I wonder exceedingly if I have done anything at all good; and who can tell me? and why should I wish to know? In so little a while, I, and the English language, and the bones of my descendants, will have ceased to be a memory! And yet — and yet — one would like to leave an image for a few years upon men’s minds — for fun. This is a very dark frame of mind, consequent on overwork and the conclusion of the excruciating Ebb Tide. Adieu.
What do you suppose should be done with The Ebb Tide? It would make a volume of 200 pp.; on the other hand, I might likely have some more stories soon: The Owl, Death in the Pot, The Sleeper Awakened; all these are possible. The Owl might be half as long; The Sleeper Awakened, ditto; Death in the Pot a deal shorter, I believe. Then there’s the Go-Between, which is not impossible altogether. The Owl, The Sleeper Awakened, and the Go-Between end reasonably well; Death in the Pot is an ungodly massacre. O, well, The Owl only ends well in so far as some lovers come together, and nobody is killed 315 at the moment, but you know they are all doomed, they are Chouan fellows.
Friday, 9th. — Well, the mail is in; no Blue-book, depressing letter from C.; a long, amusing ramble from my mother; vast masses of Romeike; they are going to war now; and what will that lead to? and what has driven them to it but the persistent misconduct of these two officials? I know I ought to rewrite the end of this bloody Ebb Tide: well, I can’t. C’est plus fort que moi; it has to go the way it is, and be jowned to it! From what I make out of the reviews, I think it would be better not to republish The Ebb Tide: but keep it for other tales, if they should turn up. Very amusing how the reviews pick out one story and damn the rest! and it is always a different one. Be sure you send me the article from Le Temps. Talking of which, ain’t it manners in France to acknowledge a dedication? I have never heard a word from Le Sieur Bourget.
Saturday, 17th. — Since I wrote this last, I have written a whole chapter of my Grandfather, and read it to-night; it was on the whole much appreciated, and I kind of hope it ain’t bad myself. ‘Tis a third writing, but it wants a fourth. By next mail, I believe I might send you 3 chapters. That is to say Family Annals, The Service of the Northern Lights, and The Building of the Bell Rock. Possibly even 4 — A Houseful of Boys. I could finish my Grandfather very easy now; my father and Uncle Alan stop the way. I propose to call the book: Northern Lights: Memoirs of a Family of Engineers. I tell you, it is going to be a good book. My idea in sending MS. would be to get it set up; two proofs to me, one to Professor Swan, Ardchapel, Helensburgh — mark it private and confidential — one 316 to yourself; and come on with criticisms! But I’ll have to see. The total plan of the book is this —
I.
Domestic Annals.
II.
The Service of the Northern Lights.
III.
The Building of the Bell Rock.
IV.
A Houseful of Boys (or the Family in Baxter’s Place).
There will be an Introduction ‘The Surname of Stevenson’ which has proved a mighty queer subject of inquiry. But, Lord! if I were among libraries.
V.
Education of an Engineer.
VI.
The Grandfather.
VII.
Alan Stevenson.
VIII.
Thomas Stevenson.
Sunday, 18th. — I shall put in this envelope the end of the ever-to-be-execrated Ebb Tide, or Stevenson’s Blooming Error. Also, a paper apart for David Balfour. The slips must go in another enclosure, I suspect, owing to their beastly bulk. Anyway, there are two pieces of work off my mind, and though I could wish I had rewritten a little more of David, yet it was plainly to be seen it was impossible. All the points indicated by you have been brought out; but to rewrite the end, in my present state of over-exhaustion and fiction-phobia, would have been madness; and I let it go as it stood. My grandfather is good enough for me, these days. I do not work any less; on the whole, if anything, a little more. But it is different.
The slips go to you in four packets; I hope they are what they should be, but do not think so. I am at a pitch of discontent with fiction in all its form — or my forms — that prevents me being able to be even interested. I have had to stop all drink; smoking I am trying to stop also. It annoys me dreadfully: and yet if I take a glass of claret, I have a headache the next day! O, and a good headache too; none of your trifles.
