to Henry James

Apia, July 1893.

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,—Yes.  Les Trophées, on the whole, a book. [298b]  It is excellent; but is it a life’s work?  I always suspect you of a volume of sonnets up your sleeve; when is it coming down?  I am in one of my moods of wholesale impatience with all fiction and all verging on it, reading instead, with rapture, Fountainhall’s Decisions.  You never read it: well, it hasn’t much form, and is inexpressibly dreary, I should suppose, to others—and even to me for pages.  It’s like walking in a mine underground, and with a damned bad lantern, and picking out pieces of ore.  This, and war, will be my excuse for not having read your (doubtless) charming work of fiction.  The revolving year will bring me round to it; and I know, when fiction shall begin to feel a little solid to me again, that I shall love it, because it’s James.  Do you know, when I am in this mood, I would rather try to read a bad book?  It’s not so disappointing, anyway.  And Fountainhall is prime, two big folio volumes, and all dreary, and all true, and all as terse as an obituary; and about one interesting fact on an average in twenty pages, and ten of them unintelligible for technicalities.  There’s literature, if you like!  It feeds; it falls about you genuine like rain.  Rain: nobody has done justice to rain in literature yet: surely a subject for a Scot.  But then you can’t do rain in that ledger-book style that I am trying for—or between a ledger-book and an old ballad.  How to get over, how to escape from, the besotting particularity of fiction.  ‘Roland approached the house; it had green doors and window blinds; and there was a scraper on the upper step.’  To hell with Roland and the scraper!—Yours ever,

R. L. S.