to R. Le Gallienne

Vailima, Samoa, December 28th, 1893.

DEAR MR. LE GALLIENNE,—I have received some time ago, through our friend Miss Taylor, a book of yours.  But that was by no means my first introduction to your name.  The same book had stood already on my shelves; I had read articles of yours in the Academy; and by a piece of constructive criticism (which I trust was sound) had arrived at the conclusion that you were ‘Log-roller.’  Since then I have seen your beautiful verses to your wife.  You are to conceive me, then, as only too ready to make the acquaintance of a man who loved good literature and could make it.  I had to thank you, besides, for a triumphant exposure of a paradox of my own: the literary-prostitute disappeared from view at a phrase of yours—‘The essence is not in the pleasure but the sale.’  True: you are right, I was wrong; the author is not the whore, but the libertine; and yet I shall let the passage stand.  It is an error, but it illustrated the truth for which I was contending, that literature—painting—all art, are no other than pleasures, which we turn into trades.

And more than all this, I had, and I have to thank you for the intimate loyalty you have shown to myself; for the eager welcome you give to what is good—for the courtly tenderness with which you touch on my defects.  I begin to grow old; I have given my top note, I fancy;—and I have written too many books.  The world begins to be weary of the old booth; and if not weary, familiar with the familiarity that breeds contempt.  I do not know that I am sensitive to criticism, if it be hostile; I am sensitive indeed, when it is friendly; and when I read such criticism as yours, I am emboldened to go on and praise God.

You are still young, and you may live to do much.  The little, artificial popularity of style in England tends, I think, to die out; the British pig returns to his true love, the love of the styleless, of the shapeless, of the slapdash and the disorderly.  There is trouble coming, I think; and you may have to hold the fort for us in evil days.

Lastly, let me apologise for the crucifixion that I am inflicting on you (bien à contre-cœur) by my bad writing.  I was once the best of writers; landladies, puzzled as to my ‘trade,’ used to have their honest bosoms set at rest by a sight of a page of manuscript.—‘Ah,’ they would say, ‘no wonder they pay you for that’;—and when I sent it in to the printers, it was given to the boys!  I was about thirty-nine, I think, when I had a turn of scrivener’s palsy; my hand got worse; and for the first time, I received clean proofs.  But it has gone beyond that now, I know I am like my old friend James Payn, a terror to correspondents; and you would not believe the care with which this has been written.—Believe me to be, very sincerely yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.