TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

  Wensleydale, Bournemouth, Sunday, 28th September 1884.

MY DEAR PEOPLE, ­I keep better, and am to-day downstairs for the first time.  I find the lockers entirely empty; not a cent to the front.  Will you pray send us some?  It blows an equinoctial gale, and has blown for nearly a week.  Nimbus Britannicus; piping wind, lashing rain; the sea is a fine colour, and wind-bound ships lie at anchor under the Old Harry rocks, to make one glad to be ashore.

The Henleys are gone, and two plays practically done.  I hope they may produce some of the ready. ­I am, ever affectionate son,

     R. L. S.

TO ANDREW CHATTO

   During the earlier Bournemouth days were firmly established
   Stevenson’s cordial relations with the several English publishers
   Cassell & Co., Chatto & Windus, and Longmans, and a little later with
   C. Scribner’s Sons in America.

     Wensleydale, Bournemouth, October 3, 1884.

DEAR MR. CHATTO, ­I have an offer of £25 for Otto from America.  I do not know if you mean to have the American rights; from the nature of the contract, I think not; but if you understood that you were to sell the sheets, I will either hand over the bargain to you, or finish it myself and hand you over the money if you are pleased with the amount.  You see, I leave this quite in your hands.  To parody an old Scotch story of servant and master:  if you don’t know that you have a good author, I know that I have a good publisher.  Your fair, open, and handsome dealings are a good point in my life, and do more for my crazy health than has yet been done by any doctor. ­Very truly yours,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO W. E. HENLEY

There is no certain clue to the date of the following; neither has it been possible to make sure what was the enclosure mentioned.  The special illness referred to seems to be that of the preceding May at Hyères.

     [Wensleydale, Bournemouth, October 1884?]

DEAR BOY, ­I trust this finds you well; it leaves me so-so.  The weather is so cold that I must stick to bed, which is rotten and tedious, but can’t be helped.

I find in the blotting book the enclosed, which I wrote to you the eve of my blood.  Is it not strange?  That night, when I naturally thought I was coopered, the thought of it was much in my mind; I thought it had gone; and I thought what a strange prophecy I had made in jest, and how it was indeed like to be the end of many letters.  But I have written a good few since, and the spell is broken.  I am just as pleased, for I earnestly desire to live.  This pleasant middle age into whose port we are steering is quite to my fancy.  I would cast anchor here, and go ashore for twenty years and see the manners of the place.  Youth was a great time, but somewhat fussy.  Now in middle age (bar lucre) all seems mighty placid.  It likes me; I spy a little bright café in one corner of the port, in front of which I now propose we should sit down.  There is just enough of the bustle of the harbour and no more; and the ships are close in, regarding us with stern-windows ­the ships that bring deals from Norway and parrots from the Indies.  Let us sit down here for twenty years, with a packet of tobacco and a drink, and talk of art and women.  By-and-by, the whole city will sink, and the ships too, and the table, and we also; but we shall have sat for twenty years and had a fine talk; and by that time, who knows? exhausted the subject.

I send you a book which (or I am mistook) will please you; it pleased me.  But I do desire a book of adventure ­a romance ­and no man will get or write me one.  Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott, too and I am short.  I want to hear swords clash.  I want a book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like Treasure Island, alas! which I have never read, and cannot though I live to ninety.  I would God that some one else had written it!  By all that I can learn, it is the very book for my complaint.  I like the way I hear it opens; and they tell me John Silver is good fun.  And to me it is, and must ever be, a dream unrealised, a book unwritten.  O my sighings after romance, or even Skeltery, and O! the weary age which will produce me neither!

CHAPTER I

The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul.  The single horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across Willesden Common, had not met a traveller, when the sound of wheels ­

CHAPTER I

“Yes, sir,” said the old pilot, “she must have dropped into the bay a little afore dawn.  A queer craft she looks.”

“She shows no colours,” returned the young gentleman musingly.

“They’re a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark,” resumed the old salt.  “We shall soon know more of her.”

“Ay,” replied the young gentleman called Mark, “and here, Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the cliff.”

“God bless her kind heart, sir,” ejaculated old Seadrift.

CHAPTER I

The notary, Jean Rossignol, had been summoned to the top of a great house in the Isle St. Louis to make a will; and now, his duties finished, wrapped in a warm roquelaure and with a lantern swinging from one hand, he issued from the mansion on his homeward way.  Little did he think what strange adventures were to befall him! ­

That is how stories should begin.  And I am offered HUSKS instead.

    What should be:  What is: 
  The Filibuster’s Cache.  Aunt Anne’s Tea Cosy. 
  Jerry Abershaw.  Mrs. Brierly’s Niece. 
  Blood Money:  A Tale.  Society:  A Novel.

     R. L. S.

TO THE REV. PROFESSOR LEWIS CAMPBELL

   In reply to a gift of books, including the correspondent’s well-known
   translation of Sophocles.

     [Wensleydale, Bournemouth, November 1884.]

MY DEAR CAMPBELL, ­The books came duly to hand.  My wife has occupied the translation ever since, nor have I yet been able to dislodge her.  As for the primer, I have read it with a very strange result:  that I find no fault.  If you knew how, dogmatic and pugnacious, I stand warden on the literary art, you would the more appreciate your success and my ­well, I will own it ­disappointment.  For I love to put people right (or wrong) about the arts.  But what you say of Tragedy and of Sophocles very amply satisfies me; it is well felt and well said; a little less technically than it is my weakness to desire to see it put, but clear and adequate.  You are very right to express your admiration for the resource displayed in Oedipus King; it is a miracle.  Would it not have been well to mention Voltaire’s interesting onslaught, a thing which gives the best lesson of the difference of neighbour arts? ­since all his criticisms, which had been fatal to a narrative, do not amount among them to exhibit one flaw in this masterpiece of drama.  For the drama, it is perfect; though such a fable in a romance might make the reader crack his sides, so imperfect, so ethereally slight is the verisimilitude required of these conventional, rigid, and egg-dancing arts.

I was sorry to see no more of you; but shall conclude by hoping for better luck next time.  My wife begs to be remembered to both of you. ­Yours sincerely,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO W. E. HENLEY

   The “Arabs” mentioned below are the stories comprised in the volume
   More New Arabian Nights:  The Dynamiter, written by Stevenson and
   his wife in collaboration.

     Wensleydale, Bournemouth, November 1884.

DEAR HENLEY, ­We are all to pieces in health, and heavily handicapped with Arabs.  I have a dreadful cough, whose attacks leave me ætat. 90.  I never let up on the Arabs, all the same, and rarely get less than eight pages out of hand, though hardly able to come downstairs for twittering knees.

I shall put in ­’s letter.  He says so little of his circumstances that I am in an impossibility to give him advice more specific than a copybook.  Give him my love, however, and tell him it is the mark of the parochial gentleman who has never travelled to find all wrong in a foreign land.  Let him hold on, and he will find one country as good as another; and in the meanwhile let him resist the fatal British tendency to communicate his dissatisfaction with a country to its inhabitants.  ’Tis a good idea, but it somehow fails to please.  In a fortnight, if I can keep my spirit in the box at all, I should be nearly through this Arabian desert; so can tackle something fresh. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO W. H. LOW

It was some twenty months since the plan of publishing the Child’s Garden in the first instance as a picture-book had been mooted (see above, pp. 18, foll.).  But it had never taken effect, and in the following March the volume appeared without illustrations in England, and also, I believe, in America.

Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth, Hants, England,
First week in November, I guess, 1884.

MY DEAR LOW, ­Now, look here, the above is my address for three months, I hope; continue, on your part, if you please, to write to Edinburgh, which is safe; but if Mrs. Low thinks of coming to England, she might take a run down from London (four hours from Waterloo, main line) and stay a day or two with us among the pines.  If not, I hope it will be only a pleasure deferred till you can join her.

My Children’s Verses will be published here in a volume called A Child’s Garden.  The sheets are in hand; I will see if I cannot send you the lot, so that you might have a bit of a start.  In that case I would do nothing to publish in the States, and you might try an illustrated edition there; which, if the book went fairly over here, might, when ready, be imported.  But of this more fully ere long.  You will see some verses of mine in the last Magazine of Art, with pictures by a young lady; rather pretty, I think.  If we find a market for Phasellulus loquitur, we can try another.  I hope it isn’t necessary to put the verse into that rustic printing.  I am Philistine enough to prefer clean printer’s type; indeed, I can form no idea of the verses thus transcribed by the incult and tottering hand of the draughtsman, nor gather any impression beyond one of weariness to the eyes.  Yet the other day, in the Century, I saw it imputed as a crime to Vedder that he had not thus travestied Omar Khayyàm.  We live in a rum age of music without airs, stories without incident, pictures without beauty, American wood engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-point etchings that ought to have been mezzotints.  I think of giving ’em literature without words; and I believe if you were to try invisible illustration, it would enjoy a considerable vogue.  So long as an artist is on his head, is painting with a flute, or writes with an etcher’s needle, or conducts the orchestra with a meat-axe, all is well; and plaudits shower along with roses.  But any plain man who tries to follow the obtrusive canons of his art, is but a commonplace figure.  To hell with him is the motto, or at least not that; for he will have his reward, but he will never be thought a person of parts.

January 3, 1885. ­And here has this been lying near two months.  I have failed to get together a preliminary copy of the Child’s Verses for you, in spite of doughty efforts; but yesterday I sent you the first sheet of the definitive edition, and shall continue to send the others as they come.  If you can, and care to, work them ­why so, well.  If not, I send you fodder.  But the time presses; for though I will delay a little over the proofs, and though it is even possible they may delay the English issue until Easter, it will certainly not be later.  Therefore perpend, and do not get caught out.  Of course, if you can do pictures, it will be a great pleasure to me to see our names joined; and more than that, a great advantage, as I dare say you may be able to make a bargain for some share a little less spectral than the common for the poor author.  But this is all as you shall choose; I give you carte blanche to do or not to do. ­Yours most sincerely,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

O, Sargent has been and painted my portrait; a very nice fellow he is, and is supposed to have done well; it is a poetical but very chicken-boned figure-head, as thus represented.

     R. L. S. Go on.

P.P.S. ­Your picture came; and let me thank you for it very much.  I am so hunted I had near forgotten.  I find it very graceful; and I mean to have it framed.

TO SIR WALTER SIMPSON

     Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth [first week of
        November 1884].

MY DEAR SIMPSON, ­At last, after divers adventures here we are:  not Pommery and Greno as you see, “but jist plain auld Bonellie, no very faur frae Jenniper Green,” as I might say if I were writing to Charles.  I hope now to receive a good bundle from you ere long; and I will try to be both prompt and practical in response.  I hope to hear your boy is better:  ah, that’s where it bites, I know, that is where the childless man rejoices; although, to confess fully, my whole philosophy of life renounces these renunciations; I am persuaded we gain nothing in the least comparable to what we lose, by holding back the hand from any province of life; the intrigue, the imbroglio, such as it is, was made for the plunger and not for the teetotaller.  And anyway I hope your news is good.

I have nearly finished Lawson’s most lively pamphlet.  It is very clear and interesting.  For myself, I am in our house ­a home of our own, in a most lovely situation, among forest trees, where I hope you will come and see us and find me in a repaired and more comfortable condition ­greatly pleased with it ­rather hard-up, verging on the dead-broke ­and full tilt at hammering up some New Arabians for the pot.

I wonder what you do without regular habits of work.  I am capable of only two theories of existence:  the industrious worker’s, the spreester’s; all between seems blank to me.  We grow too old, and I, at least, am too much deteriorated, for the last; and the first becomes a bedrock necessary.  My father is in a gloomy state and has the yellow flag at the peak, or the fore, or wherever it should be; and he has just emptied some melancholy vials on me; I am also, by way of change, spitting blood.  This somewhat clouds the termination of my note. ­Yours ever affectionately,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO THOMAS STEVENSON LETTER I

   About this time Mr. Stevenson was in some hesitation as to letting
   himself be proposed for the office of President of the Royal Society
   of Edinburgh.

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, November 1884.

MY DEAR FATHER, ­I have no hesitation in recommending you to let your name go up; please yourself about an address; though I think, if we could meet, we could arrange something suitable.  What you propose would be well enough in a way, but so modest as to suggest a whine.  From that point of view it would be better to change a little; but this, whether we meet or not, we must discuss.  Tait, Chrystal, the Royal Society, and I, all think you amply deserve this honour and far more; it is not the True Blue to call this serious compliment a “trial”; you should be glad of this recognition.  As for resigning, that is easy enough if found necessary; but to refuse would be husky and unsatisfactory. Sic subs.

     R. L. S.

My cold is still very heavy; but I carry it well.  Fanny is very very much out of sorts, principally through perpetual misery with me.  I fear I have been a little in the dumps, which, as you know, sir, is a very great sin.  I must try to be more cheerful; but my cough is so severe that I have sometimes most exhausting nights and very peevish wakenings.  However, this shall be remedied, and last night I was distinctly better than the night before.  There is, my dear Mr. Stevenson (so I moralise blandly as we sit together on the devil’s garden-wall), no more abominable sin than this gloom, this plaguy peevishness; why (say I) what matters it if we be a little uncomfortable ­that is no reason for mangling our unhappy wives.  And then I turn and girn on the unfortunate Cassandra. ­Your fellow culprit,

     R. L. S.

TO THOMAS STEVENSON LETTER II

Mr. Stevenson, the elder, had read the play of Admiral Guinea, written in September by his son and Mr. Henley in collaboration, and had protested, with his usual vehemence of feeling and expression, against the stage confrontation of profane blackguardry in the person of Pew with evangelical piety in that of the reformed slaving captain who gives his name to the piece.

     Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth (The three B’s)
        [November 5, 1884].

MY DEAR FATHER, ­Allow me to say, in a strictly Pickwickian sense, that you are a silly fellow.  I am pained indeed, but how should I be offended?  I think you exaggerate; I cannot forget that you had the same impression of the Deacon; and yet, when you saw it played, were less revolted than you looked for; and I will still hope that the Admiral also is not so bad as you suppose.  There is one point, however, where I differ from you very frankly.  Religion is in the world; I do not think you are the man to deny the importance of its rôlé; and I have long decided not to leave it on one side in art.  The opposition of the Admiral and Mr. Pew is not, to my eyes, either horrible or irreverent; but it may be, and it probably is, very ill done:  what then?  This is a failure; better luck next time; more power to the elbow, more discretion, more wisdom in the design, and the old defeat becomes the scene of the new victory.  Concern yourself about no failure; they do not cost lives as in engineering; they are the pierres perdues of successes.  Fame is (truly) a vapour; do not think of it; if the writer means well and tries hard, no failure will injure him, whether with God or man.

I wish I could hear a brighter account of yourself; but I am inclined to acquit the Admiral of having a share in the responsibility.  My very heavy cold is, I hope, drawing off; and the change to this charming house in the forest will, I hope, complete my re-establishment. ­With love to all, believe me, your ever affectionate

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO W. E. HENLEY

  Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, November 11, 1884.

DEAR BOY, ­I have been nearly smashed altogether; fever and chills, with really very considerable suffering; and to my deep gloom and some fear about the future, work has had to stop.  There was no way out of it; yesterday and to-day nothing would come, it was a mere waste of tissue, productive of spoiled paper.

I hope it will not last long; for the bum-baily is panting at my rump, and when I turn a scared eye across my shoulder, I behold his talons quivering above my frock-coat tails.

Gosse has writ to offer me £40 for a Christmas number ghost story for the Pall Mall:  eight thousand words.  I have, with some conditions, accepted; I pray Heaven I may be able to do it.  But I am not sure that my incapacity to work is wholly due to illness; I believe the morphine I have been taking for my bray may have a hand in it.  It moderates the bray, but, I think, sews up the donkey.

I think my wife is a little better.  If only I could get in trim, and get this work done, I should be quite chipper.

     R. L. S.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

   The two next letters, on the same subject, are written in the styles
   and characters of the two Edinburgh ex-elders, Johnstone (or Johnson)
   and Thomson alternately.

     Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth, November 11 .

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­I am in my new house, thus proudly styled, as you perceive; but the deevil a tower ava’ can be perceived (except out of window); this is not as it should be; one might have hoped, at least, a turret.  We are all vilely unwell.  I put in the dark watches imitating a donkey with some success, but little pleasure; and in the afternoon I indulge in a smart fever, accompanied by aches and shivers.  There is thus little monotony to be deplored.  I at least am a regular invalid; I would scorn to bray in the afternoon; I would indignantly refuse the proposal to fever in the night.  What is bred in the bone will come out, sir, in the flesh; and the same spirit that prompted me to date my letter regulates the hour and character of my attacks. ­I am, sir, yours,

     THOMSON.

TO MISS FERRIER

The controversy here mentioned had been one in which Mr. Samuel Smiles and others had taken part, concerning the rival claims of Robert Stevenson, the grandfather of R. L. S., and John Rennie to have been the chief engineers of the Bell Rock Lighthouse (see A Family of Engineers, chap. iii.).

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, No, 1884.

MY DEAR COGGIE, ­Many thanks for the two photos which now decorate my room.  I was particularly glad to have the Bell Rock.  I wonder if you saw me plunge, lance in rest, into a controversy thereanent?  It was a very one-sided affair.  The man I attacked cried “Boo-hoo!” and referred me to his big brother.  And the big brother refused to move.  So I slept upon the field of battle, paraded, sang Te Deum, and came home after a review rather than a campaign.

Please tell Campbell I got his letter.  The Wild Woman of the West has been much amiss and complaining sorely.  I hope nothing more serious is wrong with her than just my ill-health, and consequent anxiety and labour; but the deuce of it is, that the cause continues.  I am about knocked out of time now:  a miserable, snuffling, shivering, fever-stricken, nightmare-ridden, knee-jottering, hoast-hoast-hoasting shadow and remains of man.  But we’ll no gie ower jist yet a bittie.  We’ve seen waur; and dod, mem, it’s my belief that we’ll see better.  I dinna ken ’at I’ve muckle mair to say to ye, or, indeed, onything; but jist here’s guid-fallowship, guid health, and the wale o’ guid fortune to your bonny sel’; and my respecs to the Perfessor and his wife, and the Prinshiple, an’ the Bell Rock, an’ ony ither public chara’ters that I’m acquaunt wi’.

     R. L. S.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

     [Bournemouth, November 13, 1884.]

MY DEAR THOMSON, ­It’s a maist remarkable fac’, but nae shüner had I written yon braggin’, blawin’ letter aboot ma business habits, when bang! that very day, ma hoast begude in the aifternune.  It is really remaurkable; it’s providenshle, I believe.  The ink wasnae fair dry, the words werenae weel ooten ma mouth, when bang, I got the lee.  The mair ye think o’t, Thomson, the less ye’ll like the looks o’t.  Proavidence (I’m no’ sayin’) is all verrà weel in its place; but if Proavidence has nae mainners, wha’s to learn’t?  Proavidence is a fine thing, but hoo would you like Proavidence to keep your till for ye?  The richt place for Proavidence is in the kirk; it has naething to do wi’ private correspondence between twa gentlemen, nor freendly cracks, nor a wee bit word of sculduddery ahint the door, nor, in shoart, wi’ ony hole-and-corner wark, what I would call.  I’m pairfec’ly willin’ to meet in wi’ Proavidence, I’ll be prood to meet in wi’ him, when my time’s come and I cannae dae nae better; but if he’s to come skulking aboot my stair-fit, damned, I micht as weel be deid for a’ the comfort I’ll can get in life.  Cannae he no be made to understand that it’s beneath him?  Gosh, if I was in his business, I wouldnae steir my heid for a plain, auld ex-elder that, tak him the way he taks himsel’, ’s just aboot as honest as he can weel afford, an’ but for a wheen auld scandals, near forgotten noo, is a pairfec’ly respectable and thoroughly decent man.  Or if I fashed wi’ him ava’, it wad be kind o’ handsome like; a pun’-note under his stair door, or a bottle o’ auld, blended malt to his bit marnin’, as a teshtymonial like yon ye ken sae weel aboot, but mair successfu’.

Dear Thomson, have I ony money?  If I have, send it, for the loard’s sake.

     JOHNSTONE.

TO W. E. HENLEY

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, No, 1884.

MY DEAR BOY, ­A thousand thanks for the Molière.  I have already read, in this noble presentment, La Comtesse d’Escarbaguas, Le Malade Imaginaire, and a part of Les Femmes Savantes; I say, Poquelin took damned good care of himself:  Argan and Arysule, what parts!  Many thanks also for John Silver’s pistol; I recognise it; that was the one he gave Jim Hawkins at the mouth of the pit; I shall get a plate put upon it to that effect.

My birthday was a great success; I was better in health; I got delightful presents; I received the definite commission from the P.M.G., and began to write the tale; and in the evening Bob arrived, a simple seraph.  We have known each other ten years; and here we are, too, like the pair that met in the infirmary:  why can we not mellow into kindness and sweetness like Bob?  What is the reason?  Does nature, even in my octogenarian carcase, run too strong that I must be still a bawler and a brawler and a treader upon corns?  You, at least, have achieved the miracle of embellishing your personal appearance to that point that, unless your mother is a woman of even more perspicacity than I suppose, it is morally impossible that she can recognise you.  When I saw you ten years ago, you looked rough and ­kind of stigmatised, a look of an embittered political shoemaker; where is it now?  You now come waltzing around like some light-hearted monarch; essentially jovial, essentially royal; radiant of smiles.  And in the meanwhile, by a complementary process, I turn into a kind of hunchback with white hair!  The devil.

Well, let us be thankful for our mercies; in these ten years what a change from the cell in the hospital, and the two sick boys in the next bed, to the influence, the recognition, the liberty, and the happiness of to-day!  Well, well; fortune is not so blind as people say; you dreed a good long weird; but you have got into a fine green paddock now to kick your heels in.  And I, too, what a difference; what a difference in my work, in my situation, and unfortunately, also in my health!  But one need not complain of a pebble in the shoe, when by mere justice one should rot in a dungeon.

