  Vailima, Samoa, December 3rd, 1893. DEAR JOHNNIE,—Well, I must say you seem to be a tremendous fellow! Before I was eight I used to write stories—or dictate them at least—and I had produced an excellent history of Moses, for which I got £1 from an uncle; but I had never gone the length of a play, so you have beaten me fairly on my own ground. I hope you may continue to do so, and thanking you heartily for your nice letter, I shall beg you to believe me yours truly, Robert Louis Stevenson. to Russell P—NVailima, Samoa, December 3rd, 1893. DEAR RUSSELL,—I have to thank you very much for your capital letter, which came to hand here in Samoa Robert Louis Stevenson. to Alison CunninghamVailima, December 5, 1893. MY DEAREST CUMMY,—This goes to you with a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. The Happy New Year anyway, for I think it should reach you about Noor’s Day. I dare say it may be cold and frosty. Do you remember when you used to take me out of bed in the early morning, carry me to the back windows, show me the hills of Fife, and quote to me. ‘A’ the hills are covered wi’ snaw, There is not much chance of that here! I wonder how my mother is going to stand the winter. If she can, it will be a very good thing for her. We are in that part of the year which I like the best—the Rainy or Hurricane Season. ‘When it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is horrid,’ and our fine days are certainly fine like heaven; such a blue of the sea, such green of the trees, and such crimson of the hibiscus flowers, you never saw; and the air as mild and gentle as a baby’s breath, and yet not hot! R. L. S. to Charles Baxter6th December 1893.
No, it seems to have been her brother who had succeeded. MY DEAR CHARLES,—The above is my story, and I wonder if any light can be thrown on it. I prefer the girl’s father dead; and the question is, How in that case could Lieutenant George Murray get his order to ‘apprehend’ and his power to ‘sell’ her in marriage? A good legal note on these points is very ardently desired by me; it will be the corner-stone of my novel. This is for—I am quite wrong to tell you—for you will tell others—and nothing will teach you that all my schemes are in the air, and vanish and reappear again like shapes in the clouds—it is for Heathercat: whereof the first volume will be called The Killing Time, and I believe I have authorities ample for that. But the second volume is to be called (I believe) Darien, and for that I want, I fear, a good deal of truck:— Darien Papers, I hope may do me. Some sort of general history of the Darien affair (if there is a decent one, which I misdoubt), it would also be well to have—the one with most details, if possible. It is singular how obscure to me this decade of Scots history remains, 1690–1700—a deuce of a want of light and grouping to it! However, I believe I shall be mostly out of Scotland in my tale; first in Carolina, next in Darien. I want also—I am the daughter of the horse-leech truly—‘Black’s new large map of Scotland,’ sheets 3, 4, and 5, a 7s. 6d. touch. I believe, if you can get the Caldwell Papers, they had better come also; and if there be any reasonable work—but no, I must call a halt. . . . I fear the song looks doubtful, but I’ll consider of it, and I can promise you some reminiscences which it will amuse me to write, whether or not it will amuse the public to read of them. But it’s an unco business to supply deid-heid coapy.
Vailima, Samoa, December 7th, 1893. MY DEAR BARRIE,—I have received duly the magnum opus, and it really is a magnum opus. I have been very much prevented of late, having carried out thoroughly to my own satisfaction two considerable illnesses, had a birthday, and visited Honolulu, where politics are (if possible) a shade more exasperating than they are with us. I am told that it was just when I was on the point of leaving that I received your superlative epistle about the cricket eleven. In that case it is impossible I should have answered it, which is inconsistent with my own recollection of the fact. What I remember is, that I sat down under your immediate inspiration and wrote an answer in every way worthy. If I didn’t, as it seems proved that I couldn’t, it will never be done now. However, I did the next best thing, I equipped my cousin Graham Balfour with a letter of introduction, and from him, if you know how—for he is rather of the Scottish I have lately been returning to my wallowing in the mire. When I was a child, and indeed until I was nearly a man, I consistently read Covenanting books. Now that I am a grey-beard—or would be, if I could raise the beard—I have returned, and for weeks back have read little else but Wodrow, Walker, Shields, etc. Of course this is with an idea of a novel, but in the course of it I made a very curious discovery. I have been accustomed to hear refined and intelligent critics—those who know so much better what we are than we do ourselves,—trace down my literary descent from all sorts of people, including Addison, of whom I could never read a word. Well, laigh i’ your lug, sir—the clue was found. My style is from the Covenanting writers. Take a particular case—the fondness for rhymes. I don’t know of any English prose-writer who rhymes except by accident, and then a stone had better be tied around his neck and himself cast into the sea. But my Covenanting buckies rhyme all the time—a beautiful example of the unconscious rhyme above referred to. Do you know, and have you really tasted, these delightful works? If not, it should be remedied; there is enough of the Auld Licht in you to be ravished. I suppose you know that success has so far attended my banners—my political banners I mean, and not my literary. In conjunction with the Three Great Powers I have succeeded in getting rid of My President and My Chief-Justice. They’ve gone home, the one to Germany, the other to Souwegia. I hear little echoes of footfalls Whereupon I make you my salute with the firm remark that it is time to be done with trifling and give us a great book, and my ladies fall into line with me to pay you a most respectful courtesy, and we all join in the cry, ‘Come to Vailima!’ My dear sir, your soul’s health is in it—you will never do the great book, you will never cease to work in L., etc., till you come to Vailima. Robert Louis Stevenson. to R. Le GallienneVailima, Samoa, December 28th, 1893. DEAR MR. LE GALLIENNE,—I have received some time ago, through our friend Miss Taylor, a book of yours. But that was by no means my first introduction to your name. The same book had stood already on my shelves; I had read articles of yours in the Academy; and by a piece of constructive criticism (which I trust was sound) had arrived at the conclusion that you were ‘Log-roller.’ Since then I have seen your beautiful verses to your wife. You are to conceive me, then, as only too ready to make the acquaintance of a man who loved good literature and could make it. I had to thank you, besides, for a triumphant exposure of a paradox of my own: the literary-prostitute disappeared from view at a phrase of yours—‘The essence is not in the pleasure but the sale.’ True: you are right, I was wrong; the author is not the whore, but the libertine; and yet I shall let the passage stand. It is an error, but it illustrated the truth for which I was contending, that literature—painting—all art, are no other than pleasures, which we turn into trades. And more than all this, I had, and I have to thank you for the intimate loyalty you have shown to myself; for the eager welcome you give to what is good—for the courtly tenderness with which you touch on my defects. You are still young, and you may live to do much. The little, artificial popularity of style in England tends, I think, to die out; the British pig returns to his true love, the love of the styleless, of the shapeless, of the slapdash and the disorderly. There is trouble coming, I think; and you may have to hold the fort for us in evil days. Lastly, let me apologise for the crucifixion that I am inflicting on you (bien À contre-coeur) by my bad writing. I was once the best of writers; landladies, puzzled as to my ‘trade,’ used to have their honest bosoms set at rest by a sight of a page of manuscript.