Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (920 page)

To W. E. Henley

Stevenson, hard at work upon
Providence and the Guitar
,
New Arabian Nights
, and
Travels with a Donkey
, was at this time occupying for a few days my rooms at Trinity in my absence. The college buildings and gardens, the ideal setting and careful tutelage of English academic life — in these respects so strongly contrasted with the Scottish — affected him always with a sense of unreality. The gyp mentioned is the present head porter of the college.

[
Trinity College, Cambridge, Autumn 1878.
]

MY DEAR HENLEY, — Here I am living like a fighting-cock, and have not spoken to a real person for about sixty hours. Those who wait on me are not real. The man I know to be a myth, because I have seen him acting so often in the Palais Royal. He plays the Duke in
Tricoche et Cacolet
; I knew his nose at once. The part he plays here is very dull for him, but conscientious. As for the bedmaker, she’s a dream, a kind of cheerful, innocent nightmare; I never saw so poor an imitation of humanity. I cannot work —
cannot
. Even the
Guitar
is still undone; I can only write ditch-water. ‘Tis ghastly; but I am quite cheerful, and that is more important. Do you think you could prepare the printers for a possible breakdown this week? I shall try all I know on Monday; but if I can get nothing better than I got this morning, I prefer to drop a week. Telegraph to me if you think it necessary. I shall not leave till Wednesday at soonest. Shall write again.

R. L. S.

To Edmund Gosse

The matter of the loan and its repayment, here touched on, comes up again in Stevenson’s last letter of all, that which closes the book. Stevenson and Mr. Gosse had planned a joint book of old murder stories retold, and had been to visit the scene of one famous murder together.

[
Edinburgh, April 16, 1879
]

Pool of Siloam, by El Dorado, Delectable Mountains, Arcadia.

MY DEAR GOSSE, — Herewith of the dibbs — a homely 220 fiver. How, and why, do you continue to exist? I do so ill, but for a variety of reasons. First, I wait an angel to come down and trouble the waters; second, more angels; third — well, more angels. The waters are sluggish; the angels — well, the angels won’t come, that’s about all. But I sit waiting and waiting, and people bring me meals, which help to pass time (I’m sure it’s very kind of them), and sometimes I whistle to myself; and as there’s a very pretty echo at my pool of Siloam, the thing’s agreeable to hear. The sun continues to rise every day, to my growing wonder. “The moon by night thee shall not smite.” And the stars are all doing as well as can be expected. The air of Arcady is very brisk and pure, and we command many enchanting prospects in space and time. I do not yet know much about my situation; for, to tell the truth, I only came here by the run since I began to write this letter; I had to go back to date it; and I am grateful to you for having been the occasion of this little outing. What good travellers we are, if we had only faith; no man need stay in Edinburgh but by unbelief; my religious organ has been ailing for a while past, and I have lain a great deal in Edinburgh, a sheer hulk in consequence. But I got out my wings, and have taken a change of air.

I read your book with great interest, and ought long ago to have told you so. An ordinary man would say that he had been waiting till he could pay his debts.... The book is good reading. Your personal notes of those you saw struck me as perhaps most sharp and “best held.” See as many people as you can, and make a book of them before you die. That will be a living book, upon my word. You have the touch required. I ask you to put hands to it in private already. Think of what Carlyle’s caricature of old Coleridge is to us who never saw S. T. C. With that and
Kubla Khan
, we have the man in the fact. Carlyle’s picture, of course, is not of the author of
Kubla
, but of the author of that surprising 221
Friend
which has knocked the breath out of two generations of hopeful youth. Your portraits would be milder, sweeter, more true perhaps, and perhaps not so truth-
telling
— if you will take my meaning.

I have to thank you for an introduction to that beautiful — no, that’s not the word — that jolly, with an Arcadian jollity — thing of Vogelweide’s. Also for your preface. Some day I want to read a whole book in the same picked dialect as that preface. I think it must be one E. W. Gosse who must write it. He has got himself into a fix with me by writing the preface; I look for a great deal, and will not be easily pleased.

