"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 Sisera," and "Herodias and John
the Baptist," good stout poems, fiery and sound. "'Tis but a mask and
behind it chuckles the God of the Garden," I shall never forget. By the
by, an error of the press, page 49, line 4, "No infant's lesson are the
ways of God." _The_ is dropped.
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 licence 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 had somehow
offended you; however, all's well that ends well, and I am glad I am
forgiven--did you not fail to appreciate the attitude of Dodd? He was a
fizzle and a stick, he knew it, he knew nothing else, and there is an
undercurrent of bitterness in him. And then the problem that Pinkerton
laid down: why the artist can _do nothing else_? is one that continually
exercises myself. He cannot: granted. But Scott could. And Montaigne.
And Julius Caesar. And many more. And why can't R. L. S.? Does it not
amaze you? It does me. I think of the Renaissance fellows, and their
all-round human sufficiency, and compare it with the ineffable smallness
of the field in which we labour and in which we do so little. I think
_David Balfour_ a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the
thing to occupy the leisure of a busy man; but for the top flower of a
man's life it seems to me inadequate. Small is the word; it is a small
age, and I am of it. I could have wished to be otherwise busy in this
world. I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write _David
Balfours_ too. _Hinc illae lacrymae._ I take my own case as most handy,
but it is as illustrative of my quarrel with the age. We take all these
pains, and we don't do as well as Michael Angelo or Leonardo, or even
Fielding, who was an active magistrate, or Richardson, who was a busy
bookseller. _J'ai honte pour nous_; my ears burn.
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 lot of stuff in the
kettle, and a great deal of it Celtic. I have changed my mind
progressively about England: practically the whole of Scotland is
Celtic, and the western half of England, and all Ireland, and the Celtic
blood makes a rare blend for art. If it is stiffened up with Latin
blood, you get the French. We were less lucky: we had only
Scandinavians, themselves decidedly artistic, and the Low-German lot.
However, that is a good starting-point, and with all the other elements
in your crucible, it may come to something great very easily. I wish you
would hurry up and let me see it. Here is a long while I have been
waiting for something _good_ in art; and what have I seen? Zola's
_Debacle_ and a few of Kipling's tales. Are you a reader of Barbey
d'Aurevilly? He is a never-failing source of pleasure to me, for my
sins, I suppose. What a work is the _Rideau Cramoisi!_ and
_L'Ensorcelee!_ and _Le Chevalier Des Touches!_
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.[74] My application to Scribner has been quite in
vain. See if you can get hold of some historic sharp in the club, and
tap him; they must some of them have written memoirs or notes of some
sort; perhaps still unprinted; if that be so, get them copied for me.
R. L. S.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
_Vailima, Jan. 29th, 1894._
MY DEAR COLVIN,--I had fully intended for your education and moral
health to fob you off with the meanest possible letter this month, and
unfortunately I find I will have to treat you to a good long account of
matters here. I believe I have told you before about Tui-ma-le-alii-fano
and my taking him down to introduce him to the Chief Justice. Well, Tui
came back to Vailima one day in the blackest sort of spirits, saying the
war was decided, that he also must join in the fight, and that there was
no hope whatever of success. He must fight as a point of honour for his
family and country; and in his case, even if he escaped on the field of
battle, deportation was the least to be looked for. He said he had a
letter of complaint from the Great Council of A'ana which he wished to
lay before the Chief Justice; and he asked me to accompany him as if I
were his nurse. We went down about dinner time; and by the way received
from a lurking native the famous letter in an official blue envelope
gummed up to the edges. It proved to be a declaration of war, quite
formal, but with some variations that really made you bounce. White
residents were directly threatened, bidden to have nothing to do with
the King's party, not to receive their goods in their houses, etc.,
under pain of an accident. However, the Chief Justice took it very
wisely and mildly, and between us, he and I and Tui made up a plan which
has proved successful--so far. The war is over--fifteen chiefs are this
morning undergoing a curious double process of law, comparable to a
court martial; in which their complaints are to be considered, and if
possible righted, while their conduct is to be criticised, perhaps
punished. Up to now, therefore, it has been a most successful policy;
but the danger is before us. My own feeling would decidedly be that all
would be spoiled by a single execution. The great hope after all lies in
the knotless, rather flaccid character of the people. These are no
Maoris. All the powers that Cedercrantz let go by disuse the new C. J.
is stealthily and boldly taking back again; perhaps some others also. He
has shamed the chiefs in Mulinuu into a law against taking heads, with a
punishment of six years' imprisonment and, for a chief, degradation. To
him has been left the sole conduct of this anxious and decisive inquiry.
If the natives stand it, why, well! But I am nervous.
TO H. B. BAILDON
_Vailima, 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 splendid time of it on the
whole. But it gets a little stale, and my work will begin to senesce;
and parties to shy bricks at me; and now it begins to look as if I
should survive to see myself impotent and forgotten. It's a pity suicide
is not thought the ticket in the best circles.
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 SIDNEY COLVIN
_Feb. 1894._
DEAR COLVIN,--By a reaction, when your letter is a little decent, mine
is to be naked and unashamed. We have been much exercised. No one can
prophesy here, of course, and the balance still hangs trembling, but I
_think_ it will go for peace.
The mail was very late this time: hence the paltriness of this note.
When it came and I had read it, I retired with _The Ebb Tide_ and read
it all before I slept. I did not dream it was near as good; I am afraid
I think it excellent. A little indecision about Attwater, not much. It
gives me great hope, as I see I _can_ work in that constipated, mosaic
manner, which is what I have to do just now with _Weir of Hermiston_.
We have given a ball; I send you a paper describing the event. We have
two guests in the house, Captain-Count Wurmbrand and Monsieur Albert de
Lautreppe. Lautreppe is awfully nice--a quiet, gentlemanly fellow,
_gonfle de reves_, as he describes himself--once a sculptor in the
atelier of Henry Crosse, he knows something of art, and is really a
resource to me.
Letter from Meredith very kind. Have you seen no more of Graham?
What about my Grandfather? The family history will grow to be quite a
chapter.
I suppose I am growing sensitive; perhaps, by living among barbarians, I
expect more civility. Look at this from the author of a very interesting
and laudatory critique. He gives quite a false description of something
of mine, and talks about my "insolence." Frankly, I supposed "insolence"
to be a tapu word. I do not use it to a gentleman, I would not write it
of a gentleman: I may be wrong, but I believe we did not write it of a
gentleman in old days, and in my view he (clever fellow as he is) wants
to be kicked for applying it to me. By writing a novel--even a bad
one--I do not make myself a criminal for anybody to insult. This may
amuse you. But either there is a change in journalism, too gradual for
you to remark it on the spot, or there is a change in me. I cannot bear
these phrases; I long to resent them. My forbears, the tenant farmers of
the Mures, would not have suffered such expressions unless it had been
from Cauldwell, or Rowallan, or maybe Auchendrane. My Family Pride
bristles. I am like the negro, "I just heard last night" who my great,
great, great, great grandfather was.--Ever yours,
R. L. S.
TO J. H. BATES
The next is to a correspondent in Cincinnati, who had been the
founder of an R. L. S. Society in that city, "originally," he writes
me, under date April 7, 1895, "the outcome of a boyish fancy, but it
has now grown into something more substantial."
_Vailima, 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 chapter, and I need not remind you (for you have
said it yourself) how much depends upon your own exertions whether to
make it to me a real honour or only a derision. This is to let you know
that I accept the position that you have seriously offered to me in a
quite serious spirit. I need scarce tell you that I shall always be
pleased to receive reports of your proceedings; and if I do not always
acknowledge them, you are to remember that I am a man very much occupied
otherwise, and not at all to suppose that I have lost interest in my
chapter.
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 ARCHER
_Vailima, 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."
Marjorie Fleming I have known, as you surmise, for long. She was
possibly--no, I take back possibly--she was one of the greatest works of
God. Your note about the resemblance of her verses to mine gave me great
joy, though it only proved me a plagiarist. By the by, was it not over
_The Child's Garden of Verses_ that we first scraped acquaintance? I am
sorry indeed to hear that my esteemed correspondent Tomarcher has such
poor taste in literature.[75] I fear he cannot have inherited this trait
from his dear papa. Indeed, I may say I know it, for I remember the
energy of papa's disapproval when the work passed through his hands on
its way to a second birth, which none regrets more than myself. It is an
odd fact, or perhaps a very natural one; I find few greater pleasures
than reading my own works, but I never, O I never read _The Black
Arrow_. In that country Tomarcher reigns supreme. Well, and after all,
if Tomarcher likes it, it has not been written in vain.
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 round, in the gas lamps and the
crowded theatres, when I am away here in the tropical forest and the
vast silences!
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 SIDNEY COLVIN
Partly concerning a fresh rising, this time of the partisans of
Tamasese from the district of Atua, which had occurred and was after
some time suppressed; partly in reference to the visit of Mr. Sidney
Lysaght; partly in reply to a petition that his letters might be less
entirely taken up with native affairs, of relatively little meaning
to his correspondent.
