_Vailima_, June 18th, 94.
MY DEAR COLVIN,—You are to please understand that my last letter is
withdrawn unconditionally. You and Baxter are having all the trouble of
this Edition, and I simply put myself in your hands for you to do what
you like with me, and I am sure that will be the best, at any rate.
Hence you are to conceive me withdrawing all objections to your printing
anything you please. After all it is a sort of family affair. About the
Miscellany Section, both plans seem to me quite good. Toss up. I think
the _Old Gardener_ has to stay where I put him last. It would not do to
separate John and Robert.
In short, I am only sorry I ever uttered a word about the edition, and
leave you to be the judge. I have had a vile cold which has prostrated
me for more than a fortnight, and even now tears me nightly with
spasmodic coughs; but it has been a great victory. I have never borne a
cold with so little hurt; wait till the clouds blow by, before you begin
to boast! I have had no fever; and though I’ve been very unhappy, it is
nigh over, I think. Of course, _St. Ives_ has paid the penalty. I must
not let you be disappointed in _St. I._ It is a mere tissue of
adventures; the central figure not very well or very sharply drawn; no
philosophy, no destiny, to it; some of the happenings very good in
themselves, I believe, but none of them _bildende_, none of them
constructive, except in so far perhaps as they make up a kind of sham
picture of the time, all in italics and all out of drawing. Here and
there, I think, it is well written; and here and there it’s not. Some of
the episodic characters are amusing, I do believe; others not, I suppose.
However, they are the best of the thing such as it is. If it has a merit
to it, I should say it was a sort of deliberation and swing to the style,
which seems to me to suit the mail-coaches and post-chaises with which it
sounds all through. ’Tis my most prosaic book.
I called on the two German ships now in port, and we are quite friendly
with them, and intensely friendly of course with our own _Curaçoas_. But
it is other guess work on the beach. Some one has employed, or
subsidised, one of the local editors to attack me once a week. He is
pretty scurrilous and pretty false. The first effect of the perusal of
the weekly Beast is to make me angry; the second is a kind of deep,
golden content and glory, when I seem to say to people: ‘See! this is my
position—I am a plain man dwelling in the bush in a house, and behold
they have to get up this kind of truck against me—and I have so much
influence that they are obliged to write a weekly article to say I have
none.’
By this time you must have seen Lysaght and forgiven me the letter that
came not at all. He was really so nice a fellow—he had so much to tell
me of Meredith—and the time was so short—that I gave up the intervening
days between mails entirely to entertain him.
We go on pretty nicely. Fanny, Belle, and I have had two months alone,
and it has been very pleasant. But by to-morrow or next day noon, we
shall see the whole clan assembled again about Vailima table, which will
be pleasant too; seven persons in all, and the Babel of voices will be
heard again in the big hall so long empty and silent. Good-bye. Love to
all. Time to close.—Yours ever,
R. L. S.