Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 1 Part 39

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES-LES-PALMIERS, VAR [OCTOBER 1883].

COLVIN, COLVIN, COLVIN, - Yours received; also interesting copy of P. WHISTLES. 'In the mult.i.tude of councillors the Bible declares there is wisdom,' said my great-uncle, 'but I have always found in them distraction.' It is extraordinary how tastes vary: these proofs have been handed about, it appears, and I have had several letters; and - distraction. 'AEsop: the Miller and the a.s.s.'

Notes on details:-

1. I love the occasional trochaic line; and so did many excellent writers before me.

2. If you don't like 'A Good Boy,' I do.

3. In 'Escape at Bedtime,' I found two suggestions. 'Shove' for 'above' is a correction of the press; it was so written.

'Twinkled' is just the error; to the child the stars appear to be there; any word that suggests illusion is a horror.

4. I don't care; I take a different view of the vocative.

5. Bewildering and childering are good enough for me. These are rhymes, jingles; I don't go for eternity and the three unities.

I will delete some of those condemned, but not all. I don't care for the name Penny Whistles; I sent a sheaf to Henley when I sent 'em. But I've forgot the others. I would just as soon call 'em 'Rimes for Children' as anything else. I am not proud nor particular.

Your remarks on the BLACK ARROW are to the point. I am pleased you liked Crookback; he is a fellow whose h.e.l.lish energy has always fired my attention. I wish Shakespeare had written the play after he had learned some of the rudiments of literature and art rather than before. Some day, I will re-tickle the Sable Missile, and shoot it, MOYENNANT FINANCES, once more into the air; I can lighten it of much, and devote some more attention to d.i.c.k o' Gloucester.

It's great sport to write tushery.

By this I reckon you will have heard of my proposed excursiolorum to the Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece, and kindred sites. If the excursiolorum goes on, that is, if MOYENNANT FINANCES comes off, I shall write to beg you to collect introductiolorums for me.

Distinguo: 1. SILVERADO was not written in America, but in Switzerland's icy mountains. 2. What you read is the bleeding and disembowelled remains of what I wrote. 3. The good stuff is all to come - so I think. 'The Sea Fogs,' 'The Hunter's Family,' 'Toils and Pleasures' - BELLES PAGES. - Yours ever,

RAMNUGGER.

O! - Seeley is too clever to live, and the book a gem. But why has he read too much Arnold? Why will he avoid - obviously avoid - fine writing up to which he has led? This is a winking, curled- and-oiled, ultra-cultured, Oxford-don sort of an affectation that infuriates my honest soul. 'You see' - they say - 'how unbombastic WE are; we come right up to eloquence, and, when it's hanging on the pen, dammy, we scorn it!' It is literary Deronda-ism. If you don't want the woman, the image, or the phrase, mortify your vanity and avoid the appearance of wanting them.

Letter: TO W. H. LOW

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES, OCTOBER [1883].

MY DEAR LOW, - . . . Some day or other, in Ca.s.sell's MAGAZINE OF ART, you will see a paper which will interest you, and where your name appears. It is called 'Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Artists,' and the signature of R. L. Stevenson will be found annexed

Please tell the editor of MANHATTAN the following secrets for me: 1ST, That I am a beast; 2ND, that I owe him a letter; 3RD, that I have lost his, and cannot recall either his name or address; 4TH, that I am very deep in engagements, which my absurd health makes it hard for me to overtake; but 5TH, that I will bear him in mind; 6TH and last, that I am a brute.

My address is still the same, and I live in a most sweet corner of the universe, sea and fine hills before me, and a rich variegated plain; and at my back a craggy hill, loaded with vast feudal ruins.

I am very quiet; a person pa.s.sing by my door half startles me; but I enjoy the most aromatic airs, and at night the most wonderful view into a moonlit garden. By day this garden fades into nothing, overpowered by its surroundings and the luminous distance; but at night and when the moon is out, that garden, the arbour, the flight of stairs that mount the artificial hillock, the plumed blue gum- trees that hang trembling, become the very skirts of Paradise.

Angels I know frequent it; and it thrills all night with the flutes of silence. d.a.m.n that garden;- and by day it is gone.

Continue to testify boldly against realism. Down with Dagon, the fish G.o.d! All art swings down towards imitation, in these days, fatally. But the man who loves art with wisdom sees the joke; it is the l.u.s.tful that tremble and respect her ladys.h.i.+p; but the honest and romantic lovers of the Muse can see a joke and sit down to laugh with Apollo.

The prospect of your return to Europe is very agreeable; and I was pleased by what you said about your parents. One of my oldest friends died recently, and this has given me new thoughts of death.

Up to now I had rather thought of him as a mere personal enemy of my own; but now that I see him hunting after my friends, he looks altogether darker. My own father is not well; and Henley, of whom you must have heard me speak, is in a questionable state of health.