Well, sir, here’s to you, and farewell. — Yours ever,
R. L. S.
To Edmund Gosse
June 10th, 1893.
MY DEAR GOSSE, — My mother tells me you never received the very long and careful letter that I sent you more than a year ago; or is it two years?
I was indeed so much surprised at your silence that I wrote to Henry James and begged him to inquire if you had received it; his reply was an (if possible) higher power of the same silence; whereupon I bowed my head and acquiesced. But there is no doubt the letter was written and sent; and I am sorry it was lost, for it contained, among other things, an irrecoverable criticism of your father’s Life, with a number of suggestions for another edition, which struck me at the time as excellent.
Well, suppose we call that cried off, and begin as before? It is fortunate indeed that we can do so, being both for a while longer in the day. But, alas! when I see “works of the late J. A. S.,” I can see no help and no reconciliation possible. I wrote him a letter, I think, three years ago, heard in some roundabout way that he had received it, waited in vain for an answer (which had probably miscarried), and in a humour between frowns and smiles wrote to him no more. And now the strange, poignant, pathetic, brilliant creature is gone into the night, and the voice is silent that uttered so much excellent discourse; and I am sorry that I did not write to him again. Yet I am glad for him; light lie the turf! The Saturday is the only obituary I have seen, and I thought it very good upon the whole. I should be half tempted to write an In Memoriam, but I am submerged with other work. Are you going to do it? I very much admire your efforts that way; you are our only academician.
So you have tried fiction? I will tell you the truth: 318 when I saw it announced, I was so sure you would send it to me, that I did not order it! But the order goes this mail, and I will give you news of it. Yes, honestly, fiction is very difficult; it is a terrible strain to carry your characters all that time. And the difficulty of according the narrative and the dialogue (in a work in the third person) is extreme. That is one reason out of half a dozen why I so often prefer the first. It is much in my mind just now, because of my last work, just off the stocks three days ago, The Ebb Tide: a dreadful, grimy business in the third person, where the strain between a vilely realistic dialogue and a narrative style pitched about (in phrase) ‘four notes higher’ than it should have been, has sown my head with grey hairs; or I believe so — if my head escaped, my heart has them.
The truth is, I have a little lost my way, and stand bemused at the cross-roads. A subject? Ay, I have dozens; I have at least four novels begun, they are none good enough; and the mill waits, and I’ll have to take second best. The Ebb Tide I make the world a present of; I expect, and, I suppose, deserve to be torn to pieces; but there was all that good work lying useless, and I had to finish it!
All your news of your family is pleasant to hear. My wife has been very ill, but is now better; I may say I am ditto, The Ebb Tide having left me high and dry, which is a good example of the mixed metaphor. Our home, and estate, and our boys, and the politics of the island, keep us perpetually amused and busy; and I grind away with an odd, dogged, down sensation — and an idea in petto that the game is about played out. I have got too realistic, and I must break the trammels — I mean I would if I could; but the yoke is heavy. I saw with amusement that Zola says the same thing; and truly the Débâcle was a mighty big book, I have no need for a bigger, though the last part is a mere mistake in my opinion. But the Emperor, and Sedan, and the doctor at the ambulance, and the horses 319 in the field of battle, Lord, how gripped it is! What an epical performance! A
ccording to my usual opinion, I believe I could go over that book and leave a masterpiece by blotting and no ulterior art. But that is an old story, ever new with me. Taine gone, and Renan, and Symonds, and Tennyson, and Browning; the suns go swiftly out, and I see no suns to follow, nothing but a universal twilight of the demi-divinities, with parties like you and me and Lang beating on toy drums and playing on penny whistles about glow-worms. But Zola is big anyway; he has plenty in his belly; too much, that is all; he wrote the Débâcle and he wrote La Bête humaine, perhaps the most excruciatingly silly book that I ever read to an end. And why did I read it to an end, W. E. G.? Because the animal in me was interested in the lewdness. Not sincerely, of course, my mind refusing to partake in it; but the flesh was slightly pleased. And when it was done, I cast it from me with a peal of laughter, and forgot it, as I would forget a Montépin. Taine is to me perhaps the chief of these losses; I did luxuriate in his Origines; it was something beyond literature, not quite so good, if you please, but so much more systematic, and the pages that had to be “written” always so adequate. Robespierre, Napoleon, were both excellent good.