Many thanks to both of you; long life to our friendship, and that means, I do most firmly believe, to these clay continents on which we fly our colours; good luck to one and all, and may God continue to be merciful. ­Your old and warm friend,

     R. L. S.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

Stevenson had been unable to finish for the Pall Mall Christmas number the tale he had first intended; had tried the publishers with Markheim (afterwards printed in the collection called Merry Men), which proved too short; had then furbished up as well as he could a tale drafted in the Pitlochry days, The Body Snatcher, which was advertised in the streets of London by sandwich-men carrying posters so horrific that they were suppressed, if I remember right, by the police.  Stevenson rightly thought the tale not up to his best mark, and would not take the full payment which had been bargained for.  His correspondent was just about to start on a tour to the United States.

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, No, 1884.

MY DEAR GOSSE, ­This Mr. Morley of yours is a most desperate fellow.  He has sent me (for my opinion) the most truculent advertisement I ever saw, in which the white hairs of Gladstone are dragged round Troy behind my chariot wheels.  What can I say?  I say nothing to him; and to you, I content myself with remarking that he seems a desperate fellow.

All luck to you on your American adventure; may you find health, wealth, and entertainment!  If you see, as you likely will, Frank R. Stockton, pray greet him from me in words to this effect: ­

  My Stockton if I failed to like,
    It were a sheer depravity,
  For I went down with the Thomas Hyke
    And up with the Negative Gravity!

I adore these tales.

I hear flourishing accounts of your success at Cambridge, so you leave with a good omen.  Remember me to green corn if it is in season; if not, you had better hang yourself on a sour apple tree, for your voyage has been lost. ­Yours affectionately,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO AUSTIN DOBSON

   Written in acknowledgment of the gift of a desk.

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth [December 1884 ?].

DEAR DOBSON, ­Set down my delay to your own fault; I wished to acknowledge such a gift from you in some of my inapt and slovenly rhymes; but you should have sent me your pen and not your desk.  The verses stand up to the axles in a miry cross-road, whence the coursers of the sun shall never draw them; hence I am constrained to this uncourtliness, that I must appear before one of the kings of that country of rhyme without my singing robes.  For less than this, if we may trust the book of Esther, favourites have tasted death; but I conceive the kingdom of the Muses mildlier mannered; and in particular that county which you administer and which I seem to see as a half-suburban land; a land of hollyhocks and country houses; a land where at night, in thorny and sequestered bypaths, you will meet masqueraders going to a ball in their sedans, and the rector steering homeward by the light of his lantern; a land of the windmill, and the west wind, and the flowering hawthorn with a little scented letter in the hollow of its trunk, and the kites flying over all in the season of kites, and the far away blue spires of a cathedral city.

Will you forgive me, then, for my delay and accept my thanks not only for your present, but for the letter which followed it, and which perhaps I more particularly value, and believe me to be, with much admiration, yours very truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO W. E. HENLEY

Stevenson and his wife were still busy on More New Arabian Nights (the romance of the Great North Road having been begun and postponed).  The question here touched is, to what publishers should they be offered.

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, December 1884.

DEAR LAD, ­For Cassell, I thought the G.N.R. (not railway this time) was the motto.  What are Cassells to do with this eccentric mass of blague and seriousness?  Their poor auld pows will a’ turn white as snaw, man.  They would skriegh with horror.  You see, the lot of tales is now coming to a kind of bearing.  They are being quite rehandled; all the three intercalary narratives have been condemned and are being replaced ­two by picturesque and highly romantic adventures; one by a comic tale of character; and the thing as it goes together so far, is, I do think, singularly varied and vivid, coming near to laughter and touching tears.

Will Cassell stand it?  No.

Et de deux.

I vote for the syndicate, and to give Cassell the North Road when done. Et sic subscr.

     R. L. S.

My health is better.  I never sleep, to be sure; Cawdor hath butchered sleep; and I am twinged a bit by aches and rheumatism; but I get my five to seven hours of work; and if that is not health, it is the nearest I am like to have.

TO HENRY JAMES

The following to Mr. Henry James refers to the essay of R. L. S. called A Humble Remonstrance, which had just appeared in Longman’s Magazine.  Mr. James had written holding out the prospect of a continuance of the friendly controversy which had thus been opened up between them on the aims and qualities of fiction.

     Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth, December 8, 1884.

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES, ­This is a very brave hearing from more points than one.  The first point is that there is a hope of a sequel.  For this I laboured.  Seriously, from the dearth of information and thoughtful interest in the art of literature, those who try to practise it with any deliberate purpose run the risk of finding no fit audience.  People suppose it is “the stuff” that interests them; they think, for instance, that the prodigious fine thoughts and sentiments in Shakespeare impress by their own weight, not understanding that the unpolished diamond is but a stone.  They think that striking situations, or good dialogue, are got by studying life; they will not rise to understand that they are prepared by deliberate artifice and set off by painful suppressions.  Now, I want the whole thing well ventilated, for my own education and the public’s; and I beg you to look as quick as you can, to follow me up with every circumstance of defeat where we differ, and (to prevent the flouting of the laity) to emphasise the points where we agree.  I trust your paper will show me the way to a rejoinder; and that rejoinder I shall hope to make with so much art as to woo or drive you from your threatened silence.  I would not ask better than to pass my life in beating out this quarter of corn with such a seconder as yourself.

Point the second ­I am rejoiced indeed to hear you speak so kindly of my work; rejoiced and surprised.  I seem to myself a very rude, left-handed countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by a man so accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you.  You will happily never have cause to understand the despair with which a writer like myself considers (say) the park scene in Lady Barberina.  Every touch surprises me by its intangible precision; and the effect when done, as light as syllabub, as distinct as a picture, fills me with envy.  Each man among us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine; but when we come to speak of performance, I recognise myself, compared with you, to be a lout and slouch of the first water.

Where we differ, both as to the design of stories and the delineation of character, I begin to lament.  Of course, I am not so dull as to ask you to desert your walk; but could you not, in one novel, to oblige a sincere admirer, and to enrich his shelves with a beloved volume, could you not, and might you not, cast your characters in a mould a little more abstract and academic (dear Mrs. Pennyman had already, among your other work, a taste of what I mean), and pitch the incidents, I do not say in any stronger, but in a slightly more emphatic key ­as it were an episode from one of the old (so-called) novels of adventure?  I fear you will not; and I suppose I must sighingly admit you to be right.  And yet, when I see, as it were, a book of Tom Jones handled with your exquisite precision and shot through with those side-lights of reflection in which you excel, I relinquish the dear vision with regret.  Think upon it.

As you know, I belong to that besotted class of man, the invalid:  this puts me to a stand in the way of visits.  But it is possible that some day you may feel that a day near the sea and among pinewoods would be a pleasant change from town.  If so, please let us know; and my wife and I will be delighted to put you up, and give you what we can to eat and drink (I have a fair bottle of claret). ­On the back of which, believe me, yours sincerely,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. ­I reopen this to say that I have re-read my paper, and cannot think I have at all succeeded in being either veracious or polite.  I knew, of course, that I took your paper merely as a pin to hang my own remarks upon; but, alas! what a thing is any paper!  What fine remarks can you not hang on mine!  How I have sinned against proportion, and with every effort to the contrary, against the merest rudiments of courtesy to you!  You are indeed a very acute reader to have divined the real attitude of my mind; and I can only conclude, not without closed eyes and shrinking shoulders, in the well-worn words,

  Lay on, Macduff!

TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, December 9, 1884.

MY DEAR PEOPLE, ­The dreadful tragedy of the Pall Mall has come to a happy but ludicrous ending:  I am to keep the money, the tale writ for them is to be buried certain fathoms deep, and they are to flash out before the world with our old friend of Kinnaird, The Body Snatcher.  When you come, please to bring ­

  (1) My Montaigne, or, at least, the two last volumes.

  (2) My Milton in the three vols. in green.

  (3) The Shakespeare that Babington sent me for a wedding-gift.

  (4) Hazlitt’s Table Talk and Plain Speaker.

If you care to get a box of books from Douglas and Foulis, let them be solid. Croker Papers, Correspondence of Napoleon, History of Henry IV., Lang’s Folk Lore, would be my desires.

I had a charming letter from Henry James about my Longman paper.  I did not understand queries about the verses; the pictures to the Seagull I thought charming; those to the second have left me with a pain in my poor belly and a swimming in the head.

About money, I am afloat and no more, and I warn you, unless I have great luck, I shall have to fall upon you at the New Year like a hundredweight of bricks.  Doctor, rent, chemist, are all threatening; sickness has bitterly delayed my work; and unless, as I say, I have the mischief’s luck, I shall completely break down. Verbum sapientibus. I do not live cheaply, and I question if I ever shall; but if only I had a halfpenny worth of health, I could now easily suffice.  The last breakdown of my head is what makes this bankruptcy probable.

Fanny is still out of sorts; Bogue better; self fair, but a stranger to the blessings of sleep. ­Ever affectionate son,

     R. L. S.

TO W. E. HENLEY

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth [December 1884].

DEAR LAD, ­I have made up my mind about the P. M. G., and send you a copy, which please keep or return.  As for not giving a reduction, what are we?  Are we artists or city men?  Why do we sneer at stockbrokers?  O nary; I will not take the £40.  I took that as a fair price for my best work; I was not able to produce my best; and I will be damned if I steal with my eyes open. Sufficit. This is my lookout.  As for the paper being rich, certainly it is; but I am honourable.  It is no more above me in money than the poor slaveys and cads from whom I look for honesty are below me.  Am I Pepys, that because I can find the countenance of “some of our ablest merchants,” that because ­and ­pour forth languid twaddle and get paid for it, I, too, should “cheerfully continue to steal”?  I am not Pepys.  I do not live much to God and honour; but I will not wilfully turn my back on both.  I am, like all the rest of us, falling ever lower from the bright ideas I began with, falling into greed, into idleness, into middle-aged and slippered fireside cowardice; but is it you, my bold blade, that I hear crying this sordid and rank twaddle in my ear?  Preaching the dankest Grundyism and upholding the rank customs of our trade ­you who are so cruel hard upon the customs of the publishers?  O man, look at the Beam in our own Eyes; and whatever else you do, do not plead Satan’s cause, or plead it for all; either embrace the bad, or respect the good when you see a poor devil trying for it.  If this is the honesty of authors ­to take what you can get and console yourself because publishers are rich ­take my name from the rolls of that association.  ’Tis a caucus of weaker thieves, jealous of the stronger. ­Ever yours,

     THE ROARING R. L. S.

You will see from the enclosed that I have stuck to what I think my dues pretty tightly in spite of this flourish:  these are my words for a poor ten-pound note!

TO MISS FERRIER

   This refers to the death of Sir Alexander Grant, the distinguished
   Aristotelian scholar and Principal of Edinburgh University.

     [Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, De.]

MY DEAR COGGIE, ­We are very much distressed to hear of this which has befallen your family.  As for Sir Alexander, I can but speak from my own feelings:  he survived to finish his book and to conduct, with such a great success, the tercentenary.  Ah, how many die just upon the threshold!  Had he died a year ago, how great a disappointment!  But all this is nothing to the survivors.  Do please, as soon as you are able, let us know how it goes and how it is likely to go with the family; and believe that both my wife and I are most anxious to have good news, or the best possible.  My poor Coggie, I know very well how you must feel; you are passing a bad time.

Our news must seem very impertinent.  We have both been ill; I, pretty bad, my wife, pretty well down; but I, at least, am better.  The Bogue, who is let out every night for half an hour’s yapping, is anchored in the moonlight just before the door, and, under the belief that he is watchdog at a lone farm beleaguered by moss-troopers, is simply raising Cain.

I can add nothing more, but just that we wish to hear as soon as you have nothing else to do ­not to hurry, of course, ­if it takes three months, no matter ­but bear us in mind.

     R. L. S.

TO W. E. HENLEY

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth [Winter 1884].

MY DEAR LAD, ­Here was I in bed; not writing, not hearing, and finding myself gently and agreeably ill used; and behold I learn you are bad yourself.  Get your wife to send us a word how you are.  I am better decidedly.  Bogue got his Christmas card, and behaved well for three days after.  It may interest the cynical to learn that I started my last hemorrhage by too sedulous attentions to my dear Bogue.  The stick was broken; and that night Bogue, who was attracted by the extraordinary aching of his bones, and is always inclined to a serious view of his own ailments, announced with his customary pomp that he was dying.  In this case, however, it was not the dog that died. (He had tried to bite his mother’s ankles.) I have written a long and peculiarly solemn paper on the technical elements of style.  It is path-breaking and epoch-making; but I do not think the public will be readily convoked to its perusal.  Did I tell you that S. C. had risen to the paper on James?  At last!  O but I was pleased; he’s (like Johnnie) been lang, lang o’ comin’, but here he is.  He will not object to my future manoeuvres in the same field, as he has to my former.  All the family are here; my father better than I have seen him these two years; my mother the same as ever.  I do trust you are better, and I am yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO H. A. JONES

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, De, 1884.

DEAR SIR, ­I am so accustomed to hear nonsense spoken about all the arts, and the drama in particular, that I cannot refrain from saying “Thank you” for your paper.  In my answer to Mr. James, in the December Longman, you may see that I have merely touched, I think in a parenthesis, on the drama; but I believe enough was said to indicate our agreement in essentials.

Wishing you power and health to further enunciate and to act upon these principles, believe me, dear sir, yours truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

Stevenson had begun with great eagerness to prepare material for a volume on the Duke of Wellington for the series of English Worthies published by Messrs. Longman and edited by Mr. Andrew Lang, but beyond preparation the scheme never went.

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, Ja, 1885.

DEAR S. C., ­I am on my feet again, and getting on my boots to do the Iron Duke.  Conceive my glee:  I have refused the £100, and am to get some sort of royalty, not yet decided, instead.  ’Tis for Longman’s English Worthies, edited by A. Lang.  Aw haw, haw!

Now, look here, could you get me a loan of the Despatches, or is that a dream?  I should have to mark passages I fear, and certainly note pages on the fly.  If you think it a dream, will Bain get me a second-hand copy, or who would?  The sooner, and cheaper, I can get it the better.  If there is anything in your weird library that bears on either the man or the period, put it in a mortar and fire it here instanter; I shall catch.  I shall want, of course, an infinity of books:  among which, any lives there may be; a life of the Marquis Marmont (the Maréchal), Marmont’s Memoirs, Greville’s Memoirs, Peel’s Memoirs, Napier, that blind man’s history of England you once lent me, Hamley’s Waterloo; can you get me any of these?  Thiers, idle Thiers also.  Can you help a man getting into his boots for such a huge campaign?  How are you?  A Good New Year to you.  I mean to have a good one, but on whose funds I cannot fancy:  not mine leastways, as I am a mere derelict and drift beam-on to bankruptcy.

For God’s sake, remember the man who set out for to conquer Arthur Wellesley, with a broken bellows and an empty pocket. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. STEVENSON.

TO THOMAS STEVENSON

Stevenson had been asked by his father to look over the proofs of a paper which the latter was about to read, as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, “On the Principal Causes of Silting in Estuaries,” in connection with the Manchester Ship Canal Scheme.

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, 14th January 1885.

MY DEAR FATHER, ­I am glad you like the changes.  I own I was pleased with my hand’s darg; you may observe, I have corrected several errors which (you may tell Mr. Dick) he had allowed to pass his eagle eye; I wish there may be none in mine; at least, the order is better.  The second title, “Some New Engineering Questions involved in the M. S. C. Scheme of last Session of P.,” likes me the best.  I think it a very good paper; and I am vain enough to think I have materially helped to polish the diamond.  I ended by feeling quite proud of the paper, as if it had been mine; the next time you have as good a one, I will overhaul it for the wages of feeling as clever as I did when I had managed to understand and helped to set it clear.  I wonder if I anywhere misapprehended you?  I rather think not at the last; at the first shot I know I missed a point or two.  Some of what may appear to you to be wanton changes, a little study will show to be necessary.

Yes, Carlyle was ashamed of himself as few men have been; and let all carpers look at what he did.  He prepared all these papers for publication with his own hand; all his wife’s complaints, all the evidence of his own misconduct:  who else would have done so much?  Is repentance, which God accepts, to have no avail with men? nor even with the dead?  I have heard too much against the thrawn, discomfortable dog:  dead he is, and we may be glad of it; but he was a better man than most of us, no less patently than he was a worse.  To fill the world with whining is against all my views:  I do not like impiety.  But ­but ­there are two sides to all things, and the old scalded baby had his noble side. ­Ever affectionate son,

     R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN LETTER I

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, January 1885.

DEAR S. C., ­I have addressed a letter to the G. O. M. à propos of Wellington; and I became aware, you will be interested to hear, of an overwhelming respect for the old gentleman.  I can blaguer his failures; but when you actually address him, and bring the two statures and records to confrontation, dismay is the result.  By mere continuance of years, he must impose; the man who helped to rule England before I was conceived, strikes me with a new sense of greatness and antiquity, when I must actually beard him with the cold forms of correspondence.  I shied at the necessity of calling him plain “Sir”!  Had he been “My lord,” I had been happier; no, I am no equalitarian.  Honour to whom honour is due; and if to none, why, then, honour to the old!

These, O Slade Professor, are my unvarnished sentiments:  I was a little surprised to find them so extreme, and therefore I communicate the fact.

Belabour thy brains, as to whom it would be well to question.  I have a small space; I wish to make a popular book, nowhere obscure, nowhere, if it can be helped, unhuman.  It seems to me the most hopeful plan to tell the tale, so far as may be, by anecdote.  He did not die till so recently, there must be hundreds who remember him, and thousands who have still ungarnered stories.  Dear man, to the breach!  Up, soldier of the iron dook, up, Slades, and at ’em! (which, conclusively, he did not say:  the at ’em-ic theory is to be dismissed).  You know piles of fellows who must reek with matter; help! help!  I am going to try Happy-and-Glorious-long-to-reign-over-us.  H.M. must remember things:  and it is my belief, if my letter could be discreetly introduced, she would like to tell them.  So I jest, when I don’t address my mind to it:  when I do, shall I be smit louting to my knee, as before the G. O. M.?  Problème! ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN LETTER II

In the two following letters are expressed some of the distress and bitterness with which, in common with most Englishmen, Stevenson felt the circumstances of Gordon’s abandonment in the Soudan and the failure of the belated attempt to rescue him.  The advice to go on with “my book” refers, if I remember right, to some scheme for the republication in book form of stray magazine papers of mine of a more or less personal or biographical nature.

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, February 1885.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­You are indeed a backward correspondent, and much may be said against you.  But in this weather, and O dear! in this political scene of degradation, much must be forgiven.  I fear England is dead of Burgessry, and only walks about galvanised.  I do not love to think of my countrymen these days; nor to remember myself.  Why was I silent?  I feel I have no right to blame any one; but I won’t write to the G. O. M. I do really not see my way to any form of signature, unless “your fellow criminal in the eyes of God,” which might disquiet the proprieties.

About your book, I have always said:  go on.  The drawing of character is a different thing from publishing the details of a private career.  No one objects to the first, or should object, if his name be not put upon it; at the other, I draw the line.  In a preface, if you chose, you might distinguish; it is, besides, a thing for which you are eminently well equipped, and which you would do with taste and incision.  I long to see the book.  People like themselves (to explain a little more); no one likes his life, which is a misbegotten issue, and a tale of failure.  To see these failures either touched upon, or coasted, to get the idea of a spying eye and blabbing tongue about the house, is to lose all privacy in life.  To see that thing, which we do love, our character, set forth, is ever gratifying.  See how my Talk and Talkers went; every one liked his own portrait, and shrieked about other people’s; so it will be with yours.  If you are the least true to the essential, the sitter will be pleased; very likely not his friends, and that from various motives.

     R. L. S.

When will your holiday be?  I sent your letter to my wife, and forget.  Keep us in mind, and I hope we shall be able to receive you.

TO J. A. SYMONDS

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, February 1885.

MY DEAR SYMONDS, ­Yes we have both been very neglectful.  I had horrid luck, catching two thundering influenzas in August and November.  I recovered from the last with difficulty, but have come through this blustering winter with some general success; in the house, up and down.  My wife, however, has been painfully upset by my health.  Last year, of course, was cruelly trying to her nerves; Nice and Hyères are bad experiences; and though she is not ill, the doctor tells me that prolonged anxiety may do her a real mischief.

I feel a little old and fagged, and chary of speech, and not very sure of spirit in my work; but considering what a year I have passed, and how I have twice sat on Charon’s pierhead, I am surprising.

My father has presented us with a very pretty home in this place, into which we hope to move by May.  My Child’s Verses come out next week. Otto begins to appear in April; More New Arabian Nights as soon as possible.  Moreover, I am neck deep in Wellington; also a story on the stocks, The Great North Road.  O, I am busy!  Lloyd is at college in Edinburgh.  That is, I think, all that can be said by way of news.

Have you read Huckleberry Finn?  It contains many excellent things; above all, the whole story of a healthy boy’s dealings with his conscience, incredibly well done.

My own conscience is badly seared; a want of piety; yet I pray for it, tacitly, every day; believing it, after courage, the only gift worth having; and its want, in a man of any claims to honour, quite unpardonable.  The tone of your letter seemed to me very sound.  In these dark days of public dishonour, I do not know that one can do better than carry our private trials piously.  What a picture is this of a nation!  No man that I can see, on any side or party, seems to have the least sense of our ineffable shame:  the desertion of the garrisons.  I tell my little parable that Germany took England, and then there was an Indian Mutiny, and Bismarck said:  “Quite right:  let Delhi and Calcutta and Bombay fall; and let the women and children be treated Sepoy fashion,” and people say, “O, but that is very different!” And then I wish I were dead.  Millais (I hear) was painting Gladstone when the news came of Gordon’s death; Millais was much affected, and Gladstone said, “Why? It is the man’s own temerity!” Voilà lé Bourgeois! lé voilà nu!  But why should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I have held my peace?  Why did I hold my peace?  Because I am a sceptic:  i.e. a Bourgeois.  We believe in nothing, Symonds; you don’t, and I don’t; and these are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour.  I will first try to take the beam out of my own eye, trusting that even private effort somehow betters and braces the general atmosphere.  See, for example, if England has shown (I put it hypothetically) one spark of manly sensibility, they have been shamed into it by the spectacle of Gordon.  Police-Officer Cole is the only man that I see to admire.  I dedicate my New Arabs to him and Cox, in default of other great public characters. ­Yours ever most affectionately,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

   The following refers to an edition of Gray, with notes and a short
   prefatory Life by Mr. Gosse; and to the publication of the Child’s
   Garden of Verses.

