_Vailima_, _Samoa_,
_Oct._ 6_th_, 1894.
MY DEAR COLVIN,—We have had quite an interesting month and mostly in
consideration of that road which I think I told you was about to be made.
It was made without a hitch, though I confess I was considerably
surprised. When they got through, I wrote a speech to them, sent it down
to a Missionary to be translated, and invited the lot to a feast. I
thought a good deal of this feast. The occasion was really interesting.
I wanted to pitch it in hot. And I wished to have as many influential
witnesses present as possible. Well, as it drew towards the day I had
nothing but refusals. Everybody supposed it was to be a political
occasion, that I had made a hive of rebels up here, and was going to push
for new hostilities.
The Amanuensis has been ill, and after the above trial petered out. I
must return to my own, lone Waverley. The captain refused, telling me
why; and at last I had to beat up for people almost with prayers.
However, I got a good lot, as you will see by the accompanying newspaper
report. The road contained this inscription, drawn up by the chiefs
themselves:
‘THE ROAD OF GRATITUDE.’
‘Considering the great love of Tusitala in his loving care of us in our
distress in the prison, we have therefore prepared a splendid gift. It
shall never be muddy, it shall endure for ever, this road that we have
dug.’ This the newspaper reporter could not give, not knowing any
Samoan. The same reason explains his references to Seumanutafa’s speech,
which was not long and _was_ important, for it was a speech of courtesy
and forgiveness to his former enemies. It was very much applauded.
Secondly, it was not Poè, it was Mataafã (don’t confuse with Mataafa) who
spoke for the prisoners. Otherwise it is extremely correct.
I beg your pardon for so much upon my aboriginals. Even you must
sympathise with me in this unheard-of compliment, and my having been able
to deliver so severe a sermon with acceptance. It remains a nice point
of conscience what I should wish done in the matter. I think this
meeting, its immediate results, and the terms of what I said to them,
desirable to be known. It will do a little justice to me, who have not
had too much justice done me. At the same time, to send this report to
the papers is truly an act of self-advertisement, and I dislike the
thought. Query, in a man who has been so much calumniated, is that not
justifiable? I do not know; be my judge. Mankind is too complicated for
me; even myself. Do I wish to advertise? I think I do, God help me! I
have had hard times here, as every man must have who mixes up with public
business; and I bemoan myself, knowing that all I have done has been in
the interest of peace and good government; and having once delivered my
mind, I would like it, I think, to be made public. But the other part of
me _regimbs_.
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,
and I will ask you to spare _St. Ives_ when it goes to you; it is a sort
of _Count Robert of Paris_. But I hope rather a _Dombey and Son_, to be
succeeded by _Our Mutual Friend_ and _Great Expectations_ and _A Tale of
Two Cities_. No toil has been spared over the ungrateful canvas; and it
_will not_ come together, and I must live, and my family. 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, common-place 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. Good thing anyway! for it seems
to have sold the Edition. And I look forward confidently to an
aftermath; I do not think my health can be so hugely improved, without
some subsequent improvement in my brains. Though, of course, there is
the possibility that literature is a morbid secretion, and abhors health!
I do not think it is possible to have fewer illusions than I. I
sometimes wish I had more. They are amusing. But I cannot take myself
seriously as an artist; the limitations are so obvious. I did take
myself seriously as a workman of old, but my practice has fallen off. I
am now an idler and cumberer of the ground; it may be excused to me
perhaps by twenty years of industry and ill-health, which have taken the
cream off the milk.
As I was writing this last sentence, I heard the strident rain drawing
near across the forest, and by the time I was come to the word ‘cream’ it
burst upon my roof, and has since redoubled, and roared upon it. A very
welcome change. All smells of the good wet earth, sweetly, with a kind
of Highland touch; the crystal rods of the shower, as I look up, have
drawn their criss-cross over everything; and a gentle and very welcome
coolness comes up around me in little draughts, blessed draughts, not
chilling, only equalising the temperature. Now the rain is off in this
spot, but I hear it roaring still in the nigh neighbourhood—and that
moment, I was driven from the verandah by random rain drops, spitting at
me through the Japanese blinds. These are not tears with which the page
is spotted! Now the windows stream, the roof reverberates. It is good;
it answers something which is in my heart; I know not what; old memories
of the wet moorland belike.
