Jacob Tonson.
P.S. — I am quite well; I hope you are quite well. The world is too much with us, and my mother bids me bind my hair and lace my bodice blue.
To Charles Baxter
Vailima Plantation, Upolu, Samoan Islands, 18th July 1892.
MY DEAR CHARLES, — ... I have been now for some time contending with powers and principalities, and I have never once seen one of my own letters to the Times. So when you see something in the papers that you think might interest the exiles of Upolu, do not think twice, out with your saxpence, and send it flying to Vailima. Of what you say of the past, eh, man, it was a queer time, and awful miserable, but there’s no sense in denying it was awful fun. Do you mind the youth in highland garb and the tableful of coppers? Do you mind the SIGNAL of Waterloo Place? — Hey, how the blood stands to the heart at such a memory! — Hae ye the notes o’t? Gie’s them. — Gude’s sake, man, gie’s the notes o’t; I mind ye made a tüne o’t an’ played it on your pinanny; gie’s the notes. Dear Lord, that past.
Glad to hear Henley’s prospects are fair: his new volume is the work of a real poet. He is one of those who can make a noise of his own with words, and in whom experience strikes an individual note. There is perhaps no more genuine poet living, bar the Big Guns. In case I cannot overtake an acknowledgment to himself by this mail, please let him hear of my pleasure and admiration. How poorly Kipling compares! He is all smart journalism and cleverness: it is all bright and shallow and limpid, like a business paper — a good one, s’entend; but there is 214 no blot of heart’s blood and the Old Night: there are no harmonics, there is scarce harmony to his music; and in Henley — all of these; a touch, a sense within sense, a sound outside the sound, the shadow of the inscrutable, eloquent beyond all definition. The First London Voluntary knocked me wholly. — Ever yours affectionately, my dear Charles,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
Kind memories to your father and all friends.
To W. E. Henley
Vailima Plantation, Upolu, Samoa, August 1st, 1892.
MY DEAR HENLEY, — It is impossible to let your new volume pass in silence. I have not received the same thrill of poetry since G. M.’s Joy of Earth volume and Love in a Valley; and I do not know that even that was so intimate and deep. Again and again, I take the book down, and read, and my blood is fired as it used to be in youth. Andante con moto in the Voluntaries, and the thing about the trees at night (No. XXIV. I think) are up to date my favourites. I did not guess you were so great a magician; these are new tunes, this is an undertone of the true Apollo; these are not verse, they are poetry — inventions, creations, in language. I thank you for the joy you have given me, and remain your old friend and present huge admirer,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
The hand is really the hand of Esau, but under a course of threatened scrivener’s cramp.
For the next edition of the Book of Verses, pray accept an emendation. Last three lines of Echoes No. XLIV. read —
“But life in act? How should the grave
Be victor over these,
Mother, a mother of men?”
The two vocatives scatter the effect of this inimitable 215 close. If you insist on the longer line, equip “grave” with an epithet.
R. L. S.
To E. L. Burlingame
Accompanying the MS. of the article giving extracts from the record kept by Robert Stevenson the elder of the trip on which Sir Walter Scott sailed in his company on board the Northern Lights yacht: printed in Scribner’s Magazine, 1893.
Vailima, Upolu, August 1st, ‘92.
MY DEAR BURLINGAME, — Herewith My Grandfather. I have had rather a bad time suppressing the old gentleman, who was really in a very garrulous stage; as for getting him in order, I could do but little towards that; however, there are one or two points of interest which may justify us in printing. The swinging of his stick and not knowing the sailor of Coruiskin, in particular, and the account of how he wrote the lives in the Bell Book particularly please me. I hope my own little introduction is not egoistic; or rather I do not care if it is. It was that old gentleman’s blood that brought me to Samoa.
By the by, vols. vii., viii., and ix. of Adams’s History have never come to hand; no more have the dictionaries.