—‘Ah,’ they would say, ‘no wonder they pay you for that’;—and when I sent it in to the printers, it was given to the boys! I was about thirty-nine, I think, when I had a turn of scrivener’s palsy; my hand got worse; and for the first time, I received clean proofs. But it has gone beyond that now, I know I am like my old friend James Payn, a terror to correspondents; and you would not believe the care with which this has been written.—Believe me to be, very sincerely yours, Robert Louis Stevenson. to Mrs. A. BakerDecember 1893. DEAR MADAM,—There is no trouble, and I wish I could help instead. As it is, I fear I am only going to put you I am writing to them by this mail to send you Catriona. You say, dear madam, you are good enough to say, it is ‘a keen pleasure’ to you to bring my book within the reach of the blind. Conceive then what it is to me! and believe me, sincerely yours, Robert Louis Stevenson. I was a barren tree before, A moment, lend your hand, I bring R. L. S. to Henry JamesApia, December 1893. MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,—The mail has come upon me like an armed man three days earlier than was expected; and the Lord help me! It is impossible I should answer anybody the way they should be. Your jubilation over Catriona did me good, and still more the subtlety and truth of your remark on the starving of the visual sense 1st. War to the adjective. 2nd. Death to the optic nerve. Admitted we live in an age of the optic nerve in literature. For how many centuries did literature get along without a sign of it? However, I’ll consider your letter. How exquisite is your character of the critic in Essays in London! I doubt if you have done any single thing so satisfying as a piece of style and of insight.—Yours ever, R. L. S. to Charles Baxter1st January ’94. MY DEAR CHARLES,—I am delighted with your idea, and first, I will here give an amended plan and afterwards give you a note of some of the difficulties. [Plan of the Edinburgh edition—14 vols.] . . . It may be a question whether my Times letters might not be appended to the ‘Footnote’ with a note of the dates of discharge of Cedercrantz and Pilsach. I am particularly pleased with this idea of yours, because I am come to a dead stop. I never can remember how bad I have been before, but at any rate I am bad enough just now, I mean as to literature; in health I am well and R. L. S. to H. B. BaildonVailima, January 15th, 1894. MY DEAR BAILDON,—Last mail brought your book and its Dedication. ‘Frederick Street and the gardens, and the short-lived Jack o’ Lantern,’ are again with me—and the note of the east wind, and Froebel’s voice, and the smell of soup in Thomson’s stair. Truly, you had no need to put yourself under the protection of any other saint, were that saint our Tamate himself! Yourself were enough, and yourself coming with so rich a sheaf. For what is this that you say about the Muses? They have certainly never better inspired you than in ‘Jael and And this reminds me you have a bad habit which is to be comminated in my theory of letters. Same page, two lines lower: ‘But the vulture’s track’ is surely as fine to the ear as ‘But vulture’s track,’ and this latter version has a dreadful baldness. The reader goes on with a sense of impoverishment, of unnecessary sacrifice; he has been robbed by footpads, and goes scouting for his lost article! Again, in the second Epode, these fine verses would surely sound much finer if they began, ‘As a hardy climber who has set his heart,’ than with the jejune ‘As hardy climber.’ I do not know why you permit yourself this license with grammar; you show, in so many pages, that you are superior to the paltry sense of rhythm which usually dictates it—as though some poetaster had been suffered to correct the poet’s text. By the way, I confess to a heartfelt weakness for Auriculas.—Believe me the very grateful and characteristic pick-thank, but still sincere and affectionate, Robert Louis Stevenson. to W. H. Low.Vailima, January 15th, 1894. MY DEAR LOW,—. . . Pray you, stoop your proud head, and sell yourself to some Jew magazine, and make the visit out. I assure you, this is the spot for a sculptor or painter. This, and no other—I don’t say to stay there, but to come once and get the living colour into them. I am used to it; I do not notice it; rather prefer my grey, freezing recollections of Scotland; but there it is, and every morning is a thing to give thanks for, and every night another—bar when it rains, of course. About The Wrecker—rather late days, and I still suspect I am amazed at the effect which this Chicago exhibition has produced upon you and others. It set Mrs. Fairchild literally mad—to judge by her letters. And I wish I had seen anything so influential. I suppose there was an aura, a halo, some sort of effulgency about the place; for here I find you louder than the rest. Well, it may be there is a time coming; and I wonder, when it comes, whether it will be a time of little, exclusive, one-eyed rascals like you and me, or parties of the old stamp who can paint and fight, and write and keep books of double entry, and sculp, and scalp. It might be. You have a This is degenerating into mere twaddle. So please remember us all most kindly to Mrs. Low, and believe me ever yours, Robert Louis Stevenson. P.S.—Were all your privateers voiceless in the war of 1812? Did no one of them write memoirs? I shall have to do my privateer from chic, if you can’t help me. R. L. S. to H. B. BaildonVailima, January 30th, 1894. MY DEAR BAILDON,—‘Call not blessed.’—Yes, if I could die just now, or say in half a year, I should have had a But your letter goes on to congratulate me on having done the one thing I am a little sorry for; a little—not much—for my father himself lived to think that I had been wiser than he. But the cream of the jest is that I have lived to change my mind; and think that he was wiser than I. Had I been an engineer, and literature my amusement, it would have been better perhaps. I pulled it off, of course, I won the wager, and it is pleasant while it lasts; but how long will it last? I don’t know, say the Bells of Old Bow. All of which goes to show that nobody is quite sane in judging himself. Truly, had I given way and gone in for engineering, I should be dead by now. Well, the gods know best. . . . I hope you got my letter about the Rescue.—Adieu, R. L. S. True for you about the benefit: except by kisses, jests, song, et hoc genus omne, man cannot convey benefit to another. The universal benefactor has been there before him. to J. H. BatesVailima, Samoa, March 25th, 1894. MY DEAR MR. JOE H. BATES,—I shall have the greatest pleasure in acceding to your complimentary request. I shall think it an honour to be associated with your In this world, which (as you justly say) is so full of sorrow and suffering, it will always please me to remember that my name is connected with some efforts after alleviation, nor less so with purposes of innocent recreation which, after all, are the only certain means at our disposal for bettering human life. With kind regards, to yourself, to Mr. L. C. Congdon, to E. M. G. Bates, and to Mr. Edward Hugh Higlee Bates, and the heartiest wishes for the future success of the chapter, believe me, yours cordially, Robert Louis Stevenson. to William ArcherVailima, Samoa, March 27th, 1894. MY DEAR ARCHER,—Many thanks for your Theatrical World. Do you know, it strikes me as being really very good? I have not yet read much of it, but so far as I have looked, there is not a dull and not an empty page in it. Hazlitt, whom you must often have thought of, would have been pleased. Come to think of it, I shall put this book upon the Hazlitt shelf. You have acquired a manner that I can only call august; otherwise, I should have to call it such amazing impudence. The Bauble Shop and Becket are examples of what I mean. But it ‘sets you weel.’ We have just now a curious breath from Europe. A young fellow just beginning letters, and no fool, turned up here with a letter of introduction in the well-known blue ink and decorative hieroglyphs of George Meredith. His name may be known to you. It is Sidney Lysaght. He is staying with us but a day or two, and it is strange to me and not unpleasant to hear all the names, old and new, come up again. But oddly the new are so much more in number. If I revisited the glimpses of the moon on your side of the ocean, I should know comparatively few of them. My amanuensis deserts me—I should have said you, for yours is the loss, my script having lost all bond with humanity. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin: that nobody can read my hand. It is a humiliating circumstance that thus evens us with printers! You must sometimes think it strange—or perhaps it is only I that should so think it—to be following the old My dear Archer, my wife joins me in the best wishes to yourself and Mrs. Archer, not forgetting Tom; and I am yours very cordially, Robert Louis Stevenson. to W. B. YeatsVailima, Samoa, April 14, 1894. DEAR SIR,—Long since when I was a boy I remember the emotions with which I repeated Swinburne’s poems and ballads. Some ten years ago, a similar spell was cast upon me by Meredith’s Love in the Valley; the stanzas beginning ‘When her mother tends her’ haunted me and made me drunk like wine; and I remember waking with them all the echoes of the hills about HyÈres. It may interest you to hear that I have a third time fallen in slavery: this is to your poem called the Lake Isle of Innisfrae. It is so quaint and airy, simple, artful, and eloquent to the heart—but I seek words in vain. Enough that ‘always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds on the shore,’ and am, yours gratefully, Robert Louis Stevenson. to George MeredithVailima, Samoa, April 17th, 1894. MY DEAR MEREDITH,—Many good things have the gods sent to me of late. First of all there was a letter from you by the kind hand of Mariette, if she is not too great a lady to be remembered in such a style; and then there came one Lysaght with a charming note of introduction He will have told you doubtless more of my news than I could tell you myself; he has your European perspective, a thing long lost to me. I heard with a great deal of interest the news of Box Hill. And so I understand it is to be enclosed! Allow me to remark, that seems a far more barbaric trait of manners than the most barbarous of ours. We content ourselves with cutting off an occasional head. I hear we may soon expect the Amazing Marriage. You know how long, and with how much curiosity, I have looked forward to the book. Now, in so far as you have adhered to your intention, Gower Woodsere will be a family portrait, age twenty-five, of the highly respectable and slightly influential and fairly aged Tusitala. You have not known that gentleman; console yourself, he is not worth knowing. At the same time, my dear Meredith, he is very sincerely yours—for what he is worth, for the memories of old times, and in the expectation of many pleasures still to come. I suppose we shall never see each other again; flitting youths of the Lysaght species may occasionally cover these unconscionable leagues and bear greetings to and fro. But we ourselves must be content to converse on an occasional sheet of notepaper, and I shall never see whether you have grown older, and you shall never deplore that Gower Woodsere should have declined into the pantaloon Tusitala. It is perhaps better Robert Louis Stevenson. P.S.—My wife joins me in the kindest messages to yourself and Mariette. to Charles Baxter[Vailima], April 17, ’94. MY DEAR CHARLES,—St. Ives is now well on its way into the second volume. There remains no mortal doubt that it will reach the three volume standard. I am very anxious that you should send me— 1st. Tom and Jerry, a cheap edition. 2nd. The book by Ashton—the Dawn of the Century, I think it was called—which Colvin sent me, and which has miscarried, and 3rd. If it is possible, a file of the Edinburgh Courant for the years 1811, 1812, 1813, or 1814. I should not care for a whole year. If it were possible to find me three months, winter months by preference, it would do my business not only for St. Ives, but for the Justice-Clerk as well. Suppose this to be impossible, perhaps I could get the loan of it from somebody; or perhaps it would be possible to have some one read a file for me and make notes. This would be extremely bad, as unhappily one man’s food is another man’s poison, and the reader would probably leave out everything I should choose. But if you are reduced to that, you might mention to the man who is to read for me that balloon ascensions are in the order of the day. 4th. It might be as well to get a book on balloon ascension, particularly in the early part of the century. . . . . . III. At last this book has come from Scribner, and, alas! I have the first six or seven chapters of St. Ives to recast entirely. Who could foresee that they clothed the French prisoners in yellow? But that one fatal fact—and I have had a long letter from Dr. Scott Dalgleish, 25 Mayfield Terrace, asking me to put my name down to the Ballantyne Memorial Committee. I have sent him a pretty sharp answer in favour of cutting down the memorial and giving more to the widow and children. If there is to be any foolery in the way of statues or other trash, please send them a guinea; but if they are going to take my advice and put up a simple tablet with a few heartfelt words, and really devote the bulk of the subscriptions to the wife and family, I will go to the length of twenty pounds, if you will allow me (and if the case of the family be at all urgent), and at least I direct you to send ten pounds. I suppose you had better see Scott Dalgleish himself on the matter. I take the opportunity here to warn you that my head is simply spinning with a multitude of affairs, and I shall probably forget a half of my business at last. R. L. S. to Mrs. SitwellVailima, April 1894. MY DEAR FRIEND,—I have at last got some photographs, and hasten to send you, as you asked, a portrait of Tusitala. He is a strange person; not so lean, say experts, but infinitely battered; mighty active again on the whole; going up and down our break-neck road at all hours of the day and night on horseback; holding meetings with all manner of chiefs; quite a political personage—God save the mark!—in a small way, but at heart very conscious of the inevitable flat failure that awaits every one. I shall never do a better book than Catriona, that is my high-water mark, and the trouble of production increases on me at a great rate—and mighty anxious about how I am to leave my family: an elderly This is very like an epitaph, bar the handwriting, which is anything but monumental, and I dare say I had better stop. Fanny is down at her own cottage planting or deplanting or replanting, I know not which, and she will not be home till dinner, by which time the mail will be all closed, else she would join me in all good messages and remembrances of love. I hope you will congratulate Burne Jones from me on his baronetcy. I cannot make out to be anything but raspingly, harrowingly sad; so I will close, and not affect levity which I cannot feel. Do not altogether forget me; keep a corner of your memory for the exile Louis. to Charles Baxter[Vailima, May 1894.] MY DEAR CHARLES,—My dear fellow, I wish to assure you of the greatness of the pleasure that this Edinburgh Edition gives me. I suppose it was your idea to give it that name. No other would have affected me in the same manner. Do you remember, how many years ago—I would be afraid to hazard a guess—one night when I communicated to you certain intimations of early death and aspirations after fame? I was particularly maudlin; and my remorse the next morning on a review of my folly has written the matter very deeply in my mind; from yours it may easily have fled. If any one at that moment I must tell you, what I just remembered in a flash as I was walking about dictating this letter—there was in the original plan of the Master of Ballantrae a sort of introduction Suppose we do what I have proposed about Fergusson’s monument, I wonder if an inscription like this would look arrogant— This stone originally erected In spacing this inscription I would detach the names of Fergusson and Burns, but leave mine in the