Well, it has blown by again, and I am in my place once more, with an
accompaniment of perpetual dripping on the verandah—and very much
inclined for a chat. The exact subject I do not know! It will be bitter
at least, and that is strange, for my attitude is essentially _not_
bitter, but I have come into these days when a man sees above all the
seamy side, and I have dwelt some time in a small place where he has an
opportunity of reading little motives that he would miss in the great
world, and indeed, to-day, I am almost ready to call the world an error.
Because? Because I have not drugged myself with successful work, and
there are all kinds of trifles buzzing in my ear, unfriendly trifles,
from the least to the—well, to the pretty big. All these that touch me
are Pretty Big; and yet none touch me in the least, if rightly looked at,
except the one eternal burthen to go on making an income. If I could
find a place where I could lie down and give up for (say) two years, and
allow the sainted public to support me, if it were a lunatic asylum,
wouldn’t I go, just! But we can’t have both extremes at once, worse
luck! I should like to put my savings into a proprietarian investment,
and retire in the meanwhile into a communistic retreat, which is
double-dealing. But you men with salaries don’t know how a family weighs
on a fellow’s mind.
I hear the article in next week’s _Herald_ is to be a great affair, and
all the officials who came to me the other day are to be attacked! This
is the unpleasant side of being (without a salary) in public life; I will
leave anyone to judge if my speech was well intended, and calculated to
do good. It was even daring—I assure you one of the chiefs looked like a
fiend at my description of Samoan warfare. Your warning was not needed;
we are all determined to _keep the peace_ and to _hold our peace_. I
know, my dear fellow, how remote all this sounds! Kindly pardon your
friend. I have my life to live here; these interests are for me
immediate; and if I do not write of them, I might as soon not write at
all. There is the difficulty in a distant correspondence. It is perhaps
easy for me to enter into and understand your interests; I own it is
difficult for you; but you must just wade through them for friendship’s
sake, and try to find tolerable what is vital for your friend. I cannot
forbear challenging you to it, as to intellectual lists. It is the proof
of intelligence, the proof of not being a barbarian, to be able to enter
into something outside of oneself, something that does not touch one’s
next neighbour in the city omnibus.
Good-bye, my lord. May your race continue and you flourish—Yours ever,
TUSITALA.
EPILOGUE
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. It was not like him to be sensitive to a rough word in a
friendly review, nor to recur with so much feeling to my unlucky
complaint, quickly regretted and withdrawn, as to his absorption in
native affairs and local interests. To judge by these letters, his old
invincible spirit of inward 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. Again, it was a new thing in his life that he should thus
painfully feel the strain of literary work, at almost all other times his
chief delight and pastime, and should express the longing to lay it down.
His friend Mr. Charles Baxter and I at once telegraphed to him, as the
success of the Edinburgh Edition enabled us to do, in terms intended to
ease his mind and to induce him to take the rest of which he seemed so
urgently in need. It seems doubtful if our words were fully understood:
it is more doubtful still if that ever-shaping mind had retained any
capacity for rest, except, as he had himself foretold, the rest of the
grave. At any rate he took none, but on receipt of our message only
turned to his old expedient, a change of labour. He gave up for a while
the attempt to finish _St. Ives_; a task as to which I may say that he
had no occasion to write so despondingly, for as a tale of adventure,
manners, and the road, which is all it was meant to be, it will be found
a very spirited and entertaining piece, lacking, indeed, the dénouement,
and containing a chapter or two which the author would doubtless have
cancelled or recast, but others which are in almost his happiest manner
of invention and narrative. He gave this up, and turned to a more
arduous theme, the tragic story of the Scottish moorlands, in which the
varieties and the strength of border character were to be illustrated in
the Four Brothers of Cauldstaneslap, and the Hanging Judge was to be
called upon, like Brutus, to condemn his son, and the two Kirsties,
younger and elder, were to embody one the wavering and the other the
heroic soul of woman.
