_Vailima_, _Samoa_, _April_ 1891.
DEAR MR. ANGUS,—Surely I remember you! It was W. C. Murray who made us
acquainted, and we had a pleasant crack. I see your poet is not yet
dead. I remember even our talk—or you would not think of trusting that
invaluable _Jolly Beggars_ to the treacherous posts, and the perils of
the sea, and the carelessness of authors. I love the idea, but I could
not bear the risk. However—
‘Hale be your heart, hale be your fiddle—’
it was kindly thought upon.
My interest in Burns is, as you suppose, perennial. I would I could be
present at the exhibition, with the purpose of which I heartily
sympathise; but the _Nancy_ has not waited in vain for me, I have
followed my chest, the anchor is weighed long ago, I have said my last
farewell to the hills and the heather and the lynns: like Leyden, I have
gone into far lands to die, not stayed like Burns to mingle in the end
with Scottish soil. I shall not even return like Scott for the last
scene. Burns Exhibitions are all over. ’Tis a far cry to Lochow from
tropical Vailima.
‘But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’
When your hand is in, will you remember our poor Edinburgh Robin? Burns
alone has been just to his promise; follow Burns, he knew best, he knew
whence he drew fire—from the poor, white-faced, drunken, vicious boy that
raved himself to death in the Edinburgh madhouse. Surely there is more
to be gleaned about Fergusson, and surely it is high time the task was
set about. I may tell you (because your poet is not dead) something of
how I feel: we are three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre this last
century. Well, the one is the world’s, he did it, he came off, he is for
ever; but I and the other—ah! what bonds we have—born in the same city;
both sickly, both pestered, one nearly to madness, one to the madhouse,
with a damnatory creed; both seeing the stars and the dawn, and wearing
shoe-leather on the same ancient stones, under the same pends, down the
same closes, where our common ancestors clashed in their armour, rusty or
bright. And the old Robin, who was before Burns and the flood, died in
his acute, painful youth, and left the models of the great things that
were to come; and the new, who came after, outlived his greensickness,
and has faintly tried to parody the finished work. If you will collect
the strays of Robin Fergusson, fish for material, collect any last
re-echoing of gossip, command me to do what you prefer—to write the
preface—to write the whole if you prefer: anything, so that another
monument (after Burns’s) be set up to my unhappy predecessor on the
causey of Auld Reekie. You will never know, nor will any man, how deep
this feeling is: I believe Fergusson lives in me. I do, but tell it not
in Gath; every man has these fanciful superstitions, coming, going, but
yet enduring; only most men are so wise (or the poet in them so dead)
that they keep their follies for themselves.—I am, yours very truly,