Letter: TO WILLIAM ARCHER
VAILIMA, SAMOA, MARCH 27TH, 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 G.o.d. 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 sc.r.a.ped acquaintance? I am sorry indeed to hear that my esteemed correspondent Tomarcher has such poor taste in literature. 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body can read my hand.
It is a humiliating circ.u.mstance 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,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
Letter: TO W. B. YEATS
VAILIMA, SAMOA, APRIL 14, 1894.
DEAR SIR, - Long since when I was a boy I remember the emotions with which I repeated Swinburne"s poems and ballads. Some ten years ago, a similar spell was cast upon me by Meredith"s LOVE IN THE VALLEY; the stanzas beginning "When her mother tends her"
haunted me and made me drunk like wine; and I remember waking with them all the echoes of the hills about Hyeres. It may interest you to hear that I have a third time fallen in slavery: this is to your poem called the LAKE ISLE OF INNISFRAE. It is so quaint and airy, simple, artful, and eloquent to the heart - but I seek words in vain. Enough that "always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds on the sh.o.r.e," and am, yours gratefully,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
Letter: TO GEORGE MEREDITH
VAILIMA, SAMOA, APRIL 17TH, 1894.
MY DEAR MEREDITH, - Many good things have the G.o.ds sent to me of late. First of all there was a letter from you by the kind hand of Mariette, if she is not too great a lady to be remembered in such a style; and then there came one Lysaght with a charming note of introduction in the well-known hand itself. We had but a few days of him, and liked him well. There was a sort of geniality and inward fire about him at which I warmed my hands. It is long since I have seen a young man who has left in me such a favourable impression; and I find myself telling myself, "O, I must tell this to Lysaght," or, "This will interest him," in a manner very unusual after so brief an acquaintance. The whole of my family shared in this favourable impression, and my halls have re-echoed ever since, I am sure he will be amused to know, with WIDDICOMBE FAIR.
He will have told you doubtless more of my news than I could tell you myself; he has your European perspective, a thing long lost to me. I heard with a great deal of interest the news of Box Hill.
And so I understand it is to be enclosed! Allow me to remark, that seems a far more barbaric trait of manners than the most barbarous of ours. We content ourselves with cutting off an occasional head.
I hear we may soon expect the AMAZING MARRIAGE. You know how long, and with how much curiosity, I have looked forward to the book.
Now, in so far as you have adhered to your intention, Gower Woodsere will be a family portrait, age twenty-five, of the highly respectable and slightly influential and fairly aged TUSITALA. You have not known that gentleman; console yourself, he is not worth knowing. At the same time, my dear Meredith, he is very sincerely yours - for what he is worth, for the memories of old times, and in the expectation of many pleasures still to come. I suppose we shall never see each other again; flitting youths of the Lysaght species may occasionally cover these unconscionable leagues and bear greetings to and fro. But we ourselves must be content to converse on an occasional sheet of notepaper, and I shall never see whether you have grown older, and you shall never deplore that Gower Woodsere should have declined into the pantaloon TUSITALA.
It is perhaps better so. Let us continue to see each other as we were, and accept, my dear Meredith, my love and respect.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
P.S. - My wife joins me in the kindest messages to yourself and Mariette.
Letter: TO CHARLES BAXTER
[VAILIMA], APRIL 17, "94.
MY DEAR CHARLES, - ST. IVES is now well on its way into the second volume. There remains no mortal doubt that it will reach the three volume standard.
I am very anxious that you should send me -
1ST. TOM AND JERRY, a cheap edition.
2nd. The book by Ashton - the DAWN OF THE CENTURY, I think it was called - which Colvin sent me, and which has miscarried, and
3rd. If it is possible, a file of the EDINBURGH COURANT for the years 1811, 1812, 1813, or 1814. I should not care for a whole year. If it were possible to find me three months, winter months by preference, it would do my business not only for ST. IVES, but for the JUSTICE-CLERK as well. Suppose this to be impossible, perhaps I could get the loan of it from somebody; or perhaps it would be possible to have some one read a file for me and make notes. This would be extremely bad, as unhappily one man"s food is another man"s poison, and the reader would probably leave out everything I should choose. But if you are reduced to that, you might mention to the man who is to read for me that balloon ascensions are in the order of the day.
4th. It might be as well to get a book on balloon ascension, particularly in the early part of the century.
III. At last this book has come from Scribner, and, alas! I have the first six or seven chapters of ST. IVES to recast entirely.
Who could foresee that they clothed the French prisoners in yellow?
But that one fatal fact - and also that they shaved them twice a week - d.a.m.ns the whole beginning. If it had been sent in time, it would have saved me a deal of trouble. . . .
I have had a long letter from Dr. Scott Dalgleish, 25 Mayfield Terrace, asking me to put my name down to the Ballantyne Memorial Committee. I have sent him a pretty sharp answer in favour of cutting down the memorial and giving more to the widow and children. If there is to be any foolery in the way of statues or other trash, please send them a guinea; but if they are going to take my advice and put up a simple tablet with a few heartfelt words, and really devote the bulk of the subscriptions to the wife and family, I will go to the length of twenty pounds, if you will allow me (and if the case of the family be at all urgent), and at least I direct you to send ten pounds. I suppose you had better see Scott Dalgleish himself on the matter. I take the opportunity here to warn you that my head is simply spinning with a mult.i.tude of affairs, and I shall probably forget a half of my business at last.
R. L. S.
Letter: TO MRS. SITWELL
VAILIMA, APRIL 1894.
MY DEAR FRIEND, - I have at last got some photographs, and hasten to send you, as you asked, a portrait of Tusitala. He is a strange person; not so lean, say experts, but infinitely battered; mighty active again on the whole; going up and down our break-neck road at all hours of the day and night on horseback; holding meetings with all manner of chiefs; quite a political personage - G.o.d save the mark! - in a small way, but at heart very conscious of the inevitable flat failure that awaits every one. I shall never do a better book than CATRIONA, that is my high-water mark, and the trouble of production increases on me at a great rate - and mighty anxious about how I am to leave my family: an elderly man, with elderly preoccupations, whom I should be ashamed to show you for your old friend; but not a hope of my dying soon and cleanly, and "winning off the stage." Rather I am daily better in physical health. I shall have to see this business out, after all; and I think, in that case, they should have - they might have - spared me all my ill-health this decade past, if it were not to unbar the doors. I have no taste for old age, and my nose is to be rubbed in it in spite of my face. I was meant to die young, and the G.o.ds do not love me.
This is very like an epitaph, bar the handwriting, which is anything but monumental, and I dare say I had better stop. f.a.n.n.y is down at her own cottage planting or deplanting or replanting, I know not which, and she will not be home till dinner, by which time the mail will be all closed, else she would join me in all good messages and remembrances of love. I hope you will congratulate Burne Jones from me on his baronetcy. I cannot make out to be anything but raspingly, harrowingly sad; so I will close, and not affect levity which I cannot feel. Do not altogether forget me; keep a corner of your memory for the exile