[_Vailima, April 1894._]
MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is the very day the mail goes, and I have as yet
written you nothing. But it was just as well--as it was all about my
"blacks and chocolates," and what of it had relation to whites you will
read some of in the Times. It means, as you will see, that I have at one
blow quarrelled with _all_ the officials of Samoa, the Foreign Office,
and I suppose her Majesty the Queen with milk and honey blest. But
you'll see in the Times. I am very well indeed, but just about dead and
mighty glad the mail is near here, and I can just give up all hope of
contending with my letters, and lie down for the rest of the day. These
Times letters are not easy to write. And I dare say the consuls say,
"Why, then, does he write them?"
I had miserable luck with _St. Ives_; being already half-way through it,
a book I had ordered six months ago arrives at last, and I have to
change the first half of it from top to bottom! How could I have dreamed
the French prisoners were watched over like a female charity school,
kept in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week? And I had made all
my points on the idea that they were unshaved and clothed anyhow.
However, this last is better business; if only the book had come when I
ordered it! _A propos_, many of the books you announce don't come as a
matter of fact. When they are of any value, it is best to register them.
Your letter, alas! is not here; I sent it down to the cottage, with all
my mail, for Fanny; on Sunday night a boy comes up with a lantern and a
note from Fanny, to say the woods are full of Atuas and I must bring a
horse down that instant, as the posts are established beyond her on the
road, and she does not want to have the fight going on between us.
Impossible to get a horse; so I started in the dark on foot, with a
revolver, and my spurs on my bare feet, leaving directions that the boy
should mount after me with the horse. Try such an experience on Our Road
once, and do it, if you please, after you have been down town from nine
o'clock till six, on board the ship-of-war lunching, teaching Sunday
School (I actually do) and making necessary visits; and the Saturday
before, having sat all day from 1/2-past six to 1/2-past four, scriving
at my Times letter. About half-way up, just in fact at "point" of the
outposts, I met Fanny coming up. Then all night long I was being wakened
with scares that really should be looked into, though I _knew_ there was
nothing in them and no bottom to the whole story; and the drums and
shouts and cries from Tanugamanono and the town keeping up an all-night
corybantic chorus in the moonlight--the moon rose late--and the
search-light of the war-ship in the harbour making a jewel of brightness
as it lit up the bay of Apia in the distance. And then next morning,
about eight o'clock, a drum coming out of the woods and a party of
patrols who had been in the woods on our left front (which is our true
rear) coming up to the house, and meeting there another party who had
been in the woods on our right {front / rear} which is Vaea Mountain,
and 43 of them being entertained to ava and biscuits on the verandah,
and marching off at last in single file for Apia. Briefly, it is not
much wonder if your letter and my whole mail was left at the cottage,
and I have no means of seeing or answering particulars.
The whole thing was nothing but a bottomless scare; it was _obviously_
so; you couldn't make a child believe it was anything else, but it has
made the consuls sit up. My own private scares were really abominably
annoying; as for instance after I had got to sleep for the ninth time
perhaps--and that was no easy matter either, for I had a crick in my
neck so agonising that I had to sleep sitting up--I heard noises as of a
man being murdered in the boys' house. To be sure, said I, this is
nothing again, but if a man's head was being taken, the noises would be
the same! So I had to get up, stifle my cries of agony from the crick,
get my revolver, and creep out stealthily to the boys' house. And there
were two of them sitting up, keeping watch of their own accord like good
boys, and whiling the time over a game of Sweepi (Cascino--the whist of
our islanders)--and one of them was our champion idiot, Misifolo, and I
suppose he was holding bad cards, and losing all the time--and these
noises were his humorous protests against Fortune!
Well, excuse this excursion into my "blacks and chocolates." It is the
last. You will have heard from Lysaght how I failed to write last mail.
The said Lysaght seems to me a very nice fellow. We were only sorry he
could not stay with us longer. Austin came back from school last week,
which made a great time for the Amanuensis, you may be sure. Then on
Saturday, the _Curacoa_ came in--same commission, with all our old
friends; and on Sunday, as already mentioned, Austin and I went down to
service and had lunch afterwards in the wardroom. The officers were
awfully nice to Austin; they are the most amiable ship in the world; and
after lunch we had a paper handed round on which we were to guess, and
sign our guess, of the number of leaves on the pine-apple; I never saw
this game before, but it seems it is much practised in the Queen's
Navee. When all have betted, one of the party begins to strip the
pine-apple head, and the person whose guess is furthest out has to pay
for the sherry. My equanimity was disturbed by shouts of _The American
Commodore_, and I found that Austin had entered and lost about a bottle
of sherry! He turned with great composure and addressed me. "I am afraid
I must look to you, Uncle Louis." The Sunday School racket is only an
experiment which I took up at the request of the late American Land
Commissioner; I am trying it for a month, and if I do as ill as I
believe, and the boys find it only half as tedious as I do, I think it
will end in a month. I have _carte blanche_, and say what I like; but
does any single soul understand me?
Fanny is on the whole very much better. Lloyd has been under the
weather, and goes for a month to the South Island of New Zealand for
some skating, save the mark! I get all the skating I want among
officials.
Dear Colvin, please remember that my life passes among my "blacks or
chocolates." If I were to do as you propose, in a bit of a tiff, it
would cut you off entirely from my life. You must try to exercise a
trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into
some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you? I
think you are truly a little too Cockney with me.--Ever yours,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO W. B. YEATS
_Vailima, 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 Hyeres. 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
Innisfree_. 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 MEREDITH
The young lady referred to in the following is Mr. Meredith's
daughter, now Mrs. H. Sturgis; the bearer of the introduction, Mr.
Sidney Lysaght, author of _The Marplot_ and _One of the Grenvilles._
It is only in the first few chapters of Mr. Meredith's _Amazing
Marriage_ that the character of Gower Woodseer has been allowed to
retain any likeness to that of R. L. S.
_Vailima, 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 in the
well-known hand itself. We had but a few days of him, and liked him
well. There was a sort of geniality and inward fire about him at which I
warmed my hands. It is long since I have seen a young man who has left
in me such a favourable impression; and I find myself telling myself,
"O, I must tell this to Lysaght," or, "This will interest him," in a
manner very unusual after so brief an acquaintance. The whole of my
family shared in this favourable impression, and my halls have re-echoed
ever since, I am sure he will be amused to know, with _Widdicombe Fair_.
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 Woodseer 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 Woodseer should have declined into the pantaloon
_Tusitala_. It is perhaps better so. Let us continue to see each other
as we were, and accept, my dear Meredith, my love and respect.
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 also that they shaved them twice a week--damns the whole
beginning. If it had been sent in time, it would have saved me a deal of
trouble....
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. SITWELL
[_Vailima, 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 man, with elderly preoccupations, whom I should be ashamed to
show you for your old friend; but not a hope of my dying soon and
cleanly, and "winning off the stage." Rather I am daily better in
physical health. I shall have to see this business out, after all; and I
think, in that case, they should have--they might have--spared me all my
ill-health this decade past, if it were not to unbar the doors. I have
no taste for old age, and my nose is to be rubbed in it in spite of my
face. I was meant to die young, and the gods do not love me.
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 aspiration 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 could have shown me the Edinburgh Edition, I
suppose I should have died. It is with gratitude and wonder that I
consider "the way in which I have been led." Could a more preposterous
idea have occurred to us in those days when we used to search our
pockets for coppers, too often in vain, and combine forces to produce
the threepence necessary for two glasses of beer, or wander down the
Lothian Road without any, than that I should be strong and well at the
age of forty-three in the island of Upolu, and that you should be at
home bringing out the Edinburgh Edition? If it had been possible, I
should almost have preferred the Lothian Road Edition, say, with a
picture of the old Dutch smuggler on the covers. I have now something
heavy on my mind. I had always a great sense of kinship with poor Robert
Fergusson--so clever a boy, so wild, of such a mixed strain, so
unfortunate, born in the same town with me, and, as I always felt,
rather by express intimation than from evidence, so like myself. Now the
injustice with which the one Robert is rewarded and the other left out
in the cold sits heavy on me, and I wish you could think of some way in
which I could do honour to my unfortunate namesake. Do you think it
would look like affectation to dedicate the whole edition to his memory?
I think it would. The sentiment which would dictate it to me is too
abstruse; and besides, I think my wife is the proper person to receive
the dedication of my life's work. At the same time, it is very odd--it
really looks like the transmigration of souls--I feel that I must do
something for Fergusson; Burns has been before me with the gravestone.
It occurs to me you might take a walk down the Canongate and see in what
condition the stone is. If it be at all uncared for, we might repair it,
and perhaps add a few words of inscription.
