to H. B. Baildon

Vailima, Upolu [Undated, but written in 1891].

MY DEAR BAILDON,—This is a real disappointment.  It was so long since we had met, I was anxious to see where time had carried and stranded us.  Last time we saw each other—it must have been all ten years ago, as we were new to the thirties—it was only for a moment, and now we’re in the forties, and before very long we shall be in our graves.  Sick and well, I have had a splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little—and then only some little corners of misconduct for which I deserve hanging, and must infallibly be damned—and, take it all over, damnation and all, would hardly change with any man of my time, unless perhaps it were Gordon or our friend Chalmers: a man I admire for his virtues, love for his faults, and envy for the really A1 life he has, with everything heart—my heart, I mean—could wish.  It is curious to think you will read this in the grey metropolis; go the first grey, east-windy day into the Caledonian Station, if it looks at all as it did of yore: I met Satan there.  And then go and stand by the cross, and remember the other one—him that went down—my brother, Robert Fergusson.  It is a pity you had not made me out, and seen me as patriarch and planter.  I shall look forward to some record of your time with Chalmers: you can’t weary me of that fellow, he is as big as a house and far bigger than any church, where no man warms his hands.  Do you know anything of Thomson?  Of A—, B—, C—, D—, E—, F—, at all?  As I write C.’s name mustard rises my nose; I have never forgiven that weak, amiable boy a little trick he played me when I could ill afford it: I mean that whenever I think of it, some of the old wrath kindles, not that I would hurt the poor soul, if I got the world with it.  And Old X—?  Is he still afloat?  Harmless bark!  I gather you ain’t married yet, since your sister, to whom I ask to be remembered, goes with you.  Did you see a silly tale, John Nicholson’s Predicament, [220] or some such name, in which I made free with your home at Murrayfield?  There is precious little sense in it, but it might amuse.  Cassell’s published it in a thing called Yule-Tide years ago, and nobody that ever I heard of read or has ever seen Yule-Tide.  It is addressed to a class we never met—readers of Cassell’s series and that class of conscientious chaff, and my tale was dull, though I don’t recall that it was conscientious.  Only, there’s the house at Murrayfield and a dead body in it.  Glad the Ballads amused you.  They failed to entertain a coy public, at which I wondered, not that I set much account by my verses, which are the verses of Prosator; but I do know how to tell a yarn, and two of the yarns are great.  Rahero is for its length a perfect folk-tale: savage and yet fine, full of tailforemost morality, ancient as the granite rocks; if the historian, not to say the politician, could get that yarn into his head, he would have learned some of his A B C. But the average man at home cannot understand antiquity; he is sunk over the ears in Roman civilisation; and a tale like that of Rahero falls on his ears inarticulate.  The Spectator said there was no psychology in it; that interested me much: my grandmother (as I used to call that able paper, and an able paper it is, and a fair one) cannot so much as observe the existence of savage psychology when it is put before it.  I am at bottom a psychologist and ashamed of it; the tale seized me one-third because of its picturesque features, two-thirds because of its astonishing psychology, and the Spectator says there’s none.  I am going on with a lot of island work, exulting in the knowledge of a new world, ‘a new created world’ and new men; and I am sure my income will DECLINE and FALL off; for the effort of comprehension is death to the intelligent public, and sickness to the dull.

I do not know why I pester you with all this trash, above all as you deserve nothing.  I give you my warm talofa (‘my love to you,’ Samoan salutation).  Write me again when the spirit moves you.  And some day, if I still live, make out the trip again and let us hob-a-nob with our grey pows on my verandah.—Yours sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.