to Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1886.]

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,—The Book—It is all drafted: I hope soon to send you for comments Chapters III., IV., and V.  Chapter VII. is roughly but satisfactorily drafted: a very little work should put that to rights.  But Chapter VI. is no joke; it is a mare magnum: I swim and drown and come up again; and it is all broken ends and mystification: moreover, I perceive I am in want of more matter.  I must have, first of all, a little letter from Mr. Ewing about the phonograph work: If you think he would understand it is quite a matter of chance whether I use a word or a fact out of it.  If you think he would not: I will go without.  Also, could I have a look at Ewing’s précis?  And lastly, I perceive I must interview you again about a few points; they are very few, and might come to little; and I propose to go on getting things as well together as I can in the meanwhile, and rather have a final time when all is ready and only to be criticised.  I do still think it will be good.  I wonder if Trélat would let me cut?  But no, I think I wouldn’t after all; ’tis so quaint and pretty and clever and simple and French, and gives such a good sight of Fleeming: the plum of the book, I think.

You misunderstood me in one point: I always hoped to found such a society; that was the outside of my dream, and would mean entire success.  But—I cannot play Peter the Hermit.  In these days of the Fleet Street journalist, I cannot send out better men than myself, with wives or mothers just as good as mine, and sisters (I may at least say) better, to a danger and a long-drawn dreariness that I do not share.  My wife says it’s cowardice; what brave men are the leader-writers!  Call it cowardice; it is mine.  Mind you, I may end by trying to do it by the pen only: I shall not love myself if I do; and is it ever a good thing to do a thing for which you despise yourself?—even in the doing?  And if the thing you do is to call upon others to do the thing you neglect?  I have never dared to say what I feel about men’s lives, because my own was in the wrong: shall I dare to send them to death?  The physician must heal himself; he must honestly try the path he recommends: if he does not even try, should he not be silent?

I thank you very heartily for your letter, and for the seriousness you brought to it.  You know, I think when a serious thing is your own, you keep a saner man by laughing at it and yourself as you go.  So I do not write possibly with all the really somewhat sickened gravity I feel.  And indeed, what with the book, and this business to which I referred, and Ireland, I am scarcely in an enviable state.  Well, I ought to be glad, after ten years of the worst training on earth—valetudinarianism—that I can still be troubled by a duty.  You shall hear more in time; so far, I am at least decided: I will go and see Balfour when I get to London.

We have all had a great pleasure: a Mrs. Rawlinson came and brought with her a nineteen-year-old daughter, simple, human, as beautiful as—herself; I never admired a girl before, you know it was my weakness: we are all three dead in love with her.  How nice to be able to do so much good to harassed people by—yourself!  Ever yours,

R. L. S.