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 describing my arrival in
Edinburgh on a visit to yourself and your placing in my hands the papers
of the story. I actually wrote it, and then condemned the idea--as being
a little too like Scott, I suppose. Now I must really find the MS. and
try to finish it for the E.E. It will give you, what I should so much
like you to have, another corner of your own in that lofty monument.
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
by Robert Burns has been
repaired at the
charges of Robert Louis Stevenson,
and is by him re-dedicated to
the memory of Robert Fergusson,
as the gift of one Edinburgh
lad to another.
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 SIDNEY COLVIN
_Vailima, May 18th, 1894._
MY DEAR COLVIN,--Your proposals for the Edinburgh Edition are entirely
to my mind. About the _Amateur Emigrant_, it shall go to you by this
mail well slashed. If you like to slash some more on your own account, I
give you permission. 'Tis not a great work; but since it goes to make up
the two first volumes as proposed, I presume it has not been written in
vain.[76]--_Miscellanies_. I see with some alarm the proposal to print
_Juvenilia_; does it not seem to you taking myself a little too much as
Grandfather William? I am certainly not so young as I once was--a lady
took occasion to remind me of the fact no later agone than last night.
"Why don't you leave that to the young men, Mr. Stevenson?" said
she--but when I remember that I felt indignant at even John Ruskin when
he did something of the kind I really feel myself blush from head to
heel. If you want to make up the first volume, there are a good many
works which I took the trouble to prepare for publication and which have
never been republished. In addition to _Roads_ and _Dancing Children_,
referred to by you, there is _An Autumn Effect_ in the Portfolio, and a
paper on Fontainebleau--_Forest Notes_ is the name of it--in Cornhill. I
have no objection to any of these being edited, say with a scythe, and
reproduced. But I heartily abominate and reject the idea of reprinting
_The Pentland Rising_. For God's sake let me get buried first.
_Tales and Fantasies._ Vols. I. and II. have my hearty approval. But I
think III. and IV. had better be crammed into one as you suggest. I will
reprint none of the stories mentioned. They are below the mark. Well, I
dare say the beastly _Body-Snatcher_ has merit, and I am unjust to it
from my recollections of the Pall Mall. But the other two won't do. For
vols. V. and VI., now changed into IV. and V., I propose the common
title of _South Sea Yarns_. There! These are all my differences of
opinion. I agree with every detail of your arrangement, and, as you see,
my objections have turned principally on the question of hawking unripe
fruit. I dare say it is all pretty green, but that is no reason for us
to fill the barrow with trash. Think of having a new set of type cast,
paper especially made, etc., in order to set up rubbish that is not fit
for the Saturday Scotsman. It would be the climax of shame.
I am sending you a lot of verses, which had best, I think, be called
_Underwoods_ Book III., but in what order are they to go? Also, I am
going on every day a little, till I get sick of it, with the attempt to
get _The Emigrant_ compressed into life; I know I can--or you can after
me--do it. It is only a question of time and prayer and ink, and should
leave something, no, not good, but not all bad--a very genuine
appreciation of these folks. You are to remember besides there is that
paper of mine on Bunyan in the Magazine of Art. O, and then there's
another thing in Seeley called some spewsome name, I cannot recall it.
Well--come, here goes for _Juvenilia_. _Dancing Infants_, _Roads_, _An
Autumn Effect_, _Forest Notes_ (but this should come at the end of them,
as it's really rather riper), the t'other thing from Seeley, and I'll
tell you, you may put in my letter to the Church of Scotland--it's not
written amiss, and I dare say _The Philosophy of Umbrellas_ might go in,
but there I stick--and remember _that_ was a collaboration with James
Walter Ferrier. O, and there was a little skit called _The Charity
Bazaar_, which you might see; I don't think it would do. Now, I do not
think there are two other words that should be printed.--By the way,
there is an article of mine called _The Day after To-morrow_ in the
Contemporary which you might find room for somewhere; it's no' bad.
Very busy with all these affairs and some native ones also.
TO R. A. M. STEVENSON
[_Vailima, June 17th, 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, was quite
a great party, and dates back to the wars of Edward First. The last male
heir of Stevenson of Stevenson died 1670, L220, 10s. to the bad, from
drink. About the same time the Stevensons, who were mostly in Cunningham
before, crop up suddenly in the parish of Neilston, over the border in
Renfrewshire. Of course, they may have been there before, but there is
no word of them in that parish till 1675 in any extracts I have. Our
first traceable ancestor was a tenant farmer of Mure of
Cauldwell's--James in Nether Carsewell. Presently two families of
maltmen are found in Glasgow, both, by re-duplicated proofs, related to
James (the son of James) in Nether Carsewell. We descend by his second
marriage from Robert; one of these died 1733. It is not very romantic up
to now, but has interested me surprisingly to fish out, always hoping
for more--and occasionally getting at least a little clearness and
confirmation. But the earliest date, 1655, apparently the marriage of
James in Nether Carsewell, cannot as yet be pushed back. From which of
any number of dozen little families in Cunningham we should derive, God
knows! Of course, it doesn't matter a hundred years hence, an argument
fatal to all human enterprise, industry, or pleasure. And to me it will
be a deadly disappointment if I cannot roll this stone away! One
generation further might be nothing, but it is my present object of
desire, and we are so near it! There is a man in the same parish called
Constantine; if I could only trace to him, I could take you far afield
by that one talisman of the strange Christian name of Constantine. But
no such luck! And I kind of fear we shall stick at James.
I. JAMES, a tenant of the Mures, in Nether-Carsewell,
|| Neilston, married (1665?) Jean Keir.
|| |
----------------------------------------------
|
II. ROBERT (Maltman in Glasgow), died 1733,
| married 1st; married second,
| Elizabeth Cumming.
| ||
| ------------------------------
| |
WILLIAM (Maltman in Glasgow). III. ROBERT (Maltman in
| Glasgow), married
-------------------- Margaret Fulton (had
| | | a large family).
| | | ||
ROBERT, MARION, ELIZABETH. 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.
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 pride, not
admiration; it is an expansion of the identity, intimately pleasing, and
wholly uncritical; I can expend myself in the person of an inglorious
ancestor with perfect comfort; or a disgraced, if I could find one. I
suppose, perhaps, it is more to me who am childless, and refrain with a
certain shock from looking forwards. But, I am sure, in the solid
grounds of race, that you have it also in some degree.
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
feel harassed. I have a great family here about me, a great anxiety. The
loss (to use my grandfather's expression), the "loss" of our family is
that we are disbelievers in the morrow--perhaps I should say, rather, in
next year. The future is _always_ black to us; it was to Robert
Stevenson; to Thomas; I suspect to Alan; to R. A. M. S. it was so almost
to his ruin in youth; to R. L. S., who had a hard hopeful strain in him
from his mother, it was not so much so once, but becomes daily more so.
Daily so much more so, that I have a painful difficulty in believing I
can ever finish another book, or that the public will ever read it.
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 me. They
are such illogical fools; a logical fool in an office, with a lot of red
tape, is conceivable. Furthermore, he is as much as we have any reason
to expect of officials--a thoroughly common-place, unintellectual lot.
But these people are wholly on wires; laying their ears down, skimming
away, pausing as though shot, and presto! full spread on the other tack.
I observe in the official class mostly an insane jealousy of the
smallest kind, as compared to which the artist's is of a grave, modest
character--the actor's, even; a desire to extend his little authority,
and to relish it like a glass of wine, that is _impayable_. Sometimes,
when I see one of these little kings strutting over one of his
victories--wholly illegal, perhaps, and certain to be reversed to his
shame if his superiors ever heard of it--I could weep. The strange thing
is that they _have nothing else_. I auscultate them in vain; no real
sense of duty, no real comprehension, no real attempt to comprehend, no
wish for information--you cannot offend one of them more bitterly than
by offering information, though it is certain that you have _more_, and
obvious that you have _other_, information than they have; and talking
of policy, they could not play a better stroke than by listening to you,
and it need by no means influence their action. _Tenez_, you know what a
French post office or railway official is? That is the diplomatic card
to the life. Dickens is not in it; caricature fails.
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, _St. 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 doing it
though; and if you ask me why! After that I am on _Weir of Hermiston_
and _Heathercat_, two Scotch stories, which will either be something
different, or I shall have failed. The first is generally designed, and
is a private story of two or three characters in a very grim vein. The
second--alas! the thought--is an attempt at a real historical novel, to
present a whole field of time; the race--our own race--the west land and
Clydesdale blue bonnets, under the influence of their last trial, when
they got to a pitch of organisation in madness that no other peasantry
has ever made an offer at. I was going to call it _The Killing Time_,
but this man Crockett has forestalled me in that. Well, it'll be a big
smash if I fail in it; but a gallant attempt. All my weary reading as a
boy, which you remember well enough, will come to bear on it; and if my
mind will keep up to the point it was in a while back, perhaps I can
pull it through.
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 _maitre-es-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.