On this theme, which had already been working in his mind for some years,
he felt his inspiration return, and laboured during the month of November
and the first days of December at the full pitch of his powers and in the
conscious happiness of their exercise. About the same time various
external circumstances occurred to give him pleasure. The incident of
the road-making, as the reader has seen, had brought home to him as
nothing else could have done the sense of the love and gratitude he had
won from the island people and their chiefs, and of the power he was able
to exercise on them for their good. Soon afterwards, the anniversaries
of his own birthday and of the American thanksgiving feast brought
evidences hardly less welcome, after so much contention and annoyance as
the island affairs and politics had involved him in, of the honour and
affection in which he was held by all that was best in the white
community. By each succeeding mail came stronger proofs from home of the
manner in which men of letters of the younger generation had come to
regard him as their master, their literary conscience and example, and
above all their friend. Deepest, perhaps, of all lay that pleasure of
feeling himself to be working once more at his best. Of the many and
various gifts of this brilliant spirit—adventurer, observer, humorist,
moralist, essayist, poet, critic, and romancer—of all his many and
various gifts, the master gift was assuredly the creative, the gift of
human and historical imagination. It was not in vain that his islanders
called him Tusitala. Teller of tales he had been, first and foremost,
from his childhood; seer into the hearts and fates of men and women he
was growing to be more and more. The time was now ripe—had only the
strength sufficed—for his career as a creative writer to enter upon a new
and ampler phase. 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 full measure of his powers; and if in the literature of romance there
is to be found work more masterly, of more piercing human insight or more
concentrated imaginative vision and beauty, I do not know it.
But to enter on such a task under such conditions was of all his
adventures the most adventurous. The Pacific climate had brought him, as
we have seen, a renewal for some years of nervous energy and joy in
living, but it may be doubted if that climate is ever truly and in the
long run restorative to men of northern blood. At any rate it demands as
a condition of health some measure of repose, and to repose he had, here
as elsewhere, been a stranger. He entered upon his new labour, taxing
alike to heart and mind, with all the fibres of his brain long strained
by unremitting toil in the tropic heats he loved. Readers will remember
the gallant doctrine of his early essay. ‘By all means begin your folio;
even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a
month, make one brave push, and see what can be accomplished in a week.
It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful
labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which outlives
the most untimely end.’ In a temper truly accordant with this doctrine
he applied himself to his new task, and before it was fully half
accomplished the doom so long foreshadowed and so little feared had
overtaken him; he had died as he would have desired to die, and fallen
smiling in the midst of the battle. That he was more or less distinctly
aware of the imminence of the blow we may gather from the tenor of some
of his letters written in these weeks. On the last day of his life,
after a morning of happy work and pleasant correspondence, he was seen
gazing long and wistfully at the mountain summit which he had chosen to
be his burial-place. Towards the evening of the same day, he was talking
gaily with his wife, and trying to reassure her under the sense of coming
calamity which oppressed her, when the sudden rupture of a blood-vessel
in the brain laid him, almost in a moment, unconscious at her feet; and
before two hours were over he had passed away. To the English-speaking
world 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 inspiring of examples; and to his friends an image of the
memory more vivid and more dear than are the presences of almost any of
the living.
APPENDIX
_Address to the Chiefs on the opening of the Road of Gratitude_, Oct.
1894.
MR. STEVENSON said: ‘We are met together to-day to celebrate an event and
to do honour to certain chiefs, my friends,—Lelei, Mataafa, Salevao, Poè,
Teleso, Tupuola Lotofaga, Tupuola Amaile, Muliaiga, Ifopo, and Fatialofa.
