to say things in’t.
An’ then there’ll be a title-page and a
dedication and an index wi’ the first lines
like, and the deil an’ a’. Man, it’ll
be grand. Nae copies to be given to the Liberys.
I am alane myself, in Nice, they ca’t,
but damned, I think they micht as well ca’t
Nesty. The Pile-on, ’s they ca’t,
’s aboot as big as the river Tay at Perth; and
it’s rainin’ maist like Greenock.
Dod, I’ve seen ‘s had mair o’ what
they ca’ the I-talian at Muttonhole.
I-talian! I haenae seen the sun for eicht and
forty hours. Thomson’s better, I believe.
But the body’s fair attenyated. He’s
doon to seeven stane eleeven, an’ he sooks awa’
at cod liver île, till it’s a fair disgrace.
Ye see he tak’s it on a drap brandy;
and it’s my belief, it’s just an excuse
for a dram. He an’ Stevison gang aboot their
lane, maistly; they’re company to either, like,
an’ whiles they’ll speak o’ Johnson.
But he’s far awa’, losh me!
Stevison’s last book ’s in a third edeetion;
an’ it’s bein’ translated (like the
psaulms of David, nae less) into French; and an eediot
they ca’ Asher a kind o’
rival of Tauchnitz is bringin’ him
oot in a paper book for the Frenchies and the German
folk in twa volumes. Sae he’s in luck, ye
see. Yours,
THOMSON.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
Stevenson here narrates in his own
fashion by what generalship he at
last got rid of the Campagne Defli
without having to pay compensation
as his wife expected.
Hotel du Petit Louvre,
Marseille, 15 Fe.
DEAR SIR, This is to intimate
to you that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson were
yesterday safely delivered
of a
Campagne.
The parents are both doing much better
than could be expected; particularly the dear papa.
There, Colvin, I did it this time.
Huge success. The propriétaires were scattered
like chaff. If it had not been the agent, may
Israel now say, if it had not been the agent who was
on our side! But I made the agent march!
I threatened law; I was Immense what do
I say? Immeasurable. The agent, however,
behaved well and is a fairly honest little one-eared,
white-eyed tom-cat of an opera-going gold-hunter.
The propriétaire non est inventa; we
countermarched her, got in valuators; and in place
of a hundred francs in her pocket, she got nothing,
and I paid one silver biscuit! It might
go further but I am convinced will not, and anyway,
I fear not the consequences.
The weather is incredible; my heart
sings; my health satisfies even my wife. I did
jolly well right to come after all and she now admits
it. For she broke down as I knew she would, and
I from here, without passing a night at the Defli,
though with a cruel effusion of coach-hires, took
up the wondrous tale and steered the ship through.
I now sit crowned with laurel and literally exulting
in kudos. The affair has been better managed
than our two last winterings, I am yours,
BRABAZON DRUM.
TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM
The verses referred to in the following
are those of the Child’s
Garden.
[Nice, February 1883.]
MY DEAR CUMMY, You must
think, and quite justly, that I am one of the meanest
rogues in creation. But though I do not write
(which is a thing I hate), it by no means follows
that people are out of my mind. It is natural
that I should always think more or less about you,
and still more natural that I should think of you
when I went back to Nice. But the real reason
why you have been more in my mind than usual is because
of some little verses that I have been writing, and
that I mean to make a book of; and the real reason
of this letter (although I ought to have written to
you anyway) is that I have just seen that the book
in question must be dedicated to
ALISON CUNNINGHAM,
the only person who will really understand
it, I don’t know when it may be ready, for it
has to be illustrated, but I hope in the meantime you
may like the idea of what is to be; and when the time
comes, I shall try to make the dedication as pretty
as I can make it. Of course, this is only a flourish,
like taking off one’s hat; but still, a person
who has taken the trouble to write things does not
dedicate them to any one without meaning it; and you
must just try to take this dedication in place of
a great many things that I might have said, and that
I ought to have done, to prove that I am not altogether
unconscious of the great debt of gratitude I owe you.
This little book, which is all about my childhood,
should indeed go to no other person but you, who did
so much to make that childhood happy.
Do you know, we came very near sending
for you this winter. If we had not had news that
you were ill too, I almost believe we should have done
so, we were so much in trouble.
I am now very well; but my wife has
had a very, very bad spell, through overwork and anxiety,
when I was lost! I suppose you heard of
that. She sends you her love, and hopes you will
write to her, though she no more than I deserves it.
She would add a word herself, but she is too played
out. I am, ever your old boy,
R. L. S.
TO W. E. HENLEY
Stevenson was by this time beginning
to send home some of the MS. of the Child’s
Garden, the title of which had not yet been settled.
The pieces as first numbered are in a different
order from that afterwards adopted, but the reader
will easily identify the references.
[Nice, March 1883.]
MY DEAR LAD, This is to
announce to you the MS. of Nursery Verses, now numbering
XLVIII. pieces or 599 verses, which, of course, one
might augment ad infinitum.
But here is my notion to make all clear.
I do not want a big ugly quarto; my
soul sickens at the look of a quarto. I want
a refined octavo, not large not larger
than the Donkey book, at any price.
I think the full page might hold four
verses of four lines, that is to say, counting their
blanks at two, of twenty-two lines in height.
The first page of each number would only hold two
verses or ten lines, the title being low down.
At this rate, we should have seventy-eight or eighty
pages of letterpress.
The designs should not be in the text,
but facing the poem; so that if the artist liked,
he might give two pages of design to every poem that
turned the leaf, i.e. longer than eight lines,
i.e. to twenty-eight out of the forty-six.
I should say he would not use this privilege (?) above
five times, and some he might scorn to illustrate at
all, so we may say fifty drawings. I shall come
to the drawings next.
But now you see my book of the thickness,
since the drawings count two pages, of 180 pages;
and since the paper will perhaps be thicker, of near
two hundred by bulk. It is bound in a quiet green
with the words in thin gilt. Its shape is a slender,
tall octavo. And it sells for the publisher’s
fancy, and it will be a darling to look at; in short,
it would be like one of the original Heine books in
type and spacing.
Now for the pictures. I take
another sheet and begin to jot notes for them when
my imagination serves: I will run through the
book, writing when I have an idea. There, I have
jotted enough to give the artist a notion. Of
course, I don’t do more than contribute ideas,
but I will be happy to help in any and every way.
I may as well add another idea; when the artist finds
nothing much to illustrate, a good drawing of any
object mentioned in the text, were it only a
loaf of bread or a candlestick, is a most delightful
thing to a young child. I remember this keenly.
Of course, if the artist insists on
a larger form, I must, I suppose, bow my head.
But my idea I am convinced is the best, and would make
the book truly, not fashionably pretty.
I forgot to mention that I shall have
a dedication; I am going to dedicate ’em to
Cummy; it will please her, and lighten a little my
burthen of ingratitude. A low affair is the Muse
business.
I will add no more to this lest you
should want to communicate with the artist; try another
sheet. I wonder how many I’ll keep wandering
to.
O I forgot. As for the title,
I think “Nursery Verses” the best.
Poetry is not the strong point of the text, and I
shrink from any title that might seem to claim that
quality; otherwise we might have “Nursery Muses”
or “New Songs of Innocence” (but that were
a blasphemy), or “Rimes of Innocence”:
the last not bad, or an idea “The
Jews’ Harp,” or now I have
it “The Penny Whistle.”
THE
PENNY WHISTLE
NURSERY
VERSES
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
ILLUSTRATED BY
And here we have an excellent frontispiece,
of a party playing on a P. W. to a little ring of
dancing children.
THE PENNY
WHISTLE
is the name for
me.
Fool! this is all wrong, here is the true name:
PENNY
WHISTLES
FOR SMALL WHISTLERS.
The second title is queried, it is
perhaps better, as simply PENNY WHISTLES.
Nor you, O Penny Whistler, grudge
That I your instrument debase:
By worse performers still we judge,
And give that fife a second
place!
Crossed penny whistles on the cover,
or else a sheaf of ’em.
SUGGESTIONS
IV. The procession the
child running behind it. The procession tailing
off through the gates of a cloudy city.
IX. Foreign Lands. This
will, I think, want two plates the child
climbing, his first glimpse over the garden wall, with
what he sees the tree shooting higher and
higher like the beanstalk, and the view widening.
The river slipping in. The road arriving in Fairyland.
X. Windy Nights. The
child in bed listening the horseman galloping.
XII. The child helplessly watching
his ship then he gets smaller, and the
doll joyfully comes alive the pair landing
on the island the ship’s deck with
the doll steering and the child firing the penny cannon.
Query two plates? The doll should never come properly
alive.
XV. Building of the ship storing
her Navigation Tom’s accident,
the other child paying no attention.
XXXI. The Wind. I sent you my notion
of already.
XXXVII. Foreign Children. The
foreign types dancing in a jing-a-ring, with the English
child pushing in the middle. The foreign children
looking at and showing each other marvels. The
English child at the leeside of a roast of beef.
The English child sitting thinking with his picture-books
all round him, and the jing-a-ring of the foreign
children in miniature dancing over the picture-books.
XXXIX. Dear artist, can you do me that?
XLII. The child being started
off the bed sailing, curtains and all,
upon the sea the child waking and finding
himself at home; the corner of toilette might be worked
in to look like the pier.
XLVII. The lighted part of the
room, to be carefully distinguished from my child’s
dark hunting grounds. A shaded lamp.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
Hôtel des Ãles d’Or, Hyères,
Var, March 2 .
MY DEAR MOTHER, It must
be at least a fortnight since we have had a scratch
of a pen from you; and if it had not been for Cummy’s
letter, I should have feared you were worse again:
as it is, I hope we shall hear from you to-day or
to-morrow at latest.
Health. Our news
is good: Fanny never got so bad as we feared,
and we hope now that this attack may pass off in threatenings.
I am greatly better, have gained flesh, strength,
spirits; eat well, walk a good deal, and do some work
without fatigue. I am off the sick list.
Lodging. We have
found a house up the hill, close to the town, an excellent
place though very, very little. If I can get the
landlord to agree to let us take it by the month just
now, and let our month’s rent count for the
year in case we take it on, you may expect to hear
we are again installed, and to receive a letter dated
thus:
La Solitude,
Hyères-les-Palmiers,
Var.
If the man won’t agree to that,
of course I must just give it up, as the house would
be dear enough anyway at 2000 f. However, I hope
we may get it, as it is healthy, cheerful, and close
to shops, and society, and civilisation. The
garden, which is above, is lovely, and will be cool
in summer. There are two rooms below with a kitchen,
and four rooms above, all told. Ever your
affectionate son, R. L. STEVENSON.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
“Cassandra” was a nickname
of the elder Mr. Stevenson for his daughter-in-law.
The scheme of a play to be founded on Great Expectations
was one of a hundred formed in these days and afterwards
given up.
Hôtel des Ãles
d’Or, but my address will be Chalet la Solitude,
Hyères-les-Palmiers,
Var, France, March 17, 1883.
DEAR SIR, Your undated
favour from Eastbourne came to hand in course of post,
and I now hasten to acknowledge its receipt. We
must ask you in future, for the convenience of our
business arrangements, to struggle with and tread
below your feet this most unsatisfactory and uncommercial
habit. Our Mr. Cassandra is better; our Mr. Wogg
expresses himself dissatisfied with our new place
of business; when left alone in the front shop, he
bawled like a parrot; it is supposed the offices are
haunted.
To turn to the matter of your letter,
your remarks on Great Expectations are very
good. We have both re-read it this winter, and
I, in a manner, twice. The object being a play;
the play, in its rough outline, I now see: and
it is extraordinary how much of Dickens had to be
discarded as unhuman, impossible, and ineffective:
all that really remains is the loan of a file (but
from a grown-up young man who knows what he was doing,
and to a convict who, although he does not know it
is his father the father knows it is his
son), and the fact of the convict-father’s return
and disclosure of himself to the son whom he has made
rich. Everything else has been thrown aside; and
the position has had to be explained by a prologue
which is pretty strong. I have great hopes of
this piece, which is very amiable and, in places, very
strong indeed: but it was curious how Dickens
had to be rolled away; he had made his story turn
on such improbabilities, such fantastic trifles, not
on a good human basis, such as I recognised. You
are right about the casts, they were a capital idea;
a good description of them at first, and then afterwards,
say second, for the lawyer to have illustrated points
out of the history of the originals, dusting the particular
bust that was all the development the thing
would bear. Dickens killed them. The only
really well executed scenes are the riverside
ones; the escape in particular is excellent; and I
may add, the capture of the two convicts at the beginning.
Miss Havisham is, probably, the worst thing in human
fiction. But Wemmick I like; and I like Trabb’s
boy; and Mr. Wopsle as Hamlet is splendid.
The weather here is greatly improved,
and I hope in three days to be in the chalet.
That is, if I get some money to float me there.
I hope you are all right again, and
will keep better. The month of March is past
its mid career; it must soon begin to turn toward the
lamb; here it has already begun to do so; and I hope
milder weather will pick you up. Wogg has eaten
a forpet of rice and milk, his beard is streaming,
his eyes wild. I am besieged by demands of work
from America.
The £50 has just arrived; many thanks;
I am now at ease. Ever your affectionate
son, pro Cassandra, Wogg and Co.,
R. L. S.
TO W. E. HENLEY
[Chalet la Solitude,
Hyères, April 1883.]
My head is singing with Otto;
for the first two weeks I wrote and revised and only
finished IV chapters: last week, I have just drafted
straight ahead, and I have just finished Chapter XI.
It will want a heap of oversight and much will not
stand, but the pace is good; about 28 Cornhill pp.
drafted in seven days, and almost all of it dialogue indeed
I may say all, for I have dismissed the rest very
summarily in the draft: one can always tickle
at that. At the same rate, the draft should be
finished in ten days more; and then I shall have the
pleasure of beginning again at the beginning.
Ah damned job! I have no idea whether or not
Otto will be good. It is all pitched pretty high
and stilted; almost like the Arabs, at that; but of
course there is love-making in Otto, and indeed a
good deal of it. I sometimes feel very weary;
but the thing travels and I like it when
I am at it.
Remember me kindly to all. Your ex-contributor,
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
His correspondent had at his request
been writing and despatching to him fair copies
of the various sets of verses for the Child’s
Garden (as the collection was ultimately called),
which he had been from time to time sending home.
Chalet la Solitude,
Hyères [April 1883].
MY DEAR FRIEND, I am one
of the lowest of the but that’s understood.
I received the copy, excellently written, with I think
only one slip from first to last. I have struck
out two, and added five or six; so they now number
forty-five; when they are fifty, they shall out on
the world. I have not written a letter for a
cruel time; I have been, and am, so busy, drafting
a long story (for me, I mean), about a hundred Cornhill
pages, or say about as long as the Donkey book:
Prince Otto it is called, and is, at the present
hour, a sore burthen but a hopeful. If I had
him all drafted, I should whistle and sing. But
no: then I’ll have to rewrite him; and
then there will be the publishers, alas! But some
time or other, I shall whistle and sing, I make no
doubt.
I am going to make a fortune, it has
not yet begun, for I am not yet clear of debt; but
as soon as I can, I begin upon the fortune. I
shall begin it with a halfpenny, and it shall end
with horses and yachts and all the fun of the fair.
This is the first real grey hair in my character:
rapacity has begun to show, the greed of the protuberant
guttler. Well, doubtless, when the hour strikes,
we must all guttle and protube. But it comes
hard on one who was always so willow-slender and as
careless as the daisies.
Truly I am in excellent spirits.
I have crushed through a financial crisis; Fanny is
much better; I am in excellent health, and work from
four to five hours a day from one to two
above my average, that is; and we all dwell together
and make fortunes in the loveliest house you ever
saw, with a garden like a fairy story, and a view like
a classical landscape.
Little? Well, it is not large.
And when you come to see us, you will probably have
to bed at the hotel, which is hard by. But it
is Eden, madam, Eden and Beulah and the Delectable
Mountains and Eldorado and the Hesperidean Isles and
Bimini.
We both look forward, my dear friend,
with the greatest eagerness to have you here.
It seems it is not to be this season: but I appoint
you with an appointment for next season. You
cannot see us else: remember that. Till
my health has grown solid like an oak-tree, till my
fortune begins really to spread its boughs like the
same monarch of the woods (and the acorn, ay
de mi! is not yet planted), I expect to be
a prisoner among the palms.
Yes, it is like old times to be writing
you from the Riviera, and after all that has come
and gone, who can predict anything? How fortune
tumbles men about! Yet I have not found that they
change their friends, thank God.
Both of our loves to your sister and
yourself. As for me, if I am here and happy,
I know to whom I owe it; I know who made my way for
me in life, if that were all, and I remain, with love,
your faithful friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO EDMUND GOSSE
“Gilder” in the following
is of course the late R. W. Gilder, for
many years the admirable editor
of the Century Magazine.
Chalet la Solitude,
Hyères [April 1883].