I have looked this trash over, and it is not at all the letter I wanted
to write--not truck about officials, ancestors, and the like
rancidness--but you have to let your pen go in its own broken-down gait,
like an old butcher's pony, stop when it pleases, and go on again as it
will.--Ever, my dear Bob, your affectionate cousin,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
_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 _Curacoas_. 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.
TO HENRY JAMES
_Vailima, 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 to a barber or keep a baked-potato stall. But I have no
doubt in the course of a week, or perhaps to-morrow, things will look
better.
We have at present in port the model warship of Great Britain. She is
called the _Curacoa_, 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 Curacoa Club, and the road up to Vailima
is known as the Curacoa 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[77] quarters, with the wounded falling down at the
word; the ambulances hastening up and carrying them away; the Captain
suddenly crying, "Fire in the ward-room!" and the squad hastening
forward with the hose; and, last and most curious spectacle of all, all
the men in their dust-coloured fatigue clothes, at a note of the bugle,
falling simultaneously flat on deck, and the ship proceeding with its
prostrate crew--_quasi_ to ram an enemy; our dinner at night in a wild
open anchorage, the ship rolling almost to her gunwales, and showing us
alternately her bulwarks up in the sky, and then the wild broken cliffy
palm-crested shores of the island with the surf thundering and leaping
close aboard. We had the ward-room mess on deck, lit by pink wax tapers,
everybody, of course, in uniform but myself, and the first lieutenant
(who is a rheumaticky body) wrapped in a boat cloak. Gradually the
sunset faded out, the island disappeared from the eye, though it
remained menacingly present to the ear with the voice of the surf; and
then the captain turned on the searchlight and gave us the coast, the
beach, the trees, the native houses, and the cliffs by glimpses of
daylight, a kind of deliberate lightning. About which time, I suppose,
we must have come as far as the dessert, and were probably drinking our
first glass of port to Her Majesty. We stayed two days at the island,
and had, in addition, a very picturesque snapshot at the native life.
The three islands of Manu'a are independent, and are ruled over by a
little slip of a half-caste girl about twenty, who sits all day in a
pink gown, in a little white European house with about a quarter of an
acre of roses in front of it, looking at the palm-trees on the village
street, and listening to the surf. This, so far as I could discover, was
all she had to do. "This is a very dull place," she said. It appears she
could go to no other village for fear of raising the jealousy of her own
people in the capital. And as for going about "tafatafaoing," as we say
here, its cost was too enormous. A strong able-bodied native must walk
in front of her and blow the conch shell continuously from the moment
she leaves one house until the moment she enters another. Did you ever
blow the conch shell? I presume not; but the sweat literally hailed off
that man, and I expected every moment to see him burst a blood-vessel.
We were entertained to kava in the guest-house with some very original
features. The young men who run for the _kava_ have a right to
misconduct themselves _ad libitum_ on the way back; and though they were
told to restrain themselves on the occasion of our visit, there was a
strange hurly-burly at their return, when they came beating the trees
and the posts of the houses, leaping, shouting, and yelling like
Bacchants.
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 _Curacoa_ and Manu'a, I am, at least
on paper. And I decline any longer to give you examples of how not to
write.
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 _Abbe 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 MARCEL SCHWOB
_Vailima, 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 savoury 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 farewells, even
in art; even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent. So here
with these exquisite pieces the XVIIth, XVIIIth, and IVth of the present
collection. You will perhaps never excel them; I should think the
"Hermes," never. Well, you will do something else, and of that I am in
expectation.--Yours cordially,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO A. ST. GAUDENS
_Vailima, 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 BOODLE
_Vailima, 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, varied by acute revulsions; and those who are by nature
courageous and cheerful, and have grown old in experience, learn to rub
their hands over infinitesimal successes. However, as I really believe
there is some good done in the long run--_gutta cavat lapidem non vi_ in
this business--it is a useful and honourable career in which no one
should be ashamed to embark. Always remember the fable of the sun, the
storm, and the traveller's cloak. Forget wholly and for ever all small
pruderies, and remember that _you cannot change ancestral feelings of
right and wrong without what is practically soul-murder_. Barbarous as
the customs may seem, always hear them with patience, always judge them
with gentleness, always find in them some seed of good; see that you
always develop them; remember that all you can do is to civilise the man
in the line of his own civilisation, such as it is. And never expect,
never believe in, thaumaturgic conversions. They may do very well for
St. Paul; in the case of an Andaman islander they mean less than
nothing. In fact, what you have to do is to teach the parents in the
interests of their great-grandchildren.
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 I have done. _Deteriora sequor_. And you must
somehow manage to forgive your old friend; and if you will be so very
good, continue to give us news of you, and let us share the knowledge of
your adventures, sure that it will be always followed with
interest--even if it is answered with the silence of ingratitude. For I
am not a fool; I know my faults, I know they are ineluctable, I know
they are growing on me. I know I may offend again, and I warn you of it.
But the next time I offend, tell me so plainly and frankly like a lady,
and don't lacerate my heart and bludgeon my vanity with imaginary faults
of your own and purely gratuitous penance. I might suspect you of irony!
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 must just imagine her sentiments. I find I have not the heart to
speak of your recent loss. You remember perhaps, when my father died,
you told me those ugly images of sickness, decline, and impaired reason,
which then haunted me day and night, would pass away and be succeeded by
things more happily characteristic. I have found it so. He now haunts
me, strangely enough, in two guises; as a man of fifty, lying on a
hillside and carving mottoes on a stick, strong and well; and as a
younger man, running down the sands into the sea near North Berwick,
myself--_aetat. 11_--somewhat horrified at finding him so beautiful when
stripped! I hand on your own advice to you in case you have forgotten
it, as I know one is apt to do in seasons of bereavement.--Ever yours,
with much love and sympathy,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. A. BAKER
This refers again to the printing of some of his books in Braille
type for the blind.
_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 SIDNEY COLVIN
_July, 1894._
MY DEAR COLVIN,--I have to thank you this time for a very good letter,
and will announce for the future, though I cannot now begin to put in
practice, good intentions for our correspondence. I will try to return
to the old system and write from time to time during the month; but
truly you did not much encourage me to continue! However, that is all
by-past. I do not know that there is much in your letter that calls for
answer. Your questions about _St. Ives_ were practically answered in my
last; so were your wails about the edition, _Amateur Emigrant_, etc. By
the end of the year _St. I._ will be practically finished, whatever it
be worth, and that I know not. When shall I receive proofs of the Magnum
Opus? or shall I receive them at all?
The return of the Amanuensis feebly lightens my heart. You can see the
heavy weather I was making of it with my unaided pen. The last month has
been particularly cheery largely owing to the presence of our good
friends the Curacoas. She is really a model ship, charming officers and
charming seamen. They gave a ball last month, which was very rackety and
joyous and naval....
On the following day, about one o'clock, three horsemen might have been
observed approaching Vailima, who gradually resolved themselves into two
petty officers and a native guide. Drawing himself up and saluting, the
spokesman (a corporal of Marines) addressed me thus. "Me and my
shipmates inwites Mr. and Mrs. Stevens, Mrs. Strong, Mr. Austin, and Mr.
Balfour to a ball to be given to-night in the self-same 'all." It was of
course impossible to refuse, though I contented myself with putting in a
very brief appearance. One glance was sufficient; the ball went off like
a rocket from the start. I had only time to watch Belle careering around
with a gallant bluejacket of exactly her own height--the standard of
the British navy--an excellent dancer and conspicuously full of
small-talk--and to hear a remark from a beach-comber, "It's a nice sight
this some way, to see the officers dancing like this with the men, but I
tell you, sir, these are the men that'll fight together!"
I tell you, Colvin, the acquaintance of the men--and boys--makes me feel
patriotic. Eeles in particular is a man whom I respect. I am half in a
mind to give him a letter of introduction to you when he goes home. In
case you feel inclined to make a little of him, give him a dinner, ask
Henry James to come to meet him, etc.--you might let me know. I don't
know that he would show his best, but he is a remarkably fine fellow, in
every department of life.
We have other visitors in port. A Count Festetics de Tolna, an Austrian
officer, a very pleasant, simple, boyish creature, with his young wife,
daughter of an American millionaire; he is a friend of our own Captain
Wurmbrand, and it is a great pity Wurmbrand is away.
