to J. A. Symonds

Bournemouth, February 1885.

MY DEAR SYMONDS,—Yes, we have both been very neglectful.  I had horrid luck, catching two thundering influenzas in August and November.  I recovered from the last with difficulty, but have come through this blustering winter with some general success; in the house, up and down.  My wife, however, has been painfully upset by my health.  Last year, of course, was cruelly trying to her nerves; Nice and Hyères are bad experiences; and though she is not ill, the doctor tells me that prolonged anxiety may do her a real mischief.

I feel a little old and fagged, and chary of speech, and not very sure of spirit in my work; but considering what a year I have passed, and how I have twice sat on Charon’s pierhead, I am surprising.

My father has presented us with a very pretty home in this place, into which we hope to move by May.  My Child’s Verses come out next week.  Otto begins to appear in April; More New Arabian Nights as soon as possible.  Moreover, I am neck deep in Wellington; also a story on the stocks, Great North Road.  O, I am busy! Lloyd is at college in Edinburgh.  That is, I think, all that can be said by way of news.

Have you read Huckleberry Finn?  It contains many excellent things; above all, the whole story of a healthy boy’s dealings with his conscience, incredibly well done.

My own conscience is badly seared; a want of piety; yet I pray for it, tacitly, every day; believing it, after courage, the only gift worth having; and its want, in a man of any claims to honour, quite unpardonable.  The tone of your letter seemed to me very sound.  In these dark days of public dishonour, I do not know that one can do better than carry our private trials piously.  What a picture is this of a nation!  No man that I can see, on any side or party, seems to have the least sense of our ineffable shame: the desertion of the garrisons.  I tell my little parable that Germany took England, and then there was an Indian Mutiny, and Bismarck said: ‘Quite right: let Delhi and Calcutta and Bombay fall; and let the women and children be treated Sepoy fashion,’ and people say, ‘O, but that is very different!’  And then I wish I were dead.  Millais (I hear) was painting Gladstone when the news came of Gordon’s death; Millais was much affected, and Gladstone said, ‘Why?  It is the man’s own temerity!’  Voilà le Bourgeois! le voilà nu!  But why should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I have held my peace?  Why did I hold my peace?  Because I am a sceptic: i.e. a Bourgeois.  We believe in nothing, Symonds; you don’t, and I don’t; and these are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour.  I will first try to take the beam out of my own eye, trusting that even private effort somehow betters and braces the general atmosphere.  See, for example, if England has shown (I put it hypothetically) one spark of manly sensibility, they have been shamed into it by the spectacle of Gordon.  Police-Officer Cole is the only man that I see to admire.  I dedicate my New Arabs to him and Cox, in default of other great public characters.—Yours ever most affectionately,

Robert Louis Stevenson.