to Mr. Marcel Schwob

Vailima, Upolu, Samoa, July 7, 1894.

DEAR MR. MARCEL SCHWOB,—Thank you for having remembered me in my exile.  I have read Mimes twice as a whole; and now, as I write, I am reading it again as it were by accident, and a piece at a time, my eye catching a word and travelling obediently on through the whole number.  It is a graceful book, essentially graceful, with its haunting agreeable melancholy, its pleasing savour of antiquity.  At the same time, by its merits, it shows itself rather as the promise of something else to come than a thing final in itself.  You have yet to give us—and I am expecting it with impatience—something of a larger gait; something daylit, not twilit; something with the colours of life, not the flat tints of a temple illumination; something that shall be said with all the clearnesses and the trivialities of speech, not sung like a semi-articulate lullaby.  It will not please yourself as well, when you come to give it us, but it will please others better.  It will be more of a whole, more worldly, more nourished, more commonplace—and not so pretty, perhaps not even so beautiful.  No man knows better than I that, as we go on in life, we must part from prettiness and the graces.  We but attain qualities to lose them; life is a series of farewells, even in art; even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent.  So here with these exquisite pieces the XVIIth, XVIIIth, and IVth of the present collection.  You will perhaps never excel them; I should think the ‘Hermes,’ never.  Well, you will do something else, and of that I am in expectation.—Yours cordially,

Robert Louis Stevenson.