Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 1 Part 42

NOT THE TRUE BLUE!

I will think more of his prayers when I see in him a spirit of PRAISE. Piety is a more childlike and happy att.i.tude than he admits. Martha, Martha, do you hear the knocking at the door? But Mary was happy. Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest epitome of religion, and a work exactly as pious although not quite so true as the multiplication table - even that dry-as-dust epitome begins with a heroic note. What is man's chief end? Let him study that; and ask himself if to refuse to enjoy G.o.d's kindest gifts is in the spirit indicated. Up, Dullard! It is better service to enjoy a novel than to mump.

I have been most unjust to the Shorter Catechism, I perceive. I wish to say that I keenly admire its merits as a performance; and that all that was in my mind was its peculiarly unreligious and unmoral texture; from which defect it can never, of course, exercise the least influence on the minds of children. But they learn fine style and some austere thinking unconsciously. - Ever your loving son,

R. L. S.

Letter: TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES-LES-PALMIERS, VAR, JANUARY 1 (1884).

MY DEAR PEOPLE, - A Good New Year to you. The year closes, leaving me with 50 pounds in the bank, owing no man nothing, 100 pounds more due to me in a week or so, and 150 pounds more in the course of the month; and I can look back on a total receipt of 465 pounds, 0s. 6d. for the last twelve months!

And yet I am not happy!

Yet I beg! Here is my beggary:-

1. Sellar's Trial.

2. George Borrow's Book about Wales.

3. My Grandfather's Trip to Holland.

4. And (but this is, I fear, impossible) the Bell Rock Book.

When I think of how last year began, after four months of sickness and idleness, all my plans gone to water, myself starting alone, a kind of spectre, for Nice - should I not be grateful? Come, let us sing unto the Lord!

Nor should I forget the expected visit, but I will not believe in that till it befall; I am no cultivator of disappointments, 'tis a herb that does not grow in my garden; but I get some good crops both of remorse and grat.i.tude. The last I can recommend to all gardeners; it grows best in s.h.i.+ny weather, but once well grown, is very hardy; it does not require much labour; only that the husbandman should smoke his pipe about the flower-plots and admire G.o.d's pleasant wonders. Winter green (otherwise known as Resignation, or the 'false grat.i.tude plant') springs in much the same soil; is little hardier, if at all; and requires to be so dug about and dunged, that there is little margin left for profit. The variety known as the Black Winter green (H. V. Stevensoniana) is rather for ornament than profit.

'John, do you see that bed of resignation?' - 'It's doin' bravely, sir.' - 'John, I will not have it in my garden; it flatters not the eye and comforts not the stomach; root it out.' - 'Sir, I ha'e seen o' them that rase as high as nettles; gran' plants!' - 'What then?

Were they as tall as alps, if still unsavoury and bleak, what matters it? Out with it, then; and in its place put Laughter and a Good Conceit (that capital home evergreen), and a bush of Flowering Piety - but see it be the flowering sort - the other species is no ornament to any gentleman's Back Garden.'

JNO. BUNYAN.

Letter: TO SIDNEY COLVIN

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES-LES-PALMIERS, VAR, 9TH MARCH 1884.

MY DEAR S. C., - You will already have received a not very sane note from me; so your patience was rewarded - may I say, your patient silence? However, now comes a letter, which on receipt, I thus acknowledge.

I have already expressed myself as to the political aspect. About Grahame, I feel happier; it does seem to have been really a good, neat, honest piece of work. We do not seem to be so badly off for commanders: Wolseley and Roberts, and this pile of Woods, Stewarts, Alisons, Grahames, and the like. Had we but ONE statesman on any side of the house!

Two chapters of OTTO do remain: one to rewrite, one to create; and I am not yet able to tackle them. For me it is my chief o' works; hence probably not so for others, since it only means that I have here attacked the greatest difficulties. But some chapters towards the end: three in particular - I do think come off. I find them stirring, dramatic, and not unpoetical. We shall see, however; as like as not, the effort will be more obvious than the success.

For, of course, I strung myself hard to carry it out. The next will come easier, and possibly be more popular. I believe in the covering of much paper, each time with a definite and not too difficult artistic purpose; and then, from time to time, drawing oneself up and trying, in a superior effort, to combine the facilities thus acquired or improved. Thus one progresses. But, mind, it is very likely that the big effort, instead of being the masterpiece, may be the blotted copy, the gymnastic exercise. This no man can tell; only the brutal and licentious public, snouting in Mudie's wash-trough, can return a dubious answer.

I am to-day, thanks to a pure heaven and a beneficent, loud- talking, antiseptic mistral, on the high places as to health and spirits. Money holds out wonderfully. f.a.n.n.y has gone for a drive to certain meadows which are now one sheet of jonquils: sea-bound meadows, the thought of which may freshen you in Bloomsbury. 'Ye have been fresh and fair, Ye have been filled with flowers' - I fear I misquote. Why do people babble? Surely Herrick, in his true vein, is superior to Martial himself, though Martial is a very pretty poet.

Did you ever read St. Augustine? The first chapters of the CONFESSIONS are marked by a commanding genius. Shakespearian in depth. I was struck dumb, but, alas! when you begin to wander into controversy, the poet drops out. His description of infancy is most seizing. And how is this: 'Sed majorum nugae negotia vocantur; puerorum autem talia c.u.m sint puniuntur a majoribus.'

Which is quite after the heart of R. L. S. See also his splendid pa.s.sage about the 'luminosus limes amicitiae' and the 'nebulae de limosa concupiscentia carnis'; going on 'UTRUMQUE in confuso aestuabat et rapiebat imbecillam aetatem per abrupta cupiditatum.'

That 'Utrumque' is a real contribution to life's science. l.u.s.t ALONE is but a pigmy; but it never, or rarely, attacks us single- handed.