text. Or would that look like sham modesty, and is it better to bring out the three Roberts? to R. A. M. StevensonVailima, June 1894. MY DEAR BOB,—I must make out a letter this mail or perish in the attempt. All the same, I am deeply stupid, in bed with a cold, deprived of my amanuensis, and conscious of the wish but not the furnished will. You may be interested to hear how the family inquiries go. It is now quite certain that we are a second-rate lot, and came out of Cunningham or Clydesdale, therefore British folk; so that you are Cymry on both sides, and I Cymry and Pict. We may have fought with King Arthur and known Merlin. The first of the family, Stevenson of Stevenson, So much, though all inchoate, I trouble you with, knowing that you, at least, must take an interest in it. So much is certain of that strange Celtic descent, that the past has an interest for it apparently gratuitous, but fiercely strong. I wish to trace my ancestors a thousand years, if I trace them by gallowses. It is not love, not I. James, a tenant of the Muirs, in Nether-Carsewell, Neilston, married (1665?) Jean Keir. II. Robert (Maltman in Glasgow), died 1733, married 1st; married second, Elizabeth Cumming. [Of Robert and 1st marriage: William (Maltman in Glasgow), of him: Robert, Marion and Elizabeth] III. Robert [of Robert and Elizabeth Cumming] (Maltman in Glasgow), married Margaret Fulton (had a large family). IV. Alan, West India merchant, married Jean Lillie. V. Robert, married Jean Smith. VI. Alan.—Margaret Jones. VII. R. A. M. S. Note.—Between 1730–1766 flourished in Glasgow Alan the Coppersmith, who acts as a kind of a pin to the whole Stevenson system there. He was caution to Robert the Second’s will, and to William’s will, and to the will of a John, another maltman. Enough genealogy. I do not know if you will be able to read my hand. Unhappily, Belle, who is my amanuensis, is out of the way on other affairs, and I have to make the unwelcome effort. (O this is beautiful, I am quite pleased with myself.) Graham has just arrived last night (my mother is coming by the other steamer in three days), and has told me of your meeting, and he said you looked a little older than I did; so that I suppose we keep step fairly on the downward side of the hill. He thought you looked harassed, and I could imagine that too. I sometimes I have so huge a desire to know exactly what you are doing, that I suppose I should tell you what I am doing by way of an example. I have a room now, a part of the twelve-foot verandah sparred in, at the most inaccessible end of the house. Daily I see the sunrise out of my bed, which I still value as a tonic, a perpetual tuning fork, a look of God’s face once in the day. At six my breakfast comes up to me here, and I work till eleven. If I am quite well, I sometimes go out and bathe in the river before lunch, twelve. In the afternoon I generally work again, now alone drafting, now with Belle dictating. Dinner is at six, and I am often in bed by eight. This is supposing me to stay at home. But I must often be away, sometimes all day long, sometimes till twelve, one, or two at night, when you might see me coming home to the sleeping house, sometimes in a trackless darkness, sometimes with a glorious tropic moon, everything drenched with dew—unsaddling and creeping to bed; and you would no longer be surprised that I live out in this country, and not in Bournemouth—in bed. My great recent interruptions have (as you know) come from politics; not much in my line, you will say. But it is impossible to live here and not feel very sorely the consequences of the horrid white mismanagement. I tried standing by and looking on, and it became too much for All this keeps me from my work, and gives me the unpleasant side of the world. When your letters are disbelieved it makes you angry, and that is rot; and I wish I could keep out of it with all my soul. But I have just got into it again, and farewell peace! My work goes along but slowly. I have got to a crossing place, I suppose; the present book, Saint Ives, is nothing; it is in no style in particular, a tissue of adventures, the central character not very well done, no philosophic pith under the yarn; and, in short, if people will read it, that’s all I ask; and if they won’t, damn them! I like For two months past, Fanny, Belle, Austin (her child), and I have been alone; but yesterday, as I mentioned, Graham Balfour arrived, and on Wednesday my mother and Lloyd will make up the party to its full strength. I wish you could drop in for a month or a week, or two hours. That is my chief want. On the whole, it is an unexpectedly pleasant corner I have dropped into for an end of it, which I could scarcely have foreseen from Wilson’s shop, or the Princes Street Gardens, or the Portobello Road. Still, I would like to hear what my alter ego thought of it; and I would sometimes like to have my old maÎtre Ès arts express an opinion on what I do. I put this very tamely, being on the whole a quiet elderly man; but it is a strong passion with me, though intermittent. Now, try to follow my example and tell me something about yourself, Louisa, the Bab, and your work; and kindly send me some specimens of what you’re about. I have only seen one thing by you, about Notre Dame in the Westminster or St. James’s, since I left England, now I suppose six years ago. R. L. Stevenson. to Henry JamesVailima, July 7th, 1894. DEAR HENRY JAMES,—I am going to try and dictate to you a letter or a note, and begin the same without any spark of hope, my mind being entirely in abeyance. This malady is very bitter on the literary man. I have had it now coming on for a month, and it seems to get worse instead of better. If it should prove to be softening of the brain, a melancholy interest will attach to the present document. I heard a great deal about you from my mother and Graham Balfour; the latter declares that you could take a First in any Samoan subject. If that be so, I should like to hear you on the theory of the constitution. Also to consult you on the force of the particles o lo ’o and ua, which are the subject of a dispute among local pundits. You might, if you ever answer this, give me your opinion on the origin of the Samoan race, just to complete the favour. They both say that you are looking well, and I suppose I may conclude from that that you are feeling passably. I wish I was. Do not suppose from this that I am ill in body; it is the numskull that I complain of. And when that is wrong, as you must be very keenly aware, you begin every day with a smarting disappointment, which is not good for the temper. I am in one of the humours when a man wonders how any one can be such an ass as to embrace the profession of letters, and not get apprenticed We have at present in port the model warship of Great Britain. She is called the CuraÇoa, and has the nicest set of officers and men conceivable. They, the officers, are all very intimate with us, and the front verandah is known as the CuraÇoa Club, and the road up to Vailima is known as the CuraÇoa Track. It was rather a surprise to me; many naval officers have I known, and somehow had not learned to think entirely well of them, and perhaps sometimes ask myself a little uneasily how that kind of men could do great actions? and behold! the answer comes to me, and I see a ship that I would guarantee to go anywhere it was possible for men to go, and accomplish anything it was permitted man to attempt. I had a cruise on board of her not long ago to Manu’a, and was delighted. The goodwill of all on board; the grim playfulness of — I tasted on that occasion what it is to be great. My name was called next after the captain’s, and several chiefs (a thing quite new to me, and not at all Samoan practice) drank to me by name. And now, if you are not sick of the CuraÇoa and Manu’a, By the by, you sent me long ago a work by Anatole France, which I confess I did not taste. Since then I have made the acquaintance of the AbbÉ Coignard, and have become a faithful adorer. I don’t think a better book was ever written. And I have no idea what I have said, and I have no idea what I ought to have said, and I am a total ass, but my heart is in the right