continue to see, the pen goes
from time to time, though neither fast enough nor constantly enough to
please me.

My wife is at Bath with my father and mother, and the interval of
widowery explains my writing. Another person writing for you when you
have done work is a great enemy to correspondence. To-day I feel out of
health, and shan't work; and hence this so much over-due reply.

I was re-reading some of your _South Sea Idyls_ the other day: some of
the chapters are very good indeed; some pages as good as they can be.

How does your class get along? If you like to touch on _Otto_, any day
in a by-hour, you may tell them--as the author's last dying
confession--that it is a strange example of the difficulty of being
ideal in an age of realism; that the unpleasant giddy-mindedness, which
spoils the book and often gives it a wanton air of unreality and
juggling with air-bells, comes from unsteadiness of key; from the too
great realism of some chapters and passages--some of which I have now
spotted, others I dare say I shall never spot--which disprepares the
imagination for the cast of the remainder.

Any story can be made _true_ in its own key; any story can be made
_false_ by the choice of a wrong key of detail or style: _Otto_ is made
to reel like a drunken--I was going to say man, but let us substitute
cipher--by the variations of the key. Have you observed that the famous
problem of realism and idealism is one purely of detail? Have you seen
my _Note on Realism_ in Cassell's Magazine of Art; and _Elements of
Style_ in the Contemporary; and _Romance_ and _Humble Apology_ in
Longman's? They are all in your line of business; let me know what you
have not seen and I'll send 'em.

I am glad I brought the old house up to you. It was a pleasant old spot,
and I remember you there, though still more dearly in your own strange
den upon a hill in San Francisco; and one of the most San Francisco-y
parts of San Francisco.

Good-bye, my dear fellow, and believe me your friend,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

Concerning the payment which Mr. Gosse had procured him from an
American magazine for the set of verses addressed to Mr. Low (see
above, p. 172).

[_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Feb. 17, 1886._]

DEAR GOSSE,--Non, c'est honteux! for a set of shambling lines that don't
know whether they're trochees or what they are, that you or any of the
crafty ones would blush all over if you had