to W. E. Henley

La Solitude, Hyères [Summer 1883].

DEAR LAD,—Glad you like Fontainebleau.  I am going to be the means, under heaven, of aërating or liberating your pages.  The idea that because a thing is a picture-book all the writing should be on the wrong tack is triste but widespread.  Thus Hokusai will be really a gossip on convention, or in great part.  And the Skelt will be as like a Charles Lamb as I can get it.  The writer should write, and not illustrate pictures: else it’s bosh. . . .

Your remarks about the ugly are my eye.  Ugliness is only the prose of horror.  It is when you are not able to write Macbeth that you write Thérèse Raquin.  Fashions are external: the essence of art only varies in so far as fashion widens the field of its application; art is a mill whose thirlage, in different ages, widens and contracts; but, in any case and under any fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the little man produces cleverness (personalities, psychology) instead of beauty, ugliness instead of terror, and jokes instead of mirth.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be ever, world without end.  Amen!

And even as you read, you say, ‘Of course, quelle rengaîne!’

R. L. S.