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Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson — Volume 2 by Robert Louis Stevenson
page 32 of 426 (07%)
after all; 'tis so quaint and pretty and clever and simple and
French, and gives such a good sight of Fleeming: the plum of the
book, I think.

You misunderstood me in one point: I always hoped to found such a
society; that was the outside of my dream, and would mean entire
success. BUT - I cannot play Peter the Hermit. In these days of
the Fleet Street journalist, I cannot send out better men than
myself, with wives or mothers just as good as mine, and sisters (I
may at least say) better, to a danger and a long-drawn dreariness
that I do not share. My wife says it's cowardice; what brave men
are the leader-writers! Call it cowardice; it is mine. Mind you,
I may end by trying to do it by the pen only: I shall not love
myself if I do; and is it ever a good thing to do a thing for which
you despise yourself? - even in the doing? And if the thing you do
is to call upon others to do the thing you neglect? I have never
dared to say what I feel about men's lives, because my own was in
the wrong: shall I dare to send them to death? The physician must
heal himself; he must honestly TRY the path he recommends: if he
does not even try, should he not be silent?

I thank you very heartily for your letter, and for the seriousness
you brought to it. You know, I think when a serious thing is your
own, you keep a saner man by laughing at it and yourself as you go.
So I do not write possibly with all the really somewhat sickened
gravity I feel. And indeed, what with the book, and this business
to which I referred, and Ireland, I am scarcely in an enviable
state. Well, I ought to be glad, after ten years of the worst
training on earth - valetudinarianism - that I can still be
troubled by a duty. You shall hear more in time; so far, I am at
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