to W. H. Low

Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, March 13, 1885.

MY DEAR LOW,—Your success has been immense.  I wish your letter had come two days ago: Otto, alas! has been disposed of a good while ago; but it was only day before yesterday that I settled the new volume of Arabs.  However, for the future, you and the sons of the deified Scribner are the men for me.  Really they have behaved most handsomely.  I cannot lay my hand on the papers, or I would tell you exactly how it compares with my English bargain; but it compares well.  Ah, if we had that copyright, I do believe it would go far to make me solvent, ill-health and all.

I wrote you a letter to the Rembrandt, in which I stated my views about the dedication in a very brief form.  It will give me sincere pleasure, and will make the second dedication I have received, the other being from John Addington Symonds.  It is a compliment I value much; I don’t know any that I should prefer.

I am glad to hear you have windows to do; that is a fine business, I think; but, alas! the glass is so bad nowadays; realism invading even that, as well as the huge inferiority of our technical resource corrupting every tint.  Still, anything that keeps a man to decoration is, in this age, good for the artist’s spirit.

By the way, have you seen James and me on the novel?  James, I think in the August or September—R. L. S. in the December Longman.  I own I think the école bête, of which I am the champion, has the whip hand of the argument; but as James is to make a rejoinder, I must not boast.  Anyway the controversy is amusing to see.  I was terribly tied down to space, which has made the end congested and dull.  I shall see if I can afford to send you the April Contemporary—but I dare say you see it anyway—as it will contain a paper of mine on style, a sort of continuation of old arguments on art in which you have wagged a most effective tongue.  It is a sort of start upon my Treatise on the Art of Literature: a small, arid book that shall some day appear.

With every good wish from me and mine (should I not say ‘she and hers’?) to you and yours, believe me yours ever,

Robert Louis Stevenson.