Glad you saw and liked Lysaght. He has left in our house a most cheerful
and pleasing memory, as a good, pleasant, brisk fellow with good health
and brains, and who enjoys himself and makes other people happy. I am
glad he gave you a good report of our surroundings and way of life; but
I knew he would, for I believe he had a glorious time--and gave one.[78]
I am on fair terms with the two Treaty officials, though all such
intimacies are precarious; with the consuls, I need not say, my position
is deplorable. The President (Herr Emil Schmidt) is a rather dreamy man,
whom I like. Lloyd, Graham and I go to breakfast with him to-morrow; the
next day the whole party of us lunch on the _Curacoa_ and go in the
evening to a _Bierabend_ at Dr. Funk's. We are getting up a paper-chase
for the following week with some of the young German clerks, and have in
view a sort of child's party for grown-up persons with kissing games,
etc., here at Vailima. Such is the gay scene in which we move. Now I
have done something, though not as much as I wanted, to give you an idea
of how we are getting on, and I am keenly conscious that there are other
letters to do before the mail goes.--Yours ever,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO J. M. BARRIE
_Vailima, July 13, 1894._
MY 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 always see your characters evolve. But, indeed, I
did not pay much attention; being all bent upon my visit to a
shooting-box, where I should fish a real trout-stream, and I believe
preserved. I did, too, and it was a charming stream, clear as crystal,
without a trace of peat--a strange thing in Scotland--and alive with
trout; the name of it I cannot remember, it was something like the
Queen's River, and in some hazy way connected with memories of Mary
Queen of Scots. It formed an epoch in my life, being the end of all my
trout-fishing. I had always been accustomed to pause and very
laboriously to kill every fish as I took it. But in the Queen's River I
took so good a basket that I forgot these niceties; and when I sat down,
in a hard rain shower, under a bank, to take my sandwiches and sherry,
lo! and behold, there was the basketful of trouts still kicking in their
agony.
I had a very unpleasant conversation with my conscience. All that
afternoon I persevered in fishing, brought home my basket in triumph,
and sometime that night, "in the wee sma' hours ayont the twal," I
finally forswore the gentle craft of fishing. I dare say your local
knowledge may identify this historic river; I wish it could go farther
and identify also that particular Free kirk in which I sat and groaned
on Sunday. While my hand is in I must tell you a story. At that antique
epoch you must not fall into the vulgar error that I was myself ancient.
I was, on the contrary, very young, very green, and (what you will
appreciate, Mr. Barrie) very shy. There came one day to lunch at the
house two very formidable old ladies--or one very formidable, and the
other what you please--answering to the honoured and historic name of
the Miss C---- A----'s of Balnamoon. At table I was exceedingly funny,
and entertained the company with tales of geese and bubbly-jocks. I was
great in the expression of my terror for these bipeds, and suddenly this
horrid, severe, and eminently matronly old lady put up a pair of gold
eye-glasses, looked at me awhile in silence, and pronounced in a
clangorous voice her verdict. "You give me very much the effect of a
coward, Mr. Stevenson!" I had very nearly left two vices behind me at
Glenogil--fishing and jesting at table. And of one thing you may be very
sure, my lips were no more opened at that meal.
_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
tousse 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 the ghoul-haunted woodland of Fever--but whither
that way points there can be no question--and there will be a meeting of
the twa Hoasting Scots Makers in spite of fate, fortune and the Devil.
_Absit omen!_
My dear Barrie, I am a little in the dark about this new work of yours:[79]
what is to become of me afterwards? You say carefully--methought
anxiously--that I was no longer me when I grew up? I cannot bear this
suspense: what is it? It's no forgery? And AM I HANGIT? These are the
elements of a very pretty lawsuit which you had better come to Samoa to
compromise. I am enjoying a great pleasure that I had long looked
forward to, reading Orme's _History of Indostan_; I had been looking out
for it everywhere; but at last, in four volumes, large quarto,
beautiful type and page, and with a delectable set of maps and plans,
and all the names of the places wrongly spelled--it came to Samoa,
little Barrie. I tell you frankly, you had better come soon. I am sair
failed a'ready; and what I may be if you continue to dally, I dread to
conceive. I may be speechless; already, or at least for a month or so,
I'm little better than a teetoller--I beg pardon, a teetotaller. It is
not exactly physical, for I am in good health, working four or five
hours a day in my plantation, and intending to ride a paper-chase next
Sunday--ay, man, that's a fact, and I havena had the hert to breathe it
to my mother yet--the obligation's poleetical, for I am trying every
means to live well with my German neighbours--and, O Barrie, but it's no
easy!... To be sure, there are many exceptions. And the whole of the
above must be regarded as private--strictly private. Breathe it not in
Kirriemuir: tell it not to the daughters of Dundee! What a nice extract
this would make for the daily papers! and how it would facilitate my
position here!
_August 5th._--This is Sunday, the Lord's Day. "The hour of attack
approaches." And it is a singular consideration what I risk; I may yet
be the subject of a tract, and a good tract too--such as one which I
remember reading with recreant awe and rising hair in my youth, of a boy
who was a very good boy, and went to Sunday Schule, and one day kipped
from it, and went and actually bathed, and was dashed over a waterfall,
and he was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. A dangerous
trade, that, and one that I have to practise. I'll put in a word when I
get home again, to tell you whether I'm killed or not. "Accident in the
(Paper) Hunting Field: death of a notorious author. We deeply regret to
announce the death of the most unpopular man in Samoa, who broke his
neck, at the descent of Magiagi, from the misconduct of his little
raving lunatic of an old beast of a pony. It is proposed to commemorate
the incident by the erection of a suitable pile. The design (by our
local architect, Mr. Walker) is highly artificial, with a rich and
voluminous Crockett at each corner, a small but impervious Barrieer at
the entrance, an arch at the top, an Archer of a pleasing but solid
character at the bottom; the colour will be genuine William-Black; and
Lang, lang may the ladies sit wi' their fans in their hands." Well,
well, they may sit as they sat for me, and little they'll reck, the
ungrateful jauds! Muckle they cared about Tusitala when they had him!
But now ye can see the difference; now leddies, ye can repent, when ower
late, o' your former cauldness and what ye'll perhaps allow me to ca'
your _tepeedity_! He was beautiful as the day, but his day is done! And
perhaps, as he was maybe gettin' a wee thing fly-blown, it's nane too
shuene.
_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 question, sir, is otiose and malign; it deserves, it shall
have no answer. And now without further delay to the main purpose of
this hasty note. We received and we have already in fact distributed the
gorgeous fahbrics of Kirriemuir. Whether from the splendour of the robes
themselves, or from the direct nature of the compliments with which you
had directed us to accompany the presentations, one young lady blushed
as she received the proofs of your munificence.... Bad ink, and the
dregs of it at that, but the heart in the right place. Still very
cordially interested in my Barrie and wishing him well through his
sickness, which is of the body, and long defended from mine, which is of
the head, and by the impolite might be described as idiocy. The whole
head is useless, and the whole sitting part painful: reason, the recent
Paper Chase.
There was racing and chasing in Vailele plantation,
And vastly we enjoyed it,
But, alas! for the state of my foundation,
For it wholly has destroyed it.
Come, my mind is looking up. The above is wholly impromptu.--On oath,
TUSITALA.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
The missionary view of the Sunday paper-chase, with an account of
Stevenson's apologies to the ladies and gentlemen of the mission,
have been printed by Mr. W. E. Clarke in the Chronicle of the London
Missionary Society for April and May 1908.
_[Vailima] Aug. 7th, 1894._
MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is to inform you, sir, that on Sunday last (and
this is Tuesday) I attained my ideal here, and we had a paper-chase in
Vailele Plantation, about 15 miles, I take it, from us; and it was all
that could be wished. It is really better fun than following the hounds,
since you have to be your own hound, and a precious bad hound I was,
following every false scent on the whole course to the bitter end; but I
came in 3rd at the last on my little Jack, who stuck to it gallantly,
and awoke the praises of some discriminating persons. (5 + 7 + 2-1/2 =
14-1/2 miles; yes, that is the count.) We had quite the old sensations
of exhilaration, discovery, an appeal to a savage instinct; and I felt
myself about 17 again, a pleasant experience. However, it was on the
Sabbath Day, and I am now a pariah among the English, as if I needed any
increment of unpopularity. I must not go again; it gives so much
unnecessary tribulation to poor people, and, sure, we don't want to make
tribulation. I have been forbidden to work, and have been instead doing
my two or three hours in the plantation every morning. I only wish
somebody would pay me L10 a day for taking care of cacao, and I could
leave literature to others. Certainly, if I have plenty of exercise, and
no work, I feel much better; but there is Biles the butcher! him we
have always with us.
I do not much like novels, I begin to think, but I am enjoying
exceedingly Orme's _History of Hindostan_, a lovely book in its way, in
large quarto, with a quantity of maps, and written in a very lively and
solid eighteenth century way, never picturesque except by accident and
from a kind of conviction, and a fine sense of order. No historian I
have ever read is so minute; yet he never gives you a word about the
people; his interest is entirely limited in the concatenation of events,
into which he goes with a lucid, almost superhuman, and wholly ghostly
gusto. "By the ghost of a mathematician" the book might be announced. A
very brave, honest book.
Your letter to hand.
