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wife shimmers at me from my chimney-piece-brought some months ago by the natural McClure-but seems to refer to one as dim and distant and delightful as a "toast" of the last century. I wish I could make you homesick-I wish I could spoil your fun. It is a very featureless time. The summer is rank with rheumatisma dark, drowned, unprecedented season. The town is empty but I am not going away. I have no money, but I have a little work. I have lately written several short fictions but you may not see them unless you come home. I have just begun a novel1 which is to run through the Atlantic from January 1st and which I aspire to finish by the end of this year. In reality I suppose I shall not be fully delivered of it before the middle of next. After that, with God's help, I propose, for a longish period, to do nothing but short lengths. I want to leave a multitude of pictures of my time, projecting my small circular frame upon as many different spots as possible and going in for number as well as quality, so that the number may constitute a total having a certain value as observation and testimony. But there isn't so much as a creature here even to whisper such an intention to. Nothing lifts its hand in these islands save blackguard party politics. Criticism is of an abject density and puerility-it doesn't exist -it writes the intellect of our race too low. Lang,2 in the D. N.,3 every morning, and I believe in a hundred other places, uses his beautiful thin facility to write everything down to the lowest level of Philistine twaddle-the view of the old lady round the corner or the clever person at the dinner party. The incorporated society of authors (I belong to it, and so do you, I think, but I don't know what it is) gave a dinner the other night to American literati to thank them for praying for international copyright. I carefully forbore to go, thinking the

1 The Tragic Muse.

2 Andrew Lang. Part of an imaginary letter of his-to Thackerayis reprinted below, p. 692.

3 Daily News.

gratulation premature, and I see by this morning's Times that the banqueted boon is further off than ever. Edmund Gosse has sent me his clever little life of Congreve, just out, and I have read it but it isn't so good as his Raleigh. But no more was the insufferable subject. . . . Come, my dear Louis, grow not too thin. I can't question you-because, as I say, I don't conjure you up. You have killed the imagination in me -that part of it which formed your element and in which you sat vivid and near. Your wife and mother and Mr. Lloyd suffer also I must confess it-by this failure of breath, of faith. Of course I have your letter-from Manasquan (is that the idiotic name?) of the ingenuous me, to think there was a date! It was terribly impersonal--it did me little good. A little more and I shan't believe in you enough to bless you. Take this, therefore, as your last chance. I follow all with an aching wing, an inadequate geography, and an ineradicable hope. Ever, my dear Louis, yours, to the last snub

T

HENRY JAMES

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Y DEAR JAMES Yes I own up-I am untrue to

MY friendship and (what is less, but still considerable) to

civilization. I am not coming home for another year. There it is, cold and bald, and now you won't believe in me at all, and serve me right (says you) and the devil take me. But look here, and judge me tenderly. have had more fun and pleasure of my life these past months than ever before, and more health than any time in ten long years. And even here in Honolulu I have withered in the cold; and this precious deep is filled with islands, which we may still visit; and though the sea is a deathful place, I like to be there, and like squalls (when they are over); and to draw near to a new island, I cannot say how much I like. In short, I take another year of this sort of life, and mean to try to work down among the poisoned arrows, and mean (if it may be) to come back again when the thing is through, and converse with Henry James as heretofore; and in the meanwhile issue directions to H. J. to write to me once more. Let him address here at Honolulu, for my views are vague; and if it is sent here it will follow and find me, if I am to be found; and if I am not to be found, the man James will have done his duty, and we shall be at the bottom of the sea, where no post-office clerk can be expected to discover us, or languishing on a coral island, the philosophic drudges of some barbarian potentate: perchance, of an American missionary. My wife has just sent to Mrs. Sitwell a translation (tant bien que mal 2) of a letter I have had from my chief friend in this part of the world: go and see her, and get a hearing of it;

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1 Reprinted through special arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons. 2 Indifferently well done.

it will do you good; it is a better method of correspondence than even Henry James's. I jest, but seriously it is a strange. thing for a tough, sick middle-aged scrivener like R. L. S. to receive a letter so conceived from a man fifty years old, a leading politician, a crack orator, and the great wit of his village: boldly say, "the highly popular M. P.2 of Tautira." My nineteenth century strikes here, and lies alongside of something beautiful and ancient. I think the receipt of such a letter might humble, shall I say even? and for me, I would rather have received it than written "Redgauntlet" or the "Sixth Æneid.” All told, if my books have enabled or helped me to make this voyage, to know Rui, and to have received such a letter, they have (in the old prefatorial expression) not been writ in vain. It would seem from this that I have been not so much humbled as puffed up; but, I assure you, I have in fact been both. A little of what that letter says is my own earning; not all, but yet a little; and the little makes me proud, and all the rest ashamed; and in the contrast, how much more beautiful altogether is the ancient man than him of today!

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly. And to curry favor with him, I wish I could be more explicit; but, indeed, I am still of necessity extremely vague, and cannot tell what I am to do, nor where I am to go for some while yet. As soon as I am sure, you shall hear. All are fairly well-the wife your countrywoman, least of all; troubles are not entirely wanting; but on the whole we prosper, and we are all affectionately yours,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

The letter in question, translated presumably by Stevenson himself, is reprinted on the following pages.

2 Member of Parliament.

59

TO ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1

MAKE you to know my great affection. At the hour when you left us, I was filled with tears; my wife, Rui Telime, also, and all of my household. When you embarked I felt a great sorrow. It is for this that I went upon the road, and you looked from that ship, and I looked at you on the ship with great grief until you had raised the anchor and hoisted the sails. When the ship started I ran along the beach to see you still; and when you were on the open sea I cried out to you, "Farewell, Louis"; and when I was coming back to my house I seemed to hear your voice crying, "Rui, farewell." Afterwards I watched the ship as long as I could until the night fell: and when it was dark I said to myself, “If I had wings I should fly to the ship to meet you, and to sleep amongst you, so that I might be able to come back to shore and to tell Rui Telime, 'I have slept upon the ship of Teriitera.'" After that we passed that night in the impatience of grief. o'clock I seemed to hear your voice, "Teriitera-Rui-here is the hour for putter and tiro” [cheese and syrup]. sleep that night, thinking continually of you, my very dear friend, until the morning; being then still awake, I went to see Tapina Tutu on her bed, and alas, she was not there. Afterwards I looked into your rooms; they did not please me as they used to do. I did not hear your voice saying, “Hail Rui"; I thought then that you had gone, and that you had left me. Rising up, I went to the beach to see your ship, and I could not see it. I wept, then, until the night, telling myself continually, "Teriitera returns into his own country and leaves his dear Rui in grief, so that I suffer for him, and weep 1 See the preceding letter.-Reprinted through special arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons.

Towards eight

I did not

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