Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 2 Part 38

APIA, JULY 1893.

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES, - Yes. LES TROPHEES, on the whole, a book.

It is excellent; but is it a life's work? I always suspect YOU of a volume of sonnets up your sleeve; when is it coming down? I am in one of my moods of wholesale impatience with all fiction and all verging on it, reading instead, with rapture, FOUNTAINHALL'S DECISIONS. You never read it: well, it hasn't much form, and is inexpressibly dreary, I should suppose, to others - and even to me for pages. It's like walking in a mine underground, and with a d.a.m.ned bad lantern, and picking out pieces of ore. This, and war, will be my excuse for not having read your (doubtless) charming work of fiction. The revolving year will bring me round to it; and I know, when fiction shall begin to feel a little SOLID to me again, that I shall love it, because it's James. Do you know, when I am in this mood, I would rather try to read a bad book? It's not so disappointing, anyway. And FOUNTAINHALL is prime, two big folio volumes, and all dreary, and all true, and all as terse as an obituary; and about one interesting fact on an average in twenty pages, and ten of them unintelligible for technicalities. There's literature, if you like! It feeds; it falls about you genuine like rain. Rain: n.o.body has done justice to rain in literature yet: surely a subject for a Scot. But then you can't do rain in that ledger-book style that I am trying for - or between a ledger-book and an old ballad. How to get over, how to escape from, the besotting PARTICULARITY of fiction. 'Roland approached the house; it had green doors and window blinds; and there was a sc.r.a.per on the upper step.' To h.e.l.l with Roland and the sc.r.a.per! - Yours ever,

R. L. S.

Letter: TO A. CONAN DOYLE

VAILIMA, JULY 12, 1893.

MY DEAR DR. CONAN DOYLE, - The WHITE COMPANY has not yet turned up; but when it does - which I suppose will be next mail - you shall hear news of me. I have a great talent for compliment, accompanied by a hateful, even a diabolic frankness.

Delighted to hear I have a chance of seeing you and Mrs. Doyle; Mrs. Stevenson bids me say (what is too true) that our rations are often spare. Are you Great Eaters? Please reply.

As to ways and means, here is what you will have to do. Leave San Francis...o...b.. the down mail, get off at Samoa, and twelve days or a fortnight later, you can continue your journey to Auckland per Upolu, which will give you a look at Tonga and possibly Fiji by the way. Make this a FIRST PART OF YOUR PLANS. A fortnight, even of Vailima diet, could kill n.o.body.

We are in the midst of war here; rather a nasty business, with the head-taking; and there seem signs of other trouble. But I believe you need make no change in your design to visit us. All should be well over; and if it were not, why! you need not leave the steamer.

- Yours very truly,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Letter: TO CHARLES BAXTER

19TH JULY '93.

. . . We are in the thick of war - see ILl.u.s.tRATED LONDON NEWS - we have only two outside boys left to us. Nothing is doing, and PER CONTRA little paying. . . My life here is dear; but I can live within my income for a time at least - so long as my prices keep up - and it seems a clear duty to waste none of it on gadding about. .

. . My life of my family fills up intervals, and should be an excellent book when it is done, but big, d.a.m.nably big.

My dear old man, I perceive by a thousand signs that we grow old, and are soon to pa.s.s away! I hope with dignity; if not, with courage at least. I am myself very ready; or would be - will be - when I have made a little money for my folks. The blows that have fallen upon you are truly terrifying; I wish you strength to bear them. It is strange, I must seem to you to blaze in a Birmingham prosperity and happiness; and to myself I seem a failure. The truth is, I have never got over the last influenza yet, and am miserably out of heart and out of kilter. Lungs pretty right, stomach nowhere, spirits a good deal overshadowed; but we'll come through it yet, and c.o.c.k our bonnets. (I confess with sorrow that I am not yet quite sure about the INTELLECTS; but I hope it is only one of my usual periods of non-work. They are more unbearable now, because I cannot rest. NO REST BUT THE GRAVE FOR SIR WALTER! O the words ring in a man's head.)

R. L. S.

Letter: TO A. CONAN DOYLE

VAILIMA, AUGUST 23RD, 1893.

MY DEAR DR. CONAN DOYLE, - I am reposing after a somewhat severe experience upon which I think it my duty to report to you.

Immediately after dinner this evening it occurred to me to re- narrate to my native overseer Simele your story of THE ENGINEER'S THUMB. And, sir, I have done it. It was necessary, I need hardly say, to go somewhat farther afield than you have done. To explain (for instance) what a railway is, what a steam hammer, what a coach and horse, what coining, what a criminal, and what the police. I pa.s.s over other and no less necessary explanations. But I did actually succeed; and if you could have seen the drawn, anxious features and the bright, feverish eyes of Simele, you would have (for the moment at least) tasted glory. You might perhaps think that, were you to come to Samoa, you might be introduced as the Author of THE ENGINEER'S THUMB. Disabuse yourself. They do not know what it is to make up a story. THE ENGINEER'S THUMB (G.o.d forgive me) was narrated as a piece of actual and factual history.

Nay, and more, I who write to you have had the indiscretion to perpetrate a trifling piece of fiction ent.i.tled THE BOTTLE IMP.

Parties who come up to visit my unpretentious mansion, after having admired the ceilings by Vanderputty and the tapestry by Gobbling, manifest towards the end a certain uneasiness which proves them to be fellows of an infinite delicacy. They may be seen to shrug a brown shoulder, to roll up a speaking eye, and at last secret bursts from them: 'Where is the bottle?' Alas, my friends (I feel tempted to say), you will find it by the Engineer's Thumb! Talofa- soifuia.