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, March 12, 1885.

MY DEAR GOSSE, ­I was indeed much exercised how I could be worked into Gray; and lo! when I saw it, the passage seemed to have been written with a single eye to elucidate the ­worst? ­well, not a very good poem of Gray’s.  Your little life is excellent, clean, neat, efficient.  I have read many of your notes, too, with pleasure.  Your connection with Gray was a happy circumstance; it was a suitable conjunction.

I did not answer your letter from the States, for what was I to say?  I liked getting it and reading it; I was rather flattered that you wrote it to me; and then I’ll tell you what I did ­I put it in the fire.  Why?  Well, just because it was very natural and expansive; and thinks I to myself, if I die one of these fine nights, this is just the letter that Gosse would not wish to go into the hands of third parties.  Was I well inspired?  And I did not answer it because you were in your high places, sailing with supreme dominion, and seeing life in a particular glory; and I was peddling in a corner, confined to the house, overwhelmed with necessary work, which I was not always doing well, and, in the very mild form in which the disease approaches me, touched with a sort of bustling cynicism.  Why throw cold water?  How ape your agreeable frame of mind?  In short, I held my tongue.

I have now published on 101 small pages The Complete Proof of Mr. R. L. Stevenson’s Incapacity to Write Verse, in a series of graduated examples with table of contents.  I think I shall issue a companion volume of exercises:  “Analyse this poem.  Collect and comminate the ugly words.  Distinguish and condemn the chevilles.  State Mr. Stevenson’s faults of taste in regard to the measure.  What reasons can you gather from this example for your belief that Mr. S. is unable to write any other measure?”

They look ghastly in the cold light of print; but there is something nice in the little ragged regiment for all; the blackguards seem to me to smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my ears freshly; not song, if you will, but a child’s voice.

I was glad you enjoyed your visit to the States.  Most Englishmen go there with a confirmed design of patronage, as they go to France for that matter; and patronage will not pay.  Besides, in this year of ­grace, said I? ­of disgrace, who should creep so low as an Englishman?  “It is not to be thought of that the flood” ­ah, Wordsworth, you would change your note were you alive to-day!

I am now a beastly householder, but have not yet entered on my domain.  When I do, the social revolution will probably cast me back upon my dung heap.  There is a person called Hyndman whose eye is on me; his step is beHynd me as I go.  I shall call my house Skerryvore when I get it:  SKERRYVORE:  c’est bon pour la poéshie.  I will conclude with my favourite sentiment:  “The world is too much with me.”

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
       The Hermit of Skerryvore,

Author of “John Vane Tempest:  a Romance,” “Herbert and Henrietta:  or the Nemesis of Sentiment,” “The Life and Adventures of Colonel Bludyer Fortescue,” “Happy Homes and Hairy Faces,” “A Pound of Feathers and a Pound of Lead,” part author of “Minn’s Complete Capricious Correspondent:  a Manual of Natty, Natural, and Knowing Letters,” and editor of the “Poetical Remains of Samuel Burt Crabbe, known as the melodious Bottle-Holder.”

  Uniform with the above: 

“The Life and Remains of the Reverend Jacob Degray Squah,” author of “Heave-yo for the New Jerusalem,” “A Box of Candles; or the Patent Spiritual Safety Match,” and “A Day with the Heavenly Harriers.”

TO W. H. LOW

   The “dedication” referred to was that of a forthcoming illustrated
   edition of Keats’s Lamia.

     Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, March 13, 1885.

MY DEAR LOW, ­Your success has been immense.  I wish your letter had come two days ago:  Otto, alas! has been disposed of a good while ago; but it was only day before yesterday that I settled the new volume of Arabs.  However, for the future, you and the sons of the deified Scribner are the men for me.  Really they have behaved most handsomely.  I cannot lay my hand on the papers, or I would tell you exactly how it compares with my English bargain; but it compares well.  Ah, if we had that copyright, I do believe it would go far to make me solvent, ill-health and all.

I wrote you a letter to the Rembrandt, in which I stated my views about the dedication in a very brief form.  It will give me sincere pleasure, and will make the second dedication I have received, the other being from John Addington Symonds.  It is a compliment I value much; I don’t know any that I should prefer.

I am glad to hear you have windows to do; that is a fine business, I think; but, alas! the glass is so bad nowadays; realism invading even that, as well as the huge inferiority of our technical resource corrupting every tint.  Still, anything that keeps a man to decoration is, in this age, good for the artist’s spirit.

By the way, have you seen James and me on the novel?  James, I think in the August or September ­R.  L. S. in the December Longman.  I own I think the école bête, of which I am the champion, has the whip hand of the argument; but as James is to make a rejoinder, I must not boast.  Anyway the controversy is amusing to see.  I was terribly tied down to space, which has made the end congested and dull.  I shall see if I can afford to send you the April Contemporary ­but I dare say you see it anyway ­as it will contain a paper of mine on style, a sort of continuation of old arguments on art in which you have wagged a most effective tongue.  It is a sort of start upon my Treatise on the Art of Literature:  a small, arid book that shall some day appear.

With every good wish from me and mine (should I not say “she and hers"?) to you and yours, believe me yours ever,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO P.G.HAMERTON

The work of his correspondent’s which R. L. S. notices in the following is the sumptuous volume Landscape:  Seeley & Co., 1885.  The passages specially referred to will be found pp. 46-62 of that work.

     Bournemouth, March 16, 1885.

MY DEAR HAMERTON, ­Various things have been reminding me of my misconduct:  First, Swan’s application for your address; second, a sight of the sheets of your Landscape book; and last, your note to Swan, which he was so kind as to forward.  I trust you will never suppose me to be guilty of anything more serious than an idleness, partially excusable.  My ill-health makes my rate of life heavier than I can well meet, and yet stops me from earning more.  My conscience, sometimes perhaps too easily stifled, but still (for my time of life and the public manners of the age) fairly well alive, forces me to perpetual and almost endless transcriptions.  On the back of all this, my correspondence hangs like a thundercloud; and just when I think I am getting through my troubles, crack, down goes my health, I have a long, costly sickness, and begin the world again.  It is fortunate for me I have a father, or I should long ago have died; but the opportunity of the aid makes the necessity none the more welcome.  My father has presented me with a beautiful house here ­or so I believe, for I have not yet seen it, being a cage bird but for nocturnal sorties in the garden.  I hope we shall soon move into it, and I tell myself that some day perhaps we may have the pleasure of seeing you as our guest.  I trust at least that you will take me as I am, a thoroughly bad correspondent, and a man, a hater, indeed, of rudeness in others, but too often rude in all unconsciousness himself; and that you will never cease to believe the sincere sympathy and admiration that I feel for you and for your work.

About the Landscape, which I had a glimpse of while a friend of mine was preparing a review, I was greatly interested, and could write and wrangle for a year on every page; one passage particularly delighted me, the part about Ulysses ­jolly.  Then, you know, that is just what I fear I have come to think landscape ought to be in literature; so there we should be at odds.  Or perhaps not so much as I suppose, as Montaigne says it is a pot with two handles, and I own I am wedded to the technical handle, which (I likewise own and freely) you do well to keep for a mistress.  I should much like to talk with you about some other points; it is only in talk that one gets to understand.  Your delightful Wordsworth trap I have tried on two hardened Wordsworthians, not that I am not one myself.  By covering up the context, and asking them to guess what the passage was, both (and both are very clever people, one a writer, one a painter) pronounced it a guide-book.  “Do you think it an unusually good guide-book?” I asked, and both said, “No, not at all!” Their grimace was a picture when I showed the original.

I trust your health and that of Mrs. Hamerton keep better; your last account was a poor one.  I was unable to make out the visit I had hoped, as (I do not know if you heard of it) I had a very violent and dangerous hemorrhage last spring.  I am almost glad to have seen death so close with all my wits about me, and not in the customary lassitude and disenchantment of disease.  Even thus clearly beheld I find him not so terrible as we suppose.  But, indeed, with the passing of years, the decay of strength, the loss of all my old active and pleasant habits, there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent and pacifying compensation.  I trust, if your health continues to trouble you, you may find some of the same belief.  But perhaps my fine discovery is a piece of art, and belongs to a character cowardly, intolerant of certain feelings, and apt to self-deception.  I don’t think so, however; and when I feel what a weak and fallible vessel I was thrust into this hurly-burly, and with what marvellous kindness the wind has been tempered to my frailties, I think I should be a strange kind of ass to feel anything but gratitude.

I do not know why I should inflict this talk upon you; but when I summon the rebellious pen, he must go his own way; I am no Michael Scott, to rule the fiend of correspondence.  Most days he will none of me; and when he comes, it is to rape me where he will. ­Yours very sincerely,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO W. E. HENLEY LETTER I

Stevenson was by this time beginning to realise that work at play-writing in collaboration with Mr. Henley was doing much more to exhaust his strength than to replenish either of their purses, and Mr. Henley, who had built hopes of fame and fortune on their collaboration, was very unwilling to face the fact.

     [Bournemouth, March 1885.]

MY DEAR LAD, ­That is all right, and a good job.  About coming down, you cannot get into us for a while, as you may imagine; we are in desperate vortex, and everybody ’most dead.  I have been two days in bed with liver and slight bleeding.

Do you think you are right to send Macaire and the Admiral about?  Not a copy have I sent, nor (speaking for myself personally) do I want sent.  The reperusal of the Admiral, by the way, was a sore blow; eh, God, man, it is a low, black, dirty, blackguard, ragged piece:  vomitable in many parts ­simply vomitable.  Pew is in places a reproach to both art and man.  But of all that afterwards.  What I mean is that I believe in playing dark with second and third-rate work.  Macaire is a piece of job-work, hurriedly bockled; might have been worse, might have been better; happy-go-lucky; act it or-let-it-rot piece of business.  Not a thing, I think, to send in presentations.  Do not let us gober ourselves ­and, above all, not gober dam pot-boilers ­and p.b.’s with an obvious flaw and hole in them, such as is our unrealised Bertrand in this one.  But of this also, on a meeting.

I am not yet done with my proofs, I am sorry to say; so soon as I am, I must tackle Kidnapped seriously, or be content to have no bread, which you would scarcely recommend.  It is all I shall be able to do to wait for the Young Folk money, on which I’ll have to live as best I can till the book comes in.

Plays at that rate I do not think I can possibly look at before July; so let that be a guide to you in your views.  July, or August, or September, or thereabouts:  these must be our times, whichever we attack.  I think you had better suspend a visit till we can take you in and till I can speak.  It seems a considerable waste of money; above all, as just now I could not even offer you meals with my woman in such a state of overwork.  My father and mother have had to go to lodgings. ­Post.

     R. L. S.

TO W. E. HENLEY LETTER II

     [Bournemouth, March 1885.]

DEAR LAD, ­Much better, but rather unequal to do what I ought, a common complaint.  The change of weather much helped me, not too soon.

I have thought as well as I could of what you said; and I come unhesitatingly to the opinion that the stage is only a lottery, must not be regarded as a trade, and must never be preferred to drudgery.  If money comes from any play, let us regard it as a legacy, but never count upon it in our income for the year.  In other words, I must go on and drudge at Kidnapped, which I hate, and am unfit to do; and you will have to get some journalism somehow.  These are my cold and blighting sentiments.  It is bad enough to have to live by an art ­but to think to live by an art combined with commercial speculation ­that way madness lies.

Time is our only friend.  The Admiral, pulled simply in pieces and about half deleted, will act some day:  such is my opinion.  I can no more. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO WILLIAM ARCHER

An anonymous review of the Child’s Garden, appearing in March, gave R. L. S. so much pleasure that he wrote (in the four words, “Now who are you?”) to inquire the name of its writer, and learned that it was Mr. Archer; with whom he had hitherto had no acquaintance.  He thereupon entered into friendly correspondence with his critic.

     Bournemouth, March 29, 1885.

DEAR MR. ARCHER, ­Yes, I have heard of you and read some of your work; but I am bound in particular to thank you for the notice of my verses.  “There,” I said, throwing it over to the friend who was staying with me, “it’s worth writing a book to draw an article like that.”  Had you been as hard upon me as you were amiable, I try to tell myself I should have been no blinder to the merits of your notice.  For I saw there, to admire and to be very grateful for, a most sober, agile pen; an enviable touch; the marks of a reader, such as one imagines for one’s self in dreams, thoughtful, critical, and kind; and to put the top on this memorial column, a greater readiness to describe the author criticised than to display the talents of his censor.

I am a man blasé to injudicious praise (though I hope some of it may be judicious too), but I have to thank you for THE BEST CRITICISM I EVER HAD; and am therefore, dear Mr. Archer, the most grateful critickee now extant.

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. ­I congratulate you on living in the corner of all London that I like best. À propos, you are very right about my voluntary aversion from the painful sides of life.  My childhood was in reality a very mixed experience, full of fever, nightmare, insomnia, painful days and interminable nights; and I can speak with less authority of gardens than of that other “land of counterpane.”  But to what end should we renew these sorrows?  The sufferings of life may be handled by the very greatest in their hours of insight; it is of its pleasures that our common poems should be formed; these are the experiences that we should seek to recall or to provoke; and I say with Thoreau, “What right have I to complain, who have not ceased to wonder?” and, to add a rider of my own, who have no remedy to offer.

     R. L. S.

TO MR. AND MRS. JOSEPH PENNELL

   Acknowledging the dedication of an illustrated Canterbury
   Pilgrimage.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Summer 1885.]

DEAR SIR AND MADAM, ­This horrible delay must be forgiven me.  It was not caused by any want of gratitude; but by the desire to acknowledge the dedication more suitably (and to display my wit) in a copy of verses.  Well, now I give that up, and tell you in plain prose, that you have given me much pleasure by the dedication of your graceful book.

As I was writing the above, I received a visit from Lady Shelley, who mentioned to me that she was reading Mrs. Pennell’s Mary Wollstonecraft with pleasure.  It is odd how streams cross.  Mr. Pennell’s work I have, of course, long known and admired:  and I believe there was once some talk, on the part of Mr. Gilder, that we should work together; but the scheme fell through from my rapacity; and since then has been finally rendered impossible (or so I fear) by my health.

I should say that when I received the Pilgrimage, I was in a state (not at all common with me) of depression; and the pleasant testimony that my work had not all been in vain did much to set me up again.  You will therefore understand, late as is the hour, with what sincerity I am able to sign myself ­Gratefully yours,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

MR. AND MRS. PENNELL, ­I see I should explain that this is all in my own hand, I have not fobbed you off with an amanuensis; but as I have two handwritings (both equally bad in these days) I might lead you to think so.

     R. L. S.

TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN LETTER I

   On the death of Professor Fleeming Jenkin, who in Stevenson’s early
   student days at Edinburgh had been both the warmest and the wisest of
   his elder friends (died June 12, 1885).

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1885.]

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN, ­You know how much and for how long I have loved, respected, and admired him; I am only able to feel a little with you.  But I know how he would have wished us to feel.  I never knew a better man, nor one to me more lovable; we shall all feel the loss more greatly as time goes on.  It scarce seems life to me; what must it be to you?  Yet one of the last things that he said to me was, that from all these sad bereavements of yours he had learned only more than ever to feel the goodness and what we, in our feebleness, call the support of God; he had been ripening so much ­to other eyes than ours, we must suppose he was ripe, and try to feel it.  I feel it is better not to say much more.  It will be to me a great pride to write a notice of him:  the last I can now do.  What more in any way I can do for you, please to think and let me know.  For his sake and for your own, I would not be a useless friend:  I know, you know me a most warm one; please command me or my wife, in any way.  Do not trouble to write to me; Austin, I have no doubt, will do so, if you are, as I fear you will be, unfit.

My heart is sore for you.  At least you know what you have been to him; how he cherished and admired you; how he was never so pleased as when he spoke of you; with what a boy’s love, up to the last, he loved you.  This surely is a consolation.  Yours is the cruel part ­to survive; you must try and not grudge to him his better fortune, to go first.  It is the sad part of such relations that one must remain and suffer; I cannot see my poor Jenkin without you.  Nor you indeed without him; but you may try to rejoice that he is spared that extremity.  Perhaps I (as I was so much his confidant) know even better than you can do what your loss would have been to him; he never spoke of you but his face changed; it was ­you were ­his religion.

I write by this post to Austin and to the Academy. ­Yours most sincerely,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN LETTER II

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1885.]

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN, ­I should have written sooner, but we are in a bustle, and I have been very tired, though still well.  Your very kind note was most welcome to me.  I shall be very much pleased to have you call me Louis, as he has now done for so many years.  Sixteen, you say? is it so long?  It seems too short now; but of that we cannot judge, and must not complain.

I wish that either I or my wife could do anything for you; when we can, you will, I am sure, command us.

I trust that my notice gave you as little pain as was possible.  I found I had so much to say, that I preferred to keep it for another place and make but a note in the Academy.  To try to draw my friend at greater length, and say what he was to me and his intimates, what a good influence in life and what an example, is a desire that grows upon me.  It was strange, as I wrote the note, how his old tests and criticisms haunted me; and it reminded me afresh with every few words how much I owe to him.

I had a note from Henley, very brief and very sad.  We none of us yet feel the loss; but we know what he would have said and wished.

Do you know that Dew Smith has two photographs of him, neither very bad? and one giving a lively, though not flattering air of him in conversation?  If you have not got them, would you like me to write to Dew and ask him to give you proofs?

I was so pleased that he and my wife made friends; that is a great pleasure.  We found and have preserved one fragment (the head) of the drawing he made and tore up when he was last here.  He had promised to come and stay with us this summer.  May we not hope, at least, some time soon to have one from you? ­Believe me, my dear Mrs. Jenkin, with the most real sympathy, your sincere friend,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Dear me, what happiness I owe to both of you!

TO C. HOWARD CARRINGTON

   In answer to an inquiry from a correspondent not personally known to
   him, who had by some means heard of the Great North Road project.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 9th .

DEAR SIR, ­The Great North Road is still unfinished; it is scarce I should say beyond Highgate:  but it will be finished some day, bar the big accident.  It will not however gratify your taste; the highwayman is not grasped:  what you would have liked (and I, believe me) would have been Jerry Abershaw:  but Jerry was not written at the fit moment; I have outgrown the taste ­and his romantic horse-shoes clatter faintlier down the incline towards Lethe. ­Truly yours,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO KATHARINE DE MATTOS

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Summer 1885.

MY DEAR CATHERINE, ­’Tis the most complete blague and folly to write to you; you never answer and, even when you do, your letters crackle under the teeth like ashes; containing nothing as they do but unseasonable japes and a great cloudy vagueness as of the realm of chaos.  In this I know well they are like mine; and it becomes me well to write such ­but not you ­for reasons too obvious to mention.  We have both been sick; but to-day I am up, though with an aching back.  But I hope all will be better.  Of your views, state, finances, etc. etc., I know nothing.  We were mighty near the end of all things financially, when a strange shape of a hand giving appeared in Heaven or from Hell, and set us up again for the moment; yet still we totter on a whoreson brink.  I beg pardon.  I forgot I was writing to a lady; but the word shall stay:  it is the only word; I would say it to the Q ­n of E ­d.

How do you like letters of this kind?  It is your kind.  They mean nothing; they are blankly insignificant; and impudently put one in the wrong.  One has learnt nothing; and forsooth one must reply. ­Yours, the Inexpressive Correspondent,

     R. L. S.

Hey-ey-ey!  Sold again.  Hey-ey-ey!

Postscript:  sold again.

TO W. H. LOW

In August of this year Stevenson made with his wife an excursion to the west country (stopping at Dorchester on the way, for the pleasure of seeing Mr. Thomas Hardy at home), and was detained for several weeks at The New London inn, Exeter, by a bad fit of hemorrhage.  His correspondence is not resumed until the autumn.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, October 22, 1885.

MY DEAR LOW, ­I trust you are not annoyed with me beyond forgiveness; for indeed my silence has been devilish prolonged.  I can only tell you that I have been nearly six months (more than six) in a strange condition of collapse, when it was impossible to do any work, and difficult (more difficult than you would suppose) to write the merest note.  I am now better, but not yet my own man in the way of brains, and in health only so-so.  I suppose I shall learn (I begin to think I am learning) to fight this vast, vague feather-bed of an obsession that now overlies and smothers me; but in the beginnings of these conflicts, the inexperienced wrestler is always worsted, and I own I have been quite extinct.  I wish you to know, though it can be no excuse, that you are not the only one of my friends by many whom I have thus neglected; and even now, having come so very late into the possession of myself, with a substantial capital of debts, and my work still moving with a desperate slowness ­as a child might fill a sandbag with its little handfuls ­and my future deeply pledged, there is almost a touch of virtue in my borrowing these hours to write to you.  Why I said “hours” I know not; it would look blue for both of us if I made good the word.

I was writing your address the other day, ordering a copy of my next, Prince Otto, to go your way.  I hope you have not seen it in parts; it was not meant to be so read; and only my poverty (dishonourably) consented to the serial evolution.

I will send you with this a copy of the English edition of the Child’s Garden.  I have heard there is some vile rule of the post-office in the States against inscriptions; so I send herewith a piece of doggerel which Mr. Bunner may, if he thinks fit, copy off the fly-leaf.

Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in my own dining-room, in my own velveteen jacket, and twisting as I go my own moustache; at one corner a glimpse of my wife, in an Indian dress, and seated in a chair that was once my grandfather’s, but since some months goes by the name of Henry James’s ­for it was there the novelist loved to sit ­adds a touch of poesy and comicality.  It is, I think, excellent, but is too eccentric to be exhibited.  I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress, and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end; between us an open door exhibits my palatial entrance hall and a part of my respected staircase.  All this is touched in lovely, with that witty touch of Sargent’s; but, of course, it looks dam queer as a whole.

Pray let me hear from you, and give me good news of yourself and your wife, to whom please remember me. ­Yours most sincerely, my dear Low,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO W. E. HENLEY

Prince Otto was published in October of this year; and the following refers to two reviews of it ­one of them by Mr. Henley, which to the writer’s displeasure had been pruned by the editor before printing; the other by a writer in the Saturday Review who declared that Otto was “a fool and a wittol,” and could see nothing but false style in the story of Seraphina’s flight through the forest.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Autumn 1885.]

