Роберт Льюис Стивенсон
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 23
To Mrs. Sitwell
“John Knox” and “J. K.” herein mentioned are the two papers on John Knox and His Relations with Women, first printed in Macmillan’s Magazine and afterwards in Familiar Studies of Men and Books.
Swanston, Wednesday [Autumn], 1874.
I have been hard at work all yesterday, and besides had to write a long letter to Bob, so I found no time until quite late, and then was sleepy. Last night it blew a fearful gale; I was kept awake about a couple of hours, and could not get to sleep for the horror of the wind’s noise; the whole house shook; and, mind you, our house is a house, a great castle of jointed stone that would weigh up a street of English houses; so that when it quakes, as it did last night, it means something. But the quaking was not what put me about; it was the horrible howl of the wind round the corner; the audible haunting of an incarnate anger about the house; the evil spirit that was abroad; and, above all, the shuddering silent pauses when the storm’s heart stands dreadfully still for a moment. O how I hate a storm at night! They have been a great influence in my life, I am sure; for I can remember them so far back – long before I was six at least, for we left the house in which I remember listening to them times without number when I was six. And in those days the storm had for me a perfect impersonation, as durable and unvarying as any heathen deity. I always heard it, as a horseman riding past with his cloak about his head, and somehow always carried away, and riding past again, and being baffled yet once more, ad infinitum, all night long. I think I wanted him to get past, but I am not sure; I know only that I had some interest either for or against in the matter; and I used to lie and hold my breath, not quite frightened, but in a state of miserable exaltation.
My first John Knox is in proof, and my second is on the anvil. It is very good of me so to do; for I want so much to get to my real tour and my sham tour, the real tour first; it is always working in my head, and if I can only turn on the right sort of style at the right moment, I am not much afraid of it. One thing bothers me; what with hammering at this J. K., and writing necessary letters, and taking necessary exercise (that even not enough, the weather is so repulsive to me, cold and windy), I find I have no time for reading except times of fatigue, when I wish merely to relax myself. O – and I read over again for this purpose Flaubert’s Tentation de St. Antoine; it struck me a good deal at first, but this second time it has fetched me immensely. I am but just done with it, so you will know the large proportion of salt to take with my present statement, that it’s the finest thing I ever read! Of course, it isn’t that, it’s full of longueurs, and is not quite “redd up,” as we say in Scotland, not quite articulated; but there are splendid things in it.
I say, do take your macaroni with oil: do, please. It’s beastly with butter. – Ever your faithful friend,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Mrs. Sitwell
Mr. (later Sir) George Grove was for some years before and after this date the editor of Macmillan’s Magazine (but the true monument to his memory is of course his Dictionary of Music). After the Knox articles no more contributions from R. L. S. appeared in this magazine, partly, I think, because Mr. Alexander Macmillan disapproved of his essay on Burns published the following year. The Portfolio paper here mentioned is that entitled On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places.
[Swanston, Autumn 1874], Thursday.
MY DEAR FRIEND, – I have another letter from Grove, about my John Knox, which is flattering in its way: he is a very gushing and spontaneous person. I am busy with another Portfolio paper for which I can find no name; I think I shall require to leave it without.
I am afraid I shall not get to London on my way to Poland, but I must try to manage it on my way back; I must see you anyway, before I tackle this sad winter work, just to get new heart. As it is, I am as jolly as three, in good health, fairish working trim and on good, very good, terms with my people.
Look here, I must have people well. If they will keep well, I am all right: if they won’t – well I’ll do as well as I can, and forgive them, and try to be something of a comfortable thought in spite. So with that cheerful sentiment, good-night dear friend and good health to you.
Saturday.– Your letter to-day. Thank you. It is a horrid day, outside. You talk of my setting to a book, as if I could; don’t you know that things must come to me? I can do but little; I mostly wait and look out. I am struggling with a Portfolio paper just now, which will not come straight somehow and will get too gushy; but a little patience will get it out of the kink and sober it down I hope. I have been thinking over my movements, and am not sure but that I may get to London on my way to Poland after all. Hurrah! But we must not halloo till we are out of the wood; this may be only a clearing.
God help us all, it is a funny world. To see people skipping all round us with their eyes sealed up with indifference, knowing nothing of the earth or man or woman, going automatically to offices and saying they are happy or unhappy out of a sense of duty, I suppose, surely at least from no sense of happiness or unhappiness, unless perhaps they have a tooth that twinges, is it not like a bad dream? Why don’t they stamp their foot upon the ground and awake? There is the moon rising in the east, and there is a person with their heart broken and still glad and conscious of the world’s glory up to the point of pain; and behold they know nothing of all this! I should like to kick them into consciousness, for damp gingerbread puppets as they are. S. C. is down on me for being bitter; who can help it sometimes, especially after they have slept ill?
I am going to have a lot of lunch presently; and then I shall feel all right again, and the loneliness will pass away as often before. It is the flesh that is weak. Already I have done myself all the good in the world by this scribble, and feel alive again and pretty jolly.