MY DEAR GOSSE, I am very
guilty; I should have written to you long ago; and
now, though it must be done, I am so stupid that I
can only boldly recapitulate. A phrase of three
members is the outside of my syntax.
First, I like the Rover better
than any of your other verse. I believe you are
right, and can make stories in verse. The last
two stanzas and one or two in the beginning but
the two last above all I thought excellent.
I suggest a pursuit of the vein. If you want a
good story to treat, get the Memoirs of the Chevalier
Johnstone, and do his passage of the Tay; it would
be excellent: the dinner in the field, the woman
he has to follow, the dragoons, the timid boatmen,
the brave lasses. It would go like a charm; look
at it, and you will say you owe me one.
Second, Gilder asking me for fiction,
I suddenly took a great resolve, and have packed off
to him my new work, The Silverado Squatters.
I do not for a moment suppose he will take it; but
pray say all the good words you can for it. I
should be awfully glad to get it taken. But if
it does not mean dibbs at once, I shall be ruined for
life. Pray write soon and beg Gilder your prettiest
for a poor gentleman in pecuniary sloughs.
Fourth, next time I am supposed to
be at death’s door write to me like a Christian,
and let not your correspondence attend on business. Yours
ever,
R. L. S.
P.S. I see I have
led you to conceive the Squatters are fiction.
They are not, alas!
TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON LETTER I
Chalet la Solitude,
May 5 .
MY DEAREST PEOPLE, I have
had a great piece of news. There has been offered
for Treasure Island how much do you
suppose? I believe it would be an excellent jest
to keep the answer till my next letter. For two
cents I would do so. Shall I? Anyway, I’ll
turn the page first. No well A
hundred pounds, all alive, O! A hundred jingling,
tingling, golden, minted quid. Is not this wonderful?
Add that I have now finished, in draft, the fifteenth
chapter of my novel, and have only five before me,
and you will see what cause of gratitude I have.
The weather, to look at the per
contra sheet, continues vomitable; and Fanny
is quite out of sorts. But, really, with such
cause of gladness, I have not the heart to be dispirited
by anything. My child’s verse book is finished,
dedication and all, and out of my hands you
may tell Cummy; Silverado is done, too, and
cast upon the waters; and this novel so near completion,
it does look as if I should support myself without
trouble in the future. If I have only health,
I can, I thank God. It is dreadful to be a great,
big man, and not be able to buy bread.
O that this may last!
I have to-day paid my rent for the half year, till
the middle of
September, and got my lease: why they have been
so long, I know not.
I wish you all sorts of good things.
When is our marriage day? Your loving and
ecstatic son,
TREESURE EILAAN.
It has been for me a Treasure Island verily.
TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON LETTER II
La Solitude, Hyères,
May 8, 1883.
MY DEAR PEOPLE, I was disgusted
to hear my father was not so well. I have a most
troubled existence of work and business. But the
work goes well, which is the great affair. I
meant to have written a most delightful letter; too
tired, however, and must stop. Perhaps I’ll
find time to add to it ere post.
I have returned refreshed from eating,
but have little time, as Lloyd will go soon with the
letters on his way to his tutor, Louis Robert (!!!!),
with whom he learns Latin in French, and French, I
suppose, in Latin, which seems to me a capital education.
He, Lloyd, is a great bicycler already, and has been
long distances; he is most new-fangled over his instrument,
and does not willingly converse on other subjects.
Our lovely garden is a prey to snails;
I have gathered about a bushel, which, not having
the heart to slay, I steal forth withal and deposit
near my neighbour’s garden wall. As a case
of casuistry, this presents many points of interest.
I loathe the snails, but from loathing to actual butchery,
trucidation of multitudes, there is still a step that
I hesitate to take. What, then, to do with them?
My neighbour’s vineyard, pardy! It is a
rich, villa, pleasure-garden of course; if it were
a peasant’s patch, the snails, I suppose, would
have to perish.
The weather these last three days
has been much better, though it is still windy and
unkind. I keep splendidly well, and am cruelly
busy, with mighty little time even for a walk.
And to write at all, under such pressure, must be
held to lean to virtue’s side.
My financial prospects are shining.
O if the health will hold, I should easily support
myself. Your ever affectionate son,
R. L. S.
TO EDMUND GOSSE LETTER I
La Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers,
Var [May 20, 1883].
MY DEAR GOSSE, I enclose
the receipt and the corrections. As for your
letter and Gilder’s, I must take an hour or so
to think; the matter much importing to
me. The £40 was a heavenly thing.
I send the MS. by Henley, because
he acts for me in all matters, and had the thing,
like all my other books, in his detention. He
is my unpaid agent an admirable arrangement
for me, and one that has rather more than doubled
my income on the spot.
If I have been long silent, think
how long you were so and blush, sir, blush.
I was rendered unwell by the arrival
of your cheque, and, like Pepys, “my hand still
shakes to write of it.” To this grateful
emotion, and not to D.T., please attribute the raggedness
of my hand.
This year I should be able to live
and keep my family on my own earnings, and that in
spite of eight months and more of perfect idleness
at the end of last and beginning of this. It is
a sweet thought.
This spot, our garden and our view,
are sub-celestial. I sing daily with my Bunyan,
that great bard,
“I dwell already the next door to
Heaven!”
If you could see my roses, and my
aloes, and my fig-marigolds, and my olives, and my
view over a plain, and my view of certain mountains
as graceful as Apollo, as severe as Zeus, you would
not think the phrase exaggerated.
It is blowing to-day a hot
mistral, which is the devil or a near connection of
his.
This to catch the post. Yours affectionately,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO EDMUND GOSSE LETTER II
La Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers,
Var, France, May 21, 1883.
MY DEAR GOSSE, The night
giveth advice, generally bad advice; but I have taken
it. And I have written direct to Gilder to tell
him to keep the book back and go on with it in
November at his leisure. I do not know if this
will come in time; if it doesn’t, of course things
will go on in the way proposed. The £40, or,
as I prefer to put it, the 1000 francs, has been such
a piercing sun-ray as my whole grey life is gilt withal.
On the back of it I can endure. If these good
days of Longman and the Century only last, it will
be a very green world, this that we dwell in and that
philosophers miscall. I have no taste for that
philosophy; give me large sums paid on the receipt
of the MS. and copyright reserved, and what do I care
about the non-bëent? Only I know it can’t
last. The devil always has an imp or two in every
house, and my imps are getting lively. The good
lady, the dear, kind lady, the sweet, excellent lady,
Nemesis, whom alone I adore, has fixed her wooden eye
upon me. I fall prone; spare me, Mother Nemesis!
But catch her!
I must now go to bed; for I have had
a whoreson influenza cold, and have to lie down all
day, and get up only to meals and the delights, June
delights, of business correspondence.
You said nothing about my subject
for a poem. Don’t you like it? My own
fishy eye has been fixed on it for prose, but I believe
it could be thrown out finely in verse, and hence
I resign and pass the hand. Twig the compliment? Yours
affectionately,
R. L. S.
TO W. E. HENLEY LETTER I
“Tushery” had been a name
in use between Stevenson and Mr. Henley for romances
of the Ivanhoe type. He now applies it
to his own tale of the Wars of the Roses, The
Black Arrow, written for Mr. Henderson’s
Young Folks, of which the office was in Red Lion
Court.
[Hyères, May 1883.]
... The influenza has busted
me a good deal; I have no spring, and am headachy.
So, as my good Red Lion Courier begged me for another
Butcher’s Boy I turned me to what
thinkest ’où? to Tushery, by
the mass! Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery.
And every tusher tushes me so free, that may I be
tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush. The
Black Arrow: A Tale of Tunstall Forest is
his name: tush! a poor thing!
Will Treasure Island proofs be coming soon,
think you?
I will now make a confession.
It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness
that begot John Silver in Treasure Island.
Of course, he is not in any other quality or feature
the least like you; but the idea of the maimed man,
ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken
from you.
Otto is, as you say, not a thing to
extend my public on. It is queer and a little,
little bit free; and some of the parties are immoral;
and the whole thing is not a romance, nor yet a comedy;
nor yet a romantic comedy; but a kind of preparation
of some of the elements of all three in a glass jar.
I think it is not without merit, but I am not always
on the level of my argument, and some parts are false,
and much of the rest is thin; it is more a triumph
for myself than anything else; for I see, beyond it,
better stuff. I have nine chapters ready, or almost
ready, for press. My feeling would be to get
it placed anywhere for as much as could be got for
it, and rather in the shadow, till one saw the look
of it in print. Ever yours,
PRETTY SICK.
TO W. E. HENLEY LETTER II
La Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers,
May 1883.
MY DEAR LAD, The books
came some time since, but I have not had the pluck
to answer: a shower of small troubles having fallen
in, or troubles that may be very large.
I have had to incur a huge vague debt
for cleaning sewers; our house was (of course) riddled
with hidden cesspools, but that was infallible.
I have the fever, and feel the duty to work very heavy
on me at times; yet go it must. I have had to
leave Fontainebleau, when three hours would
finish it, and go full-tilt at tushery for a while.
But it will come soon.
I think I can give you a good article
on Hokusai; but that is for afterwards; Fontainebleau
is first in hand.
By the way, my view is to give the
Penny Whistles to Crane or Greenaway.
But Crane, I think, is likeliest; he is a fellow who,
at least, always does his best.
Shall I ever have money enough to write a play?
O dire necessity!
A word in your ear: I don’t
like trying to support myself. I hate the strain
and the anxiety; and when unexpected expenses are foisted
on me, I feel the world is playing with false dice. Now
I must Tush, adieu.
AN ACHING, FEVERED,
PENNY-JOURNALIST.
A lytle Jape of TUSHERIE.
By A. Tusher.
The pleasant river gushes
Among the meadows
green;
At home the author tushes;
For him it flows
unseen.
The Birds among the Bushes
May wanton on
the spray;
But vain for him who tushes
The brightness
of the day!
The frog among the rushes
Sits singing in
the blue.
By’r la’kin! but these tushes
Are wearisome
to do!
The task entirely crushes
The spirit of
the bard:
God pity him who tushes
His task is very
hard.
The filthy gutter slushes,
The clouds are
full of rain,
But doomed is he who tushes
To tush and tush
again.
At morn with his hair-br_u_shes,
Still “tush”
he says, and weeps;
At night again he tushes,
And tushes till
he sleeps.
And when at length he pushes
Beyond the river
dark
’Las, to the man who tushes,
“Tush,”
shall be God’s remark!
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
[Chalet la Solitude,
Hyères, May 1883.]
COLVIN, The attempt to
correspond with you is vain. Well, well, then
so be it. I will from time to time write you
an insulting letter, brief but monstrous harsh.
I regard you in the light of a genteel impostor.
Your name figures in the papers but never to a piece
of letter-paper: well, well.
News. I am well: Fanny been
ill but better: Otto about three-quarters
done; Silverado proofs a terrible job it
is a most unequal work new wine in old
bottles large rats, small bottles: as
usual, penniless O but penniless:
still, with four articles in hand (say £35) and the
£100 for Silverado imminent, not hopeless.
Why am I so penniless, ever, ever
penniless, ever, ever penny-penny-penniless and dry?
The birds upon the thorn,
The poppies in the corn,
They surely are more fortunate or prudenter
than I!
In Arabia, everybody is called the
Father of something or other for convenience or insult’s
sake. Thus you are “the Father of Prints,”
or of “Bummkopferies,” or “Father
of Unanswered Correspondence.” They would
instantly dub Henley “the Father of Wooden Legs”;
me they would denominate the “Father of Bones,”
and Matthew Arnold “the Father of Eyeglasses.”
I have accepted most of the excisions.
Proposed titles:
The Innocent Muse.
A Child’s Garden of Rhymes.
Songs of the Playroom.
Nursery Songs.
I like the first?
R. L. S.
TO W. E. HENLEY LETTER I
La Solitude, Hyères,
May or June 1883.
DEAR LAD, Snatches in return
for yours; for this little once, I’m well to
windward of you.
Seventeen chapters of Otto
are now drafted, and finding I was working through
my voice and getting screechy, I have turned back again
to rewrite the earlier part. It has, I do believe,
some merit: of what order, of course, I am the
last to know; and, triumph of triumphs, my wife my
wife who hates and loathes and slates my women admits
a great part of my Countess to be on the spot.
Yes, I could borrow, but it is the
joy of being before the public, for once. Really,
£100 is a sight more than Treasure Island is
worth.
The reason of my dèche?
Well, if you begin one house, have to desert it, begin
another, and are eight months without doing any work,
you will be in a dèche too. I am not
in a dèche, however; distingue I
would fain distinguish; I am rather a swell, but not
solvent. At a touch the edifice, ædificium,
might collapse. If my creditors began to babble
around me, I would sink with a slow strain of music
into the crimson west. The difficulty in my elegant
villa is to find oil, oleum, for the dam axles.
But I’ve paid my rent until September; and beyond
the chemist, the grocer, the baker, the doctor, the
gardener, Lloyd’s teacher, and the great chief
creditor Death, I can snap my fingers at all men.
Why will people spring bills on you? I try to
make ’em charge me at the moment; they won’t,
the money goes, the debt remains. The Required
Play is in the Merry Men.
Q. E. F.
I thus render honour to your flair;
it came on me of a clap; I do not see it yet beyond
a kind of sunset glory. But it’s there:
passion, romance, the picturesque, involved:
startling, simple, horrid: a sea-pink in sea-froth!
S’agit de la désenterrer. “Help!”
cries a buried masterpiece.
Once I see my way to the year’s
end, clear, I turn to plays; till then I grind at
letters; finish Otto; write, say, a couple of
my Traveller’s Tales; and then, if all
my ships come home, I will attack the drama in earnest.
I cannot mix the skeins. Thus, though I’m
morally sure there is a play in Otto, I dare
not look for it: I shoot straight at the story.
As a story, a comedy, I think Otto
very well constructed; the echoes are very good, all
the sentiments change round, and the points of view
are continually, and, I think (if you please), happily
contrasted. None of it is exactly funny, but
some of it is smiling.
R. L. S.
TO W. E. HENLEY LETTER II
The verses alluded to are some of
those afterwards collected in
Underwoods.
[Chalet la Solitude,
Hyères, May or June 1883.]
DEAR HENLEY, You may be
surprised to hear that I am now a great writer of
verses; that is, however, so. I have the mania
now like my betters, and faith, if I live till I am
forty, I shall have a book of rhymes like Pollock,
Gosse, or whom you please. Really, I have begun
to learn some of the rudiments of that trade, and
have written three or four pretty enough pieces of
octosyllabic nonsense, semi-serious, semi-smiling.
A kind of prose Herrick, divested of the gift of verse,
and you behold the Bard. But I like it.
R. L. S.
TO JULES SIMONEAU
This friend was the keeper of the inn
and restaurant where Stevenson had boarded at Monterey
in the autumn of 1879. In writing French, as
will be seen, Stevenson had always more grip of
idiom than of grammar.
[La Solitude, Hyères,
May or June 1883.]
MON CHER ET BON SIMONEAU, J’ai
commencé plusieurs fois de vous écrire;
et voilà -t-il pas qu’un empêchement
quelconque est arrivé toujours.
La lettre ne part pas; et
je vous laisse toujours dans
lé droit de soupçonner mon coeur.
Mon bon ami, ne pensez pas
que je vous aï oublié où
que je vous oublierai jamais.
Il n’en est de rien.
Vôtre bon souvenir me tient de bien
près, et je lé garderai jusqu’Ã
la mort.
J’ai failli mourir
de bien près; maïs me voici bien
rétabli, bien que toujours un
peu chétif et malingre. J’habite,
comme vous voyez, la France. Je
travaille beaucoup, et je commence
à ne pas être lé dernier; déjÃ
on me dispute ce que j’écris,
et je n’ai pas à me plaindre
de ce que l’on appelle
les honoraires. Me voici alors
très affairé, très heureux dans mon ménage,
gâté par ma femme, habitant la plus petite maisonette
dans lé plus beau jardin du
monde, et voyant de mes fen êtrès
la mer, les isles d’Hyères, et les belles collines,
montagnes et forts de Toulon.
Et vous, mon très
cher ami? Comment celà va-t-il?
Comment vous portez-vous? Comment
va lé commerce? Comment aimez vous
lé pays? et l’enfant? et la femme?
Et enfin toutes les questions possibles.
Ãcrivez-moi donc bien vite, cher
Simoneau. Et quant à moi, je vous
promets que vous entendrez bien
vîte parler de moi; je vous
récrirai sous peu, et je
vous enverrai un de mes livres.
Ceci n’est qu’un serrement
de main, from the bottom of my heart,
dear and kind old man. Your friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO W. E. HENLEY
The “new dictionary”
means, of course, the first instalments of the
great Oxford Dictionary of the English
Language, edited by Dr. J. A.
H. Murray.
La Solitude, Hyères [June 1883].
DEAR LAD, I was delighted
to hear the good news about .