place, and I am, my dear Henry James, yours, R. L. S. to Mr. Marcel SchwobVailima, Upolu, Samoa, July 7, 1894. DEAR MR. MARCEL SCHWOB,—Thank you for having remembered me in my exile. I have read Mimes twice as a whole; and now, as I write, I am reading it again as it were by accident, and a piece at a time, my eye catching a word and travelling obediently on through the whole number. It is a graceful book, essentially graceful, with its haunting agreeable melancholy, its pleasing savour of antiquity. At the same time, by its merits, it shows itself rather as the promise of something else to come than a thing final in itself. You have yet to give us—and I am expecting it with impatience—something of a larger gait; something daylit, not twilit; something with the colours of life, not the flat tints of a temple illumination; something that shall be said with all the clearnesses and the trivialities of speech, not sung like a semi-articulate lullaby. It will not please yourself as well, when you come to give it us, but it will please others better. It will be more of a whole, more worldly, more nourished, more commonplace—and not so pretty, perhaps not even so beautiful. No man knows better than I that, as we go on in life, we must part from prettiness and the graces. We but attain qualities to lose them; life is a series of Robert Louis Stevenson. to A. St. GaudensVailima, Samoa, July 8, 1894. MY DEAR ST. GAUDENS,—This is to tell you that the medallion has been at last triumphantly transported up the hill and placed over my smoking-room mantelpiece. It is considered by everybody a first-rate but flattering portrait. We have it in a very good light, which brings out the artistic merits of the god-like sculptor to great advantage. As for my own opinion, I believe it to be a speaking likeness, and not flattered at all; possibly a little the reverse. The verses (curse the rhyme) look remarkably well. Please do not longer delay, but send me an account for the expense of the gilt letters. I was sorry indeed that they proved beyond the means of a small farmer.—Yours very sincerely, Robert Louis Stevenson. to Miss Adelaide BoodleVailima, July 14, 1894. MY DEAR ADELAIDE,—. . . So, at last, you are going into mission work? where I think your heart always was. You will like it in a way, but remember it is dreary long. Do you know the story of the American tramp who was offered meals and a day’s wage to chop with the back of an axe on a fallen trunk. ‘Damned if I can go on chopping when I can’t see the chips fly!’ You will never see the chips fly in mission work, never; and be sure you know it beforehand. The work is one long dull disappointment, Now, my dear Adelaide, dismiss from your mind the least idea of fault upon your side; nothing is further from the fact. I cannot forgive you, for I do not know your fault. My own is plain enough, and the name of it is cold-hearted neglect; and you may busy yourself more usefully in trying to forgive me. But ugly as my fault is, you must not suppose it to mean more than it does; it does not mean that we have at all forgotten you, that we have become at all indifferent to the thought of you. See, in my life of Jenkin, a remark of his, very well expressed, on the friendships of men who do not write to each other. I can honestly say that I have not changed to you in any way; though I have behaved thus ill, thus cruelly. Evil is done by want of—well, principally by want of industry. You can imagine what I would say (in a novel) of any one who had behaved as We are all fairly well, though I have been off work and off—as you know very well—letter-writing. Yet I have sometimes more than twenty letters, and sometimes more than thirty, going out each mail. And Fanny has had a most distressing bronchitis for some time, which she is only now beginning to get over. I have just been to see her; she is lying—though she had breakfast an hour ago, about seven—in her big cool, mosquito-proof room, ingloriously asleep. As for me, you see that a doom has come upon me: I cannot make marks with a pen—witness ‘ingloriously’ above; and my amanuensis not appearing so early in the day, for she is then immersed in household affairs, and I can hear her ‘steering the boys’ up and down the verandahs—you must decipher this unhappy letter for yourself and, I fully admit, with everything against you. A letter should be always well written; how much more a letter of apology! Legibility is the politeness of men of letters, as punctuality of kings and beggars. By the punctuality of my replies, and the beauty of my hand-writing, judge what a fine conscience I must have! Now, my dear gamekeeper, I must really draw to a close. For I have much else to write before the mail goes out three days hence. Fanny being asleep, it would not be conscientious to invent a message from her, so you Robert Louis Stevenson. Vailima, Samoa, July 16, 1894. DEAR MRS. BAKER,—I am very much obliged to you for your letter and the enclosure from Mr. Skinner. Mr. Skinner says he ‘thinks Mr. Stevenson must be a very kind man’; he little knows me. But I am very sure of one thing, that you are a very kind woman. I envy you—my amanuensis being called away, I continue in my own hand, or what is left of it—unusually legible, I am thankful to see—I envy you your beautiful choice of an employment. There must be no regrets at least for a day so spent; and when the night falls you need ask no blessing on your work. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these.’—Yours truly, Robert Louis Stevenson. to J. M. BarrieMY DEAR BARRIE,—This is the last effort of an ulcerated conscience. I have been so long owing you a letter, I have heard so much of you, fresh from the press, from my mother and Graham Balfour, that I have to write a letter no later than to-day, or perish in my shame. But the deuce of it is, my dear fellow, that you write such a very good letter that I am ashamed to exhibit myself before my junior (which you are, after all) in the light of the dreary idiot I feel. Understand that there will be nothing funny in the following pages. If I can manage to be rationally coherent, I shall be more than satisfied. In the first place, I have had the extreme satisfaction to be shown that photograph of your mother. It bears evident traces of the hand of an amateur. How is it that amateurs invariably take better photographs than professionals? I must qualify invariably. My own negatives have always represented a province of chaos and old night in which you might dimly perceive fleecy spots of twilight, representing nothing; so that, if I am right in supposing the portrait of your mother to be yours, I must salute you as my superior. Is that your mother’s breakfast? Or is it only afternoon tea? If the first, do let me recommend to Mrs. Barrie to add an egg to her ordinary. Which, if you please, I will ask her to eat to the honour of her son, and I am sure she will live much longer for it, to enjoy his fresh successes. I never in my life saw anything more deliciously characteristic. I declare I can hear her speak. I wonder my mother could resist the temptation of your proposed visit to Kirriemuir, which it was like your kindness to propose. By the way, I was twice in Kirriemuir, I believe in the year ’71, when I was going on a visit to Glenogil. It was Kirriemuir, was it not? I have a distinct recollection of an inn at the end—I think the upper end—of an irregular open place or square, in which I July 29th No, Barrie, ’tis in vain they try to alarm me with their bulletins. No doubt, you’re ill, and unco ill, I believe; but I have been so often in the same case that I know pleurisy and pneumonia are in vain against Scotsmen who can write, (I once could.) You cannot imagine probably how near me this common calamity brings you. Ce que j’ai toussÉ dans ma vie! How often and how long have I been on the rack at night and learned to appreciate that noble passage in the Psalms when somebody or other is said to be more set on something than they ‘who dig for hid treasures—yea, than those who long for the morning’—for all the world, as you have been racked and you have longed. Keep your heart up, and you’ll do. Tell that to your mother, if you are still in any danger or suffering. And by the way, if you are at all like me—and I tell myself you are very like me—be sure there is only one thing good for you, and that is the sea in hot climates. Mount, sir, into ‘a little frigot’ of 5000 tons or so, and steer peremptorily for the tropics; and what if the ancient mariner, who guides your frigot, should startle the silence of the ocean with the cry of land ho!