Seventeen chapters of OTTO are now drafted, and finding I was working through my voice and getting screechy, I have turned back again to rewrite the earlier part. It has, I do believe, some merit: of what order, of course, I am the last to know; and, triumph of triumphs, my wife - my wife who hates and loathes and slates my women - admits a great part of my Countess to be on the spot.
Yes, I could borrow, but it is the joy of being before the public, for once. Really, 100 pounds is a sight more than TREASURE ISLAND is worth.
The reason of my DECHE? Well, if you begin one house, have to desert it, begin another, and are eight months without doing any work, you will be in a DECHE too. I am not in a DECHE, however; DISTINGUO - I would fain distinguish; I am rather a swell, but NOT SOLVENT. At a touch the edifice, AEDIFICIUM, might collapse. If my creditors began to babble around me, I would sink with a slow strain of music into the crimson west. The difficulty in my elegant villa is to find oil, OLEUM, for the dam axles. But I've paid my rent until September; and beyond the chemist, the grocer, the baker, the doctor, the gardener, Lloyd's teacher, and the great thief creditor Death, I can snap my fingers at all men. Why will people spring bills on you? I try to make 'em charge me at the moment; they won't, the money goes, the debt remains. - The Required Play is in the MERRY MEN.
Q. E. F.
I thus render honour to your FLAIR; it came on me of a clap; I do not see it yet beyond a kind of sunset glory. But it's there: passion, romance, the picturesque, involved: startling, simple, horrid: a sea-pink in sea-froth! S'AGIT DE LA DESENTERRER. 'Help!' cries a buried masterpiece.
Once I see my way to the year's end, clear, I turn to plays; till then I grind at letters; finish OTTO; write, say, a couple of my TRAVELLER'S TALES; and then, if all my ships come home, I will attack the drama in earnest. I cannot mix the skeins. Thus, though I'm morally sure there is a play in OTTO, I dare not look for it: I shoot straight at the story.
As a story, a comedy, I think OTTO very well constructed; the echoes are very good, all the sentiments change round, and the points of view are continually, and, I think (if you please), happily contrasted. None of it is exactly funny, but some of it is smiling.
R. L. S.
Letter: TO EDMUND GOSSE
LA SOLITUDE, HYERES [SUMMER 1883].
MY DEAR GOSSE, - I have now leisurely read your volume; pretty soon, by the way, you will receive one of mine.
It is a pleasant, instructive, and scholarly volume. The three best being, quite out of sight - Crashaw, Otway, and Etherege. They are excellent; I hesitate between them; but perhaps Crashaw is the most brilliant
Your Webster is not my Webster; nor your Herrick my Herrick. On these matters we must fire a gun to leeward, show our colours, and go by. Argument is impossible. They are two of my favourite authors: Herrick above all: I suppose they are two of yours. Well, Janus-like, they do behold us two with diverse countenances, few features are common to these different avatars; and we can but agree to differ, but still with gratitude to our entertainers, like two guests at the same dinner, one of whom takes clear and one white soup. By my way of thinking, neither of us need be wrong.
The other papers are all interesting, adequate, clear, and with a pleasant spice of the romantic. It is a book you may be well pleased to have so finished, and will do you much good. The Crashaw is capital: capital; I like the taste of it. Preface clean and dignified. The handling throughout workmanlike, with some four or five touches of preciosity, which I regret.
With my thanks for information, entertainment, and a pleasurable envy here and there. - Yours affectionately,
R. L. S.
Letter: TO W. E. HENLEY
LA SOLITUDE, HYERES-LES-PALMIERS, VAR, SEPTEMBER 19, 1883.
DEAR BOY, - Our letters vigorously cross: you will ere this have received a note to Coggie: God knows what was in it.