You are all aware in some degree of what has happened. You know these
chiefs to have been prisoners; you perhaps know that during the term of
their confinement, I had it in my power to do them certain favours. One
thing some of you cannot know, that they were immediately repaid by
answering attentions. They were liberated by the new administration; by
the King, and the Chief Justice, and the Ta’its’ifono, who are here
amongst us to-day, and to whom we all desire to tender our renewed and
perpetual gratitude for that favour. As soon as they were free men—owing
no man anything—instead of going home to their own places and families,
they came to me; they offered to do this work for me as a free gift,
without hire, without supplies, and I was tempted at first to refuse
their offer. I knew the country to be poor, I knew famine threatening; I
knew their families long disorganised for want of supervision. Yet I
accepted, because I thought the lesson of that road might be more useful
to Samoa than a thousand breadfruit trees; and because to myself it was
an exquisite pleasure to receive that which was so handsomely offered.
It is now done; you have trod it to-day in coming hither. It has been
made for me by chiefs; some of them old, some sick, all newly delivered
from a harassing confinement, and in spite of weather unusually hot and
insalubrious. I have seen these chiefs labour valiantly with their own
hands upon the work, and I have set up over it, now that it is finished,
the name of ‘The Road of Gratitude’ (the road of loving hearts) and the
names of those that built it. ‘In perpetuam memoriam,’ we say and speak
idly. At least so long as my own life shall be spared, it shall be here
perpetuated; partly for my pleasure and in my gratitude; partly for
others; to continually publish the lesson of this road.’
Addressing himself to the chiefs, Mr. Stevenson then said:—
‘I will tell you, Chiefs, that, when I saw you working on that road, my
heart grew warm; not with gratitude only, but with hope. It seemed to me
that I read the promise of something good for Samoa; it seemed to me, as
I looked at you, that you were a company of warriors in a battle,
fighting for the defence of our common country against all aggression.
For there is a time to fight, and a time to dig. You Samoans may fight,
you may conquer twenty times, and thirty times, and all will be in vain.
There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it before it is too late. It
is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their
produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country. If you
do not others will.’
The speaker then referred to the parable of the ‘Talents,’ Matt. xxv.
14–30, and continuing, impressively asked: ‘What are you doing with your
talent, Samoa? Your three talents, Savaii, Upolu, and Tutuila? Have you
buried it in a napkin? Not Upolu at least. You have rather given it out
to be trodden under feet of swine: and the swine cut down food trees and
burn houses, according to the nature of swine, or of that much worse
animal, foolish man, acting according to his folly. “Thou knewest that I
reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed.” But God
has both sown and strawed for you here in Samoa; He has given you a rich
soil, a splendid sur copious rain; all is ready to your hand, half done.
And I repeat to you that thing which is sure: if you do not occupy and
use your country, others will. It will not continue to be yours or your
childrens, if you occupy it for nothing. You and your children will in
that case be cast out into outer darkness, where shall be weeping and
gnashing of teeth; for that is the law of God which passeth not away. I
who speak to you have seen these things. I have seen them with my
eyes—these judgments of God. I have seen them in Ireland, and I have
seen them in the mountains of my own country—Scotland—and my heart was
sad. These were a fine people in the past—brave, gay, faithful, and very
much like Samoans, except in one particular, that they were much wiser
and better at that business of fighting of which you think so much. But
the time came to them as it now comes to you, and it did not find them
ready. The messenger came into their villages and they did not know him;
they were told, as you are told, to use and occupy their country, and
they would not hear. And now you may go through great tracts of the land
and scarce meet a man or a smoking house, and see nothing but sheep
feeding. The other people that I tell you of have come upon them like a
foe in the night, and these are the other people’s sheep who browse upon
the foundation of their houses. To come nearer; and I have seen this
judgment in Oahu also. I have ridden there the whole day along the coast
of an island. Hour after hour went by and I saw the face of no living
man except that of the guide who rode with me. All along that desolate
coast, in one bay after another, we saw, still standing, the churches
that have been built by the Hawaiians of old. There must have been many
hundreds, many thousands, dwelling there in old times, and worshipping
God in these now empty churches. For to-day they were empty; the doors
were closed, the villages had disappeared, the people were dead and gone;
only the church stood on like a tombstone over a grave, in the midst of
the white men’s sugar fields. The other people had come and used that
country, and the Hawaiians who occupied it for nothing had been swept
away, “where is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
‘I do not speak of this lightly, because I love Samoa and her people. I
love the land, I have chosen it to be my home while I live, and my grave
after I am dead; and I love the people, and have chosen them to be my
people to live and die with. And I see that the day is come now of the
great battle; of the great and the last opportunity by which it shall be
decided, whether you are to pass away like these other races of which I
have been speaking, or to stand fast and have your children living on and
honouring your memory in the land you received of your fathers.