Please send me Stonehenge on the Horse, Stories and Interludes by Barry Pain, and Edinburgh Sketches and Memoirs by David Masson. The Wrecker has turned up. So far as I have seen, it is very satisfactory, but on p, 549, there has been a devil of a miscarriage. The two Latin quotations instead of following each other being separated (doubtless for printing considerations) by a line of prose. My compliments to the printers; there is doubtless such a thing as good printing, but there is such a thing as good sense.
The sequel to Kidnapped, David Balfour by name, is about three-quarters done and gone to press for serial publication. By what I can find out it ought to be through hand with that and ready for volume form early next spring. — Yours very sincerely,
R. L. S.
To Andrew Lang
Mr. Andrew Lang had been supplying Stevenson with some books and historical references for his proposed novel The Young Chevalier.
[Vailima, August 1892.]
MY DEAR LANG, — I knew you would prove a trusty purveyor. The books you have sent are admirable. I got the name of my hero out of Brown — Blair of Balmyle — Francie Blair. But whether to call the story Blair of Balmyle, or whether to call it The Young Chevalier, I have not yet decided. The admirable Cameronian tract — perhaps you will think this a cheat — is to be boned into David Balfour, where it will fit better, and really furnishes me with a desired foothold over a boggy place.
Later; no, it won’t go in, and I fear I must give up “the idolatrous occupant upon the throne,” a phrase that overjoyed me beyond expression. I am in a deuce of a flutter with politics, which I hate, and in which I certainly do not shine; but a fellow cannot stand aside and look on at such an exhibition as our government. ‘Tain’t decent; no gent can hold a candle to it. But it’s a grind to be interrupted by midnight messengers and pass your days writing proclamations (which are never proclaimed) and petitions (which ain’t petited) and letters to the Times, which it makes my jaw yawn to re-read, and all your time have your heart with David Balfour; he has just left Glasgow this morning for Edinburgh, James More has escaped from the castle; it is far more real to me than the Behring Sea or the Baring brothers either — he got the news of James More’s escape from the Lord Advocate, and started off straight to comfort Catriona. You don’t know her; she’s James More’s daughter, and a respectable young wumman; the Miss Grants think so — the Lord Advocate’s daughters — so there can’t be anything really wrong. Pretty soon we all go to Holland, and be hanged; thence to Dunkirk, and be damned; 217 and the tale concludes in Paris, and be Poll-parrotted. This is the last authentic news. You are not a real hard-working novelist; not a practical novelist; so you don’t know the temptation to let your characters maunder. Dumas did it, and lived. But it is not war; it ain’t sportsmanlike, and I have to be stopping their chatter all the time. Brown’s appendix is great reading.
My only grief is that I can’t
Use the idolatrous occupant.
Yours ever,
R. L. S.
Blessing and praising you for a useful (though idolatrous) occupant of Kensington.
To Miss Adelaide Boodle
Samoa and the Samoans for children, continued after an eight months’ pause.
Vailima Plantation, Samoan Islands, August 14th, 1892.