DEAR LAD, ­If there was any more praise in what you wrote, I think [the editor] has done us both a service; some of it stops my throat.  What, it would not have been the same if Dumas or Musset had done it, would it not?  Well, no, I do not think it would, do you know, now; I am really of opinion it would not; and a dam good job too.  Why, think what Musset would have made of Otto!  Think how gallantly Dumas would have carried his crowd through!  And whatever you do, don’t quarrel with .  It gives me much pleasure to see your work there; I think you do yourself great justice in that field; and I would let no annoyance, petty or justifiable, debar me from such a market.  I think you do good there.  Whether (considering our intimate relations) you would not do better to refrain from reviewing me, I will leave to yourself:  were it all on my side, you could foresee my answer; but there is your side also, where you must be the judge.

As for the Saturday.  Otto is no “fool,” the reader is left in no doubt as to whether or not Seraphina was a Messalina (though much it would matter, if you come to that); and therefore on both these points the reviewer has been unjust.  Secondly, the romance lies precisely in the freeing of two spirits from these court intrigues; and here I think the reviewer showed himself dull.  Lastly, if Otto’s speech is offensive to him, he is one of the large class of unmanly and ungenerous dogs who arrogate and defile the name of manly.  As for the passages quoted, I do confess that some of them reek Gongorically; they are excessive, but they are not inelegant after all.  However, had he attacked me only there, he would have scored.

Your criticism on Gondremark is, I fancy, right.  I thought all your criticisms were indeed; only your praise ­chokes me. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO WILLIAM ARCHER

   The paper referred to in this and the following letters is one which
   Mr. Archer wrote over his own signature in the November number of
   Time, a magazine now extinct.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, October 28, 1885.

DEAR MR. ARCHER, ­I have read your paper with my customary admiration; it is very witty, very adroit; it contains a great deal that is excellently true (particularly the parts about my stories and the description of me as an artist in life); but you will not be surprised if I do not think it altogether just.  It seems to me, in particular, that you have wilfully read all my works in terms of my earliest; my aim, even in style, has quite changed in the last six or seven years; and this I should have thought you would have noticed.  Again, your first remark upon the affectation of the italic names; a practice only followed in my two affected little books of travel, where a typographical minauderie of the sort appeared to me in character; and what you say of it, then, is quite just.  But why should you forget yourself and use these same italics as an index to my theology some pages further on?  This is lightness of touch indeed; may I say, it is almost sharpness of practice?

Excuse these remarks.  I have been on the whole much interested, and sometimes amused.  Are you aware that the praiser of this “brave gymnasium” has not seen a canoe nor taken a long walk since ’79? that he is rarely out of the house nowadays, and carries his arm in a sling?  Can you imagine that he is a back-slidden communist, and is sure he will go to hell (if there be such an excellent institution) for the luxury in which he lives?  And can you believe that, though it is gaily expressed, the thought is hag and skeleton in every moment of vacuity or depression?  Can you conceive how profoundly I am irritated by the opposite affectation to my own, when I see strong men and rich men bleating about their sorrows and the burthen of life, in a world full of “cancerous paupers,” and poor sick children, and the fatally bereaved, ay, and down even to such happy creatures as myself, who has yet been obliged to strip himself, one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen except smoking (and the days of that I know in my heart ought to be over), I forgot eating, which I still enjoy, and who sees the circle of impotence closing very slowly but quite steadily around him?  In my view, one dank, dispirited word is harmful, a crime of lèse-humanité, a piece of acquired evil; every gay, every bright word or picture, like every pleasant air of music, is a piece of pleasure set afloat; the reader catches it, and, if he be healthy, goes on his way rejoicing; and it is the business of art so to send him, as often as possible.

For what you say, so kindly, so prettily, so precisely, of my style, I must in particular thank you; though even here, I am vexed you should not have remarked on my attempted change of manner:  seemingly this attempt is still quite unsuccessful!  Well, we shall fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.

And now for my last word:  Mrs. Stevenson is very anxious that you should see me, and that she should see you, in the flesh.  If you at all share in these views, I am a fixture.  Write or telegraph (giving us time, however, to telegraph in reply, lest the day be impossible), and come down here to a bed and a dinner.  What do you say, my dear critic?  I shall be truly pleased to see you; and to explain at greater length what I meant by saying narrative was the most characteristic mood of literature, on which point I have great hopes I shall persuade you. ­Yours truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. ­My opinion about Thoreau, and the passage in The Week, is perhaps a fad, but it is sincere and stable.  I am still of the same mind five years later; did you observe that I had said “modern” authors? and will you observe again that this passage touches the very joint of our division?  It is one that appeals to me, deals with that part of life that I think the most important, and you, if I gather rightly, so much less so?  You believe in the extreme moment of the facts that humanity has acquired and is acquiring; I think them of moment, but still of much less than those inherent or inherited brute principles and laws that sit upon us (in the character of conscience) as heavy as a shirt of mail, and that (in the character of the affections and the airy spirit of pleasure) make all the light of our lives.  The house is, indeed, a great thing, and should be rearranged on sanitary principles; but my heart and all my interest are with the dweller, that ancient of days and day-old infant man.

     R. L. S.

An excellent touch is .  “By instinct or design he eschews what demands constructive patience.”  I believe it is both; my theory is that literature must always be most at home in treating movement and change; hence I look for them.

TO THOMAS STEVENSON

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] October 28, 1885.

MY DEAREST FATHER, ­Get the November number of Time, and you will see a review of me by a very clever fellow, who is quite furious at bottom because I am too orthodox, just as Purcell was savage because I am not orthodox enough.  I fall between two stools.  It is odd, too, to see how this man thinks me a full-blooded fox-hunter, and tells me my philosophy would fail if I lost my health or had to give up exercise!

An illustrated Treasure Island will be out next month.  I have had an early copy, and the French pictures are admirable.  The artist has got his types up in Hogarth; he is full of fire and spirit, can draw and can compose, and has understood the book as I meant it, all but one or two little accidents, such as making the Hispaniola a brig.  I would send you my copy, but I cannot; it is my new toy, and I cannot divorce myself from this enjoyment.

I am keeping really better, and have been out about every second day, though the weather is cold and very wild.

I was delighted to hear you were keeping better; you and Archer would agree, more shame to you! (Archer is my pessimist critic.) Good-bye to all of you, with my best love.  We had a dreadful overhauling of my conduct as a son the other night; and my wife stripped me of my illusions and made me admit I had been a detestable bad one.  Of one thing in particular she convicted me in my own eyes:  I mean, a most unkind reticence, which hung on me then, and I confess still hangs on me now, when I try to assure you that I do love you. ­Ever your bad son,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO HENRY JAMES

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, October 28, 1885.

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES, ­At last, my wife being at a concert, and a story being done, I am at some liberty to write and give you of my views.  And first, many thanks for the works that came to my sickbed.  And second, and more important, as to the Princess. Well, I think you are going to do it this time; I cannot, of course, foresee, but these two first numbers seem to me picturesque and sound and full of lineament, and very much a new departure.  As for your young lady, she is all there; yes, sir, you can do low life, I believe.  The prison was excellent; it was of that nature of touch that I sometimes achingly miss from your former work; with some of the grime, that is, and some of the emphasis of skeleton there is in nature.  I pray you to take grime in a good sense; it need not be ignoble:  dirt may have dignity; in nature it usually has; and your prison was imposing.

And now to the main point:  why do we not see you?  Do not fail us.  Make an alarming sacrifice, and let us see “Henry James’s chair” properly occupied.  I never sit in it myself (though it was my grandfather’s); it has been consecrated to guests by your approval, and now stands at my elbow gaping.  We have a new room, too, to introduce to you ­our last baby, the drawing-room; it never cries, and has cut its teeth.  Likewise, there is a cat now.  It promises to be a monster of laziness and self-sufficiency.

Pray see, in the November Time (a dread name for a magazine of light reading), a very clever fellow, W. Archer, stating his views of me; the rosy-gilled “athletico-æsthete”; and warning me, in a fatherly manner, that a rheumatic fever would try my philosophy (as indeed it would), and that my gospel would not do for “those who are shut out from the exercise of any manly virtue save renunciation.”  To those who know that rickety and cloistered spectre, the real R. L. S., the paper, besides being clever in itself, presents rare elements of sport.  The critical parts are in particular very bright and neat, and often excellently true.  Get it by all manner of means.

I hear on all sides I am to be attacked as an immoral writer; this is painful.  Have I at last got, like you, to the pitch of being attacked?  ’Tis the consecration I lack ­and could do without.  Not that Archer’s paper is an attack, or what either he or I, I believe, would call one; ’tis the attacks on my morality (which I had thought a gem of the first water) I referred to.

Now, my dear James, come ­come ­come.  The spirit (that is me) says, Come; and the bride (and that is my wife) says, Come; and the best thing you can do for us and yourself and your work is to get up and do so right away. ­Yours affectionately,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO WILLIAM ARCHER LETTER I

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] October 30, 1885.

DEAR MR. ARCHER, ­It is possible my father may be soon down with me; he is an old man and in bad health and spirits; and I could neither leave him alone, nor could we talk freely before him.  If he should be here when you offer your visit, you will understand if I have to say no, and put you off.

I quite understand your not caring to refer to things of private knowledge.  What still puzzles me is how you ("in the witness box” ­ha!  I like the phrase) should have made your argument actually hinge on a contention which the facts answered.

I am pleased to hear of the correctness of my guess.  It is then as I supposed; you are of the school of the generous and not the sullen pessimists; and I can feel with you.  I used myself to rage when I saw sick folk going by in their Bath-chairs; since I have been sick myself (and always when I was sick myself), I found life, even in its rough places, to have a property of easiness.  That which we suffer ourselves has no longer the same air of monstrous injustice and wanton cruelty that suffering wears when we see it in the case of others.  So we begin gradually to see that things are not black, but have their strange compensations; and when they draw towards their worst, the idea of death is like a bed to lie on.  I should bear false witness if I did not declare life happy.  And your wonderful statement that happiness tends to die out and misery to continue, which was what put me on the track of your frame of mind, is diagnostic of the happy man raging over the misery of others; it could never be written by the man who had tried what unhappiness was like.  And at any rate, it was a slip of the pen:  the ugliest word that science has to declare is a reserved indifference to happiness and misery in the individual; it declares no leaning toward the black, no iniquity on the large scale in fate’s doings, rather a marble equality, dread not cruel, giving and taking away and reconciling.

Why have I not written my Timon?  Well, here is my worst quarrel with you.  You take my young books as my last word.  The tendency to try to say more has passed unperceived (my fault, that).  And you make no allowance for the slowness with which a man finds and tries to learn his tools.  I began with a neat brisk little style, and a sharp little knack of partial observation; I have tried to expand my means, but still I can only utter a part of what I wish to say, and am bound to feel; and much of it will die unspoken.  But if I had the pen of Shakespeare, I have no Timon to give forth.  I feel kindly to the powers that be; I marvel they should use me so well; and when I think of the case of others, I wonder too, but in another vein, whether they may not, whether they must not, be like me, still with some compensation, some delight.  To have suffered, nay, to suffer, sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable.  This is a great truth, and has to be learned in the fire. ­Yours very truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

We expect you, remember that.

TO WILLIAM ARCHER LETTER II

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, November 1, 1885.

DEAR MR. ARCHER, ­You will see that I had already had a sight of your article and what were my thoughts.

One thing in your letter puzzles me.  Are you, too, not in the witness-box?  And if you are, why take a wilfully false hypothesis?  If you knew I was a chronic invalid, why say that my philosophy was unsuitable to such a case?  My call for facts is not so general as yours, but an essential fact should not be put the other way about.

The fact is, consciously or not, you doubt my honesty; you think I am making faces, and at heart disbelieve my utterances.  And this I am disposed to think must spring from your not having had enough of pain, sorrow, and trouble in your existence.  It is easy to have too much; easy also or possible to have too little; enough is required that a man may appreciate what elements of consolation and joy there are in everything but absolutely overpowering physical pain or disgrace, and how in almost all circumstances the human soul can play a fair part.  You fear life, I fancy, on the principle of the hand of little employment.  But perhaps my hypothesis is as unlike the truth as the one you chose.  Well, if it be so, if you have had trials, sickness, the approach of death, the alienation of friends, poverty at the heels, and have not felt your soul turn round upon these things and spurn them under ­you must be very differently made from me, and I earnestly believe from the majority of men.  But at least you are in the right to wonder and complain.

To “say all”?  Stay here.  All at once?  That would require a word from the pen of Gargantua.  We say each particular thing as it comes up, and “with that sort of emphasis that for the time there seems to be no other.”  Words will not otherwise serve us; no, nor even Shakespeare, who could not have put As You Like It and Timon into one without ruinous loss both of emphasis and substance.  Is it quite fair then to keep your face so steadily On my most light-hearted works, and then say I recognise no evil?  Yet in the paper on Burns, for instance, I show myself alive to some sorts of evil.  But then, perhaps, they are not your sorts.

And again:  “to say all”?  All:  yes.  Everything:  no.  The task were endless, the effect nil.  But my all, in such a vast field as this of life, is what interests me, what stands out, what takes on itself a presence for my imagination or makes a figure in that little tricky abbreviation which is the best that my reason can conceive.  That I must treat, or I shall be fooling with my readers.  That, and not the all of some one else.

And here we come to the division:  not only do I believe that literature should give joy, but I see a universe, I suppose, eternally different from yours; a solemn, a terrible, but a very joyous and noble universe, where suffering is not at least wantonly inflicted, though it falls with dispassionate partiality, but where it may be and generally is nobly borne; where, above all (this I believe; probably you don’t:  I think he may, with cancer), any brave man may make out a life which shall be happy for himself, and, by so being, beneficent to those about him.  And if he fails, why should I hear him weeping?  I mean if I fail, why should I weep?  Why should you hear me?  Then to me morals, the conscience, the affections, and the passions are, I will own frankly and sweepingly, so infinitely more important than the other parts of life, that I conceive men rather triflers who become immersed in the latter; and I will always think the man who keeps his lip stiff, and makes “a happy fireside clime,” and carries a pleasant face about to friends and neighbours, infinitely greater (in the abstract) than an atrabilious Shakespeare or a backbiting Kant or Darwin.  No offence to any of these gentlemen, two of whom probably (one for certain) came up to my standard.

And now enough said; it were hard if a poor man could not criticise another without having so much ink shed against him.  But I shall still regret you should have written on an hypothesis you knew to be untenable, and that you should thus have made your paper, for those who do not know me, essentially unfair.  The rich, fox-hunting squire speaks with one voice; the sick man of letters with another. ­Yours very truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
       (Prometheus-Heine in minimis).

P.S. ­Here I go again.  To me, the medicine bottles on my chimney and the blood on my handkerchief are accidents; they do not colour my view of life, as you would know, I think, if you had experience of sickness; they do not exist in my prospect; I would as soon drag them under the eyes of my readers as I would mention a pimple I might chance to have (saving your presence) on my posteriors.  What does it prove? what does it change? it has not hurt, it has not changed me in any essential part; and I should think myself a trifler and in bad taste if I introduced the world to these unimportant privacies.

But, again, there is this mountain-range between us ­that you do not believe me.  It is not flattering, but the fault is probably in my literary art.

TO W. H. LOW

   The “other thing coming out” mentioned below in the last paragraph
   but one was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, December 26, 1885.

MY DEAR LOW, ­Lamia has not yet turned up, but your letter came to me this evening with a scent of the Boulevard Montparnasse that was irresistible.  The sand of Lavenue’s crumbled under my heel; and the bouquet of the old Fleury came back to me, and I remembered the day when I found a twenty franc piece under my fetish.  Have you that fetish still? and has it brought you luck?  I remembered, too, my first sight of you in a frock-coat and a smoking-cap, when we passed the evening at the Café de Medicis; and my last when we sat and talked in the Parc Monceau; and all these things made me feel a little young again, which, to one who has been mostly in bed for a month, was a vivifying change.

Yes, you are lucky to have a bag that holds you comfortably.  Mine is a strange contrivance; I don’t die, damme, and I can’t get along on both feet to save my soul; I am a chronic sickist; and my work cripples along between bed and the parlour, between the medicine bottle and the cupping glass.  Well, I like my life all the same; and should like it none the worse if I could have another talk with you, though even my talks now are measured out to me by the minute hand like poisons in a minim glass.

A photograph will be taken of my ugly mug and sent to you for ulterior purposes:  I have another thing coming out, which I did not put in the way of the Scribners, I can scarce tell how; but I was sick and penniless and rather back on the world, and mismanaged it.  I trust they will forgive me.

I am sorry to hear of Mrs. Low’s illness, and glad to hear of her recovery.  I will announce the coming Lamia to Bob:  he steams away at literature like smoke.  I have a beautiful Bob on my walls, and a good Sargent, and a delightful Lemon; and your etching now hangs framed in the dining-room.  So the arts surround me. ­Yours,

     R. L. S.

TO MRS. DE MATTOS

With this cousin the writer had always been on terms of close affection, and he now dedicated to her The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  In the dedication as published only the second verse stands.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] January 1st, 1886.

DEAREST KATHARINE, ­Here, on a very little book and accompanied with lame verses, I have put your name.  Our kindness is now getting well on in years; it must be nearly of age; and it gets more valuable to me with every time I see you.  It is not possible to express any sentiment, and it is not necessary to try, at least between us.  You know very well that I love you dearly, and that I always will.  I only wish the verses were better, but at least you like the story; and it is sent to you by the one that loves you ­Jekyll, and not Hyde.

     R.  L. S.

  Ave!

  Bells upon the city are ringing in the night;
  High above the gardens are the houses full of light;
  On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free;
  And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.

  We cannae break the bonds that God decreed to bind,
  Still we’ll be the children of the heather and the wind;
  Far away from home, O, it’s still for you and me
  That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.

     R. L. S.

TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] Jast, 1886.

MY DEAR KINNICUM, ­I am a very bad dog, but not for the first time.  Your book, which is very interesting, came duly; and I immediately got a very bad cold indeed, and have been fit for nothing whatever.  I am a bit better now, and aye on the mend; so I write to tell you, I thought of you on New Year’s Day; though, I own, it would have been more decent if I had thought in time for you to get my letter then.  Well, what can’t be cured must be endured, Mr. Lawrie; and you must be content with what I give.  If I wrote all the letters I ought to write, and at the proper time, I should be very good and very happy; but I doubt if I should do anything else.

I suppose you will be in town for the New Year; and I hope your health is pretty good.  What you want is diet; but it is as much use to tell you that as it is to tell my father.  And I quite admit a diet is a beastly thing.  I doubt, however, if it be as bad as not being allowed to speak, which I have tried fully, and do not like.  When, at the same time, I was not allowed to read, it passed a joke.  But these are troubles of the past, and on this day, at least, it is proper to suppose they won’t return.  But we are not put here to enjoy ourselves:  it was not God’s purpose; and I am prepared to argue, it is not our sincere wish.  As for our deserts, the less said of them the better, for somebody might hear, and nobody cares to be laughed at.  A good man is a very noble thing to see, but not to himself; what he seems to God is, fortunately, not our business; that is the domain of faith; and whether on the first of January or the thirty-first of December, faith is a good word to end on.

My dear Cummy, many happy returns to you and my best love. ­The worst correspondent in the world,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] January 1st, 1886.

MY DEAR PEOPLE, ­Many happy returns of the day to you all; I am fairly well and in good spirits; and much and hopefully occupied with dear Jenkin’s life.  The inquiry in every detail, every letter that I read, makes me think of him more nobly.  I cannot imagine how I got his friendship; I did not deserve it.  I believe the notice will be interesting and useful.

My father’s last letter, owing to the use of a quill pen and the neglect of blotting-paper, was hopelessly illegible.  Every one tried, and every one failed to decipher an important word on which the interest of one whole clause (and the letter consisted of two) depended.

I find I can make little more of this; but I’ll spare the blots. ­Dear people, ever your loving son,

     R. L. S.

I will try again, being a giant refreshed by the house being empty.  The presence of people is the great obstacle to letter-writing.  I deny that letters should contain news (I mean mine; those of other people should).  But mine should contain appropriate sentiments and humorous nonsense, or nonsense without the humour.  When the house is empty, the mind is seized with a desire ­no, that is too strong ­a willingness to pour forth unmitigated rot, which constitutes (in me) the true spirit of correspondence.  When I have no remarks to offer (and nobody to offer them to), my pen flies, and you see the remarkable consequence of a page literally covered with words and genuinely devoid of sense.  I can always do that, if quite alone, and I like doing it; but I have yet to learn that it is beloved by correspondents.  The deuce of it is, that there is no end possible but the end of the paper; and as there is very little left of that ­if I cannot stop writing ­suppose you give up reading.  It would all come to the same thing; and I think we should all be happier....

TO W. H. LOW

In the following letter R. L. S. accepts the dedication of Mr. Low’s illustrated edition of Keats’s Lamia, and sends him in return the newly published Jekyll and Hyde, and a set of verses afterwards printed in the Century Magazine and Underwoods, and inscribed by Mr. St. Gaudens on his medallion portrait of the author.  The terms of the Lamia dedication are as follows:  “In testimony of loyal friendship and of a common faith in doubtful tales from Faery-Land, I dedicate to Robert Louis Stevenson my work in this book.”  The Latin legend inscribed above the design runs:  “Neque est ullum certius amicitiae vinculum quam consensus et societas consiliorum et voluntatum.”

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] Jand, 1886.

MY DEAR LOW, ­Lamia has come, and I do not know how to thank you, not only for the beautiful art of the designs, but for the handsome and apt words of the dedication.  My favourite is “Bathes unseen,” which is a masterpiece; and the next, “Into the green recessed woods,” is perhaps more remarkable, though it does not take my fancy so imperiously.  The night scene at Corinth pleases me also.  The second part offers fewer opportunities.  I own I should like to see both Isabella and the Eve thus illustrated; and then there’s Hyperion ­O, yes, and Endymion!  I should like to see the lot:  beautiful pictures dance before me by hundreds:  I believe Endymion would suit you best.  It also is in faery-land; and I see a hundred opportunities, cloudy and flowery glories, things as delicate as the cobweb in the bush; actions, not in themselves of any mighty purport, but made for the pencil:  the feast of Pan, Peona’s isle, the “slabbed margin of a well,” the chase of the butterfly, the nymph, Glaucus, Cybele, Sleep on his couch, a farrago of unconnected beauties.  But I divagate; and all this sits in the bosom of the publisher.

