to Mrs. Sitwell

[Mentone, January 1874.]

. . . last night I had a quarrel with the American on politics.  It is odd how it irritates you to hear certain political statements made.  He was excited, and he began suddenly to abuse our conduct to America.  I, of course, admitted right and left that we had behaved disgracefully (as we had); until somehow I got tired of turning alternate cheeks and getting duly buffeted; and when he said that the Alabama money had not wiped out the injury, I suggested, in language (I remember) of admirable directness and force, that it was a pity they had taken the money in that case.  He lost his temper at once, and cried out that his dearest wish was a war with England; whereupon I also lost my temper, and, thundering at the pitch of my voice, I left him and went away by myself to another part of the garden.  A very tender reconciliation took place, and I think there will come no more harm out of it.  We are both of us nervous people, and he had had a very long walk and a good deal of beer at dinner: that explains the scene a little.  But I regret having employed so much of the voice with which I have been endowed, as I fear every person in the hotel was taken into confidence as to my sentiments, just at the very juncture when neither the sentiments nor (perhaps) the language had been sufficiently considered.

Friday.—You have not yet heard of my book?—Four Great Scotsmen—John Knox, David Hume, Robert Burns, Walter Scott.  These, their lives, their work, the social media in which they lived and worked, with, if I can so make it, the strong current of the race making itself felt underneath and throughout—this is my idea.  You must tell me what you think of it.  The Knox will really be new matter, as his life hitherto has been disgracefully written, and the events are romantic and rapid; the character very strong, salient, and worthy; much interest as to the future of Scotland, and as to that part of him which was truly modern under his Hebrew disguise.  Hume, of course, the urbane, cheerful, gentlemanly, letter-writing eighteenth century, full of attraction, and much that I don’t yet know as to his work.  Burns, the sentimental side that there is in most Scotsmen, his poor troubled existence, how far his poems were his personally, and how far national, the question of the framework of society in Scotland, and its fatal effect upon the finest natures.  Scott again, the ever delightful man, sane, courageous, admirable; the birth of Romance, in a dawn that was a sunset; snobbery, conservatism, the wrong thread in History, and notably in that of his own land.  Voilà, madame, le menu.  Comment le trouvez-vous?  Il y a de la bonne viando, si on parvient à la cuire convenablement.

R. L. S.