A Few Letters—J. M. Barrie—George Meredith—Advice on
Going to America—A Statue to Washington—Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P.—Robert
Louis Stevenson—Mr Edmund Gosse on the Neo-Scottish School—
My Contemporaries in Fiction—Sir A. Conan Doyle—Mr.
Joseph Hocking—Robert Buchanan—Mr. E. Marshall Hall, K.C.

Copy of Letter to David Christie Murray. 15th December
1893.
My Dear Christie Murray,—Your book (my book) followed me up
here, where I had to come unexpectedly two days after our
dinner. It is delightful. I accept your challenge, and do
hereby undertake to talk to you at tremendous length the
first time we meet again about the making of another
novelist. Not that he, worse luck, has had anything like
such varied experiences. I hope you will go on with the
second volume you promise. You will find a capital chapter
for it in the Pall Mall Magazine Xmas number. I thought
that dog worth all the Xmas tales I have read this year. Its
death is almost unbearably pathetic, and so comic all the
time. The illustrator rose to his chances in one picture,
when Punch struts past the bull-dog. The one thing I wonder
at is what you say of acting, I would argue that everyone
with imagination must find delight in the stage, but I can't
understand the author of Aunt Rachel having a desire, or
rather a passion, to exchange a greater art for a smaller
one. It is not smaller, you hold. But surely it is, as the
pianist is less than the composer. I need not tell you again
what it is to me to have the dedication. The whole
arrangement of this house has been altered to give the book
its place of honour, the positions of hundreds of books has
been altered, the bringing of a small bookcase into a
different room led to the alteration of heavy furniture in
the other room, a sofa is where was a cupboard, flowerpots
have been brought inside, and red curtains have given place
to green. This is a fact.

I hope you are flourishing, and with best regards to Mrs.
Murray,—Yours ever,

(Sgd.) J. M. Barrie.

Letter of Advice sent by a Distinguished American to David
Christie Murray prior to a visit to America on a Lecturing
Tour.

Friday, 7th September.

My Dear Old Friend,—I am sending.... some letters for you
by this same post. They are to three splendid fellows, full
of power to help you, and certain to be eager to use it

If I could have seen you personally, I had it in mind to say
many things which don't lend themselves to pen and ink. Some
of them perhaps can be put down with a minimum of
awkwardness.

You are primarily, in the American mind, an eminent
novelist. They have read you (in printed cheap editions) by
the score of thousands. They think of you as a cousin of
Dickens, Thackeray, Reade and the rest. Now that is your
rÔle marked out for you by God. Stick to it, wear reasonably
conventional clothes, cultivate an intelligently conventional
aspect, and do not for your life say anything about the
stage or the latter-day hard luck you have had, or anything
else which will not commend itself to a popular sense which,
although artistic on one side is implacably Philistine on
the other. They have a tremendous regard for Reade. Carry
yourself as if you were the undoubted inheritor of the Reade
traditions. Think how Reade himself would have borne
himself—then strike out from it all the bumptious and
aggressive parts—and be the rest.

Two things destroy a man in America. One is the
suggestion of personal eccentricity, Bohemianism, etc. The
other is a disposition for criticism and controversy on
their own subjects. The latter is the more dangerous of the
two. It is a people devoured by the newspaper habit, like
the Irish or the old Greeks of the Areopagus. They ask every
few minutes “What is the news?” Thousands of smart young men
are hustling about fifteen hours a day to answer that
ceaseless question. If it occurs to any one of them anywhere
to say: “Well, here is a cocky Englishman who is over here
to make some money, but who is unable to resist the
temptation to harangue us on our shortcomings”—just that
minute you are damned—irrevocably damned. That one sniff of
blood will suffice. The whole pack will be on your shoulders
within twenty-four hours.

Yet, don't mistake me. These same newspaper men are nice
fellows, kindly to a fault, if you avoid rubbing them the
wrong way. Swear to yourself that you will be genial and
affable with every human soul you meet, and that you will
never be betrayed into an argument—on any American
subject, mind—with any living being, from the bartender
up. It is not so hard a rule, old man, and observing it
vehemently day and night will make all the wide difference
to you between miserable failure and a fine and substantial
success.

You will meet two classes of men—scholarly men like my
friends, who will take you to clubs where writers, thinkers,
students, etc., congregate, and less scholarly but not
less likeable ordinary newspaper men. Live your life as
much as possible among these two classes. You will catch
swiftly enough the shades of difference between the two. It
is the difference between, say, the Athenaeum and the
Savage. Only there is next to no caste spirit, and points of
similarity or even community crop up there between the two
which couldn't be here. The golden key to both is unvarying
amiability.

You are better calculated than most men I know to charm and
captivate them all. They will delight in your conversation
and in you, and they will see to it that you have a perfect
time and coin money—if only you lay yourself out to be
uniformly nice to them, and watch carefully to see that you
seem to be doing about as they do.

A good many minor people—hotel baggagemen, clerks, etc.,
tram conductors, policemen and the like—will seem to you
to be monstrously rude and unobliging. You will be right;
they are undoubtedly God-damned uncivil brutes. That is one
of the unhappy conditions of our life there. Don't be
tempted even to wrangle with them or talk back to them. Pass
on, and keep still. If you try to do anything else, the
upshot will be your appearing somewhere in print as a damned
Britisher for whom American ways are not good enough. The
whole country is one vast sounding board, and it vibrates
with perilous susceptibility in response to an English
accent.

Don't mention the word Ireland. Perhaps that is most
important of all. You will hear lots of Americans—good men,
too—damning the Irish. Listen to this, and say nothing,
unless something amiable about the Irish occurs to you.
Because here is a mysterious paradox. The America always
damns the Irishman. It is his foible. But if an Englishman
joins in, instantly every American within earshot hates him
for it. I plead with you to avoid that pitfall. The bottom
of it is paved with the bones of your compatriots.

So I could go on indefinitely, but I have already taxed your
patience. Briefly then—

1. Express no opinions on American subjects, political,
social or racial-save in praise.

2. Be polite and ready to talk affably wit everybody;
men who speak to you in a railway train, or the bar
tender or the bootblack, quite as much as the rest.

3. Avoid like poison eccentricities of dress and all
contact with actors an theatrical people.

4. Rebuff no interviewer. Be invariably affable
and reserved with him talk literature to him, and
reminicences of Reade, Matthew Arnold, Dean Stanley,
anybody you like especially mention things in America
which you like, and shut-up about what you don't like.

5. Keep appointments to a minute. No one else
will, but they respect immensely in others.

6. Bear in mind always that people think of you as a
big novelist, and will be only too glad to treat you at
your own valuation, gently exhibited or rather
suggested by courteous reserve. There is nothing they
won't do for you, if only you impress them as liking
them, and appreciating their kindliness, and being
studious of their sensibilities.

Take this all, my dear Christie, as from one who sincerely
wishes you well, and believes that you can and should do
well. It lies absolutely in your own hands to make a fine
personal and professional reputation in America, and to come
back with a solid bank account and a good, clear, fresh
start. You have lots of years before you; lots of important
work; lots of honest happiness. You were started once fair
on the road to the top of the tree. Here is the chance to
get back again on to that road. I am so fearfully anxious
that you should not miss it, that I take large liberties in
talking to you as I find I have done. Write to me at
Attridge's Hotel, Schull, County Cork, where I shall be from
14th to 20th September, to tell me that you are not
offended. Or if you are offended, still write to me. And I
should prize highly the chance of hearing from you from the
other side, after you have started in.

And so God be with you.