to Mrs. Sitwell

Mentone, Sunday, November 1873.

MY DEAR FRIEND,—I sat a long while up among the olive yards to-day at a favourite corner, where one has a fair view down the valley and on to the blue floor of the sea.  I had a Horace with me, and read a little; but Horace, when you try to read him fairly under the open heaven, sounds urban, and you find something of the escaped townsman in his descriptions of the country, just as somebody said that Morris’s sea-pieces were all taken from the coast.  I tried for long to hit upon some language that might catch ever so faintly the indefinable shifting colour of olive leaves; and, above all, the changes and little silverings that pass over them, like blushes over a face, when the wind tosses great branches to and fro; but the Muse was not favourable.  A few birds scattered here and there at wide intervals on either side of the valley sang the little broken songs of late autumn and there was a great stir of insect life in the grass at my feet.  The path up to this coign of vantage, where I think I shall make it a habit to ensconce myself a while of a morning, is for a little while common to the peasant and a little clear brooklet.  It is pleasant, in the tempered grey daylight of the olive shadows, to see the people picking their way among the stones and the water and the brambles; the women especially, with the weights poised on their heads and walking all from the hips with a certain graceful deliberation.

Tuesday.—I have been to Nice to-day to see Dr. Bennet; he agrees with Clark that there is no disease; but I finished up my day with a lamentable exhibition of weakness.  I could not remember French, or at least I was afraid to go into any place lest I should not be able to remember it, and so could not tell when the train went.  At last I crawled up to the station and sat down on the steps, and just steeped myself there in the sunshine until the evening began to fall and the air to grow chilly.  This long rest put me all right; and I came home here triumphantly and ate dinner well.  There is the full, true, and particular account of the worst day I have had since I left London.  I shall not go to Nice again for some time to come.

Thursday.—I am to-day quite recovered, and got into Mentone to-day for a book, which is quite a creditable walk.  As an intellectual being I have not yet begun to re-exist; my immortal soul is still very nearly extinct; but we must hope the best.  Now, do take warning by me.  I am set up by a beneficent providence at the corner of the road, to warn you to flee from the hebetude that is to follow.  Being sent to the South is not much good unless you take your soul with you, you see; and my soul is rarely with me here.  I don’t see much beauty.  I have lost the key; I can only be placid and inert, and see the bright days go past uselessly one after another; therefore don’t talk foolishly with your mouth any more about getting liberty by being ill and going south viâ the sickbed.  It is not the old free-born bird that gets thus to freedom; but I know not what manacled and hide-bound spirit, incapable of pleasure, the clay of a man.  Go south!  Why, I saw more beauty with my eyes healthfully alert to see in two wet windy February afternoons in Scotland than I can see in my beautiful olive gardens and grey hills in a whole week in my low and lost estate, as the Shorter Catechism puts it somewhere.  It is a pitiable blindness, this blindness of the soul; I hope it may not be long with me.  So remember to keep well; and remember rather anything than not to keep well; and again I say, anything rather than not to keep well.

Not that I am unhappy, mind you.  I have found the words already—placid and inert, that is what I am.  I sit in the sun and enjoy the tingle all over me, and I am cheerfully ready to concur with any one who says that this is a beautiful place, and I have a sneaking partiality for the newspapers, which would be all very well, if one had not fallen from heaven and were not troubled with some reminiscence of the ineffable aurore.

To sit by the sea and to be conscious of nothing but the sound of the waves, and the sunshine over all your body, is not unpleasant; but I was an Archangel once.

Friday.—If you knew how old I felt!  I am sure this is what age brings with it—this carelessness, this disenchantment, this continual bodily weariness.  I am a man of seventy: O Medea, kill me, or make me young again! [67]

To-day has been cloudy and mild; and I have lain a great while on a bench outside the garden wall (my usual place now) and looked at the dove-coloured sea and the broken roof of cloud, but there was no seeing in my eye.  Let us hope to-morrow will be more profitable.

R. L. S.