to William Archer

Vailima, Samoa, March 27th, 1894.

MY DEAR ARCHER,—Many thanks for your Theatrical World.  Do you know, it strikes me as being really very good?  I have not yet read much of it, but so far as I have looked, there is not a dull and not an empty page in it.  Hazlitt, whom you must often have thought of, would have been pleased.  Come to think of it, I shall put this book upon the Hazlitt shelf.  You have acquired a manner that I can only call august; otherwise, I should have to call it such amazing impudence.  The Bauble Shop and Becket are examples of what I mean.  But it ‘sets you weel.’

Marjorie Fleming I have known, as you surmise, for long.  She was possibly—no, I take back possibly—she was one of the greatest works of God.  Your note about the resemblance of her verses to mine gave me great joy, though it only proved me a plagiarist.  By the by, was it not over The Child’s Garden of Verses that we first scraped acquaintance?  I am sorry indeed to hear that my esteemed correspondent Tomarcher has such poor taste in literature. [323]  I fear he cannot have inherited this trait from his dear papa.  Indeed, I may say I know it, for I remember the energy of papa’s disapproval when the work passed through his hands on its way to a second birth, which none regrets more than myself.  It is an odd fact, or perhaps a very natural one; I find few greater pleasures than reading my own works, but I never, O I never read The Black Arrow.  In that country Tomarcher reigns supreme.  Well, and after all, if Tomarcher likes it, it has not been written in vain.

We have just now a curious breath from Europe.  A young fellow just beginning letters, and no fool, turned up here with a letter of introduction in the well-known blue ink and decorative hieroglyphs of George Meredith.  His name may be known to you.  It is Sidney Lysaght.  He is staying with us but a day or two, and it is strange to me and not unpleasant to hear all the names, old and new, come up again.  But oddly the new are so much more in number.  If I revisited the glimpses of the moon on your side of the ocean, I should know comparatively few of them.

My amanuensis deserts me—I should have said you, for yours is the loss, my script having lost all bond with humanity.  One touch of nature makes the whole world kin: that nobody can read my hand.  It is a humiliating circumstance that thus evens us with printers!

You must sometimes think it strange—or perhaps it is only I that should so think it—to be following the old round, in the gas lamps and the crowded theatres, when I am away here in the tropical forest and the vast silences!

My dear Archer, my wife joins me in the best wishes to yourself and Mrs. Archer, not forgetting Tom; and I am yours very cordially,

Robert Louis Stevenson.