[_Vailima_, _December_ 1892.]
DEAR J. M. BARRIE,—You will be sick of me soon; I cannot help it. I have
been off my work for some time, and re-read the _Edinburgh Eleven_, and
had a great mind to write a parody and give you all your sauce back
again, and see how you would like it yourself. And then I read (for the
first time—I know not how) the _Window in Thrums_; I don’t say that it is
better than _The Minister_; it’s less of a tale—and there is a beauty, a
material beauty, of the tale _ipse_, which clever critics nowadays long
and love to forget; it has more real flaws; but somehow it is—well, I
read it last anyway, and it’s by Barrie. And he’s the man for my money.
The glove is a great page; it is startlingly original, and as true as
death and judgment. Tibbie Birse in the Burial is great, but I think it
was a journalist that got in the word ‘official.’ The same character
plainly had a word to say to Thomas Haggard. Thomas affects me as a
lie—I beg your pardon; doubtless he was somebody you knew, that leads
people so far astray. The actual is not the true.
I am proud to think you are a Scotchman—though to be sure I know nothing
of that country, being only an English tourist, quo’ Gavin Ogilvy. I
commend the hard case of Mr. Gavin Ogilvy to J. M. Barrie, whose work is
to me a source of living pleasure and heartfelt national pride. There
are two of us now that the Shirra might have patted on the head. And
please do not think when I thus seem to bracket myself with you, that I
am wholly blinded with vanity. Jess is beyond my frontier line; I could
not touch her skirt; I have no such glamour of twilight on my pen. I am
a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of
genius. Take care of yourself, for my sake. It’s a devilish hard thing
for a man who writes so many novels as I do, that I should get so few to
read. And I can read yours, and I love them.
A pity for you that my amanuensis is not on stock to-day, and my own hand
perceptibly worse than usual.—Yours,