What is more important, I accept the terms of the dedication with a frank heart, and the terms of your Latin legend fairly.  The sight of your pictures has once more awakened me to my right mind; something may come of it; yet one more bold push to get free of this prison-yard of the abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my contemporaries.  I do not know, I have a feeling in my bones, a sentiment which may take on the forms of imagination, or may not.  If it does, I shall owe it to you; and the thing will thus descend from Keats even if on the wrong side of the blanket.  If it can be done in prose ­that is the puzzle ­I divagate again.  Thank you again:  you can draw and yet you do not love the ugly:  what are you doing in this age?  Flee, while it is yet time; they will have your four limbs pinned upon a stable door to scare witches.  The ugly, my unhappy friend, is de rigueur:  it is the only wear!  What a chance you threw away with the serpent!  Why had Apollonius no pimples?  Heavens, my dear Low, you do not know your business....

I send you herewith a Gothic gnome for your Greek nymph; but the gnome is interesting, I think, and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears.  It is not always the time to rejoice. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

The gnome’s name is Jekyll & Hyde; I believe you will find he is likewise quite willing to answer to the name of Low or Stevenson.

Same day. ­I have copied out on the other sheet some bad verses, which somehow your picture suggested; as a kind of image of things that I pursue and cannot reach, and that you seem ­no, not to have reached ­but to have come a thought nearer to than I. This is the life we have chosen:  well, the choice was mad, but I should make it again.

What occurs to me is this:  perhaps they might be printed in (say) the Century for the sake of my name; and if that were possible, they might advertise your book.  It might be headed as sent in acknowledgment of your Lamia.  Or perhaps it might be introduced by the phrases I have marked above.  I dare say they would stick it in:  I want no payment, being well paid by Lamia.  If they are not, keep them to yourself.

TO WILL H. LOW

Damned bad lines in return for a beautiful book

YOUTH now flees on feathered foot. 
Faint and fainter sounds the flute;
Rarer songs of Gods. 
And still,
Somewhere on the sunny hill,
Or along the winding stream. 
Through the willows, flits a dream;
Flits, but shows a smiling face,
Flees, but with so quaint a grace,
None can choose to stay at home,
All must follow ­all must roam.

This is unborn beauty:  she
Now in air floats high and free,
Takes the sun, and breaks the blue; ­
Late, with stooping pinion flew
Raking hedgerow trees, and wet
Her wing in silver streams, and set
Shining foot on temple roof. 
Now again she flies aloof,
Coasting mountain clouds, and kissed
By the evening’s amethyst.

In wet wood and miry lane Still we pound and pant in vain; Still with earthy foot we chase Waning pinion, fainting face; Still, with grey hair, we stumble on Till ­behold! ­the vision gone!  Where has fleeting beauty led?  To the doorway of the dead! [Life is gone, but life was gay:  We have come the primrose way!]

     R. L. S.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jand, 1886.

MY DEAR GOSSE, ­Thank you for your letter, so interesting to my vanity.  There is a review in the St. James’s, which, as it seems to hold somewhat of your opinions, and is besides written with a pen and not a poker, we think may possibly be yours.  The Prince has done fairly well in spite of the reviews, which have been bad:  he was, as you doubtless saw, well slated in the Saturday; one paper received it as a child’s story; another (picture my agony) described it as a “Gilbert comedy.”  It was amusing to see the race between me and Justin M’Carthy:  the Milesian has won by a length.

That is the hard part of literature.  You aim high, and you take longer over your work, and it will not be so successful as if you had aimed low and rushed it.  What the public likes is work (of any kind) a little loosely executed; so long as it is a little wordy, a little slack, a little dim and knotless, the dear public likes it; it should (if possible) be a little dull into the bargain.  I know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my heart, I think it is by an accident.  And I know also that good work must succeed at last; but that is not the doing of the public; they are only shamed into silence or affectation.  I do not write for the public; I do write for money, a nobler deity; and most of all for myself, not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and nearer home.

Let us tell each other sad stories of the bestiality of the beast whom we feed.  What he likes is the newspaper; and to me the press is the mouth of a sewer, where lying is professed as from an university chair, and everything prurient, and ignoble, and essentially dull, finds its abode and pulpit.  I do not like mankind; but men, and not all of these ­and fewer women.  As for respecting the race, and, above all, that fatuous rabble of burgesses called “the public,” God save me from such irreligion! ­that way lies disgrace and dishonour.  There must be something wrong in me, or I would not be popular.

This is perhaps a trifle stronger than my sedate and permanent opinion.  Not much, I think.  As for the art that we practise, I have never been able to see why its professors should be respected.  They chose the primrose path; when they found it was not all primroses, but some of it brambly, and much of it uphill, they began to think and to speak of themselves as holy martyrs.  But a man is never martyred in any honest sense in the pursuit of his pleasure; and delirium tremens has more of the honour of the cross.  We were full of the pride of life, and chose, like prostitutes, to live by a pleasure.  We should be paid if we give the pleasure we pretend to give; but why should we be honoured?

I hope some day you and Mrs. Gosse will come for a Sunday; but we must wait till I am able to see people.  I am very full of Jenkin’s life; it is painful, yet very pleasant, to dig into the past of a dead friend, and find him, at every spadeful, shine brighter.  I own, as I read, I wonder more and more why he should have taken me to be a friend.  He had many and obvious faults upon the face of him; the heart was pure gold.  I feel it little pain to have lost him, for it is a loss in which I cannot believe; I take it, against reason, for an absence; if not to-day, then to-morrow, I still fancy I shall see him in the door; and then, now when I know him better, how glad a meeting!  Yes, if I could believe in the immortality business, the world would indeed be too good to be true; but we were put here to do what service we can, for honour and not for hire:  the sods cover us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps well at last; these are the wages, besides what we receive so lavishly day by day; and they are enough for a man who knows his own frailty and sees all things in the proportion of reality.  The soul of piety was killed long ago by that idea of reward.  Nor is happiness, whether eternal or temporal, the reward that mankind seeks.  Happinesses are but his wayside campings; his soul is in the journey; he was born for the struggle, and only tastes his life in effort and on the condition that he is opposed.  How, then, is such a creature, so fiery, so pugnacious, so made up of discontent and aspiration, and such noble and uneasy passions ­how can he be rewarded but by rest?  I would not say it aloud; for man’s cherished belief is that he loves that happiness which he continually spurns and passes by; and this belief in some ulterior happiness exactly fits him.  He does not require to stop and taste it; he can be about the rugged and bitter business where his heart lies; and yet he can tell himself this fairy tale of an eternal tea-party, and enjoy the notion that he is both himself and something else; and that his friends will yet meet him, all ironed out and emasculate, and still be lovable, ­as if love did not live in the faults of the beloved only, and draw its breath in an unbroken round of forgiveness!  But the truth is, we must fight until we die; and when we die there can be no quiet for mankind but complete resumption into ­what? ­God, let us say ­when all these desperate tricks will lie spellbound at last.

Here came my dinner and cut this sermon short ­excusez.

     R. L. S.

TO JAMES PAYN

The late Mrs. Buckle, a daughter of Mr. James Payn married to the editor of the Times, had laughingly remonstrated, through her father, on recognising some features of her own house in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, in the description of that tenanted by the fair Cuban in the section of Stevenson’s Dynamiter which tells the story of the Brown Box.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jand, 1886.

DEAR JAMES PAYN, ­Your very kind letter came very welcome; and still more welcome the news that you see ­’s tale.  I will now tell you (and it was very good and very wise of me not to tell it before) that he is one of the most unlucky men I know, having put all his money into a pharmacy at Hyères, when the cholera (certainly not his fault) swept away his customers in a body.  Thus you can imagine the pleasure I have to announce to him a spark of hope, for he sits to-day in his pharmacy, doing nothing and taking nothing, and watching his debts inexorably mount up.

To pass to other matters:  your hand, you are perhaps aware, is not one of those that can be read running; and the name of your daughter remains for me undecipherable.  I call her, then, your daughter ­and a very good name too ­and I beg to explain how it came about that I took her house.  The hospital was a point in my tale; but there is a house on each side.  Now the true house is the one before the hospital:  is that N?  If not, what do you complain of?  If it is, how can I help what is true?  Everything in the Dynamiter is not true; but the story of the Brown Box is, in almost every particular; I lay my hand on my heart and swear to it.  It took place in that house in 1884; and if your daughter was in that house at the time, all I can say is she must have kept very bad society.

But I see you coming.  Perhaps your daughter’s house has not a balcony at the back?  I cannot answer for that; I only know that side of Queen Square from the pavement and the back windows of Brunswick Row.  Thence I saw plenty of balconies (terraces rather); and if there is none to the particular house in question, it must have been so arranged to spite me.

I now come to the conclusion of this matter.  I address three questions to your daughter: ­

  1st.  Has her house the proper terrace?
  2nd.  Is it on the proper side of the hospital?
  3rd.  Was she there in the summer of 1884?

You see, I begin to fear that Mrs. Desborough may have deceived me on some trifling points, for she is not a lady of peddling exactitude.  If this should prove to be so, I will give your daughter a proper certificate, and her house property will return to its original value.

Can man say more? ­Yours very truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

I saw the other day that the Eternal had plagiarised from Lost Sir Massingberd:  good again, sir!  I wish he would plagiarise the death of Zero.

TO W. H. LOW

The late Sir Percy and Lady Shelley had in these days attached themselves warmly to R. L. S., and saw in his ways and character a living image of those of the poet, Sir Percy’s father, as they imagined him.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan.  Somethingorother-th, 1886.

MY DEAR LOW, ­I send you two photographs:  they are both done by Sir Percy Shelley, the poet’s son, which may interest.  The sitting down one is, I think, the best; but if they choose that, see that the little reflected light on the nose does not give me a turn-up; that would be tragic.  Don’t forget “Baronet” to Sir Percy’s name.

We all think a heap of your book; and I am well pleased with my dedication. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. STEVENSON.

P.S. ­Apropos of the odd controversy about Shelley’s nose:  I have before me four photographs of myself, done by Shelley’s son:  my nose is hooked, not like the eagle, indeed, but like the accipitrine family in man:  well, out of these four, only one marks the bend, one makes it straight, and one suggests a turn-up.  This throws a flood of light on calumnious man ­and the scandal-mongering sun.  For personally I cling to my curve.  To continue the Shelley controversy:  I have a look of him, all his sisters had noses like mine:  Sir Percy has a marked hook; all the family had high cheek-bones like mine; what doubt, then, but that this turn-up (of which Jeaffreson accuses the poet, along with much other fatras) is the result of some accident similar to what has happened in my photographs by his son?

     R. L. S.

TO CHARLES J. GUTHRIE

   “The lad” is Lloyd Osbourne, at this time a student at Edinburgh
   University.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jath, 1886.

MY DEAR GUTHRIE, ­I hear the lad has got into the Spec. and I write to thank you very warmly for the part you have played.  I only wish we were both going there together to-morrow night, and you would be in the secretary’s place (that so well became you, sir) and I were to open a debate or harry you on “Private Business,” and Omond perhaps to read us a few glowing pages on ­the siege of Saragossa, was it? or the Battle of Saratoga? my memory fails me, but I have not forgotten a certain white charger that careered over the fields of incoherent fight with a prodigious consequence of laughter:  have you?  I wonder, has Omond?

Well, well, perierunt, but, I hope, non imputantur.  We have had good fun.

Again thanking you sincerely, I remain, my dear Guthrie, your old comrade,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO THOMAS STEVENSON

Kidnapped had at this time just been taken up again, and Stevenson explains the course of the story to his father, who had taken the deepest interest in it since they visited together the scene of the Appin murder.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, January 25, 1886.]

MY DEAR FATHER, ­Many thanks for a letter quite like yourself.  I quite agree with you, and had already planned a scene of religion in Balfour; the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge furnishes me with a catechist whom I shall try to make the man.  I have another catechist, the blind, pistol-carrying highway robber, whom I have transferred from the Long Island to Mull.  I find it a most picturesque period, and wonder Scott let it escape.  The Covenant is lost on one of the Tarrans, and David is cast on Earraid, where (being from inland) he is nearly starved before he finds out the island is tidal; then he crosses Mull to Toronsay, meeting the blind catechist by the way; then crosses Morven from Kinlochaline to Kingairloch, where he stays the night with the good catechist; that is where I am; next day he is to be put ashore in Appin, and be present at Colin Campbell’s death.  To-day I rest, being a little run down.  Strange how liable we are to brain fag in this scooty family!  But as far as I have got, all but the last chapter, I think David is on his feet, and (to my mind) a far better story and far sounder at heart than Treasure Island.

I have no earthly news, living entirely in my story, and only coming out of it to play patience.  The Shelleys are gone; the Taylors kinder than can be imagined.  The other day, Lady Taylor drove over and called on me; she is a delightful old lady, and great fun.  I mentioned a story about the Duchess of Wellington ­which I had heard Sir Henry tell; and though he was very tired, he looked it up and copied it out for me in his own hand. ­Your most affectionate son,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO C. W. STODDARD

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Feth, 1886.

MY DEAR STODDARD, ­I am a dreadful character; but, you see, I have at last taken pen in hand; how long I may hold it, God knows.  This is already my sixth letter to-day, and I have many more waiting; and my wrist gives me a jog on the subject of scrivener’s cramp, which is not encouraging.

I gather you were a little down in the jaw when you wrote your last.  I am as usual pretty cheerful, but not very strong.  I stay in the house all winter, which is base; but, as you continue to see, the pen goes from time to time, though neither fast enough nor constantly enough to please me.

My wife is at Bath with my father and mother, and the interval of widowery explains my writing.  Another person writing for you when you have done work is a great enemy to correspondence.  To-day I feel out of health, and shan’t work; and hence this so much over-due reply.

I was re-reading some of your South Sea Idyls the other day:  some of the chapters are very good indeed; some pages as good as they can be.

How does your class get along?  If you like to touch on Otto, any day in a by-hour, you may tell them ­as the author’s last dying confession ­that it is a strange example of the difficulty of being ideal in an age of realism; that the unpleasant giddy-mindedness, which spoils the book and often gives it a wanton air of unreality and juggling with air-bells, comes from unsteadiness of key; from the too great realism of some chapters and passages ­some of which I have now spotted, others I dare say I shall never spot ­which disprepares the imagination for the cast of the remainder.

Any story can be made true in its own key; any story can be made false by the choice of a wrong key of detail or style:  Otto is made to reel like a drunken ­I was going to say man, but let us substitute cipher ­by the variations of the key.  Have you observed that the famous problem of realism and idealism is one purely of detail?  Have you seen my Note on Realism in Cassell’s Magazine of Art; and Elements of Style in the Contemporary; and Romance and Humble Apology in Longman’s?  They are all in your line of business; let me know what you have not seen and I’ll send ’em.

I am glad I brought the old house up to you.  It was a pleasant old spot, and I remember you there, though still more dearly in your own strange den upon a hill in San Francisco; and one of the most San Francisco-y parts of San Francisco.

Good-bye, my dear fellow, and believe me your friend,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

   Concerning the payment which Mr. Gosse had procured him from an
   American magazine for the set of verses addressed to Mr. Low (see
   above, .

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Fe, 1886.]

DEAR GOSSE, ­Non, c’est honteux! for a set of shambling lines that don’t know whether they’re trochées or what they are, that you or any of the crafty ones would blush all over if you had so much as thought upon, all by yourselves, in the water-closet.  But God knows, I am glad enough of five pounds; and this is almost as honest a way to get it as plain theft, so what should I care? ­Ever yours,

     R. L. S.

TO J. A. SYMONDS

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth [Spring 1886].

MY DEAR SYMONDS, ­If we have lost touch, it is (I think) only in a material sense; a question of letters, not hearts.  You will find a warm welcome at Skerryvore from both the lightkeepers; and, indeed, we never tell ourselves one of our financial fairy tales, but a run to Davos is a prime feature.  I am not changeable in friendship; and I think I can promise you you have a pair of trusty well-wishers and friends in Bournemouth:  whether they write or not is but a small thing; the flag may not be waved, but it is there.

Jekyll is a dreadful thing, I own; but the only thing I feel dreadful about is that damned old business of the war in the members.  This time it came out; I hope it will stay in, in future.

Raskolnikoff is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years; I am glad you took to it.  Many find it dull:  Henry James could not finish it:  all I can say is, it nearly finished me.  It was like having an illness.  James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show.  To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified.  The Juge d’Instruction I thought a wonderful, weird, touching, ingenious creation:  the drunken father, and Sonia, and the student friend, and the uncircumscribed, protoplasmic humanity of Raskolnikoff, all upon a level that filled me with wonder:  the execution also, superb in places.  Another has been translated ­Humiliés et Offensés.  It is even more incoherent than Le Crime et lé Châtiment, but breathes much of the same lovely goodness, and has passages of power.  Dostoieffsky is a devil of a swell, to be sure.  Have you heard that he became a stout, imperialist conservative?  It is interesting to know.  To something of that side, the balance leans with me also in view of the incoherency and incapacity of all.  The old boyish idea of the march on Paradise being now out of season, and all plans and ideas that I hear debated being built on a superb indifference to the first principles of human character, a helpless desire to acquiesce in anything of which I know the worst assails me.  Fundamental errors in human nature of two sorts stand on the skyline of all this modern world of aspirations.  First, that it is happiness that men want; and second, that happiness consists of anything but an internal harmony.  Men do not want, and I do not think they would accept, happiness; what they live for is rivalry, effort, success ­the elements our friends wish to eliminate.  And, on the other hand, happiness is a question of morality ­or of immorality, there is no difference ­and conviction.  Gordon was happy in Khartoum, in his worst hours of danger and fatigue; Marat was happy, I suppose, in his ugliest frenzy; Marcus Aurelius was happy in the detested camp; Pepys was pretty happy, and I am pretty happy on the whole, because we both somewhat crowingly accepted a via media, both liked to attend to our affairs, and both had some success in managing the same.  It is quite an open question whether Pepys and I ought to be happy; on the other hand, there is no doubt that Marat had better be unhappy.  He was right (if he said it) that he was la misère humaine, cureless misery ­unless perhaps by the gallows.  Death is a great and gentle solvent; it has never had justice done it, no, not by Whitman.  As for those crockery chimney-piece ornaments, the bourgeois (quorum pars), and their cowardly dislike of dying and killing, it is merely one symptom of a thousand how utterly they have got out of touch of life.  Their dislike of capital punishment and their treatment of their domestic servants are for me the two flaunting emblems of their hollowness.

God knows where I am driving to.  But here comes my lunch.

Which interruption, happily for you, seems to have stayed the issue.  I have now nothing to say, that had formerly such a pressure of twaddle.  Pray don’t fail to come this summer.  It will be a great disappointment, now it has been spoken of, if you do, ­Yours ever,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO F. W. H. MYERS

   In reply to a paper of criticisms on Jekyll and Hyde.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1st, 1886.

MY DEAR SIR, ­I know not how to thank you:  this is as handsome as it is clever.  With almost every word I agree ­much of it I even knew before ­much of it, I must confess, would never have been, if I had been able to do what I like, and lay the thing by for the matter of a year.  But the wheels of Byles the Butcher drive exceeding swiftly, and Jekyll was conceived, written, re-written, re-rewritten, and printed inside ten weeks.  Nothing but this white-hot haste would explain the gross error of Hyde’s speech at Lanyon’s.  Your point about the specialised fiend is more subtle, but not less just:  I had not seen it. ­About the picture, I rather meant that Hyde had brought it himself; and Utterson’s hypothesis of the gift an error. ­The tidiness of the room, I thought, but I dare say my psychology is here too ingenious to be sound, was due to the dread weariness and horror of the imprisonment.  Something has to be done:  he would tidy the room.  But I dare say it is false.

I shall keep your paper; and if ever my works come to be collected, I will put my back into these suggestions.  In the meanwhile, I do truly lack words in which to express my sense of gratitude for the trouble you have taken.  The receipt of such a paper is more than a reward for my labours.  I have read it with pleasure, and as I say, I hope to use it with profit. ­Believe me, your most obliged,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO W. H. LOW

The following letter relates to a suggestion which Mr. Gilder, as editor of the Century Magazine, had already made in the Hyères time nearly three years previously, and had now lately revived, that Stevenson and his friend Mr. W. H. Low should make a joint excursion down the Saône and Rhone, the result to be a book written by R. L. S. and illustrated by Mr. Low.  Considerations of health caused the plan to be promptly abandoned for the second time.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886.]

MY DEAR LOW, ­This is the most enchanting picture.  Now understand my state:  I am really an invalid, but of a mysterious order.  I might be a malade imaginaire, but for one too tangible symptom, my tendency to bleed from the lungs.  If we could go (1st) We must have money enough to travel with leisure and comfort ­especially the first. (2nd) You must be prepared for a comrade who would go to bed some part of every day and often stay silent. (3rd) You would have to play the part of a thoughtful courier, sparing me fatigue, looking out that my bed was warmed, etc. (4th) If you are very nervous, you must recollect a bad hemorrhage is always on the cards, with its concomitants of anxiety and horror for those who are beside me.

Do you blench?  If so, let us say no more about it.

If you are still unafraid, and the money were forthcoming, I believe the trip might do me good, and I feel sure that, working together, we might produce a fine book.  The Rhone is the river of Angels.  I adore it:  have adored it since I was twelve, and first saw it from the train.

Lastly, it would depend on how I keep from now on.  I have stood the winter hitherto with some credit, but the dreadful weather still continues, and I cannot holloa till I am through the wood.

Subject to these numerous and gloomy provisos, I embrace the prospect with glorious feelings.

I write this from bed, snow pouring without, and no circumstance of pleasure except your letter.  That, however, counts for much.  I am glad you liked the doggerel:  I have already had a liberal cheque, over which I licked my fingers with a sound conscience.  I had not meant to make money by these stumbling feet, but if it comes, it is only too welcome in my handsome but impecunious house.

