[_Vailima_, _May_ 1894.]
MY DEAR CHARLES,—My dear fellow, I wish to assure you of the greatness of
the pleasure that this Edinburgh Edition gives me. I suppose it was your
idea to give it that name. No other would have affected me in the same
manner. Do you remember, how many years ago—I would be afraid to hazard
a guess—one night when I communicated to you certain intimations of early
death and aspirations after fame? I was particularly maudlin; and my
remorse the next morning on a review of my folly has written the matter
very deeply in my mind; from yours it may easily have fled. If any one
at that moment could have shown me the Edinburgh Edition, I suppose I
should have died. It is with gratitude and wonder that I consider ‘the
way in which I have been led.’ Could a more preposterous idea have
occurred to us in those days when we used to search our pockets for
coppers, too often in vain, and combine forces to produce the threepence
necessary for two glasses of beer, or wander down the Lothian Road
without any, than that I should be strong and well at the age of
forty-three in the island of Upolu, and that you should be at home
bringing out the Edinburgh Edition? If it had been possible, I should
almost have preferred the Lothian Road Edition, say, with a picture of
the old Dutch smuggler on the covers. I have now something heavy on my
mind. I had always a great sense of kinship with poor Robert
Fergusson—so clever a boy, so wild, of such a mixed strain, so
unfortunate, born in the same town with me, and, as I always felt, rather
by express intimation than from evidence, so like myself. Now the
injustice with which the one Robert is rewarded and the other left out in
the cold sits heavy on me, and I wish you could think of some way in
which I could do honour to my unfortunate namesake. Do you think it
would look like affectation to dedicate the whole edition to his memory?
I think it would. The sentiment which would dictate it to me is too
abstruse; and besides, I think my wife is the proper person to receive
the dedication of my life’s work. At the same time, it is very odd—it
really looks like the transmigration of souls—I feel that I must do
something for Fergusson; Burns has been before me with the gravestone.
It occurs to me you might take a walk down the Canongate and see in what
condition the stone is. If it be at all uncared for, we might repair it,
and perhaps add a few words of inscription.
I must tell you, what I just remembered in a flash as I was walking about
dictating this letter—there was in the original plan of the _Master of
Ballantrae_ a sort of introduction describing my arrival in Edinburgh on
a visit to yourself and your placing in my hands the papers of the story.
I actually wrote it, and then condemned the idea—as being a little too
like Scott, I suppose. Now I must really find the MS. and try to finish
it for the E. E. It will give you, what I should so much like you to
have, another corner of your own in that lofty monument.
Suppose we do what I have proposed about Fergusson’s monument, I wonder
if an inscription like this would look arrogant—
This stone originally erected
by Robert Burns has been
repaired at the
charges of Robert Louis Stevenson,
and is by him re-dedicated to
the memory of Robert Fergusson,
as the gift of one Edinburgh
lad to another.
In spacing this inscription I would detach the names of Fergusson and
Burns, but leave mine in the text.
Or would that look like sham modesty, and is it better to bring out the
three Roberts?