to J. A. Symonds

Skerryvore, Bournemouth [Spring 1886].

MY DEAR SYMONDS,—If we have lost touch, it is (I think) only in a material sense; a question of letters, not hearts.  You will find a warm welcome at Skerryvore from both the lightkeepers; and, indeed, we never tell ourselves one of our financial fairy tales, but a run to Davos is a prime feature.  I am not changeable in friendship; and I think I can promise you you have a pair of trusty well-wishers and friends in Bournemouth: whether they write or not is but a small thing; the flag may not be waved, but it is there.

Jekyll is a dreadful thing, I own; but the only thing I feel dreadful about is that damned old business of the war in the members.  This time it came out; I hope it will stay in, in future.

Raskolnikoff [20] is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years; I am glad you took to it.  Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me.  It was like having an illness.  James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show.  To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified.  The Juge d’Instruction I thought a wonderful, weird, touching, ingenious creation: the drunken father, and Sonia, and the student friend, and the uncircumscribed, protaplasmic humanity of Raskolnikoff, all upon a level that filled me with wonder: the execution also, superb in places.  Another has been translated—Humiliés et Offensés.  It is even more incoherent than Le Crime et le Châtiment, but breathes much of the same lovely goodness, and has passages of power.  Dostoieffsky is a devil of a swell, to be sure.  Have you heard that he became a stout, imperialist conservative?  It is interesting to know.  To something of that side, the balance leans with me also in view of the incoherency and incapacity of all.  The old boyish idea of the march on Paradise being now out of season, and all plans and ideas that I hear debated being built on a superb indifference to the first principles of human character, a helpless desire to acquiesce in anything of which I know the worst assails me.  Fundamental errors in human nature of two sorts stand on the skyline of all this modern world of aspirations.  First, that it is happiness that men want; and second, that happiness consists of anything but an internal harmony.  Men do not want, and I do not think they would accept, happiness; what they live for is rivalry, effort, success—the elements our friends wish to eliminate.  And, on the other hand, happiness is a question of morality—or of immorality, there is no difference—and conviction.  Gordon was happy in Khartoum, in his worst hours of danger and fatigue; Marat was happy, I suppose, in his ugliest frenzy; Marcus Aurelius was happy in the detested camp; Pepys was pretty happy, and I am pretty happy on the whole, because we both somewhat crowingly accepted a via media, both liked to attend to our affairs, and both had some success in managing the same.  It is quite an open question whether Pepys and I ought to be happy; on the other hand, there is no doubt that Marat had better be unhappy.  He was right (if he said it) that he was la misère humaine, cureless misery—unless perhaps by the gallows.  Death is a great and gentle solvent; it has never had justice done it, no, not by Whitman.  As for those crockery chimney-piece ornaments, the bourgeois (quorum pars), and their cowardly dislike of dying and killing, it is merely one symptom of a thousand how utterly they have got out of touch of life.  Their dislike of capital punishment and their treatment of their domestic servants are for me the two flaunting emblems of their hollowness.

God knows where I am driving to.  But here comes my lunch.

Which interruption, happily for you, seems to have stayed the issue.  I have now nothing to say, that had formerly such a pressure of twaddle.  Pray don’t fail to come this summer.  It will be a great disappointment, now it has been spoken of, if you do.—Yours ever,

Robert Louis Stevenson