The second volume of Clément Marot has come. Where and O where is the first?—Ever your affectionate
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Sidney Colvin
The Bottle here mentioned is a story that had been some time in hand called The Curate of Anstruther’s Bottle; afterwards abandoned like so many early attempts of the same kind.
[Menton, January 1874.]
MY DEAR S. C.,—I suppose this will be my last note then. I think you will find everything very jolly here, I am very jolly myself. I worked six hours to-day. I am occupied in transcribing The Bottle, which is pleasant work to me; I find much in it that I still think excellent and much that I am doubtful about; my convention is so terribly difficult that I have to put out much that pleases me, and much that I still preserve I only preserve with misgiving. I wonder if my convention is not a little too hard and too much in the style of those decadent curiosities, poems without the letter E, poems going with the alphabet and the like. And yet the idea, if rightly understood and treated as a convention always and not as an abstract principle, should not so much hamper one as it seems to do. The idea is not, of course, to put in nothing but what would naturally have been noted and remembered and handed down, but not to put in anything that would make a person stop and say—how could this be known? Without doubt it has the advantage of making one rely on the essential interest of a situation and not cocker up and validify feeble intrigue with incidental fine writing and scenery, and pyrotechnic exhibitions of inappropriate cleverness and sensibility. I remember Bob once saying to me that the quadrangle of Edinburgh University was a good thing and our having a talk as to how it could be employed in different arts. I then stated that the different doors and staircases ought to be brought before a reader of a story not by mere recapitulation but by the use of them, by the descent of different people one after another by each of them. And that the grand feature of shadow and the light of the one lamp in the corner should also be introduced only as they enabled people in the story to see one another or prevented them. And finally that whatever could not thus be worked into the evolution of the action had no right to be commemorated at all. After all, it is a story you are telling; not a place you are to describe; and everything that does not attach itself to the story is out of place.
This is a lecture not a letter, and it seems rather like sending coals to Newcastle to write a lecture to a subsidised professor. I hope you have seen Bob by this time. I know he is anxious to meet you and I am in great anxiety to know what you think of his prospects—frankly, of course: as for his person, I don’t care a damn what you think of it: I am case-hardened in that matter.
I wrote a French note to Madame Zassetsky the other day, and there were no errors in it. The complete Gaul, as you may see.—Ever yours,
Robert Louis Stevenson.