(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.
To Charles Warren Stoddard
The prospect here alluded to of a cheap edition of the little travel-books did not get realised. The volume of essays in the printer’s hands was Virginibus Puerisque. I do not know what were the pages in broad Scots copied by way of enclosure.
Hotel Belvedere, Davos, [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.[34] 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.