I wish I could write better letters to you. Mine must be very dull. I must try to give you news. Well, I was at the annual dinner of my old Academy schoolfellows last night. We sat down ten, out of seventy-two! The others are scattered all over the places of the earth, some in San Francisco, some in New Zealand, some in India, one in the backwoods—it gave one a wide look over the world to hear them talk so. I read them some verses. It is great fun; I always read verses, and in the vinous enthusiasm of the moment they always propose to have them printed; Ce qui n’arrive jamais du reste: in the morning, they are more calm.
Sunday.—It occurs to me that one reason why there is no news in my letters is because there is so little in my life. I always tell you of my concerts: I was at another yesterday afternoon: a recital of Hallé and Norman Neruda. I went in the evening to the pantomime with the Mackintoshes—cousins of mine. Their little boy, aged four, was there for the first time. To see him with his eyes fixed and open like saucers, and never varying his expression save in so far as he might sometimes open his mouth a little wider, was worth the money. He laughed only once—when the giant’s dwarf fed his master as though he were a child. Coming home, he was much interested as to who made the fairies, and wanted to know if they were like berries. I should like to know how much this question was due to the idea of their coming up from under the stage, and how much to a vague idea of rhyme. When he was told that they were not like berries, he then asked if they had not been flowers before they were fairies. It was a good deal in the vein of Herbert Spencer’s primitive man all this.
I am pretty well but have not got back to work much since Tuesday. I work far too hard at the story; but I wish I had finished it before I stopped as I feel somewhat out of the swing now.—Ever your faithful
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Sidney Colvin
Another of the literary projects which came to naught, no one of the stories mentioned having turned out according to Stevenson’s dream and desire at its first conception, or even having been preserved for use afterwards as the foundation of riper work. “Clytie” is of course the famous Roman bust from the Townley collection in the British Museum.
[Edinburgh, January 1875.]
MY DEAR COLVIN,—Thanks for your letter, I too am in such a state of business that I know not when to find the time to write. Look here—Seeley does not seem to me to have put that paper of mine in this month; so I remain unable to pay you; which is a sad pity and must be forgiven me.
What am I doing? Well I wrote my second John Knox, which is not a bad piece of work for me; begun and finished ready for press in nine days. Then I have since written a story called King Matthias’s Hunting Horn, and I am engaged in finishing another called The Two Falconers of Cairnstane. I find my stories affect me rather more perhaps than is wholesome. I have only been two hours at work to-day, and yet I have been crying and am shaking badly, as you can see in my handwriting, and my back is a bit bad. They give me pleasure though, quite worth all results. However I shall work no more to-day.
I am to get £1000 when I pass Advocate, it seems; which is good.