Vailima, Samoa, December 28th, 1893.
DEAR MR. LE GALLIENNE,—I have received some time ago, through our friend Miss Taylor, a book of yours. But that was by no means my first introduction to your name. The same book had stood already on my shelves; I had read articles of yours in the Academy; and by a piece of constructive criticism (which I trust was sound) had arrived at the conclusion that you were “Log-roller.” Since then I have seen your beautiful verses to your wife. You are to conceive me, then, as only too ready to make the acquaintance of a man who loved good literature and could make it. I had to thank you, besides, for a triumphant exposure of a paradox of my own: the literary-prostitute disappeared from view at a phrase of yours—“The essence is not in the pleasure but the sale.” True you are right, I was wrong; the author is not the whore but the libertine; and yet I shall let the passage stand. It is an error, but it illustrated the truth for which I was contending, that literature—painting—all art, are no other than pleasures, which we turn into trades.
And more than all this, I had, and I have to thank you for the intimate loyalty you have shown to myself; for the eager welcome you give to what is good—for the courtly tenderness with which you touch on my defects. I begin to grow old; I have given my top note, I fancy;—and I have written too many books. The world begins to be weary of the old booth; and if not weary, familiar with the familiarity that breeds contempt. I do not know that I am sensitive to criticism, if it be hostile; I am sensitive indeed, when it is friendly; and when I read such criticism as yours, I am emboldened to go on and praise God.
You are still young, and you may live to do much. The little artificial popularity of style in England tends, I think, to die out; the British pig returns to his true love, the love of the styleless, of the shapeless, of the slapdash and the disorderly. There is trouble coming, I think; and you may have to hold the fort for us in evil days.
Lastly, let me apologise for the crucifixion that I am inflicting on you (bien à contre-cœur) by my bad writing. I was once the best of writers; landladies, puzzled as to my “trade,” used to have their honest bosoms set at rest by a sight of a page of manuscript.—“Ah,” they would say, “no wonder they pay you for that”;—and when I sent it in to the printers, it was given to the boys! I was about thirty-nine, I think, when I had a turn of scrivener’s palsy; my hand got worse; and for the first time, I received clean proofs. But it has gone beyond that now. I know I am like my old friend James Payn, a terror to correspondents; and you would not believe the care with which this has been written.—Believe me to be, very sincerely yours,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Mrs. A. Baker
The next is in answer to a request for permission to print some of the writings of R. L. S. in Braille type for the use of the blind.
December 1893.