to Mrs. Sitwell

Swanston, Wednesday, May 1874.

Struggling away at Fables in Song.  I am much afraid I am going to make a real failure; the time is so short, and I am so out of the humour.  Otherwise very calm and jolly: cold still impossible.

Thursday.—I feel happier about the Fables, and it is warmer a bit; but my body is most decrepit, and I can just manage to be cheery and tread down hypochondria under foot by work.  I lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure outside of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except a short walk alone on the cold hills, and meals, and a couple of pipes with my father in the evening.  It is surprising how it suits me, and how happy I keep.

Saturday.—I have received such a nice long letter (four sides) from Leslie Stephen to-day about my Victor Hugo.  It is accepted.  This ought to have made me gay, but it hasn’t.  I am not likely to be much of a tonic to-night.  I have been very cynical over myself to-day, partly, perhaps, because I have just finished some of the deedest rubbish about Lord Lytton’s fables that an intelligent editor ever shot into his wastepaper basket.  If Morley prints it I shall be glad, but my respect for him will be shaken.

Tuesday.—Another cold day; yet I have been along the hillside, wondering much at idiotic sheep, and raising partridges at every second step.  One little plover is the object of my firm adherence.  I pass his nest every day, and if you saw how he files by me, and almost into my face, crying and flapping his wings, to direct my attention from his little treasure, you would have as kind a heart to him as I.  To-day I saw him not, although I took my usual way; and I am afraid that some person has abused his simple wiliness and harried (as we say in Scotland) the nest.  I feel much righteous indignation against such imaginary aggressor.  However, one must not be too chary of the lower forms.  To-day I sat down on a tree-stump at the skirt of a little strip of planting, and thoughtlessly began to dig out the touchwood with an end of twig.  I found I had carried ruin, death, and universal consternation into a little community of ants; and this set me a-thinking of how close we are environed with frail lives, so that we can do nothing without spreading havoc over all manner of perishable homes and interests and affections; and so on to my favourite mood of an holy terror for all action and all inaction equally—a sort of shuddering revulsion from the necessary responsibilities of life.  We must not be too scrupulous of others, or we shall die.  Conscientiousness is a sort of moral opium; an excitant in small doses, perhaps, but at bottom a strong narcotic.

Saturday.—I have been two days in Edinburgh, and so had not the occasion to write to you.  Morley has accepted the Fables, and I have seen it in proof, and think less of it than ever.  However, of course, I shall send you a copy of the Magazine without fail, and you can be as disappointed as you like, or the reverse if you can.  I would willingly recall it if I could.

Try, by way of change, Byron’s Mazeppa; you will be astonished.  It is grand and no mistake, and one sees through it a fire, and a passion, and a rapid intuition of genius, that makes one rather sorry for one’s own generation of better writers, and—I don’t know what to say; I was going to say ‘smaller men’; but that’s not right; read it, and you will feel what I cannot express.  Don’t be put out by the beginning; persevere, and you will find yourself thrilled before you are at an end with it.—Ever your faithful friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.