Yours very truly,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
R. L. S. Saranac, New York.
Mr. Henley wrote:
Merton Place, Chiswick, W.,
5: 7: 88.
My dear Sharp,
I am glad to have your letter. Of course I disagreed with your view of In Hospital; but I didn’t think it all worth writing about. I felt you’d mistaken my aim; but I felt that your mistake (as I conceived it to be) was honestly made, and that if the work itself had failed to produce a right effect upon you, it was useless to attempt to correct the impressions by means outside art.
Art (as I think) is treatment et præteria nil. What I tried to do in In Hospital was to treat a certain subject—which seems to me to have a genuine human interest and importance—with discretion, good feeling, and a certain dignity. If I failed, I failed as an artist. My treatment (or my art) was not good enough for my material. Voilà. I thought (I will frankly confess it) that I had got the run of the thing—that my results were touched with the distinction of art. You didn’t think so, and I saw that, as far as you were concerned, I had failed of my effort. I was sorry to have so failed, and then the matter ended. To be perfectly frank, I objected to but one expression—“occasionally crude”—in all the article. I confess I don’t see the propriety of the phrase at all. My method is, I know, the exact reverse of your own; but I beg you to believe that my efforts—of simplicity, directness, bluntness, brutality even—are carefully calculated, and that “crude”—which means raw, if it means anything at all—is a word that I’d rather not have applied to me. The Saturday Reviewer made use of it, and I had it out with him, and he owned that it was unfortunately used—that it didn’t mean “raw,” but something un-Miltonic (as it were), something novel and personal and which hadn’t had time to get conventionalised. It’s stupid and superfluous to write like this; especially as I had meant to say nothing about it. But yours of last night is so kind and pleasant that I think it best to write what’s on my mind, or rather what was on it when I read your article. For the rest, it is good to hear that you’re re-reading, and are kind of dissatisfied with your own first views. I shall look with great interest for the new statement, and value it—whatever its conclusions—a good deal. I have worked hard at the little book, and am disposed (as you see) to take it more seriously than it deserves; and whatever is said about it comes home to me.
Always yours sincerely,