_Vailima_, _Upolu_, _Samoa_, _July_ 7, 1894.
DEAR MR. MARCEL SCHWOB,—Thank you for having remembered me in my exile.
I have read _Mimes_ twice as a whole; and now, as I write, I am reading
it again as it were by accident, and a piece at a time, my eye catching a
word and travelling obediently on through the whole number. It is a
graceful book, essentially graceful, with its haunting agreeable
melancholy, its pleasing savour of antiquity. At the same time, by its
merits, it shows itself rather as the promise of something else to come
than a thing final in itself. You have yet to give us—and I am expecting
it with impatience—something of a larger gait; something daylit, not
twilit; something with the colours of life, not the flat tints of a
temple illumination; something that shall be _said_ with all the
clearnesses and the trivialities of speech, not _sung_ like a
semi-articulate lullaby. It will not please yourself as well, when you
come to give it us, but it will please others better. It will be more of
a whole, more worldly, more nourished, more commonplace—and not so
pretty, perhaps not even so beautiful. No man knows better than I that,
as we go on in life, we must part from prettiness and the graces. We but
attain qualities to lose them; life is a series of farewells, even in
art; even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent. So here with
these exquisite pieces the XVIIth, XVIIIth, and IVth of the present
collection. You will perhaps never excel them; I should think the
‘Hermes,’ never. Well, you will do something else, and of that I am in
expectation.—Yours cordially,