Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 2 Part 41

R. L. S.

Letter: TO CHARLES BAXTER

1ST JANUARY '94.

MY DEAR CHARLES, - I am delighted with your idea, and first, I will here give an amended plan and afterwards give you a note of some of the difficulties.

[Plan of the Edinburgh edition - 14 vols.]

. . . It may be a question whether my TIMES letters might not be appended to the 'Footnote' with a note of the dates of discharge of Cedercrantz and Pilsach.

I am particularly pleased with this idea of yours, because I am come to a dead stop. I never can remember how bad I have been before, but at any rate I am bad enough just now, I mean as to literature; in health I am well and strong. I take it I shall be six months before I'm heard of again, and this time I could put in to some advantage in revising the text and (if it were thought desirable) writing prefaces. I do not know how many of them might be thought desirable. I have written a paper on TREASURE ISLAND, which is to appear shortly. MASTER OF BALLANTRAE - I have one drafted. THE WRECKER is quite sufficiently done already with the last chapter, but I suppose an historic introduction to DAVID BALFOUR is quite unavoidable. PRINCE OTTO I don't think I could say anything about, and BLACK ARROW don't want to. But it is probable I could say something to the volume of TRAVELS. In the verse business I can do just what I like better than anything else, and extend UNDERWOODS with a lot of unpublished stuff. APROPOS, if I were to get printed off a very few poems which are somewhat too intimate for the public, could you get them run up in some luxuous manner, so that fools might be induced to buy them in just a sufficient quant.i.ty to pay expenses and the thing remain still in a manner private? We could supply photographs of the ill.u.s.trations - and the poems are of Vailima and the family - I should much like to get this done as a surprise for f.a.n.n.y.

R. L. S.

Letter: TO H. B. BAILDON

VAILIMA, JANUARY 15TH, 1894.

MY DEAR BAILDON, - Last mail brought your book and its Dedication.

'Frederick Street and the gardens, and the short-lived Jack o'

Lantern,' are again with me - and the note of the east wind, and Froebel's voice, and the smell of soup in Thomson's stair. Truly, you had no need to put yourself under the protection of any other saint, were that saint our Tamate himself! Yourself were enough, and yourself coming with so rich a sheaf.

For what is this that you say about the Muses? They have certainly never better inspired you than in 'Jael and Sisera,' and 'Herodias and John the Baptist,' good stout poems, fiery and sound. ''Tis but a mask and behind it chuckles the G.o.d of the Garden,' I shall never forget. By the by, an error of the press, page 49, line 4, 'No infant's lesson are the ways of G.o.d.' THE is dropped.

And this reminds me you have a bad habit which is to be comminated in my theory of letters. Same page, two lines lower: 'But the vulture's track' is surely as fine to the ear as 'But vulture's track,' and this latter version has a dreadful baldness. The reader goes on with a sense of impoverishment, of unnecessary sacrifice; he has been robbed by footpads, and goes scouting for his lost article! Again, in the second Epode, these fine verses would surely sound much finer if they began, 'As a hardy climber who has set his heart,' than with the jejune 'As hardy climber.' I do not know why you permit yourself this license with grammar; you show, in so many pages, that you are superior to the paltry sense of rhythm which usually dictates it - as though some poetaster had been suffered to correct the poet's text. By the way, I confess to a heartfelt weakness for AURICULAS. - Believe me the very grateful and characteristic pick-thank, but still sincere and affectionate,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Letter: TO W. H. LOW.

VAILIMA, JANUARY 15th, 1894.

MY DEAR LOW, - . . . Pray you, stoop your proud head, and sell yourself to some Jew magazine, and make the visit out. I a.s.sure you, this is the spot for a sculptor or painter. This, and no other - I don't say to stay there, but to come once and get the living colour into them. I am used to it; I do not notice it; rather prefer my grey, freezing recollections of Scotland; but there it is, and every morning is a thing to give thanks for, and every night another - bar when it rains, of course.

About THE WRECKER - rather late days, and I still suspect I had somehow offended you; however, all's well that ends well, and I am glad I am forgiven - did you not fail to appreciate the att.i.tude of Dodd? He was a fizzle and a stick, he knew it, he knew nothing else, and there is an undercurrent of bitterness in him. And then the problem that Pinkerton laid down: why the artist can DO NOTHING ELSE? is one that continually exercises myself. He cannot: granted. But Scott could. And Montaigne. And Julius Caesar. And many more. And why can't R. L. S.? Does it not amaze you? It does me. I think of the Renaissance fellows, and their all-round human sufficiency, and compare it with the ineffable smallness of the field in which we labour and in which we do so little. I think DAVID BALFOUR a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the thing to occupy the leisure of a busy man; but for the top flower of a man's life it seems to me inadequate. Small is the word; it is a small age, and I am of it. I could have wished to be otherwise busy in this world. I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write DAVID BALFOURS too. HINC ILLAE LACRYMAE. I take my own case as most handy, but it is as ill.u.s.trative of my quarrel with the age. We take all these pains, and we don't do as well as Michael Angelo or Leonardo, or even Fielding, who was an active magistrate, or Richardson, who was a busy bookseller. J'AI HONTE POUR NOUS; my ears burn.

