Context
From "A Letter to Edmund Gosse" and "Books Which Have Influenced Me"
Robert Louis Stevenson
The following letter was written on January 2, 1886, just before the publication of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. My dear Gosse, Thank you for your letter, so interesting to my vanity. There is a review in the St Jingo; which, as it seems to hold somewhat of your opinion and is besides
written with a pen and not a poker, we think, may possibly be yours.
The Prince has done fairly well in spite of the reviews which have been
bad; he was, as you doubtless saw, well slated in the Saturday; one paper reviewed it as a child’s story; another (picture my agony)
described it as a ‘Gilbert comedy’. It was amusing to see the race
between me and Justin M’Carthy; the Milesian has won by a length. That
is the hard part of literature. You aim high, and you take longer over
your work; and it will not be so successful as if you had aimed low and
rushed it. What the public likes is work (of any kind) a little loosely
executed; so long as it is a little wordy, a little slack, a little dim
and knotless, the dear public likes it: it should (if possible) be a
little dull into the bargain. I know that good work sometimes hits; but
with my hand on my heart, I declare I think it by an accident. And I
know also that good work must succeed at last; but that is not the
doing of the public; they are only shamed into silence or affectation.
I do not write for the public; I do write for money, a nobler deity;
and most of all for myself, not perhaps any more noble but both more
intelligent and nearer home. Let us tell each other sad
stories of the bestiality of the beast whom we feed. What he likes is
the newspaper; and to me the press is the mouth of a sewer, where lying
is professed as from an university chair, and everything prurient, and
ignoble, and essentially dull, finds its abode and pulpit. I do not
like mankind; but men, and not all of these—and fewer women. As for
respecting the race, and above all that fatuous rabble of burgesses
called ‘the public’, God save me from such irreligion; that way lies
disgrace and dishonour. There must be something wrong in me, or I would
not be popular. This is perhaps a trifle stronger than my
sedate and permanent opinion. Not much, I think. As for the art that we
profess and try to practise, I have never been able to see why its
professors should be respected. They chose the primrose path; when they
found it was not all primroses, but some of it brambly, and much of it
uphill, they began to think and to speak of themselves as holy martyrs.
But a man is never martyred in any honest sense in the pursuit of his
own pleasure; and delirium tremens has none of the honour of
the cross. We were full of the pride of life, and chose, like
prostitutes, to live by a pleasure. We should be paid, if we give the
pleasure we pretend to give; but why should we be honoured? We are
whores, some of us pretty whores, some of us not, but all whores:
whores of the mind, selling to the public the amusements of our
fireside as the whore sells the pleasures of her bed. Well,
what’s the odds? I’m a pretty sick whore anyway; though better than I
have been. If there was a card for us, how few would be allowed to walk
the streets? To the lock with the fatted brain and the rancid
imagination?—This is a gay letter: 1886 opens fairly.
The Stevenson essay from which the following passage is taken first appeared in the British Weekly, May 13, 1887.
It will be more to the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment?—a free grace, I find I must call it?—by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author’s folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader.
And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not written.