I never thought of it, but my new book, which should soon be out, contains a visit to a murder scene, but not done as we should like to see them, for, of course, I was running another hare.

If you do not answer this in four pages, I shall stop the enclosed fiver at the bank, a step which will lead to your incarceration for life. As my visits to Arcady are somewhat uncertain, you had better address 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, as usual. I shall walk over for the note if I am not yet home. — Believe me, very really yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

I charge extra for a flourish when it is successful; this isn’t, so you have it gratis. Is there any news in Babylon the Great? My fellow-creatures are electing school boards here in the midst of the ages. It is very composed of them. I can’t think why they do it. Nor why I have written a real letter. If you write a real letter back, damme, I’ll try to
correspond
with you. A thing unknown in this age. It is a consequence of the decay of faith; we cannot believe that the fellow will be at the pains to read us.

To W. E. Henley

This is in reply to some technical criticisms of his correspondent on the poem
Our Lady of the Snows
, referring to the Trappist 222 monastery in the Cévennes so called, and afterwards published in
Underwoods
.

Edinburgh
[
April 1879
].

MY DEAR HENLEY, — Heavens! have I done the like? “Clarify and strain,” indeed? “Make it like Marvell,” no less. I’ll tell you what — you may go to the devil; that’s what I think. “Be eloquent” is another of your pregnant suggestions. I cannot sufficiently thank you for that one. Portrait of a person about to be eloquent at the request of a literary friend. You seem to forget, sir, that rhyme is rhyme, sir, and — go to the devil.

I’ll try to improve it, but I shan’t be able to — O go to the devil.

Seriously, you’re a cool hand. And then you have the brass to ask me
why
“my steps went one by one”? Why? Powers of man! to rhyme with
sun
, to be sure. Why else could it be? And you yourself have been a poet! G-r-r-r-r-r! I’ll never be a poet any more. Men are so d —  — d ungrateful and captious, I declare I could weep.

Impromptu poem.

I’m going to Shandon Hydropathic
cum parentibus
. Write here. I heard from Lang. Ferrier prayeth to be remembered; he means to write, likes his Tourgenieff greatly. Also likes my
What was on the Slate
, which, under a new 223 title, yet unfound, and with a new and, on the whole, kindly
dénouement
, is going to shoot up and become a star....

I see I must write some more to you about my Monastery. I am a weak brother in verse. You ask me to re-write things that I have already managed just to write with the skin of my teeth. If I don’t re-write them, it’s because I don’t see how to write them better, not because I don’t think they should be. But, curiously enough, you condemn two of my favourite passages, one of which is J. W. Ferrier’s favourite of the whole. Here I shall think it’s you who are wrong. You see, I did not try to make good verse, but to say what I wanted as well as verse would let me. I don’t like the rhyme “ear” and “hear.” But the couplet, “My undissuaded heart I hear Whisper courage in my ear,” is exactly what I want for the thought, and to me seems very energetic as speech, if not as verse. Would “daring” be better than “courage”?
Je me le demande.
No, it would be ambiguous, as though I had used it licentiously for “daringly,” and that would cloak the sense.

In short, your suggestions have broken the heart of the scald. He doesn’t agree with them all; and those he does agree with, the spirit indeed is willing, but the d —  — d flesh cannot, cannot, cannot, see its way to profit by. I think I’ll lay it by for nine years, like Horace. I think the well of Castaly’s run out. No more the Muses round my pillow haunt. I am fallen once more to the mere proser. God bless you.

R. L. S.

To Miss Jane Balfour

This correspondent, the long-lived spinster among the Balfour sisters (died 1907, aged 91) and the well-beloved “auntie” of a numerous clan of nephews and nieces, is the subject of the set of verses,
Auntie’s Skirts
, in the
Child’s Garden
. She had been reading
Travels with a Donkey
on its publication.