These things are very solemn, and take some of the colour out of life. It is a great thing, after all, to be a man of reasonable honour and kindness. Do you remember once consulting me in Paris whether you had not better sacrifice honesty to art; and how, after much confabulation, we agreed that your art would suffer if you did? We decided better than we knew. In this strange welter where we live, all hangs together by a million filaments; and to do reasonably well by others, is the first prerequisite of art. Art is a virtue; and if I were the man I should be, my art would rise in the proportion of my life.

If you were privileged to give some happiness to your parents, I know your art will gain by it. BY G.o.d, IT WILL! SIC SUBSCRIBITUR,

R. L. S.

Letter: TO R. A. M. STEVENSON

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES-LES-PALMIERS [OCTOBER 1883].

MY DEAR BOB, - Yes, I got both your letters at Lyons, but have been since then decading in several steps Toothache; fever; Ferrier's death; lung. Now it is decided I am to leave to-morrow, penniless, for Nice to see Dr. Williams.

I was much struck by your last. I have written a breathless note on Realism for Henley; a fifth part of the subject, hurriedly touched, which will show you how my thoughts are driving. You are now at last beginning to think upon the problems of executive, plastic art, for you are now for the first time attacking them.

Hitherto you have spoken and thought of two things - technique and the ARS ARTIUM, or common background of all arts. Studio work is the real touch. That is the genial error of the present French teaching. Realism I regard as a mere question of method. The 'brown foreground,' 'old mastery,' and the like, ranking with villanelles, as technical sports and pastimes. Real art, whether ideal or realistic, addresses precisely the same feeling, and seeks the same qualities - significance or charm. And the same - very same - inspiration is only methodically differentiated according as the artist is an arrant realist or an arrant idealist. Each, by his own method, seeks to save and perpetuate the same significance or charm; the one by suppressing, the other by forcing, detail.

All other idealism is the brown foreground over again, and hence only art in the sense of a game, like cup and ball. All other realism is not art at all - but not at all. It is, then, an insincere and showy handicraft.

Were you to re-read some Balzac, as I have been doing, it would greatly help to clear your eyes. He was a man who never found his method. An inarticulate Shakespeare, smothered under forcible- feeble detail. It is astounding to the riper mind how bad he is, how feeble, how untrue, how tedious; and, of course, when he surrendered to his temperament, how good and powerful. And yet never plain nor clear. He could not consent to be dull, and thus became so. He would leave nothing undeveloped, and thus drowned out of sight of land amid the mult.i.tude of crying and incongruous details. There is but one art - to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an ILIAD of a daily paper.

Your definition of seeing is quite right. It is the first part of omission to be partly blind. Artistic sight is judicious blindness. Sam Bough must have been a jolly blind old boy. He would turn a corner, look for one-half or quarter minute, and then say, 'This'll do, lad.' Down he sat, there and then, with whole artistic plan, scheme of colour, and the like, and begin by laying a foundation of powerful and seemingly incongruous colour on the block. He saw, not the scene, but the water-colour sketch. Every artist by sixty should so behold nature. Where does he learn that?

In the studio, I swear. He goes to nature for facts, relations, values - material; as a man, before writing a historical novel, reads up memoirs. But it is not by reading memoirs that he has learned the selective criterion. He has learned that in the practice of his art; and he will never learn it well, but when disengaged from the ardent struggle of immediate representation, of realistic and EX FACTO art. He learns it in the crystallisation of day-dreams; in changing, not in copying, fact; in the pursuit of the ideal, not in the study of nature. These temples of art are, as you say, inaccessible to the realistic climber. It is not by looking at the sea that you get

'The mult.i.tudinous seas incarnadine,'

nor by looking at Mont Blanc that you find

'And visited all night by troops of stars.'

A kind of ardour of the blood is the mother of all this; and according as this ardour is swayed by knowledge and seconded by craft, the art expression flows clear, and significance and charm, like a moon rising, are born above the barren juggle of mere symbols.

The painter must study more from nature than the man of words. But why? Because literature deals with men's business and pa.s.sions which, in the game of life, we are irresistibly obliged to study; but painting with relations of light, and colour, and significances, and form, which, from the immemorial habit of the race, we pa.s.s over with an unregardful eye. Hence this crouching upon camp-stools, and these crusts. But neither one nor other is a part of art, only preliminary studies.

I want you to help me to get people to understand that realism is a method, and only methodic in its consequences; when the realist is an artist, that is, and supposing the idealist with whom you compare him to be anything but a FARCEUR and a DILETTANTE. The two schools of working do, and should, lead to the choice of different subjects. But that is a consequence, not a cause. See my chaotic note, which will appear, I fancy, in November in Henley's sheet.

Poor Ferrier, it bust me horrid. He was, after you, the oldest of my friends.

I am now very tired, and will go to bed having prelected freely.

f.a.n.n.y will finish.

R. L. S.

Letter: TO THOMAS STEVENSON