to Henry James

Apia, December 1893.

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,—The mail has come upon me like an armed man three days earlier than was expected; and the Lord help me!  It is impossible I should answer anybody the way they should be.  Your jubilation over Catriona did me good, and still more the subtlety and truth of your remark on the starving of the visual sense in that book.  ’Tis true, and unless I make the greater effort—and am, as a step to that, convinced of its necessity—it will be more true I fear in the future.  I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction.  My two aims may be described as—

1st.  War to the adjective.

2nd.  Death to the optic nerve.

Admitted we live in an age of the optic nerve in literature.  For how many centuries did literature get along without a sign of it?  However, I’ll consider your letter.

How exquisite is your character of the critic in Essays in London!  I doubt if you have done any single thing so satisfying as a piece of style and of insight.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.