Fact is, I don't like the picter.[80] O, it's a good picture, but if you
_ask_ me, you know, I believe, stoutly believe, that mankind, including
you, are going mad. I am not in the midst with the other frenzy dancers,
so I don't catch it wholly; and when you show me a thing--and ask me,
don't you know--Well, well! Glad to get so good an account of the
_Amateur Emigrant_. Talking of which, I am strong for making a volume
out of selections from the South Sea letters; I read over again the King
of Apemama, and it is good in spite of your teeth, and a real curiosity,
a thing that can never be seen again, and the group is annexed and
Tembinoka dead. I wonder, couldn't you send out to me the _first_ five
Butaritari letters and the Low Archipelago ones (both of which I have
lost or mislaid) and I can chop out a perfectly fair volume of what I
wish to be preserved. It can keep for the last of the series.
_Travels and Excursions_, vol. II. Should it not include a paper on S. F.
from the Mag. of Art? The A. E., the New Pacific capital, the Old ditto.
_Silver._ _Squat._ This would give all my works on the States; and though
it ain't very good, it's not so very bad. _Travels and Excursions_, vol.
III., to be these resuscitated letters--_Miscellanies_, vol. II.--_comme
vous voudrez, cher monsieur!_
_Monday, Aug. 13th._--I have a sudden call to go up the coast and must
hurry up with my information. There has suddenly come to our naval
commanders the need of action, they're away up the coast bombarding the
Atua rebels. All morning on Saturday the sound of the bombardment of
Luatuanu'u kept us uneasy. To-day again the big guns have been sounding
further along the coast. One delicious circumstance must not be
forgotten. Our blessed President of the Council--a kind of hoary-headed
urchin, with the dim, timid eyes of extreme childhood and a kind of
beautiful simplicity that endears him to me beyond words--has taken the
head of the army--honour to him for it, for his place is really
there--and gone up the coast in the congenial company of his
housekeeper, a woman coming on for sixty with whom he takes his walks
abroad in the morning in his shirt-sleeves, whom he reads to at night
(in a kind of Popular History of Germany) in the silence of the
Presidential mansion, and with whom (and a couple of camp stools) he
walked out last Sunday to behold the paper-chase. I cannot tell you how
taken I am with this exploit of the President's and the housekeeper's.
It is like Don Quixote, but infinitely superior. If I could only do it
without offence, what a subject it would make!
To-morrow morning early I am off up the coast myself. Therefore you must
allow me to break off here without further ceremony.--Yours ever,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO DR. BAKEWELL
The following is to a physician in Australia.
_Vailima, 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,[81] and often till
twelve, and again in the afternoon from two to four. My hand is quite
destroyed, as you may perceive, to-day to a really unusual extent. I can
sometimes write a decent fist still; but I have just returned with my
arms all stung from three hours' work in the cacao.--Yours, etc.,
R. L. S.
TO JAMES PAYN
_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
_Curacoa_, 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 _taut 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 as lief these people were shot at as
myself--or almost, for then I should have some of the fun, such as it
is.
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 facade; 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 much worse it would be if you had a broken leg!"
when you may have the crushing repartee up your sleeve, "But it is my
leg that is broken." This is a pity. But there are consolations. You are
an Englishman (I believe); you are a man of letters; you have never been
made C.B.; you hair was not red; you have played cribbage and whist; you
did not play either the fiddle or the banjo; you were never an aesthete;
you never contributed to ----'s Journal; your name is not Jabez Balfour;
you are totally unconnected with the Army and Navy departments; I
understand you to have lived within your income--why, cheer up! here are
many legitimate causes of congratulation. I seem to be writing an
obituary notice. _Absit omen!_ But I feel very sure that these
considerations will have done you more good than medicine.
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. I have a sixieme, my beast of a partner has a septieme;
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.
TO MISS MIDDLETON
A letter from the lady to whom this is addressed, and who had been a
friend of the Stevenson family in Edinburgh, had called up some
memories of a Skye terrier, Jura, of whom readers have heard
something already.
_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 DOYLE
The following refers to the papers originally contributed by various
writers to Mr. Jerome's periodical The Idler, under the title _My
First Book_, and afterwards republished in a volume. The references
towards the end are to the illustrations in the pages of The Idler.
_Vailima, Samoa, September 9, 1894._
MY DEAR CONAN DOYLE,--If you found anything to entertain you in my
_Treasure Island_ article, it may amuse you to know that you owe it
entirely to yourself. _Your_ "First Book" was by some accident read
aloud one night in my Baronial 'All. I was consumedly amused by it, so
was the whole family, and we proceeded to hunt up back Idlers and read
the whole series. It is a rattling good series, even people whom you
would not expect came in quite the proper tone--Miss Braddon, for
instance, who was really one of the best where all are good--or all but
one!... In short, I fell in love with "The First Book" series, and
determined that it should be all our first books, and that I could not
hold back where the white plume of Conan Doyle waved gallantly in the
front. I hope they will republish them, though it's a grievous thought
to me that that effigy in the German cap--likewise the other effigy of
the noisome old man with the long hair, telling indelicate stories to a
couple of deformed negresses in a rancid shanty full of wreckage--should
be perpetuated. I may seem to speak in pleasantry--it is only a
seeming--that German cap, sir, would be found, when I come to die,
imprinted on my heart. Enough--my heart is too full. Adieu.--Yours very
truly,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
(in a German cap, damn 'em!).
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
[_Vailima, September 1894._]
MY DEAR COLVIN,--This must be a very measly letter. I have been trying
hard to get along with _St. Ives_. I should now lay it aside for a year
and I dare say I should make something of it after all. Instead of that,
I have to kick against the pricks, and break myself, and spoil the book,
if there were anything to spoil, which I am far from saying. I'm as sick
of the thing as ever any one can be; it's a rudderless hulk; it's a
pagoda, and you can just feel--or I can feel--that it might have been a
pleasant story, if it had been only blessed at baptism.
Our politics have gone on fairly well, but the result is still doubtful.
_Sept. 10th._--I know I have something else to say to you, but
unfortunately I awoke this morning with colly-wobbles, and had to take a
small dose of laudanum with the usual consequences of dry throat,
intoxicated legs, partial madness and total imbecility; and for the
life of me I cannot remember what it is. I have likewise mislaid your
letter amongst the accumulations on my table, not that there was
anything in it. Altogether I am in a poor state. I forgot to tell Baxter
that the dummy had turned up and is a fine, personable-looking volume
and very good reading. Please communicate this to him.
I have just remembered an incident that I really must not let pass. You
have heard a great deal more than you wanted about our political
prisoners. Well, one day, about a fortnight ago, the last of them was
set free--Old Poe, whom I think I must have mentioned to you, the
father-in-law of my cook, was one that I had had a great deal of trouble
with. I had taken the doctor to see him, got him out on sick leave, and
when he was put back again gave bail for him. I must not forget that my
wife ran away with him out of the prison on the doctor's orders and with
the complicity of our friend the gaoler, who really and truly got the
sack for the exploit. As soon as he was finally liberated, Poe called a
meeting of his fellow-prisoners. All Sunday they were debating what they
were to do, and on Monday morning I got an obscure hint from Talolo that
I must expect visitors during the day who were coming to consult me.
These consultations I am now very well used to, and seeing first, that I
generally don't know what to advise, and second that they sometimes
don't take my advice--though in some notable cases they have taken it,
generally to my own wonder with pretty good results--I am not very fond
of these calls. They minister to a sense of dignity, but not peace of
mind, and consume interminable time, always in the morning too, when I
can't afford it. However, this was to be a new sort of consultation. Up
came Poe and some eight other chiefs, squatted in a big circle around
the old dining-room floor, now the smoking-room. And the family, being
represented by Lloyd, Graham, Belle, Austin and myself, proceeded to
exchange the necessary courtesies. Then their talking man began. He
said that they had been in prison, that I had always taken an interest
in them, that they had now been set at liberty without condition,
whereas some of the other chiefs who had been liberated before them were
still under bond to work upon the roads, and that this had set them
considering what they might do to testify their gratitude. They had
therefore agreed to work upon my road as a free gift. They went on to
explain that it was only to be on my road, on the branch that joins my
house with the public way.
Now I was very much gratified at this compliment, although (to one used
to natives) it seemed rather a hollow one. It meant only that I should
have to lay out a good deal of money on tools and food and to give wages
under the guise of presents to some workmen who were most of them old
and in ill-health. Conceive how much I was surprised and touched when I
heard the whole scheme explained to me. They were to return to their
provinces, and collect their families; some of the young men were to
live in Apia with a boat, and ply up and down the coast to A'ana and
Atua (our own Tuamasaga being quite drained of resources) in order to
supply the working squad with food. Tools they did ask for, but it was
especially mentioned that I was to make no presents. In short, the whole
of this little "presentation" to me had been planned with a good deal
more consideration than goes usually with a native campaign.
[I sat on the opposite side of the circle to the talking man. His face
was quite calm and high-bred as he went through the usual Samoan
expressions of politeness and compliment, but when he came on to the
object of their visit, on their love and gratitude to Tusitala, how his
name was always in their prayers, and his goodness to them when they had
no other friend, was their most cherished memory, he warmed up to real,
burning, genuine feeling. I had never seen the Samoan mask of reserve
laid aside before, and it touched me more than anything else. A.M.]