Sunday.– What a day! Cold and dark as mid-winter. I shall send with this two new photographs of myself for your opinion. My father regards this life “as a shambling sort of omnibus which is taking him to his hotel.” Is that not well said? It came out in a rather pleasant and entirely amicable discussion which we had this afternoon on a walk. The colouring of the world, to-day is of course hideous; we saw only one pleasant sight, a couple of lovers under a thorn-tree by the wayside, he with his arm about her waist: they did not seem to find it so cold as we. I have made a lot of progress to-day with my Portfolio paper. I think some of it should be nice, but it rambles a little; I like rambling, if the country be pleasant; don’t you? – Ever your faithful friend,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Mrs. Sitwell
[October 27, 1874], Edinburgh, Thursday.
It is cold, but very sunshiny and dry; I wish you were here; it would suit you and it doesn’t suit me; if we could change? This is the Fast day – Thursday preceding bi-annual Holy Sacrament that is – nobody does any work, they go to Church twice, they read nothing secular (except the newspapers, that is the nuance between Fast day and Sunday), they eat like fighting-cocks. Behold how good a thing it is and becoming well to fast in Scotland. I am progressing with John Knox and Women No. 2; I shall finish it, I think, in a fortnight hence; and then I shall begin to enjoy myself. J. K. and W. No. 2 is not uninteresting however; it only bores me because I am so anxious to be at something else which I like better. I shall perhaps go to Church this afternoon from a sort of feeling that it is rather a wholesome thing to do of an afternoon; it keeps one from work and it lets you out so late that you cannot weary yourself walking and so spoil your evening’s work.
Friday.– I got your letter this morning, and whether owing to that, or to the fact that I had spent the evening before in comparatively riotous living, I managed to work five hours and a half well and without fatigue; besides reading about an hour more at history. This is a thing to be proud of.
We have had lately some of the most beautiful sunsets; our autumn sunsets here are always admirable in colour. To-night there was just a little lake of tarnished green deepening into a blood-orange at the margins, framed above by dark clouds and below by the long roof-line of the Egyptian buildings on what we call the Mound, the statues on the top (of her Britannic Majesty and diverse nondescript Sphinxes) printing themselves off black against the lit space.
Saturday.– It has been colder than ever; and to-night there is a truculent wind about the house, shaking the windows and making a hollow inarticulate grumbling in the chimney. I cannot say how much I hate the cold. It makes my scalp so tight across my head and gives me such a beastly rheumatism about my shoulders, and wrinkles and stiffens my face; O I have such a Sehnsucht for Mentone, where the sun is shining and the air still, and (a friend writes to me) people are complaining of the heat.
Sunday.– I was chased out by my lamp again last night; it always goes out when I feel in the humour to write to you. To-day I have been to Church, which has not improved my temper I must own. The clergyman did his best to make me hate him, and I took refuge in that admirable poem the Song of Deborah and Barak; I should like to make a long scroll of painting (say to go all round a cornice) illustrative of this poem; with the people seen in the distance going stealthily on footpaths while the great highways go vacant; with the archers besetting the draw-wells; with the princes in hiding on the hills among the bleating sheep-flocks; with the overthrow of Sisera, the stars fighting against him in their courses and that ancient river, the river Kishon, sweeping him away in anger; with his mother looking and looking down the long road in the red sunset, and never a banner and never a spear-clump coming into sight, and her women with white faces round her, ready with lying comfort. To say nothing of the people on white asses.
O, I do hate this damned life that I lead. Work – work – work; that’s all right, it’s amusing; but I want women about me and I want pleasure. John Knox had a better time of it than I, with his godly females all leaving their husbands to follow after him; I would I were John Knox; I hate living like a hermit. Write me a nice letter if ever you are in the humour to write to me, and it doesn’t hurt your head. Good-bye. – Ever your faithful friend,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Mrs. Sitwell
The projected visit to his Russian friend in Poland did not come off, and shortly after the preceding letter Stevenson went for a few days’ walking tour in the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire, as recorded in his essay An Autumn Effect. He then came on for a visit to London.
[London, November 1874.]
When I left you I found an organ-grinder in Russell Square playing to a child; and the simple fact that there was a child listening to him, that he was giving this pleasure, entitled him, according to my theory, as you know, to some money; so I put some coppers on the ledge of his organ, without so much as looking at him, and I was going on when a woman said to me: “Yes, sir, he do look bad, don’t he? scarcely fit like to be working.” And then I looked at the man, and O! he was so ill, so yellow and heavy-eyed and drooping. I did not like to go back somehow, and so I gave the woman a shilling and asked her to give it to him for me. I saw her do so and walked on; but the face followed me, and so when I had got to the end of the division, I turned and came back as hard as I could and filled his hand with money – ten to thirteen shillings, I should think. I was sure he was going to be ill, you know, and he was a young man; and I dare say he was alone, and had no one to love him.