Bravo, he goes uphill fast. Let him beware of
vanity, and he will go higher; let him be still discontented,
and let him (if it might be) see the merits and not
the faults of his rivals, and he may swarm at last
to the top-gallant. There is no other way.
Admiration is the only road to excellence; and the
critical spirit kills, but envy and injustice are
putrefaction on its feet.
Thus far the moralist. The eager
author now begs to know whether you may have got the
other Whistles, and whether a fresh proof is to be
taken; also whether in that case the dedication should
not be printed therewith; Bulk Delights
Publishers (original aphorism; to be said sixteen
times in succession as a test of sobriety).
Your wild and ravening commands were
received; but cannot be obeyed. And anyway, I
do assure you I am getting better every day; and if
the weather would but turn, I should soon be observed
to walk in hornpipes. Truly I am on the mend.
I am still very careful. I have the new dictionary;
a joy, a thing of beauty, and bulk.
I shall be raked i’ the mools before it’s
finished; that is the only pity; but meanwhile I sing.
I beg to inform you that I, Robert
Louis Stevenson, author of Brashiana and other
works, am merely beginning to commence to prepare
to make a first start at trying to understand my profession.
O the height and depth of novelty and worth in any
art! and O that I am privileged to swim and shoulder
through such oceans! Could one get out of sight
of land all in the blue? Alas not,
being anchored here in flesh, and the bonds of logic
being still about us.
But what a great space and a great
air there is in these small shallows where alone we
venture! and how new each sight, squall, calm, or
sunrise! An art is a fine fortune, a palace in
a park, a band of music, health, and physical beauty;
all but love to any worthy practiser.
I sleep upon my art for a pillow; I waken in my art;
I am unready for death, because I hate to leave it.
I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor
shall, unless I lost her; but while I can conceive
my being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without
my art. I am not but in my art; it is
me; I am the body of it merely.
And yet I produce nothing, am the
author of Brashiana and other works: tiddy-iddity as
if the works one wrote were anything but ’prentice’s
experiments. Dear reader, I deceive you with husks,
the real works and all the pleasure are still mine
and incommunicable. After this break in my work,
beginning to return to it, as from light sleep, I wax
exclamatory, as you see.
Sursum Corda:
Heave ahead:
Here’s luck.
Art and Blue Heaven,
April and God’s Larks.
Green reeds and the sky-scattering river.
A stately music.
Enter God!
R. L. S.
Ay, but you know, until a man can
write that “Enter God,” he has made no
art! None! Come, let us take counsel together
and make some!
TO TREVOR HADDON
During the height of the Provençal
summer, for July and part of August, Stevenson
went with his wife to the Baths of Royat in Auvergne
(travelling necessarily by way of Clermont-Ferrand).
His parents joined them at Royat for part of their
visit. This and possibly the next following
letters were written during the trip. The news
here referred to was that his correspondent had won
a scholarship at the Slade School.
La Solitude, Hyères.
But just now writing from
Clermont-Ferrand,
July 5, 1883.
DEAR MR. HADDON, Your note
with its piece of excellent news duly reached me.
I am delighted to hear of your success: selfishly
so; for it is pleasant to see that one whom I suppose
I may call an admirer is no fool. I wish you
more and more prosperity, and to be devoted to your
art. An art is the very gist of life; it grows
with you; you will never weary of an art at which
you fervently and superstitiously labour. Superstitiously:
I mean, think more of it than it deserves; be blind
to its faults, as with a wife or father; forget the
world in a technical trifle. The world is very
serious; art is the cure of that, and must be taken
very lightly; but to take art lightly, you must first
be stupidly owlishly in earnest over it. When
I made Casimir say “Tiens” at the
end, I made a blunder. I thought it was what
Casimir would have said and I put it down. As
your question shows, it should have been left out.
It was a “patch” of realism, and an anti-climax.
Beware of realism; it is the devil; ’tis one
of the means of art, and now they make it the end!
And such is the farce of the age in which a man lives,
that we all, even those of us who most detest it,
sin by realism.
Notes for the student of any art.
1. Keep an intelligent eye upon
all the others. It is only by doing so
that you come to see what Art is: Art is the end
common to them all, it is none of the points by which
they differ.
2. In this age beware of realism.
3. In your own art, bow your
head over technique. Think of technique when
you rise and when you go to bed. Forget purposes
in the meanwhile; get to love technical processes;
to glory in technical successes; get to see the world
entirely through technical spectacles, to see it entirely
in terms of what you can do. Then when you have
anything to say, the language will be apt and copious.
My health is better.
I have no photograph just now; but
when I get one you shall have a copy. It will
not be like me; sometimes I turn out a capital, fresh
bank clerk; once I came out the image of Runjeet Singh;
again the treacherous sun has fixed me in the character
of a travelling evangelist. It’s quite
a lottery; but whatever the next venture proves to
be, soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, you shall have
a proof. Reciprocate. The truth is I have
no appearance; a certain air of disreputability is
the one constant character that my face presents:
the rest change like water. But still I am lean,
and still disreputable.
Cling to your youth. It is an
artistic stock in trade. Don’t give in
that you are ageing, and you won’t age.
I have exactly the same faults and qualities still;
only a little duller, greedier and better tempered;
a little less tolerant of pain and more tolerant of
tedium. The last is a great thing for life but query? a
bad endowment for art?
Another note for the art student.
4. See the good in other people’s
work; it will never be yours. See the bad in
your own, and don’t cry about it; it will be
there always. Try to use your faults; at any
rate use your knowledge of them, and don’t run
your head against stone walls. Art is not like
theology; nothing is forced. You have not to
represent the world. You have to represent only
what you can represent with pleasure and effect, and
the only way to find out what that is is by technical
exercise. Yours sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO JULES SIMONEAU
[Hyères or Royat,
Summer 1883.]
MY DEAR FRIEND SIMONEAU, It
would be difficult to tell how glad I was to get your
letter with your good news and kind remembrances, it
did my heart good to the bottom. I shall never
forget the good time we had together, the many long
talks, the games of chess, the flute on an occasion,
and the excellent food. Now I am in clover, only
my health a mere ruined temple; the ivy grows along
its shattered front, otherwise, I have no wish that
is not fulfilled: a beautiful large garden, a
fine view of plain, sea and mountain; a wife that
suits me down to the ground, and a barrel of good
Beaujolais. To this I must add that my books
grow steadily more popular, and if I could only avoid
illness I should be well to do for money, as it is,
I keep pretty near the wind. Have I other means?
I doubt it. I saw François here; and it
was in some respects sad to see him, pining in the
ungenial life and not, I think, very well pleased
with his relatives. The young men, it is true,
adored him, but his niece tried to pump me about what
money I had, with an effrontery I was glad to disappoint.
How he spoke of you I need not tell you. He is
your true friend, dear Simoneau, and your ears should
have tingled when we met, for we talked of little
but yourself.
The papers you speak about are past
dates but I will send you a paper from time to time,
as soon as I am able to go out again. We were
both well pleased to hear of your marriage, and both
Mrs. Stevenson and myself beg to be remembered with
the kindest wishes to Mrs. Simoneau. I am glad
you have done this. All races are better away
from their own country; but I think you French improve
the most of all. At home, I like you well enough,
but give me the Frenchman abroad! Had you stayed
at home, you would probably have acted otherwise.
Consult your consciousness, and you will think as
I do. How about a law condemning the people of
every country to be educated in another, to change
sons in short? Should we not gain all around?
Would not the Englishman unlearn hypocrisy? Would
not the Frenchman learn to put some heart into his
friendships? I name what strikes me as the two
most obvious defects of the two nations. The
French might also learn to be a little less rapacious
to women and the English to be a little more honest.
Indeed their merits and defects make a balance.
There is my table, not at all the
usual one, but yes, I think you will agree with it.
And by travel, each race can cure much of its defects
and acquire much of the others’ virtues.
Let us say that you and I are complete! You are
anyway: I would not change a hair of you.
The Americans hold the English faults: dishonest
and hypocrites, perhaps not so strongly but still
to the exclusion of others. It is strange that
such mean defects should be so hard to eradicate, after
a century of separation, and so great an admixture
of other blood.
Your stay in Mexico must have been
interesting indeed: and it is natural you should
be so keen against the Church on this side, we have
a painful exhibition of the other side: the libre-penseur
a mere priest without the sacraments, the narrowest
tyranny of intolerance popular, and in fact a repetition
in the XIXth century of theological ill-feeling minus
the sermons. We have speeches instead. I
met the other day one of the new lay schoolmasters
of France; a pleasant cultivated man, and for some
time listened to his ravings. “In short,”
I said, “you are like Louis Quatorze,
you wish to drive out of France all who do not agree
with you.” I thought he would protest;
not he! “Oui, Monsieur,” was
his answer. And that is the cause of liberty
and free thought! But the race of man was born
tyrannical; doubtless Adam beat Eve, and when all the
rest are dead the last man will be found beating the
last dog. In the land of Padre d. R. you
see the old tyranny still active on its crutches;
in this land, I begin to see the new, a fat fellow,
out of leading-strings and already killing flies.
This letter drones along unprofitably
enough. Let me put a period to my divagations.
Write again soon, and let me hear good news of you,
and I will try to be more quick of answer.
And with the best wishes to yourself
and all your family, believe me, your sincere friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM
The persons mentioned below in the third
paragraph are cousins of the writer and playmates
of his childhood; two of them, christened Lewis like
himself after their Balfour grandfather, had been nicknamed
after their birthplaces “Delhi” and
“Cramond” to avoid confusion. Mount
Chessie is a beautiful place near Lasswade: “Cummy”
has described his delight when she cut whistles
for him there out of a plane-tree.
[Hyères or Royat,
Summer 1883.]
MY DEAR CUMMY, Yes, I own
I am a real bad correspondent, and am as bad as can
be in most directions.
I have been adding some more poems
to your book. I wish they would look sharp about
it; but, you see, they are trying to find a good artist
to make the illustrations, without which no child
would give a kick for it. It will be quite a
fine work, I hope. The dedication is a poem too,
and has been quite a long while written, but I do
not mean you to see it till you get the book; keep
the jelly for the last, you know, as you would often
recommend in former days, so now you can take your
own medicine.
I am very sorry to hear you have been
so poorly; I have been very well; it used to be quite
the other way, used it not? Do you remember making
the whistle at Mount Chessie? I do not think it
was my knife; I believe it was yours; but rhyme
is a very great monarch, and goes before honesty,
in these affairs at least. Do you remember, at
Warriston, one autumn Sunday, when the beech nuts
were on the ground, seeing heaven open? I would
like to make a rhyme of that, but cannot.
Is it not strange to think of all
the changes: Bob, Cramond, Delhi, Minnie, and
Henrietta, all married, and fathers and mothers, and
your humble servant just the one point better off?
And such a little while ago all children together!
The time goes swift and wonderfully even; and if we
are no worse than we are, we should be grateful to
the power that guides us. For more than a generation
I have now been to the fore in this rough world, and
been most tenderly helped, and done cruelly wrong,
and yet escaped; and here I am still, the worse for
wear, but with some fight in me still, and not unthankful no,
surely not unthankful, or I were then the worst of
human things!
My little dog is a very much better
child in every way, both more loving and more amiable;
but he is not fond of strangers, and is, like most
of his kind, a great, specious humbug.
Fanny has been ill, but is much better
again; she now goes donkey rides with an old woman,
who compliments her on her French. That old woman seventy
odd is in a parlous spiritual state.
Pretty soon, in the new sixpenny illustrated
magazine, Wogg’s picture is to appear:
this is a great honour! And the poor soul, whose
vanity would just explode if he could understand it,
will never be a bit the wiser! With much
love, in which Fanny joins, believe me, your affectionate
boy,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO EDMUND GOSSE
The reference is to Mr. Gosse’s
volume called Seventeenth Century
Studies.
[Hyères or Royat,
Summer 1883.]
MY DEAR GOSSE, I have now
leisurely read your volume; pretty soon, by the way,
you will receive one of mine.
It is a pleasant, instructive, and
scholarly volume. The three best being, quite
out of sight Crashaw, Otway, and Etherege.
They are excellent; I hesitate between them; but perhaps
Crashaw is the most brilliant.
Your Webster is not my Webster; nor
your Herrick my Herrick. On these matters we
must fire a gun to leeward, show our colours, and go
by. Argument is impossible. They are two
of my favourite authors: Herrick above all:
I suppose they are two of yours. Well, Janus-like,
they do behold us two with diverse countenances, few
features are common to these different avatars;
and we can but agree to differ, but still with gratitude
to our entertainers, like two guests at the same dinner,
one of whom takes clear and one white soup. By
my way of thinking, neither of us need be wrong.
The other papers are all interesting,
adequate, clear, and with a pleasant spice of the
romantic. It is a book you may be well pleased
to have so finished, and will do you much good.
The Crashaw is capital: capital; I like the taste
of it. Preface clean and dignified. The
handling throughout workmanlike, with some four or
five touches of preciosity, which I regret.
With my thanks for information, entertainment,
and a pleasurable envy here and there. Yours
affectionately,
R. L. S.
TO MISS FERRIER
Soon after he was settled again at Hyères,
Stevenson had a great shock in the death of one
of the oldest and most intimate of his friends
of Edinburgh days, Mr. James Walter Ferrier (see the
essay Old Mortality in Memories and Portraits).
It is in accordance with the expressed wish of
this gentleman’s surviving sister that publicity
is given to the following letters:
La Solitude, Hyères
[Sep].
MY DEAR MISS FERRIER, They
say Walter is gone. You, who know how I have
neglected him, will conceive my remorse. I had
another letter written; when I heard he was worse,
I promised myself to wake up for the last time.
Alas, too late!
My dear Walter, set apart that terrible
disease, was, in his right mind, the best and gentlest
gentleman. God knows he would never intentionally
hurt a soul.
Well, he is done with his troubles
and out of his long sickness, and I dare say is glad
to be at peace and out of the body, which in him seemed
the enemy of the fine and kind spirit. He is the
first friend I have ever lost, and I find it difficult
to say anything and fear to intrude upon your grief.
But I had to try to tell you how much I shared it.
Could you get any one to tell me particulars?
Do not write yourself of course I do not
mean that; but some one else.
R. L. S.
TO W. E. HENLEY
La Solitude, Hyères,
September 19, 1883.
DEAR BOY, Our letters vigorously
cross: you will ere this have received a note
to Coggie: God knows what was in it.
It is strange, a little before the
first word you sent me so late kindly
late, I know and feel I was thinking in
my bed, when I knew you I had six friends Bob
I had by nature; then came the good James Walter with
all his failings the gentleman of
the lot, alas to sink so low, alas to do so little,
but now, thank God, in his quiet rest; next I found
Baxter well do I remember telling Walter
I had unearthed “a W.S. that I thought would
do” it was in the Academy Lane, and
he questioned me as to the Signet’s qualifications;
fourth came Simpson; somewhere about the same time,
I began to get intimate with Jenkin; last came Colvin.
Then, one black winter afternoon, long Leslie Stephen,
in his velvet jacket, met me in the Spec. by appointment,
took me over to the infirmary, and in the crackling,
blighting gas-light showed me that old head whose
excellent representation I see before me in the photograph.
Now when a man has six friends, to introduce a seventh
is usually hopeless. Yet when you were presented,
you took to them and they to you upon the nail.
You must have been a fine fellow; but what a singular
fortune I must have had in my six friends that you
should take to all. I don’t know if it is
good Latin, most probably not: but this is enscrolled
before my eyes for Walter: Tandem e nubibus
in apricum properat. Rest, I suppose, I know,
was all that remained; but O to look back, to remember
all the mirth, all the kindness, all the humorous
limitations and loved defects of that character; to
think that he was young with me, sharing that weather-beaten,
Fergussonian youth, looking forward through the clouds
to the sunburst; and now clean gone from my path,
silent well, well. This has been a
strange awakening. Last night, when I was alone
in the house, with the window open on the lovely still
night, I could have sworn he was in the room with me;
I could show you the spot; and, what was very curious,
I heard his rich laughter, a thing I had not called
to mind for I know not how long.
I see his coral waistcoat studs that
he wore the first time he dined in my house; I see
his attitude, leaning back a little, already with
something of a portly air, and laughing internally.
How I admired him! And now in the West Kirk.
I am trying to write out this haunting
bodily sense of absence; besides, what else should
I write of?
Yes, looking back, I think of him
as one who was good, though sometimes clouded.
He was the only gentle one of all my friends, save
perhaps the other Walter. And he was certainly
the only modest man among the lot. He never gave
himself away; he kept back his secret; there was always
a gentle problem behind all. Dear, dear, what
a wreck; and yet how pleasant is the retrospect!
God doeth all things well, though by what strange,
solemn, and murderous contrivances!
It is strange: he was the only
man I ever loved who did not habitually interrupt.
The fact draws my own portrait. And it is one
of the many reasons why I count myself honoured by
his friendship. A man like you had to
like me; you could not help yourself; but Ferrier was
above me, we were not equals; his true self humoured
and smiled paternally upon my failings, even as I
humoured and sorrowed over his.
