_Vailima_, _Samoa_, _March_ 27_th_, 1894.
MY DEAR ARCHER,—Many thanks for your _Theatrical World_. Do you know, it
strikes me as being really very good? I have not yet read much of it,
but so far as I have looked, there is not a dull and not an empty page in
it. Hazlitt, whom you must often have thought of, would have been
pleased. Come to think of it, I shall put this book upon the Hazlitt
shelf. You have acquired a manner that I can only call august;
otherwise, I should have to call it such amazing impudence. The _Bauble
Shop_ and _Becket_ are examples of what I mean. But it ‘sets you weel.’
Marjorie Fleming I have known, as you surmise, for long. She was
possibly—no, I take back possibly—she was one of the greatest works of
God. Your note about the resemblance of her verses to mine gave me great
joy, though it only proved me a plagiarist. By the by, was it not over
_The Child’s Garden of Verses_ that we first scraped acquaintance? I am
sorry indeed to hear that my esteemed correspondent Tomarcher has such
poor taste in literature. {323} I fear he cannot have inherited this
trait from his dear papa. Indeed, I may say I know it, for I remember
the energy of papa’s disapproval when the work passed through his hands
on its way to a second birth, which none regrets more than myself. It is
an odd fact, or perhaps a very natural one; I find few greater pleasures
than reading my own works, but I never, O I never read _The Black Arrow_.
In that country Tomarcher reigns supreme. Well, and after all, if
Tomarcher likes it, it has not been written in vain.
We have just now a curious breath from Europe. A young fellow just
beginning letters, and no fool, turned up here with a letter of
introduction in the well-known blue ink and decorative hieroglyphs of
George Meredith. His name may be known to you. It is Sidney Lysaght.
He is staying with us but a day or two, and it is strange to me and not
unpleasant to hear all the names, old and new, come up again. But oddly
the new are so much more in number. If I revisited the glimpses of the
moon on your side of the ocean, I should know comparatively few of them.
My amanuensis deserts me—I should have said you, for yours is the loss,
my script having lost all bond with humanity. One touch of nature makes
the whole world kin: that nobody can read my hand. It is a humiliating
circumstance that thus evens us with printers!
You must sometimes think it strange—or perhaps it is only I that should
so think it—to be following the old round, in the gas lamps and the
crowded theatres, when I am away here in the tropical forest and the vast
silences!
My dear Archer, my wife joins me in the best wishes to yourself and Mrs.
Archer, not forgetting Tom; and I am yours very cordially,