I had my reward; for a few yards farther on, here was another organ-grinder playing a dance tune, and perhaps a dozen children all dancing merrily to his music, singly, and by twos and threes, and in pretty little figures together. Just what my organ-grinder in my story wanted to have happen to him! It was so gay and pleasant in the twilight under the street lamp.
I am very well, have eaten well, and am so sleepy I can write no more. This I write to let you know I am no worse; all the better. – Ever your faithful friend,
R. L. S.
To Mrs. Sitwell
[Edinburgh, November 1874], Sunday.
I was never more sorry to leave you, but I never left you with a better heart, than last night. I had a long journey and a cold one; but never was sick nor sorry the whole way. It was a long one because when we got to Berwick, we had to go round through the hills by Kelso, as there was a block on the main line. I knew nothing of this, and you may imagine my bewilderment when I came to myself, the train standing and whistling dismally in the black morning, before a little vacant half-lit station, with a name up that I had never heard before. My fellow-traveller woke up and wanted to know what was wrong. “O, it’s nothing,” I said, “nothing at all, it’s an evil dream.” However we had the thing explained to us at the end of ends, and trailed on in the dark among the snowy hills, stopping every now and again and whistling in an appealing kind of way, as much as to say, “God knows where we are, for God’s sake don’t run into us“; until at last we came to a dead standstill and remained so for perhaps an hour and a quarter. This wakened us up for a little; and we managed, at last, to attract the attention of one of the officials whom we could see picking their way about the snow with lanterns. This man (very wide awake, and hale, and lusty) informed us we were waiting for another conductor, as our own guard did not know the line. “Where is the new guard coming from?” we ask. “O, close by; only – he, he – he was married last night.” And immediately we heard much hoarse laughter in the dark about us; and the moving lanterns were shaken to and fro, as if in a wind. This poor conductor! However, I recomposed myself for slumber, and did not re-awake much before Edinburgh, where I was discharged three hours too late and found my father waiting for me in the snow, with a very long face. – Ever your faithful friend,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Sidney Colvin
I forget what the Japanese prints were which I had been sending to Stevenson at his wish, but they sound like specimens of Hiroshigé and Kuniyoshi. The taste for these things was then quite new and had laid hold on him strongly.
[Edinburgh, November 1874.]
MY DEAR COLVIN, – Thank you, and God bless you for ever: this is a far better lot than the last; I have chosen four complete sets out of it for setting, quite admirable: the others are not quite one’s taste; I find the colour far from always being agreeable, it is a great toss up. They have sent me duplicates of first a mad little scene with a white horse, a red monarch and a blue arm of the sea in it; and second of a night scene with water, flowers and a black and white umbrella and a wonderful grey distance and a wonderful general effect – one of my best in fact. Do not now force yourself to make any more purchases for me; but if ever you see a thing you would like to lecture off, remember I am the person who is ready to buy it and let you have the use of it: keep this in view always.
I am working very hard (for me) and am very happy over my picters.
Goodbye, mon vieux. – Ever yours,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
P.S. – In fact if ever you see anything exceptionally fine, purchase for R. L. S. I owe you lots of money besides this, don’t I? John Knox is red and sparkling on the anvil and the hammer goes about six hours on him.
R. L. S.
To Mrs. Sitwell
During his days in London Stevenson had gone with Mrs. Sitwell to revisit the Elgin marbles, and had carried off photographs of them to put up in his room at Edinburgh. King Matthias’s Hunting Horn has perished like so many other stories of this time.
[Edinburgh, November 1874], Tuesday.
Well, I’ve got some women now, and they’re better than nothing. Three, without heads, who have been away getting framed. And you know they are more to me, after a fashion, than they can be to you, because, after a fashion also, they are women. I have come now to think the sitting figure in spite of its beautiful drapery rather a blemish, rather an interruption to the sentiment. The two others are better than one has ever dreamed; I think these two women are the only things in the world that have been better than, in Bible phrase, it had entered into my heart to conceive. Who made them? Was it Pheidias? or do they not know? It is wonderful what company they are – noble company. And then I have now three Japanese pictures that are after my own heart, and I get up from time to time and turn a bit of favourite colour over and over, roll it under my tongue, savour it till it gets all through me; and then back to my chair and to work.
This afternoon about six there was a small orange moon, lost in a great world of blue evening. A few leafless boughs, and a bit of garden railing, criss-cross its face; and below it there was blueness and the spread lights of Leith, lost in blue haze. To the east, the town, also subdued to the same blue, piled itself up, with here and there a lit window, until it could print off its outline against a faint patch of green and russet that remained behind the sunset.
I must tell you about my way of life, which is regular to a degree. Breakfast 8.30; during breakfast and my smoke afterwards till ten, when I begin work, I read Reformation; from ten, I work until about a quarter to one; from one until two, I lunch and read a book on Schopenhauer or one on Positivism; two to three work, three to six anything; if I am in before six, I read about Japan: six, dinner and a pipe with my father and coffee until 7.30; 7.30 to 9.30, work; after that either supper and a pipe at home, or out to Simpson’s or Baxter’s: bed between eleven and twelve.
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.