Well, first his mother, then himself,
they are gone: “in their resting graves.”
When I come to think of it, I do not
know what I said to his sister, and I fear to try
again. Could you send her this? There is
too much both about yourself and me in it; but that,
if you do not mind, is but a mark of sincerity.
It would let her know how entirely, in the mind of
(I suppose) his oldest friend, the good, true Ferrier
obliterates the memory of the other, who was only
his “lunatic brother.”
Judge of this for me, and do as you
please; anyway, I will try to write to her again;
my last was some kind of scrawl that I could not see
for crying. This came upon me, remember, with
terrible suddenness; I was surprised by this death;
and it is fifteen or sixteen years since first I saw
the handsome face in the Spec. I made sure, besides,
to have died first. Love to you, your wife, and
her sisters. Ever yours, dear boy,
R. L. S.
I never knew any man so superior to
himself as poor James Walter. The best of him
only came as a vision, like Corsica from the Corniche.
He never gave his measure either morally or intellectually.
The curse was on him. Even his friends did not
know him but by fits. I have passed hours with
him when he was so wise, good, and sweet, that I never
knew the like of it in any other. And for a beautiful
good humour he had no match. I remember breaking
in upon him once with a whole red-hot story (in my
worst manner), pouring words upon him by the hour about
some truck not worth an egg that had befallen me;
and suddenly, some half hour after, finding that the
sweet fellow had some concern of his own of infinitely
greater import, that he was patiently and smilingly
waiting to consult me on. It sounds nothing;
but the courtesy and the unselfishness were perfect.
It makes me rage to think how few knew him, and how
many had the chance to sneer at their better.
Well, he was not wasted, that we know;
though if anything looked liker irony than this fitting
of a man out with these rich qualities and faculties
to be wrecked and aborted from the very stocks, I do
not know the name of it. Yet we see that he has
left an influence; the memory of his patient courtesy
has often checked me in rudeness; has it not you?
You can form no idea of how handsome
Walter was. At twenty he was splendid to see;
then, too, he had the sense of power in him, and great
hopes; he looked forward, ever jesting of course, but
he looked to see himself where he had the right to
expect. He believed in himself profoundly; but
he never disbelieved in others. To the
roughest Highland student he always had his fine,
kind, open dignity of manner; and a good word behind
his back.
The last time that I saw him before
leaving for America it was a sad blow to
both of us. When he heard I was leaving, and that
might be the last time we might meet it
almost was so he was terribly upset, and
came round at once. We sat late, in Baxter’s
empty house, where I was sleeping. My dear friend
Walter Ferrier: O if I had only written to him
more! if only one of us in these last days had been
well! But I ever cherished the honour of his
friendship, and now when he is gone, I know what I
have lost still better. We live on, meaning to
meet; but when the hope is gone, the pang comes.
R. L. S.
TO EDMUND GOSSE
La Solitude, Hyères,
26th September 1883.
MY DEAR GOSSE, It appears
a bolt from Transatlantica is necessary to produce
four lines from you. It is not flattering; but
as I was always a bad correspondent, ’tis a
vice to which I am lenient. I give you to know,
however, that I have already twice (this makes three
times) sent you what I please to call a letter, and
received from you in return a subterfuge or
nothing....
My present purpose, however, which
must not be postponed, is to ask you to telegraph
to the Americans.
After a summer of good health of a
very radiant order, toothache and the death of a very
old friend, which came upon me like a thunderclap,
have rather shelved my powers. I stare upon the
paper, not write. I wish I could write like your
Sculptors; yet I am well aware that I should not try
in that direction. A certain warmth (tepid enough)
and a certain dash of the picturesque are my poor
essential qualities; and if I went fooling after the
too classical, I might lose even these. But I
envied you that page.
I am, of course, deep in schemes;
I was so ever. Execution alone somewhat halts.
How much do you make per annum, I wonder? This
year, for the first time, I shall pass £300; I may
even get halfway to the next milestone. This
seems but a faint remuneration; and the devil of it
is, that I manage, with sickness, and moves, and education,
and the like, to keep steadily in front of my income.
However, I console myself with this, that if I were
anything else under God’s Heaven, and had the
same crank health, I should make an even zero.
If I had, with my present knowledge, twelve months
of my old health, I would, could, and should do something
neat. As it is, I have to tinker at my things
in little sittings; and the rent, or the butcher,
or something, is always calling me off to rattle up
a pot-boiler. And then comes a back-set of my
health, and I have to twiddle my fingers and play patience.
Well, I do not complain, but I do
envy strong health where it is squandered. Treasure
your strength, and may you never learn by experience
the profound ennui and irritation of the shelved
artist. For then, what is life? All that
one has done to make one’s life effective then
doubles the itch of inefficiency.
I trust also you may be long without
finding out the devil that there is in a bereavement.
After love it is the one great surprise that life
preserves for us. Now I don’t think I can
be astonished any more. Yours affectionately,
R. L. S.
TO MISS FERRIER
La Solitude, Hyères,
30th Sep.
MY DEAR MISS FERRIER, I
am very much obliged to you for your letter and was
interested by all you told me. Yes, I know it
is better for him to be gone, and what you say helps
me to realise that it is so I did not know
how much he had suffered; it is so that we are cured
of life. I am a little afraid to write or think
much of Walter just yet; as I have not quite recovered
the news and I have my work and my wife to think of.
Some day soon when the sharpness passes
off (if it does) I must try to write some more of
what he was: he was so little understood.
I don’t suppose any one knew him better than
I did. But just now it is difficult to think
of him. For you I do mourn indeed, and admire
your courage: the loss is terrible. I have
no portrait of him. Is there one? If so please
let me have it: if it has to be copied please
let it be.
Henley seems to have been as good
to dear Walter as he is to all. That introduction
was a good turn I did to both. It seems so strange
for a friendship to begin all these years ago with
so much mirth and now to end with this sorrow.
Our little lives are moments in the wake of the eternal
silence: but how crowded while they last.
His has gone down in peace.
I was not certainly the best companion
for Walter, but I do believe I was the best he had.
In these early days he was not fortunate in friends looking
back I see most clearly how much we both wanted a man
of riper wisdom. We had no religion between the
pair of us that was the flaw. How
very different was our last intimacy in Gladstone Terrace.
But youth must learn looking back over
these wasted opportunities, I must try rather to remember
what I did right, than to bewail the much that I left
undone and knew not how to do. I see that even
you have allowed yourself to have regrets. Dear
Miss Ferrier, sure you were his angel. We all
had something to be glad of, in so far as we had understood
and loved and perhaps a little helped the gentle spirit;
but you may certainly be proud. He always loved
you; and I remember in his worst days spoke of you
with great affection; a thing unusual with him; for
he was walking very wild and blind and had no true
idea whether of himself or life. The lifting
afterwards was beautiful and touching. Dear Miss
Ferrier I have given your kind messages to my wife
who feels for you and reciprocates the hope to meet.
When it may come off I know not. I feel almost
ashamed to say that I keep better, I feel as if like
Mrs. Leslie “you must hate me for it” still
I can very easily throw back whether by fatigue or
want of care, and I do not like to build plans for
my return to my own land. Is there no chance
of your coming hereabouts? Though we cannot in
our small and disorderly house offer a lady a room,
one can be got close by and we can offer possible
board and a most lovely little garden for a lounge.
Please remember me kindly to your brother John and
Sir A. and Lady Grant and believe me with hearty sympathy Yours
most sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
I was rejoiced to hear he never doubted
of my love, but I must cure my hate of correspondence.
This has been a sharp lesson.
TO W. E. HENLEY
It will be remembered that “Whistles”
or “Penny Whistles” was his own name
for the verses of the Child’s Garden.
The proposal referred to at the end of this letter
was one which had reached him from Messrs. Lippincott,
the American publishers, for a sailing trip to be taken
among the Greek islands and made the subject of
a book.
La Solitude, Hyères
[October 1883].
My dear excellent, admired, volcanic
angel of a lad, trusty as a dog, eruptive as Vesuvius,
in all things great, in all the soul of loyalty:
greeting.
That you are better spirits me up
good. I have had no colour of a Mag. of Art.
From here, here in Highairs the Palm-trees, I have
heard your conversation. It came here in the
form of a Mistral, and I said to myself, Damme, there
is some Henley at the foot of this!
I shall try to do the Whistle as suggested;
but I can usually do whistles only by giving my whole
mind to it: to produce even such limping verse
demanding the whole forces of my untuneful soul.
I have other two anyway: better or worse.
I am now deep, deep, ocean deep in Otto:
a letter is a curst distraction. About 100
pp. are near fit for publication; I am either
making a spoon or spoiling the horn of a Caledonian
bull, with that airy potentate. God help me, I
bury a lot of labour in that principality; and if
I am not greatly a gainer, I am a great loser and
a great fool. However, sursum corda; faint
heart never writ romance.
Your Dumas I think exquisite; it might
even have been stronglier said: the brave old
godly pagan, I adore his big footprints on the earth.
Have you read Meredith’s Love
in the Valley? It got me, I wept; I remembered
that poetry existed.
“When her mother tends her before
the laughing mirror.”
I propose if they (Lippincotts) will
let me wait till next Autumn, and go when it is safest,
to accept £450 with £100 down; but it is now too
late to go this year. November and December are
the months when it is safest; and the back of the
season is broken. I shall gain much knowledge
by the trip; this I look upon as one of the main inducements.
R. L. S.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
The following is in answer to a letter
containing remarks on the proofs of the Child’s
Garden, then going round among some of his friends,
and on the instalments of Silverado Squatters
and the Black Arrow, which were appearing
in the Century Magazine and Young Folks respectively.
The remarks on Professor Seeley’s literary manner
are à propos of the Expansion of England,
which I had lately sent him.
La Solitude, Hyères
[October 1883].
COLVIN, COLVIN, COLVIN, Yours
received; also interesting copy of P. Whistles.
“In the multitude of councillors the Bible declares
there is wisdom,” said my great-uncle, “but
I have always found in them distraction.”
It is extraordinary how tastes vary: these proofs
have been handed about, it appears, and I have had
several letters; and distraction. Ãsop:
the Miller and the Ass.
Notes on details:
1. I love the occasional trochaic
line; and so did many excellent writers before me.
2. If you don’t like A Good Boy,
I do.
3. In Escape at Bedtime,
I found two suggestions. “Shove” for
“above” is a correction of the press;
it was so written. “Twinkled” is just
the error; to the child the stars appear to be there;
any word that suggests illusion is a horror.
4. I don’t care; I take
a different view of the vocative.
5. Bewildering and childering
are good enough for me. These are rhymes, jingles;
I don’t go for eternity and the three unities.
I will delete some of those condemned,
but not all. I don’t care for the name
Penny Whistles; I sent a sheaf to Henley when I sent
’em. But I’ve forgot the others.
I would just as soon call ’em “Rimes for
Children” as anything else. I am not proud
nor particular.
Your remarks on the Black Arrow
are to the point. I am pleased you liked Crookback;
he is a fellow whose hellish energy has always fixed
my attention. I wish Shakespeare had written
the play after he had learned some of the rudiments
of literature and art rather than before. Some
day, I will re-tickle the Sable Missile, and shoot
it, moyennant finances, once more into the
air; I can lighten it of much, and devote some more
attention to Dick o’ Gloucester. It’s
great sport to write tushery.
By this I reckon you will have heard
of my proposed excursiolorum to the Isles of Greece,
the Isles of Greece, and kindred sites. If the
excursiolorum goes on, that is if moyennant finances
comes off, I shall write to beg you to collect introductiolorums
for me.
Distinguo: 1. Silverado
was not written in America, but in Switzerland’s
icy mountain. What you read is the bleeding
and disembowelled remains of what I wrot.
The good stuff is all to come so I think.
“The Sea Fogs,” “The Hunter’s
Family,” “Toils and Pleasures” belles
pages. Yours ever,
RAMNUGGER.
O! Seeley is too clever
to live, and the book a gem. But why has he read
too much Arnold? Why will he avoid obviously
avoid fine writing up to which he has led?
This is a winking, curled-and-oiled, ultra-cultured,
Oxford-don sort of an affectation that infuriates my
honest soul. “You see” they
say “how unbombastic we are;
we come right up to eloquence, and, when it’s
hanging on the pen, dammy, we scorn it!” It
is literary Deronda-ism. If you don’t want
the woman, the image, or the phrase, mortify your
vanity and avoid the appearance of wanting them.
TO W.E.HENLEY
The first paragraph of the following
refers to contributions of R. L.
S. to the Magazine of Art under
Mr. Henley’s editorship:
La Solitude, Hyères
[Autumn 1883].
DEAR LAD, Glad you like
Fontainebleau. I am going to be the means,
under heaven, of aërating or literating your pages.
The idea that because a thing is a picture-book all
the writing should be on the wrong tack is triste
but widespread. Thus Hokusai will be really
a gossip on convention, or in great part. And
the Skelt will be as like a Charles Lamb as I can
get it. The writer should write, and not illustrate
pictures: else it’s bosh....
Your remarks about the ugly are my
eye. Ugliness is only the prose of horror.
It is when you are not able to write Macbeth
that you write Thérèse Raquin. Fashions
are external: the essence of art only varies
in so far as fashion widens the field of its application;
art is a mill whose thirlage, in different ages, widens
and contracts; but, in any case and under any fashion,
the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth,
and the little man produces cleverness (personalities,
psychology) instead of beauty, ugliness instead of
terror, and jokes instead of mirth. As it was
in the beginning, is now, and shall be ever, world
without end. Amen!
And even as you read, you say, “Of
course, quelle rengaine!”
R. L. S.
TO W. H. LOW
Manhattan mentioned below is the
name of a short-lived New York
magazine, the editor of which had
asked through Mr. Low for a
contribution from R. L. S.
La Solitude, Hyères,
October .
MY DEAR LOW, ...
Some day or other, in Cassell’s Magazine of Art,
you will see a paper which will interest you, and
where your name appears. It is called Fontainebleau:
Village Communities of Artists, and the signature
of R. L. Stevenson will be found annexed.
Please tell the editor of Manhattan
the following secrets for me: 1_st_, That I am
a beast; 2_nd_, that I owe him a letter; 3_rd_, that
I have lost his, and cannot recall either his name
or address; 4_th_, that I am very deep in engagements,
which my absurd health makes it hard for me to overtake;
but 5_th_, that I will bear him in mind; 6_th_ and
last, that I am a brute.
My address is still the same, and
I live in a most sweet corner of the universe, sea
and fine hills before me, and a rich variegated plain;
and at my back a craggy hill, loaded with vast feudal
ruins. I am very quiet; a person passing by my
door half startles me; but I enjoy the most aromatic
airs, and at night the most wonderful view into a moonlit
garden. By day this garden fades into nothing,
overpowered by its surroundings and the luminous distance;
but at night and when the moon is out, that garden,
the arbour, the flight of stairs that mount the artificial
hillock, the plumed blue gum-trees that hang trembling,
become the very skirts of Paradise. Angels I know
frequent it; and it thrills all night with the flutes
of silence. Damn that garden; and by
day it is gone.
Continue to testify boldly against
realism. Down with Dagon, the fish god!
All art swings down towards imitation, in these days,
fatally. But the man who loves art with wisdom
sees the joke; it is the lustful that tremble and
respect her ladyship; but the honest and romantic lovers
of the Muse can see a joke and sit down to laugh with
Apollo.
The prospect of your return to Europe
is very agreeable; and I was pleased by what you said
about your parents. One of my oldest friends
died recently, and this has given me new thoughts of
death. Up to now I had rather thought of him
as a mere personal enemy of my own; but now that I
see him hunting after my friends, he looks altogether
darker. My own father is not well; and Henley,
of whom you must have heard me speak, is in a questionable
state of health. These things are very solemn,
and take some of the colour out of life. It is
a great thing, after all, to be a man of reasonable
honour and kindness. Do you remember once consulting
me in Paris whether you had not better sacrifice honesty
to art; and how, after much confabulation, we agreed
that your art would suffer if you did? We decided
better than we knew. In this strange welter where
we live, all hangs together by a million filaments;
and to do reasonably well by others, is the first
pre-requisite of art. Art is a virtue; and if
I were the man I should be, my art would rise in the
proportion of my life.
If you were privileged to give some
happiness to your parents, I know your art will gain
by it. By God it will! Sic subscribitur,
R. L. S.
TO R. A. M. STEVENSON
La Solitude, Hyères
[October 1883].
MY DEAR BOB, Yes, I got
both your letters at Lyons, but have been since then
decading in several steps. Toothache; fever; Ferrier’s
death; lung. Now it is decided I am to leave
to-morrow, penniless, for Nice to see Dr. Williams.
I was much struck by your last.
