Eagerly as we awaited this volume, it has proved a gift exceeding all
our hopes--a gift, I think, almost priceless. It unites in the rarest
manner the value of a familiar correspondence with the value of an
intimate journal: for these Samoan letters to his friend Mr. Sidney
Colvin form a record, scarcely interrupted, of Stevenson's thinkings
and doings from month to month, and often from day to day, during the
last four romantic years of his life. The first is dated November 2nd,
1890, when he and his household were clearing the ground for their
home on the mountain-side of Vaea: the last, October 6th, 1894, just
two months before his grave was dug on Vaea top. During his Odyssey in
the South Seas (from August, 1888, to the spring of 1890) his letters,
to Mr. Colvin at any rate, were infrequent and tantalizingly vague;
but soon after settling on his estate in Samoa, "he for the first
time, to my infinite gratification, took to writing me long and
regular monthly budgets as full and particular as heart could wish;
and this practice he maintained until within a few weeks of his
death." These letters, occupying a place quite apart in Stevenson's
correspondence, Mr. Colvin has now edited with pious care and given to
the public.
But the great, the happy surprise of the _Vailima Letters_ is neither
their continuity nor their fulness of detail--although on each of
these points they surpass our hopes. The great, the entirely happy
surprise is their intimacy. We all knew--who could doubt it?--that
Stevenson's was a clean and transparent mind. But we scarcely allowed
for the innocent zest (innocent, because wholly devoid of vanity or
selfishness) which he took in observing its operations, or for the
child-like confidence with which he held out the crystal for his
friend to gaze into.
One is at first inclined to say that had these letters been less
open-hearted they had made less melancholy reading--the last few of
them, at any rate. For, as their editor says, "the tenor of these last
letters of Stevenson's to me, and of others written to several of his
friends at the same time, seemed to give just cause for anxiety.
Indeed, as the reader will have perceived, a gradual change had during
the past months been coming over the tone of his correspondence.... To
judge by these letters, his old invincible spirit of cheerfulness was
beginning to give way to moods of depression and overstrained feeling,
although to those about him, it seems, his charming, habitual
sweetness and gaiety of temper were undiminished." Mr. Colvin is
thinking, no doubt, of passages such as this, from the very last
letter:--
"I know I am at a climacteric for all men who live by their wits,
so I do not despair. But the truth is, I am pretty nearly useless
at literature.... Were it not for my health, which made it
impossible, I could not find it in my heart to forgive myself
that I did not stick to an honest, commonplace trade when I was
young, which might have now supported me during these ill years.
But do not suppose me to be down in anything else; only, for the
nonce, my skill deserts me, such as it is, or was. It was a very
little dose of inspiration, and a pretty little trick of style,
long lost, improved by the most heroic industry. So far, I have
managed to please the journalists. But I am a fictitious article,
and have long known it. I am read by journalists, by my
fellow-novelists, and by boys; with these _incipit et explicit_
my vogue."
I appeal to all who earn their living by pen or brush--Who does not
know moods such as this? Who has not experience of those dark days
when the ungrateful canvas refuses to come right, and the artist sits
down before it and calls himself a fraud? We may even say that these
fits of incapacity and blank despondency are part of the cost of all
creative work. They may be intensified by terror for the family
exchequer. The day passes in strenuous but futile effort, and the man
asks himself, "What will happen to me and mine if this kind of thing
continues?" Stevenson, we are allowed to say (for the letters tell
us), did torment himself with these terrors. And we may say further
that, by whatever causes impelled, he certainly worked too hard during
the last two years of his life. With regard to the passage quoted,
what seems to me really melancholy is not the baseless self-distrust,
for that is a transitory malady most incident to authorship; but that,
could a magic carpet have transported Stevenson at that moment to the
side of the friend he addressed--could he for an hour or two have
visited London--all this apprehension had been at once dispelled. He
left England before achieving his full conquest of the public heart,
and the extent of that conquest he, in his exile, never quite
realized. When he visited Sydney, early in 1893, it was to him a new
and disconcerting experience--but not, I fancy altogether
unpleasing--_digito monstrari_, or, as he puts it elsewhere, to "do
the affable celebrity life-sized." Nor do I think he quite realized
how large a place he filled in the education, as in the affections, of
the younger men--the Barries and Kiplings, the Weymans, Doyles and
Crocketts--whose courses began after he had left these shores. An
artist gains much by working alone and away from chatter and criticism
and adulation: but his gain has this corresponding loss, that he must
go through his dark hours without support. Even a master may take
benefit at times--if it be only a physical benefit--from some closer
and handier assurance than any letters can give of the place held by
his work in the esteem of "the boys."