MY DEAR MISS BOODLE, — The lean man is exceedingly ashamed of himself, and offers his apologies to the little girls in the cellar just above. If they will be so good as to knock three times upon the floor, he will hear it on the other side of his floor, and will understand that he is forgiven. I believe I got you and the children — or rather left you and the children — still on the road to the lean man’s house. When you get up there a great part of the forest has been c
leared away. It comes back again pretty quick, though not quite so high; but everywhere, except where the weeders have been kept busy, young trees have sprouted up, and the cattle and the horses cannot be seen as they feed. In this clearing there are two or three houses scattered about, and between the two biggest I think the little girls in the cellar would first notice a sort 218 of thing like a gridiron on legs made of logs and wood. Sometimes it has a flag flying on it made of rags of old clothes. It is a fort (so I am told) built by the person here who would be much the most interesting to the girls in the cellar. This is a young gentleman of eleven years of age answering to the name of Austin. It was after reading a book about the Red Indians that he thought it more prudent to create this place of strength. As the Red Indians are in North America, and this fort seems to me a very useless kind of building, I am anxious to hope that the two may never be brought together. When Austin is not engaged in building forts, nor on his lessons, which are just as annoying to him as other children’s lessons are to them, he walks sometimes in the bush, and if anybody is with him, talks all the time. When he is alone I don’t think he says anything, and I dare say he feels very lonely and frightened, just as the lean man does, at the queer noises and the endless lines of the trees. He finds the strangest kinds of seeds, some of them bright coloured like lollipops, or really like precious stones; some of them in odd cases like tobacco-pouches. He finds and collects all kinds of little shells with which the whole ground is scattered, and which, though they are the shells of land animals like our snails, are nearly of as many shapes and colours as the shells on our sea-beaches. In the streams that come running down out of the mountains, and which are all as clear and bright as mirror glass, he sees eels and little bright fish that sometimes jump together out of the surface of the brook in a little knot of silver, and fresh-water prawns which lie close under the stones, and can be seen looking up at him with eyes of the colour of a jewel. He sees all kinds of beautiful birds, some of them blue and white, some of them blue and white and red, and some of them coloured like our pigeons at home, and these last the little girls in the cellar may like to know live almost entirely on nutmegs as they fall ripe off the trees. Another little bird he may sometimes see, as the lean man 219 saw him only this morning, a little fellow not so big as a man’s hand, exquisitely neat, of a pretty bronze black like ladies’ shoes, and who sticks up behind him (much as a peacock does) his little tail shaped and fluted like a scallop shell.
Here are a lot of curious and interesting things that Austin sees round him every day; and when I was a child at home in the old country I used to play and pretend to myself that I saw things of the same kind. That the rooms were full of orange and nutmeg trees, and the cold town gardens outside the windows were alive with parrots and with lions. What do the little girls in the cellar think that Austin does? He makes believe just the other way: he pretends that the strange great trees with their broad leaves and slab-sided roots are European oaks; and the places on the road up (where you and I and the little girls in the cellar have already gone) he calls by old-fashioned, far-away European names, just as if you were to call the cellar stair and the corner of the next street — if you could only manage to pronounce the names — Upolu and Savaii. And so it is with all of us, with Austin and the lean man and the little girls in the cellar; wherever we are it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.
But you must not suppose that Austin does nothing but build forts and walk among the woods and swim in the rivers. On the contrary, he is sometimes a very busy and useful fellow; and I think the little girls in the cellar would have admired him very nearly as much as he admired himself if they had seen him setting off on horseback with his hand on his hip and his pockets full of letters and orders, at the head of quite a procession of huge white cart-horses with pack-saddles, and big brown native men with nothing on but gaudy kilts. Mighty well he managed all his commissions; and those who saw 220 him ordering and eating his single-handed luncheon in the queer little Chinese restaurant on the beach declare he looked as if the place, and the town, and the whole archipelago belonged to him. But I am not going to let you suppose that this great gentleman at the head of all his horses and his men, like the King of France in the old rhyme, would be thought much of a dandy on the streets of London. On the contrary, if he could be seen there with his dirty white cap, and his faded purple shirt, and his little brown breeks that do not reach his knees, and the bare shanks below, and the bare feet stuck in the stirrup leathers, for he is not quite long enough to reach the irons, I am afraid the little boys and girls in your part of the town might feel very much inclined to give him a penny in charity. So you see that a very, very big man in one place might seem very small potatoes in another, just as the king’s palace here (of which I told you in my last) would be thought rather a poor place of residence by a Surrey gipsy. And if you come to that, even the lean man himself, who is no end of an important person, if he were picked up from the chair where he is now sitting, and slung down, feet foremost, in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, would probably have to escape into the nearest shop, or take the consequences of being mobbed. And the ladies of his family, who are very pretty ladies, and think themselves uncommonly well-dressed for Samoa, would (if the same thing were done to them) be extremely glad to get into a cab.
