The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson — Volume 1

Whether on high the eternal vault
Be blue, or crash with thunder down -

I judge the best, whate'er befall,
Is still to sit on one's behind,
And, having duly moistened all,
Smoke with an unperturbed mind.

    R. L. S.

Letter: TO THOMAS STEVENSON

[HOTEL BELVEDERE], DAVOS, DECEMBER 12 [1880]

MY DEAR FATHER, — Here is the scheme as well as I can foresee. I begin the book immediately after the '15, as then began the attempt to suppress the Highlands.

    I. THIRTY YEARS' INTERVAL

(1) Rob Roy. (2) The Independent Companies: the Watches. (3) Story of Lady Grange. (4) The Military Roads, and Disarmament: Wade and (5) Burt.

    II. THE HEROIC AGE

(1) Duncan Forbes of Culloden. (2) Flora Macdonald. (3) The Forfeited Estates; including Hereditary Jurisdictions; and the admirable conduct of the tenants.

    III. LITERATURE HERE INTERVENES

(1) The Ossianic Controversy. (2) Boswell and Johnson. (3) Mrs. Grant of Laggan.

    IV. ECONOMY

(1) Highland Economics. (2) The Reinstatement of the Proprietors. (3) The Evictions. (4) Emigration. (5) Present State.

    V. RELIGION

(1) The Catholics, Episcopals, and Kirk, and Soc. Prop. Christ. Knowledge. (2) The Men. (3) The Disruption.

All this, of course, will greatly change in form, scope, and order; this is just a bird's-eye glance. Thank you for BURT, which came, and for your Union notes. I have read one-half (about 900 pages) of Wodrow's CORRESPONDENCE, with some improvement, but great fatigue. The doctor thinks well of my recovery, which puts me in good hope for the future. I should certainly be able to make a fine history of this.

My Essays are going through the press, and should be out in January or February. — Ever affectionate son,

    R. L. S.

Letter: TO EDMUND GOSSE

HOTEL BELVEDERE, DAVOS PLATZ [DEC. 6, 1880]

MY DEAR WEG, — I have many letters that I ought to write in preference to this; but a duty to letters and to you prevails over any private consideration. You are going to collect odes; I could not wish a better man to do so; but I tremble lest you should commit two sins of omission. You will not, I am sure, be so far left to yourself as to give us no more of Dryden than the hackneyed St. Cecilia; I know you will give us some others of those surprising masterpieces where there is more sustained eloquence and harmony of English numbers than in all that has been written since; there is a machine about a poetical young lady, and another about either Charles or James, I know not which; and they are both indescribably fine. (Is Marvell's Horatian Ode good enough? I half think so.) But my great point is a fear that you are one of those who are unjust to our old Tennyson's Duke of Wellington. I have just been talking it over with Symonds; and we agreed that whether for its metrical effects, for its brief, plain, stirring words of portraiture, as — he 'that never lost an English gun,' or — the soldier salute; or for the heroic apostrophe to Nelson; that ode has never been surpassed in any tongue or time. Grant me the Duke, O Weg! I suppose you must not put in yours about the warship; you will have to admit worse ones, however. — Ever yours,

    R. L. S.

Letter: TO EDMUND GOSSE

[HOTEL BELVEDERE], DAVOS, DEC. 19, 1880

This letter is a report of a long sederunt, also steterunt in small committee at Davos Platz, Dec. 15, 1880.

Its results are unhesitatingly shot at your head.

MY DEAR WEG, — We both insist on the Duke of Wellington. Really it cannot be left out. Symonds said you would cover yourself with shame, and I add, your friends with confusion, if you leave it out. Really, you know it is the only thing you have, since Dryden, where that irregular odic, odal, odous (?) verse is used with mastery and sense. And it's one of our few English blood-boilers.

(2) Byron: if anything: PROMETHEUS.

(3) Shelley (1) THE WORLD'S GREAT AGE from Hellas; we are both dead on. After that you have, of course, THE WEST WIND thing. But we think (1) would maybe be enough; no more than two any way.

(4) Herrick. MEDDOWES and COME, MY CORINNA. After that MR. WICKES: two any way.

(5) Leave out stanza 3rd of Congreve's thing, like a dear; we can't stand the 'sigh' nor the 'peruke.'

(6) Milton. TIME and the SOLEMN MUSIC. We both agree we would rather go without L'Allegro and Il Penseroso than these; for the reason that these are not so well known to the brutish herd.

(7) Is the ROYAL GEORGE an ode, or only an elegy? It's so good.

(8) We leave Campbell to you.

(9) If you take anything from Clough, but we don't either of us fancy you will, let it be COME BACK.

(10) Quite right about Dryden. I had a hankering after THRENODIA AUGUSTALIS; but I find it long and with very prosaic holes: though, O! what fine stuff between whiles.

(11) Right with Collins.

(12) Right about Pope's Ode. But what can you give? THE DYING CHRISTIAN? or one of his inimitable courtesies? These last are fairly odes, by the Horatian model, just as my dear MEDDOWES is an ode in the name and for the sake of Bandusia.

(13) Whatever you do, you'll give us the Greek Vase.

(14) Do you like Jonson's 'loathed stage'? Verses 2, 3, and 4 are so bad, also the last line. But there is a fine movement and feeling in the rest.

We will have the Duke of Wellington by God. Pro Symonds and Stevenson.

    R. L. S.

Letter: TO CHARLES WARREN STODDARD

HOTEL BELVEDERE, DAVOS PLATZ, SWITZERLAND [DECEMBER 1880]

DEAR CHARLES WARREN STODDARD, — Many thanks to you for the letter and the photograph. Will you think it mean if I ask you to wait till there appears a promised cheap edition? Possibly the canny Scot does feel pleasure in the superior cheapness; but the true reason is this, that I think to put a few words, by way of notes, to each book in its new form, because that will be the Standard Edition, without which no g.'s l. will be complete. The edition, briefly, SINE QUA NON. Before that, I shall hope to send you my essays, which are in the printer's hands. I look to get yours soon. I am sorry to hear that the Custom House has proved fallible, like all other human houses and customs. Life consists of that sort of business, and I fear that there is a class of man, of which you offer no inapt type, doomed to a kind of mild, general disappointment through life. I do not believe that a man is the more unhappy for that. Disappointment, except with one's self, is not a very capital affair; and the sham beatitude, 'Blessed is he that expecteth little,' one of the truest, and in a sense, the most Christlike things in literature.

Alongside of you, I have been all my days a red cannon ball of dissipated effort; here I am by the heels in this Alpine valley, with just so much of a prospect of future restoration as shall make my present caged estate easily tolerable to me — shall or should, I would not swear to the word before the trial's done. I miss all my objects in the meantime; and, thank God, I have enough of my old, and maybe somewhat base philosophy, to keep me on a good understanding with myself and Providence.

The mere extent of a man's travels has in it something consolatory. That he should have left friends and enemies in many different and distant quarters gives a sort of earthly dignity to his existence. And I think the better of myself for the belief that I have left some in California interested in me and my successes. Let me assure you, you who have made friends already among such various and distant races, that there is a certain phthisical Scot who will always be pleased to hear good news of you, and would be better pleased by nothing than to learn that you had thrown off your present incubus, largely consisting of letters I believe, and had sailed into some square work by way of change.