I have written a breathless note on Realism for Henley;
a fifth part of the subject hurriedly touched, which
will show you how my thoughts are driving. You
are now at last beginning to think upon the problems
of executive, plastic art, for you are now for the
first time attacking them. Hitherto you have spoken
and thought of two things technique and
the ars artium, or common background of all
arts. Studio work is the real touch. That
is the genial error of the present French teaching.
Realism I regard as a mere question of method.
The “brown foreground,” “old mastery,”
and the like, ranking with villanelles, as technical
sports and pastimes. Real art, whether ideal
or realistic, addresses precisely the same feeling,
and seeks the same qualities significance
or charm. And the same very same inspiration
is only methodically differentiated according as the
artist is an arrant realist or an arrant idealist.
Each, by his own method, seeks to save and perpetuate
the same significance or charm; the one by suppressing,
the other by forcing, detail. All other idealism
is the brown foreground over again, and hence only
art in the sense of a game, like cup and ball.
All other realism is not art at all but
not at all. It is, then, an insincere and showy
handicraft.
Were you to re-read some Balzac, as
I have been doing, it would greatly help to clear
your eyes. He was a man who never found his method.
An inarticulate Shakespeare, smothered under forcible-feeble
detail. It is astounding to the riper mind how
bad he is, how feeble, how untrue, how tedious; and,
of course, when he surrendered to his temperament,
how good and powerful. And yet never plain nor
clear. He could not consent to be dull, and thus
became so. He would leave nothing undeveloped,
and thus drowned out of sight of land amid the multitude
of crying and incongruous details. There is but
one art to omit! O if I knew how to
omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who
knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily
paper.
Your definition of seeing is quite
right. It is the first part of omission to be
partly blind. Artistic sight is judicious blindness.
Sam Bough must have been a jolly blind old boy.
He would turn a corner, look for one-half or quarter
minute, and then say, “This’ll do, lad.”
Down he sat, there and then, with whole artistic plan,
scheme of colour, and the like, and begin by laying
a foundation of powerful and seemingly incongruous
colour on the block. He saw, not the scene, but
the water-colour sketch. Every artist by sixty
should so behold nature. Where does he learn
that? In the studio, I swear. He goes to
nature for facts, relations, values material;
as a man, before writing a historical novel, reads
up memoirs. But it is not by reading memoirs
that he has learned the selective criterion. He
has learned that in the practice of his art; and he
will never learn it well, but when disengaged from
the ardent struggle of immediate representation, of
realistic and ex facto art. He learns it
in the crystallisation of day-dreams; in changing,
not in copying, fact; in the pursuit of the ideal,
not in the study of nature. These temples of art
are, as you say, inaccessible to the realistic climber.
It is not by looking at the sea that you get
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine,”
nor by looking at Mont Blanc that you find
“And visited all night by troops
of stars.”
A kind of ardour of the blood is the
mother of all this; and according as this ardour is
swayed by knowledge and seconded by craft, the art
expression flows clear, and significance and charm,
like a moon rising, are born above the barren juggle
of mere symbols.
The painter must study more from nature
than the man of words. By why? Because literature
deals with men’s business and passions which,
in the game of life, we are irresistibly obliged to
study; but painting with relations of light, and colour,
and significances, and form, which, from the immemorial
habit of the race, we pass over with an unregardful
eye. Hence this crouching upon camp-stools, and
these crusts. But neither one nor other is a part
of art, only preliminary studies.
I want you to help me to get people
to understand that realism is a method, and only methodic
in its consequences; when the realist is an artist,
that is, and supposing the idealist with whom you compare
him to be anything but a farceur and a dilettante.
The two schools of working do, and should, lead to
the choice of different subjects. But that is
a consequence, not a cause. See my chaotic note,
which will appear, I fancy, in November in Henley’s
sheet.
Poor Ferrier, it bust me horrid.
He was, after you, the oldest of my friends.
I am now very tired, and will go to
bed having prelected freely. Fanny will finish.
R. L. S.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
Some pages of MS. exist in which the
writer at this time attempted to re-cast and expand
a portion of the Lay Morals of 1879. A
letter written some days earlier to his father,
and partly quoted in Mr. Graham Balfour’s
Life (e, , explains his purpose.
La Solitude, Hyères,
12th October 1883.
MY DEAR FATHER, I have
just lunched; the day is exquisite, the air comes
through the open window rich with odour, and I am by
no means spiritually minded. Your letter, however,
was very much valued, and has been read oftener than
once. What you say about yourself I was glad to
hear; a little decent resignation is not only becoming
a Christian, but is likely to be excellent for the
health of a Stevenson. To fret and fume is undignified,
suicidally foolish, and theologically unpardonable;
we are here not to make, but to tread predestined,
pathways; we are the foam of a wave, and to preserve
a proper equanimity is not merely the first part of
submission to God, but the chief of possible kindnesses
to those about us. I am lecturing myself, but
you also. To do our best is one part, but to
wash our hands smilingly of the consequence is the
next part, of any sensible virtue.
I have come, for the moment, to a
pause in my moral works; for I have many irons in
the fire, and I wish to finish something to bring coin
before I can afford to go on with what I think doubtfully
to be a duty. It is a most difficult work; a
touch of the parson will drive off those I hope to
influence; a touch of overstrained laxity, besides
disgusting, like a grimace, may do harm. Nothing
that I have ever seen yet speaks directly and efficaciously
to young men; and I do hope I may find the art and
wisdom to fill up a gap. The great point, as I
see it, is to ask as little as possible, and meet,
if it may be, every view or absence of view; and it
should be, must be, easy. Honesty is the one desideratum;
but think how hard a one to meet. I think all
the time of Ferrier and myself; these are the pair
that I address. Poor Ferrier, so much a better
man than I, and such a temporal wreck. But the
thing of which we must divest our minds is to look
partially upon others; all is to be viewed; and the
creature judged, as he must be by his Creator, not
dissected through a prism of morals, but in the unrefracted
ray. So seen, and in relation to the almost omnipotent
surroundings, who is to distinguish between F. and
such a man as Dr. Candlish, or between such a man
as David Hume and such an one as Robert Burns?
To compare my poor and good Walter with myself is
to make me startle; he, upon all grounds above the
merely expedient, was the nobler being. Yet wrecked
utterly ere the full age of manhood; and the last
skirmishes so well fought, so humanly useless, so
pathetically brave, only the leaps of an expiring
lamp. All this is a very pointed instance.
It shuts the mouth. I have learned more, in some
ways, from him than from any other soul I ever met;
and he, strange to think, was the best gentleman, in
all kinder senses, that I ever knew. Ever
your affectionate son,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO W. H. LOW
The paper referred to at the beginning
of the second paragraph is one
on R. L. S. in the Century Magazine,
the first seriously critical
notice, says Mr. Low, which appeared
of him in the States.
[La Solitude, Hyères,
Oc, 1883.]
MY DEAR LOW, C’est
d’un bon camarade; and I am much obliged
to you for your two letters and the inclosure.
Times are a lityle changed with all of us since the
ever memorable days of Lavenue: hallowed be his
name! hallowed his old Fleury! of which
you did not see I think as I
did the glorious apotheosis: advanced
on a Tuesday to three francs, on the Thursday to six,
and on Friday swept off, holus bolus, for
the proprietor’s private consumption. Well,
we had the start of that proprietor. Many a good
bottle came our way, and was, I think, worthily made
welcome.
I am pleased that Mr. Gilder should
like my literature; and I ask you particularly to
thank Mr. Bunner (have I the name right?) for his
notice, which was of that friendly, headlong sort that
really pleases an author like what the French call
a “shake-hands.” It pleased me the
more coming from the States, where I have met not
much recognition, save from the buccaneers, and above
all from pirates who misspell my name. I saw
my book advertised in a number of the Critic as the
work of one R. L. Stephenson; and, I own, I boiled.
It is so easy to know the name of the man whose book
you have stolen; for there it is, at full length, on
the title-page of your booty. But no, damn him,
not he! He calls me Stephenson. These woes
I only refer to by the way, as they set a higher value
on the Century notice.
I am now a person with an established
ill-health a wife a dog possessed
with an evil, a Gadarene spirit a chalet
on a hill, looking out over the Mediterranean a
certain reputation and very obscure finances.
Otherwise, very much the same, I guess; and were a
bottle of Fleury a thing to be obtained, capable of
developing theories along with a fit spirit even as
of yore. Yet I now draw near to the Middle Ages;
nearly three years ago, that fatal Thirty struck; and
yet the great work is not yet done not
yet even conceived. But so, as one goes on, the
wood seems to thicken, the footpath to narrow, and
the House Beautiful on the hill’s summit to
draw further and further away. We learn, indeed,
to use our means; but only to learn, along with it,
the paralysing knowledge that these means are only
applicable to two or three poor commonplace motives.
Eight years ago, if I could have slung ink as I can
now, I should have thought myself well on the road
after Shakespeare; and now I find I have
only got a pair of walking-shoes and not yet begun
to travel. And art is still away there on the
mountain summit. But I need not continue; for,
of course, this is your story just as much as it is
mine; and, strange to think, it was Shakespeare’s
too, and Beethoven’s, and Phidias’s.
It is a blessed thing that, in this forest of art,
we can pursue our woodlice and sparrows, and not
catch them, with almost the same fervour of exhilaration
as that with which Sophocles hunted and brought down
the Mastodon.
Tell me something of your work, and
your wife. My dear fellow, I am yours ever,
R. L. STEVENSON.
My wife begs to be remembered to both
of you; I cannot say as much for my dog, who has never
seen you, but he would like, on general principles,
to bite you.
TO W. E. HENLEY
By this time Treasure Island
was out in book form, and the
following is in reply to some reflections
on its seamanship which had
been conveyed to him through Mr.
Henley:
[La Solitude, Hyères,
November 1883.]
MY DEAR LAD, ...
Of course, my seamanship is jimmy: did I not beseech
you I know not how often to find me an ancient mariner and
you, whose own wife’s own brother is one of
the ancientest, did nothing for me? As for my
seamen, did Runciman ever know eighteenth century Buccaneers?
No? Well, no more did I. But I have known and
sailed with seamen too, and lived and eaten with them;
and I made my put-up shot in no great ignorance, but
as a put-up thing has to be made, i.e. to be
coherent and picturesque, and damn the expense.
Are they fairly lively on the wires? Then, favour
me with your tongues. Are they wooden, and dim,
and no sport? Then it is I that am silent, otherwise
not. The work, strange as it may sound in the
ear, is not a work of realism. The next thing
I shall hear is that the etiquette is wrong in Otto’s
Court! With a warrant, and I mean it to be so,
and the whole matter never cost me half a thought.
I make these paper people to please myself, and Skelt,
and God Almighty, and with no ulterior purpose.
Yet am I mortal myself; for, as I remind you, I begged
for a supervising mariner. However, my heart
is in the right place. I have been to sea, but
I never crossed the threshold of a court; and the
courts shall be the way I want ’em.
I’m glad to think I owe you
the review that pleased me best of all the reviews
I ever had; the one I liked best before that was ’s
on the Arabians. These two are the flowers
of the collection, according to me. To live reading
such reviews and die eating ortolans sich
is my aspiration.
Whenever you come you will be equally
welcome. I am trying to finish Otto ere
you shall arrive, so as to take and be able to enjoy
a well-earned O yes, a well-earned holiday.
Longman fetched by Otto: is it a spoon
or a spoilt horn? Momentous, if the latter; if
the former, a spoon to dip much praise and pudding,
and to give, I do think, much pleasure. The last
part, now in hand, much smiles upon me. Ever
yours,
R. L. S.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
La Solitude, Hyères
[November 1883].
MY DEAR MOTHER, You must
not blame me too much for my silence; I am over head
and ears in work, and do not know what to do first.
I have been hard at Otto, hard at Silverado
proofs, which I have worked over again to a tremendous
extent; cutting, adding, rewriting, until some of
the worst chapters of the original are now, to my mind,
as good as any. I was the more bound to make
it good, as I had such liberal terms; it’s not
for want of trying if I have failed.
I got your letter on my birthday;
indeed, that was how I found it out about three in
the afternoon, when postie comes. Thank you for
all you said. As for my wife, that was the best
investment ever made by man; but “in our branch
of the family” we seem to marry well. I,
considering my piles of work, am wonderfully well;
I have not been so busy for I know not how long.
I hope you will send me the money I asked however,
as I am not only penniless, but shall remain so in
all human probability for some considerable time.
I have got in the mass of my expectations; and the
£100 which is to float us on the new year cannot come
due till Silverado is all ready; I am delaying
it myself for the moment; then will follow the binders
and the travellers and an infinity of other nuisances;
and only at the last, the jingling-tingling.
Do you know that Treasure Island
has appeared? In the November number of Henley’s
Magazine, a capital number anyway, there is a funny
publisher’s puff of it for your book; also a
bad article by me. Lang dotes on Treasure
Island: “Except Tom Sawyer and
the Odyssey,” he writes, “I never
liked any romance so much.” I will inclose
the letter though. The Bogue is angelic, although
very dirty. It has rained at last!
It was jolly cold when the rain came.
I was overjoyed to hear such good
news of my father. Let him go on at that! Ever
your affectionate,
R. L. S.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN LETTER I
Of the “small ships” here
mentioned, Fontainebleau and The Character
of Dogs are well known: A Misadventure
in France is probably a draft of the Epilogue
to an Inland Voyage, not published till five
years later. The Travelling Companion (of
which I remember little except that its scene was
partly laid in North Italy and that a publisher
to whom it was shown declared it a work of genius
but indecent) was abandoned some two years later, as
set forth on of this volume.
La Solitude, Hyères
[November 1883].
£10,000 Pounds Reward!
WHEREAS Sidney Colvin, more generally
known as the Guardian Angel, has vanished from the
gaze of Mr. R. L. Stevenson, the above reward is offered
as a means to discover the whereabouts of the misguided
gentleman. He was known as a man of irregular
habits, and his rowdy exterior would readily attract
attention in a crowd. He was never known to resist
a drink; whisky was his favourite dish. If any
one will bring him to Mr. Stevenson’s back area
door, dead or alive, the greatest rejoicing will be
felt by a bereaved and uneasy family.
Also, wherefore not a word, dear Colvin?
My news is: splendid health; great success of
the Black Arrow; another tale demanded, readers
this time (the Lord lighten them!) pleased; a great
variety of small ships launched or still upon the
stocks (also, why not send the annotated
proof of Fontainebleau? ce n’est
pas d’un bon camarade); a paper
on dogs for Carr; a paper called Old Mortality,
a paper called A Misadventure in France, a
tale entituled The Travelling Companion; Otto
arrested one foot in air; and last and not least, a
great demand for news of Sidney Colvin and others.
Herewith I pause, for why should I cast pearls before
swine?
A word, Guardian Angel. You are
much loved in this house, not by me only, but by the
wife. The Wogg himself is anxious. Ever
yours affectionately,
R. L. S.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN LETTER II
La Solitude, Hyères
[November 1883].
MY DEAR COLVIN, I have
been bad, but as you were worse, I feel no shame.
I raise a blooming countenance, not the evidence of
a self-righteous spirit.
I continue my uphill fight with the
twin spirits of bankruptcy and indigestion. Duns
rage about my portal, at least to fancy’s ear.
I suppose you heard of Ferrier’s
death: my oldest friend, except Bob. It
has much upset me. I did not fancy how much.
I am strangely concerned about it.
My house is the loveliest spot in
the universe; the moonlight nights we have are incredible;
love, poetry and music, and the Arabian Nights, inhabit
just my corner of the world nest there like
mavises.
Here lies
The carcase
of
Robert Louis Stevenson,
An active, austere, and not inelegant
writer,
who,
at the termination of a long career,
wealthy, wise, benevolent, and honoured by
the attention of two hemispheres,
yet owned it to have been his crowning favour
TO INHABIT
LA SOLITUDE.
(with the consent of the intelligent
edility of Hyères, he has been interred, below this
frugal stone, in the garden which he honoured for
so long with his poetic presence.)
I must write more solemn letters. Adieu.
Write.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. MILNE
This is to a cousin who had been
one of his favourite playmates in
childhood, and had recognised some
allusions in the proof slips of
the Child’s Garden
(the piece called A Pirate Story).
La Solitude, Hyères
[November 1883].
MY DEAR HENRIETTA, Certainly;
who else would they be? More by token, on that
particular occasion, you were sailing under the title
of Princess Royal; I, after a furious contest, under
that of Prince Alfred; and Willie, still a little
sulky, as the Prince of Wales. We were all in
a buck basket about half-way between the swing and
the gate; and I can still see the Pirate Squadron
heave in sight upon the weather bow.
I wrote a piece besides on Giant Bunker;
but I was not happily inspired, and it is condemned.