We must not make too much of what he wrote in this dark mood. A few
days later he was at work on _Weir of Hermiston_, laboring "at the
full pitch of his powers and in the conscious happiness of their
exercise." Once more he felt himself to be working at his best. The
result the world has not yet been allowed to see: for the while we are
satisfied and comforted by Mr. Colvin's assurances. "The fragment on
which he wrought during the last month of his life gives to my mind
(as it did to his own) for the first time the true measure of his
powers; and if in the literature of romance there is to be found work
more masterly, of more piercing human insight and more concentrated
imaginative wisdom, I do not know it."
On the whole, these letters from Vailima give a picture of a serene
and--allowance being made for the moods--a contented life. It is, I
suspect, the genuine Stevenson that we get in the following passage
from the letter of March, 1891:--
"Though I write so little, I pass all my hours of field-work in
continual converse and imaginary correspondence. I scarce pull up
a weed, but I invent a sentence on the matter to yourself; it
does not get written; _autant en emportent les vents_; but the
intent is there, and for me (in some sort) the companionship.
To-day, for instance, we had a great talk. I was toiling, the
sweat dripping from my nose, in the hot fit after a squall of
rain; methought you asked me--frankly, was I happy? Happy (said
I); I was only happy once; that was at Hyères; it came to an end
from a variety of reasons--decline of health, change of place,
increase of money, age with his stealing steps; since then, as
before then, I know not what it means. But I know pleasures
still; pleasure with a thousand faces and none perfect, a
thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands, and all of them
with scratching nails. High among these I place the delight of
weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence
of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds. And take
my life all through, look at it fore and back, and upside down--I
would not change my circumstances, unless it were to bring you
here. And yet God knows perhaps this intercourse of writing
serves as well; and I wonder, were you here indeed, would I
commune so continually with the thought of you. I say 'I wonder'
for a form; I know, and I know I should not."
In a way the beauty of these letters is this, that they tell us so
much of Stevenson that is new, and nothing that is strange--nothing
that we have difficulty in reconciling with the picture we had already
formed in our own minds. Our mental portraits of some other writers,
drawn from their deliberate writings, have had to be readjusted, and
sometimes most cruelly readjusted, as soon as their private
correspondence came to be published. If any of us dreamed of this
danger in Stevenson's case (and I doubt if anyone did), the danger at
any rate is past. The man of the letters is the man of the books--the
same gay, eager, strenuous, lovable spirit, curious as ever about life
and courageous as ever in facing its chances. Profoundly as he
deplores the troubles in Samoa, when he hears that war has been
declared he can hardly repress a boyish excitement. "War is a huge
_entraînement_," he writes in June, 1893; "there is no other
temptation to be compared to it, not one. We were all wet, we had been
five hours in the saddle, mostly riding hard; and we came home like
schoolboys, with such a lightness of spirits, and I am sure such a
brightness of eye, as you could have lit a candle at."
And that his was not by any means mere "literary" courage one more
extract will prove. One of his boys, Paatalise by name, had suddenly
gone mad:--
"I was busy copying David Balfour, with my left hand--a most
laborious task--Fanny was down at the native house superintending
the floor, Lloyd down in Apia, and Bella in her own house
cleaning, when I heard the latter calling on my name. I ran out
on the verandah; and there on the lawn beheld my crazy boy with
an axe in his hand and dressed out in green ferns, dancing. I ran
downstairs and found all my house boys on the back verandah,
watching him through the dining-room. I asked what it
meant?--'Dance belong his place,' they said.--'I think this is no
time to dance,' said I. 'Has he done his work?'--'No,' they told
me, 'away bush all morning.' But there they all stayed in the
back verandah. I went on alone through the dining-room and bade
him stop. He did so, shouldered the axe, and began to walk away;
but I called him back, walked up to him, and took the axe out of
his unresisting hands. The boy is in all things so good, that I
can scarce say I was afraid; only I felt it had to be stopped ere
he could work himself up by dancing to some craziness. Our house
boys protested they were not afraid; all I know is they were all
watching him round the back door, and did not follow me till I
had the axe. As for the out-boys, who were working with Fanny in
the native house, they thought it a bad business, and made no
secret of their fears."
But indeed all the book is manly, with the manliness of Scott's
_Journal_ or of Fielding's _Voyage to Lisbon_. "To the English-speaking
world," concludes Mr. Colvin, "he has left behind a treasure which it
would be vain as yet to attempt to estimate; to the profession of
letters one of the most ennobling and inspiriting of examples; and
to his friends an image of memory more vivid and more dear than are
the presences of almost any of the living." Very few men of our time
have been followed out of this world with the same regret. None have
repined less at their own fate--
"This be the verse you grave for me:--
'Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.'"