_Vailima Plantation_, _Samoan Islands_, _November_ 1_st_, 1892.
DEAR MR. BARRIE,—I can scarce thank you sufficiently for your extremely
amusing letter. No, _The Auld Licht Idyls_ never reached me—I wish it
had, and I wonder extremely whether it would not be good for me to have a
pennyworth of the Auld Licht pulpit. It is a singular thing that I
should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and so
striking, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit that cold old
huddle of grey hills from which we come. I have just finished _David
Balfour_; I have another book on the stocks, _The Young Chevalier_, which
is to be part in France and part in Scotland, and to deal with Prince
Charlie about the year 1749; and now what have I done but begun a third
which is to be all moorland together, and is to have for a centrepiece a
figure that I think you will appreciate—that of the immortal
Braxfield—Braxfield himself is my _grand premier_, or, since you are so
much involved in the British drama, let me say my heavy lead. . . .
Your descriptions of your dealings with Lord Rintoul are frightfully
unconscientious. You should never write about anybody until you persuade
yourself at least for the moment that you love him, above all anybody on
whom your plot revolves. It will always make a hole in the book; and, if
he has anything to do with the mechanism, prove a stick in your
machinery. But you know all this better than I do, and it is one of your
most promising traits that you do not take your powers too seriously.
The _Little Minister_ ought to have ended badly; we all know it did; and
we are infinitely grateful to you for the grace and good feeling with
which you lied about it. If you had told the truth, I for one could
never have forgiven you. As you had conceived and written the earlier
parts, the truth about the end, though indisputably true to fact, would
have been a lie, or what is worse, a discord in art. If you are going to
make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning. Now your
book began to end well. You let yourself fall in love with, and fondle,
and smile at your puppets. Once you had done that, your honour was
committed—at the cost of truth to life you were bound to save them. It
is the blot on _Richard Feverel_, for instance, that it begins to end
well; and then tricks you and ends ill. But in that case there is worse
behind, for the ill-ending does not inherently issue from the plot—the
story _had_, in fact, _ended well_ after the great last interview between
Richard and Lucy—and the blind, illogical bullet which smashes all has no
more to do between the boards than a fly has to do with the room into
whose open window it comes buzzing. It _might_ have so happened; it
needed not; and unless needs must, we have no right to pain our readers.
I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same kind about my Braxfield
story. Braxfield—only his name is Hermiston—has a son who is condemned
to death; plainly, there is a fine tempting fitness about this; and I
meant he was to hang. But now on considering my minor characters, I saw
there were five people who would—in a sense who must—break prison and
attempt his rescue. They were capable, hardy folks, too, who might very
well succeed. Why should they not then? Why should not young Hermiston
escape clear out of the country? and be happy, if he could, with his—
But soft! I will not betray my secret of my heroine. Suffice it to
breathe in your ear that she was what Hardy calls (and others in their
plain way don’t) a Pure Woman. Much virtue in a capital letter, such as
yours was.
Write to me again in my infinite distance. Tell me about your new book.
No harm in telling _me_; I am too far off to be indiscreet; there are too
few near me who would care to hear. I am rushes by the riverside, and
the stream is in Babylon: breathe your secrets to me fearlessly; and if
the Trade Wind caught and carried them away, there are none to catch them
nearer than Australia, unless it were the Tropic Birds. In the
unavoidable absence of my amanuensis, who is buying eels for dinner, I
have thus concluded my despatch, like St. Paul, with my own hand.
And in the inimitable words of Lord Kames, Faur ye weel, ye bitch.—Yours
very truly,