Perhaps I’ll try again; he was a horrid fellow,
Giant Bunker! and some of my happiest hours were passed
in pursuit of him. You were a capital fellow
to play: how few there were who could! None
better than yourself. I shall never forget some
of the days at Bridge of Allan; they were one golden
dream. See “A Good Boy” in the Penny
Whistles, much of the sentiment of which is taken
direct from one evening at B. of A. when we had had
a great play with the little Glasgow girl. Hallowed
be that fat book of fairy tales! Do you remember
acting the Fair One with Golden Locks? What a
romantic drama! Generally speaking, whenever
I think of play, it is pretty certain that you will
come into my head. I wrote a paper called Child’s
Play once, where, I believe, you or Willie would
recognise things....
Surely Willie is just the man to marry;
and if his wife wasn’t a happy woman, I think
I could tell her who was to blame. Is there no
word of it? Well, these things are beyond arrangement;
and the wind bloweth where it listeth which,
I observe, is generally towards the west in Scotland.
Here it prefers a south-easterly course, and is called
the Mistral usually with an adjective in
front. But if you will remember my yesterday’s
toothache and this morning’s crick, you will
be in a position to choose an adjective for yourself.
Not that the wind is unhealthy; only when it comes
strong, it is both very high and very cold, which
makes it the d-v-l. But as I am writing to a lady,
I had better avoid this topic; winds requiring a great
scope of language.
Please remember me to all at home;
give Ramsay a pennyworth of acidulated drops for his
good taste. And believe me, your affectionate
cousin,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MISS FERRIER
La Solitude, Hyères
[November 22, 1883].
DEAR MISS FERRIER, Many
thanks for the photograph. It is –well,
it is like most photographs. The sun is an artist
of too much renown; and, at any rate, we who knew
Walter “in the brave days of old” will
be difficult to please.
I was inexpressibly touched to get
a letter from some lawyers as to some money.
I have never had any account with my friends; some
have gained and some lost; and I should feel there
was something dishonest in a partial liquidation even
if I could recollect the facts, which I cannot.
But the fact of his having put aside this memorandum
touched me greatly.
The mystery of his life is great.
Our chemist in this place, who had been at Malvern,
recognised the picture. You may remember Walter
had a romantic affection for all pharmacies? and the
bottles in the window were for him a poem? He
said once that he knew no pleasure like driving through
a lamplit city, waiting for the chemists to go by.
All these things return now.
He had a pretty full translation of
Schiller’s Ãsthetic Letters, which we
read together, as well as the second part of Faust,
in Gladstone Terrace, he helping me with the German.
There is no keepsake I should more value than the
MS. of that translation. They were the best days
I ever had with him, little dreaming all would so
soon be over. It needs a blow like this to convict
a man of mortality and its burthen. I always
thought I should go by myself; not to survive.
But now I feel as if the earth were undermined, and
all my friends have lost one thickness of reality
since that one passed. Those are happy who can
take it otherwise; with that I found things all beginning
to dislimn. Here we have no abiding city, and
one felt as though he had and O too much
acted.
But if you tell me, he did not feel
my silence. However, he must have done so; and
my guilt is irreparable now. I thank God at least
heartily that he did not resent it.
Please remember me to Sir Alexander
and Lady Grant, to whose care I will address this.
When next I am in Edinburgh I will take flowers, alas!
to the West Kirk. Many a long hour we passed
in graveyards, the man who has gone and I or
rather not that man but the beautiful, genial,
witty youth who so betrayed him. Dear Miss
Ferrier, I am yours most sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO W. E. HENLEY
This refers to some dispute which had
arisen with an editor (I forget whom) concerning
the refusal of an article on Salvini. The nickname
“Fastidious Brisk,” from Ben Jonson’s
Every Man out of his Humour, was applied
by Mr. Henley to Stevenson very inappropriately
as I always thought.
La Solitude, Hyères,
Autumn 1883.
MY DEAR LAD, You know your
own business best; but I wish your honesty were not
so warfaring. These conflicts pain Lucretian sitters
on the shore; and one wonders one wonders wonders
and whimpers. I do not say my attitude is noble;
but is yours conciliatory? I revere Salvini, but
I shall never see him nor anybody play
again. That is all a matter of history, heroic
history, to me. Were I in London, I should be
the liker Tantalus no more. But as
for these quarrels: in not many years shall we
not all be clay-cold and safe below ground, you with
your loud-mouthed integrity, I with my fastidious
briskness and with all their
faults and merits, swallowed in silence. It seems
to me, in ignorance of cause, that when the dustman
has gone by, these quarrellings will prick the conscience.
Am I wrong? I am a great sinner; so, my brave
friend, are you; the others also. Let us a little
imitate the divine patience and the divine sense of
humour, and smilingly tolerate those faults and virtues
that have so brief a period and so intertwined a being.
I fear I was born a parson; but I
live very near upon the margin (though, by your leave,
I may outlive you all!), and too much rigour in these
daily things sounds to me like clatter on the kitchen
dishes. If it might be could it not
be smoothed? This very day my father writes me
he has gone to see, upon his deathbed, an old friend
to whom for years he has not spoken or written.
On his deathbed; no picking up of the lost stitches;
merely to say: my little fury, my spotted uprightness,
after having split our lives, have not a word of quarrel
to say more. And the same post brings me the
news of another War! Things in this
troubled medium are not so clear, dear Henley; there
are faults upon all hands; and the end comes, and
Ferrier’s grave gapes for us all.
THE PROSY PREACHER
(But written in deep dejection, my dear
man).
Suppose they are wrong?
Well, am I not tolerated, are you not tolerated? we
and our faults?
TO W. H. LOW
La Solitude, Hyères,
Var, 13th December 1883.
MY DEAR LOW, ...
I was much pleased with what you said about my work.
Ill-health is a great handicapper in the race.
I have never at command that press of spirits that
are necessary to strike out a thing red-hot. Silverado
is an example of stuff worried and pawed about, God
knows how often, in poor health, and you can see for
yourself the result: good pages, an imperfect
fusion, a certain languor of the whole. Not, in
short, art. I have told Roberts to send you a
copy of the book when it appears, where there are
some fair passages that will be new to you. My
brief romance, Prince Otto far my
most difficult adventure up to now is near
an end. I have still one chapter to write de
fond en comble, and three or four to strengthen
or recast. The rest is done. I do not know
if I have made a spoon, or only spoiled a horn; but
I am tempted to hope the first. If the present
bargain hold, it will not see the light of day for
some thirteen months. Then I shall be glad to
know how it strikes you. There is a good deal
of stuff in it, both dramatic and, I think, poetic;
and the story is not like these purposeless fables
of to-day, but is, at least, intended to stand firm
upon a base of philosophy or morals as
you please. It has been long gestated, and is
wrought with care. Enfin, nous verróns. My labours
have this year for the first time been rewarded with
upwards of £350; that of itself, so base we are!
encourages me; and the better tenor of my health yet
more. Remember me to Mrs. Low, and believe
me, yours most sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
La Solitude, December
20, 1883.
MY DEAR FATHER, I do not
know which of us is to blame; I suspect it is you
this time. The last accounts of you were pretty
good, I was pleased to see; I am, on the whole, very
well suffering a little still from my fever
and liver complications, but better.
I have just finished re-reading a
book, which I counsel you above all things not
to read, as it has made me very ill, and would make
you worse Lockhart’s Scott.
It is worth reading, as all things are from time to
time that keep us nose to nose with fact; though I
think such reading may be abused, and that a great
deal of life is better spent in reading of a light
and yet chivalrous strain. Thus, no Waverley novel
approaches in power, blackness, bitterness, and moral
elevation to the diary and Lockhart’s narrative
of the end; and yet the Waverley novels are better
reading for every day than the Life. You may take
a tonic daily, but not phlebotomy.
The great double danger of taking
life too easily, and taking it too hard, how difficult
it is to balance that! But we are all too little
inclined to faith; we are all, in our serious moments,
too much inclined to forget that all are sinners,
and fall justly by their faults, and therefore that
we have no more to do with that than with the thundercloud;
only to trust, and do our best, and wear as smiling
a face as may be for others and ourselves. But
there is no royal road among this complicated business.
Hegel the German got the best word of all philosophy
with his antinomies: the contrary of everything
is its postulate. That is, of course, grossly
expressed, but gives a hint of the idea, which contains
a great deal of the mysteries of religion, and a vast
amount of the practical wisdom of life. For your
part, there is no doubt as to your duty to
take things easy and be as happy as you can, for your
sake, and my mother’s, and that of many besides.
Excuse this sermon. Ever your loving son,
R. L. S.
TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
La Solitude, December
25, 1883.
MY DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER, This
it is supposed will reach you about Christmas, and
I believe I should include Lloyd in the greeting.
But I want to lecture my father; he is not grateful
enough; he is like Fanny; his resignation is not the
“true blue.” A man who has gained
a stone; whose son is better, and, after so many fears
to the contrary, I dare to say, a credit to him; whose
business is arranged; whose marriage is a picture what
I should call resignation in such a case as his would
be to “take down his fiddle and play as lood
as ever he could.” That and nought else.
And now, you dear old pious ingrate, on this Christmas
morning, think what your mercies have been; and do
not walk too far before your breakfast as
far as to the top of India Street, then to the top
of Dundas Street, and then to your ain stair heid;
and do not forget that even as laborare, so
joculari, est orare; and to be happy
the first step to being pious.
I have as good as finished my novel,
and a hard job it has been but now practically
over, laus deo! My financial prospects
better than ever before; my excellent wife a touch
dolorous, like Mr. Tommy; my Bogue quite converted,
and myself in good spirits. O, send Curry Powder
per Baxter.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
[La Solitude, Hyères]
last Sunday of ’83.
MY DEAR MOTHER, I give
my father up. I give him a parable: that
the Waverley novels are better reading for every day
than the tragic Life. And he takes it backside
foremost, and shakes his head, and is gloomier than
ever. Tell him that I give him up. I don’t
want no such a parent. This is not the man for
my money. I do not call that by the name of religion
which fills a man with bile. I write him a whole
letter, bidding him beware of extremes, and telling
him that his gloom is gallows-worthy; and I get back
an answer Perish the thought of it.
Here am I on the threshold of another
year, when, according to all human foresight, I should
long ago have been resolved into my elements; here
am I, who you were persuaded was born to disgrace you and,
I will do you the justice to add, on no such insufficient
grounds no very burning discredit when
all is done; here am I married, and the marriage recognised
to be a blessing of the first order, A1 at Lloyd’s.
There is he, at his not first youth, able to take
more exercise than I at thirty-three, and gaining
a stone’s weight, a thing of which I am incapable.
There are you; has the man no gratitude? There
is Smeoroch: is he blind? Tell him from
me that all this is
NOT THE TRUE BLUE!
I will think more of his prayers when
I see in him a spirit of praise. Piety
is a more childlike and happy attitude than he admits.
Martha, Martha, do you hear the knocking at the door?
But Mary was happy. Even the Shorter Catechism,
not the merriest epitome of religion, and a work exactly
as pious although not quite so true as the multiplication
table even that dry-as-dust epitome begins
with a heroic note. What is man’s chief
end? Let him study that; and ask himself if to
refuse to enjoy God’s kindest gifts is in the
spirit indicated. Up, Dullard! It is better
service to enjoy a novel than to mump.
I have been most unjust to the Shorter
Catechism, I perceive. I wish to say that I keenly
admire its merits as a performance; and that all that
was in my mind was its peculiarly unreligious and unmoral
texture; from which defect it can never, of course,
exercise the least influence on the minds of children.
But they learn fine style and some austere thinking
unconsciously. Ever your loving son,
R. L. S.
TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
La Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers,
Var, January 1 (1884).
MY DEAR PEOPLE, A Good
New Year to you. The year closes, leaving me
with £50 in the bank, owing no man nothing, £100
more due to me in a week or so, and £150 more in
the course of the month; and I can look back on a
total receipt of £465, 0d. for the last twelve
months!
And yet I am not happy!
Yet I beg! Here is my beggary:
1. Sellar’s Tria.
George Borrow’s Book about Wale.
My Grandfather’s Trip to Hollan.
And (but this is, I fear, impossible) the Bell Rock
Book.
When I think of how last year began,
after four months of sickness and idleness, all my
plans gone to water, myself starting alone, a kind
of spectre, for Nice should I not be grateful?
Come, let us sing unto the Lord!
Nor should I forget the expected visit,
but I will not believe in that till it befall; I am
no cultivator of disappointments, ’tis a herb
that does not grow in my garden; but I get some good
crops both of remorse and gratitude. The last
I can recommend to all gardeners; it grows best in
shiny weather, but once well grown, is very hardy;
it does not require much labour; only that the husbandman
should smoke his pipe about the flower-plots and admire
God’s pleasant wonders. Winter green (otherwise
known as Resignation, or the “false gratitude
plant”) springs in much the same soil; is little
hardier, if at all; and requires to be so dug about
and dunged, that there is little margin left for profit.
The variety known as the Black Winter green (H.
V. Stevensoniana) is rather for ornament than profit.
“John, do you see that bed of
resignation?” “It’s doin’
bravely, sir.” “John, I will
not have it in my garden; it flatters not the eye
and comforts not the stomach; root it out.” “Sir,
I ha’e seen o’ them that rase as high
as nettles; gran’ plants!” “What
then? Were they as tall as alps, if still unsavoury
and bleak, what matters it? Out with it, then;
and in its place put Laughter and a Good Conceit (that
capital home evergreen), and a bush of Flowering Piety but
see it be the flowering sort the other
species is no ornament to any gentleman’s Back
Garden.”
JNO. BUNYAN.
TO W. E. HENLEY
Early in January, Stevenson, after a
week’s visit at Hyères from his friends
Charles Baxter and W. E. Henley, accompanied them as
far as Nice, and there suddenly went down with
an attack of acute congestion, first of the lungs
and then of the kidneys. At one moment there
seemed no hope, but he recovered slowly and returned
to Hyères. His friends had not written during
his illness, fearing him to be too far gone to
care for letters. As he got better he began to
chafe at their silence.
[Hyères, February or March
1884].
TANDEM DESINO
I cannot read, work, sleep, lie still,
walk, or even play patience. These plagues will
overtake all damned silencists; among whom, from this
day out, number
Eructavit cor Timonis.
the fiery indignator
Roland Little Stevenson.
I counted miseries by the heap,
But now have had my fill,
I cannot see, I do not sleep,
But shortly I shall kill.
Of many letters, here is a
Full End.
The last will and testament of
a demitting correspondent.
My indefatigable pen
I here lay down forever. Men
Have used, and left me, and forgot;
Men are entirely off the spot;
Men are a blague and an abuse;
And I commit them to the deuce!
RODERICK LAMOND STEVENSON.
I had companions, I had friends,
I had of whisky various blends.
The whisky was all drunk; and lo!
The friends were gone for evermo!
The loquacious man at peace.
And when I marked the ingratitude,
I to my maker turned, and spewed.
RANDOLPH LOVEL STEVENSON.
A pen broken, a subverted ink-pot.
Here endeth the
Familiar Correspondence of R. L. S.
Explicuerunt Epistolae
Stevensonianae Omnes.
All men are rot; but there are two
Sidney, the oblivious Slade, and you
Who from that rabble stand confest
Ten million times the rottenest.
R. L. S.
When I was sick and safe in gaol
I thought my friends would never fail.
One wrote me nothing; t’other bard
Sent me an insolent post-card.
R. L. S.
Terminus:
Silentia.
FINIS Finaliter
finium
IF NOBODY WRITES TO ME I SHALL DIE
I now write no more.
RICHARD LEFANU STEVENSON,
Duke of
Indignation
Mark Tacebo, Isaac Blood
}
Secretary John Blind
}
Vain-hope
Go-to-bed } witnesses
Israel
Sciatica }
Originally reversed print.
Originally sideways print.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
The allusions in the second paragraph
are to the commanders in the
Nile campaigns of those years.
La Solitude, Hyères,
9th March 1884.
MY DEAR S. C., You will
already have received a not very sane note from me;
so your patience was rewarded may I say,
your patient silence? However, now comes a letter,
which on receipt, I thus acknowledge.
I have already expressed myself as
to the political aspect. About Grahame, I feel
happier; it does seem to have been really a good, neat,
honest piece of work. We do not seem to be so
badly off for commanders: Wolseley and Roberts,
and this pile of Woods, Stewarts, Alisons, Grahames,
and the like. Had we but ONE statesman on any
side of the house!
Two chapters of Otto do remain:
one to rewrite, one to create; and I am not yet able
to tackle them. For me it is my chief o’
works; hence probably not so for others, since it
only means that I have here attacked the greatest
difficulties. But some chapters towards the end:
three in particular I do think come off.
I find them stirring, dramatic, and not unpoetical.
We shall see, however; as like as not, the effort
will be more obvious than the success. For, of
course, I strung myself hard to carry it out.
The next will come easier, and possibly be more popular.
I believe in the covering of much paper, each time
with a definite and not too difficult artistic purpose;
and then, from time to time, drawing oneself up and
trying, in a superior effort, to combine the facilities
thus acquired or improved. Thus one progresses.
But, mind, it is very likely that the big effort, instead
of being the masterpiece, may be the blotted copy,
the gymnastic exercise. This no man can tell;
only the brutal and licentious public, snouting in
Mudie’s wash-trough, can return a dubious answer.
