Wednesday.—Two good things have arrived to me to-day: your letter for one, and the end of John Knox for another. I cannot write English because I have been speaking French all evening with some French people of my knowledge. It’s a sad thing the state I get into, when I cannot remember English and yet do not know French! And it is worse when it is complicated, as at present, with a pen that will not write! If you knew how I have to paint and how I have to manœuvre to get the stuff legible at all.
Thursday.—I have said the Fates are only women after a fashion; and that is one of the strangest things about them. They are wonderfully womanly—they are more womanly than any woman—and those girt draperies are drawn over a wonderful greatness of body instinct with sex; I do not see a line in them that could be a line in a man. And yet, when all is said, they are not women for us; they are of another race, immortal, separate; one has no wish to look at them with love, only with a sort of lowly adoration, physical, but wanting what is the soul of all love, whether admitted to oneself or not, hope; in a word “the desire of the moth for the star.” O great white stars of eternal marble, O shapely, colossal women, and yet not women. It is not love that we seek from them, we do not desire to see their great eyes troubled with our passions, or the great impassive members contorted by any hope or pain or pleasure; only now and again, to be conscious that they exist, to have knowledge of them far off in cloudland or feel their steady eyes shining, like quiet watchful stars, above the turmoil of the earth.
I write so ill; so cheap and miserable and penny-a-linerish is this John Knox that I have just sent, that I am low. Only I keep my heart up by thinking of you. And if all goes to the worst, shall I not be able to lay my head on the great knees of the middle Fate—O these great knees—I know all Baudelaire meant now with his géante—to lay my head on her great knees and go to sleep.
Friday.—I have finished The Story of King Matthias’ Hunting Horn, whereof I spoke to you, and I think it should be good. It excites me like wine, or fire, or death, or love, or something; nothing of my own writing ever excited me so much; it does seem to me so weird and fantastic.
Saturday.—I know now that there is a more subtle and dangerous sort of selfishness in habit than there ever can be in disorder. I never ceased to be generous when I was most déréglé; now when I am beginning to settle into habits, I see the danger in front of me—one might cease to be generous and grow hard and sordid in time and trouble. However, thank God it is life I want, and nothing posthumous, and for two good emotions I would sacrifice a thousand years of fame. Moreover I know so well that I shall never be much as a writer that I am not very sorely tempted.
My only chance is in my stories; and so you will forgive me if I postpone everything else to copy out King Matthias; I have learned by experience that a story should be copied out and finished fairly off at the first heat if ever. I am even thinking of finishing up half-a-dozen perhaps and trying the publishers? what do you say? Give me your advice?
Sunday.—Good-bye. A long story to tell but no time to tell it: well and happy. Adieu.—Ever your faithful friend,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Mrs. Sitwell
Edinburgh [Sunday, November 1874].