Page:Vailima Letters - Stevenson, Colvin - 1894.djvu/45

VAILIMA LETTERS 19

I want you to understand about this South Sea Book.¹ The job is immense; I stagger under material. I have seen the first big tache. It was necessary to see the smaller ones; the letters were at my hand for the purpose, but I was not going to lose this experience; and, instead of writing mere letters, have poured out a lot of stuff for the book. How this works and fits, time is to show. But I believe, in time, I shall get the whole thing in form. Now, up to date, that is all my design, and I beg to warn you till we have the whole (or much) of the stuff together, you can hardly judge — and I can hardly judge. Such a mass of stuff is to be handled, if possible without repetition — so much foreign matter to be introduced — if possible with perspicuity — and, as much as can be, a spirit of narrative to be preserved.

¹ The South Seas: a Record of Three Cruises: such was to be the title of the projected book, which was to narrate the experiences of the author and his family on their recent Pacific voyages, first in the yacht Casco, and afterwards in the traders Equator and Janet Nicoll. His friends looked forward to it with the hope that it would surpass his early books of travels by all the difference between the beauty and strangeness of the tropic islands and the homeliness of the banks of Sambre and Oise or the desolation of the Cevennes. But the material, perhaps from its too great richness and novelty, perhaps from the author's desire to impart solid information instead of mere impressions, proved intractable in his hands; and the work never got beyond a number of chapters in the form of letters, written with much less than his usual felicity, which were published in full in the New York Sun and, in part only, in Black and White. See below for further reference to the labour which this undertaking cost him and to his disappointment with the result.