nour and kindness. Do you
remember once consulting me in Paris whether you had not better
sacrifice honesty to art; and how, after much confabulation, we agreed
that your art would suffer if you did? We decided better than we knew.
In this strange welter where we live, all hangs together by a million
filaments; and to do reasonably well by others, is the first
pre-requisite of art. Art is a virtue; and if I were the man I should
be, my art would rise in the proportion of my life.

If you were privileged to give some happiness to your parents, I know
your art will gain by it. _By God it will!_--_Sic subscribitur_,

R. L. S.

TO R. A. M. STEVENSON

_La Solitude, Hyeres [October 1883]._

MY DEAR BOB,--Yes, I got both your letters at Lyons, but have been since
then decading in several steps. Toothache; fever; Ferrier's death; lung.
Now it is decided I am to leave to-morrow, penniless, for Nice to see
Dr. Williams.

I was much struck by your last. I have written a breathless note on
Realism for Henley; a fifth part of the subject hurriedly touched, which
will show you how my thoughts are driving. You are now at last beginning
to think upon the problems of executive, plastic art, for you are now
for the first time attacking them. Hitherto you have spoken and thought
of two things--technique and the _ars artium_, or common background of
all arts. Studio work is the real touch. That is the genial error of the
present French teaching. Realism I regard as a mere question of method.
The "brown foreground," "old mastery," and the like, ranking with
villanelles, as technical sports and pastimes. Real art, whether ideal
or realistic, addresses precisely the same feeling, and seeks the same
qualities--significance or charm. And the same--very same--inspiration
is only methodically differentiated according as the artist is an arrant
realist or an arrant idealist. Each, by his own method, seeks to save
and perpetuate the same significance or charm; the one by suppressing,
the other by forcing, detail. All other idealism is the brown foreground
over again, and hence only art in the sense of a game, like cup and
ball. All other realism is not art at all--but not at all. It is, then,
an insincere and showy handicraft.

Were you to re-read some Balzac, as I have been doing, it would greatly
help to clear your eyes. He was a man who never found his method. An
inarticulate Shakespeare, smothered under forcible-feeble