Let me know soon what is to be expected ­as far as it does not hang by that inconstant quantity, my want of health.  Remember me to Madam with the best thanks and wishes; and believe me your friend,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

   Written just before a visit to London; not, this time, as my guest at
   the British Museum, but to stay with his father at an hotel in
   Fitzroy Square.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886.]

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­I have been reading the Vth and VIth Aeneid ­the latter for the first time ­and am overpowered.  That is one of the most astonishing pieces of literature, or rather it contains the best, I ever met with.  We are all damned small fry, and Virgil is one of the tops of human achievement; I never appreciated this; you should have a certain age to feel this; it is no book for boys, who grind under the lack of enterprise and dash, and pass ignorantly over miracles of performance that leave an old hoary-headed practitioner like me stricken down with admiration.  Even as a boy, the Sibyl would have bust me; but I never read the VIth till I began it two days ago; it is all fresh and wonderful; do you envy me?  If only I knew any Latin! if you had a decent edition with notes ­many notes ­I should like well to have it; mine is a damned Didot with not the ghost of a note, type that puts my eyes out, and (I suspect) no very splendid text ­but there, the carnal feelings of the man who can’t construe are probably parents to the suspicion.

My dear fellow, I would tenfold rather come to the Monument; but my father is an old man, and if I go to town, it shall be (this time) for his pleasure.  He has many marks of age, some of childhood; I wish this knighthood business could come off, though even the talk of it has been already something, but the change (to my eyes) is thoroughly begun; and a very beautiful, simple, honourable, high-spirited and child-like (and childish) man is now in process of deserting us piecemeal. Si quis piorum ­God knows, not that he was pious, but he did his hand’s darg or tried to do it; and if not, ­well, it is a melancholy business. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN

   The first letter showing Stevenson’s new interest in the
   technicalities of music.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886.]

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN, ­I try to tell myself it is good nature, but I know it is vanity that makes me write.

I have drafted the first part of Chapter VI., Fleeming and his friends, his influence on me, his views on religion and literature, his part at the Savile; it should boil down to about ten pages, and I really do think it admirably good.  It has so much evoked Fleeming for myself that I found my conscience stirred just as it used to be after a serious talk with him:  surely that means it is good?  I had to write and tell you, being alone.

I have excellent news of Fanny, who is much better for the change.  My father is still very yellow, and very old, and very weak, but yesterday he seemed happier, and smiled, and followed what was said; even laughed, I think.  When he came away, he said to me, “Take care of yourself, my dearie,” which had a strange sound of childish days, and will not leave my mind.

You must get Litolf’s Gavottes Célèbres:  I have made another trover there:  a musette of Lully’s.  The second part of it I have not yet got the hang of; but the first ­only a few bars!  The gavotte is beautiful and pretty hard, I think, and very much of the period; and at the end of it, this musette enters with the most really thrilling effect of simple beauty.  O ­it’s first-rate.  I am quite mad over it.  If you find other books containing Lully, Rameau, Martini, please let me know; also you might tell me, you who know Bach, where the easiest is to be found.  I write all morning, come down, and never leave the piano till about five; write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano till I go to bed.  This is a fine life. ­Yours most sincerely,

     R. L. S.

If you get the musette (Lully’s), please tell me if I am right, and it was probably written for strings.  Anyway, it is as neat as ­as neat as Bach ­on the piano; or seems so to my ignorance.

I play much of the Rigadoon; but it’s strange, it don’t come off quite so well with me!

There is the first part of the musette copied (from memory, so I hope there’s nothing wrong).  Is it not angelic?  But it ought, of course, to have the gavotte before.  The gavotte is in G, and ends on the keynote thus (if I remember): ­

staccato, I think.  Then you sail into the musette.

N.B. ­Where I have put an “A” is that a dominant eleventh, or what? or just a seventh on the D? and if the latter, is that allowed?  It sounds very funny.  Never mind all my questions; if I begin about music (which is my leading ignorance and curiosity), I have always to babble questions:  all my friends know me now, and take no notice whatever.  The whole piece is marked allegro; but surely could easily be played too fast?  The dignity must not be lost; the periwig feeling.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

Written after his return from an excursion to Matlock with his father, following on their visit to London.  “The verses” means Underwoods.  The suppressed poem is that headed “To ­,” afterwards printed in Songs of Travel.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1886.]

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­This is to announce to you, what I believe should have been done sooner, that we are at Skerryvore.  We were both tired, and I was fighting my second cold, so we came straight through by the west.

We have a butler!  He doesn’t buttle, but the point of the thing is the style.  When Fanny gardens, he stands over her and looks genteel.  He opens the door, and I am told waits at table.  Well, what’s the odds; I shall have it on my tomb ­“He ran a butler.”

  He may have been this and that,
    A drunkard or a guttler;
  He may have been bald and fat ­
    At least he kept a butler.

  He may have sprung from ill or well,
    From Emperor or sutler;
  He may be burning now in Hell ­
    On earth he kept a butler.

I want to tell you also that I have suppressed your poem.  I shall send it you for yourself, and I hope you will agree with me that it was not good enough in point of view of merit, and a little too intimate as between you and me.  I would not say less of you, my friend, but I scarce care to say so much in public while we live.  A man may stand on his own head; it is not fair to set his friend on a pedestal.

The verses are now at press; I have written a damn fine ballad. ­And I am, dear S. C., ever yours,

     TOMNODDY.

TO THOMAS STEVENSON

Want of health preventing the author at this time from carrying the adventures of David Balfour, as narrated in Kidnapped, through to their issue as originally designed, it was resolved to wind them up for the present with the discomfiture of the wicked uncle, leaving open the possibility of a sequel, which was supplied six years later in Catriona.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1886.]

MY DEAR FATHER, ­The David problem has to-day been decided.  I am to leave the door open for a sequel if the public take to it, and this will save me from butchering a lot of good material to no purpose.  Your letter from Carlisle was pretty like yourself, sir, as I was pleased to see; the hand of Jekyll, not the hand of Hyde.  I am for action quite unfit, and even a letter is beyond me; so pray take these scraps at a vast deal more than their intrinsic worth.  I am in great spirits about David, Colvin agreeing with Henley, Fanny, and myself in thinking it far the most human of my labours hitherto.  As to whether the long-eared British public may take to it, all think it more than doubtful; I wish they would, for I could do a second volume with ease and pleasure, and Colvin thinks it sin and folly to throw away David and Alan Breck upon so small a field as this one. ­Ever your affectionate son,

     R. L. S.

TO MISS MONROE

   The next is in answer to criticisms on Prince Otto received from a
   lady correspondent in Chicago.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, May 25th, 1886.

DEAR MISS MONROE, ­(I hope I have this rightly) I must lose no time in thanking you for a letter singularly pleasant to receive.  It may interest you to know that I read to the signature without suspecting my correspondent was a woman; though in one point (a reference to the Countess) I might have found a hint of the truth.  You are not pleased with Otto; since I judge you do not like weakness; and no more do I. And yet I have more than tolerance for Otto, whose faults are the faults of weakness, but never of ignoble weakness, and who seeks before all to be both kind and just.  Seeks, not succeeds.  But what is man?  So much of cynicism to recognise that nobody does right is the best equipment for those who do not wish to be cynics in good earnest.  Think better of Otto, if my plea can influence you; and this I mean for your own sake ­not his, poor fellow, as he will never learn your opinion; but for yours, because, as men go in this world (and women too), you will not go far wrong if you light upon so fine a fellow; and to light upon one and not perceive his merits is a calamity.  In the flesh, of course, I mean; in the book the fault, of course, is with my stumbling pen.  Seraphina made a mistake about her Otto; it begins to swim before me dimly that you may have some traits of Seraphina?

With true ingratitude you see me pitch upon your exception; but it is easier to defend oneself gracefully than to acknowledge praise.  I am truly glad that you should like my books; for I think I see from what you write that you are a reader worth convincing.  Your name, if I have properly deciphered it, suggests that you may be also something of my countrywoman; for it is hard to see where Monroe came from, if not from Scotland.  I seem to have here a double claim on your good nature:  being myself pure Scotch and having appreciated your letter, make up two undeniable merits which, perhaps, if it should be quite without trouble, you might reward with your photograph. ­Yours truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

Evidently written about the 10th of June, very soon after the decision of Mr. Gladstone to dissolve Parliament on the defeat of the Home Rule Bill (June 8).  As to the Travelling Companion, see above, .

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1886.]

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­I am in bed again ­bloodie jackery and be damned to it.  Lloyd is better, I think; and money matters better; only my rascal carcase, and the muddy and oily lees of what was once my immortal soul are in a poor and pitiful condition.

      LITANY
  Damn the political situation
   " you
   " me
       and
   " Gladstone.

I am a kind of dam home ruler, worse luck to it.  I would support almost anything but that bill.  How am I to vote?  Great Cæsar’s Ghost! ­Ever yours,

     R. L. S.

O! the Travelling Companion won’t do; I am back on it entirely:  it is a foul, gross, bitter, ugly daub, with lots of stuff in it, and no urbanity and no glee and no true tragedy ­to the crows with it, a carrion tale!  I will do no more carrion, I have done too much in this carrion epoch; I will now be clean; and by clean, I don’t mean any folly about purity, but such things as a healthy man with his bowels open shall find fit to see and speak about without a pang of nausea. ­I am, yours,

     A REPENTANT DANKIST.

The lakeists, the drainists, the brookists, and the riverites; let me be a brookist, faute de mieux.

I did enjoy myself in town, and was a thousandfold the better of it.

TO MISS MONROE

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1886.]

MY DEAR MISS MONROE, ­I am ill in bed and stupid, incoherently stupid; yet I have to answer your letter, and if the answer is incomprehensible you must forgive me.  You say my letter caused you pleasure; I am sure, as it fell out, not near so much as yours has brought to me.  The interest taken in an author is fragile:  his next book, or your next year of culture, might see the interest frosted or outgrown; and himself, in spite of all, you might probably find the most distasteful person upon earth.  My case is different.  I have bad health, am often condemned to silence for days together ­was so once for six weeks, so that my voice was awful to hear when I first used it, like the whisper of a shadow ­have outlived all my chief pleasures, which were active and adventurous, and ran in the open air:  and being a person who prefers life to art, and who knows it is a far finer thing to be in love, or to risk a danger, than to paint the finest picture or write the noblest book, I begin to regard what remains to me of my life as very shadowy.  From a variety of reasons, I am ashamed to confess I was much in this humour when your letter came.  I had a good many troubles; was regretting a high average of sins; had been recently reminded that I had outlived some friends, and wondering if I had not outlived some friendships; and had just, while boasting of better health, been struck down again by my haunting enemy, an enemy who was exciting at first, but has now, by the iteration of his strokes, become merely annoying and inexpressibly irksome.  Can you fancy that to a person drawing towards the elderly this sort of conjunction of circumstances brings a rather aching sense of the past and the future?  Well, it was just then that your letter and your photograph were brought to me in bed; and there came to me at once the most agreeable sense of triumph.  My books were still young; my words had their good health and could go about the world and make themselves welcome; and even (in a shadowy and distant sense) make something in the nature of friends for the sheer hulk that stays at home and bites his pen over the manuscripts.  It amused me very much to remember that I had been in Chicago, not so many years ago, in my proper person; where I had failed to awaken much remark, except from the ticket collector; and to think how much more gallant and persuasive were the fellows that I now send instead of me, and how these are welcome in that quarter to the sitter of Herr Platz, while their author was not very welcome even in the villainous restaurant where he tried to eat a meal and rather failed.

And this leads me directly to a confession.  The photograph which shall accompany this is not chosen as the most like, but the best-looking.  Put yourself in my place, and you will call this pardonable.  Even as it is, even putting forth a flattered presentment, I am a little pained; and very glad it is a photograph and not myself that has to go; for in this case, if it please you, you can tell yourself it is my image ­and if it displease you, you can lay the blame on the photographer; but in that, there were no help, and the poor author might belie his labours.

Kidnapped should soon appear; I am afraid you may not like it, as it is very unlike Prince Otto in every way; but I am myself a great admirer of the two chief characters, Alan and David. Virginibus Puerisque has never been issued in the States.  I do not think it is a book that has much charm for publishers in any land; but I am to bring out a new edition in England shortly, a copy of which I must try to remember to send you.  I say try to remember, because I have some superficial acquaintance with myself:  and I have determined, after a galling discipline, to promise nothing more until the day of my death:  at least, in this way, I shall no more break my word, and I must now try being churlish instead of being false.

I do not believe you to be the least like Seraphina.  Your photograph has no trace of her, which somewhat relieves me, as I am a good deal afraid of Seraphinas ­they do not always go into the woods and see the sunrise, and some are so well-mailed that even that experience would leave them unaffected and unsoftened.  The “hair and eyes of several complexions” was a trait taken from myself; and I do not bind myself to the opinions of Sir John.  In this case, perhaps ­but no, if the peculiarity is shared by two such pleasant persons as you and I (as you and me ­the grammatical nut is hard), it must be a very good thing indeed, and Sir John must be an ass.

The Book Reader notice was a strange jumble of fact and fancy.  I wish you could have seen my father’s old assistant and present partner when he heard my father described as an “inspector of lighthouses,” for we are all very proud of the family achievements, and the name of my house here in Bournemouth is stolen from one of the sea-towers of the Hebrides which are our pyramids and monuments.  I was never at Cambridge, again; but neglected a considerable succession of classes at Edinburgh.  But to correct that friendly blunderer were to write an autobiography. ­And so now, with many thanks, believe me yours sincerely,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

   Accompanying a presentation copy of Kidnapped.  Alison Cunningham’s
   maiden name had been Hastie.

     [Bournemouth, July 1886.]

MY DEAR CUMMY, ­Herewith goes my new book, in which you will find some places that you know:  I hope you will like it:  I do.  The name of the girl at Limekilns (as will appear if the sequel is ever written) was Hastie, and I conceive she was an ancestor of yours:  as David was no doubt some kind of relative of mine.

I have no time for more, but send my love, and remembrances to your brother. ­Ever your affectionate

     R. L. S.

TO R. A. M. STEVENSON LETTER I

During these months, as already indicated, Stevenson was very much taken up, in by-hours, with trying to learn something of the theory and practice of music, and spent much of his time “pickling,” as he called it, in an elementary manner on the piano.  He even tried his hand in an experimental way at composition, and had sent one of his attempts for criticism to his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, who was better versed in the art.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 1886.

SIR, ­Your foolish letter was unduly received.  There may be hidden fifths, and if there are, it shows how dam spontaneous the thing was.  I could tinker and tic-tac-toe on a piece of paper, but scorned the act with a Threnody, which was poured forth like blood and water on the groaning organ.  If your heart (which was what I addressed) remained unmoved, let us refer to the affair no more:  crystallised emotion, the statement and the reconciliation of the sorrows of the race and the individual, is obviously no more to you than supping sawdust.  Well, well.  If ever I write another Threnody!  My next op. will probably be a Passepied and fugue in G (or D).

The mind is in my case shrunk to the size and sp. gr. of an aged Spanish filbert.  O, I am so jolly silly.  I now pickle with some freedom (1) the refrain of Martini’s Moutons; (2) Sul margine d’un rio, arranged for the infant school by the Aged Statesman; (3) the first phrase of Bach’s musette (Sweet Englishwoman, N, the rest of the musette being one prolonged cropper, which I take daily for the benefit of my health.  All my other works (of which there are many) are either arranged (by R. L. Stevenson) for the manly and melodious forefinger, or else prolonged and melancholy croppers....  I find one can get a notion of music very nicely.  I have been pickling deeply in the Magic Flute; and have arranged La dove prende, almost to the end, for two melodious forefingers.  I am next going to score the really nobler Colomba o tortorella for the same instruments.

This day is published
The works of Ludwig van Beethoven
arranged
and wiederdurchgearbeiteted
for two melodious forefingers
by,
Sir, ­Your obedient servant,
PIMPERLY STIPPLE.

That’s a good idea?  There’s a person called Lenz who actually does it ­beware his den; I lost eighteenpennies on him, and found the bleeding corpses of pieces of music divorced from their keys, despoiled of their graces, and even changed in time; I do not wish to regard music (nor to be regarded) through that bony Lenz.  You say you are “a spoon-fed idiot”; but how about Lenz?  And how about me, sir, me?

I yesterday sent Lloyd by parcel post, at great expense, an empty matchbox and empty cigarette-paper book, a bell from a cat’s collar, an iron kitchen spoon, and a piece of coal more than half the superficies of this sheet of paper.  They are now (appropriately enough) speeding towards the Silly Isles; I hope he will find them useful.  By that, and my telegram with prepaid answer to yourself, you may judge of my spiritual state.  The finances have much brightened; and if Kidnapped keeps on as it has begun, I may be solvent. ­Yours,

     THRENODIÆ AVCTOR
  (The author of ane Threnodie).

O:  Scherzo (in G Major) expressive of the Sense of favours to come.

TO R. A. M. STEVENSON LETTER II

     Skerryvore [Bournemouth, July 1886].

DEAR BOB, ­Herewith another shy; more melancholy than before, but I think not so abjectly idiotic.  The musical terms seem to be as good as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair.  Bar the dam bareness of the bass, it looks like a piece of real music from a distance.  I am proud to say it was not made one hand at a time; the bass was of synchronous birth with the treble; they are of the same age, sir, and may God have mercy on their souls! ­Yours,

     THE MAESTRO.

TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

Mr. and Mrs. T. Stevenson had been thinking of trying a winter at Bournemouth for the sake of being near their son, a plan which was eventually carried out.  The health of the former was now fast and painfully breaking.  Mr. J. W. Alexander, the well-known American artist, had been down at Skerryvore with an introduction from Mr. Gosse, and had made a drawing of Stevenson’s head.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 7th, 1886.

MY DEAR PEOPLE, ­It is probably my fault, and not yours, that I did not understand.  I think it would be well worth trying the winter in Bournemouth; but I would only take the house by the month ­this after mature discussion.  My leakage still pursues its course; if I were only well, I have a notion to go north and get in (if I could) at the inn at Kirkmichael, which has always smiled upon me much.  If I did well there, we might then meet and do what should most smile at the time.

Meanwhile, of course, I must not move, and am in a rancid box here, feeling the heat a great deal, and pretty tired of things.  Alexander did a good thing of me at last; it looks like a mixture of an aztec idol, a lion, an Indian Rajah, and a woman; and certainly represents a mighty comic figure.  F. and Lloyd both think it is the best thing that has been done of me up to now.

You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle, and me on the piano!  Dear powers, what a concerto!  I now live entirely for the piano, he for the whistle; the neighbours, in a radius of a furlong and a half, are packing up in quest of brighter climes. ­Ever yours,

     R. L. S.

P.S. ­Please say if you can afford to let us have money for this trip, and if so, how much.  I can see the year through without help, I believe, and supposing my health to keep up; but can scarce make this change on my own metal.

     R. L. S.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 1886.]

DEAR CHARLES, ­Doubtless, if all goes well, towards the 1st of August we shall be begging at your door.  Thanks for a sight of the papers, which I return (you see) at once, fearing further responsibility.

Glad you like Dauvit; but eh, man, yon’s terrible strange conduc’ o’ thon man Rankeillor.  Ca’ him a legal adviser!  It would make a bonny law-shuit, the Shaws case; and yon paper they signed, I’m thinking, wouldnae be muckle thought o’ by Puggy Deas. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

Hecky was a dog belonging to his correspondent’s brother.  Stevenson was always interested by his own retentiveness of memory for childish things, and here asks Cummy some questions to test the quality of hers.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 1886.]

MY DEAR CUMMY, ­I was sorry to get so poor account of you and Hecky.  Fanny thinks perhaps it might be Hecky’s teeth.  Sir Walter Simpson has a very clever vet.  I have forgotten his name; but if you like, I send a card and you or James might ask the address.

Now to what is more important.  Do you remember any of the following names:  Lady Boothroyd, Barny Gee, Andrew Silex, the Steward, Carus Rearn, Peter Mangles, Richard Markham, Fiddler Dick?  Please let me know and I will tell you how I come to ask.  I warn you, you will have to cast back your eyes a good long way, close upon thirty years, before you strike the trail on which I wish to lead you.

When I have had an answer I will write you a decent letter.  To-day, though nothing much is wrong with me, I am out of sorts and most disinclined for writing. ­Yours most affectionately,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO THOMAS STEVENSON

   “Coolin,” mentioned below, had been a favourite Skye terrier of
   Heriot Row days.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] July 28, 1886.

MY DEAR FATHER, ­We have decided not to come to Scotland, but just to do as Dobell wished, and take an outing.  I believe this is wiser in all ways; but I own it is a disappointment.  I am weary of England; like Alan, “I weary for the heather,” if not for the deer.  Lloyd has gone to Scilly with Katharine and C., where and with whom he should have a good time. David seems really to be going to succeed, which is a pleasant prospect on all sides.  I am, I believe, floated financially; a book that sells will be a pleasant novelty.  I enclose another review; mighty complimentary, and calculated to sell the book too.

Coolin’s tombstone has been got out, honest man! and it is to be polished, for it has got scratched, and have a touch of gilding in the letters, and be sunk in the front of the house.  Worthy man, he, too, will maybe weary for the heather, and the bents of Gullane, where (as I dare say you remember) he gaed clean gyte, and jumped on to his crown from a gig, in hot and hopeless chase of many thousand rabbits.  I can still hear the little cries of the honest fellow as he disappeared; and my mother will correct me, but I believe it was two days before he turned up again at North Berwick:  to judge by his belly, he had caught not one out of these thousands, but he had had some exercise.

I keep well. ­Ever your affectionate son,

     R. L. S.

TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

   Anticipating the gift of a cupboard and answering the questions set
   in his last.  The date of the readings had been his seventh year.  Mr.
   Galpin was a partner in Cassell, Petter, Galpin, & Co.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July or August 1886.]

MY DEAR CUMMY, ­The cupboard has not yet turned up, and I was hanging on to be able to say it had.  However, that is only a trick to escape another letter, and I should despise myself if I kept it up.  It was truly kind of you, dear Cummy, to send it to us:  and I will let you know where we set it and how it looks.