This morning as ever was, bright and early up came the whole gang of
them, a lot of sturdy, common-looking lads they seemed to be for the
most part, and fell to on my new road. Old Poe was in the highest of
good spirits, and looked better in health than he has done any time in
two years, being positively rejuvenated by the success of his scheme. He
jested as he served out the new tools, and I am sorry to say damned the
Government up hill and down dale, probably with a view to show off his
position as a friend of the family before his workboys. Now, whether or
not their impulse will last them through the road does not matter to me
one hair. It is the fact that they have attempted it, that they have
volunteered and are now really trying to execute a thing that was never
before heard of in Samoa. Think of it! It is road-making--the most
fruitful cause (after taxes) of all rebellions in Samoa, a thing to
which they could not be wiled with money nor driven by punishment. It
does give me a sense of having done something in Samoa after all.
Now there's one long story for you about "my blacks."--Yours ever,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO CHARLES BAXTER
The following was written on hearing of the death of his friend's
father.
[_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 lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue; and
whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my
fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine. And these deaths
make me think of it with an ever greater readiness. Strange that you
should be beginning a new life, when I, who am a little your junior, am
thinking of the end of mine. But I have had hard lines; I have been so
long waiting for death, I have unwrapped my thoughts from about life so
long, that I have not a filament left to hold by; I have done my
fiddling so long under Vesuvius, that I have almost forgotten to play,
and can only wait for the eruption, and think it long of coming.
Literally, no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's
good fun.
R. L. S.
TO R. A. M. STEVENSON
Stevenson had received from his cousin a letter announcing, among
other things, the birth of a son to the writer, and rambling
suggestively, as may be guessed from the following reply, over many
disconnected themes: the ethnology of Scotland, paternity and
heredity, civilisation _versus_ primitive customs and instincts, the
story of their own descent, the method of writing in collaboration,
education, Christianity and sex, the religion of conduct, anarchism,
etc.; all which matters are here discursively touched on. "Old Skene"
is, of course, the distinguished Scottish antiquarian and historian,
William Forbes Skene, in whose firm (Skene & Edwards, W.S.) Stevenson
had for a time served irregularly enough as an unpaid clerk.
[_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 trace a difference in the children about a school door. But
colour is not an essential part of a man or a race. Take my Polynesians,
an Asiatic people probably from the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf.
They range through any amount of shades, from the burnt hue of the Low
Archipelago islander, which seems half negro, to the "bleached" pretty
women of the Marquesas (close by on the map), who come out for a
festival no darker than an Italian; their colour seems to vary directly
with the degree of exposure to the sun. And, as with negroes, the babes
are born white; only it should seem a _little sack_ of pigment at the
lower part of the spine, which presently spreads over the whole field.
Very puzzling. But to return. The Picts furnish to-day perhaps a third
of the population of Scotland, say another third for Scots and Britons,
and the third for Norse and Angles is a bad third. Edinburgh was a
Pictish place. But the fact is, we don't know their frontiers. Tell some
of your journalist friends with a good style to popularise old Skene; or
say your prayers, and read him for yourself; he was a Great Historian,
and I was his blessed clerk, and did not know it; and you will not be in
a state of grace about the Picts till you have studied him. J. Horne
Stevenson (do you know him?) is working this up with me, and the fact
is--it's not interesting to the public--but it's interesting, and very
interesting, in itself, and just now very embarrassing--this rural
parish supplied Glasgow with such a quantity of Stevensons in the
beginning of last century! There is just a link wanting; and we might be
able to go back to the eleventh century, always undistinguished, but
clearly traceable. When I say just a link, I guess I may be taken to
mean a dozen. What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation
of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of
character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on
in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get
used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing;
the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of
life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic--or maenadic--foundations, form
a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days
to be bound each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They _are_
anyway, and whether I wish it or not.
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.
I looked on the perpetuation of our honoured name with veneration. My
mother collared one of the photos, of course; the other is stuck up on
my wall as the chief of our sept. Do you know any of the Gaelic-Celtic
sharps? you might ask what the name means. It puzzles me. I find a
_M'Stein_ and a _MacStephane_; and our own great-grandfather always
called himself Steenson, though he wrote it Stevenson. There are at
least three _places_ called Stevenson--_Stevenson_ in Cunningham,
_Stevenson_ in Peebles, and _Stevenson_ in Haddington. And it was not
the Celtic trick, I understand, to call places after people. I am going
to write to Sir Herbert Maxwell about the name, but you might find some
one.
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[82] of course, that collaboration shows; as for the manner, it is
superficially all mine in the sense that the last copy is all in my
hand. Lloyd did not even put pen to paper in the Paris scenes or the
Barbizon scene; it was no good; he wrote and often rewrote all the rest;
I had the best service from him on the character of Nares. You see, we
had been just meeting the man, and his memory was full of the man's
words and ways. And Lloyd is an impressionist, pure and simple. The
great difficulty of collaboration is that you can't explain what you
mean. I know what kind of effect I mean a character to give--what kind
of _tache_ he is to make; but how am I to tell my collaborator in words?
Hence it was necessary to say, "Make him So-and-so"; and this was all
right for Nares and Pinkerton and Loudon Dodd, whom we both knew, but
for Bellairs, for instance--a man with whom I passed ten minutes fifteen
years ago--what was I to say? and what could Lloyd do? I, as a personal
artist, can begin a character with only a haze in my head, but how if I
have to translate the haze into words before I begin? In our manner of
collaboration (which I think the only possible--I mean that of one
person being responsible, and giving the _coup de pouce_ to every part
of the work) I was spared the obviously hopeless business of trying to
explain to my collaborator what _style_ I wished a passage to be treated
in. These are the times that illustrate to a man the inadequacy of
spoken language. Now--to be just to written language--I can (or could)
find a language for my every mood, but how could I _tell_ any one
beforehand what this effect was to be, which it would take every art
that I possessed, and hours and hours of deliberate labour and selection
and rejection, to produce? These are the impossibilities of
collaboration. Its immediate advantage is to focus two minds together on
the stuff, and to produce in consequence an extraordinarily greater
richness of purview, consideration, and invention. The hardest chapter
of all was "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers." You would not believe
what that cost us before it assumed the least unity and colour. Lloyd
wrote it at least thrice, and I at least five times--this is from
memory. And was that last chapter worth the trouble it cost? Alas, that
I should ask the question! Two classes of men--the artist and the
educationalist--are sworn, on soul and conscience, not to ask it. You
get an ordinary, grinning, red-headed boy, and you have to educate him.
Faith supports you; you give your valuable hours, the boy does not seem
to profit, but that way your duty lies, for which you are paid, and you
must persevere. Education has always seemed to me one of the few
possible and dignified ways of life. A sailor, a shepherd, a
schoolmaster--to a less degree, a soldier--and (I don't know why, upon
my soul, except as a sort of schoolmaster's unofficial assistant, and a
kind of acrobat in tights) an artist, almost exhaust the category.
If I had to begin again--I know not--_si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse
pouvait_ ... I know not at all--I believe I should try to honour Sex
more religiously. The worst of our education is that Christianity does
not recognise and hallow Sex. It looks askance at it, over its shoulder,
oppressed as it is by reminiscences of hermits and Asiatic
self-tortures. It is a terrible hiatus in our modern religions that they
cannot see and make venerable that which they ought to see first and
hallow most. Well, it is so; I cannot be wiser than my generation.
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_[83] among the
monkeys? Mind you, Bob, if they go on being martyred a few years more,
the gross, dull, not unkindly bourgeois may get tired or ashamed or
afraid of going on martyring; and the anarchists come out at the top
just like the early Christians. That is, of course, they will step into
power as a _personnel_, but God knows what they may believe when they
come to do so; it can't be stranger or more improbable than what
Christianity had come to be by the same time.
Your letter was easily read, the pagination presented no difficulty, and
I read it with much edification and gusto. To look back, and to
stereotype one bygone humour--what a hopeless thing! The mind runs ever
in a thousand eddies like a river between cliffs. You (the ego) are
always spinning round in it, east, west, north, and south. You are
twenty years old, and forty, and five, and the next moment you are
freezing at an imaginary eighty; you are never the plain forty-four that
you should be by dates. (The most philosophical language is the Gaelic,
which has _no present tense_--and the most useless.) How, then, to
choose some former age, and stick there?
R. L. S.
TO SIR HERBERT MAXWELL
_Vailima, 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.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
_Vailima, Samoa, October 6th, 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 Poe, it was Mataaf[=a] (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_.[84]
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, 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. 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
raindrops, 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 for my
family. That is rightly the root and ground of my ill. The jingling,
tingling, damned mint sauce is the trouble always; and 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 aries don't know how alas 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 any one 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.
TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM
For a fuller account of the road-making affair here mentioned, see
pp. 431, 462.
_[Vailima] October 8th, 1894._
MY DEAR CUMMY,--So I hear you are ailing? Think shame to yoursell! 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 for 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 hae nae time to say mair.
They say I'm gettin' _fat_--a fact!--Your laddie, with all love,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO JAMES PAYN
_Vailima, 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
_Curacoa_--"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 hemorrhage,
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. The waves of faintness and nausea succeeded each other for
twelve hours, and I do feel a legitimate pride in thinking that I stuck
to my work all through and wrote a good deal of _Admiral Guinea_ (which
I might just as well not have written for all the reward it ever brought
me) in spite of the barbarous bad conditions. I think that is my great
boast; and it seems a little thing alongside of your _Gleams of Memory_
illustrated by spasms of arthritic gout. We really should have an order
of merit in the trade of letters. For valour, Scott would have had it;
Pope too; myself on the strength of that castor-oil; and James Payn
would be a Knight Commander. The worst of it is, though Lang tells me
you exhibit the courage of Huish, that not even an order can alleviate
the wretched annoyance of the business. I have always said that there
is nothing like pain; toothache, dumb-ague, arthritic gout, it does not
matter what you call it, if the screw is put upon the nerves
sufficiently strong, there is nothing left in heaven or in earth that
can interest the sufferer. Still, even to this there is the consolation
that it cannot last for ever. Either you will be relieved and have a
good hour again before the sun goes down, or else you will be liberated.
It is something after all (although not much) to think that you are
leaving a brave example; that other literary men love to remember, as I
am sure they will love to remember, everything about you--your
sweetness, your brightness, your helpfulness to all of us, and in
particular those one or two really adequate and noble papers which you
have been privileged to write during these last years.--With the
heartiest and kindest good-will, I remain, yours ever,
R. L. S.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
This was the last letter I received from my friend. On the morning of
his death the following month he spoke of being behindhand with his
December letter and of his intention to write it next day.
[_Vailima, November 1894._]
DEAR COLVIN,--Saturday there was a ball to the ship, and on Sunday Gurr
had a child to be baptized. Belle was to be godmother and had to be got
down; which was impossible, as the jester Euclid says. However, we had
four men of very different heights take the poles of a sort of bier and
carry her shoulder high down the road, till we met a trap. On the return
journey on Sunday, they were led by Austin playing (?) on a bugle, and
you have no idea how picturesque a business it was; the four half-naked
bearers, the cane lounge at that height from the ground, and Belle in
black and pretty pale reclining very like a dead warrior of yore.
However she wasn't dead yet. All the rest of the afternoon we hung
about and had consultations about the baptism. Just as we went in to
dinner, I saw the moon rise accurately full, looking five times greater
than nature, and the face that we try to decipher in its silver disk
wearing an obliterated but benignant expression. The ball followed;
bluejackets and officers danced indiscriminately, after their pleasant
fashion; and Belle, who lay in the hotel verandah, and held a sort of
reception all night, had her longest visit from one of the blue-jackets,
her partner in the last ball. About one on the Sunday morning all was
over, and we went to bed--I, alas! only to get up again, my room being
in the verandah, where a certain solemnly absurd family conclave (all
drunk) was being held until (I suppose) three. By six, I was awake, and
went out on the verandah. On the east the dawn had broken, cold and pink
and rust colour, and the marshes were all smoking whitely and blowing
into the bay like smoke, but on the west, all was golden. The street was
empty, and right over it hung the setting moon, accurately round, yellow
as an apricot, but slumberous, with an effect of afternoon you would not
believe if you had not seen it. Then followed a couple of hours on the
verandah I would be glad to forget. By seven X. Y. had joined me, as
drunk as they make 'em. As he sat and talked to me, he smelt of the
charnel house, methought. He looked so old (he is one month my senior);
he spoke so silly; his poor leg is again covered with boils, which will
spell death to him; and--enough. That interview has made me a
teetotaller. O, it is bad to grow old. For me, it is practically hell. I
do not like the consolations of age. I was born a young man; I have
continued so; and before I end, a pantaloon, a driveller--enough again.
But I don't enjoy getting elderly. Belle and I got home about three in
the afternoon, she having in the meantime renounced all that makes life
worth living in the name of little Miss Gurr, and I seriously reflecting
on renouncing the kindly bowl in earnest! Presently after arrived the
news of Margery Ide (the C.J.'s daughter) being seriously ill,
alarmingly ill. Fanny wanted to go down; it was a difficult choice; she
was not fit for it; on the other hand (and by all accounts) the patient
would die if she did not get better nursing. So we made up our own
minds, and F. and I set out about dusk, came to the C.J.'s in the middle
of dinner, and announced our errand. I am glad to say the C.J. received
her very willingly; and I came home again, leaving her behind, where she
was certainly much wanted.
_Nov. 4th._--You ask about _St. Ives_. No, there is no Burford Bridge in
it, and no Boney. He is a squire of dames, and there are petticoats in
the story, and damned bad ones too, and it is of a tolerable length, a
hundred thousand, I believe, at least. Also, since you are curious on
the point, St. Ives learned his English from a Mr. Vicary, an English
lawyer, a prisoner in France. He must have had a fine gift of languages!
Things are going on here in their usual gently disheartening gait. The
Treaty Officials are both good fellows whom I can't help liking, but who
will never make a hand of Samoa.--Yours ever,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO PROFESSOR MEIKLEJOHN
Congratulating an old friend of Savile Club days (see vol. xxiii. p.
263) on his sailor son.
_Vailima, Samoa, Nov. 6th, 1894._
MY DEAR MEIKLEJOHN,--Greeting! This is but a word to say how much we
felicitate ourselves on having made the acquaintance of Hughie. He is
having a famous good chance on board the _Curacoa_, which is the best
ship I have ever seen. And as for himself, he is a most engaging boy, of
whom you may very well be proud, and I have no mortal manner of doubt
but what you are. He comes up here very often, where he is a great
favourite with my ladies, and sings me "the melancholy airs of my
native land" with much acceptancy. His name has recently become changed
in Vailima. Beginning with the courteous "Mr. Meiklejohn," it shaded off
into the familiar "Hughie," and finally degenerated into "the
Whitrett."[85] I hear good reports of him abroad and ashore, and I
scarce need to add my own testimony.
Hughie tells me you have gone into the publishing business, whereat I
was much shocked. My own affairs with publishers are now in the most
flourishing state, owing to my ingenuity in leaving them to be dealt
with by a Scotch Writer to the Signet. It has produced revolutions in
the book trade and my banking account. I tackled the Whitrett severely
on a grammar you had published, which I had not seen and condemned out
of hand and in the broadest Lallan. I even condescended on the part of
that grammar which I thought to be the worst and condemned your
presentation of the English verb unmercifully. It occurs to me, since
you are a publisher, that the least thing you could do would be to send
me a copy of that grammar to correct my estimate. But I fear I am
talking too long to one of the enemy. I begin to hear in fancy the voice
of Meiklejohn upraised in the Savile Club: "No quarter to publishers!"
So I will ask you to present my compliments to Mrs. Meiklejohn upon her
son, and to accept for yourself the warmest reminiscences of auld lang
syne.--Yours sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO LIEUTENANT EELES
_Vailima, 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 what remains of Tusitala's.
First of all, for business. When you go to London you are to charter a
hansom cab and proceed to the Museum. It is particular fun to do this on
Sundays when the Monument is shut up. Your cabman expostulates with you,
you persist. The cabman drives up in front of the closed gates and says,
"I told you so, sir." You breathe in the porter's ears the mystic name
of _Colvin_, and he immediately unfolds the iron barrier. You drive in,
and doesn't your cabman think you're a swell. A lord mayor is nothing to
it. Colvin's door is the only one in the eastern gable of the building.
Send in your card to him with "From R. L. S." in the corner, and the
machinery will do the rest. Henry James's address is 34 De Vere Mansions
West. I cannot remember where the place is; I cannot even remember on
which side of the park. But it's one of those big Cromwell Road-looking
deserted thoroughfares out west in Kensington or Bayswater, or between
the two; and anyway Colvin will be able to put you on the direct track
for Henry James. I do not send formal introductions, as I have taken the
liberty to prepare both of them for seeing you already.
Hoskyn is staying with us.
It is raining dismally. The Curacoa 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.
TO SIR HERBERT MAXWELL
_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 LANG
The following refers of course to _Weir of Hermiston_, the chief
character of which was studied from the traditions of Lord Braxfield,
and on which Stevenson was working at the full height of his powers
when death overtook him two days later.
_Vailima, 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 transcripts. They must be very interesting. Do you know I picked up
the other day an old Longman's where I found an article of yours that I
had missed, about Christie's? I read it with great delight. The year
ends with us pretty much as it began, among wars and rumours of wars,
and a vast and splendid exhibition of official incompetence.--Yours
ever,
R. L. STEVENSON.