[_Vailima_, _August_ 1892.]
MY DEAR MRS. FAIRCHILD,—Thank you a thousand times for your letter. You
are the Angel of (the sort of) Information (that I care about); I appoint
you successor to the newspaper press; and I beg of you, whenever you wish
to gird at the age, or think the bugs out of proportion to the roses, or
despair, or enjoy any cosmic or epochal emotion, to sit down again and
write to the Hermit of Samoa. What do I think of it all? Well, I love
the romantic solemnity of youth; and even in this form, although not
without laughter, I have to love it still. They are such ducks! But
what are they made of? We were just as solemn as that about atheism and
the stars and humanity; but we were all for belief anyway—we held atheism
and sociology (of which none of us, nor indeed anybody, knew anything)
for a gospel and an iron rule of life; and it was lucky enough, or there
would have been more windows broken. What is apt to puzzle one at first
sight in the New Youth is that, with such rickety and risky problems
always at heart, they should not plunge down a Niagara of Dissolution.
But let us remember the high practical timidity of youth. I was a
particularly brave boy—this I think of myself, looking back—and plunged
into adventures and experiments, and ran risks that it still surprises me
to recall. But, dear me, what a fear I was in of that strange blind
machinery in the midst of which I stood; and with what a compressed heart
and what empty lungs I would touch a new crank and await developments! I
do not mean to say I do not fear life still; I do; and that terror (for
an adventurer like myself) is still one of the chief joys of living.
But it was different indeed while I was yet girt with the priceless robes
of inexperience; then the fear was exquisite and infinite. And so, when
you see all these little Ibsens, who seem at once so dry and so
excitable, and faint in swathes over a play (I suppose—for a wager) that
would seem to me merely tedious, smile behind your hand, and remember the
little dears are all in a blue funk. It must be very funny, and to a
spectator like yourself I almost envy it. But never get desperate; human
nature is human nature; and the Roman Empire, since the Romans founded it
and made our European human nature what it is, bids fair to go on and to
be true to itself. These little bodies will all grow up and become men
and women, and have heaps of fun; nay, and are having it now; and
whatever happens to the fashion of the age, it makes no difference—there
are always high and brave and amusing lives to be lived; and a change of
key, however exotic, does not exclude melody. Even Chinamen, hard as we
find it to believe, enjoy being Chinese. And the Chinaman stands alone
to be unthinkable; natural enough, as the representative of the only
other great civilisation. Take my people here at my doors; their life is
a very good one; it is quite thinkable, quite acceptable to us. And the
little dears will be soon skating on the other foot; sooner or later, in
each generation, the one-half of them at least begin to remember all the
material they had rejected when first they made and nailed up their
little theory of life; and these become reactionaries or conservatives,
and the ship of man begins to fill upon the other tack.
Here is a sermon, by your leave! It is your own fault, you have amused
and interested me so much by your breath of the New Youth, which comes to
me from so far away, where I live up here in my mountain, and secret
messengers bring me letters from rebels, and the government sometimes
seizes them, and generally grumbles in its beard that Stevenson should
really be deported. O, my life is the more lively, never fear!
It has recently been most amusingly varied by a visit from Lady Jersey.
I took her over mysteriously (under the pseudonym of my cousin, Miss
Amelia Balfour) to visit Mataafa, our rebel; and we had great fun, and
wrote a Ouida novel on our life here, in which every author had to
describe himself in the Ouida glamour, and of which—for the Jerseys
intend printing it—I must let you have a copy. My wife’s chapter, and my
description of myself, should, I think, amuse you. But there were finer
touches still; as when Belle and Lady Jersey came out to brush their
teeth in front of the rebel King’s palace, and the night guard squatted
opposite on the grass and watched the process; or when I and my
interpreter, and the King with his secretary, mysteriously disappeared to
conspire.—Ever yours sincerely,