Carus Rearn and Andrew Silex and the others were from a story you read me in Cassell’s Family Paper, and which I have been reading again and found by no means a bad story.  Mr. Galpin lent me all the old volumes, and I mean to re-read Custaloga also, but have not yet.  It was strangely like old times to read the other; don’t you remember the poisoning with mushrooms?  That was Andrew Silex. ­Yours most affectionately,

     R. L. S.

TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

Having given up going to Scotland for a summer change, Stevenson had started on the “outing” which he mentions in the last letter.  It took the shape of a ten days’ visit to my house at the British Museum, followed by another made in the company of Mr. Henley to Paris, chiefly for the sake of seeing the W. H. Lows and the sculptor Rodin.

     British Museum [August 10th, 1886].

MY DEAR MOTHER, ­We are having a capital holiday, and I am much better, and enjoying myself to the nines.  Richmond is painting my portrait.  To-day I lunch with him, and meet Burne-Jones; to-night Browning dines with us.  That sounds rather lofty work, does it not?  His path was paved with celebrities.  To-morrow we leave for Paris, and next week, I suppose, or the week after, come home.  Address here, as we may not reach Paris.  I am really very well. ­Ever your affectionate son,

     R. L. S.

TO T. WATTS-DUNTON

   Written after his return from London and Paris.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth [September 1886].

DEAR MR. WATTS, ­The sight of the last Athenæum reminds me of you, and of my debt, now too long due.  I wish to thank you for your notice of Kidnapped; and that not because it was kind, though for that also I valued it, but in the same sense as I have thanked you before now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers.  A critic like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity, and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance, surely not in vain.

What you say of the two parts in Kidnapped was felt by no one more painfully than by myself.  I began it partly as a lark, partly as a pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from the canvas, and I found I was in another world.  But there was the cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old friend Byles the butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back door.  So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one part merely galvanised:  no work, only an essay.  For a man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist’s proper virtue, the days of sinécures and patrons look very golden:  the days of professional literature very hard.  Yet I do not so far deceive myself as to think I should change my character by changing my epoch; the sum of virtue in our books is in a relation of equality to the sum of virtues in ourselves; and my Kidnapped was doomed, while still in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the thing it is.

And now to the more genial business of defence.  You attack my fight on board the Covenant:  I think it literal.  David and Alan had every advantage on their side ­position, arms, training, a good conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have taken the round-house by attack; and since the defenders had firearms and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out.  The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not; still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity. ­I am, dear Mr. Watts, your very sincere admirer,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, September 1886.

MY DEAR CUMMY, ­I am home from a long holiday, vastly better in health.  My wife not home yet, as she is being cured in some rather boisterous fashion by some Swedish doctors.  I hope it may do her good, as the process seems not to be agreeable in itself.

Your cupboard has come, and it is most beautiful:  it is certainly worth a lot of money, and is just what we have been looking for in all the shops for quite a while:  so your present falls very pat.  It is to go in our bedroom I think; but perhaps my wife will think it too much of a good thing to be put so much out of the way, so I shall not put it in its place till her return.  I am so well that I am afraid to speak of it, being a coward as to boasting.  I take walks in the wood daily, and have got back to my work after a long break.  The story I wrote you about was one you read to me in Cassell’s Family Paper long ago when it came out.  It was astonishing how clearly I remembered it all, pictures, characters, and incidents, though the last were a little mixed and I had not the least the hang of the story.  It was very pleasant to read it again, and remember old days, and the weekly excursion to Mrs. Hoggs after that precious journal.  Dear me, lang syne now!  God bless you, dear Cummy. ­Your afft. boy,

     R. L. STEVENSON.

TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON LETTER I

Mr. Locker-Lampson, better known as Frederick Locker, the friend of Tennyson and most accomplished writer of vers de société in his time, had through their common friend Mr. Andrew Lang asked Stevenson for a set of verses, and he had sent the following ­which were first printed, I believe, at the head of a very scarce volume: ­“Rowfant Rhymes, by Frederick Locker, with an introduction by Austin Dobson.  Cleveland, The Rowfant Club, 1895. 127 copies only printed.”

     Skerryvore, September 4, 1886.

  Not roses to the rose, I trow,
    The thistle sends, nor to the bee
  Do wasps bring honey.  Wherefore now
    Should Locker ask a verse from me?

  Martial, perchance, ­but he is dead,
    And Herrick now must rhyme no more;
  Still burning with the muse, they tread
    (And arm in arm) the shadowy shore.

  They, if they lived, with dainty hand,
    To music as of mountain brooks,
  Might bring you worthy words to stand
    Unshamed, dear Locker, in your books.

  But tho’ these fathers of your race
    Be gone before, yourself a sire,
  To-day you see before your face
    Your stalwart youngsters touch the lyre.

  On these ­on Lang or Dobson ­call,
    Long leaders of the songful feast. 
  They lend a verse your laughing fall ­
    A verse they owe you at the least.

TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON

To Mr. Locker’s acknowledgment of these verses Stevenson replied as follows, asking his correspondent’s interest on behalf of a friend who had been kind to him at Hyères, in procuring a nomination for her son to the Blue-Coat School.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, September 1886.

DEAR LOCKER, ­You take my verses too kindly, but you will admit, for such a bluebottle of a versifier to enter the house of Gertrude, where her necklace hangs, was not a little brave.  Your kind invitation, I fear, must remain unaccepted; and yet ­if I am very well ­perhaps next spring ­(for I mean to be very well) ­my wife might....  But all that is in the clouds with my better health.  And now look here:  you are a rich man and know many people, therefore perhaps some of the Governors of Christ’s Hospital.  If you do, I know a most deserving case, in which I would (if I could) do anything.  To approach you, in this way, is not decent; and you may therefore judge by my doing it, how near this matter lies to my heart.  I enclose you a list of the Governors, which I beg you to return, whether or not you shall be able to do anything to help me.

The boy’s name is ­; he and his mother are very poor.  It may interest you in her cause if I tell you this:  that when I was dangerously ill at Hyères, this brave lady, who had then a sick husband of her own (since dead) and a house to keep and a family of four to cook for, all with her own hands, for they could afford no servant, yet took watch-about with my wife, and contributed not only to my comfort, but to my recovery in a degree that I am not able to limit.  You can conceive how much I suffer from my impotence to help her, and indeed I have already shown myself a thankless friend.  Let not my cry go up before you in vain! ­Yours in hope,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON LETTER II

   Mr. Locker, apparently misunderstanding the application, had replied
   with a cheque.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, September 1886.

MY DEAR LOCKER, ­That I should call myself a man of letters, and land myself in such unfathomable ambiguities!  No, my dear Locker, I did not want a cheque; and in my ignorance of business, which is greater even than my ignorance of literature, I have taken the liberty of drawing a pen through the document and returning it; should this be against the laws of God or man, forgive me.  All that I meant by my excessively disgusting reference to your material well-being was the vague notion that a man who is well off was sure to know a Governor of Christ’s Hospital; though how I quite arrived at this conclusion I do not see.  A man with a cold in the head does not necessarily know a ratcatcher; and the connection is equally close ­as it now appears to my awakened and somewhat humbled spirit.  For all that, let me thank you in the warmest manner for your friendly readiness to contribute.  You say you have hopes of becoming a miser:  I wish I had; but indeed I believe you deceive yourself, and are as far from it as ever.  I wish I had any excuse to keep your cheque, for it is much more elegant to receive than to return; but I have my way of making it up to you, and I do sincerely beg you to write to the two Governors.  This extraordinary out-pouring of correspondence would (if you knew my habits) convince you of my great eagerness in this matter.  I would promise gratitude; but I have made a promise to myself to make no more promises to anybody else, having broken such a host already, and come near breaking my heart in consequence; and as for gratitude, I am by nature a thankless dog, and was spoiled from a child up.  But if you can help this lady in the matter of the Hospital, you will have helped the worthy.  Let me continue to hope that I shall make out my visit in the spring, and believe me, yours very truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

It may amuse you to know that a very long while ago, I broke my heart to try to imitate your verses, and failed hopelessly.  I saw some of the evidences the other day among my papers, and blushed to the heels.

     R. L. S.

I give up finding out your name in the meantime, and keep to that by which you will be known ­Frederick Locker.

TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON LETTER III

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] 24th September 1886.

MY DEAR LOCKER, ­You are simply an angel of light, and your two letters have gone to the post; I trust they will reach the hearts of the recipients ­at least, that could not be more handsomely expressed.  About the cheque:  well now, I am going to keep it; but I assure you Mrs. ­ has never asked me for money, and I would not dare to offer any till she did.  For all that I shall stick to the cheque now, and act to that amount as your almoner.  In this way I reward myself for the ambiguity of my epistolary style.

I suppose, if you please, you may say your verses are thin (would you so describe an arrow, by the way, and one that struck the gold?  It scarce strikes me as exhaustively descriptive), and, thin or not, they are (and I have found them) inimitably elegant.  I thank you again very sincerely for the generous trouble you have taken in this matter which was so near my heart, and you may be very certain it will be the fault of my health and not my inclination, if I do not see you before very long; for all that has past has made me in more than the official sense sincerely yours,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO AUGUSTE RODIN

   Written after another visit to me in London, in November, which had
   been cut short by fogs.  “Le Printemps” is Rodin’s group so called.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, December 1886.]

MON CHER AMI, ­Il y a bien longtemps déjà que je vous dois des lettres par dizaines; maïs bien que je vais mieux, je ne vais toujours que doucement.  Il a fallu faire lé voyage à Bournemouth comme une fuite en Égypte, par crainte des brouillards qui me tuaient; et j’en ressentais beaucoup de fatigue.  Mais maintenant celà commence à aller, et je puis vous donner de mes nouvelles.

Le Printemps est arrivé, maïs il avait lé bras cassé, et nous l’avons laissé, lors de nôtre fuite, aux soins d’un médecin-de-statues.  Je l’attends de jour en jour; et ma maisonette en resplendira bientôt.  Je regrette beaucoup lé dédicace; peutêtre, quand vous viendrez nous voir, ne serait-il pas trop tard de l’ajouter?  Je n’en saïs rien, je l’espère.  L’oeuvre, c’est pour tout lé monde; lé dédicace est pour moi.  L’oeuvre est un cadeau, trop beau même; c’est lé mot d’amitié qui me lé donne pour de bon.  Je suis si bête que je m’embrouille, et me perds; maïs vous me comprendrez, je pense.

Je ne puis même pas m’exprimer en Anglais; comment voudriez vous que je lé pourrais en Français?  Plus heureux que vous, lé Némésis des arts ne me visite pas sous lé masque du désenchantement; elle me suce l’intelligence et me laisse bayer aux corneilles, sans capacité maïs sans regret; sans espérance, c’est vrai, maïs aussi, Dieu merci, sans désespoir.  Un doux étonnement me tient; je ne m’habitue pas à me trouver si bûche, maïs je m’y résigne; même si celà durait, ce ne serait pas désagréable ­maïs comme je mourrais certainement de faim, ce serait tout au moins regrettable pour moi et ma famille.

Je voudrais pouvoir vous écrire; maïs ce n’est pas moi qui tiens la plume ­c’est l’autre, lé bête, celui qui ne connaît pas lé Français, celui qui n’aime pas mes amis comme je les aime, qui ne goûte pas aux choses de l’art comme j’y goûte; celui que je renie, maïs auquel je commande toujours assez pour lé faire prendre la plume en main et écrire des tristes bavardages.  Celui-là, mon cher Rodin, vous ne l’aimez pas; vous ne devez jamais lé connaître.  Vôtre ami, qui dort à present, comme un ours, au plus profond de mon être, se réveillera sous peu.  Alors, il vous écrira de sa propre main.  Attendez lui.  L’autre ne compte pas; ce n’est qu’un secrétaire infidèlé et triste, à l’âme gelée, à la tête de bois.

Celui qui dort est toujours, mon cher ami, bien à vous; celui qui écrit est chargé de vous en faire part et de signer de la raison sociale,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ET TRIPLE-BRUTE.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

The following refers first, if I remember right, to some steps that were being taken to obtain recognition in the form of a knighthood for the elder Stevenson’s public services; next, to the writer’s own work at the time in hand; and lastly, to my volume on Keats then in preparation for the English Men of Letters series.

     Skerryvore, De, 1886.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­This is first-rate of you, the Lord love you for it!  I am truly much obliged.  He ­my father ­is very changeable; at times, he seems only a slow quiet edition of himself; again, he will be very heavy and blank; but never so violent as last spring; and therefore, to my mind, better on the whole.

Fanny is pretty peepy; I am splendid.  I have been writing much verse ­quite the bard, in fact; and also a dam tale to order, which will be what it will be:  I don’t love it, but some of it is passable in its mouldy way, The Misadventures of John Nicholson.  All my bardly exercises are in Scotch; I have struck my somewhat ponderous guitar in that tongue to no small extent:  with what success, I know not, but I think it’s better than my English verse; more marrow and fatness, and more ruggedness.

How goes Keats?  Pray remark, if he (Keats) hung back from Shelley, it was not to be wondered at, when so many of his friends were Shelley’s pensioners.  I forget if you have made this point; it has been borne in upon me reading Dowden and the Shelley Papers; and it will do no harm if you have made it.  I finished a poem to-day, and writ 3000 words of a story, tant bien que mal; and have a right to be sleepy, and (what is far nobler and rarer) am so. ­My dear Colvin, ever yours,

     THE REAL MACKAY.

TO LADY TAYLOR

Stevenson’s volume of tales The Merry Men, so called from the story which heads the collection, was about to appear with a dedication to Lady Taylor.  Professor Dowden’s Shelley had lately come out, and had naturally been read with eager interest in a circle where Sir Percy (the poet’s son) and Lady Shelley were intimate friends and neighbours.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth [New Year, 1887].

MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR, ­This is to wish you all the salutations of the year, with some regret that I cannot offer them in person; yet less than I had supposed.  For hitherto your flight to London seems to have worked well; and time flies and will soon bring you back again.  Though time is ironical, too; and it would be like his irony if the same tide that brought you back carried me away.  That would not be, at least, without some meeting.

I feel very sorry to think the book to which I have put your name will be no better, and I can make it no better.  The tales are of all dates and places; they are like the box, the goose, and the cottage of the ferryman; and must go floating down time together as best they can.  But I am after all a (superior) penny-a-liner; I must do, in the Scotch phrase, as it will do with me; and I cannot always choose what my books are to be, only seize the chance they offer to link my name to a friend’s.  I hope the lot of them (the tales) will look fairly disciplined when they are clapped in binding; but I fear they will be but an awkward squad.  I have a mild wish that you at least would read them no further than the dedication.

I suppose we have all been reading Dowden.  It seems to me a really first-rate book, full of justice, and humour without which there can be no justice; and of fine intelligence besides.  Here and there, perhaps a trifle precious, but this is to spy flaws in a fine work.  I was weary at my resemblances to Shelley; I seem but a Shelley with less oil, and no genius; though I have had the fortune to live longer and (partly) to grow up.  He was growing up.  There is a manlier note in the last days; in spite of such really sickening aberrations as the Emillia Viviani business.  I try to take a humorously-genial view of life; but Emillia Viviani, if I have her detested name aright, is too much for my philosophy.  I cannot smile when I see all these grown folk waltzing and piping the eye about an insubordinate and perfectly abominable schoolgirl, as silly and patently as false as Blanche Amory. I really think it is one of those episodes that make the angels weep.

With all kind regards and affectionate good wishes to and for you and yours, believe me, your affectionate friend,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO LADY TAYLOR

   The reference in the last paragraph to a “vision” cannot be
   explained, his correspondent’s daughters retaining no memory on the
   subject.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, January 1887.]

MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR, ­I don’t know but what I agree fairly well with all you say, only I like The Merry Men, as a fantasia or vision of the sea, better than you do.  The trouble with Olalla is that it somehow sounds false; and I think it must be this that gives you the feeling of irreverence.  Of Thrawn Janet, which I like very much myself, you say nothing, thus uttering volumes; but it is plain that people cannot always agree.  I do not think it is a wholesome part of me that broods on the evil in the world and man; but I do not think that I get harm from it; possibly my readers may, which is more serious; but at any account, I do not purpose to write more in this vein.  But the odd problem is:  what makes a story true? Markheim is true; Olalla false; and I don’t know why, nor did I feel it while I worked at them; indeed I had more inspiration with Olalla, as the style shows.  I am glad you thought that young Spanish woman well dressed; I admire the style of it myself, more than is perhaps good for me; it is so solidly written.  And that again brings back (almost with the voice of despair) my unanswerable:  why is it false?

Here is a great deal about my works.  I am in bed again; and my wife but so-so; and we have no news recently from Lloyd; and the cat is well; and we see, or I see, no one; so that other matters are all closed against me.

Your vision is strange indeed; but I see not how to use it; I fear I am earthy enough myself to regard it as a case of disease, but certainly it is a thrilling case to hear of. ­Ever affectionately yours,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO HENRY JAMES

This letter is written on the front page of a set of proofs of Memories and Portraits.  The “silly Xmas story” is The Misadventures of John Nicholson; the “volume of verse” appeared later in the year as Underwoods.  The signature refers to the two Scots poets of whom, “in his native speech,” he considered himself the follower.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, January 1887.

  All the salutations!

MY DEAR JAMES, ­I send you the first sheets of the new volume, all that has yet reached me, the rest shall follow in course.  I am really a very fair sort of a fellow all things considered, have done some work; a silly Xmas story (with some larks in it) which won’t be out till I don’t know when.  I am also considering a volume of verse, much of which will be cast in my native speech, that very dark oracular medium:  I suppose this is a folly, but what then?  As the nurse says in Marryat, “It was only a little one.”

My wife is peepy and dowie:  two Scotch expressions with which I will leave you to wrestle unaided, as a preparation for my poetical works.  She is a woman (as you know) not without art:  the art of extracting the gloom of the eclipse from sunshine; and she has recently laboured in this field not without success or (as we used to say) not without a blessing.  It is strange:  “we fell out my wife and I” the other night; she tackled me savagely for being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting that there was no use in turning life into King Lear; presently it was discovered that there were two dead combatants upon the field, each slain by an arrow of the truth, and we tenderly carried off each other’s corpses.  Here is a little comedy for Henry James to write!  The beauty was each thought the other quite unscathed at first.  But we had dealt shrewd stabs.

You say nothing of yourself, which I shall take to be good news.  Archer’s note has gone.  He is, in truth, a very clever fellow that Archer, and I believe a good one.  It is a pleasant thing to see a man who can use a pen; he can:  really says what he means, and says it with a manner; comes into print like one at his ease, not shame-faced and wrong-foot-foremost like the bulk of us.  Well, here is luck, and here are the kindest recollections from the canary-bird and from King Lear, from the Tragic Woman and the Flimsy Man.

     ROBERT RAMSAY FERGUSSON STEVENSON.

TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON

Stevenson suffered more even than usual after the turn of the year and during the spring of 1887, and for several months his correspondence almost entirely fails.  This is in reply to an invitation to Rowfant for Easter.

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, February 5th, 1887.

MY DEAR LOCKER, ­Here I am in my bed as usual, and it is indeed a long while since I went out to dinner.  You do not know what a crazy fellow this is.  My winter has not so far been luckily passed, and all hope of paying visits at Easter has vanished for twelve calendar months.  But because I am a beastly and indurated invalid, I am not dead to human feelings; and I neither have forgotten you nor will forget you.  Some day the wind may round to the right quarter and we may meet; till then I am still truly yours,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO HENRY JAMES

   The volume of tales here mentioned is The Merry Men; that of
   essays, Memories and Portraits; that of verse, Underwoods.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, February 1887.]

MY DEAR JAMES, ­My health has played me it in once more in the absurdest fashion, and the creature who now addresses you is but a stringy and white-faced bouilli out of the pot of fever, with the devil to pay in every corner of his economy.  I suppose (to judge by your letter) I need not send you these sheets, which came during my collapse by the rush.  I am on the start with three volumes, that one of tales, a second one of essays, and one of ­ahem ­verse.  This is a great order, is it not?  After that I shall have empty lockers.  All new work stands still; I was getting on well with Jenkin when this blessed malady unhorsed me, and sent me back to the dung-collecting trade of the republisher.  I shall re-issue Virg.  Puer. as vol.  I. of Essays, and the new vol. as vol.  II. of ditto; to be sold, however, separately.  This is but a dry maundering; however, I am quite unfit ­“I am for action quite unfit Either of exercise or wit.”  My father is in a variable state; many sorrows and perplexities environ the house of Stevenson; my mother shoots north at this hour on business of a distinctly rancid character; my father (under my wife’s tutorage) proceeds to-morrow to Salisbury; I remain here in my bed and whistle; in no quarter of heaven is anything encouraging apparent, except that the good Colvin comes to the hotel here on a visit.  This dreary view of life is somewhat blackened by the fact that my head aches, which I always regard as a liberty on the part of the powers that be.  This is also my first letter since my recovery.  God speed your laudatory pen!

My wife joins in all warm messages. ­Yours,

     R. L. S.

TO AUGUSTE RODIN

     Skerryvore, Bournemouth, February 1887.

MON CHER AMI, ­Je vous néglige, et cependant ce n’est véritablement pas de ma faute.  J’ai fait encore une maladie; et je puis dire que je l’ai royalement bien faîte.  Que celà vous aide à me pardonner.  Certes je ne vous oublie pas; et je puis dire que je ne vous oublierai jamais.  Si je n’écris pas, dites que je suis malade ­c’est trop souvent vrai, dites que je suis las d’écrivailler ­ce sera toujours vrai; maïs ne dites pas, et ne pensez pas, que je deviens indifférent.  J’ai devant moi vôtre portrait tiré d’un journal anglais (et encadré à mes frais), et je lé regarde avec amitié, je lé regarde même avec une certaine complaisance ­dirai-je, de faux aloi? comme un certificat de jeunesse.  Je me croyais trop vieux ­au moins trop quarante-ans ­pour faire de nouveaux amis; et quand je regarde vôtre portrait, et quand je pense au plaisir de vous revoir, je sens que je m’étais trompé. Écrivez-moi donc un petit mot, pour me dire que vous ne gardez pas rancune de mon silence, et que vous comptez bientôt venir en Angleterre.  Si vous tardez beaucoup, ce sera moi qui irai vous relancer. ­Bien à vous, mon cher ami,

     R. L. STEVENSON.

TO W. H. LOW

   Mr. Low and his wife, who were at this time leaving Paris for good,
   had been meditating a visit to the Stevensons at Bournemouth on their
   way home to the United States.