June 18th, ‘93. — Well, I have left fiction wholly, and gone to my Grandfather, and on the whole found peace. By next month my Grandfather will begin to be quite grown up. I have already three chapters about as good as done; by which, of course, as you know, I mean till further notice or the next discovery. I like biography far better than fiction myself: fiction is too free. In biography you have your little handful of facts, little bits of a puzzle, and you sit and think, and fit ‘em together this way and that, and get up and throw ‘em down, and say damn, and go out for a walk. And it’s real soothing; and when done, gives an idea of finish to the writer that is very peaceful. Of course, it’s not really so finished as 320 quite a rotten novel; it always has and always must have the incurable illogicalities of life about it, the fathoms of slack and the miles of tedium. Still, that’s where the fun comes in; and when you have at last managed to shut up the castle spectre (dulness), the very outside of his door looks beautiful by contrast. There are pages in these books that may seem nothing to the reader; but you remember what they were, you know what they might have been, and they seem to you witty beyond comparison. In my Grandfather I’ve had (for instance) to give up the temporal order almost entirely; doubtless the temporal order is the great foe of the biographer; it is so tempting, so easy, and lo! there you are in the bog! — Ever yours,
R. L. Stevenson.
With all kind messages from self and wife to you and yours. My wife is very much better, having been the early part of this year alarmingly ill. She is now all right, only complaining of trifles, annoying to her, but happily not interesting to her friends. I am in a hideous state, having stopped drink and smoking; yes, both. No wine, no tobacco; and the dreadful part of it is that — looking forward — I have — what shall I say? — nauseating intimations that it ought to be for ever.
To Henry James
Vailima Plantation, Samoan Islands, June 17th, 1893.
MY DEAR HENRY JAMES, — I believe I have neglected a mail in answering yours. You will be very sorry to hear that my wife was exceedingly ill, and very glad to hear that she is better. I cannot say that I feel any more anxiety about her. We shall send you a photograph of her taken in Sydney in her customary island habit as she 321 walks and gardens and shrilly drills her brown assistants. She was very ill when she sat for it, which may a little explain the appearance of the photograph. It reminds me of a friend of my grandmother’s who used to say when talking to younger women, “Aweel, when I was young, I wasnae just exactly what ye wad call bonny, but I was pale, penetratin’, and interestin’.” I would not venture to hint that Fanny is “no bonny,” but there is no doubt but that in this presentment she is “pale, penetratin’, and interestin’.”
As you are aware, I have been wading deep waters and contending with the great ones of the earth, not wholly without success. It is, you may be interested to hear, a dreary and infuriating business. If you can get the fools to admit one thing, they will always save their face by denying another. If you can induce them to take a step to the right hand, they generally indemnify themselves by cutting a caper to the left. I always held (upon no evidence whatever, from a mere sentiment or intuition) that politics was the dirtiest, the most foolish, and the most random of human employments. I always held, but now I know it! Fortunately, you have nothing to do with anything of the kind, and I may spare you the horror of further details.
I received from you a book by a man by the name of Anatole France. Why should I disguise it? I have no use for Anatole. He writes very prettily, and then afterwards? Baron Marbot was a different pair of shoes. So likewise is the Baron de Vitrolles, whom I am now perusing with delight. His escape in 1814 is one of the best pages I remember anywhere to have read. But Marbot and Vitrolles are dead, and what has become of the living? It seems as if literature were coming to a stand. I am sure it is with me; and I am sure everybody will say so when they have the privilege of reading The Ebb Tide. My dear man, the grimness of that story is not to be depicted in words. There are only four characters, to be sure, but 322 they are such a troop of swine! And their behaviour is really so deeply beneath any possible standard, that on a retrospect I wonder I have been able to endure them myself until the yarn was finished. Well, there is always one thing; it will serve as a touchstone. If the admirers of Zola admire him for his pertinent ugliness and pessimism, I think they should admire this; but if, as I have long suspected, they neither admire nor understand the man’s art, and only wallow in his rancidness like a hound in offal, then they will certainly be disappointed in The Ebb Tide. Alas! poor little tale, it is not even rancid.