Oa'u, O lau no moni, O Tusitala.

More commonly known as,

R. L. STEVENSON.

Have read the REFUGEES; Conde and old P. Murat very good; Louis XIV. and Louvois with the letter bag very rich. You have reached a trifle wide perhaps; too MANY celebrities? Though I was delighted to re-encounter my old friend Du Chaylu. Old Murat is perhaps your high water mark; 'tis excellently human, cheerful and real. Do it again. Madame de Maintenon struck me as quite good. Have you any doc.u.ment for the decapitation? It sounds steepish. The devil of all that first part is that you see old Dumas; yet your Louis XIV.

is DISTINCTLY GOOD. I am much interested with this book, which fulfils a good deal, and promises more. Question: How far a Historical Novel should be wholly episodic? I incline to that view, with trembling. I shake hands with you on old Murat.

R. L. S.

Letter: TO GEORGE MEREDITH

SEPT. 5TH, 1893, VAILIMA PLANTATION, UPOLU, SAMOA.

MY DEAR MEREDITH, - I have again and again taken up the pen to write to you, and many beginnings have gone into the waste paper basket (I have one now - for the second time in my life - and feel a big man on the strength of it). And no doubt it requires some decision to break so long a silence. My health is vastly restored, and I am now living patriarchally in this place six hundred feet above the sea on the shoulder of a mountain of 1500. Behind me, the unbroken bush slopes up to the backbone of the island (3 to 4000) without a house, with no inhabitants save a few runaway black boys, wild pigs and cattle, and wild doves and flying foxes, and many parti-coloured birds, and many black, and many white: a very eerie, dim, strange place and hard to travel. I am the head of a household of five whites, and of twelve Samoans, to all of whom I am the chief and father: my cook comes to me and asks leave to marry - and his mother, a fine old chief woman, who has never lived here, does the same. You may be sure I granted the pet.i.tion. It is a life of great interest, complicated by the Tower of Babel, that old enemy. And I have all the time on my hands for literary work. My house is a great place; we have a hall fifty feet long with a great red-wood stair ascending from it, where we dine in state - myself usually dressed in a singlet and a pair of trousers - and attended on by servants in a single garment, a kind of kilt - also flowers and leaves - and their hair often powdered with lime.

The European who came upon it suddenly would think it was a dream.

We have prayers on Sunday night - I am a perfect pariah in the island not to have them oftener, but the spirit is unwilling and the flesh proud, and I cannot go it more. It is strange to see the long line of the brown folk crouched along the wall with lanterns at intervals before them in the big shadowy hall, with an oak cabinet at one end of it and a group of Rodin's (which native taste regards as PRODIGIEUs.e.m.e.nT LESTE) presiding over all from the top - and to hear the long rambling Samoan hymn rolling up (G.o.d bless me, what style! But I am off business to-day, and this is not meant to be literature.).

I have asked Colvin to send you a copy of CATRIONA, which I am sometimes tempted to think is about my best work. I hear word occasionally of the AMAZING MARRIAGE. It will be a brave day for me when I get hold of it. Gower Woodseer is now an ancient, lean, grim, exiled Scot, living and labouring as for a wager in the tropics; still active, still with lots of fire in him, but the youth - ah, the youth where is it? For years after I came here, the critics (those genial gentlemen) used to deplore the relaxation of my fibre and the idleness to which I had succ.u.mbed. I hear less of this now; the next thing is they will tell me I am writing myself out! and that my unconscientious conduct is bringing their grey hairs with sorrow to the dust. I do not know - I mean I do know one thing. For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been rightly speaking since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on - ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. At least I have not failed, but I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air over my head.

This is a devilish egotistical yarn. Will you try to imitate me in that if the spirit ever moves you to reply? And meantime be sure that away in the midst of the Pacific there is a house on a wooded island where the name of George Meredith is very dear, and his memory (since it must be no more) is continually honoured. - Ever your friend,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Remember me to Mariette, if you please; and my wife sends her most kind remembrances to yourself.

R. L. S.

Letter: TO AUGUSTUS ST. GAUDENS

VAILIMA, SEPTEMBER 1893.

MY DEAR ST. GAUDENS, - I had determined not to write to you till I had seen the medallion, but it looks as if that might mean the Greek Kalends or the day after to-morrow. Rea.s.sure yourself, your part is done, it is ours that halts - the consideration of conveyance over our sweet little road on boys' backs, for we cannot very well apply the horses to this work; there is only one; you cannot put it in a panier; to put it on the horse's back we have not the heart. Beneath the beauty of R. L. S., to say nothing of his verses, which the publishers find heavy enough, and the genius of the G.o.d-like sculptor, the spine would snap and the well-knit limbs of the (ahem) cart-horse would be loosed by death. So you are to conceive me, sitting in my house, dubitative, and the medallion chuckling in the warehouse of the German firm, for some days longer; and hear me meanwhile on the golden letters.

Alas! they are all my fancy painted, but the price is prohibitive.

I cannot do it. It is another day-dream burst. Another gable of Abbotsford has gone down, fortunately before it was builded, so there's n.o.body injured - except me. I had a strong conviction that I was a great hand at writing inscriptions, and meant to exhibit and test my genius on the walls of my house; and now I see I can't.