“A blemish in the cut appears,
Alas! it cost both blood and tears.
The glancing graver swerved aside,
Fast flowed the artist’s vital tide!
And now the apologetic bard
Demands indulgence for his pard.”
STEVENSON’S LATER LETTERS
London Bookman, Dec. 1899.
Out of these noble volumes of Stevenson letters two things come to me of new, of which the first is the more important. Before and above all else these books (with their appendage, the Vailima Correspondence) are the record of as noble a friendship as I know of in letters. And perhaps, as following from this, we have here a Stevenson without shadows. Not even a full statue, but rather a medallion in low relief—as it were the St. Gaudens bust done into printer’s ink.
It is difficult to say precisely what one feels, with Mr. Colvin (and long may he be spared) still in the midst of us. And yet I cannot help putting it on record that what impresses me most in these volumes, wherein are so many things lovely and of good report, is the way in which, in order that one friend may shine like a city set on a hill, the other friend consistently retires himself into deepest shade. Yet all the same Mr. Colvin is ever on the spot. You can trace him on every page—emergent only when an explanation must be made, never saying a word too much, obviously in possession of all the facts, but desirous of no reward or fame or glory to himself if only Tusitala continue to shine the first among his peers. Truly there is a love not perhaps surpassing the love of women, but certainly passing it, in that it is different in kind and degree.
Obviously, however, Mr. Colvin often wounded with the faithful wounds of a friend, and sometimes in return he was blessed, and sometimes he was banned. But always the next letter made it all right.
To those outside of his family and familiars Stevenson was always a charming and sometimes a regular correspondent. To myself, with no claim upon him save that of a certain instinctive mutual liking, he wrote with the utmost punctuality every two months from 1888 to the week of his death.
It is the irony of fate that about thirty of these letters lie buried somewhere beneath, above, or behind an impenetrable barrier of 25,000 books. In a certain great “flitting” conducted by village workmen these manuscripts disappeared, and have so far eluded all research. But at the next upturning of the Universe, I doubt not they will come to light and be available for Mr. Colvin’s twentieth edition. It was a great grief to me that I had no more to contribute besides those few but precious documents which appear in their places in the second volume of “Letters to Family and Friends.”