_To Robert Louis Stevenson._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
April 28th, '90.
My dear Louis,
I didn't, for two reasons, answer your delightful letter, or rather
exquisite note, from the Sydney Club, but I must thank you for it now,
before the gulfs have washed you down, or at least have washed away from
you all after-tastes of brineless things--the stay-at-home works of
lubberly friends. One of the reasons just mentioned was that I had
written to you at Sydney (c/o the mystic Towns,) only a few days before
your note arrived; the other is that until a few days ago I hugged the
soft illusion that by the time anything else would reach you, you would
already have started for England. This fondest of hopes of all of us has
been shattered in a manner to which history furnishes a parallel only in
the behaviour of its most famous coquettes and courtesans. You are
indeed the male Cleopatra or buccaneering Pompadour of the Deep--the
wandering Wanton of the Pacific. You swim into our ken with every
provocation and prospect--and we have only time to open our arms to
receive you when your immortal back is turned to us in the act of still
more provoking flight. The moral is that we have to be virtuous whether
we like it or no. Seriously, it was a real heart-break to have September
substituted for June; but I have a general faith in the fascinated
providence who watches over you, to the neglect of all other human
affairs--I believe that even _He_ has an idea that you know what you are
about, and even what _He_ is, though He by this time doesn't in the
least know himself. Moreover I have selfish grounds of resignation in
the fact that I shall be in England in September, whereas, to my almost
intolerable torment, I should probably not have been in June. Therefore
when you come, if you ever do, which in my heart of hearts I doubt, I
shall see you in all your strange exotic bloom, in all your paint and
beads and feathers. May you grow a magnificent extra crop of all such
things (as they will bring you a fortune here,) in this much grudged
extra summer. Charming and delightful to me to see you with a palate for
_my_ plain domestic pudding, after all the wild cannibal smacks that you
have learned to know. I think the better of the poor little study in the
painfully-familiar, since hearing that it could bear such voyages and
resist such tests. You have fed a presumption that vaguely stirs within
me--that of trying to get at you in June or July with a fearfully
long-winded but very highly-finished novel which I am putting forth in
(probably) the last days of May. If I were sure it would overtake you on
some coral strand I shouldn't hesitate; for, seriously and selfishly
speaking, I can't (spiritually) afford _not_ to put the book under the
eye of the sole and single Anglo-saxon capable of perceiving--though he
may care for little else in it--how well it is written. So I shall
probably cast it upon the waters and pray for it; as I suppose you are
coming back to Sydney, it may meet you there, and you can read it on the
voyage home. In that box you'll _have_ to. I don't say it to bribe you
in advance to unnatural tolerance--but I have an impression that I
didn't make copious or clear to you in my last what a grand literary
life your Master of B. has been leading here. Somehow, a miracle has
been wrought for you (for you they are,) and the fine old feather-bed of
English taste _has_ thrilled with preternatural recognitions. The most
unlikely number of people _have_ discerned that the Master is "well
written." It has had the highest success of honour that the
English-reading public can now confer; where it has failed (the
success, save that it hasn't failed at all!) it has done so through the
constitutional incapacity of the umpire--infected, by vulgar
intercourses, as with some unnameable disease. We have lost our
status--_nous n'avons plus qualite_--to confer degrees. Nevertheless,
last year you woke us up at night, for an hour--and we scrambled down in
our shirt and climbed a garden-wall and stole a laurel, which we have
been brandishing ever since over your absent head. I tell you this
because I think Colvin (at least it was probably he--he is visibly
better--or else Mrs. Sitwell) mentioned to me the other day that you had
asked in touching virginal ignorance for news of the fate of the book.
Its "fate," my dear fellow, has been glittering glory--simply: and I
ween--that is I hope--you will find the glitter has chinked as well. I
sent you a new Zola the other day--at a venture: but I have no
confidence that I gratified a curiosity. I haven't read The Human
Beast--one knows him without that--and I am told Zola's account of him
is dull and imperfect. I would read anything new about him--but this is
old, old, old. I hope your pen, this summer, will cleave the deeps of
art even as your prow, or your keel, or whatever's the knowing name for
it, furrows the Pacific flood. Into what strange and wondrous dyes you
must be now qualified to dip it! Roast yourself, I beseech you, on the
sharp spit of perfection, that you may give out your aromas and
essences! Tell your wife, please, to read between the lines of this, and
between the words and the letters, all that I miss the occasion to write
directly to _her_. I hope she has continued to distil, to your mother,
the honey of those impressions of which a few months ago the latter lent
me for a day or two a taste--on its long yellow foolscap combs. They
would make, they _will_ make, of course, a deliciously sweet book. I
hope Lloyd, whom I greet and bless, is living up to the height of his
young privilege--and secreting honey too, according to the mild
discipline of the hive. There are lots of things more to tell you, no
doubt, but if I go on they will all take the shape of questions, and
that won't be fair. The supreme thing to say is Don't, oh _don't_,
simply ruin our nerves and our tempers for the rest of life by _not_
throwing the rope in September, to him who will, for once in his life,
not muff his catch: