to J. M. Barrie

Vailima Plantation, Samoan Islands, November 1st, 1892.

DEAR MR. BARRIE,—I can scarce thank you sufficiently for your extremely amusing letter.  No, The Auld Licht Idyls never reached me—I wish it had, and I wonder extremely whether it would not be good for me to have a pennyworth of the Auld Licht pulpit.  It is a singular thing that I should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and so striking, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit that cold old huddle of grey hills from which we come.  I have just finished David Balfour; I have another book on the stocks, The Young Chevalier, which is to be part in France and part in Scotland, and to deal with Prince Charlie about the year 1749; and now what have I done but begun a third which is to be all moorland together, and is to have for a centrepiece a figure that I think you will appreciate—that of the immortal Braxfield—Braxfield himself is my grand premier, or, since you are so much involved in the British drama, let me say my heavy lead. . . .

Your descriptions of your dealings with Lord Rintoul are frightfully unconscientious.  You should never write about anybody until you persuade yourself at least for the moment that you love him, above all anybody on whom your plot revolves.  It will always make a hole in the book; and, if he has anything to do with the mechanism, prove a stick in your machinery.  But you know all this better than I do, and it is one of your most promising traits that you do not take your powers too seriously.  The Little Minister ought to have ended badly; we all know it did; and we are infinitely grateful to you for the grace and good feeling with which you lied about it.  If you had told the truth, I for one could never have forgiven you.  As you had conceived and written the earlier parts, the truth about the end, though indisputably true to fact, would have been a lie, or what is worse, a discord in art.  If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.  Now your book began to end well.  You let yourself fall in love with, and fondle, and smile at your puppets.  Once you had done that, your honour was committed—at the cost of truth to life you were bound to save them.  It is the blot on Richard Feverel, for instance, that it begins to end well; and then tricks you and ends ill.  But in that case there is worse behind, for the ill-ending does not inherently issue from the plot—the story had, in fact, ended well after the great last interview between Richard and Lucy—and the blind, illogical bullet which smashes all has no more to do between the boards than a fly has to do with the room into whose open window it comes buzzing.  It might have so happened; it needed not; and unless needs must, we have no right to pain our readers.  I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same kind about my Braxfield story.  Braxfield—only his name is Hermiston—has a son who is condemned to death; plainly, there is a fine tempting fitness about this; and I meant he was to hang.  But now on considering my minor characters, I saw there were five people who would—in a sense who must—break prison and attempt his rescue.  They were capable, hardy folks, too, who might very well succeed.  Why should they not then?  Why should not young Hermiston escape clear out of the country? and be happy, if he could, with his—  But soft!  I will not betray my secret of my heroine.  Suffice it to breathe in your ear that she was what Hardy calls (and others in their plain way don’t) a Pure Woman.  Much virtue in a capital letter, such as yours was.

Write to me again in my infinite distance.  Tell me about your new book.  No harm in telling me; I am too far off to be indiscreet; there are too few near me who would care to hear.  I am rushes by the riverside, and the stream is in Babylon: breathe your secrets to me fearlessly; and if the Trade Wind caught and carried them away, there are none to catch them nearer than Australia, unless it were the Tropic Birds.  In the unavoidable absence of my amanuensis, who is buying eels for dinner, I have thus concluded my despatch, like St. Paul, with my own hand.

And in the inimitable words of Lord Kames, Faur ye weel, ye bitch.—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.