to W. E. Henley
La Solitude, Hyères [Summer 1883].
DEAR LAD,—Glad you like Fontainebleau. I am going to be the means, under heaven, of aërating or liberating your pages. The idea that because a thing is a picture-book all the writing should be on the wrong tack is triste but widespread. Thus Hokusai will be really a gossip on convention, or in great part. And the Skelt will be as like a Charles Lamb as I can get it. The writer should write, and not illustrate pictures: else it’s bosh. . . .
Your remarks about the ugly are my eye. Ugliness is only the prose of horror. It is when you are not able to write Macbeth that you write Thérèse Raquin. Fashions are external: the essence of art only varies in so far as fashion widens the field of its application; art is a mill whose thirlage, in different ages, widens and contracts; but, in any case and under any fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the little man produces cleverness (personalities, psychology) instead of beauty, ugliness instead of terror, and jokes instead of mirth. As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be ever, world without end. Amen!
And even as you read, you say, ‘Of course, quelle rengaîne!’
R. L. S.
to Alison Cunningham
La Solitude, Hyères [Summer 1883].
MY DEAR CUMMY,—Yes, I own I am a real bad correspondent, and am as bad as can be in most directions.
I have been adding some more poems to your book. I wish they would look sharp about it; but, you see, they are trying to find a good artist to make the illustrations, without which no child would give a kick for it. It will be quite a fine work, I hope. The dedication is a poem too, and has been quite a long while written, but I do not mean you to see it till you get the book; keep the jelly for the last, you know, as you would often recommend in former days, so now you can take your own medicine.