I write to you by the hands of another, because I am threatened again with scrivener’s cramp. My health is beyond reproach; I wish I could say as much for my wife’s, which is far from the thing. Give us some news of yours, and even when none of us write, do not suppose for a moment that we are forgetful of our old gamekeeper. Our prettiest walk, an alley of really beautiful green sward which leads through Fanny’s garden to the river and the bridge and the beginning of the high woods on 221 the mountain-side, where the Tapu a fafine (or spirit of the land) has her dwelling, and the work-boys fear to go alone, is called by a name that I think our gamekeeper has heard before — Adelaide Road.
With much love from all of us to yourself, and all good wishes for your future, and the future of the children in the cellar, believe me your affectionate friend,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Sidney Colvin
Vailima [August 1892].
MY DEAR COLVIN, — You will have no letter at all this month and it is really not my fault. I have been saving my hand as much as possible for Davy Balfour; only this morning I was getting on first rate with him, when about half-past nine there came a prick in the middle of the ball of my thumb, and I had to take to the left hand and two words a minute. I fear I slightly exaggerate the speed of my left hand; about a word and a half in the minute — which is dispiriting to the last degree. Your last letter with the four excellent reviews and the good news about The Wrecker was particularly welcome. I have already written to Charles Baxter about the volume form appearance of The Beach of Falesá. In spite of bad thumbs and other interruptions I hope to send to Baxter by this mail the whole first part (a good deal more than half) of David Balfour ready for press. This is pretty satisfactory, and I think ought to put us beyond the reach of financial catastrophe for the year.
A cousin of mine, Graham Balfour, arrived along with your last. It was rather a lark. Fanny, Belle and I stayed down at the hotel two nights expecting the steamer, and we had seven horses down daily for the party and the baggage. These were on one occasion bossed by Austin, age eleven. “I’m afraid I cannot do that now,” said he 222 in answer to some communication, “as I am taking charge of the men here.” In the course of the forenoon he took “his” men to get their lunch, and had his own by himself at the Chinese restaurant. What a day for a boy. The steamer came in at last on Saturday morning after breakfast. We three were out at the place of anchorage in the hotel boat as she came up, spotting rather anxiously for our guest, whom none of us had ever seen. We chose out some rather awful cads and tried to make up our mind to them; they
were the least offensive yet observed among an awful crew of cabin passengers; but when the Simon Pure appeared at last upon the scene he was as nice a young fellow as you would want. Followed a time of giddy glory — one crowded hour of glorious life — when I figured about the deck with attendant shemales in the character of the local celebrity, was introduced to the least unpresentable of the ruffians on board, dogged about the deck by a diminutive Hebrew with a Kodak, the click of which kept time to my progress like a pair of castanets, and filled up in the Captain’s room on iced champagne at 8.30 of God’s morning. The Captain in question, Cap. Morse, is a great South Sea character, like the side of a house and the green-room of a music-hall, but with all the saving qualities of the seaman. The celebrity was a great success with this untutored observer. He was kind enough to announce that he expected (rather with awe) a much more “thoughtful” person; and I think I pleased him much with my parting salutation, “Well, Captain, I suppose you and I are the two most notorious men in the Pacific.” I think it will enable you to see the Captain if I tell you that he recited to us in cold blood the words of a new comic song; doubtless a tribute to my literary character. I had often heard of Captain Morse and always had detested all that I was told, and detested the man in confidence, just as you are doing; but really he has a wonderful charm of strength, loyalty, and simplicity. The whole celebrity business was 223 particularly characteristic; the Captain has certainly never read a word of mine; and as for the Jew with the Kodak, he had never heard of me till he came on board. There was a third admirer who sent messages in to the Captain’s cabin asking if the Lion would accept a gift of Webster’s Unabridged. I went out to him and signified a manly willingness to accept a gift of anything. He stood and bowed before me, his eyes danced with excitement. “Mr. Stevenson,” he said and his voice trembled, “your name is very well known to me. I have been in the publishing line in Canada and I have handled many of your works for the trade.” “Come,” I said, “here’s genuine appreciation.”
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 785