Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 1 Part 37

[CHALET LA SOLITUDE, HYERES, MAY 1883.]

DEAR HENLEY, - You may be surprised to hear that I am now a great writer of verses; that is, however, so. I have the mania now like my betters, and faith, if I live till I am forty, I shall have a book of rhymes like Pollock, Gosse, or whom you please. Really, I have begun to learn some of the rudiments of that trade, and have written three or four pretty enough pieces of octosyllabic nonsense, semi-serious, semi-smiling. A kind of prose Herrick, divested of the gift of verse, and you behold the Bard. But I like it.

R. L. S.

Letter: TO W. E. HENLEY

HYERES [JUNE 1883].

DEAR LAD, - I was delighted to hear the good news about -. Bravo, he goes uphill fast. Let him beware of vanity, and he will go higher; let him be still discontented, and let him (if it might be) see the merits and not the faults of his rivals, and he may swarm at last to the top-gallant. There is no other way. Admiration is the only road to excellence; and the critical spirit kills, but envy and injustice are putrefaction on its feet.

Thus far the moralist. The eager author now begs to know whether you may have got the other Whistles, and whether a fresh proof is to be taken; also whether in that case the dedication should not be printed therewith; Bulk Delights Publishers (original aphorism; to be said sixteen times in succession as a test of sobriety).

Your wild and ravening commands were received; but cannot be obeyed. And anyway, I do a.s.sure you I am getting better every day; and if the weather would but turn, I should soon be observed to walk in hornpipes. Truly I am on the mend. I am still very careful. I have the new dictionary; a joy, a thing of beauty, and - bulk. I shall be raked i' the mools before it's finished; that is the only pity; but meanwhile I sing.

I beg to inform you that I, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of BRASHIANA and other works, am merely beginning to commence to prepare to make a first start at trying to understand my profession. O the height and depth of novelty and worth in any art! and O that I am privileged to swim and shoulder through such oceans! Could one get out of sight of land - all in the blue?

Alas not, being anch.o.r.ed here in flesh, and the bonds of logic being still about us.

But what a great s.p.a.ce and a great air there is in these small shallows where alone we venture! and how new each sight, squall, calm, or sunrise! An art is a fine fortune, a palace in a park, a band of music, health, and physical beauty; all but love - to any worthy practiser. I sleep upon my art for a pillow; I waken in my art; I am unready for death, because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can conceive my being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my art. I AM not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely.

And yet I produce nothing, am the author of BRASHIANA and other works: tiddy-iddity - as if the works one wrote were anything but 'prentice's experiments. Dear reader, I deceive you with husks, the real works and all the pleasure are still mine and incommunicable. After this break in my work, beginning to return to it, as from light sleep, I wax exclamatory, as you see.

Sursum Corda: Heave ahead: Here's luck.

Art and Blue Heaven, April and G.o.d's Larks.

Green reeds and the sky-scattering river.

A stately music.

Enter G.o.d!

R. L. S.

Ay, but you know, until a man can write that 'Enter G.o.d,' he has made no art! None! Come, let us take counsel together and make some!

Letter: TO W. E. HENLEY

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES [SUMMER 1883].

DEAR LAD, - Glad you like FONTAINEBLEAU. I am going to be the means, under heaven, of aerating or liberating your pages. The idea that because a thing is a picture-book all the writing should be on the wrong tack is TRISTE but widespread. Thus Hokusai will be really a gossip on convention, or in great part. And the Skelt will be as like a Charles Lamb as I can get it. The writer should write, and not ill.u.s.trate pictures: else it's bosh. . . .

Your remarks about the ugly are my eye. Ugliness is only the prose of horror. It is when you are not able to write MACBETH that you write THERESE RAQUIN. Fashions are external: the essence of art only varies in so far as fashion widens the field of its application; art is a mill whose thirlage, in different ages, widens and contracts; but, in any case and under any fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the little man produces cleverness (personalities, psychology) instead of beauty, ugliness instead of terror, and jokes instead of mirth. As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be ever, world without end.

Amen!

And even as you read, you say, 'Of course, QUELLE RENGAINE!'

R. L. S.

Letter: TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES [SUMMER 1883].