I am amazed at the effect which this Chicago exhibition has produced upon you and others. It set Mrs. Fairchild literally mad - to judge by her letters. And I wish I had seen anything so influential. I suppose there was an aura, a halo, some sort of effulgency about the place; for here I find you louder than the rest. Well, it may be there is a time coming; and I wonder, when it comes, whether it will be a time of little, exclusive, one-eyed rascals like you and me, or parties of the old stamp who can paint and fight, and write and keep books of double entry, and sculp, and scalp. It might be. You have a lot of stuff in the kettle, and a great deal of it Celtic. I have changed my mind progressively about England, practically the whole of Scotland is Celtic, and the western half of England, and all Ireland, and the Celtic blood makes a rare blend for art. If it is stiffened up with Latin blood, you get the French. We were less lucky: we had only Scandinavians, themselves decidedly artistic, and the Low-German lot. However, that is a good starting-point, and with all the other elements in your crucible, it may come to something great very easily. I wish you would hurry up and let me see it. Here is a long while I have been waiting for something GOOD in art; and what have I seen? Zola's DEBACLE and a few of Kipling's tales.

Are you a reader of Barbey d'Aurevilly? He is a never-failing source of pleasure to me, for my sins, I suppose. What a work is the RIDEAU CRAMOISI! and L'ENSORCELEE! and LE CHEVALIER DES TOUCHES!

This is degenerating into mere twaddle. So please remember us all most kindly to Mrs. Low, and believe me ever yours,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. - Were all your privateers voiceless in the war of 1812? Did NO ONE of them write memoirs? I shall have to do my privateer from chic, if you can't help me. My application to Scribner has been quite in vain. See if you can get hold of some historic sharp in the club, and tap him; they must some of them have written memoirs or notes of some sort; perhaps still unprinted; if that be so, get them copied for me.

R. L. S.

Letter: TO H. B. BAILDON

VAILIMA, JANUARY 30TH, 1894.

MY DEAR BAILDON, - 'Call not blessed.' - Yes, if I could die just now, or say in half a year, I should have had a splendid time of it on the whole. But it gets a little stale, and my work will begin to senesce; and parties to shy bricks at me; and now it begins to look as if I should survive to see myself impotent and forgotten.

It's a pity suicide is not thought the ticket in the best circles.

But your letter goes on to congratulate me on having done the one thing I am a little sorry for; a little - not much - for my father himself lived to think that I had been wiser than he. But the cream of the jest is that I have lived to change my mind; and think that he was wiser than I. Had I been an engineer, and literature my amus.e.m.e.nt, it would have been better perhaps. I pulled it off, of course, I won the wager, and it is pleasant while it lasts; but how long will it last? I don't know, say the Bells of Old Bow.

All of which goes to show that n.o.body is quite sane in judging himself. Truly, had I given way and gone in for engineering, I should be dead by now. Well, the G.o.ds know best.

I hope you got my letter about the RESCUE. - Adieu,

R. L. S.

True for you about the benefit: except by kisses, jests, song, ET HOC GENUS OMNE, man CANNOT convey benefit to another. The universal benefactor has been there before him.

Letter: TO J. H. BATES

VAILIMA, SAMOA, MARCH 25TH, 1894.

MY DEAR MR. JOE H. BATES, - I shall have the greatest pleasure in acceding to your complimentary request. I shall think it an honour to be a.s.sociated with your chapter, and I need not remind you (for you have said it yourself) how much depends upon your own exertions whether to make it to me a real honour or only a derision. This is to let you know that I accept the position that you have seriously offered to me in a quite serious spirit. I need scarce tell you that I shall always be pleased to receive reports of your proceedings; and if I do not always acknowledge them, you are to remember that I am a man very much occupied otherwise, and not at all to suppose that I have lost interest in my chapter.

In this world, which (as you justly say) is so full of sorrow and suffering, it will always please me to remember that my name is connected with some efforts after alleviation, nor less so with purposes of innocent recreation which, after all, are the only certain means at our disposal for bettering human life.

With kind regards, to yourself, to Mr. L. C. Congdon, to E. M. G.

Bates, and to Mr. Edward Hugh Higlee Bates, and the heartiest wishes for the future success of the chapter, believe me, yours cordially,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.