I am to-day, thanks to a pure heaven
and a beneficent, loud-talking, antiseptic mistral,
on the high places as to health and spirits. Money
holds out wonderfully. Fanny has gone for a drive
to certain meadows which are now one sheet of jonquils:
sea-bound meadows, the thought of which may freshen
you in Bloomsbury. “Ye have been fresh and
fair, Ye have been filled with flowers” I
fear I misquote. Why do people babble? Surely
Herrick, in his true vein, is superior to Martial himself,
though Martial is a very pretty poet.
Did you ever read St. Augustine?
The first chapters of the Confessions are marked
by a commanding genius: Shakespearian in depth.
I was struck dumb, but, alas! when you begin to wander
into controversy, the poet drops out. His description
of infancy is most seizing. And how is this:
“Sed majorum nugae negotia vocantur;
puerorum autem talia cum sint puniuntur a majoribus.”
Which is quite after the heart of R. L. S. See also
his splendid passage about the “luminosus
limes amicitiae” and the “nebulae
de limosa concupiscentia carnis”;
going on “Utrumque in confuso aestuabat
et rapiebat imbecillam aetatem per abrupta
cupiditatum.” That “Utrumque”
is a real contribution to life’s science.
Lust alone is but a pigmy; but it never, or
rarely, attacks us single-handed.
Do you ever read (to go miles off,
indeed) the incredible Barbey d’Aurévilly?
A psychological Poe to be for a moment Henley.
I own with pleasure I prefer him with all his folly,
rot, sentiment, and mixed metaphors, to the whole
modern school in France. It makes me laugh when
it’s nonsense; and when he gets an effect (though
it’s still nonsense and mere Poëry, not poesy)
it wakens me. Ce qui ne meurt pas nearly killed
me with laughing, and left me well, it left
me very nearly admiring the old ass. At least,
it’s the kind of thing one feels one couldn’t
do. The dreadful moonlight, when they all three
sit silent in the room by George, sir,
it’s imagined and the brief scene
between the husband and wife is all there. Quant
au fond, the whole thing, of course, is a fever
dream, and worthy of eternal laughter. Had the
young man broken stones, and the two women been hard-working
honest prostitutes, there had been an end of the whole
immoral and baseless business: you could at least
have respected them in that case.
I also read Petronius Arbiter,
which is a rum work, not so immoral as most modern
works, but singularly silly. I tackled some Tacitus
too. I got them with a dreadful French crib on
the same page with the text, which helps me along
and drives me mad. The French do not even try
to translate. They try to be much more classical
than the classics, with astounding results of barrenness
and tedium. Tacitus, I fear, was too solid for
me. I liked the war part; but the dreary intriguing
at Rome was too much.
R. L. S.
TO MR. DICK
This correspondent was for many
years head clerk and confidential
assistant in the family firm at
Edinburgh.
La Solitude, Hyères,
12th March 1884.
MY DEAR MR. DICK, I have
been a great while owing you a letter; but I am not
without excuses, as you have heard. I overworked
to get a piece of work finished before I had my holiday,
thinking to enjoy it more; and instead of that, the
machinery near hand came sundry in my hands! like
Murdie’s uniform. However, I am now, I think,
in a fair way of recovery; I think I was made, what
there is of me, of whipcord and thorn-switches; surely
I am tough! But I fancy I shall not overdrive
again, or not so long. It is my theory that work
is highly beneficial, but that it should, if possible,
and certainly for such partially broken-down instruments
as the thing I call my body, be taken in batches, with
a clear break and breathing space between. I
always do vary my work, laying one thing aside to
take up another, not merely because I believe it rests
the brain, but because I have found it most beneficial
to the result. Reading, Bacon says, makes a full
man, but what makes me full on any subject is to banish
it for a time from all my thoughts. However,
what I now propose is, out of every quarter to work
two months, and rest the third. I believe I shall
get more done, as I generally manage, on my present
scheme, to have four months’ impotent illness
and two of imperfect health one before,
one after, I break down. This, at least, is not
an economical division of the year.
I re-read the other day that heartbreaking
book, the Life of Scott. One should read
such works now and then, but O, not often. As
I live, I feel more and more that literature should
be cheerful and brave-spirited, even if it cannot
be made beautiful and pious and heroic. We wish
it to be a green place; the Waverley Novels are better
to re-read than the over-true Life, fine as
dear Sir Walter was. The Bible, in most parts,
is a cheerful book; it is our little piping theologies,
tracts, and sermons that are dull and dowie; and even
the Shorter Catechism, which is scarcely a work of
consolation, opens with the best and shortest and
completest sermon ever written upon Man’s
chief end. Believe me, my dear Mr. Dick,
very sincerely yours,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
P.S. You see I have
changed my hand. I was threatened apparently with
scrivener’s cramp, and at any rate had got to
write so small, that the revisal of my MS. tried my
eyes, hence my signature alone remains upon the old
model; for it appears that if I changed that, I should
be cut off from my “vivers.”
R. L. S.
TO COSMO MONKHOUSE
This amiable and excellent public servant,
art-critic, and versifier was a friend of old Savile
Club days; the drift of his letter can easily be
guessed from this reply. The reference to Lamb
is to the essay on the Restoration dramatists.
La Solitude, Hyères,
March 16, 1884.
MY DEAR MONKHOUSE, You
see with what promptitude I plunge into correspondence;
but the truth is, I am condemned to a complete inaction,
stagnate dismally, and love a letter. Yours, which
would have been welcome at any time, was thus doubly
precious.
Dover sounds somewhat shiveringly
in my ears. You should see the weather I
have cloudless, clear as crystal, with just
a punkah-draft of the most aromatic air, all pine
and gum tree. You would be ashamed of Dover;
you would scruple to refer, sir, to a spot so paltry.
To be idle at Dover is a strange pretension; pray,
how do you warm yourself? If I were there I should
grind knives or write blank verse, or
But at least you do not bathe? It is idle to
deny it: I have I may say I nourish a
growing jealousy of the robust, large-legged, healthy
Britain-dwellers, patient of grog, scorners of the
timid umbrella, innocuously breathing fog: all
which I once was, and I am ashamed to say liked it.
How ignorant is youth! grossly rolling among unselected
pleasures; and how nobler, purer, sweeter, and lighter,
to sip the choice tonic, to recline in the luxurious
invalid chair, and to tread, well-shawled, the little
round of the constitutional. Seriously, do you
like to repose? Ye gods, I hate it. I never
rest with any acceptation; I do not know what people
mean who say they like sleep and that damned bedtime
which, since long ere I was breeched, has rung a knell
to all my day’s doings and beings. And
when a man, seemingly sane, tells me he has “fallen
in love with stagnation,” I can only say to
him, “You will never be a Pirate!” This
may not cause any regret to Mrs. Monkhouse; but in
your own soul it will clang hollow think
of it! Never! After all boyhood’s aspirations
and youth’s immoral day-dreams, you are condemned
to sit down, grossly draw in your chair to the fat
board, and be a beastly Burgess till you die.
Can it be? Is there not some escape, some furlough
from the Moral Law, some holiday jaunt contrivable
into a Better Land? Shall we never shed blood?
This prospect is too grey.
Here lies a man who never did
Anything but what he was bid;
Who lived his life in paltry ease,
And died of commonplace disease.
To confess plainly, I had intended
to spend my life (or any leisure I might have from
Piracy upon the high seas) as the leader of a great
horde of irregular cavalry, devastating whole valleys.
I can still, looking back, see myself in many favourite
attitudes; signalling for a boat from my pirate ship
with a pocket-handkerchief, I at the jetty end, and
one or two of my bold blades keeping the crowd at bay;
or else turning in the saddle to look back at my whole
command (some five thousand strong) following me at
the hand-gallop up the road out of the burning valley:
this last by moonlight.
Et point du tout. I am a poor
scribe, and have scarce broken a commandment to mention,
and have recently dined upon cold veal! As for
you (who probably had some ambitions), I hear of you
living at Dover, in lodgings, like the beasts of the
field. But in heaven, when we get there, we shall
have a good time, and see some real carnage. For
heaven is must be that great
Kingdom of Antinomia, which Lamb saw dimly adumbrated
in the Country Wife, where the worm which never
dies (the conscience) peacefully expires, and the
sinner lies down beside the Ten Commandments.
Till then, here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling,
with neither health nor vice for anything more spirited
than procrastination, which I may well call the Consolation
Stakes of Wickedness; and by whose diligent practice,
without the least amusement to ourselves, we can rob
the orphan and bring down grey hairs with sorrow to
the dust.
This astonishing gush of nonsense
I now hasten to close, envelope, and expedite to Shakespeare’s
Cliff. Remember me to Shakespeare, and believe
me, yours very sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO EDMUND GOSSE
Mr. Gosse had written describing
the office which he then occupied, a
picturesque old-fashioned chamber
in the upper stories of the Board
of Trade.
La Solitude, Hyères,
March 17, 1884.
MY DEAR GOSSE, Your office office
is profanely said your bower upon the leads
is divine. Have you, like Pepys, “the right
to fiddle” there? I see you mount the companion,
barbiton in hand, and, fluttered about by city sparrows,
pour forth your spirit in a voluntary. Now when
the spring begins, you must lay in your flowers:
how do you say about a potted hawthorn? Would
it bloom? Wallflower is a choice pot-herb; lily-of-the-valley,
too, and carnation, and Indian cress trailed about
the window, is not only beautiful by colour, but the
leaves are good to eat. I recommend thyme and
rosemary for the aroma, which should not be left upon
one side; they are good quiet growths.
On one of your tables keep a great
map spread out; a chart is still better it
takes one further the havens with their
little anchors, the rocks, banks, and soundings, are
adorably marine; and such furniture will suit your
ship-shape habitation. I wish I could see those
cabins; they smile upon me with the most intimate
charm. From your leads, do you behold St. Paul’s?
I always like to see the Foolscap; it is London per
se and no spot from which it is visible is without
romance. Then it is good company for the man
of letters, whose veritable nursing Pater-Noster
is so near at hand.
I am all at a standstill; as idle
as a painted ship, but not so pretty. My romance,
which has so nearly butchered me in the writing, not
even finished; though so near, thank God, that a few
days of tolerable strength will see the roof upon
that structure. I have worked very hard at it,
and so do not expect any great public favour. In
moments of effort, one learns to do the easy things
that people like. There is the golden maxim; thus
one should strain and then play, strain again and
play again. The strain is for us, it educates;
the play is for the reader, and pleases. Do you
not feel so? We are ever threatened by two contrary
faults: both deadly. To sink into what my
forefathers would have called “rank conformity,”
and to pour forth cheap replicas, upon the one hand;
upon the other, and still more insidiously present,
to forget that art is a diversion and a decoration,
that no triumph or effort is of value, nor anything
worth reaching except charm. Yours affectionately,
R. L. S.
TO MISS FERRIER
Soon after the date of the following
letter Miss Ferrier went out to
her friends and stayed with them
through the trying weeks which
followed.
La Solitude, Hyères
[March 22, 1884].
MY DEAR MISS FERRIER, Are
you really going to fail us? This seems a dreadful
thing. My poor wife, who is not well off for friends
on this bare coast, has been promising herself, and
I have been promising her, a rare acquisition.
And now Miss Burn has failed, and you utter a very
doubtful note. You do not know how delightful
this place is, nor how anxious we are for a visit.
Look at the names: “The Solitude” is
that romantic? The palm-trees? how
is that for the gorgeous East? “Var”?
the name of a river “the quiet waters
by”! ’Tis true, they are in another
department, and consist of stones and a biennial spate;
but what a music, what a plash of brooks, for the
imagination! We have hills; we have skies; the
roses are putting forth, as yet sparsely; the meadows
by the sea are one sheet of jonquils; the birds sing
as in an English May for, considering we
are in France and serve up our song-birds, I am ashamed
to say, on a little field of toast and with a sprig
of thyme (my own receipt) in their most innocent and
now unvocal bellies considering all this,
we have a wonderfully fair wood-music round this Solitude
of ours. What can I say more? All
this awaits you. Kennst du das Land, in short. Your
sincere friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO W. H. LOW
The verses enclosed were the set
entitled “The Canoe Speaks,”
afterwards printed in Underwoods.
Stevenson was suffering at this
time from a temporary weakness of
the eyesight.
La Solitude, Hyères
[April 1884].
MY DEAR LOW, The blind
man in these sprawled lines sends greeting. I
have been ill, as perhaps the papers told you.
The news “great news glorious
news sec-ond ed-ition!” went
the round in England.
Anyway, I now thank you for your pictures,
which, particularly the Arcadian one, we all (Bob
included, he was here sick-nursing me) much liked.
Herewith are a set of verses which
I thought pretty enough to send to press. Then
I thought of the Manhattan, towards whom I have guilty
and compunctious feelings. Last, I had the best
thought of all to send them to you in case
you might think them suitable for illustration.
It seemed to me quite in your vein. If so, good;
if not, hand them on to Manhattan, Century, or Lippincott,
at your pleasure, as all three desire my work or pretend
to. But I trust the lines will not go unattended.
Some riverside will haunt you; and O! be tender to
my bathing girls. The lines are copied in my
wife’s hand, as I cannot see to write otherwise
than with the pen of Cormoran, Gargantua,
or Nimrod. Love to your wife. Yours
ever,
R. L. S.
Copied it myself.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
La Solitude, Hyères,
April 19, 1884.
MY DEAR FATHER, Yesterday
I very powerfully stated the Hæresis Stevensoniana,
or the complete body of divinity of the family theologian,
to Miss Ferrier. She was much impressed; so was
I. You are a great heresiarch; and I know no better.
Whaur the devil did ye get thon about the soap?
Is it altogether your own? I never heard it elsewhere;
and yet I suspect it must have been held at some time
or other, and if you were to look up you would probably
find yourself condemned by some Council.
I am glad to hear you are so well.
The hear is excellent. The Cornhills came; I
made Miss Ferrier read us Thrawn Janet, and
was quite bowled over by my own works. The Merry
Men I mean to make much longer, with a whole new
dénouement, not yet quite clear to me. The Story
of a Lie I must rewrite entirely also, as it is
too weak and ragged, yet is worth saving for the Admiral.
Did I ever tell you that the Admiral was recognised
in America?
When they are all on their legs this
will make an excellent collection.
Has Davie never read Guy Mannering,
Rob Roy, or The Antiquary? All
of which are worth three Waverleys. I think
Kenilworth better than Waverley; Nigel,
too; and Quentin Durward about as good.
But it shows a true piece of insight to prefer Waverley,
for it is different; and though not quite coherent,
better worked in parts than almost any other:
surely more carefully. It is undeniable that the
love of the slap-dash and the shoddy grew upon Scott
with success. Perhaps it does on many of us,
which may be the granite on which D.’s opinion
stands. However, I hold it, in Patrick Walker’s
phrase, for an “old, condemned, damnable error.”
Dr. Simson was condemned by P. W. as being “a
bagful of” such. One of Patrick’s
amenities!
Another ground there may be to D.’s
opinion; those who avoid (or seek to avoid) Scott’s
facility are apt to be continually straining and torturing
their style to get in more of life. And to many
the extra significance does not redeem the strain.
DOCTOR STEVENSON.
TO W. E. HENLEY
La Solitude, Hyères,
April 20th, 1884.
I have been really ill for two days,
hemorrhage, weakness, extreme nervousness that will
not let me lie a moment, and damned sciatica o’
nights; but to-day I am on the recovery. Time;
for I was miserable. It is not often that I suffer,
with all my turns and tumbles, from the sense of serious
illness; and I hate it, as I believe everybody does.
And then the combination of not being able to read,
not being allowed to speak, being too weak to write,
and not wishing to eat, leaves a man with some empty
seconds. But I bless God, it’s over now;
to-day I am much mended.
Insatiable gulf, greedier than hell,
and more silent than the woods of Styx, have you or
have you not lost the dedication to the Child’s
Garden? Answer that plain question as otherwise
I must try to tackle to it once again.
Sciatica is a word employed much by
Shakespeare in a certain connection. ’Tis
true, he was no physician, but as I read, he had smarted
in his day. I, too, do smart. And yet this
keen soprano agony, these veins of fire and bombshell
explosions in the knee, are as nothing to a certain
dull, drowsy pain I had when my kidneys were congested
at Nice; there was death in that; the creak of Charon’s
rowlocks, and the miasmas of the Styx. I
may say plainly, much as I have lost the power of bearing
pain, I had still rather suffer much than die.
Not only the love of life grows on me, but the fear
of certain odd end-seconds grows as well. ’Tis
a suffocating business, take it how you will; and Tyrrel
and Forest only bunglers.
