I tasted on that occasion what it is to be great. My name was called next after the captain’s, and several chiefs (a thing quite new to me, and not at all Samoan practice) drank to me by name.
And now, if you are not sick of the _Curaçoa_ and Manu’a, I am, at least on paper. And I decline any longer to give you examples of how not to write.
By the by, you sent me long ago a work by Anatole France, which I confess I did not _taste_. Since then I have made the acquaintance of the _Abbé Coignard_, and have become a faithful adorer. I don’t think a better book was ever written.
And I have no idea what I have said, and I have no idea what I ought to have said, and I am a total ass, but my heart is in the right place, and I am, my dear Henry James, yours,
_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,