—say, when the day is dawning—and you should see the turquoise mountain tops of Upolu coming hand over fist above the horizon? Mr. Barrie, sir, ’tis then there would be larks! And though I cannot be certain that our climate would suit you (for it does not suit some), I am sure as death the voyage would do you good—would do you Best—and if Samoa didn’t do, you needn’t stay beyond the month, and I should have had another pleasure in my life, which is a serious consideration for me. I take this as the hand of the Lord preparing your way to Vailima—in the desert, certainly—in the desert of Cough and by My dear Barrie, I am a little in the dark about this new work of yours August 5th. This is Sunday, the Lord’s Day. ‘The hour of attack approaches.’ And it is a singular consideration what I Monday, August 6th. Well, sir, I have escaped the dangerous conjunction of the widow’s only son and the Sabbath Day. We had a most enjoyable time, and Lloyd and I were 3 and 4 to arrive; I will not tell here what interval had elapsed between our arrival and the arrival of 1 and 2; the There was racing and chasing in Vailile plantation, Come, my mind is looking up. The above is wholly impromptu.—On oath, Tusitala. August 12, 1894 And here, Mr. Barrie, is news with a vengeance. Mother Hubbard’s dog is well again—what did I tell you? Pleurisy, pneumonia, and all that kind of truck is quite unavailing against a Scotchman who can write—and not only that, but it appears the perfidious dog is married. This incident, so far as I remember, is omitted from the original epic— She went to the graveyard It now remains to inform you that I have taken what we call here ‘German offence’ at not receiving cards, and that the only reparation I will accept is that Mrs. Barrie This letter, about nothing, has already endured too long. I shall just present the family to Mrs. Barrie—Tamaitai, Tamaitai Matua, Teuila, Palema, Loia, and with an extra low bow, Yours, Tusitala. to Dr. BakewellVailima, August 7, 1894. DEAR DR. BAKEWELL,—I am not more than human. I am more human than is wholly convenient, and your anecdote was welcome. What you say about unwilling work, my dear sir, is a consideration always present with me, and yet not easy to give its due weight to. You grow gradually into a certain income; without spending a penny more, with the same sense of restriction as before when you painfully scraped two hundred a year together, you find you have spent, and you cannot well stop spending, a far larger sum; and this expense can only be supported by a certain production. However, I am off work this month, and occupy myself instead in weeding my cacao, paper chases, and the like. I may tell you, my average of work in favourable circumstances is far greater than you suppose: from six o’clock till eleven at latest, R. L. S.
Vailima, Upolu, Samoa [August 11, 1894]. MY DEAR JAMES PAYN,—I hear from Lang that you are unwell, and it reminds me of two circumstances: First, that it is a very long time since you had the exquisite pleasure of hearing from me; and second, that I have been very often unwell myself, and sometimes had to thank you for a grateful anodyne. They are not good, the circumstances, to write an anodyne letter. The hills and my house at less than (boom) a minute’s interval quake with thunder; and though I cannot hear that part of it, shells are falling thick into the fort of Luatuanu’u (boom). It is my friends of the CuraÇoa, the Falke, and the Bussard bombarding (after all these—boom—months) the rebels of Atua. (Boom-boom.) It is most distracting in itself; and the thought of the poor devils in their fort (boom) with their bits of rifles far from pleasant. (Boom-boom.) You can see how quick it goes, and I’ll say no more about Mr. Bow-wow, only you must understand the perpetual accompaniment of this discomfortable sound, and make allowances for the value of my copy. It is odd, though, I can well remember, when the Franco-Prussian war began, and I was in Eilean Earraid, far enough from the sound of the loudest cannonade, I could hear the shots fired, and I felt the pang in my breast of a man struck. It was sometimes so distressing, so instant, that I lay in the heather on the top of the island, with my face hid, kicking my heels for agony. And now, when I can hear the actual concussion of the air and hills, when I know personally the people who stand exposed to it, I am able to go on tant bien que mal with a letter to James Payn! The blessings of age, though mighty small, are tangible. I have heard a great deal of them since I came into the world, and now that I begin to taste of them—Well! But this is one, that people do get cured of the excess of sensibility; and I had You are to conceive me, then, sitting in my little gallery room, shaken by these continual spasms of cannon, and with my eye more or less singly fixed on the imaginary figure of my dear James Payn. I try to see him in bed; no go. I see him instead jumping up in his room in Waterloo Place (where ex hypothesi he is not), sitting on the table, drawing out a very black briar-root pipe, and beginning to talk to a slim and ill-dressed visitor in a voice that is good to hear and with a smile that is pleasant to see. (After a little more than half an hour, the voice that was ill to hear has ceased, the cannonade is over.) And I am thinking how I can get an answering smile wafted over so many leagues of land and water, and can find no way. I have always been a great visitor of the sick; and one of the sick I visited was W. E. Henley, which did not make very tedious visits, so I’ll not get off much purgatory for them. That was in the Edinburgh Infirmary, the old one, the true one, with Georgius Secundus standing and pointing his toe in a niche of the faÇade; and a mighty fine building it was! And I remember one winter’s afternoon, in that place of misery, that Henley and I chanced to fall in talk about James Payn himself. I am wishing you could have heard that talk! I think that would make you smile. We had mixed you up with John Payne, for one thing, and stood amazed at your extraordinary, even painful, versatility; and for another, we found ourselves each students so well prepared for examinations on the novels of the real Mackay. Perhaps, after all, this is worth something in life—to have given so much pleasure to a pair so different in every way as were Henley and I, and to be talked of with so much interest by two such (beg pardon) clever lads! The cheerful Lang has neglected to tell me what is the matter with you; so, I’m sorry to say, I am cut off from all the customary consolations. I can’t say, ‘Think how By the by, did you ever play piquet? I have fallen a victim to this debilitating game. It is supposed to be scientific; God save the mark, what self-deceivers men are! It is distinctly less so than cribbage. But how fascinating! There is such material opulence about it, such vast ambitions may be realised—and are not; it may be called the Monte Cristo of games. And the thrill with which you take five cards partakes of the nature of lust—and you draw four sevens and a nine, and the seven and nine of a suit that you discarded, and O! but the world is a desert! You may see traces of discouragement in my letter: all due to piquet! There has been a disastrous turn of the luck against me; a month or two ago I was two thousand ahead; now, and for a week back, I have been anything from four thousand eight hundred to five thousand two hundred astern. If I have a sixiÈme, my beast of a partner has a septiÈme; and if I have three aces, three kings, three queens, and three knaves (excuse the slight exaggeration), the devil holds quatorze of tens!—I remain, my dear James Payn, your sincere and obliged friend—old friend let me say, Robert Louis Stevenson.
