to W. E. Henley

Hyères, May 1884.

DEAR BOY,—Old Mortality [318] is out, and I am glad to say Coggie likes it.  We like her immensely.

I keep better, but no great shakes yet; cannot work—cannot: that is flat, not even verses: as for prose, that more active place is shut on me long since.

My view of life is essentially the comic; and the romantically comic.  As you Like It is to me the most bird-haunted spot in letters; Tempest and Twelfth Night follow.  These are what I mean by poetry and nature.  I make an effort of my mind to be quite one with Molière, except upon the stage, where his inimitable jeux de scène beggar belief; but you will observe they are stage-plays—things ad hoc; not great Olympian debauches of the heart and fancy; hence more perfect, and not so great.  Then I come, after great wanderings, to Carmosine and to Fantasio; to one part of La Dernière Aldini (which, by the by, we might dramatise in a week), to the notes that Meredith has found, Evan and the postillion, Evan and Rose, Harry in Germany.  And to me these things are the good; beauty, touched with sex and laughter; beauty with God’s earth for the background.  Tragedy does not seem to me to come off; and when it does, it does so by the heroic illusion; the anti-masque has been omitted; laughter, which attends on all our steps in life, and sits by the deathbed, and certainly redacts the epitaph, laughter has been lost from these great-hearted lies.  But the comedy which keeps the beauty and touches the terrors of our life (laughter and tragedy-in-a-good-humour having kissed), that is the last word of moved representation; embracing the greatest number of elements of fate and character; and telling its story, not with the one eye of pity, but with the two of pity and mirth.

R. L. S.