MY DEAR c.u.mMY, - Yes, I own I am a real bad correspondent, and am as bad as can be in most directions.

I have been adding some more poems to your book. I wish they would look sharp about it; but, you see, they are trying to find a good artist to make the ill.u.s.trations, without which no child would give a kick for it. It will be quite a fine work, I hope. The dedication is a poem too, and has been quite a long while written, but I do not mean you to see it till you get the book; keep the jelly for the last, you know, as you would often recommend in former days, so now you can take your own medicine.

I am very sorry to hear you have been so poorly; I have been very well; it used to be quite the other way, used it not? Do you remember making the whistle at Mount Chessie? I do not think it WAS my knife; I believe it was yours; but rhyme is a very great monarch, and goes before honesty, in these affairs at least. Do you remember, at Warriston, one autumn Sunday, when the beech nuts were on the ground, seeing heaven open? I would like to make a rhyme of that, but cannot.

Is it not strange to think of all the changes: Bob, Cramond, Delhi, Minnie, and Henrietta, all married, and fathers and mothers, and your humble servant just the one point better off? And such a little while ago all children together! The time goes swift and wonderfully even; and if we are no worse than we are, we should be grateful to the power that guides us. For more than a generation I have now been to the fore in this rough world, and been most tenderly helped, and done cruelly wrong, and yet escaped; and here I am still, the worse for wear, but with some fight in me still, and not unthankful - no, surely not unthankful, or I were then the worst of human beings!

My little dog is a very much better child in every way, both more loving and more amiable; but he is not fond of strangers, and is, like most of his kind, a great, specious humbug.

f.a.n.n.y has been ill, but is much better again; she now goes donkey rides with an old woman, who compliments her on her French. That old woman - seventy odd - is in a parlous spiritual state.

Pretty soon, in the new sixpenny ill.u.s.trated magazine, Wogg's picture is to appear: this is a great honour! And the poor soul whose vanity would just explode if he could understand it, will never be a bit the wiser! - With much love, in which f.a.n.n.y joins, believe me, your affectionate boy,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Letter: TO W. E. HENLEY

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES, SUMMER 1883.

DEAR LAD, - s.n.a.t.c.hes in return for yours; for this little once, I'm well to windward of you.

Seventeen chapters of OTTO are now drafted, and finding I was working through my voice and getting screechy, I have turned back again to rewrite the earlier part. It has, I do believe, some merit: of what order, of course, I am the last to know; and, triumph of triumphs, my wife - my wife who hates and loathes and slates my women - admits a great part of my Countess to be on the spot.

Yes, I could borrow, but it is the joy of being before the public, for once. Really, 100 pounds is a sight more than TREASURE ISLAND is worth.

The reason of my DECHE? Well, if you begin one house, have to desert it, begin another, and are eight months without doing any work, you will be in a DECHE too. I am not in a DECHE, however; DISTINGUO - I would fain distinguish; I am rather a swell, but NOT SOLVENT. At a touch the edifice, AEDIFICIUM, might collapse. If my creditors began to babble around me, I would sink with a slow strain of music into the crimson west. The difficulty in my elegant villa is to find oil, OLEUM, for the dam axles. But I've paid my rent until September; and beyond the chemist, the grocer, the baker, the doctor, the gardener, Lloyd's teacher, and the great thief creditor Death, I can snap my fingers at all men. Why will people spring bills on you? I try to make 'em charge me at the moment; they won't, the money goes, the debt remains. - The Required Play is in the MERRY MEN.

Q. E. F.

I thus render honour to your FLAIR; it came on me of a clap; I do not see it yet beyond a kind of sunset glory. But it's there: pa.s.sion, romance, the picturesque, involved: startling, simple, horrid: a sea-pink in sea-froth! S'AGIT DE LA DESENTERRER.

'Help!' cries a buried masterpiece.

Once I see my way to the year's end, clear, I turn to plays; till then I grind at letters; finish OTTO; write, say, a couple of my TRAVELLER'S TALES; and then, if all my ships come home, I will attack the drama in earnest. I cannot mix the skeins. Thus, though I'm morally sure there is a play in OTTO, I dare not look for it: I shoot straight at the story.