Vailima, Samoa, September 9, 1894. DEAR MISS MIDDLETON,—Your letter has been like the drawing up of a curtain. Of course I remember you very well, and the Skye terrier to which you refer—a heavy, dull, fatted, graceless creature he grew up to be—was my own particular pet. It may amuse you, perhaps, as much as ‘The Inn’ amused me, if I tell you what made this dog particularly mine. My father was the natural god of all the dogs in our house, and poor Jura took to him of course. Jura was stolen, and kept in prison somewhere for more than a week, as I remember. When he came back Smeoroch had come and taken my father’s heart from him. He took his stand like a man, and positively never spoke to my father again from that day until the day of his death. It was the only sign of character he ever showed. I took him up to my room and to be my dog in consequence, partly because I was sorry for him, and partly because I admired his dignity in misfortune. With best regards and thanks for having reminded me of so many pleasant days, old acquaintances, dead friends, and—what is perhaps as pathetic as any of them—dead dogs, I remain, yours truly, Robert Louis Stevenson. to A. Conan DoyleVailima, Samoa, September 9, 1894. MY DEAR CONAN DOYLE,—If you found anything to entertain you in my Treasure Island article, it may amuse Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Baxter[Vailima, September 1894.] MY DEAR CHARLES,—. . . Well, there is no more Edmund Baxter now; and I think I may say I know how you feel. He was one of the best, the kindest, and the most genial men I ever knew. I shall always remember his brisk, cordial ways and the essential goodness which he showed me whenever we met with gratitude. And the always is such a little while now! He is another of the landmarks gone; when it comes to my own turn to R. L. S. to R. A. M. Stevenson[Vailima, September 1894.] DEAR BOB,—You are in error about the Picts. They were a Gaelic race, spoke a Celtic tongue, and we have no evidence that I know of that they were blacker than other Celts. The Balfours, I take it, were plainly Celts; their name shows it—the ‘cold croft,’ it means; so does their country. Where the black Scotch come from nobody knows; but I recognise with you the fact that the whole of Britain is rapidly and progressively becoming more pigmented; already in one man’s life I can decidedly I remember very well your attitude to life, this conventional surface of it. You had none of that curiosity for the social stage directions, the trivial ficelles of the business; it is simian, but that is how the wild youth of man is captured; you wouldn’t imitate, hence you kept free—a wild dog, outside the kennel—and came dam’ near starving for your pains. The key to the business is of course the belly; difficult as it is to keep that in view in the zone of three miraculous meals a day in which we were brought up. Civilisation has become reflex with us; you might think that hunger was the name of the best sauce; but hunger to the cold solitary under a bush of a rainy night is the name of something quite different. I defend civilisation for the thing it is, for the thing it has come to be, the standpoint of a real old Tory. My ideal would be the Female Clan. But how can you turn these crowding dumb multitudes back? They don’t do anything because; they do things, write able articles, stitch shoes, dig, from the purely simian impulse. Go and reason with monkeys! No, I am right about Jean Lillie. Jean Lillie, our double great-grandmother, the daughter of David Lillie, sometime Deacon of the Wrights, married, first, Alan Stevenson, who died May 26, 1774, ‘at Santt Kittes of a fiver,’ by whom she had Robert Stevenson, born 8th June 1772; and, second, in May or June 1787, Thomas Smith, a widower, and already the father of our grandmother. This improbable double connection always tends to confuse a student of the family, Thomas Smith being doubly our great-grandfather. Get the Anglo-Saxon heresy out of your head; they superimposed their language, they scarce modified the race; only in Berwickshire and Roxburgh have they very largely affected the place names. The Scandinavians did much more to Scotland than the Angles. The Saxons didn’t come. Enough of this sham antiquarianism. Yes, it is in the matter of the book, But no doubt there is something great in the half-success that has attended the effort of turning into an emotional religion, Bald Conduct, without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious, and constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not constitutive, but dear! it’s dreary! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the cast-iron ‘gentleman’ and duty formula, with as little fervour and poetry as possible; stoical and short. . . . There is a new something or other in the wind, which exercises me hugely: anarchy,—I mean, anarchism. People who (for pity’s sake) commit dastardly murders very basely, die like saints, and leave beautiful letters behind ’em (did you see Vaillant to his daughter? it was the New Testament over again); people whose conduct is inexplicable to me, and yet their spiritual life higher than that of most. This is just what the early Christians must have seemed to the Romans. Is this, then, a new drive R. L. S. to Sir Herbert MaxwellVailima, Samoa, September 10, 1894. DEAR SIR HERBERT MAXWELL,—I am emboldened by reading your very interesting Rhind Lectures to put to you a question: What is my name, Stevenson? I find it in the forms Stevinetoun, Stevensoune, Stevensonne, Stenesone, Stewinsoune, M’Stein, and MacStephane. My family, and (as far as I can gather) the majority of the inglorious clan, hailed from the borders of Cunningham and Renfrew, and the upper waters of the Clyde. In the Barony of Bothwell was the seat of the laird Stevenson of Stevenson; but, as of course you know, there is a parish in Cunningham and places in Peebles and Haddington bearing the same name. If you can at all help me, you will render me a real service which I wish I could think of some manner to repay.—Believe me, yours truly, Robert Louis Stevenson. P.S.—I should have added that I have perfect evidence before me that (for some obscure reason) Stevenson was a favourite alias with the M‘Gregors.