‘The Land Commission and the Chief Justice will soon have ended their
labours. Much of your land will be restored to you, to do what you can
with. Now is the time the messenger is come into your villages to summon
you; the man is come with the measuring rod; the fire is lighted in which
you shall be tried; whether you are gold or dross. Now is the time for
the true champions of Samoa to stand forth. And who is the true champion
of Samoa? It is not the man who blackens his face, and cuts down trees,
and kills pigs and wounded men. It is the man who makes roads, who
plants food trees, who gathers harvests, and is a profitable servant
before the Lord, using and improving that great talent that has been
given him in trust. That is the brave soldier; that is the true
champion; because all things in a country hang together like the links of
the anchor cable, one by another: but the anchor itself is industry.
‘There is a friend of most of us, who is far away; not to be forgotten
where I am, where Tupuola is, where Poè Lelei, Mataafa, Solevao, Poè
Teleso, Tupuola Lotofaga, Tupuolo Amaile, Muliaiga, Ifopo, Fatialofa,
Lemusu are. He knew what I am telling you; no man better. He saw the
day was come when Samoa had to walk in a new path, and to be defended,
not only with guns and blackened faces, and the noise of men shouting,
but by digging and planting, reaping and sowing. When he was still here
amongst us, he busied himself planting cacao; he was anxious and eager
about agriculture and commerce, and spoke and wrote continually; so that
when we turn our minds to the same matters, we may tell ourselves that we
are still obeying Mataafa. Ua tautala mai pea o ia ua mamao.
‘I know that I do not speak to idle or foolish hearers. I speak to those
who are not too proud to work for gratitude. Chiefs! You have worked
for Tusitala, and he thanks you from his heart. In this, I could wish
you could be an example to all Samoa—I wish every chief in these islands
would turn to, and work, and build roads, and sow fields, and plant food
trees, and educate his children and improve his talents—not for love of
Tusitala, but for the love of his brothers, and his children, and the
whole body of generations yet unborn.
‘Chiefs! On this road that you have made many feet shall follow. The
Romans were the bravest and greatest of people! mighty men of their
hands, glorious fighters and conquerors. To this day in Europe you may
go through parts of the country where all is marsh and bush, and perhaps
after struggling through a thicket, you shall come forth upon an ancient
road, solid and useful as the day it was made. You shall see men and
women bearing their burdens along that even way, and you may tell
yourself that it was built for them perhaps fifteen hundred years
before,—perhaps before the coming of Christ,—by the Romans. And the
people still remember and bless them for that convenience, and say to one
another, that as the Romans were the bravest men to fight, so they were
the best at building roads.
‘Chiefs! Our road is not built to last a thousand years, yet in a sense
it is. When a road is once built, it is a strange thing how it collects
traffic, how every year as it goes on, more and more people are found to
walk thereon, and others are raised up to repair and perpetuate it, and
keep it alive; so that perhaps even this road of ours may, from
reparation to reparation, continue to exist and be useful hundreds and
hundreds of years after we are mingled in the dust. And it is my hope
that our far-away descendants may remember and bless those who laboured
for them to-day.’
* * * * *
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press