     [April 1887.]

MY DEAR LOW, ­The fares to London may be found in any continental Bradshaw or sich; from London to Bournemouth impoverished parties who can stoop to the third class get their ticket for the matter of 10s., or, as my wife loves to phrase it, “a half a pound.”  You will also be involved in a 3s. fare to get to Skerryvore; but this, I dare say, friends could help you in on your arrival; so that you may reserve your energies for the two tickets ­costing the matter of a pound ­and the usual gratuities to porters.  This does not seem to me much:  considering the intellectual pleasures that await you here, I call it dirt cheap.  I believe the third class from Paris to London (via Dover) is about forty francs, but I cannot swear.  Suppose it to be fifty.

                                                               frcs.
  50 x 2 = 100 100

The expense of spirit or spontaneous lapse of coin on the journey,
at 5 frcs. a head, 5 x 2 = 10 10

Victuals on ditto, at 5 frcs. a head, 5 x 2 = 10 10

Gratuity to stewardess, in case of severe prostration, at 3 francs 3

One night in London, on a modest footing, say 20 20

Two tickets to Bournemouth at 12·50, 12·50 x 2 = 25 25

Porters and general devilment, say 5 5

Cabs in London, say 2 shillings, and in Bournemouth,
3 shillings = 5 shillings, 6 frc 6·
------
frcs. 179·25

Or, the same in pounds, £7, 3-1/2d. 
Or, the same in dollars, $35·45,

if there be any arithmetical virtue in me.  I have left out dinner in London in case you want to blow out, which would come extry, and with the aid of vangs fangs might easily double the whole amount ­above all if you have a few friends to meet you.

In making this valuable project, or budget, I discovered for the first time a reason (frequently overlooked) for the singular costliness of travelling with your wife.  Anybody would count the tickets double; but how few would have remembered ­or indeed has any one ever remembered? ­to count the spontaneous lapse of coin double also?  Yet there are two of you, each must do his daily leakage, and it must be done out of your travelling fund.  You will tell me, perhaps, that you carry the coin yourself:  my dear sir, do you think you can fool your Maker?  Your wife has to lose her quota; and by God she will ­if you kept the coin in a belt.  One thing I have omitted:  you will lose a certain amount on the exchange, but this even I cannot foresee, as it is one of the few things that vary with the way a man has. ­I am, dear sir, yours financially,

     SAMUEL BUDGETT.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

I had lately sent him two books, the fifth volume of Huxley’s Collected Essays and Cotter Morison’s Service of Man:  the latter a work of Positivist tendency, which its genial and accomplished author had long meditated, but which unfortunately he only began to write after a rapid decline of health and power had set in.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Spring 1887.]

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­I read Huxley, and a lot of it with great interest.  Eh, what a gulf between a man with a mind like Huxley and a man like Cotter Morison.  Truly ’tis the book of a boy; before I was twenty I was done with all these considerations.  Nor is there one happy phrase, except “the devastating flood of children.”  Why should he din our ears with languid repetitions of the very first ideas and facts that a bright lad gets hold of; and how can a man be so destitute of historical perspective, so full of cheap outworn generalisations ­feudal ages, time of suffering ­pas tant qu’aujourdhui, M. Cotter!  Christianity ­which? what? how?  You must not attack all forms, from Calvin to St. Thomas, from St. Thomas to (One who should surely be considered) Jesus Christ, with the same missiles:  they do not all tell against all.  But there it is, as we said; a man joins a sect, and becomes one-eyed.  He affects a horror of vices which are just the thing to stop his “devastating flood of babies,” and just the thing above all to keep the vicious from procreating.  Where, then, is the ground of this horror in any intelligent Servant of Humanity?  O, beware of creeds and anti-creeds, sects and anti-sects.  There is but one truth, outside science, the truth that comes of an earnest, smiling survey of mankind “from China to Peru,” or further, and from to-day to the days of Probably Arboreal; and the truth (however true it is) that robs you of sympathy with any form of thought or trait of man, is false for you, and heretical, and herético-plastic.  Hear Morison struggling with his chains; hear me, hear all of us, when we suffer our creeds or anti-creeds to degenerate towards the whine, and begin to hate our neighbours, or our ancestors, like ourselves.  And yet in Morison, too, as in St. Thomas, as in Rutherford, ay, or in Peden, truth struggles, or it would not so deform them.  The man has not a devil; it is an angel that tears and blinds him.  But Morison’s is an old, almost a venerable seraph, with whom I dealt before I was twenty, and had done before I was twenty-five.

Behold how the voices of dead preachers speak hollowly (and lengthily) within me! ­Yours ever ­and rather better –­not much,

     R. L. S.

TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

     Skerryvore, April 16th, 1887.

MY DEAREST CUMMY, ­As usual, I have been a dreary bad fellow and not written for ages; but you must just try to forgive me, to believe (what is the truth) that the number of my letters is no measure of the number of times I think of you, and to remember how much writing I have to do.  The weather is bright, but still cold; and my father, I’m afraid, feels it sharply.  He has had ­still has, rather ­a most obstinate jaundice, which has reduced him cruelly in strength, and really upset him altogether.  I hope, or think, he is perhaps a little better; but he suffers much, cannot sleep at night, and gives John and my mother a severe life of it to wait upon him.  My wife is, I think, a little better, but no great shakes.  I keep mightily respectable myself.

Coolin’s Tombstone is now built into the front wall of Skerryvore, and poor Bogie’s (with a Latin inscription also) is set just above it.  Poor, unhappy wee man, he died, as you must have heard, in fight, which was what he would have chosen; for military glory was more in his line than the domestic virtues.  I believe this is about all my news, except that, as I write, there is a blackbird singing in our garden trees, as it were at Swanston.  I would like fine to go up the burnside a bit, and sit by the pool and be young again ­or no, be what I am still, only there instead of here, for just a little.  Did you see that I had written about John Todd?  In this month’s Longman it was; if you have not seen it, I will try and send it you.  Some day climb as high as Halkerside for me (I am never likely to do it for myself), and sprinkle some of the well water on the turf.  I am afraid it is a pagan rite, but quite harmless, and ye can sain it wi’ a bit prayer.  Tell the Peewies that I mind their forbears well.  My heart is sometimes heavy and sometimes glad to mind it all.  But for what we have received, the Lord make us truly thankful.  Don’t forget to sprinkle the water, and do it in my name; I feel a childish eagerness in this.

Remember me most kindly to James, and with all sorts of love to yourself, believe me, your laddie,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. ­I suppose Mrs. Todd ought to see the paper about her man; judge of that, and if you think she would not dislike it, buy her one from me, and let me know.  The article is called Pastoral, in Longman’s Magazine for April.  I will send you the money; I would to-day, but it’s the Sabbie day, and I cannae.

     R. L. S.

Remembrances from all here.

TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN LETTER I

   The following sets forth the pros and cons which were balancing
   each other in his mind in regard to his scheme of going to make a
   stand in his own person against agrarian outrage in Ireland.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] April 15 or
        (the hour not being known), 1887.

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN, ­It is I know not what hour of the night; but I cannot sleep, have lit the gas, and here goes.

First, all your packet arrived:  I have dipped into the Schumann already with great pleasure.  Surely, in what concerns us there is a sweet little chirrup; the Good Words arrived in the morning just when I needed it, and the famous notes that I had lost were recovered also in the nick of time.

And now I am going to bother you with my affairs:  premising, first, that this is private; second, that whatever I do the Life shall be done first, and I am getting on with it well; and third, that I do not quite know why I consult you, but something tells me you will hear with fairness.

Here is my problem.  The Curtin women are still miserable prisoners; no one dare buy their farm of them, all the manhood of England and the world stands aghast before a threat of murder. (1) Now, my work can be done anywhere; hence I can take up without loss a back-going Irish farm, and live on, though not (as I had originally written) in it:  First Reason. (2) If I should be killed, there are a good many who would feel it:  writers are so much in the public eye, that a writer being murdered would attract attention, throw a bull’s-eye light upon this cowardly business:  Second Reason. (3) I am not unknown in the States, from which the funds come that pay for these brutalities:  to some faint extent, my death (if I should be killed) would tell there:  Third Reason. (4) Nobody else is taking up this obvious and crying duty: Fourth Reason. (5) I have a crazy health and may die at any moment, my life is of no purchase in an insurance office, it is the less account to husband it, and the business of husbanding a life is dreary and demoralising:  Fifth Reason.

I state these in no order, but as they occur to me.  And I shall do the like with the objections.

First Objection:  It will do no good; you have seen Gordon die, and nobody minded; nobody will mind if you die.  This is plainly of the devil.  Second Objection:  You will not even be murdered, the climate will miserably kill you, you will strangle out in a rotten damp heat, in congestion, etc.  Well, what then?  It changes nothing:  the purpose is to brave crime; let me brave it, for such time and to such an extent as God allows.  Third Objection:  The Curtin women are probably highly uninteresting females.  I haven’t a doubt of it.  But the Government cannot, men will not, protect them.  If I am the only one to see this public duty, it is to the public and the Right I should perform it ­not to Mesdames Curtin.  Fourth Objection:  I am married.  “I have married a wife!” I seem to have heard it before.  It smells ancient! what was the context?  Fifth Objection:  My wife has had a mean life (1), loves me (2), could not bear to lose me (3). (1) I admit:  I am sorry. (2) But what does she love me for? and (3) she must lose me soon or late.  And after all, because we run this risk, it does not follow we should fail.  Sixth Objection:  My wife wouldn’t like it.  No, she wouldn’t.  Who would?  But the Curtins don’t like it.  And all those who are to suffer if this goes on, won’t like it.  And if there is a great wrong, somebody must suffer.  Seventh Objection:  I won’t like it.  No, I will not; I have thought it through, and I will not.  But what of that?  And both she and I may like it more than we suppose.  We shall lose friends, all comforts, all society:  so has everybody who has ever done anything; but we shall have some excitement, and that’s a fine thing; and we shall be trying to do the right, and that’s not to be despised.  Eighth Objection:  I am an author with my work before me.  See Second Reason.  Ninth Objection:  But am I not taken with the hope of excitement?  I was at first.  I am not much now.  I see what a dreary, friendless, miserable, God-forgotten business it will be.  And anyway, is not excitement the proper reward of doing anything both right and a little dangerous?  Tenth Objection:  But am I not taken with a notion of glory?  I dare say I am.  Yet I see quite clearly how all points to nothing coming, to a quite inglorious death by disease and from the lack of attendance; or even if I should be knocked on the head, as these poor Irish promise, how little any one will care.  It will be a smile at a thousand breakfast-tables.  I am nearly forty now; I have not many illusions.  And if I had?  I do not love this health-tending, housekeeping life of mine.  I have a taste for danger, which is human, like the fear of it.  Here is a fair cause; a just cause; no knight ever set lance in rest for a juster.  Yet it needs not the strength I have not, only the passive courage that I hope I could muster, and the watchfulness that I am sure I could learn.

Here is a long midnight dissertation; with myself; with you.  Please let me hear.  But I charge you this:  if you see in this idea of mine the finger of duty, do not dissuade me.  I am nearing forty, I begin to love my ease and my home and my habits, I never knew how much till this arose; do not falsely counsel me to put my head under the bed-clothes.  And I will say this to you:  my wife, who hates the idea, does not refuse.  “It is nonsense,” says she, “but if you go, I will go.”  Poor girl, and her home and her garden that she was so proud of!  I feel her garden most of all, because it is a pleasure (I suppose) that I do not feel myself to share.

   1.  Here is a great wrong.
   2. " a growing wrong.
   3. " a wrong founded on crime.
   4. " crime that the Government cannot prevent.
   5. " crime that it occurs to no man to defy.
   6.  But it has occurred to me.
   7.  Being a known person, some will notice my defiance.
   8.  Being a writer, I can make people notice it.
   9.  And, I think, make people imitate me.
  10.  Which would destroy in time this whole scaffolding of oppression.
  11.  And if I fail, however ignominiously, that is not my concern. 
        It is, with an odd mixture of reverence and humorous remembrances
        of Dickens, be it said ­it is A-nother’s.

And here, at I cannot think what hour of the morning, I shall dry up, and remain ­Yours, really in want of a little help,

R. L. S.

Sleepless at midnight’s dewy hour.
" " witching "
" " maudlin "
etc.

Next morning. ­Eleventh Objection:  I have a father and mother.  And who has not?  Macduff’s was a rare case; if we must wait for a Macduff.  Besides, my father will not perhaps be long here.  Twelfth Objection:  The cause of England in Ireland is not worth supporting. À qui lé dites-vous? And I am not supporting that.  Home Rule, if you like.  Cause of decency, the idea that populations should not be taught to gain public ends by private crime, the idea that for all men to bow before a threat of crime is to loosen and degrade beyond redemption the whole fabric of man’s decency.

TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN LETTER II

The first paragraph of the following refers to the Life of Fleeming Jenkin; the second, to a remark of his correspondent that a task such as he had proposed to himself in Ireland should be undertaken by a society rather than an individual.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1887.]

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN, ­The Book.  It is all drafted:  I hope soon to send you for comments Chapters III., IV., and V. Chapter VII. is roughly but satisfactorily drafted:  a very little work should put that to rights.  But Chapter VI. is no joke; it is a mare magnum:  I swim and drown and come up again; and it is all broken ends and mystification:  moreover, I perceive I am in want of more matter.  I must have, first of all, a little letter from Mr. Ewing about the phonograph work:  If you think he would understand it is quite a matter of chance whether I use a word or a fact out of it.  If you think he would not:  I will go without.  Also, could I have a look at Ewing’s précis?  And lastly, I perceive I must interview you again about a few points; they are very few, and might come to little; and I propose to go on getting things as well together as I can in the meanwhile, and rather have a final time when all is ready and only to be criticised.  I do still think it will be good.  I wonder if Trélat would let me cut?  But no, I think I wouldn’t after all; ’tis so quaint and pretty and clever and simple and French, and gives such a good sight of Fleeming:  the plum of the book, I think.

You misunderstood me in one point:  I always hoped to found such a society; that was the outside of my dream, and would mean entire success. But ­I cannot play Peter the Hermit.  In these days of the Fleet Street journalist, I cannot send out better men than myself, with wives or mothers just as good as mine, and sisters (I may at least say) better, to a danger and a long-drawn dreariness that I do not share.  My wife says it’s cowardice; what brave men are the leader-writers!  Call it cowardice; it is mine.  Mind you, I may end by trying to do it by the pen only:  I shall not love myself if I do; and is it ever a good thing to do a thing for which you despise yourself? ­even in the doing?  And if the thing you do is to call upon others to do the thing you neglect?  I have never dared to say what I feel about men’s lives, because my own was in the wrong:  shall I dare to send them to death?  The physician must heal himself; he must honestly try the path he recommends:  if he does not even try, should he not be silent?

I thank you very heartily for your letter, and for the seriousness you brought to it.  You know, I think when a serious thing is your own, you keep a saner man by laughing at it and yourself as you go.  So I do not write possibly with all the really somewhat sickened gravity I feel.  And indeed, what with the book, and this business to which I referred, and Ireland, I am scarcely in an enviable state.  Well, I ought to be glad, after ten years of the worst training on earth ­valetudinarianism ­that I can still be troubled by a duty.  You shall hear more in time; so far, I am at least decided:  I will go and see Balfour when I get to London.

We have all had a great pleasure:  a Mrs. Rawlinson came and brought with her a nineteen-year-old daughter, simple, human, as beautiful as ­herself; I never admired a girl before, you know it was my weakness:  we are all three dead in love with her.  How nice to be able to do so much good to harassed people by ­yourself! ­Ever yours,

     R. L. S.

TO MISS RAWLINSON

   Here follows a compliment in verse to the young lady last mentioned,
   whose Christian name was May.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1887.]

  Of the many flowers you brought me,
    Only some were meant to stay,
  And the flower I thought the sweetest
    Was the flower that went away.

  Of the many flowers you brought me,
    All were fair and fresh and gay,
  But the flower I thought the sweetest
    Was the blossom of the May.

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

Within a fortnight after the date of the above Stevenson went himself, and for the last time, to Scotland, and was present, too late for recognition, at the death of his father (May 8, 1887).  Business detained him for some weeks, and the following was written just before his return to Bournemouth.

     [Edinburgh, June 1887.]

MY DEAR S. C., ­At last I can write a word to you.  Your little note in the P.M.G. was charming.  I have written four pages in the Contemporary, which Bunting found room for:  they are not very good, but I shall do more for his memory in time.

About the death, I have long hesitated, I was long before I could tell my mind; and now I know it, and can but say that I am glad.  If we could have had my father, that would have been a different thing.  But to keep that changeling ­suffering changeling ­any longer, could better none and nothing.  Now he rests; it is more significant, it is more like himself.  He will begin to return to us in the course of time, as he was and as we loved him.

My favourite words in literature, my favourite scene ­“O let him pass,” Kent and Lear ­was played for me here in the first moment of my return.  I believe Shakespeare saw it with his own father.  I had no words; but it was shocking to see.  He died on his feet, you know; was on his feet the last day, knowing nobody ­still he would be up.  This was his constant wish; also that he might smoke a pipe on his last day.  The funeral would have pleased him; it was the largest private funeral in man’s memory here.

We have no plans, and it is possible we may go home without going through town.  I do not know; I have no views yet whatever; nor can have any at this stage of my cold and my business. ­Ever yours,

     R. L. S.

TO SIR WALTER SIMPSON

   Written during a short visit to me between his return from Scotland
   and his departure for New York.

     British Museum [July 1887].

MY DEAR SIMPSON, ­This is a long time I have not acknowledged the Art of Golf, though I read it through within thirty-six hours of its arrival.  I have been ill and out of heart, and ill again and again ill, till I am weary of it, and glad indeed to try the pitch-farthing hazard of a trip to Colorado or New Mexico.  There we go, if I prove fit for the start, on August 20th.

Meanwhile, the Art of Golf.  A lot of it is very funny, and I liked the fun very well; but what interested me most was the more serious part, because it turns all the while on a branch of psychology that no one has treated and that interests me much:  the psychology of athletics.  I had every reason to be interested in it, because I am abnormal:  I have no memory in athletics.  I have forgotten how to ride and how to skate; and I should not be the least surprised if I had forgotten how to swim.

I find I can write no more:  it is the first I have tried since I was ill; and I am too weak. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO W. E. HENLEY

During the two months following his father’s death Stevenson had suffered much both from his old complaints and from depression of mind.  His only work had been in preparing for press the verse collection Underwoods, the Life of Fleeming Jenkin, and the volume of essays called Memories and Portraits.  The opinions quoted are those of physicians.

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] August 1887.

DEAR LAD, ­I write to inform you that Mr. Stevenson’s well-known work, Virginibus Puerisque, is about to be reprinted.  At the same time a second volume called Memories and Portraits will issue from the roaring loom.  Its interest will be largely autobiographical, Mr. S. having sketched there the linéaments of many departed friends, and dwelt fondly, and with a m’istened eye, upon by-gone pleasures.  The two will be issued under the common title of Familiar Essays; but the volumes will be vended separately to those who are mean enough not to hawk at both.

The blood is at last stopped:  only yesterday.  I began to think I should not get away.  However, I hope ­I hope ­remark the word ­no boasting ­I hope I may luff up a bit now.  Dobell, whom I saw, gave as usual a good account of my lungs, and expressed himself, like his neighbours, hopefully about the trip.  He says, my uncle says, Scott says, Brown says ­they all say ­You ought not to be in such a state of health; you should recover.  Well, then, I mean to.  My spirits are rising again after three months of black depression:  I almost begin to feel as if I should care to live:  I would, by God!  And so I believe I shall. ­Yours,

     BULLETIN M’GURDER.

How has the Deacon gone?

TO W. H. LOW

     [Skerryvore, Bournemouth] August 6th, 1887.

MY DEAR LOW, ­We ­my mother, my wife, my stepson, my maidservant, and myself, five souls ­leave, if all is well, Auth, per Wilson line s.s.  Ludgate Hill.  Shall probably evade N. Y. at first, cutting straight to a watering-place:  Newport, I believe, its name.  Afterwards we shall steal incognito into la bonne ville, and see no one but you and the Scribners, if it may be so managed.  You must understand I have been very seedy indeed, quite a dead body; and unless the voyage does miracles, I shall have to draw it dam fine.  Alas, “The Canoe Speaks” is now out of date; it will figure in my volume of verses now imminent.  However, I may find some inspiration some day. ­Till very soon, yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE

The lady to whom the following (and much correspondence yet to come) is addressed had been an attached friend of the Skerryvore household and a pupil of Stevenson’s in the art of writing.  She had given R. L. S. a paper-cutter by way of farewell token at his starting.

     Bournemouth, August 19th, 1887.

MY DEAR MISS BOODLE, ­I promise you the paper-knife shall go to sea with me; and if it were in my disposal, I should promise it should return with me too.  All that you say, I thank you for very much; I thank you for all the pleasantness that you have brought about our house; and I hope the day may come when I shall see you again in poor old Skerryvore, now left to the natives of Canada, or to worse barbarians, if such exist.  I am afraid my attempt to jest is rather à contre-coeur. ­Good-bye ­au revoir ­and do not forget your friend,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO MESSRS.CHATTO AND WINDUS

   The titles and proofs mentioned in the text are presumably those of
   Underwoods and Memories and Portraits.

     Bournemouth [August 1887].

DEAR SIRS, ­I here enclose the two titles.  Had you not better send me the bargains to sign?  I shall be here till Saturday; and shall have an address in London (which I shall send you) till Monday, when I shall sail.  Even if the proofs do not reach you till Monday morning, you could send a clerk from Fenchurch Street Station at 10.23 A.M. for Galleons Station, and he would find me embarking on board the Ludgate Hill, Island Berth, Royal Albert Dock.  Pray keep this in case it should be necessary to catch this last chance.  I am most anxious to have the proofs with me on the voyage. ­Yours very truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

      “Life is over; life was gay.”