[
Swanston, June 1879.
]

MY DEAR AUNTIE, — If you could only think a little less of me and others, and a great deal more of your 224 delightful self, you would be as nearly perfect as there is any need to be. I think I have travelled with donkeys all my life; and the experience of this book could be nothing new to me. But if ever I knew a real donkey, I believe it is yourself. You are so eager to think well of everybody else (except when you are angry on account of some third person) that I do not believe you have ever left yourself time to think properly of yourself. You never understand when other people are unworthy, nor when you yourself are worthy in the highest degree. Oblige us all by having a guid conceit o’ yoursel and despising in the future the whole crowd, including your affectionate nephew,

R. L. S.

To Edmund Gosse

This letter is contemporary with the much-debated Cornhill essay
On some Aspects of Burns
, afterwards published in
Familiar Studies of Men and Books
. “Meredith’s story” is probably the
Tragic Comedians
.

Swanston, July 24, 1879.

MY DEAR GOSSE, — I have greatly enjoyed your article, which seems to me handsome in tone, and written like a fine old English gentleman. But is there not a hitch in the sentence at foot of page 153? I get lost in it.

Chapters VIII. and IX. of Meredith’s story are very good, I think. But who wrote the review of my book? Whoever he was, he cannot write; he is humane, but a duffer; I could weep when I think of him; for surely to be virtuous and incompetent is a hard lot. I should prefer to be a bold pirate, the gay sailor-boy of immorality, and a publisher at once. My mind is extinct; my appetite is expiring; I have fallen altogether into a hollow-eyed, yawning way of life, like the parties in Burne Jones’s pictures.... Talking of Burns. (Is this not sad, Weg? I use the term of reproach not because I am angry with you this time, but because I am angry with myself and desire to give pain.) Talking, I say, of Robert 225 Burns, the inspired poet is a very gay subject for study. I made a kind of chronological table of his various loves and lusts, and have been comparatively speechless ever since. I am sorry to say it, but there was something in him of the vulgar, bagmanlike, professional seducer. — Oblige me by taking down and reading, for the hundredth time, I hope, his
Twa Dogs
and his
Address to the Unco Guid
. I am only a Scotchman, after all, you see; and when I have beaten Burns, I am driven at once, by my parental feelings, to console him with a sugar-plum. But hang me if I know anything I like so well as the
Twa Dogs
. Even a common Englishman may have a glimpse, as it were from Pisgah, of its extraordinary merits.

“
English, The
: — a dull people, incapable of comprehending the Scottish tongue. Their history is so intimately connected with that of Scotland, that we must refer our readers to that heading. Their literature is principally the work of venal Scots.” — Stevenson’s
Handy Cyclopædia
. Glescow: Blaikie & Bannock.

Remember me in suitable fashion to Mrs. Gosse, the offspring, and the cat. — And believe me ever yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Sidney Colvin

Rembrandt
refers to an article in the Edinburgh Review. “Bummkopf” was Stevenson’s name for the typical pedant, German or other, who cannot clear his edifice of its scaffolding, nor set forth the results of research without intruding on the reader all its processes, evidences, and supports.
Burns
is the aforesaid Cornhill essay: not the rejected Encyclopædia article.

17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh
[
July 28, 1879
].

MY DEAR COLVIN, — I am just in the middle of your
Rembrandt
. The taste for Bummkopf and his works is agreeably dissembled so far as I have gone; and the reins have never for an instant been thrown upon the neck of that wooden Pegasus; he only perks up a learned snout from a footnote in the cellarage of a paragraph; 226 just, in short, where he ought to be, to inspire confidence in a wicked and adulterous generation. But, mind you, Bummkopf is not human; he is Dagon the fish god, and down he will come, sprawling on his belly or his behind, with his hands broken from his helpless carcase, and his head rolling oft into a corner. Up will rise on the other side, sane, pleasurable, human knowledge: a thing of beauty and a joy, etc.

I’m three parts through
Burns
; long, dry, unsympathetic, but sound and, I think, in its dry way, interesting. Next I shall finish the story, and then perhaps Thoreau. Meredith has been staying with Morley, has been cracking me up, he writes, to that literary Robespierre; and he (the L. R.) is about, it is believed, to write to me on a literary scheme. Is it Keats, hope you? My heart leaps at the thought. — Yours ever,