[_Vailima_, _December_ 1891.]
MY DEAR BURLINGAME,—The end of _The Wrecker_ having but just come in, you
will, I dare say, be appalled to receive three (possibly four) chapters
of a new book of the least attractive sort: a history of nowhere in a
corner, for no time to mention, running to a volume! Well, it may very
likely be an illusion; it is very likely no one could possibly wish to
read it, but I wish to publish it. If you don’t cotton to the idea,
kindly set it up at my expense, and let me know your terms for
publishing. The great affair to me is to have per return (if it might
be) four or five—better say half a dozen—sets of the roughest proofs that
can be drawn. There are a good many men here whom I want to read the
blessed thing, and not one would have the energy to read MS. At the same
time, if you care to glance at it, and have the time, I should be very
glad of your opinion as to whether I have made any step at all towards
possibly inducing folk at home to read matter so extraneous and
outlandish. I become heavy and owlish; years sit upon me; it begins to
seem to me to be a man’s business to leave off his damnable faces and say
his say. Else I could have made it pungent and light and lively. In
considering, kindly forget that I am R. L. S.; think of the four chapters
as a book you are reading, by an inhabitant of our ‘lovely but fatil’
islands; and see if it could possibly amuse the hebetated public. I have
to publish anyway, you understand; I have a purpose beyond; I am
concerned for some of the parties to this quarrel. What I want to hear
is from curiosity; what I want you to judge of is what we are to do with
the book in a business sense. To me it is not business at all; I had
meant originally to lay all the profits to the credit of Samoa; when it
comes to the pinch of writing, I judge this unfair—I give too much—and I
mean to keep (if there be any profit at all) one-half for the artisan;
the rest I shall hold over to give to the Samoans _for that which I
choose and against work done_. I think I have never heard of greater
insolence than to attempt such a subject; yet the tale is so strange and
mixed, and the people so oddly charactered—above all, the whites—and the
high note of the hurricane and the warships is so well prepared to take
popular interest, and the latter part is so directly in the day’s
movement, that I am not without hope but some may read it; and if they
don’t, a murrain on them! Here is, for the first time, a tale of
Greeks—Homeric Greeks—mingled with moderns, and all true; Odysseus
alongside of Rajah Brooke, _proportion gardée_; and all true. Here is
for the first time since the Greeks (that I remember) the history of a
handful of men, where all know each other in the eyes, and live close in
a few acres, narrated at length, and with the seriousness of history.
Talk of the modern novel; here is a modern history. And if I had the
misfortune to found a school, the legitimate historian might lie down and
die, for he could never overtake his material. Here is a little tale
that has not ‘caret’-ed its ‘vates’; ‘sacer’ is another point.