Do you ever read (to go miles off, indeed) the incredible Barbey d'Aurevilly? A psychological Poe - to be for a moment Henley. I own with pleasure I prefer him with all his folly, rot, sentiment, and mixed metaphors, to the whole modern school in France. It makes me laugh when it's nonsense; and when he gets an effect (though it's still nonsense and mere Poery, not poesy) it wakens me. CE QUI NE MEURT PAS nearly killed me with laughing, and left me - well, it left me very nearly admiring the old a.s.s. At least, it's the kind of thing one feels one couldn't do. The dreadful moonlight, when they all three sit silent in the room - by George, sir, it's imagined - and the brief scene between the husband and wife is all there. QUANT AU FOND, the whole thing, of course, is a fever dream, and worthy of eternal laughter. Had the young man broken stones, and the two women been hard-working honest prost.i.tutes, there had been an end of the whole immoral and baseless business: you could at least have respected them in that case.

I also read PETRONIUS ARBITER, which is a rum work, not so immoral as most modern works, but singularly silly. I tackled some Tacitus too. I got them with a dreadful French crib on the same page with the text, which helps me along and drives me mad. The French do not even try to translate. They try to be much more cla.s.sical than the cla.s.sics, with astounding results of barrenness and tedium.

Tacitus, I fear, was too solid for me. I liked the war part; but the dreary intriguing at Rome was too much.

R. L. S.

Letter: TO MR. d.i.c.k

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES, VAR, 12TH MARCH 1884.

MY DEAR MR. d.i.c.k, - I have been a great while owing you a letter; but I am not without excuses, as you have heard. I overworked to get a piece of work finished before I had my holiday, thinking to enjoy it more; and instead of that, the machinery near hand came sundry in my hands! like Murdie's uniform. However, I am now, I think, in a fair way of recovery; I think I was made, what there is of me, of whipcord and thorn-switches; surely I am tough! But I fancy I shall not overdrive again, or not so long. It is my theory that work is highly beneficial, but that it should, if possible, and certainly for such partially broken-down instruments as the thing I call my body, be taken in batches, with a clear break and breathing s.p.a.ce between. I always do vary my work, laying one thing aside to take up another, not merely because I believe it rests the brain, but because I have found it most beneficial to the result. Reading, Bacon says, makes a full man, but what makes me full on any subject is to banish it for a time from all my thoughts. However, what I now propose is, out of every quarter, to work two months' and rest the third. I believe I shall get more done, as I generally manage, on my present scheme, to have four months' impotent illness and two of imperfect health - one before, one after, I break down. This, at least, is not an economical division of the year.

I re-read the other day that heartbreaking book, the LIFE OF SCOTT.

One should read such works now and then, but O, not often. As I live, I feel more and more that literature should be cheerful and brave-spirited, even if it cannot be made beautiful and pious and heroic. We wish it to be a green place; the WAVERLEY NOVELS are better to re-read than the over-true life, fine as dear Sir Walter was. The Bible, in most parts, is a cheerful book; it is our little piping theologies, tracts, and sermons that are dull and dowie; and even the Shorter Catechism, which is scarcely a work of consolation, opens with the best and shortest and completest sermon ever written - upon Man's chief end. - Believe me, my dear Mr.

d.i.c.k, very sincerely yours,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. - You see I have changed my hand. I was threatened apparently with scrivener's cramp, and at any rate had got to write so small, that the revisal of my MS. tried my eyes, hence my signature alone remains upon the old model; for it appears that if I changed that, I should be cut off from my 'vivers.'

R. L. S.

Letter: TO COSMO MONKHOUSE

LA SOLITUDE, HYERES-LES-PALMIERS, VAR, MARCH 16, 1884.

MY DEAR MONKHOUSE, - You see with what prompt.i.tude I plunge into correspondence; but the truth is, I am condemned to a complete inaction, stagnate dismally, and love a letter. Yours, which would have been welcome at any time, was thus doubly precious.

Dover sounds somewhat s.h.i.+veringly in my ears. You should see the weather I have - cloudless, clear as crystal, with just a punkah- draft of the most aromatic air, all pine and gum tree. You would be ashamed of Dover; you would scruple to refer, sir, to a spot so paltry. To be idle at Dover is a strange pretension; pray, how do you warm yourself? If I were there I should grind knives or write blank verse, or - But at least you do not bathe? It is idle to deny it: I have - I may say I nourish - a growing jealousy of the robust, large-legged, healthy Britain-dwellers, patient of grog, scorners of the timid umbrella, innocuously breathing fog: all which I once was, and I am ashamed to say liked it. How ignorant is youth! grossly rolling among unselected pleasures; and how n.o.bler, purer, sweeter, and lighter, to sip the choice tonic, to recline in the luxurious invalid chair, and to tread, well-shawled, the little round of the const.i.tutional. Seriously, do you like to repose? Ye G.o.ds, I hate it. I never rest with any acceptation; I do not know what people mean who say they like sleep and that d.a.m.ned bedtime which, since long ere I was breeched, has rung a knell to all my day's doings and beings. And when a man, seemingly sane, tells me he has 'fallen in love with stagnation,' I can only say to him, 'You will never be a Pirate!' This may not cause any regret to Mrs. Monkhouse; but in your own soul it will clang hollow - think of it! Never! After all boyhood's aspirations and youth's immoral day-dreams, you are condemned to sit down, grossly draw in your chair to the fat board, and be a beastly Burgess till you die.

Can it be? Is there not some escape, some furlough from the Moral Law, some holiday jaunt contrivable into a Better Land? Shall we never shed blood? This prospect is too grey.

'Here lies a man who never did Anything but what he was bid; Who lived his life in paltry ease, And died of commonplace disease.'