[Vailima], October 8th 1894. MY DEAR CUMMY,—So I hear you are ailing? Think shame to yourself! So you think there is nothing better to be done with time than that? and be sure we can all do much ourselves to decide whether we are to be ill or well! like a man on the gymnastic bars. We are all pretty well. As for me, there is nothing the matter with me in the world, beyond the disgusting circumstance that I am not so young as once I was. Lloyd has a gymnastic machine, and practises upon it every morning for an hour: he is beginning to be a kind of young Samson. Austin grows fat and brown, and gets on not so ill with his lessons, and my mother is in great price. We are having knock-me-down weather for heat; I never remember it so hot before, and I fancy it means we are to have a hurricane again this year, I think; since we came here, we have not had a single gale of wind! The Pacific is but a child to the North Sea; but when she does get excited, and gets up and girds herself, she can do something good. We have had a very interesting business here. I helped the chiefs who were in prison; and when they were set free, what should they do but offer to make a part of my road for me out of gratitude? Well, I was ashamed to refuse, and the trumps dug my road for me, and put up this inscription on a board:— ‘Considering the great love of His Excellency Tusitala in his loving care of us in our tribulation in the prison we have made this great gift; it shall never be muddy, it shall go on for ever, this road that we have dug!’ We had a great feast when it was done, and I read them a kind of lecture, which I dare say Auntie will have, and can let you see. Weel, guid bye to ye, and joy be wi’ ye! I Robert Louis Stevenson. to James PaynVailima, Samoa, Nov. 4, 1894. MY DEAR JAMES PAYN,—I am asked to relate to you a little incident of domestic life at Vailima. I had read your Gleams of Memory, No. 1; it then went to my wife, to Osbourne, to the cousin that is within my gates, and to my respected amanuensis, Mrs. Strong. Sunday approached. In the course of the afternoon I was attracted to the great ’all—the winders is by Vanderputty, which upon entering I beheld a memorable scene. The floor was bestrewn with the forms of midshipmen from the CuraÇoa—‘boldly say a wilderness of gunroom’—and in the midst of this sat Mrs. Strong throned on the sofa and reading aloud Gleams of Memory. They had just come the length of your immortal definition of boyhood in the concrete, and I had the pleasure to see the whole party dissolve under its influence with inextinguishable laughter. I thought this was not half bad for arthritic gout! Depend upon it, sir, when I go into the arthritic gout business, I shall be done with literature, or at least with the funny business. It is quite true I have my battlefields behind me. I have done perhaps as much work as anybody else under the most deplorable conditions. But two things fall to be noticed: In the first place, I never was in actual pain; and in the second, I was never funny. I’ll tell you the worst day that I remember. I had a hÆmorrhage, and was not allowed to speak; then, induced by the devil, or an errant doctor, I was led to partake of that bowl which neither cheers nor inebriates—the castor-oil bowl. Now, when castor-oil goes right, it is one thing; but when it goes wrong, it is another. And it went wrong with me that day. R. L. S. to Lieutenant EelesVailima, Samoa, November 24, 1894. MY DEAR EELES,—The hand, as you will perceive (and also the spelling!), is Teuila’s, but the scrannel voice is Hoskyn is staying with us. It is raining dismally. The CuraÇoa track is hardly passable, but it must be trod to-morrow by the degenerate feet of their successor the Wallaroos. I think it a very good account of these last that we don’t think them either deformed or habitual criminals—they seem to be a kindly lot. The doctor will give you all the gossip. I have preferred in this letter to stick to the strictly solid and necessary. With kind messages from all in the house to all in the wardroom, all in the gunroom, and (may we dare to breathe it) to him who walks abaft, believe me, my dear Eeles, yours ever, R. L. Stevenson.
Vailima, Samoa, December 1, 1894. DEAR SIR HERBERT,—Thank you very much for your long and kind letter. I shall certainly take your advice and call my cousin, the Lyon King, into council. It is certainly a very interesting subject, though I don’t suppose it can possibly lead to anything, this connection between the Stevensons and M’Gregors. Alas! your invitation is to me a mere derision. My chances of visiting Heaven are about as valid as my chances of visiting Monreith. Though I should like well to see you, shrunken into a cottage, a literary Lord of Ravenscraig. I suppose it is the inevitable doom of all those who dabble in Scotch soil; but really your fate is the more blessed. I cannot conceive anything more grateful to me, or more amusing or more picturesque, than to live in a cottage outside your own park-walls.—With renewed thanks, believe me, dear Sir Herbert, yours very truly, Robert Louis Stevenson. to Andrew LangVailima, Samoa, December 1, 1894. MY DEAR LANG,—For the portrait of Braxfield, much thanks! It is engraved from the same Raeburn portrait that I saw in ’76 or ’77 with so extreme a gusto that I have ever since been Braxfield’s humble servant, and am now trying, as you know, to stick him into a novel. Alas! one might as well try to stick in Napoleon. The picture shall be framed and hung up in my study. Not only as a memento of you, but as a perpetual encouragement to do better with his Lordship. I have not yet received the R. L. Stevenson. to Edmund GosseVailima, Samoa, December 1, 1894. I AM afraid, MY DEAR WEG, that this must be the result of bribery and corruption! The volume to which the dedication stands as preface seems to me to stand alone in your work; it is so natural, so personal, so sincere, so articulate in substance, and what you always were sure of—so rich in adornment. Let me speak first of the dedication. I thank you for it from the heart. It is beautifully said, beautifully and kindly felt; and I should be a churl indeed if I were not grateful, and an ass if I were not proud. I remember when Symonds dedicated a book to me; I wrote and told him of ‘the pang of gratified vanity’ with which I had read it. The pang was present again, but how much more sober and autumnal—like your volume. Let me tell you a story, or remind you of a story. In the year of grace something or other, anything between ’76 and ’78 I mentioned to you in my usual autobiographical and inconsiderate manner that I was hard up. You said promptly that you had a balance at your banker’s, and could make it convenient to let me have a cheque, and I accepted and got the money—how much was it?—twenty or perhaps thirty pounds? I know not—but it was a great convenience. The same evening, or the next day, I But here comes my Amanuensis, so we’ll get on more swimmingly now. You will understand perhaps that what so particularly pleased me in the new volume, what seems to me to have so personal and original a note, are the middle-aged pieces in the beginning. The whole of them, I may say, though I must own an especial liking to— ‘I yearn not for the fighting fate, You take the change gallantly. Not I, I must confess. It is all very well to talk of renunciation, and of course it has to be done. But, for my part, give me a roaring toothache! I do like to be deceived and to dream, but I have very little use for either watching or meditation. I was not born for age. And, curiously enough, I seem It is rather funny that this matter should come up just now, as I am at present engaged in treating a severe case of middle age in one of my stories—‘The Justice-Clerk.’ The case is that of a woman, and I think that I am doing her justice. You will be interested, I believe, to see the difference in our treatments. Secreta VitÆ, comes nearer to the case of my poor Kirstie. Come to think of it, Gosse, I believe the main distinction is that you have a family growing up around you, and I am a childless, rather bitter, very clear-eyed, blighted youth. I have, in fact, lost the path that makes it easy and natural for you to descend the hill. I am going at it straight. And where I have to go down it is a precipice. I must not forget to give you a word of thanks for An English Village. It reminds me strongly of Keats, which is enough to say; and I was particularly pleased with the petulant sincerity of the concluding sentiment. Well, my dear Gosse, here’s wishing you all health and prosperity, as well as to the mistress and the bairns. May you live long, since it seems as if you would continue to enjoy life. May you write many more books as good as this one—only there’s one thing impossible, you can never write another dedication that can give the same pleasure to the vanished Tusitala. |
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