Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (956 page)

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 149 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

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 151 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

[
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 152 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 153 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 154 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 155 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 156 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,