Well, this is an essay on death, or
worse, on dying: to return to daylight and the
winds, I perceive I have grown to live too much in
my work and too little in life. ’Tis the
dollars do it: the world is too much. Whenever
I think I would like to live a little, I hear the
butcher’s cart resounding through the neighbourhood;
and so to plunge again. The fault is a good fault
for me; to be able to do so, is to succeed in life;
and my life has been a huge success. I can live
with joy and without disgust in the art by which I
try to support myself; I have the best wife in the
world; I have rather more praise and nearly as much
coin as I deserve; my friends are many and true-hearted.
Sir, it is a big thing in successes. And if mine
anchorage lies something open to the wind, Sciatica,
if the crew are blind, and the captain spits blood,
one cannot have all, and I may be patched up again,
who knows? “His timbers yet are (indifferently)
sound, and he may float again.”
Thanks for the word on Silverado. Yours
ever,
THE SCIATICATED BARD.
TO TREVOR HADDON
The allusions to Skelt, the last of the
designers and etchers of cheap sheets illustrating
the popular dramas and melodramas of the day, will
need no explanation to readers familiar with the essay
A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured.
La Solitude, Hyères,
April 23rd, 1884.
DEAR MR. HADDON, I am pleased
to see your hand again, and, waiting my wife’s
return, to guess at some of the contents. For
various things have befallen me of late. First,
as you see, I had to change my hand; lastly I have
fallen into a kind of blindness, and cannot read.
This more inclines me for something to do, to answer
your letter before I have read it, a safe plan familiar
to diplomatists.
I gather from half shut eyes that
you were a Skeltist; now seriously that is a good
beginning; there is a deal of romance (cheap) in Skelt.
Look at it well, and you will see much of Dickens.
And even Skelt is better than conscientious, grey
back-gardens, and conscientious, dull still lives.
The great lack of art just now is a spice of life and
interest; and I prefer galvanism to acquiescence in
the grave. All do not; ’tis an affair of
tastes; and mine are young. Those who like death
have their innings to-day with art that is like mahogany
and horse-hair furniture, solid, true, serious and
as dead as Cæsar. I wish I could read Treasure
Island; I believe I should like it. But work
done, for the artist, is the Golden Goose killed;
you sell its feathers and lament the eggs. To-morrow
the fresh woods!
I have been seriously ill, and do
not pick up with that finality that I should like
to see. I linger over and digest my convalescence
like a favourite wine; and what with blindness, green
spectacles, and seclusion, cut but a poor figure in
the world.
I made out at the end that you were
asking some advice but what, my failing
eyes refuse to inform me. I must keep a sheet
for the answer; and Mrs. Stevenson still delays, and
still I have no resource against tedium but the waggling
of this pen.
You seem to me to be a pretty lucky
young man; keep your eyes open to your mercies.
That part of piety is eternal; and the man who forgets
to be grateful has fallen asleep in life. Please
to recognise that you are unworthy of all that befalls
you unworthy, too, I hear you wail, of
this terrible sermon; but indeed we are not worthy
of our fortunes; love takes us in a counterfeit, success
comes to us at play, health stays with us while we
abuse her; and even when we gird at our fellow-men,
we should remember that it is of their good will alone,
that we still live and still have claims to honour.
The sins of the most innocent, if they were exactly
visited, would ruin them to the doer. And if you
know any man who believes himself to be worthy of
a wife’s love, a friend’s affection, a
mistress’s caress, even if venal, you may rest
assured he is worthy of nothing but a kicking.
I fear men who have no open faults; what do they conceal?
We are not meant to be good in this world, but to
try to be, and fail, and keep on trying; and when we
get a cake to say, “Thank God!” and when
we get a buffet, to say, “Just so: well
hit!”
I have been getting some of the buffets
of late; but have amply earned them you
need not pity me. Pity sick children and the individual
poor man; not the mass. Don’t pity anybody
else, and never pity fools. The optimistic Stevenson;
but there is a sense in these wanderings.
Now I have heard your letter, and
my sermon was not mal-Ã -propos. For you seem
to be complaining. Everybody’s home is depressing,
I believe; it is their difficult business to make
it less so. There is an unpleasant saying, which
would have pricked me sharply at your age. Yours
truly,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO COSMO MONKHOUSE
La Solitude, Hyères
[April 24, 1884].
DEAR MONKHOUSE, If you
are in love with repose, here is your occasion:
change with me. I am too blind to read, hence
no reading; I am too weak to walk, hence no walking;
I am not allowed to speak, hence no talking; but the
great simplification has yet to be named; for, if this
goes on, I shall soon have nothing to eat and
hence, O Hallelujah! hence no eating. The offer
is a fair one: I have not sold myself to the devil,
for I could never find him. I am married, but
so are you. I sometimes write verses, but so
do you. Come! Hic quies! As for the commandments,
I have broken them so small that they are the dust
of my chambers; you walk upon them, triturate and
toothless; and with the Golosh of Philosophy, they
shall not bite your heel. True, the tenement is
falling. Ay, friend, but yours also. Take
a larger view; what is a year or two? dust in the
balance! ’Tis done, behold you Cosmo Stevenson,
and me R. L. Monkhouse; you at Hyères, I in London;
you rejoicing in the clammiest repose, me proceeding
to tear your tabernacle into rags, as I have already
so admirably torn my own.
My place to which I now introduce
you it is yours is like a London
house, high and very narrow; upon the lungs I will
not linger; the heart is large enough for a ballroom;
the belly greedy and inefficient; the brain stocked
with the most damnable explosives, like a dynamiter’s
den. The whole place is well furnished, though
not in a very pure taste; Corinthian much of it; showy
and not strong.
About your place I shall try to find
my way above, an interesting exploration. Imagine
me, as I go to bed, falling over a blood-stained remorse;
opening that cupboard in the cerebellum and being welcomed
by the spirit of your murdered uncle. I should
probably not like your remorses; I wonder if you will
like mine; I have a spirited assortment; they whistle
in my ear o’ nights like a north-easter.
I trust yours don’t dine with the family; mine
are better mannered; you will hear nought of them
till 2 A.M., except one, to be sure, that I have made
a pet of, but he is small; I keep him in buttons,
so as to avoid commentaries; you will like him much if
you like what is genuine.
Must we likewise change religions?
Mine is a good article, with a trick of stopping;
cathedral bell note; ornamental dial; supported by
Venus and the Graces; quite a summer-parlour piety.
Of yours, since your last, I fear there is little
to be said.
There is one article I wish to take
away with me: my spirits. They suit me.
I don’t want yours; I like my own; I have had
them a long while in bottle. It is my only reservation. Yours
(as you decide),
R. L. MONKHOUSE.
TO W. E. HENLEY
La Solitude, Hyères
[May 1884].
DEAR BOY, Old Mortality
is out, and I am glad to say Coggie likes it.
We like her immensely.
I keep better, but no great shakes
yet; cannot work cannot: that is flat,
not even verses: as for prose, that more active
place is shut on me long since.
My view of life is essentially the
comic; and the romantically comic. As You Like
It is to me the most bird-haunted spot in letters;
Tempest and Twelfth Night follow.
These are what I mean by poetry and nature. I
make an effort of my mind to be quite one with Molière,
except upon the stage, where his inimitable jeux
de scène beggar belief; but you will observe
they are stage-plays things ad hoc;
not great Olympian debauches of the heart and fancy;
hence more perfect, and not so great. Then I
come, after great wanderings, to Carmosine and to
Fantasio; to one part of La Dernière Aldini (which,
by the by, we might dramatise in a week), to the notes
that Meredith has found, Evan and the postillion,
Evan and Rose, Harry in Germany. And to me these
things are the good; beauty, touched with sex and
laughter; beauty with God’s earth for the background.
Tragedy does not seem to me to come off; and when it
does, it does so by the heroic illusion; the anti-masque
has been omitted; laughter, which attends on all our
steps in life, and sits by the deathbed, and certainly
redacts the epitaph, laughter has been lost from these
great-hearted lies. But the comedy which keeps
the beauty and touches the terrors of our life (laughter
and tragedy-in-a-good-humour having kissed), that
is the last word of moved representation; embracing
the greatest number of elements of fate and character;
and telling its story, not with the one eye of pity,
but with the two of pity and mirth.
R. L. S.
TO EDMUND GOSSE
Early in May Stevenson again fell very
dangerously ill with hemorrhage of the lungs, and
lay for several weeks between life and death, until
towards the end of June he was brought sufficiently
round to venture by slow stages on the journey to
England, staying for two or three weeks at Royat
on the way. His correspondent had lately been
appointed Clark Reader in English Literature at Trinity
College, Cambridge.
[La Solitude, Hyères]
From my bed, May 29, 1884.
DEAR GOSSE, The news of
the Professorate found me in the article of well,
of heads or tails; I am still in bed, and a very poor
person. You must thus excuse my damned delay;
but, I assure you, I was delighted. You will
believe me the more, if I confess to you that my first
sentiment was envy; yes, sir, on my blood-boltered
couch I envied the professor. However, it was
not of long duration; the double thought that you
deserved and that you would thoroughly enjoy your success
fell like balsam on my wounds. How came it that
you never communicated my rejection of Gilder’s
offer for the Rhone? But it matters not.
Such earthly vanities are over for the present.
This has been a fine well-conducted illness.
A month in bed; a month of silence; a fortnight of
not stirring my right hand; a month of not moving without
being lifted. Come! Ãa y est: devilish
like being dead. Yours, dear Professor,
academically,
R. L. S.
I am soon to be moved to Royat; an
invalid valet goes with me! I got him cheap second-hand.
In turning over my late friend Ferrier’s
commonplace book, I find three poems from Viol
and Flute copied out in his hand: “When
Flower-time,” “Love in Winter,”
and “Mistrust.” They are capital too.
But I thought the fact would interest you. He
was no poetist either; so it means the more.
“Love in W.!” I like the best.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN LETTER I
Enclosing some supplementary verses
for the Child’s Garden.
Marseilles, June
1884.
DEAR S. C., Are these four
in time? No odds about order. I am at Marseille
and stood the journey wonderfully. Better address
Hotel Chabassière, Royat, Puy de Dôme. You
see how this d d poeshie flows from me
in sickness: Are they good or bad? Wha kens?
But I like the Little Land, I think, as well
as any. As time goes on I get more fancy in.
We have no money, but a valet and a maid. The
valet is no end; how long can you live on a valet?
Vive lé valet! I am tempted to
call myself a valetudinarian. I love my love
with a V because he is a Valetudinarian; I took him
to Valetta or Valais, gave him his Vails and tenderly
addressed him with one word,
Vale.
P.S. It does not
matter of course about order. As soon as I have
all the slips I shall organise the book for the publisher.
A set of 8 will be put together under the title An
Only Child; another cycle of 10 will be called
In the Garden, and other six called Bedtime
to end all up. It will now make quite a little
volume of a good way upwards of 100 pp.
Will you instruct Bain to send me a Bible; of a type
that I can read without blindness; the better if with
notes; there is a Clarendon Press Bible, pray see
it yourself. I also want Ewald’s History
in a translation.
R. L. S.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN LETTER II
The play of Deacon Brodie,
the joint work of R. L. S. and W. E. H.,
was to be performed in London early
in July.
[Hotel Chabassière,
Royat, July 1884.]
DEAR S. C., Books received
with great thanks. Very nice books, though I
see you underrate my cecity: I could no more read
their beautiful Bible than I could sail in heaven.
However I have sent for another and can read the rest
for patience.
I quite understand your feelings about
the Deacon, which is a far way behind; but
I get miserable when I think of Henley cutting this
splash and standing, I fear, to lose a great deal
of money. It is about Henley, not Brodie, that
I care. I fear my affections are not strong to
my past works; they are blotted out by others; and
anyhow the Deacon is damn bad.
I am half asleep and can no more discourse.
Say to your friends, “Look here, some friends
of mine are bringing out a play; it has some stuff;
suppose you go and see it.” But I know I
am a cold, unbelieving fellow, incapable of those
hot claps that honour you and Henley and therefore I
am asleep. Child’s Garden (first instalment)
come. Fanny ill; self asleep.
R. L. S.
TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
Hotel Chabassière,
Royat [July 1884].
MY DEAR PEOPLE, The weather
has been demoniac; I have had a skiff of cold, and
was finally obliged to take to bed entirely; to-day,
however, it has cleared, the sun shines, and I begin
to
Several days after. I
have been out once, but now am back in bed. I
am better, and keep better, but the weather is a mere
injustice. The imitation of Edinburgh is, at
times, deceptive; there is a note among the chimney
pots that suggests Howe Street; though I think the
shrillest spot in Christendom was not upon the Howe
Street side, but in front, just under the Miss Graemes’
big chimney stack. It had a fine alto character a
sort of bleat that used to divide the marrow in my
joints say in the wee, slack hours.
That music is now lost to us by rebuilding; another
air that I remember, not regret, was the solo of the
gas-burner in the little front room; a knickering,
flighty, fleering, and yet spectral cackle. I
mind it above all on winter afternoons, late, when
the window was blue and spotted with rare rain-drops,
and, looking out, the cold evening was seen blue all
over, with the lamps of Queen’s and Frederick’s
Street dotting it with yellow, and flaring eastward
in the squalls. Heavens, how unhappy I have been
in such circumstances I, who have now positively
forgotten the colour of unhappiness; who am full like
a fed ox, and dull like a fresh turf, and have no more
spiritual life, for good or evil, than a French bagman.
We are at Chabassière’s, for
of course it was nonsense to go up the hill when we
could not walk.
The child’s poems in a far extended
form are likely soon to be heard of which
Cummy I dare say will be glad to know. They will
make a book of about one hundred pages. Ever
your affectionate,
R. L. S.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
I had reported to Stevenson a remark
made by one of his greatest
admirers, Sir E. Burne-Jones, on
some particular analogy, I forget
what, between a passage of Defoe
and one in Treasure Island.
[Hotel Chabassière,
Royat, July 1884.]
... Here is a quaint thing, I
have read Robinson, Colonel Jack, Moll
Flanders, Memoirs of a Cavalier, History
of the Plague, History of the Great Storm,
Scotch Church and Union. And there my
knowledge of Defoe ends except a book, the
name of which I forget, about Peterborough in Spain,
which Defoe obviously did not write, and could not
have written if he wanted. To which of these does
B. J. refer? I guess it must be the history of
the Scottish Church. I jest; for, of course,
I know it must be a book I have never read,
and which this makes me keen to read I
mean Captain Singleton. Can it be got and
sent to me? If Treasure Island is at all
like it, it will be delightful. I was just the
other day wondering at my folly in not remembering
it, when I was writing T. I., as a mine
for pirate tips. T. I. came out of Kingsley’s
At Last, where I got the Dead Man’s Chest and
that was the seed and out of the great Captain
Johnson’s History of Notorious Pirates.
The scenery is Californian in part, and in part chic.
I was downstairs to-day! So now
I am a made man till the next time.
R. L. STEVENSON.
If it was Captain Singleton, send it to me,
won’t you?
Later. My life dwindles
into a kind of valley of the shadow picnic. I
cannot read; so much of the time (as to-day) I must
not speak above my breath, that to play patience,
or to see my wife play it, is become the be-all and
the end-all of my dim career. To add to my gaiety,
I may write letters, but there are few to answer.
Patience and Poesy are thus my rod and staff; with
these I not unpleasantly support my days.
I am very dim, dumb, dowie, and damnable.
I hate to be silenced; and if to talk by signs is
my forte (as I contend), to understand them cannot
be my wife’s. Do not think me unhappy; I
have not been so for years; but I am blurred, inhabit
the debatable frontier of sleep, and have but dim
designs upon activity. All is at a standstill;
books closed, paper put aside, the voice, the eternal
voice of R. L. S., well silenced. Hence this
plaint reaches you with no very great meaning, no very
great purpose, and written part in slumber by a heavy,
dull, somnolent, superannuated son of a bedpost.
TO W. E. HENLEY
I suppose, but cannot remember,
that I had in the meantime sent him
Captain Singleton.
[Hotel Chabassière,
Royat, July 1884.]
DEAR BOY, I am glad that
has disappointed
you. Depend upon it, nobody is so bad as to be
worth scalping, except your dearest friends and parents;
and scalping them may sometimes be avoided by scalping
yourself. I grow daily more lymphatic and benign;
bring me a dynamiter, that I may embrace and bless
him! So, if I continue to evade the friendly
hemorrhage, I shall be spared in anger to pour forth
senile and insignificant volumes, and the clever lads
in the journals, not doubting of the eye of Nemesis,
shall mock and gird at me.
All this seems excellent news of the
Deacon. But O! that the last tableau,
on from Leslie’s entrance, were re-written!
We had a great opening there and missed it. I
read for the first time Captain Singleton;
it has points; and then I re-read Colonel Jack
with ecstasy; the first part is as much superior to
Robinson Crusoe as Robinson is to The
Inland Voyage. It is pretty, good, philosophical,
dramatic, and as picturesque as a promontory goat in
a gale of wind. Get it and fill your belly with
honey.
Fanny hopes to be in time for the
Deacon. I was out yesterday, and none
the worse. We leave Monday.
R. L. S.