you that I do love you.--Ever your bad son,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO HENRY JAMES

_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, October 28, 1885._

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--At last, my wife being at a concert, and a story
being done, I am at some liberty to write and give you of my views. And
first, many thanks for the works that came to my sickbed. And second,
and more important, as to the _Princess_.[13] Well, I think you are
going to do it this time; I cannot, of course, foresee, but these two
first numbers seem to me picturesque and sound and full of lineament,
and very much a new departure. As for your young lady, she is all there;
yes, sir, you can do low life, I believe. The prison was excellent; it
was of that nature of touch that I sometimes achingly miss from your
former work; with some of the grime, that is, and some of the emphasis
of skeleton there is in nature. I pray you to take grime in a good
sense; it need not be ignoble: dirt may have dignity; in nature it
usually has; and your prison was imposing.

And now to the main point: why do we not see you? Do not fail us. Make
an alarming sacrifice, and let us see "Henry James's chair" properly
occupied. I never sit in it myself (though it was my grandfather's); it
has been consecrated to guests by your approval, and now stands at my
elbow gaping. We have a new room, too, to introduce to you--our last
baby, the drawing-room; it never cries, and has cut its teeth. Likewise,
there is a cat now. It promises to be a monster of laziness and
self-sufficiency.

Pray see, in the November Time (a dread name for a magazine of light
reading), a very clever fellow, W. Archer, stating his views of me; the
rosy-gilled "athletico-aesthete"; and warning me, in a fatherly manner,
that a rheumatic fever would try my philosophy (as indeed it would), and
that my gospel would not do for "those who are shut out from the
exercise of any manly virtue save renunciation." To those who know that
rickety and cloistered spectre, the real R. L. S., the paper, besides
being clever in itself, presents rare elements of sport. The critical
parts are in particular very bright and neat, and often excellently
true. Get it by all manner of means.

I hear on all sides I am to be attacked as an immoral writer; this is
painful. Have I at last got, like you, to the pitch of being attacked?
'Tis the consecration I lack--and could do without. Not that Archer's
paper is an attack, or what either