By way of an antidote or febrifuge, I am going on at a great rate with my History of the Stevensons, which I hope may prove rather amusing, in some parts at least. The excess of materials weighs upon me. My grandfather is a delightful comedy part; and I have to treat him besides as a serious and (in his way) a heroic figure, and at times I lose my way, and I fear in the end will blur the effect. However, à la grâce de Dieu! I’ll make a spoon or spoil a horn. You see, I have to do the Building of the Bell Rock by cutting down and packing my grand-sire’s book, which I rather hope I have done, but do not know. And it makes a huge chunk of a very different style and quality between Chapters II. and IV. And it can’t be helped! It is just a delightful and exasperating necessity. You know, the stuff is really excellent narrative: only, perhaps there’s too much of it! There is the rub. Well, well, it will be plain to you that my mind is affected; it might be with less. The Ebb Tide and Northern Lights are a full meal for any plain man.
I have written and ordered your last book, The Real Thing, so be sure and don’t send it. What else are you doing or thinking of doing? News I have none, and don’t want any. I have had to stop all strong drink and all tobacco, and am now in a transition state between the two, which seems to be near madness. You never smoked, I think, so you can never taste the joys of stopping it. 323 But at least you have drunk, and you can enter perhaps into my annoyance when I suddenly find a glass of claret or a brandy-and-water give me a splitting headache the next morning. No mistake about it; drink anything, and there’s your headache. Tobacco just as bad for me. If I live through this breach of habit, I shall be a white-livered puppy indeed. Actually I am so made, or so twisted, that I do not like to think of a life without the red wine on the table and the tobacco with its lovely little coal of fire. It doesn’t amuse me from a distance. I may find it the Garden of Eden when I go in, but I don’t like the colour of the gate-posts. Suppose somebody said to you, you are to leave your home, and your books, and your clubs, and go out and camp in mid-Africa, and command an expedition, you would howl, and kick, and flee. I think the same of a life without wine and tobacco; and if this goes on, I’ve got to go and do it, sir, in the living flesh!
I thought Bourget was a friend of yours? And I thought the French were a polite race? He has taken
my dedication with a stately silence that has surprised me into apoplexy. Did I go and dedicate my book to the nasty alien, and the ‘norrid Frenchman, and the Bloody Furrineer? Well, I wouldn’t do it again; and unless his case is susceptible of explanation, you might perhaps tell him so over the walnuts and the wine, by way of speeding the gay hours. Sincerely, I thought my dedication worth a letter.
If anything be worth anything here below! Do you know the story of the man who found a button in his hash, and called the waiter? “What do you call that?” says he. “Well,” said the waiter, “what d’you expect? Expect to find a gold watch and chain?” Heavenly apologue, is it not? I expected (rather) to find a gold watch and chain; I expected to be able to smoke to excess and drink to comfort all the days of my life; and I am 324 still indignantly staring on this button! It’s not even a button; it’s a teetotal badge! — Ever yours,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Sidney Colvin
Saturday, 24th (?) June .
MY DEAR COLVIN, — Yesterday morning, after a day of absolute temperance, I awoke to the worst headache I had had yet. Accordingly, temperance was said farewell to, quinine instituted, and I believe my pains are soon to be over. We wait, with a kind of sighing impatience, for war to be declared, or to blow finally off, living in the meanwhile in a kind of children’s hour of firelight and shadow and preposterous tales; the king seen at night galloping up our road upon unknown errands and covering his face as he passes our cook; Mataafa daily surrounded (when he awakes) with fresh “white man’s boxes” (query, ammunition?) and professing to be quite ignorant of where they come from; marches of bodies of men across the island; concealment of ditto in the bush; the coming on and off of different chiefs; and such a mass of ravelment and rag-tag as the devil himself could not unwind.
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 795
